You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps

by Tom Holt

  Out onto the landing, through the computer room, down one flight of the back stairs, across the lower landing (once upon a time they’d tried calling it the mezzanine, but the effort of trying to keep straight faces had interfered with work, so they’d abandoned that), down one flight of the middle stairs, on down the corridor, through the fire door and into the front office.

  ‘I’ll be out for the rest of the day,’ he told Mr Tanner’s mum. She gave him a sympathetic look. ‘Scotland?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have fun.’

  A balrog in a nuclear reactor. ‘I’ll try,’ Benny said, and stepped into the revolving door.

  It wasn’t what I thought it was. It wasn’t what I thought it was. Does lying to yourself make you go blind? It wasn’t what I thought it was, it can’t have been.

  Colin opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the underside of his bed. Ah yes, he said to himself, I remember now. I came down here because I was scared in case the demon came back.

  Not a demon. Not what I thought it was.

  The room was full of daylight, and he was still wearing the clothes he’d had on yesterday. He wriggled sideways until he could stand up. The face in the mirror looked even dozier than usual. He shaved its chin, but that didn’t help a great deal. Time to go downstairs for breakfast.

  Dad wasn’t there; he’d gone in early, Mum told him, as she confronted him with a huge bowl full of porridge. It was ten years since he’d first explained to her that porridge gave him racing indigestion. He ate it alone and in silence, then went to work.

  ‘Morning,’ he called out as he passed the front desk. It was pure habit, a Pavlovian reaction. Each morning for the last eight years, he’d called out his insincere greeting, and Pam on the front desk had echoed it. He knew what Pam looked like, so there was no point wasting a neck-swivel just to see her. He cocked his wrist to push open the connecting door.

  ‘Hi,’ said the receptionist. ‘You must be Colin Hollingshead.’

  He stopped and turned his head. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Who—?’

  She smiled at him. ‘I’m the new receptionist,’ she said.

  Compare and contrast. He’d made two recent visits to the office of J. W. Wells, in the City. On both occasions, there had been a (why mince words?) stunningly lovely girl behind the front desk. The first time, he’d experienced that numbed, having-just-walked-through-a-plate-glass-door feeling that besets susceptible young men when confronted with extreme beauty. The second time he’d been too preoccupied to care, but he’d still been human enough to notice. The young female sitting where Pam usually sat wasn’t in the same league: nice-looking, on balance, though maybe a smidge on the chunky side. On the other hand—

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re—’

  ‘Pam’s on holiday,’ she explained. ‘I’m filling in for her. Actually, I’m her niece.’

  Colin relaxed slightly. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

  She frowned. ‘Ah,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a funny name. Is it short for—?’

  ‘No, that’s not what I’m called.’ Her frown deepened. ‘Oh well, I suppose I’d better tell you and get it over with. I’m called Famine.’

  Colin thought for a moment. ‘That’s Spanish, isn’t it?’

  She winced slightly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘English. My two sisters are called Pestilence and War, and my kid brother—’ She sighed. ‘My Dad’s quite religious, you see. You can laugh now if you want to.’

  Colin frowned. ‘I don’t think it’s funny,’ he said. ‘It must be really difficult for you.’

  She shrugged. ‘You get used to it,’ she said. ‘And it’s sort of a family tradition. Like, Dad’s first name is Envy, and he’s got six brothers and sisters. Bit of a pain, really.’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ Colin said. ‘Have you got a middle name? You could use that instead.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘For my middle name, they called me after Dad’s sister. I’m Famine L. Williams.’ She shrugged again. ‘Could’ve been worse,’ she said. ‘I heard on the radio once about some family in America that called their kids after Santa’s reindeer.’

  Colin pursed his lips. ‘That’d be worse?’

  ‘Or there’s the seven dwarves,’ she added, ‘or the 1966 England World Cup squad. Mostly people call me Fam, for short.’

  ‘I’ll do that, then,’ Colin said. Then he grinned. ‘My Dad’s a nutcase too,’ he said.

  Fam seemed to hesitate for a moment, then she grinned. ‘That’s what Auntie Pam told me,’ she said.

