by Tom Holt
They were both still on the floor, though at least they were sitting up, and they were gazing into each other’s eyes with a mutual look of such intense, concentrated soppiness that Connie wondered why the hell she’d ever objected to the sight of goblins eating scrambled egg on toast. She looked away, but the damage had been done.
‘Hi, Connie,’ Cassie burbled. ‘You’ve met Colin, haven’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Connie snapped. ‘Look, can I have a word with you outside?’
‘Urn, it’s not really very convenient right now.’
‘Cassie, I need to talk to you right now,’ Connie hissed. ‘It’s very important.’
‘Better do as she says, fluffmuffin,’ Colin simpered.
‘All right.’
‘Hurry back.’
‘I will, pumpkin-blossom. Will you miss me?’
‘You bet. Will you miss me?
‘Ever so much.’
‘For crying out loud,’ Connie moaned. ‘Cassie, will you please pull yourself together and get over here now?’
‘All right.’ A catch in her voice. ‘I love you, poppet.’
‘I love you too, honeybundle.’
‘Mww mww.’
‘Mww mww mww.’
‘Cassie!’ Connie shrieked; and, very slowly, Cassie stood up and backed away, not taking her gaze off Colin’s nauseatingly radiant face. As soon as she was within arm’s reach, Connie grabbed her and hauled her out onto the landing.
‘Cassie’ she started to say, but she got no further. Cassie had grabbed hold of her and crushed all the air out of her lungs with a rib-creasing hug.
‘Oh Connie, I’m so happy,’ Cassie said, talking very fast, ‘and I think it’s wonderful that you’re the first to know because if it hadn’t been for you I don’t suppose we’d ever have found each other, and it’s so wonderful I think I’m going to cry’
‘Cassie,’ Connie said, slowly and forcefully, ‘shut the fuck up.’ Cassie subsided just a bit, though she was still bobbing up and down as though there was a loop of elastic coming out of the lop of her head. ‘Now listen,’ Connie went on. ‘I need to ask you something.’
‘Well,’ Cassie said, ‘originally we were thinking June, but that’s such an awfully long way away, I suppose it all depends on getting time off from work, and I’d want my cousin Tracy to be my bridesmaid and she lives in Canada, so there’s arrangements to be made, and I’d really like to have the reception at - ‘
‘That’s not what I wanted to ask.’
‘It wasn’t? Oh.’
‘No,’ Connie said grimly. ‘What I want to know is, did you put the philtre in the tea yourself?’
‘Philtre?’ Connie could practically hear the light switch on inside Cassie’s head. ‘You think someone made us drink the philtre}’
‘Well, of course, you stupid cow. Think about it. Why else are you acting like this?’
Scowl; also pout, which was something Connie had never seen Cassie do before. ‘Because I’ve just found the only man in the world for me, of course.’
‘But you haven’t just found him,’ Connie explained patiently. ‘You’ve known him for weeks now, and last time we discussed the subject you reckoned the sight of him made you want to throw up.’
“That’s not true. I never’
‘Well,’ Connie conceded impatiently, ‘maybe I’m exaggerating just a bit. But not by much. Don’t you remember?’
Cassie frowned. ‘No. Yes,’ she amended, her eyebrows shooting up. ‘Yes, I do remember. Funkhausen’s Loop. And then the dead couple came to see me, and I thought about it then, but I decided no way, because the thought of being in love with a complete loser like’ Her eyes widened, like eggs broken into a frying pan. ‘Oh shit, Connie,’ she said. ‘You’re right, it’s got to be that bloody love philtre. Not that it matters,’ she said, her face relapsing into sickening ecstasy. ‘In fact, it’s the best thing that could possibly ever have happened to me. Oh Connie, I’m so really, really, really happy, I just want to run out into the street and shout out, “Listen everybody, I’m in love!”
Connie, whose jaw had dropped like the loading gate of a car ferry, took a step back. ‘Dear God,’ she said. ‘However much of that muck did they put in that tea? They must’ve used six times the normal dose.’
Cassie’s forehead puckered for a second as memory stabbed its way through the eggshell of joy. ‘That’s bad, isn’t it? Exceeding the recommended dosage, I mean.’
