Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘Send you back,’ Paul repeated. ‘I didn’t bring you here. Talking of which—’

  ‘What?’ Colin the goblin opened his round little eyes wide, till they were the size of blood-red tennis balls. ‘Well, I didn’t get here by fucking taxi, sunshine. Last thing I knew, I was sitting in my office doing this month’s VAT; and then, suddenly—’

  ‘What do you mean, “then suddenly”?’ A wave of panic broke over Paul like a surfer’s dream. ‘If you didn’t - look, have you seen a girl? Human, about five two, straight dark brown hair—’

  ‘’Course not,’ snarled Colin. ‘I follow the rules, me; no going Topside until the doors’re locked, keep out of the way of humans at all times. At least,’ he added ferociously, ‘I try to follow the rules, except of course when I’m suddenly whisked away by titanic supernatural forces and dumped in a wide open space full of humans and birds.’

  ‘But—’ Paul began to argue; and maybe he shifted his feet and accidentally trod on a questing duck, because one of them suddenly exploded off the ground in a flurry of wings, zooming straight up past his nose. Instinctively he jumped back and shut his eyes; and when he opened them again, there was Sophie, just as she’d been, with a stunned expression on her face and grains of birdseed dribbling out through her fingers.

  ‘Did—?’

  ‘Sophie,’ Paul said quietly.

  ‘Did I just - go somewhere?’ She turned her head and looked at him, her face completely empty. ‘Only I could’ve sworn—’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Paul interrupted quickly. ‘You were sitting at a desk, and there were these forms—’

  ‘VAT returns,’ Sophie said, nodding. ‘I know about them, I’ve got an accountant who’s an uncle, I mean the other way round, and in the holidays I used to—’ She shook herself like a wet dog. ‘Screw that,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about that. How the hell do you know? About the desk, and the—’

  ‘Because,’ Paul said, trying to keep still and calm, ‘you vanished; and where you’re standing now there was this goblin, and he told me . . .’

  ‘Goblin? Oh God, I think I’m going to throw up. I turned into a goblin.’

  Paul shook his head. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I think you just changed places for a second or two. Look, why don’t we go somewhere, instead of discussing this in the middle of St James’s bloody Park?’

  ‘But the ducks—’

  ‘Oh for—’ Paul held out the hand with the birdseed bag in it and turned it over. Birdseed swamped his left foot, and immediately he could feel duck beaks drumming on his toe, like a host of elven chiropodists. ‘There,’ he said, ‘all done. Now, shall we go somewhere a bit less bloody public?’

  ‘All right.’ Sophie staggered slightly as she followed him, across the park, over the road (suddenly no traffic) and into a pasta bar, which happened to be the nearest public building. Paul practically had to shove her into a seat.

  ‘Well,’ she said, smiling suddenly and without apparent provocation, ‘while we’re here, we might as well have lunch.’

  ‘What?’ It took Paul a moment to remember the meaning of the word ‘lunch’; it was rather like hearing English unexpectedly when you’ve been living with a remote tribe in the heart of the rain forest for the last five years. ‘Oh, right, lunch,’ he said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Great,’ Sophie replied, ‘I’m starving,’ and she grabbed the tall, plastic-coated menu. ‘Right, I think I’ll go for the straight spag bol, but with—’

  ‘Sophie.’ He caught himself a touch too late; he’d said it the way Paul Carpenter used to say it, back when they were living together and she’d said or done something so outstandingly unreasonable that even he felt compelled to protest. ‘Ms Pettingell,’ he corrected, but that didn’t sound right either. ‘Look,’ he compromised. ‘Before we start getting all wrapped up in spaghetti,’ he said, and his scowl was so fierce that the giggle evaporated on her lips, ‘I want to get to the bottom of this vanishing business—’

  ‘You said you wanted lunch.’

  Oink? ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘You said, let’s nip across the road and find somewhere - All right, you didn’t actually say lunch, but it sounded like—’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Apparently Phil Marlow had a shorter temper than Paul Carpenter. ‘All right, let me clarify the position. This is a serious enquiry into something really bizarre and scary. It’s not a - a date. All right?’

