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

by Tom Holt

  Oscar was grinning. It was, of course, difficult to be sure, given its rather unconventional facial geography, but Colin was convinced that it could see what he was thinking, and the grin was because he’d taken the bait, just as he was supposed to. Fair enough, now he came to think of it. Accepting a seat on the board of Hollingshead & Farren in exchange for his conscience was a bit like selling Manhattan to the palefaces for a handful of shiny beads. He hoped that that was why Dad had just frowned, and that this hadn’t been his idea.

  Not that it was of very great consequence, since Dad was now just one jump ahead of the everlasting barbecue, and there were strange-looking people with cloven hooves all around him, operating machinery. Colin’s head had started to hurt, and he wanted to get out of there. After all, now that the contract had actually been signed and the new workforce had reported for duty and started their first shift, he’d failed, there was nothing more he could do. In which case— ‘Look at that.’ Dad had picked up a newly fettled widget from one of the plastic bins into which the finished product dropped from the delivery chute. ‘Lovely piece of work, better than the stuff the Swiss turn out. They’re all right, these lads of yours.’

  ‘I am delighted to hear you say so,’ Oscar replied quietly. ‘It’s a point of pride with us that we always keep our side of the bargain.’

  That was about as much as Colin could take. Mumbling something about an upset stomach (not a million miles from the truth) he scuttled across the shop floor and through the fire doors into the back yard. Home; the passport, the station, the airport; after that he wasn’t quite sure, but it didn’t really matter. He thought of those road signs you get on the outskirts of big towns that say ‘All Other Destinations’. That was exactly where he wanted to go, and he couldn’t wait to get there.

  ‘Feeling better?’ _.

  He turned his head. Oscar was standing beside him, directly between him and the side gate.

  ‘No,’ Colin said. ‘I think I’d better go home.’

  ‘Of course.’ Oscar nodded, and Colin noticed that it was holding something in its hand; sort of burgundy colour, a little book. A passport.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Colin said. ‘Where did you get that from?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Oscar held it out to him. Colin grabbed at it but as soon as his fingertips brushed its cover, it vanished. Colin opened his hand, and found nothing in it except a few wisps of pale grey ash.

  ‘You won’t be needing it,’ Oscar reassured him. ‘Of course, you could go to the station anyway. You’ll find it’s closed for renovation: a complete refit, very ambitious. If you’re thinking about taxis or buses, you should be prepared for a very long wait. You have no car, and walking, or even running—’ It shook its head. ‘You could always try.’

  Colin looked at it for a moment. ‘I might just do that.’

  ‘Of course,’ Oscar said, and stood aside.

  Colin took two steps toward the gate and staggered. Pins and needles in both feet, worse than he’d ever felt before; worse even than that time in the tea shop—

  ‘Quite,’ Oscar said. ‘In the end, you see, everything eventually turns out to be about true love. If I were you—’ It made a sort of wavy gesture with its left hand, and the pins and needles went away again, ‘I’d go into town and buy myself a nice, smart new suit, for being a director in. A small act of celebration would seem to be in order, after all.’

  ‘A suit,’ Colin said.

  ‘Indeed. I believe you’d look good in a middle-weight dark grey wool with perhaps the faintest suggestion of chalk-tripes. If you wish, I can come with you and help you choose.’

  Colin thanked it but said he’d rather go alone, and left. Once he was a couple of hundred yards away from the factory, he thought, Yes, but I can send away for a new passport, and then realised that most likely he couldn’t, not if Oscar didn’t want him to. Just for fun he looked in at the station. It was surrounded by hoardings and scaffolding, and a big blue sign told him the name of the contractor and the scheduled completion date for Phase One. There was a long, grumpy queue at the bus stop; he felt that he should stop and apologise to them, but he couldn’t think how to explain why it was all his fault.

  Even so; he went on a bit further, past British Home Stores to the travel agent’s. Only it wasn’t there any more. In its place was a large, smart-looking Burton’s, and the notice in their window said that they were having a special offer on business suits.

