by Tom Holt
Never mind, said a quiet voice inside Benny’s head. If it was easy, they wouldn’t need you to do it.
Fine. Benny sighed. The most obvious way to find lurking predators from beyond the veil was to wander about the building looking weak and helpless. He was under no illusions about their possible intentions. They weren’t here to see the sights or do a spot of early Christmas shopping. If they’d broken through, it could only be because their insatiable, ravening hunger for some tiny scrap of life had driven them to it. The best way to find them would be to offer them bait and lure them into attacking. How he’d deal with them once he’d found them was another problem he didn’t have an answer to right now, but with any luck he’d think of something when the time came.
No point sneaking and prancing round the place Starsky-and-Hutch-style, flattening himself against walls and kicking doors open. Instead, he stuck his hands in his pockets, let his shoulders slump, and strolled down the corridor in the general direction of the stationery cupboard.
Just round the corner he met the thin-faced girl from Kntertainment & Media, the one whose name he could never remember. Even at JWW, questions like, ‘Excuse me, but have you seen any dead people recently?’ would be likely to result in lips pursed and eyebrows raised. Instead he asked, ‘Did you see anybody come out of my office just now?’
She frowned before answering. ‘You mean the young couple in the funny clothes?’
Just occasionally, it’s better to search hopelessly than to find. ‘That’d be them,’ Benny replied. ‘You don’t happen to remember which way they went?’
More serious consideration; then she said, ‘I think they were heading for the back stairs. You only just missed them.’
‘Thanks,’ Benny muttered, and started to walk away; but the thin-faced girl coughed meaningfully.
‘Have you got a minute?’ she asked.
‘What? Well, no, actually,’ Benny said. ‘I wanted a quick word with those people, before they leave the building.’
‘Only,’ the thin-faced girl went on, as though she hadn’t heard him, ‘I wanted to ask you about something. Not you personally,’ she added, and the tip of her usually sallow nose pinkened a little. ‘A senior practitioner. Someone with wisdom, knowledge and experience.’
In spite of what the proverbs say, the difference between flattery and Virgin Atlantic is that, occasionally, flattery will get you somewhere. ‘Fair enough,’ Benny said. ‘What?’
‘Love philtre,’ the thin-faced girl said. ‘I have a job on at the moment where the use of love philtre seems the obvious course.’
Benny grinned. ‘You haven’t been here long, have you?’
The thin-faced girl narrowed her eyes, making herself look remarkably like a chisel. ‘Define long.’
‘Because if you had,’ Benny went on smoothly, ‘you’d know that the firm’s fortunes were founded on the stuff. JWW’s patent oxy-hydrogen love philtre. Never touched the stuff myself,’ he added. ‘Never needed to. But it works, no doubt about it.’
‘Yes,’ the thin-faced girl said, ‘quite. I, however, have never used it before. Kindly state the recommended dose and the effects.’
‘Right.’ Benny thought for a moment. ‘Five millilitres ought to get the job done - it tastes funny so if you’re administering it by stealth, best mix it with something. Alcohol is fine, but anything with sugar in it can lead to side effects. What happens when you drink it is, you’re fine for between two and fifteen minutes, depending on metabolism, and then you pass out, zappo. When you come round, the first person you see is It. Back in the old days, we used to put something in it to make it opposite-sex-specific, but now we’re a bit more broad-minded and flexible. Once it’s done the job, that’s it. Till death do us part, basically. I remember once, back in ‘76’
‘Thank you,’ the thin-faced girl said. ‘You have been extremely helpful.’
‘No worries,’ Benny replied. ‘The intended victims - anybody I know?’
She didn’t answer that. Instead, she opened her bag and took out a small jar. ‘Manticore fat,’ she said. ‘Applied liberally to the skin, it will render you invulnerable to dragon-fire and the acidic spittle of harpies. A token of appreciation,’ she added. ‘Goodbye.’