  ‘She’s your mum’s sister, right?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘How did I guess?’

  She smiled at him. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said, and hesitated.

  ‘I’d better get on, I suppose,’ he said, though of course he had nothing useful to do, and all day to fill with doing it.

  ‘See you around, then.’

  ‘See you.’

  Colin shoved through the connecting door and pottered down to his office, just in case some splendid task or quest was waiting on his desk. No such luck, so he sat down. He remembered.

  My Dad in is league with the Devil, and last night I saw— And this morning, I forgot all about it while I was chatting to some girl on reception. Eek. So what does that make me?

  Normal? He considered the interpretation and rejected it. No, he was a callous, shallow, thoughtless bastard. How could any decent human being possibly allow himself to be sidetracked by nice-looking girls when his universe was in tatters and his own father was in mortal peril - no, immortal peril, which was far worse.

  Nice-looking? Well, yes. Also bright, cheerful, easy to get along with, nice sense of humour—

  There is no thunk as the arrow strikes home; presumably Cupid uses a silencer, as befits a sniper. Instead, there’s a slight jolt. The subconscious mind registers a change that slightly affects everything. It’s like playing with the TV remote: you turn the colour down to black and white, then gradually bring it back up again. That moment, when the shades of grey start to blush into the first faint colours, is pretty much what it’s like. Oh, you say to yourself, as you acknowledge the fact for the first time. Right. From there on, it gathers pace; but there’s a moment, like the short interval of time when you realise you’ve caught a cold, when the symptoms are still only slight, but the diagnosis is certain. Whether you then proceed to extremes of daydreaming, mooning about, making a fool and a nuisance of yourself, depends on the severity of the case and your own nature. The start, however, is always the same.

  Well then, Colin thought.

  Next he scowled at a blank spot on the wall, because it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time if it’d tried. How often had he laughed in infuriated scorn at the movies, when the hero and heroine discover their true feelings for each other in the middle of a gun battle, car chase, earthquake, alien invasion (or, if it’s a Bond film, all of the above simultaneously), because surely you’d be far too preoccupied with blind terror and stuff like that. Apparently not. The world was breaking up all around him, bloody great big chunks of sky were crashing down at him like Newton’s apple, but that didn’t matter. He was still in the firing line for a fly-by shooting. Maybe that was the rule rather than the exception. Maybe true love always comes at the most inconvenient moment, like phone calls from your mother, or jury service. Maybe that’s how you’re supposed to know that this one’s the—

  Colin opened his eyes wide and sat up. Miss Right? Apparently his subconscious mind thought so, or it wouldn’t be flailing around concepts like true love. Really, though? He’d barely said two words to Fam and already he was holding a lighted match over a gunpowder trail that led directly to mortgages, soft furnishings, kiddie seats in the car, Sunday mornings at the DIY superstore, family holidays, thinking seriously about pensions, school league tables and Christmas round robins filled with graduating offspring and minor geriatric ai
lments. When you’re about to die, your whole past life’s supposed to flash before your eyes. When you fall in true love, on the other hand, what you see in the twinkling of an eye is your entire future. It’s very much a matter of opinion which is the more depressing.

  Even so, Colin thought. So what? He thought of a father-in-law called Envy and a brother-in-law who, if he opted for a career as a professional darts player, would be seen standing at the oche with DEATH WILLIAMS spreadeagled in big white letters across his shoulder blades, and against that balanced the memory of a smile. No big deal. In fact, the utter unspeakableness of their families was something they had in common which would undoubtedly draw them closer together—

  He gave up. Resistance is futile; likewise logic, common sense and the instinctive urge to self-preservation. He glanced at his watch; ten minutes since he’d come in through the front-office door. He might as well amble back to reception and see if there were any messages for him.

  Usually Colin slouched along the corridor, though sometimes he dawdled and occasionally he traipsed. This time he practically sprinted. His head was full of sleigh-bells and birdsong, which was probably why he almost failed to notice something unusual standing in the middle of the small room just in front of the fire door, where they kept the photocopier, the shredder and three battered old green filing cabinets.