  Well, fine. To paraphrase the words of the poet, you can lead a free man to water, but you can’t make him drink; all you can do is drown him. So he went in - but he didn’t get himself a nice new suit. Instead he bought a tie, light blue with little yellow sunflowers on it. It wasn’t much; in fact it was pathetic, a single tea bag thrown into Boston Harbour. Unfortunately, it seemed that it was the best he could do.

  Colin went back to the factory. On the way, he made a resolution. So he couldn’t save his Dad’s soul from eternal damnation. So he couldn’t do anything about the fact that the workforce had been fired and replaced by non-union demons (hooflegs rather than blacklegs; dear God, he was even starting to think like bloody Oscar now). So he couldn’t even run away to the Andaman Islands and start a new life as a beachcomber. There was one thing he could still do to win himself a little smear of happiness on Life’s windscreen; or at least he could give it a go, though he didn’t rate his chances very much. And it’d be a minor act of rebellion against Oscar, who seemed very keen on fixing him up with Cassie Clay. Yes; he could find Fam, blurt out a grovelling apology and ask her out for a proper date. It was a bit like asking the lifeboat to go back to the sinking Titanic so that he could get his sponge bag, but so what? He’d done his best to do the noble, unselfish things and got precisely nowhere. At least finding true love would be doing something, rather than giving up completely.

  Fam wasn’t behind the front desk, where she should have been. Instead, there was someone he was pretty sure that he didn’t know. He reckoned that he’d have remembered her if he’d met her before.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked.

  She smiled at him. It was the kind of smile that should have stopped him dead in his tracks and left him stammering and glowing bright red like a traffic light. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘I’m Rosie. You must be Colin.’

  ‘What’re you doing there?’ he said. ‘Where’s Fam? Ms Williams?’

  Rosie looked at him for a moment; Colin had the uncomfortable feeling of “being gripped in tweezers, as though she was about to smear him on a glass slide and shove him under a microscope. ‘She left,’ Rosie said.

  ‘She left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Another smile. If ever they got around to inventing the smileproof vest, a smile like that would present a very substantial challenge. ‘I don’t know, do I? I’m just a temp.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Temp. Temporary receptionist. There was an ad in the local paper, and I answered it.’

  Which was a lie, of course. Fam had been there that morning; unless, of course, she’d given in her notice immediately after Colin had stood her up, and Dad had phoned in the ad as soon as she’d crossed the threshold on her way out. Dates, copy deadlines: he tried to do the mental arithmetic, but he couldn’t concentrate. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Look, I need to talk to her about something. Did she leave a number or anything like that?’

  Beautiful Rosie shrugged; her perfectly straight shoulder-length auburn hair bobbed slightly, like the most beautiful maggot any fish had ever seen squirming on a hook. Complete waste of effort. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose Mr Hollingshead senior might know. Why don’t you ask him?’

  No point answering that. ‘All right,’ Colin said, ‘give me the phone book, I’ll look in that.’

  Rosie got the book for him. Her nails were blood-red, perfectly almond-shaped and implausibly long. He grabbed the book and started turning the pages.

  Shouldn’t be difficult, surely. Her Dad�
�s initial, he remembered, was E. He rifled pages till he got to Williams.

  He had no bother at all finding E. Williams in the book. There was a whole page of them, two full columns in tiny type; and, by some bizarre coincidence, all of them appeared to live in Mortlake. He sighed, closed the book and slid it back across the desk at her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Rosie said.

  ‘Nothing.’ Colin was about to slouch off when he hesitated. Something about the way she’d looked at him; or rather, something about the very corner of her eye.

  ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ he asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Where was your last job?’

  A very slight frown. A stunningly lovely frown, sure, but a frown, as opposed to a smile. ‘Oh, up in the City. Packed it in because I couldn’t be bothered with the commuting.’

  ‘Specially now that they’ve closed the station.’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  Colin looked at Rosie again. Quite definitely he’d never seen her before in his life. On the other hand, he knew exactly where he’d seen her last. ‘Your last job,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t an outfit called J. W. Wells, was it? Seventy St Mary Axe.’