Benny stood for several seconds after she’d clip-clopped away down the corridor, looking at the jar balanced on the palm of his hand. He knew all about manticore fat, of course; in particular, he knew that it didn’t actually work as a dragon-slayer’s barrier cream, although it was the best thing on the market for bicycle sprockets. What puzzled him was that it was there at all. People didn’t usually give him presents just for answering simple work-related questions. He was both touched and suspicious, in roughly equal proportions.
Who the hell was she, anyway?
Then he remembered what he’d been doing, cursed himself for allowing himself to be distracted, stuffed the pot into his jacket pocket and broke into a run.
There was an unfamiliar knock at Cassie’s door. She looked up from the lease that she was studying, and frowned.
Couldn’t be Connie, or Benny Shumway; they knocked, but distinctively. Dennis Tanner and old Mr Wells didn’t knock, presumably on the basis that it was their door and they could open it how and when they damn well pleased. Julie and Christine, the secretaries, had killer-woodpecker knocks, while Peter Melznic and Cas Suslowicz both tended to stand outside the door and say ‘Hello?’ plaintively, like dogs left outside in the rain.
Cassie pulled herself together; why speculate, when she could know? ‘Come in,’ she said, and the door opened.
They stood in the doorway, hand in hand. An objective observer might have said that they were sweet, their fingers tenderly entwined, her cheek resting on his shoulder. Ask any doctor, however, and he’ll be sure to tell you: sweet things are bad for you.
‘Miss Clay?’ the young man said.
Cassie opened her mouth, but some joker had hit the mute button. What she’d been meaning to say was, ‘I know you; you were in that tea shop, in the Funkhausen’s Loop.’ She didn’t get around to doing that, however. Mostly it was because she could see the corridor outside and the door opposite, even though they were standing in the way.
The weird was commonplace at 70 St Mary Axe. Even there, however, it was reasonable to assume that translucent people were bad news.
‘Are we disturbing you?’ asked the girl.
Trick question, surely. In which case, give the reply they aren’t expecting. ‘No,’ Cassie croaked. ‘Um, what can I do for you?’
The man and the girl looked at each other. There was a sort of transcendent soppiness in their eyes that would’ve brought yesterday’s dinner to the lips of Barbara Cartland. Then the girl said, ‘We’d like to come back to life, please. If that’s all right.’
Cassie felt as though someone had parked a large skip right on top of her chest. ‘Um,’ she said again. ‘Are you, like, dead?’
They nodded. They were, she noticed, wearing matching sweaters. With little sheep on them.
‘Right.’ Instinct, years of meeting clients and taking notes, had her reaching for pen and paper.
‘Well,’ she went on, ‘properly speaking, that’d be necromancy, and that’s not really my department. Probably you’ll need to see my colleague Mr Wells, or Mr Melznic might be able to’
The girl looked at her companion, worried and disappointed. He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. Somehow, Cassie just knew that his pet name for the girl was pumpkin. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘we were rather hoping you could help us. You see’
‘You’re me,’ the girl said. It wasn’t interrupting, more like a sort of staggered chorus. Cassie had always hated it when boyfriends had finished her sentences for her; next thing, she always thought, they’d be stealing her soul.
‘What did you say?’ Cassie asked.
‘You’re me,’ the girl repeated, ‘or at least I’m you. I can never remember which way round it ought to be, though I don’t suppose it really
matters terribly much. It’d probably be easier to say, we’re us.’
Like hell, Cassie’s instincts were shrieking. I could be many things, but never such a pathetic bloody drip. ‘How do you mean, exactly?’ she said.
The man broke in. ‘We don’t mean to be pushy,’ he said, ‘but do you think we could possibly come in and sit down, rather than having this discussion where anybody could hear us?’
‘Fine.’ Cassie waved vaguely at the visitors’ chairs. Before he sat down, the man made a point of closing the door.
‘All right,’ Cassie said, and in her own voice she heard the getting-down-to-business tone she’d perfected over the years for talking to punters. She was impressed by her own professionalism. Pen poised over paper, she said, ‘Can we start off with your names?’
Once again, they exchanged glances. ‘Well, no,’ the girl said. You see, we lost them.’
‘You lost your names?’
