by Tom Holt
Resourcefulness had never been one of the qualities Paul would have attributed to himself, but if necessity was the mother of invention, extreme pain in the face was at the very least its aunt. Nodding his head to make Sophie follow him, he led the way down one flight of stairs, along a bit of corridor and into the room where the laser printer lurked. It was deserted, of course; but there was a computer station there, and the computer was switched on. He sat down and started to type.
It’s like this, he wrote. We’re in a sort of alternate dimension. I was trapped here. You got pulled into it by a goblin called Colin leaving, I think, though I’m not sure. Trouble is, I don’t know how we get out again. Also, going back wouldn’t be a really good idea for me right now, since they think I killed Ricky Wurmtoter—
‘No, they don’t,’ Sophie interrupted. ‘They think you’re dead, remember? Anyhow, it was that creep Philip Marlow, they practically caught him red-handed. Oh, you don’t know him, he was after your—’ She stopped and scowled. ‘Just a second. How do you know about that if you’ve been trapped in this whatever it is you called it?’
Oh for—Paul went back and deleted that. It’s complicated.
‘You don’t say.’
You think Phil Marlow’s a creep? I thought you liked him.
Sophie opened her mouth, then closed it again. ‘Now you come to mention it,’ she said, ‘so did I. But not any more, apparently. Look, what’s that got to do with anything?’
If only I knew a bit more about typing, Paul thought, I could set up it’s complicated as a macro, and save myself a lot of work. Later, he typed. Look, I’ll explain everything later, I promise. Only now, I
His fingers uncurled. Only now, what? By now, back in realspace, Dennis Tanner would have discovered that Phil Marlow had escaped from the strongroom; quite probably, also, Mr Laertides would have told everybody about who Phil Marlow really was. It definitely wouldn’t be safe to go back, either as Phil or as Paul. Staying here, on the other hand, in an empty building, presumably an entirely deserted universe, didn’t strike Paul as a good idea either. And even if he could get back somehow, if he risked Professor Van Spee’s dire warning and stole some more crystals, there was the danger that Sophie’d be stuck here. It was all much, much too difficult, and he really wished it was happening to someone else, preferably his worst enemy.
Only now I haven’t got a clue what to do next.Any suggestions?
And then Sophie did something completely unexpected, not to mention out of character. She smiled. It was almost a smirk, only Sophie didn’t smirk, the way whales rarely tap-dance. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Budge over. I need to get to the keyboard.’
A wave of blessed relief hit Paul like a large velvet hammer; because for what seemed like for ever, he had been very much on his own, having to cope with all manner of weird and terrible things, and now here was Sophie, pushing him out of the way in a manner that implied that she knew what to do. Paul had, of course, loved her since the first time he’d set eyes on her, but that had been his Pavlovian reaction to any girl who stayed still for five minutes and didn’t stamp on his foot while wearing stiletto heels. He’d loved her like he’d loved all the others, back then, before he took the medicine. There hadn’t been any reason (because Love, like other forms of psychotic behaviour, doesn’t need a reason) and if he’d been called into the witness box, put on oath and asked why he loved her, he’d have had to admit that it was the same impulse that made people climb mountains, simply because she was there. Now, maybe for the first time, there was something he could love her for; because, after everything he’d had to go through on his own, right at the very furthest extreme of his rope, she was suddenly here, and taking charge. True, she’d also hit him very hard in the face, but nobody’s perfect.
He glanced down at the screen. Mail write; she was typing fast, her fingers scampering across the keys like the legs of bald pink spiders. To: [email protected]. Then she hit the return key a couple of times, and typed in—
Help
- And, before Paul could reach down and stop her, Sophie hit the send button.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Ot the ell,’ Paul tried to shout, ‘id you oo at for?’ Slight pause, while Sophie translated. ‘I’ve sent an e-mail to Mr Tanner,’ she said blithely. ‘You see, I think I’ve figured out where we are. If this is really a different dimension, it’s got to be the artificial one that Professor Van Spee made for himself. I’ve been working with him, you see, ever since you died - whatever. Anyway, he told me about it, it’s how all his inventions work. And the thing is, although you can’t get backwards and forwards you know, like physically, it’s possible to send an e-mail, because theoretically it’s all the same dimension, just phased differently because of the elemental resonances—’
‘Yes, but Tanner,’ Paul howled, ignoring the pain in his jaw. ‘He’s going to kill me. He thinks I murdered Ricky Wurmtoter.’