  Sophie looked at him, and it was like peering into a long, dark tunnel. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘But I’m still starving. I can’t handle a whole portion of garlic bread, so let’s go halves.’

  ‘Garlic bread,’ Paul repeated. ‘All right, yes, why the hell not? And then can we talk about you disappearing, and turning into a goblin called Colin?’

  She opened both her eyes very wide. ‘Colin?’

  ‘I don’t know, I think it’s a goblin thing. They know we can’t pronounce their real names, something like that. Doesn’t matter. The point is, I recognised him. I met him before.’

  Sophie frowned, as if groping for the point. ‘Small world?’ she suggested hopefully.

  ‘And he,’ Paul ground on - why was it he felt like he was reading out a scientific paper to an audience of small children and clowns? - ‘he seemed just as surprised as you did, so my guess is it wasn’t him who made it happen. I don’t know,’ he admitted, ‘I was so scared you’d been - well, vanished, like the other time . . .’ He stopped short. Did he even know about the other time? ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he rallied bravely. ‘Who got kidnapped by the elf woman, whatsername . . .’

  ‘Countess Judy,’ Sophie replied, with a faint shudder. ‘And she wasn’t an elf, they’re pointed ears and lace wings and ballet costume. Countess Judy was the Queen of the Fey. Which is a totally different kettle of barracudas,’ she added with feeling.

  ‘That’s right, I remember now. Anyhow, that was what I thought, and—’ A waiter was standing over them. Sophie asked for something technical, bits of Italian, including one word which Paul had always thought meant ‘typewriter’. He grunted ‘Same for me,’ and the waiter went away.

  ‘That’s really sweet,’ Sophie was saying. ‘That you were worried, I mean.’

  Sweet? Sweet? It suddenly occurred to him that maybe the real Sophie was still missing, and that goblins can be anybody they choose; because Sophie didn’t use the S-word, not ever. But goblins always gave themselves away, if you knew what to look for; there was a grin, a certain gleam in the eye, and he wasn’t looking at it. Even so; sweet, for crying out loud. ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, ‘if there’s even the remotest chance that Countess Judy’s come back—’

  ‘Oh.’ Her face closed down again. ‘That’s what you were worried about, I see. Well, I don’t think it was anything like that. I mean, I can remember exactly what it was like when the Fey got me, and you wouldn’t mistake it for anything else. Trust me.’

  The waiter came back, dumped two plates of spaghetti down in front of them and went away. Sophie grabbed her fork and started to twirl. That was perhaps the most reassuring piece of evidence so far. Paul had watched Sophie eat spaghetti many times, always with fascinated horror. The ruthless way she twirled the stuff onto her fork put him in mind of the propeller of a vast tanker getting tangled in fishermen’s nets, and the culmination of the procedure, when she poked the entanglement into her face and went slurp was like that bit with the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

  ‘Let’s not talk about it any more, okay?’ she said, as the tines spun relentlessly in the tangled mess. ‘Right, so it was like really weird, but a lot of weird things happen around JWW, and I’m still alive and in one piece, so it can’t have been that big a deal.’ She reached out a hand and grabbed the pepper mill. Another important clue, because Sophie couldn’t eat a plate of mince in tomato effluent without first poisoning it beyond redemption with a thick lava-crust of ground black pepper.

  ‘Good idea,’ Paul said. ‘In that case,
maybe you could answer a question for me. It’s not something I’ve felt able to ask anyone else in the office, but—’

  Sophie looked at him over her fork. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘This bloke who was here before me,’ he said, and paused, making a play of trying to remember a once-heard name. ‘Carpenter?’

  She nodded vigorously. ‘Paul Carpenter. He joined the same time as I did.’

  ‘Ah, right. So what exactly happened to him?’

  ‘Oh, he died.’ Paul froze; he could feel the ends of his fingers and the tips of his ears getting cold - because she hadn’t said, ‘He died’ in a low, strangled, choking-back-sobs way. It was that initial Oh that screwed everything up. ‘Apparently he was at this really wild party with a load of goblins and everybody was pretty well pissed as rats, and there was an accident.’