The man nodded. ‘When we died, yes. It happens sometimes. ‘It’s a kind of’ He hesitated, and then the girl squeezed his hand again, and Cassie could see him drawing strength from her like a tanker refuelling, and it was all so romantic and sad that she wanted to scream. ‘It’s a kind of punishment,’ he went on. ‘For, well, suicide.’
Cassie heard the pen clatter on her desk, which suggested that she’d dropped it. ‘Suicide?’
‘They both nodded simultaneously. ‘You see,’ the girl went on, ‘when we found out we couldn’t be together’
‘Right.’ Cassie groped for a pencil in her desk-tidy. ‘I see. No names. I suppose addresses are out of the question too, in that case’
The girl gave her a small, apologetic smile. ‘Not to worry,’ Cassie said firmly. ‘I’ll just put down X and, um, Y. And you’re both dead.’
‘That’s right,’ the man said.
‘I see. And you want us to, well, do something about that for you.’
‘Yes, please.’
Cassie took a deep breath. In the back of her mind, she was frantically skimming through dusty old memory folders of day-release lectures and vocational-training weekends, from back when she’d been keen and eager. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you were wanting to lodge a formal appeal, there’s a fairly straightforward procedure. First, you have to serve notice of intention to appeal within six months of date of death.’ She fixed her stare on a small patch of wall about three inches above the man’s head. ‘When would that have been, precisely?’
‘That’s complicated,’ the man replied.
‘Is it?’
He nodded. ‘Depends which one you mean,’ he replied.
‘I see. So which of you died first?’
‘Not like that.’ The girl was twiddling the ends of her hair round her left index finger, presumably out of nerves. ‘You see’
‘Yes?’
‘The thing is,’ the man said, ‘it’s sort of happened more than once.’
‘More than once?’ This time, Cassie stared straight at him. ‘What, you mean death?’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ the girl said. ‘Because of reincarnation, you see.’
The soft ping that Cassie heard just then was her pencil-lead snapping. ‘Reincarnation.’
‘Yes.’ The man nodded enthusiastically. ‘It’s because we’re star-crossed, you see,’ he said. ‘What happened was, we were supposed to get together and get married and live happily ever after, but something must’ve gone wrong, and we didn’t.’ Cassie saw the girl’s fingers tighten around his once more, and looked away. ‘So, well, we killed ourselves’
(The way you do, Cassie thought.)
‘And when we got to the other place,’ the girl said, ‘we asked to see the manager, and he looked up his files and said yes, there’s been a bit of a mix-up but not to worry, we could come back to life and meet each other all over again and everything would be just fine.’ She hesitated, and snuffled loudly. The man fished in his translucent pocket and handed her a see-through tissue. She blew her nose, then went on, ‘So back we came, and yes, we met up like we’d been told we I would, but then’
Cassie waited while the girl did more snuffling, and the man patted her tenderly on the shoulder. Hell must be like this, Cassie thought.
‘When we got there,’ the girl continued, ‘we found out’
She subsided into snuffledom. The man said, ‘Basically, Ms Clay, we found out that we didn’t love each other any more.’
The girl looked up sharply. ‘No, that’s not right, pumpkin.’ (Ah, Cassie thought.) ‘We loved each other to bits and pieces, but somehow we couldn’t’
‘There didn’t seem to be any reason to it,’ the man said. ‘I mean, she knew she loved me, and I knew I worshipped the ground she stood on, but somehow we couldn’t seem to make a go of it. We started quarrelling, which we’d never ever done before-‘
‘We couldn’t talk to each other,’ the girl whimpered damply. It was terrible. We’d always been able to talk to each other.’
‘We used to talk for hours and hours and hours and hours,’ the man said tenderly.
‘And then suddenly we couldn’t,’ the girl said. ‘And it was like there was some dreadful force making me blame him when I new perfectly well it wasn’t his fault’
‘Same with me,’ the man put in.
‘And then one day we had this awful row, and even though we knew we still loved each other a hundred and ninety per cent, that was it. The end. It was all over.’
‘I see,’ Cassie said, frowning. ‘Excuse me if this sounds silly, hut were you in a tea shop at the time?’