Sophie gave him her own special don’t-be-so-silly look. ‘Oh, we’ll explain all that,’ she said. ‘Like, obviously it couldn’t have been you, you wouldn’t hurt a fly. I expect he was just, what’s the expression they use, eliminating you from their enquiries—’
Behind them, the door flew open. Paul swung round to see who’d burst in, and saw someone who looked just like Ricky Wurmtoter - except that Ricky was dead, wasn’t he? But it wasn’t the new arrival’s identity that was monopolising his attention. It was the long, shiny sword he was gripping in his outstretched right hand, so that the needle-sharp point was just bending the skin slightly under Sophie’s chin.
‘Apologies for the melodrama,’ he said, and he sounded just like Ricky. ‘You - stay absolutely still.’
It was one of those occasions when ambiguity was not your friend. ‘Me?’ Paul squeaked.
‘Good Lord, no. You can move about as much as you like. Her.’
‘But—’
‘And before you make a complete arse of yourself trying to rescue her, you might like to know she just sent an e-mail to Dennis Tanner, letting him know you’re here. Hence,’ he added grimly, ‘the trace elements of distrust and downright animosity clouding my otherwise sunny disposition.’
‘I know,’ Paul said. ‘She was only trying to help.’
Sophie had been uncharacteristically quiet throughout all this; now she yelped, ‘That’s right!’ in a tiny little voice. Something about it, probably the tininess, seemed to convince Ricky that she wasn’t a threat. He pulled the sword back, and lowered it.
‘Bastard!’ Sophie screamed at him. ‘And anyway, you’re dead.’
‘So’s he,’ Ricky replied reasonably, nodding towards Paul, ‘and you’re not yelling at him.’
‘Yes, but she hit me on the jaw a few minutes ago,’ Paul couldn’t help pointing out.
‘Maybe she just doesn’t like dead people,’ Ricky suggested.
Talking of which . . . Paul didn’t have a sword handy, and he was pretty sure he didn’t pack a mean right cross like Ms Pettingell; but there was a fat, heavy-looking book on the desk a few inches from his right hand. He picked it up and threw it at Ricky’s head. Probably only sheer luck that it connected, because Paul had lousy hand/eye coordination and cleared pubs in seconds whenever he hefted a dart, but the effect was quite dramatic. Ricky tottered sideways, caught his foot in a coil of the spaghetti that spewed out of the back of the computer, and keeled over, dragging the monitor and the keyboard down with him. There was a rather satisfying crash, and even a few sparks.
‘Bastard,’ Paul said conversationally, echoing Sophie and rubbing his jaw. It was starting to feel much better now. ‘And why aren’t you dead, anyway? Tanner thinks you are. He thinks I killed you.’
‘You bloody nearly did,’ Ricky growled, gathering himself up off the floor. ‘Talk about gratitude. Thank you so much, Ricky, for rushing down here to save me the moment you saw that e-mail on the office net; oh and by the way, here’s a broken skull as a token of our appreciation.’
Sophie just glowered
at him. ‘You can’t feel it, though,’ she said. ‘You’re dead.’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ Ricky snapped. ‘And now, if you two pinheads have quite finished, could we possibly go somewhere else, before Dennis and his horrible relatives find us? I’ve been to a lot of trouble to get out of the way for a bit, and I’d hate for it all to go to waste.’
Paul wasn’t so sure about that. If Dennis Tanner came charging in and found him and a perfectly healthy (bruises aside) Ricky Wurmtoter, it would solve at least one of his major problems. On the other hand, there weren’t any more big fat books handy, and he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of stopping Ricky leaving if he wanted to go somewhere. If Ricky left and then Tanner turned up, it would probably be very bad.
‘Please yourself,’ he muttered. ‘Where do you suggest, anyhow?’
