by Tom Holt
‘My pleasure, Ms Clay,’ the gnome replied, and vanished.
CHAPTER TEN
Colin woke up and fumbled for the alarm clock. Another morning. The usual status check; he had a bit of a headache - reasonable enough, since he remembered having indulged in strong drink the previous evening - and one hell of a sore throat. A cold on its way. What fun.
Another day at the office, and then he remembered. She’d be on reception. She wasn’t Snotty Gillett’s girlfriend after all. She’d said ‘See you in the morning’ when they’d all left the pub last night. Joy unbounded.
And then he remembered. He’d gone to the pub to meet the strange woman from JWW. When he left it, he’d bumped into that - that whatever, the thing that had barged into his room that night, and hadn’t there been something about the two of them having a lads’ night out, just him and it, getting to know each other better? And then he’d had that extraordinary dream, where the strange woman had stabbed him and he’d
Yes, he remembered, but just before she said ‘See you in the morning,’ she’d given him her phone number. Joy still unbounded, and screw all the weird stuff.
Her phone number, which he’d forgotten. Horror.
‘Morning,’ she practically sang at him as he stumbled through the door. ‘Oh, and your Dad’s been looking for you.’
‘Ah,’ Colin said.
‘Meeting, in the boardroom,’ she said. ‘He seemed a bit put out that he couldn’t find you earlier.’
A bit put out. Right. ‘Anyone in there with him?’
A slight frown on that delightful face. ‘There was a blonde woman called to see him, nine sharp.’ She said the word blonde with a certain inflection, like the clerk of the court reading out charges - blonde with intent to cause grievous emotional harm and he was wondering about that when she added: ‘She asked if you were in so she could have a word with you first, but I told her you weren’t in yet.’
‘Oh, right.’ Just a trace of hesitation, as though scouring his mind for a long-buried memory. ‘Was she from J. W. Wells? Clay, I think her name is.’
‘Mphm.’
‘Oh, her,’ Colin said, and maybe he went a bit overboard on the heavy sigh ‘Dreadful woman,’ he added. ‘Boring. Still’ He shrugged. ‘Better get on and get it over with, I suppose.’ Pause. Full eye contact. Deep breath. ‘Are you doing anything for lunch?’
‘No.’
‘Only, I was going to head into town, there’s a new sort of Italian place I noticed a couple of days ago’
‘Yes, love to,’ she said, cutting him off in mid-dither. And she smiled. ‘Go on,’ she added, ‘you’ll be late.’
Up the stairs two at a time; offbeat combination of the spring in the step that comes from a date duly secured and terror at the thought of being late for the meeting. Colin stopped outside the boardroom door and listened, but he could only hear Dad’s booming drone. He knocked and went in.
‘At bloody last,’ his father said. But Colin was too preoccupied to notice or care what sort of mood the old sod was in. Nor was he particularly interested in Cassie, sitting next to the old man, writing something on a big pad of A4 paper. Instead, his attention was monopolised by
‘I gather you’ve met Oscar,’ Dad said, nodding in its direction. ‘And Miss Clay, from J. W. Wells.’
Only then did he notice that Cassie was trying to establish non-verbal communication with him; she was opening her eyes wide, twitching her head sideways, mouthing something at him, but he couldn’t begin to take any of it in. He sat down, as far away from Oscar as he could get.
‘Anyway.’ Dad turned away from him and looked down at the papers in front of him. Colin recognised the contract. ‘I think we can say that’s all pretty well sorted; so, if Miss Clay wouldn’t mind being the witness, we can all crack on and get this thing signed.’
Colin opened his mouth, but nothing came out. What with one thing and another, he’d let the whole ghastly soul-selling business slip his mind. After all, hadn’t Cassie said she thought she’d be able to derail the procedure before it got to this point? He’d taken that as permission to let it slither down his list of priorities and things to lie awake at night shuddering about; and now here it was, happening, in spite of everything. It wasn’t fair; it was an ambush, a sneak attack when his back was turned, and it had caught him completely unprepared. Even so, he opened his mouth to start yelling. Then he saw the pen in his father’s hand.