‘That’s right, yes,’ the girl said, as though Cassie knowing that was the most natural thing ever. ‘Anyway, I ran out into the street, and he didn’t follow me, and that was that. Of course, without him life just wasn’t worth living’
‘Complete waste of time,’ the man agreed fervently.
‘And so next thing we knew we were back at the other place,’ the girl said, shredding tissue with her fingers.
‘The manager was there waiting for us to arrive, I’ll say that for him,’ the man put in. ‘No attempt to pretend it wasn’t their fault or anything, we’ve got no complaints on that score. In fact, we can’t speak too highly of the quality of service.’
‘And he said,’ the girl continued, ‘that he couldn’t understand what had happened, but naturally he’d send us straight back again for another try.’
‘He said that?’ Cassie mumbled.
‘Oh yes.’ The man nodded. ‘Nice bloke, we really took to him. So back we went, only this time for some reason we ended up something like a hundred years earlier, in Victorian times; which was a bit of a facer, obviously, but we wouldn’t have minded. But exactly the same thing happened all over again: rows, not talking, all that.’
‘So you committed suicide,’ Cassie said. ‘Again.’
‘More or less,’ the man said. ‘Well, this time I was a subaltern in the British army, so I got myself posted to the East and died of malaria, but it was practically suicide.’
‘I fell into a decline,’ the girl said. ‘You know, like in books. I didn’t know it was actually possible, but it is.’
‘I see,’ Cassie said, and she noticed how deep the bite marks were in the pencil she was still holding. ‘Let me guess. You went back again’
‘And again,’ the girl said with a little sigh, ‘and again. Always the same, of course.’
‘We used to say we should be clocking up Frequent Dier points,’ the man said. ‘It was our little joke.’
Something else went ping at that point, but this time it wasn’t a pencil lead, it was something deep and fundamental inside Cassie’s brain. ‘Right, I get the picture,’ she interrupted brusquely. ‘But where the hell do I fit into all this?’
‘We’re coming to that,’ the man said severely. ‘You see, the most recent time, when we got there and the manager came out to see us’
‘He was really apologetic,’ the girl said. ‘I think he was genuinely upse
t about it all.’
‘He told us,’ the man said, ‘that there’s some regulation or other about the number of times you can be reincarnated before you, well, sort of come to an end; and apparently, we’d had our ration - no fault of our own, he made that perfectly clear - but he’d been to see his boss and really made a fuss about it, and as a gesture of goodwill they were prepared to give us one last chance.’ He looked at Cassie, and through his pale blue eyes she could see the coat hook on the back of the door. ‘You,’ he said.
‘Me?’
The girl’s head bobbed up and down. ‘And a man called Colin Hollingshead. They - well, you and him - you’re our last chance. You’re us, you see, reincarnated. If you and he don’t get together this time, and fall in love and get married and live happily ever after - well that’s all our chances used up, and we’ll never …’
She dissolved into sobs, like ice cream in a microwave. The man was patting and hand-squeezing and there-thereing, and Cassie had to shout quite loud to make herself heard
‘Just a fucking minute,’ she said.
They looked up, startled, and stared at her.
‘Sorry,’ Cassie said. ‘I didn’t mean to Look,’ she wailed, ‘I really don’t want to seem unsympathetic, and it’s obvious that you’ve both had a really raw deal and everything, but I’ve met this Colin Hollingshead, and he’s a nice enough bloke in his way, but’ The power of speech ebbed away from her, as though her battery had finally gone flat, and all she could do was wave her hands, gently and vaguely. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated. ‘But there it is.’
The man was staring at her. It was as though a monk or a hermit had spent his entire life praying to be granted a beatific vision; and finally, eventually, one evening in the solitude of his lonely cell the vision had appeared before him in glory and blown a raspberry. ‘Are you saying,’ he said slowly, ‘that you’re refusing to help us?’
Classie gritted her teeth. It was like drowning kittens and decapitating Barbie dolls and whisking up fluffy hamsters in a blender, but it had to be done. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Sorry,’ she added.