‘It’s bad,’ Connie confirmed, with feeling. ‘Five millilitres for an average-sized European female; any more than that, and …’ She tailed off. ‘So it wasn’t your idea, then.’
To her credit, Cassie was trying to fight it, but she was clearly fighting a losing battle. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened in the history of the galaxy, but it wasn’t me. I wonder who it was.’
‘I wonder that too,’ Connie muttered. ‘Anybody who’d give someone an overdose like that is either completely half-witted or else deliberately trying to do damage. Either way, it’d be a good idea to find out who it was.’
At that point the door opened and Colin’s head appeared round it. ‘Are you going to be very much longer, sweetness?’ he asked wistfully. ‘Only it’s really awful being here without you.’
‘I love you, dreambunny.’
‘I love you too, honeypot.’
Gently but firmly Connie closed the door on him. ‘Cassie,’ she said seriously, ‘you do realise there’s no known antidote? True love till death, and they mean it.’
Cassie let go a sigh that’d have taken a three-masted schooner halfway across the Atlantic. ‘That’s so romantic,’ she sighed. ‘It’s like Romeo and’
‘Hang on.’ Connie cut her off in mid-croon. ‘What was that you said a moment ago? About a dead couple?’
‘Oh, them.’ Cassie fought it again; valiant but fatuous, like trying to mop up the Mediterranean with a tea towel. ‘Yes, they came to see me. They explained it to me, the whole thing. They’re time-crossed lovers, you see. It’s all to do with reincarnation and - it’s sort of like a ladder in the tights of causality.’ She frowned, as if she’d just realised what she’d said. ‘Anyway, they’ll be so pleased,’ she said. ‘It’s exactly what they wanted, so isn’t that perfect?’
There’s only so much that flesh and blood can take. ‘Fine,’ Connie said, ‘and I hope you’ll be really happy together. What about these dead people? How did they get in here, for a start?’
Cassie shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me,’ she said. ‘They didn’t say. I didn’t ask,’ she said, remembering. ‘Does it matter particularly?’
Connie cast her mind back to the last time she’d been madly in love. Had it turned her brains to mashed swede? She was sure it hadn’t. ‘Does it matter?’ she repeated. ‘Dead people tramping through here like coach parties in the Cotswolds and you ask if it matters. Oh God,’ she added, as the implications sank home like arrowheads. ‘The door.’
‘Door?’
‘In Benny’s office. Some clown must’ve left it open.’
Cassie frowned. ‘That wouldn’t be good, would it?’
Connie shut her eyes for a moment. Time-crossed lovers; one of her colleagues dosed to the eyeballs with love philtre by an unknown hand; the dead on this side of the door, exercising their right to roam. Just another day at the office. ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘If they come back, keep them talking. If you see Benny’ She might as well have been talking to the wall. ‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘Both of you. Don’t let him out of your sight.’
‘Oh, I won’t,’ Cassie said, with a simper that made Connie wince down to her toes. ‘You are happy for me, Connie, aren’t you?’
‘Bloody ecstatic,’ Connie replied, and hurried away.
No sign of Benny in his office, but the connecting door was shut, locked, padlocked and bolted in the usual way. As soon as she saw it, Connie felt the adrenalin drain out of her. She stumbled back to her office like a Sleepwa
lker, flipped into her chair, closed her eyes and sighed. She felt exhausted, wearier than she could ever remember. A small part of her brain was still chewing its way through the overload of information she’d recently acquired, plotting each bizarre fact on mental graph-paper and trying to join the dots to make something that could be mistaken for sense. But it took too much effort. They fired me, didn’t they, she told herself. And if I’m fired, it means I don’t have to do this any more. I can bugger off to my little cottage in the country and leave them to it, all of them. For me, the war is over.
How about that? How about the fact that They, whoever They might be, had taken steps to get her out of the way just as the extreme weirdness was about to start? Coincidence - Connie believed in coincidences, and one of these days she might actually see a real one, but that hadn’t happened yet, she was quite sure. Whatever was happening, someone was doing it on purpose. Love philtre in the tea, for one thing.