‘Closed-file store,’ Ricky said. ‘You know what it’s like in there. Dennis won’t set foot in the place unless he’s absolutely got to, and that’s the version in normal space. I believe the one over this side is a lot stranger.’
Hardly encouraging; but Ricky was already striding down the corridor. ‘Might as well,’ Paul hissed to Sophie, who nodded glumly and followed him.
‘Hope you don’t mind me borrowing this,’ Ricky barked out as they scurried to keep up with him. It took Paul a second or so to figure out that this referred to the sword in Ricky’s hand. Paul hadn’t bothered examining it in any detail while it had been tucked under Sophie’s chin. Now Ricky happened to mention it, however, he couldn’t help noticing the glossy brown sheen of the blade, the extravagant pattern of silver whorls deep inside the steel—
A sword transcending dimensions, a living blade, the other half of Vicky the mermaid. Evidently that was how Ricky had got into Custardspace. It was also a way out, and not a Van Spee’s crystal needed; which meant, presumably, no need for Colin the goblin to be inconvenienced as and when Sophie crossed back into Realspace. It was slightly unsettling to think that the sword was also, viewed from a certain perspective, fifty per cent of Ricky’s ex-wife, but that really wasn’t any of Paul’s business.
‘I suppose I owe you an apology,’ Ricky went on, as he lunged off down a corridor that Paul wasn’t sure he’d ever been in before. ‘Framing you for my death, I mean. Sorry about that. Only I didn’t realise it was you and not that Philip Marlow person till it was too late. Plans all made, you see, everything scheduled and timetabled, I had to press on and hope you’d find a way of coping, which obviously you did. I always knew you were the resourceful type—’
‘Hang on,’ Paul said. ‘You knew it was me?’
The back of Ricky’s head nodded. ‘On the first floor landing. You were standing in front of the mirror, and it’s an imp-reflector - you know, like the top of the table in the board room, it shows things as they really are, not as they appear to be. I caught sight of your reflection in it, and I knew straight away, for some reason best known to yourself you were back alive again and disguised as that Marlow bloke. Of course, I’ve never met Marlow, I only know what he looks like from his personnel file, so—’
‘You knew it was me,’ Paul repeated. ‘And anyway, it doesn’t matter. Even if it hadn’t been me, even if it really had been Phil Marlow, what the hell do you think you were doing, making it look like he’d poisoned you to death?’
A slight shrug, as Ricky shoved open the closed-file store door. ‘It was him or me,’ he said. ‘All right, it was someone or me, and I don’t know this Marlow guy from a bar of soap, so the hell with it. If you’ve got to dump a million tons of horseshit on the head of an innocent man, it’s better if it’s a stranger rather than a close friend or valued colleague, right?’
‘No,’ Paul said. But Ricky wasn’t listening. He’d clicked into full action-adventure mode, creeping stealthily along the walls and racks of shelving with the sword at the ready, carefully searching for hidden enemies and other lurking hazards. He carried on like that for a minute or so, until he tripped over a discarded electric fan, barked his shin on a shelf bracket, and gave the whole thing up as a bad job.
‘I think we’re safe here,’ he said, limping back to where Paul and Sophie were waiting for him. ‘For now, anyway. In theory, this being Van Spee’s Dimension, there shouldn’t be anything alive here apart from us, just inanimate objects. Some of the stuff that’s got chucked in here over the years, though, it’s hard to draw the line, if you know what I mean. In most offices, old bits of equipment get slung in the lumber room because they’ve died suddenly. Here, though, sometimes it’s the other way around.’ He paused and shuddered slightly. ‘I particularly remember an old green filing cabinet that took to following people about, usually just after lunch. Finally we got it cornered, dragged it in here and bolted it securely to the wall, just over there—’ He pointed to a patch of broken, crumbling plaster, where it looked as though something had yanked itself free with extreme force. ‘Oh,’ Ricky said. ‘Bugger. Never mind.’
‘You knew it was me,’ Paul repeated for the second time. ‘They were going to kill me. I was locked up in the strongroom with a bunch of goblins standing guard, while they had a partners’ meeting to decide how to put me to death. And all the time—’
‘It was important.’ Ricky sounded angry and guilty, both at the same time. ‘When you’re up against someone like that, with your life on the line, you can’t muck about. Sometimes one of the good guys gets hurt in the process. Can’t be helped. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry,’ Paul said. ‘Fine.’