Oh, he thought.
There’s always a sort of kids-party-game feel to the signing of a legal document, as it gets passed round like the parcel, and everybody has to have a go. When it was his turn, Colin couldn’t resist sneaking a look to see what Oscar’s signature looked like, but there wasn’t one. Instead there was a circular emblem embossed into the paper, slightly discoloured by scorch marks. He slid the paper back across the table, and Cassie signed both copies for the third time. Dad took one of them and slid it into the folder open in front of him. Oscar took the other copy, and Colin looked away to avoid seeing what it did with it. Then there was a scraping of chairs on the polished wood floor. Oscar nodded to him as it passed, which made him feel sick. Dad said ‘Thanks for coming’ to Cassie in a mildly distracted tone of voice; he was going to show Oscar something in the factory, apparently. Cassie, on the other hand, was taking an inordinate length time packing her papers and pens and whatever into her briefcase.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she hissed, as soon as Dad and the thing were safely out of the room.
‘What?’
‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘About last night.’
‘What?’ Colin shook his head, as though trying to get rid of the turmoil inside his head by sheer centrifugal force. ‘You promised me,’ he burst out. ‘You promised you’d find a way of stopping it.’
That wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. ‘I did no such thing,’ she snapped defensively. ‘I said I’d see if there was anything I could do. But then I found out they’d been talking direct to each other, cutting me out, so’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry,’ Colin repeated savagely. ‘My Dad has just sold his soul to - to that thing, and you’re sorry.’
‘Yes.’ Cassie’s forehead tightened into a warning frown. ‘I’m sorry, all right? Now, can we talk about?’
‘No.’ He stopped. ‘What do you mean, last night? What’s any of that that got to do with you?’
Her eyes widened, as though he’d just deliberately poured a cup of tea down the front of her blouse. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean’ Stop; think. ‘Well, some stuff happened to me last night, sure, but I don’t remember you coming into it. All right, I did have a drink with a really strange woman from your office, Connie something; and then I ran into, um, a couple of old friends in the pub. And then I went home. And yes, I had a bloody funny dream, about being stabbed and dying and being reborn as a’
‘Yes?’
‘You were in it,’ he said slowly. ‘You were in my dreams.’
‘Halle-bloody-lujah,’ Cassie said sharply. ‘Yes, that’s right. Only it wasn’t a dream. I know, because I was there too. I was the racing car, and you were the little dog.’
‘My God.’ For a moment, a sound outside the door snagged Colin’s attention; he was afraid it might be his Dad coming back, with or without Oscar. But the door didn’t open, so he went on:
‘What d’you mean, real? It couldn’t have actually happened, for crying out loud. I was a dog. I saw my own funeral. That’s not’
‘It’s called Funkhausen’s Loop,’ she interrupted briskly. ‘It’s a magical technique for investigating conditions like avatar slip and Ustinov’s Syndrome.’
Colin groaned aloud. ‘Could you maybe make a special effort and speak English for a change? Ustinov’s Syndrome?’
‘Sorry.’ Cassie frowned slightly. I forgot. Basically, it’s about things to do with time; but not like a time machine or anything. It’s breakdowns and
anomalies in your own temporal network. In this case,’ she added, with just a trace of an apologetic simper, ‘reincarnation. Funkhausen’s Loop means that you can sneak a look at your previous existences, to see if there’s feedback or bleed-through or anything like that.’
‘You’re doing it again,’ Colin protested angrily. ‘Bleed-through?’
She closed her eyes and opened them again. He guessed it was her version of counting to ten. ‘Where stuff from a previous life seeps through into this one and messes things up. Which is what’s happening to us, apparently.’
It was, Colin decided, one hell of a bad time to have a thick head, not to mention savage indigestion and pins and needles in his left leg. ‘Is it?’ he said.
‘Yes. Look, don’t you remember? We were people in the Middle Ages, on horseback; you were holding a hawk. And then we were sort of in Jane Austen’s time, and’
Now he came to think of it, yes. ‘And peasants,’ he interrupted. ‘There was a cow inside the house,’ he added, ‘which is simply gross.’