  Almost, but not quite. He stopped, looked at it and wilted, like an Action Man inadvertently microwaved.

  It was much smaller than the one at home; hardly more than a sapling.

  Finally, as a last resort, Connie tried Levinson & De Pienaar on Temporal Displacement. She hadn’t bothered looking there before, partly because she was sure it was really something quite simple and straightforward, partly because her copy of Levinson was on the top shelf and she’d have to stand on a chair to reach it.

  She stepped back down and blew dust off the top of the book. It fell open at the flyleaf. Constance Schwartz-Alberich. St Barthold’s College, Nuneaton. She frowned. She’d written that in the same year that the Beatles had recorded ‘Eleanor Rigby’. Maybe she was getting too old for all this nonsense.

  Or maybe not. She sat down and turned to the index. Cassie’s problem had chafed at her mind ever since the poor girl had explained it to her in the pub, and the irritation was getting in the way of her work. Better to get it sorted out once and for all, and then she’d be able to concentrate on doing what she was paid for.

  Anomalies: 3, 7, 13, 67, 69-72, 86, 92f; 103— There were some aspects of the matter that definitely rang bells, to the point where, if Connie closed her eyes, she could practically see Quasimodo swinging to and fro underneath them. The difficulty was, they had nothing to do with the particulars of the case. They were out of place, like a torpedo in a salad.

  Nothing on page thirteen. She flipped back to the end of the book. Twenty years ago, she felt sure, she’d have been able to put her finger on it straight away, no messing. It was just a matter of seeing the bigger picture.

  Knock. The door opened, and Cassie came in. With a sigh, Connie put the book down. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘This bloody thing of yours. It’s really starting to bug me.’

  ‘Me too,’ Cassie said. ‘But that’s not why I’m here. I was wondering, could you just cast your eye over this clause here? I think it means what I want it to mean, but I’ve been staring at it for so long it could mean practically anything.’

  Connie grinned. ‘Give it here,’ she said. She read it quickly and nodded. ‘Seems perfectly clear to me,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, right. Thanks.’

  ‘Roughly paraphrased, it means, we’ve got you by the balls, but deep down we’re philanthropists, so we’ve bunged in this huge great loophole so you can scamper away like frightened woodland creatures and there’s bugger-all that we’ll be able to do about it. Was that what you wanted it to say?’

  ‘Oh.’ Cassie sat down. ‘It’s no good,’ she said. ‘It’s really starting to get to me.’

  ‘I know.’ Connie picked up a pen, crossed out some words in the offending paragraph and wrote some bits in over the top. ‘Try that,’ she said. ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes, much. I guess. Oh, I don’t know. Is it all right or not?’

  ‘Search me. I can’t concentrate either. A bloody menace, that’s what you are.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Unlike you,’ Connie went on, ‘I’m trying to do something about it. Or I was, before you barged in.’ She swivelled the book round so that Cassie could see the title on the spine.

  ‘Temporal displacement,’ Cassie said. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Connie admitted. ‘But I’ve tried everything sensible I could think of, so I thought I’d waste my time on something that it couldn’t possibly be.’

  Cassie nodded. ‘I can see the logic in that,’ she said. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘No, but like I said, I’d only just started. Come back in half an hour, when I’ve failed properly.’

  Cassie stood up. ‘It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s only a load of coincidences, or I’m imagining things, or—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Connie said. ‘Here, what about this? Porzig’s ghost: did you do that at college?’

  Cassie frowned. ‘It does sound vaguely familiar,’ she said. ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Well—’ Connie said, but the phone rang. She picked it up, listened, grunted, and put it down. ‘Here,’ she said, pushing the book across the desk, ‘you’ll have to read it for yourself. Apparently, I’ve been summoned.’

  ‘Summoned?’

  ‘By Them. God only knows why, but there’s only one way to find out. You read that bit there, and I’ll explain what I’m on about when I get back.’

  So Cassie picked up the book. Connie had marked the place with an empty After Eight wrapper.