  Paul didn’t say anything for a moment. He was waiting for some appropriate comment about what a tragedy it was, a promising young life cut short, we shall not see his like again. But Sophie just carried on twirling her fork, pitching the mess into her face, and sucking in the ends like a supercharged Dyson. That was it, then. He died, but it was his own silly fault.

  Even so. ‘That must’ve been quite a shock,’ he said, ‘if you’d been working with the bloke.’

  ‘Well.’ Slurp; another dozen thread-ends vanished between Sophie’s thin lips. ‘Yes, it was completely unexpected, of course, you’re always a bit stunned when someone you know gets killed or something like that. But it’s not like we were close or anything. ’

  You lying bitch. You pasta-sucking heartless cow. ‘Ah, right,’ Paul said. ‘So, did he have any family?’

  She shook her head. ‘Parents emigrated, I think, and I never heard he had any other close relatives. Sad, really, being all on your own like that. He was all right, I suppose. A bit dozy most of the time, rather immature, but harmless enough. And of course I got stuck with all his work as well as my own. We were both helping Professor Van Spee - have you run into him at all? Very polite, but a bit creepy, and God only knows what this project he’s working on is actually about. And of course he never explains anything, it’s really annoying.’

  Hardly a seamless change of subject. As far as Sophie was concerned, Paul Carpenter could be dismissed in a few rather disapproving sentences, because that was all he merited. ‘Thanks,’ Paul said, winching the Marlow smile across his face. ‘Only, people around the office keep mentioning him but whenever I’ve asked, they just go all quiet and then start talking about something else. I was wondering if it was some deadly secret or something.’

  Sophie shook her head, and the upturned ends of her straight, dark brown hair trailed lightly in her bolognese sauce, like a lover’s fingertips traced delicately across your cheek. ‘You’d expect there to be some desperate goings-on behind it all, what with all the weird shit that happens at JWW. But apparently it really was just a stupid accident. It was something really silly, like a giant cake collapsing and smothering him. It’s not actually all that funny, of course, but if you’d ever met Paul you’d realise how - well, appropriate, really.’ She smiled faintly, then went on: ‘I think it was Rosie’s party - that’s Mr Tanner’s mother, she works on reception. I have an idea that Paul had a crush on her, which sound a bit yuck, her being a goblin, but of course she can change her shape at will, and she’s got this thing about turning herself into these really obvious tarty women. I’m afraid poor old Paul was a complete sucker for all that stuff.’

  Possible explanation: she knows who I really am, and she’s punishing me deliberately for pretending to be someone else and not telling her I’m actually still alive. Possible, but rather unlikely. ‘He sounds like a real loser,’ Paul snarled. ‘No wonder you were glad to see the back of him.’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t as bad as all that,’ Sophie said; and she was smiling, with that faint glow he’d seen a few times in a girl’s eyes, though never when they were pointed at him. Usually that glow was his cue to make an excuse and leave before things got nauseatingly embarrassing. How often he’d dreamed about the day when he’d be on the receiving end of a glow like that - and now, here it was, and all he really wanted to do was pick up his plate of spaghetti in tomato sauce and grind it into her face. Not as bad as all that; she’d loved him once, he knew it, even he couldn’t have imagined it all, but she’d never glowed at him like that. It had been a fierce, reluctant love, almost as though she’d resented the completeness of her devotion to him. Indeed; now he thought about it, it struck him that she’d never enjoyed being in love with him. All the time it had been an intrusion, a weakness, almost a failing. Now, though, he could see a deep pleasure behind that glow; and if someone - Mr Laertides, maybe - were to sidle up to her and offer her an antidote guaranteed to cure her, purge every trace of it out of her system, she’d be all horrified and refuse. The bitch, he thought. A cute nose, a pretty face, and they aren’t even real; and suddenly she’s floating-on-air, singin’in-the-rain happy; how shallow can you get? It was worse than if she’d taken the love philtre, because—

  Paul broke off from his train of thought and opened his eyes wide. Oblivious in her joy, Sophie had wound two turns of her hair onto her fork, along with the spaghetti, and was just about to stuff it into her mouth. ‘Um,’ he said, but it was too late. She closed her mouth, removed the fork, did the big slurp and realised that, at a rather fundamental level, things weren’t quite as they should be. ‘Uck,’ she spluttered. ‘Oh, hit!’

