by Tom Holt
‘Sucker,’ the man said; then he screwed the lid on the jar, and everything was silent.
‘Gordon?’
Gordon hesitated, his tray gripped precariously in one hand while the other tried to fish coins out of his pocket past the big bunch of keys, and looked round. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you.’
It was a risk he ran every time he had lunch in the canteen: a disconcerting ambush by a more or less irritating colleague. There was neither time nor an obvious vector for escape, so he accepted his fate as gracefully as he could. ‘How’ve you been, Neville?’ he asked, synthesising interest like Rumpelstiltskin spinning gold out of straw. ‘Haven’t seen much of you since you started on the six o’clock slot.’
‘Marvellous,’ Neville replied, grinning. ‘Come over here and sit down, I want to talk to you.’
My fault for not dying young while I had the chance, Gordon muttered to himself. He did as he was told, and started to disembark the contents of his tray onto the formica table. There weren’t many places left where you could still find the genuine, original, unspeakably naff 1970s formica in its natural habitat.
‘You got my message, then,’ Neville said.
Gordon frowned. ‘Did I?’
‘Sorry for all the melodrama,’ Neville replied, opening up his grin to Insufferable Level 2. ‘But if I’d told you normally - you know, chatting like this - you wouldn’t have done anything about it. Which is understandable enough; after all, you’ve always thought of me as an annoying little shit—’
‘No, no.’ Gordon frowned. ‘Well, yes. If it’s any consolation, I think of lots of people that way.’
‘Me too. Doesn’t matter. The point is,’ Neville continued, spreading his skinny forearms across the table, ‘you did as you were told and looked at the website. That’s good.’
‘Website? Oh, you mean that. How did you know I looked at the website?’
The soft gurgling noise Neville made was one of his trademarks. For what it was worth, he was a genuinely brilliant meteorologist, and he could also whistle more or less in tune. It was important to bear in mind that there was always some good in everybody. ‘I don’t think you really want to know,’ he replied. ‘So,’ he went on, ‘what did you think?’
‘About the website?’ Gordon pointed a forkful of shepherd’s pie at his face, caught sight of it and put it back on his plate. ‘With a certain amount of editing, it could be mere harmless drivel. I’m not saying you haven’t still got a long way to go, but it’s possible so long as you stick at it.’
‘Drivel.’
‘Harmless drivel,’ Gordon reminded him. ‘Or at least, there are several places where it aspires to be harmless drivel. Ah, but Man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?’
Neville wasn’t grinning any more. ‘Is this your facetious way of telling me you don’t believe what we’re telling you?’
‘Yes. Do you want my bread roll, by the way? If you had two of them, you’d be able to bang them together and light a fire.’
‘What is it you don’t believe?’
Gordon sighed. ‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘A joke’s a joke, but it isn’t a fence post; hammering it into the ground is not recommended. I’ll admit you had me fooled for a minute or two, but . . .
Neville picked up the ketchup bottle, took the lid off, sniffed and put it back where he’d found it. ‘You’re saying you think the whole thing’s a spoof. A leg-pull.’
‘To more or less the same extent that Ronald Reagan was an actor; but yes, I think that’s what you intended it to be.’
‘I see.’ Neville was beginning to look genuinely angry. ‘Obviously I’ve been overestimating your intelligence all these years.’
‘You mean underestimating, surely.’
Neville shook his head. ‘My own silly fault. I honestly thought you had the breadth of mind, the perception, the depth of vision . . . ’
‘Sometimes I do,’ Gordon said. ‘Quite often, in fact; usually around half ten, eleven at night. Right now, though, I’m sober.’
Neville didn’t seem to find that particularly funny. ‘That’s a pity. But we can deal with it. After all, seeing is believing.’
‘Sometimes,’ Gordon replied cautiously. ‘Other times, it’s nature’s way of telling you to lay off the vodka chasers. All depends on what it is you start seeing.’
Neville pushed his chair back and stood up. ‘So,’ he said. ‘What are you planning on doing now?’