  … is generally misinterpreted as a reference to Leo Porzig, late Fulbright professor of applied metaphysics at Stanford University. In fact, Porzig was not the first to identify the phenomenon; however, it was his landmark article in Metempsychosis 67 (1962) that initially drew attention to the research conducted in Paris by Lehmann and Diakonov between 1927 and 1932 …

  Cassie frowned. Skip all that.

  … his epoch-making 1962 article, Porzig characterises the effect thus: An individual A, of sound mind and subject to no perceptible supernatural influence, becomes aware that he is in fact leading the life of another individual, B - he has some or all of B’s memories, finds himself in situations alien to his own circumstances but relevant to B’s, experiences emotions or holds opinions entirely foreign to his own nature but in keeping with B’s. In some cases reported by Lehmann and Diakonov, at the relevant time B had predeceased A, sometimes by a substantial number of years, whereas in other instances A and B were almost exact contemporaries and B was still alive. Under the influence of the syndrome, subjects had espoused causes they detested, quarrelled bitterly with close friends and family, and in some instances married partners they heartily disliked. Lehmann and Diakonov collated the data but were unable to advance any cogent explanation; it was Porzig who proposed the hypothesis that the effect is a symptom of a temporal anomaly, in essence a massive rupture in the time/causality interface, whereby B, having been preordained to commit some act or suffer some experience but having been prevented by the intervention of some unforeseen and anomalous external force or event, B’s destiny attaches itself to A and influences his existence in all relevant aspects as though A were indeed B—

  Cassie looked up and rubbed her eyelids. It wasn’t quite as bad as tax statutes or EU directives, but it wasn’t exactly light holiday reading either. She went back and had another crack at it. Second time around wasn’t much better than the first; third time, a glimmer of light began to shine through the cracks. She cast her mind back to college, when she’d had to wade through this sort of garbage all the time.
Back then, it had always helped if she stuck in a few names, so she did that, and went through it in her mind to see if it made any sense.

  All right. Suppose Sean Connery’s got a destiny; he’s destined to be the first man on Mars. But, the day before the Mars rocket’s due to blast off from Canaveral, Sean trips over the cat, falls down the stairs and sprains his ankle. Destiny is foiled; but what’s written is written, so instead Destiny darts out into the street and press-gangs the first remotely suitable person it comes across - Jim Carrey, say - into taking Sean’s place. Accordingly, Jim abandons his promising career in insurance, signs up with NASA and becomes an astronaut. Destiny is happy, because in the end a human toe leaves a print in the chartreuse dust of an alien world; whether Jim likes it or not is neither here nor there. Fine.

  Back to the book—

  … complications arise when the superimposition of B’s destiny on A prevents A from fulfilling his own destiny, which in turn lights on a random third party C, and so on in a rapidly escalating chain reaction. That no such sequence of events has yet been detected or recorded, Porzig argued, is beside the point; given the right circumstances, such a chain reaction could quite possibly develop, with obviously disastrous consequences. Dismissing Porzig as unduly alarmist and seeking to refute his basic conclusions, Hrozny and Crossland (JTS 105, 1972, pp 156-94) argued that such an effect would immediately be neutralised and readjusted by Meilhac’s Phenomenon, and accordingly …

  Cassie shut the book. She couldn’t be arsed with Hrozny and Crossland right now. In fact, if they both fell down an open manhole cover, and Meilhac tumbled in after them and broke his stupid neck, it’d serve them all right for complicating her life to the point where she wanted to scream.

  Living someone else’s life instead of my own, she thought; well. In a sense, she’d been doing that for years (Daddy’s voice: You don’t want to be a boring old accountant, kitten, you ‘re going to be a sorcerer just like me) but that wasn’t an effect or a phenomenon, that was her own fault for not digging her heels in and saying no. The recent stuff, though; that was something else. Suppose, then, that somebody she didn’t know, hadn’t ever met, had been destined since Time began to fall in love with Colin Hollingshead. A nasty thought, that, although it was always possible that this unknown person had been very naughty in a previous existence. Suppose, though; and suppose somewhere along the line true love had cast a shoe or blown a tyre; and suppose that, in consequence, there was this huge splodge of romance ricocheting around like a stray bullet, and she just happened to be in the way—