‘That’s right.’ Cassie sounded relieved. ‘Those were flashbacks from previous incarnations. We knew each other in past lives. In fact, we were’ She hesitated. ‘But it never worked out,’ she went on. ‘Something always screwed us up, but we never knew what it was. Things would be going along just fine, and then suddenly we’d find we couldn’t carry on any more and we split up,’ She was looking at him. ‘You know what that makes us?’ She had to brace herself to say the next bit. ‘Time-crossed lovers.’
Oink, Colin thought. ‘You what?’
‘Think about it, for pity’s sake,’ she snapped. ‘You do know basic reincarnation theory, don’t you?’
‘No.’
Cassie made a small noise; a cross between the roar of a Spanish bull and tearing linen. ‘Sorry,’ she added, ‘but this is so frustrating. Look, there’s no time for the whole deal now, so I ‘m oversimplifying like crazy. You die, okay?’
Colin frowned. ‘What, now?’
‘No.’ Eyes shut and opened again. ‘You die, and your spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it leaves your body and gets put into a new one.’
‘Is that what happens, then?’ Colin said, in a tiny voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’
‘And then,’ Cassie went on, ‘that body dies and you move to the next one, and so on. That’s unless you’ve been really horribly bad, in which case the new host rejects you, and’
‘That’s where Oscar comes in.’
‘Grossly oversimplifying, yes. Sort of. Anyway, so it goes on, und that’s basic reincarnation for you. But just occasionally, you get unfinished business; that’s usually where you had something really important going on in your life and for some reason it hasn’t been sorted out when you die. In which case, it carries over into the next one.’ She paused, searching for the right simile. ‘It’s like when you’re a kid and you won’t eat up your greens, so they’re served up at you for every meal until you do eat them. Right?’
Colin shrugged.
‘Anyhow,’ Cassie continued, ‘that must be what’s happening to us. According to Funkhausen, anyhow. You see, we’ve got all these lives where the two of us come together, and then for no apparent reason it all screws up, so the cold greens get carried forward to breakfast, if you see what I mean. And until we finally get our act together’
‘Hold on,’ Colin protested. ‘Are you suggesting that we should? And all because some people in the Middle Ages got their wires crossed? That’s sick.’
He could sense that Cassie’s patience was running out faster than the North Sea oil reserves, but he didn’t particularly care. ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ she said, ‘I’m just explaining. You wanted me to.’
‘All right, fine.’ He shook his head. ‘But now we know what’s going on, we can just ignore it, surely. I mean’ He paused, as huge surges of embarrassment swept through him like flood water. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘now we know we don’t, like, fancy each other, and it’s just this sort of hangover from a bunch of dead people. Surely if we just stay out of each other’s way from now on, it’ll solve itself.’
Cassie bit her lip. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Depends on whether us meeting each other like this was just coincidence and bad luck, or whether the forces acting on us dragged us together in this life same as they seem to have been doing for generations. If it’s the second one, I don’t think it’s going to be as easy as just making an effort to avoid each other.’
That sounded ominous. ‘You mean there’s someone doing this to us?’
‘No, not the way you make it sound. It’s more impersonal than that. More like magnetism or gravity. If it really is the second one, our lives will pan out so that we keep running into each other and getting involved, whether we like it or not.’
‘If it’s the second one.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don’t know.’
Cassie sighed. ‘It’s not really my field of expertise,’ she said. Actually, it’s a pretty obscure branch of the profession, partly because it’s difficult and vague, mostly because there’s not enough money in it to make it worthwhile doing the research. In fact, I can only think of one specialist in this sort of stuff, and that’s Professor Van Spee of Leiden.’
‘So can you ask him?’
‘He’s dead.’ She shook her head. ‘He did publish several articles about it in one of the journals, I could look them up and see if there’s anything helpful. Otherwise’ She pulled a sad face. ‘I don’t think any of the people working at our place would know very much about it.’