‘Eating my lunch?’ Gordon caught another glimpse of the shepherd’s pie. ‘No, maybe not. In that case, I may as well go back to the office and do some work.’
Neville moved to block him from getting up. It was like being threatened by a Ray Harryhausen pipe cleaner. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘you’re going straight to the fifteenth floor and you’re going to tell them to fire me because I’ve gone crazy. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Gordon frowned. ‘Do you want me to do that?’ he asked.
‘No, of course not.’
‘That’s all right, then, because I’d prefer not to. And besides, you only imagine the world is ruled by enormous flying lizards. By BBC standards, that makes you dangerously sane.’
People were, of course, beginning to stare. But Gordon was used to that; it was Neville who seemed disconcerted - odd, really, considering that he made his living being stared at by up to ten million people at a time.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you, and then you’ll see. Meanwhile, if you so much as breathe a word about this—’
‘You’ll feed me to the dragon?’
Neville scowled at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘Dragons don’t eat people. That’s just a myth.’
‘It is?’ In spite of himself, Gordon smiled. ‘You’re sure?’
Neville made an uncouth noise with his mouth and walked away, leaving Gordon with his plate of congealed shepherd’s pie and a few things to think about. Most of them were variations on the theme of There-but-for-the-grace-of-God; it was just as well that he’d taken to the bottle as a way of dealing with the nightmares of his profession rather than retreating inside his own head, as Neville had done.
Staring at the shepherd’s pie wasn’t going to make it edible. Gordon got up, spread a paper napkin over his plate as a mark of respect to the dead, and went back to his office. Even in spite of everything he’d had to suffer for its sake, he still had a spark of lingering affection for his work. Ever since he could remember, he’d had the romantic, idiotic notion of the weather being the planet’s way of showing her feelings - the sun her smile, the rain her tears, mist and fog her stark, bleak moods, snow her mischievous winter grin - and according to the satellite, tomorrow ought to be a genuinely sad day, with legitimate heavy rain instead of the usual crocodile tears that he found so hard to explain or forgive. He could therefore forecast wet weather with a clear conscience; just this once, it had his permission to rain.
Once again, he passed the door of the Cat’s Whiskers and kept on going. He had no illusions about being cured or having found a better way. One of the lesser reasons why he drank so much was the fact that he quite enjoyed it. He liked the taste of the stuff, the ambience of a properly dark, respectably scruffy lounge bar, the gentle relaxation of feeling his thoughts gradually getting slower and fuzzier. It certainly beat sitting at home alone in front of the telly. (Although the same could, of course, also be said of malaria or, indeed, death.) But the pub would still be there tomorrow; quite possibly the day after tomorrow, too. He’d appreciate it all the more after a couple of days away. In the same way, it made a refreshing change to wake up in the morning without a hangover.
Gordon was thinking about that last factor and reflecting on how much easier the world was to cope with when you didn’t have a four-alarmer headache as he opened his front door and reached for the light switch; ironic, really, since before he was able to touch fingernail to plastic, someone stepped out of the darkness behind him and bashed him over the head wi
th eight inches of lead-filled hosepipe.
The first thing Gordon saw when he woke up was a goldfish bowl.
Considering some of the things he’d seen a second or so after waking up (scary monsters with big eyes and horns; scuttling, crawly beetles; his first wife) it was odd that the sight of a small orange fish swimming round and round in a small glass container should have shaken him as much as it did. But this was no ordinary goldfish. This was identical to the one he’d seen on Neville’s website, the one that belonged to no known species.
‘Neville?’ he said, as loudly as his reverberating head would allow.
‘You’ve woken up, then,’ said Neville’s voice behind him.
He tried to twist round and face him, but found he could-n’t. This turned out to have something to do with the blue nylon rope that surrounded him in coils like a mummy’s thermal underwear and held him firmly in the armchair he was sitting on. Quite a lot to do with it, in fact.
‘All right, Neville,’ he said, looking round the best he could. ‘I know about the ropes and stuff, thanks to the second Mrs Smelt. What’s the goldfish for?’