‘Hang on.’ Sophie had that dangerous timbre in her voice that commanded attention. ‘Something not quite right here. You said your life was on the line.’
Ricky nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘It was.’
‘So you thought, I’ll cunningly cheat death by dying.’ She clicked her tongue. ‘Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, emigrated to Canada and grown a beard or something?’
Paul was impressed; he’d never seen anybody move so quickly. Ricky swung round, making a conscious decision at the last moment to belay the instinct to poke Sophie under the chin with the sword again. ‘Canada,’ he said. ‘What the hell do you know about Canada?’
Sophie had backed away into the corner of a rack of shelves. ‘All right, then, Australia. Or Papua bloody New Guinea. What I meant was—’
Ricky relaxed, from the soles of his feet up. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Private joke. And to answer your question, absolutely no dice. He’s not someone you can run away from just by going somewhere very fast in an unexpected direction. That’d be like looking for a gas leak with a lighted match. That’s why I had to come here, of course, to Speespace. It’s the only place in this or any world where he can’t come after me.’
‘Excuse me,’ Paul said in a quiet voice, ‘but who’s he, exactly?’
‘What?’ Ricky looked as though he’d just run through a locked plate-glass door without knowing it was there. ‘You don’t know - Oh, for crying out loud.’ He sagged, leaning against a shelf unit. ‘You mean, you haven’t really got the foggiest idea what’s going on around here?’
‘No,’ said Paul and Sophie at precisely the same moment.
‘But you’re going to tell us,’ Sophie added savagely, ‘or I will personally take that overgrown pencil-sharpener off you and stick it right up—’ Then she screamed.
It was a full-blooded, extra-volume, super-high-fidelity rendition of the classic sci-fi B-movie scream, the sort of thing you’d expect to hear in any sleepy small Midwestern American community when the Martians or the Pod People blow into town. It wasn’t the typical reaction of a sophisticated young urban woman faced with an everyday kitchen appliance. On the other hand, there has to be an element of give and take in these matters. People shouldn’t freak out at the mere sight of fridge-freezers. Fridge-freezers, by the same token, shouldn’t suddenly lunge out of the shadows and fling their doors open.
The different ways in which Sophie, Ricky and Paul reacted to this sudden intrus
ion were, in many respects, illuminating. Sophie started yelling like a pig in a blender. Ricky, by contrast, sprang into action. He jumped up, landed perfectly poised on the balls of his feet, legs a shoulders’ width apart, leaning slightly forward at the waist; his left hand grasped a chair, held out as an improvised shield, while he gripped the sword with his right in a coaching-manual-perfect high backhand guard. For his part, Paul stood rooted to the spot, staring at the white light pouring out of the open fridge door, which backlit its contents: a sad-looking lump of antique cheese and a milk carton. They looked very, very familiar -
‘Hang on,’ Paul said.
‘Quiet,’ Ricky hissed. ‘It’s confused, can’t figure out which of us to attack first. That’s our best chance, keep it off guard. So if you keep absolutely still—’
‘No, listen,’ Paul said. ‘That’s my fridge.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Ricky snapped at him. ‘What’d your fridge be doing here, stalking us? Now, on the count of three—’
‘It is,’ Paul insisted. ‘It’s my fridge. And that’s the pint of milk I bought in the seven-eleven on the corner of Ascot Terrace ten days ago. Look, it’s still got the little sticky price tag with their name on it.’
‘Actually, he’s right,’ Sophie broke in. ‘I remember it now, from the flat. It’s got that scratch, look, down at the bottom, where you bashed into it that time with the Hoover.’
‘On the count of three,’ Ricky repeated loudly, but he’d forfeited their attention. Rather huffily, he straightened his back and put the chair down, though without entirely relaxing his grip on the sword. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so it’s your fridge, you deal with the bloody thing. Give it a carrot or blow up its nose or something, whatever it is you usually do when it goes berserk.’
Paul frowned. ‘It’s never done anything like this before,’ he said. ‘I’ve had it for ages, it’s never been any bother.’