‘Oh.’ Colin felt for a moment as though he was swimming through lumpy gravy; he didn’t really understand, or believe, but neither could he simply dismiss what she’d been saying as drivel and put it out of his mind. He’d seen too much: trees, Oscar, his own grave, that sort of thing. Then a small but vital point occurred to him, and its advent was like a flood of harsh white light: that, in the context of all the other shit that was circling over his head like a flock of vultures, it really wasn’t that big a deal. If the weird symptoms they apparently shared were bugging the hell out of Ms Clay, naturally he felt for her but not to the extent that he was prepared to do anything about it. As for himself, he had other worries. ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile,’ he added, and his voice took on an edge that surprised him, ‘perhaps you’d like to tell me how we’re going to get my Dad out of this bloody horrible mess that your stupid firm’s got him into. Or had you forgotten about that?’
Cassie looked at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I don’t see there’s anything I can do about it. I mean, he knew what he was doing.’
‘How can you say that?’ Colin exploded. ‘He’s just sold his soul’
‘Yes, all right.’ Just a bit shrill there, he noticed. ‘But I explained it to him. We’re obliged to do that, under the Code of Practice.’
That one hit Colin squarely between the eyes. ‘There’s a Code of Practice?’
‘Oh yes.’ Cassie nodded vigorously. ‘Like in financial services and stuff. It’s even got its own British Standard, and a Kitemark. That’s where JWW comes in, mostly. It’s our job to explain the terms and conditions to the consumer. And then we certify that we’ve done it, and that complies with the Code of Practice. So you can see, surely, that there’s not a lot I could have done. I’m sorry,’ she added, and Colin got the impression that maybe she was, a little bit. That, however, was cold comfort.
‘Well, sod that,’ he said. ‘All right, so he’s made the contract. How do you go about cancelling it?’
‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘I mean, not without the purchaser’s agreement. And really, I don’t see them going along with it. I mean, why should they?’
Colin took a deep breath ‘What if,’ he said, ‘I let them have me instead?’
That surprised her all right. ‘What?’
‘What if I took his
place?’ Colin paused to listen to what he’d just said. He couldn’t remember having taken the decision to say it; it came out because it had to, because he had no choice. His father, after all. ‘Look at it from their point of view,’ he went on. ‘I mean, Dad - well, he’s no angel, right? In fact, he’s been a right bastard ever since I can remember. I don’t think he’s ever actually killed anybody or stuff like that; but he said it himself, if there really is an afterlife and a Very Bad Place where you go if you’ve been a scumbag, then it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s where he’s been heading all along. In which case,’ he went on, ‘from their point of view it’s a very bad deal. What I mean is, they’re buying something they’d have got for free in thirty years or so. But if they cancel the deal and take me instead’ He shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. ‘Not that I’m a saint or anything, but the sort of life I’ve led, I never even had the opportunities to do anything evil or bad. I must be a much better bargain, surely.’
Cassie was looking at him. ‘Are you serious?’ she said. ‘Come on, use your brain. By your own admission, no offence, but sooner or later, one way or the other, your father’s going to end up-So really,’ she went on, ‘if we’re going to be absolutely brutal about it, he’ll be no worse off. But if you get them to take you instead - I mean, it’d be pointless. And you saw - well, Oscar. Do you really want to spend all eternity with the likes of?’
‘No, of course not,’ Colin shouted. ‘But he’s my Dad, for crying out loud. It’s like saying, why bother to save someone from drowning, because we’re all going to die eventually anyway?’
She frowned. ‘Well, no, actually, because for a start’
‘Quiet.’ He hadn’t meant to snap at Cassie but he was getting uť the point where it really didn’t matter. ‘I don’t actually want your opinion, thanks all the same, just some professional advice. You can invoice me if you want.’
‘Go on.’
‘All I want to know is,’ he said, in a flat voice, ‘can you go back and put it to them, see if they’d be interested? And if so, make the necessary arrangements, paperwork and stuff. That’s all. Will you do that?’