Tea. It doesn’t grow on trees; well, it does, or at any rate on bushes. But it doesn’t arrive in cups on your desk without help from an intermediary. Either you follow it into the long grass and hunt it down yourself, or someone has to bring it. So; find out who brought the tea. But that would involve going back to Cassie’s room and asking a question, quite possibly in highly embarrassing circumstances. Have I got the energy to do that? Connie asked herself.
Her phone rang, and she looked at it for a moment. Cas Suslowicz bleating for help with his planning application; Dennis Tanner demanding to know how much money she’d earned the firm in the last ten minutes; the new bosses, informing her that they’d bet her pension fund on a three-legged greyhound. Only one way to find out.
She picked it up.
‘Connie? It’s me, Cassie.’
‘Talk of the Devil.’
‘Well, yes, as it happens.’ Slight pause. ‘There was something I forgot to mention.’
‘Yes, in a minute. First, that tea tray. Did you ask for it?’
‘What? No, I don’t think so. Listen’
‘Interesting. Can you remember who brought it in?’
‘No. I mean yes, it was Thingy. The new girl on reception.’
‘Oh.’ Connie scowled. ‘Only I’ve been trying to figure out who put the philtre in the tea, and it occurred to me’
‘Connie,’ Cassie said plaintively, ‘shut up a moment and listen. It’s Colin.’
It took Connie a moment to remember who Colin was. Oh yes. Him. ‘If you’ve called me just to tell me that his eyes remind you of deep pools at sunset, I’ll come down there and break your arm.’
‘It’s not that,’ Cassie said. ‘Actually, there’s a slight problem. You know the deal we’re doing for his company?’
‘It’s his father’s company, I thought.’
‘Yes, yes, all right. Well, it’s gone a bit squiffy.’
‘Squiffy.’
‘Yes. You see, Colin’s gone and sold his soul to the Devil.’
‘What?’
‘It was meant to be his father,’ Cassie explained, ‘but either there’s been a monumental cock-up, or Colin’s dad did it on purpose. Anyway, it makes things a bit awkward. For us, I mean.’
Connie leaned back in her chair and massaged the bridge of her nose thoughtfully. ‘It does, rather, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘Look, if I come down there, will you two promise to behave? Only I find it hard to concentrate when people are slobbering all over each other in the same room.’
On the way to Cassie’s office, Connie tried to rally her thoughts. She liked Cassie, for some reason she couldn’t quite fathom, but did she really want to get involved in something as messy and complicated as this threatened to be? It all depended, she decided, on whether she was involved already.
Connie knocked loudly on the door, and counted up to ten after Cassie had called out, ‘Come in.’ They were sitting on either side of the desk - holding hands, it was true, but with three feet of melamine-covered chipboard between them: there were limits to the offences against her sensibilities that they could perpetrate. Connie sat down, held up her hand for quiet and looked at Cassie. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me all about it.’
So Cassie told her. Some of it Connie knew already, of course. Other bits, such as the dead couple’s revelations and the details of the Hollingshead & Farren deal, were new to her. When Cassie had finished, Connie sat still and quiet for a moment, and then said, ‘That’s odd.’
Cassie and Colin looked at each other. Correction: they’d been doing nothing else but look at each other since she’d come into the room, but the expressions on their faces changed. For the better, in Connie’s opinion. ‘What’s odd?’ Cassie asked.
‘Think about it,’ Connie replied. ‘The dead couple tell you that their - well, for want of a better word, their souls have been born again, over and over again, because there’s this ghastly screw-up, time-crossed love and so forth, and this is their last chance to get it right. Obligingly, an unknown hand spikes your tea with philtre; hey presto, you two fall in love till death do you part, which is exactly what the dead couple want. All right so far?’
Cassie nodded. Colin had gone back to gazing tenderly, and Connie shifted slightly in her chair so that she wouldn’t have to look at him.
‘Meanwhile,’ Connie went on, ‘his father’s gone and done this deal, so now - well, we know what’s going to happen,’ she added awkwardly. ‘The point is - and stop me if I’ve got this wrong, because spiritual conveyancing was never my thing, I did about three weeks of it when I was still with Robinson’s, and that must be, what, thirty-seven years ago; the point is, surely, that if a soul goes down to the Very Bad Place, then as far as reincarnation and stuff goes, that’s it. Out of the loop for good, and all previous bets are off. Do you see what I’m getting at?’