‘There is no goldfish.’
Gordon dipped his head towards the glass bowl. ‘So what’s that, then? One of those lava lamps they advertise in the colour supplements?’
‘That’s a dragon.’
‘No kidding.’
The dragon was looking at them, opening and closing its mouth as it finned water. Definitely not a species he’d ever seen in a book or a pet shop. If it was a hybrid of some kind, he couldn’t figure out what it was a hybrid of. It held still for a moment, flexed its gills wide and went back to opening and closing its mouth.
‘Turn the sound back on,’ Gordon said wearily. ‘I can’t make out a word it’s saying.’
‘You want to hear what it’s saying?’
‘What? Oh yes. Sure.’
‘All right.’ Neville took a step forward and slid back a concealed panel in the arm of a chair, revealing some kind of keyboard. ‘Won’t be a moment.’
‘You take your time,’ Gordon said. ‘After all, if an impossible thing’s worth failing to do, it’s worth failing to do properly.’
Neville gave him a poisonous look and opened a drawer in his desk, from which he took a little net of the kind they sell in pet shops for evicting goldfish from their homes. The fish saw him coming and tried to avoid the net. It managed to make a pretty good job of it; at least three seconds passed before Neville was able to flick it out of the water and into an empty teacup. Gordon could see the poor thing squirming and wriggling—
‘For pity’s sake, Neville,’ he said disgustedly. ‘You’ll kill it if you do that.’
Neville shrugged. ‘He’s got it coming, if you ask me. But it’ll be OK, so long as he does as he’s told. Right then, you. Talk to me.’
And then, to his complete astonishment, Gordon could hear the goldfish gasping and panting. It sounded almost human. ‘Neville!’ he shouted, and he struggled against the ropes, just as the fish was struggling against the air. Both of them were on a hiding to nothing, of course.
‘Now then, your worship,’ Neville was saying to the fish. ‘Tell the nice gentleman who you are.’
‘No,’ the goldfish said.
‘Please yourself. You aren’t going back in the water till you do. And since you haven’t got room in that cup to change shape—’
‘Want to bet?’
‘Yes,’ Neville said pleasantly. ‘Go on, then.’
Gordon heard a terrible rasping noise, one of the ugliest sounds he’d ever heard in his life. It was the fish, trying to breathe. ‘Fish,’ he shouted, ‘do as he says, please.’
‘No . . .’ The voice was deep, with a strong accent Gordon couldn’t place at all. The pain in it was all too easy to identify, however. For a split second, Gordon reckoned he knew what it must feel like to drown in air.
‘Stubborn little thing, isn’t he?’ Neville sighed. ‘Getting a civil answer out of him’s like trying to get plain English from a lawyer; I’m not sure it can be done. We’ve been through this performance every day for a week, you know.’
The rasping noise was unbearable now. ‘Neville,’ Gordon said, forcing himself to sound calm, ‘if I promise I believe you, will you put the fish back?’
Neville smiled. ‘It’s all very well you saying that,’ he replied, ‘but what makes you think I can trust you? After all,’ he added, ‘you’re a weatherman.’
‘Neville—’
Neville held up his hands. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I can see this is upsetting you. Come along, little fellow,’ he said, picking up the teacup and dumping the fish back into the water. ‘Better now?’
For a few seconds the goldfish lay in the water at a disturbing angle, motionless. Gordon was about to yell out, ‘You bastard, you killed him!’ when the fish dabbed feebly with its tail and pulled itself upright.
‘There, you see?’ Neville said. ‘Right as rain, if you’ll excuse the pun. Tough critters, these dragons. Strong-willed, too.’
Even now, Gordon wanted to try and reason with the lunatic; to try and explain that, even if what they’d both heard actually was a goldfish talking, all that proved was that here was a goldfish that could talk. All the stuff about dragons and rain was still—But it occurred to him that his colleague probably wasn’t the most rational person in the world right now, and besides, he didn’t want to provoke him into repeating the experiment he’d just had to witness. ‘I can see that,’ he said. ‘Thank you for showing me. I don’t suppose I’d ever have believed you if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.’