  She looked as though he’d just slapped her or something. ‘As a matter of fact, yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Fancy you knowing that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Colin said. ‘Fancy.’

  ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘that’s sort of why I took this job. You see, I remembered the name, what with you being clients of JWW and all; so when I saw your ad in the paper, I thought, there’s a funny thing. It felt like it was - I don’t know, sort of meant, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ Colin grunted. ‘I get the general idea.’

  ‘So, anyway,’ Rosie went on. ‘Here I am. I think I’ll enjoy working here, after JWW. It was always so hectic there - you know, phone always ringing, clients coming in without an appointment, all stressy. This looks like it’ll be a nice change of pace.’

  ‘Sure,’ Colin said. ‘Nothing ever happens here.’

  She looked at him. ‘Listen,’ she said - it was a sort of stern cooing, like a turtle-dove demanding to see the manager. ‘I’m sorry about your friend leaving, but there’s no point getting all tense with me about it, is there? So let’s just start again and see if we can’t be pleasant. Right?’

  If Colin had been a cat, he’d have had his ears flat to the sides of his skull by now. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Quite right. Welcome to Hollingshead and Farren, Rosie. Great to have you on board.’

  ‘Thanks.’ She smiled once more, but he saw it coming in plenty of time, and it whistled past him like a cannon ball. ‘Oh, I clean forgot. Oscar said, soon as you got in, could you nip down to the foundry and have a word?’

  ‘Foundry,’ Colin repeated. ‘Got you, yes. Cheerio for now, then.’

  He didn’t go to the foundry. Instead, he ran up the stairs, two steps at a time, to the manky, dusty, cobwebby old cupboard on the second-floor landing where all the junk and wiffin went to hide. There was all sorts in there: dead typewriters, broken office chairs, worn-out brooms, seventy years’ worth of back numbers of the British Plumbing & Sanitaryware Gazette. Also, he knew for a fact, there were loads of old phone directories; he’d seen them once, when he’d been looking for something. True, they were very ancient; the most recent one, he recalled, was at least eight years old. But it was worth having a look, on the assumption that Fam’s family had lived at the same house eight years ago—

  E. Williams: bingo! Instead of a whole page of the bastards, all huddled together in Mortlake like Boers in a laager, there were just two of them; and one of them lived in Putney. He stuffed the book under his arm, scuttled across the landing to the room where the laser printer lurked, nestled like a fairy-tale dragon in its tangled brake of cables, shut the door and sat down. There was a phone on the desk. He reached for it, found the place in the phone book and started dialling. There was a knock at the door, but he ignored it.

  He waited for the ring-ring. It didn’t come. Instead, he got the bagpipe drone that tells you the number’s been cut off.

  He swore and dumped the phone back on its cradle. More knocking on the door. Screw it, he thought, and yelled, ‘Come in.’

  It was Rosie, and she was smiling. ‘Thought you might like a nice cup of tea,’ she said.

  ‘Not really,’ Colin replied, but by then she’d put the cup and saucer down on the desk and gone away. He sighed. As it happened, he was quite thirsty, and it was a shame to waste a nice cuppa that he hadn’t had to make himself. He liked milk, no sugar, though he was prepared to bet a million pounds she already knew that.

  He picked up the cup and froze.

  On the rim of the cup, opposite to where he’d been about to put his lips, was a row of little houses; also a tiny dockyard and a miniature wee jetty, extending a centimetre out to tea. The buildings and structures were quaint and oldy-worldy, and there was a minute little signboard, like the ones you get on the railway telling you the name of the station, that said Boston. Seven millimetres or so from the end of the jetty floated a very small sailing ship, on whose deck scuttled teeny-tiny specks of activity. Colin didn’t have a magnifying glass or anything like that, but he reckoned he knew what they were doing. They were throwing stuff over the side of the ship. Just as he was about to throw the cup at the wall and run for it, the dinky little sail unfurled, and on it he saw titchy little letters that read:

  NICE TRY

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Banks have a thing about snappy, friendly-sounding slogans. They want to be thought of as action banks, listening banks, banks that like to say Yes. The Bank of the Dead was no exception. Originally founded in China over a thousand years ago as a means whereby the living could provide for the souls of their ancestors in the afterlife, the Bank had pioneered the concept of the snappy, friendly slogan along with paper money and the endowment mortgage. Though some of their earlier efforts at catchy advertising punchlines had, on reflection, struck them as unfortunate (‘Now you can take it with you’, regrettably followed up with ‘Why not pockets in shrouds?’), they’d always been rather proud of one they’d come up with towards the close of the Yuan Dynasty:

  The Bank Of The Dead: We Are Your Future

  Small wonder, then, that dealing with them on a daily basis for nearly three years had come to prey on Benny’s mind. The one thing that came close to setting it at rest was the door that separated his office from their bleak, dimensionless realm. It was only cheap plywood, but it was hexed, bewitched, shielded and enchanted with every kind of spell, incantation, charm and rune known to the trade, along with a battery of locks whose wards existed on different spatio-temporal planes, and a chain forged from meteorite iron in the flames of the last of the Great Dragons. It’s an uncertain world, and Benny had never trusted it or any of its components, but if there was one thing in which he had any degree of faith, it was the door.

  Which someone had apparently opened.

  He stood and stared at it for close to twenty seconds. Understandable: it’s not every day that you see something that’s completely impossible. The door couldn’t be open, because he knew for a stone-cold fact that he’d locked it himself, personally - it wasn’t something he was slapdash about - and he had the one and only set of keys. Just to make sure that he hadn’t left them in his desk drawer, he felt his right thigh until he found the chain, looped round his manticore-hide trouser-belt, from which his keyring hung in his pocket. He pulled them out and looked at them. All present and correct.

  So, Benny thought, if I didn’t unlock it and I’ve got the only keys, and it’s magically impossible for anybody on this side to open the door without the keys, it stands to reason—

  He shuddered. The disturbing fact was that the defences, though theoretically perfect and absolute, only really worked from this side. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. That was the whole point of the door. But Benny was a realist. Everything real, even magic
, obeys certain basic physical laws. But the dead aren’t real, it’s one of their salient features, and accordingly they are bound by no laws or rules of any kind. Door or no door, deep down in his uncomfortable soul Benny knew that the dead only stayed on their side because of a gentleman’s agreement between Mr Dao, the bank’s chief cashier, and Jack Wells, the firm’s erstwhile senior partner. Under the terms of the deal, J. W. Wells & Co had moved all their accounts to the Bank, in return for higher interest rates on fixed-term deposits, highly competitive business-account charges, free monthly statements and a promise on Mr Dao’s word of honour not to come through the door and start abducting the living. Any breach of the agreement, it was strictly understood, wouldn’t be tolerated, which meant that if the dead did come marauding through the door, snatching up any hapless mortal who crossed their path and dragging them back with them into their infinity of desolation and despair, JWW would be entitled to close all their accounts and take their business elsewhere without incurring penalty charges or loss of interest. That was, of course, a comfort. But.

  Benny backed slowly away until he was standing by his desk. Without turning his head or taking his gaze from the door, he leaned back and fumbled till he’d laid hands on a ten-foot pole he kept handy for all sorts of reasons. With this, he prodded at the door until it swung shut; then he pounced forward and started shooting home bolts and turning keys.

  That was better, but only up to a point. He’d locked the stable door, but something told him he was way, way beyond stray horses. Something had come through. Whatever it was, there was a fair chance that it was still in the building. And, since he was the firm’s pest-control officer, which is only a PC way of saying hero, it was his job to go and look for it. How jolly nice.

  The problem was, how do you set about looking for the dead? The Undead, now, that was a piece of cake. Benny had a whole battery of handy, pocket-size gadgets, ranging from the basic cheap-and-cheerful Pedersen’s Zombie-Find-‘n’-Stake to the cutting-edge, top-of-the-line RDG200 from Van Helsing Direct. A fat lot of good they’d do him. He didn’t know what to look for, because he knew perfectly well that what he was looking for didn’t exist. It’d be like searching for WMD’s in Iraq.