‘No,’ Cassie said, scowling at her.
Connie sighed. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Look at it this way. Suppose you hadn’t drunk the philtre, right? Pre-philtre, I believe I’m right in saying, you and him were not particularly attracted to each other. Just nod,’ she added quickly. They nodded. ‘In other words,’ she went on, ‘the last chance was on track to be a washout. You two don’t get together, so when you die and the true love hasn’t happened, there’s an imbalance, anomaly, bloody awful fuck-up, call it what you like. I’m no expert, but I believe that’d be rather serious. Auditors and so forth.’
Cassie nodded. ‘It’d threaten the whole fabric of spatio’
‘Quite. Spare me the Latin. But if-sorry, I’ve forgotten your name again; Colin, that’s right. If Colin goes to the Very Bad Place, he’s taken out of the loop, there’s no imbalance and suddenly everything’s all right - from their point of view, I mean,’ she added quickly, as Colin started to say something. ‘Because if his soul is, well, forfeited, I suppose you could call it, then the auditors can balance their books, the fabric of thingummibob won’t go all to cock and everybody - nearly everybody - is off the hook. Convenient, wouldn’t you say?’
Five seconds of dead silence. Furthermore, they were looking at her, instead of at each other. It’s the way I tell ‘em, Connie decided.
‘What the hell is she talking about?’ Colin asked.
Cassie ignored him. ‘But now we’ve fallen in love’
‘Now that’s happened,’ Connie went on, ‘I’m not quite sure how we stand. I mean, you two have fallen in love, fine, that ought to be enough to sort out the time-crossed thing on its own, so it must follow that whoever did the business with the philtre wasn’t in on the selling-Colin’s-soul thing, because where’d be the point? Unless,’ she added doubtfully, ‘I’m barking up the wrong tree entirely, and it is just a coincidence. No.’ She shook her head. ‘Colour me paranoid if you want, but it can’t be, it’s all too neat and tidy. Someone’s playing silly buggers, at any rate, but just now I can’t for the life of me figure out’
‘Just a minute,’ Colin broke in. He’d been sitting with a stuffed expression on his face, as though he’d drunk far to
o much fizzy drink; suddenly he seemed to snap out of it, and there was even an actual genuine frown starting to form on his face. ‘Someone dosed us with a love potion?’
Connie sighed. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘So that we’d fall madly in love for ever?’
As though someone had pulled a string somewhere, Cassie’s hand reached out for his. He twitched his arm away at the last moment.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Poppet,’ he added. ‘But that’s all wrong. I shouldn’t be in love with her at all. I’ve already found my one true love. That strange woman on the front desk at our place told me.’
Connie heard a sort of stifled sob from where Cassie was sitting, but ignored it. ‘Go on,’ she said.
‘That’s right,’ Colin went on, as though he’d just woken up out of a really weird dream, and was gradually coming to terms with the fact that he was back in the real world. ‘Fam. Fam Williams.’ He paused, and his frown blossomed like a rose in June. ‘Who’s now on the front desk here, and if somebody’d care to explain that to me sometime, I’d be grateful. Anyhow, it’s her. My one true love. Not’ He stopped, as though someone had just stuck something in his mouth. ‘Who the hell did that to us?’ he howled. ‘Because’
Colin was interrupted by Cassie sprinting from the room, dripping tears like a watering can as she went. Connie sighed, waited till the door had slammed behind her, and said, ‘Actually, I was wondering that. Think about it.’
Colin looked at her. The penny dropped, gathering momentum; when it landed, it had the terminal velocity of an asteroid.
‘Fam,’ he said. ‘She brought in the tea.’
‘Quite,’ Connie said. ‘But remember, she’s just the hired help. We’re a pretty old-fashioned bunch here, Mr Hollingshead, very much the old unregenerate upstairs-downstairs mentality. Which means,’ she went on, as Colin opened his mouth, ‘that secretaries and receptionists and the like don’t take the initiative, they just do as they’re told. Meaning, your true love wouldn’t have gone making tea off her own bat. Somebody with the necessary authority would’ve told her to do it. Do you see what I’m getting at?’