  Insensitive and immature he might have been, but Paul reckoned he knew Sophie quite well, well enough to predict what her reaction would be if he burst out laughing at this juncture. On the other hand, what with one thing and another, it’d been some time since he’d had a good laugh, and if anything in the whole world was genuinely, delightfully funny, it was the expression on her face—

  Screw it, Paul thought; and then the laughter took over.

  He was still laughing when Sophie jumped up, knocking over her chair, and fled; through the door and out into the street, with the end of her hair still in her mouth, entwined with spaghetti like ivy and Russian vine. Then he tried to pull himself together, but only because people were staring. More joy in heaven, he thought as he dragged money out of his wallet and dropped it on the table; he didn’t dare try and finish his meal, for fear of choking to death. He found his way out into the street, leaned against a wall and laughed until he felt his stomach muscles twanging like guitar strings.

  ‘So you fed them,’ said Mr Laertides, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head. ‘Then what?’

  Paul hesitated. By rights, of course, he ought to tell his boss the whole story. For all he knew, the business with Sophie vanishing and being replaced by Colin the goblin was the entire point of the experiment. The fact was, however, that there were elements of the story he didn’t feel like explaining; how he’d first come across Colin, for example. Also, in spite of or perhaps precisely because of how helpful and nice Mr Laertides had been to him, he still didn’t trust him as far as he could sneeze him through a blocked nostril. ‘Nothing much,’ he therefore replied. ‘It was lunchtime, so we had lunch—’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Some pasta place just across the road. Can’t remember what it was called, sorry.’

  ‘Pasta,’ Mr Laertides replied. ‘Never got on with the stuff myself, I have to admit. Irrational, I know, but I never could drum up any enthusiasm for eating string. Give me a nice bacon sandwich any day. So then what?’

  ‘Then we came back here,’ Paul said.

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mr Laertides shrugged. ‘Well, we can’t expect miracles. All right, here’s what I want you to do this afternoon.’ He leaned forward, grabbed a copy of the Evening Standard off his desk, and opened it. ‘Odeon, Tottenham Court Road. Programme starts 2.30 - but that means there’s twenty minutes of trailers and mobile-phone adverts, so really it means ten to three, which ought to give you plent
y of time. Julia Roberts and Russell Crowe. Do a pink form when you get back for the tickets and popcorn.’

  Tickets, plural, Paul noticed. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘You want me to go to the pictures?’

  Mr Laertides nodded. ‘It’s extremely important,’ he replied, ‘especially in light of this morning. Yes, I think it’s got to be done. You’ll need to take someone with you, of course.’

  Paul stared at him. ‘Will I?’

  ‘Well, of course. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any point, the whole thing’d be a waste of time. Tell you what,’ he went on, ‘you might as well get that Pettingell female to go with you.Theo can manage on his own for one afternoon.’

  Paul breathed out slowly through his nose before answering. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘that might not be a good idea. We, um, I think I might have offended her, when we were doing the ducks thing.’

  ‘Really? What did you do? Make a pass at her?’

  He wasn’t sure why that made him so angry. Possibly the casual way Mr Laertides said it, as though Paul was the sort of person who went around making passes at girls, rather than just wanting to but not having the courage. ‘No, of course I bloody didn’t,’ he said.

  Mr Laertides shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘keep your hair on. So what did you do?’

  ‘I laughed.’

  ‘Laughed?’

  Paul nodded. ‘She got a bit of her hair wound round her fork, along with the spaghetti. She didn’t think it was very funny.’

  ‘Silly cow.’ Mr Laertides grinned. ‘Really, she did that? What happened?’

  ‘Anyway,’ Paul said firmly, ‘I don’t think she’d want to go to the pictures with me after that. Not even if it’s work.’