Neville sat down cross-legged on the floor and looked up at him, reminding Gordon of a starved greyhound. ‘Oh come on,’ he said. ‘I’m not stupid, you know. You aren’t really convinced. You probably think it was all done with hidden microphones and rubbish. It’s going to take much more than that to make you really believe.’ He shrugged his chickenbone shoulders. ‘But that’s all right,’ he said. ‘We’ll convince you sooner or later, I’m positive of that. Pretty soon—’ His expression changed; remarkable, Gordon couldn’t help thinking, how being barking mad could make even a complete twit like Neville look distinctly sinister. ‘Pretty soon you’ll have all the evidence you could possibly want; you and everybody else. And then - well, let’s say it’ll be interesting to see what happens. ’
Gordon took a deep breath. He had no idea how one was supposed to go about handling situations like this - doubtless there were officially endorsed techniques, taught to professional loon-handlers to A level and beyond - but he had no objection to improvising. The best approach he could think of was to try and reawaken Neville’s latent inferiority complex. Neville was bound to have an inferiority complex; you could-n’t be an odious little squirt like Neville for forty-odd years without acquiring one.
‘Neville,’ he said, trying to sound bored, ‘have you any idea how stupid you sound when you’re trying to do Dr No impressions? If you want to kill the fucking goldfish, go ahead; they can’t put you in prison for that. But if you don’t get these bloody ropes off me in ten seconds flat, I’m going to stick them, and the goldfish bowl, and anything else I can fit in there, right up your . . .’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Really?’ Gordon laughed. ‘So what’re you going to do? You’re going to keep me tied up here for ever? Kill me and dissolve the body in battery acid? You wouldn’t even know how to get it out of the battery without spilling it down your trousers. Listen; pack it in now, while I’m still inclined to treat you as a sick but pretty funny joke, and we’ll say no more about it. Otherwise it’s going to turn nasty - you know, as in police and tabloids and prison? It’s never worth it, Neville; even an idiot like you should be able to see that.’
The expression on Neville’s face as he shook his head was little short of chilling. ‘I expect you’re right,’ he said sadly - but the sadness was remote, as if he was expressing formal sympathy for some unfortunate victim of
famine or flood in one of those funny little countries you have to look up in the atlas. ‘But I stopped worrying about myself a long time ago. You can’t afford to worry about what happens to you when you’ve got something as important as this to take care of.’
‘Neville,’ Gordon said; but he didn’t get any further, because that was when someone kicked the door in. What with the thunderflashes and the tear gas that followed the initial forced entry, Gordon didn’t get much of a look at the men who came bursting into the room - some through the door, some in through the window on ropes, as in the Milk Tray adverts - but to judge by their black balaclavas and exotic automatic weapons, they probably weren’t collecting for the church roof fund.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Get real, will you?’ said the pet-shop owner. ‘Where am I going to get my hands on an okapi?’
The men in grey suits looked at each other. ‘Two okapis,’ their spokesman said.
‘What?’
‘We need two okapis,’ the spokesman explained. ‘One male and one female.’
‘Do you really?’ The pet-shop owner breathed out through his nose. ‘Look, lads,’ he said, ‘why can’t you just settle for a nice hamster instead? I’ve got plenty of hamsters.’
The spokesman frowned. ‘So have we,’ he said. ‘In fact, we’ve got more hamsters than we need, really. We started off with two a short while ago, but now we seem to have lots of them. Tell you what,’ he added, ‘we could do a deal. All our spare hamsters for a pair of okapis.’
‘That’s a lot of hamsters,’ pointed out his chief aide.
The pet-shop man sighed and went back behind his counter, in a manner designed to suggest that he’d lost interest in these negotiations. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’d love to be able to help you out here, but I can’t. No okapis. No lemurs or ocelots or bird-eating spiders.’ He picked up a thick wad of paper from the counter and held it out to the spokesman. ‘None of the stuff on this list. They’re lines we just don’t carry. Sorry.’