‘Quite soon,’ Bianca said, ‘I shall have had enough of this.’
‘I think you ought to tell someone,’ Mike replied, calmly folding the tarpaulin which, removed a moment or so ago, had revealed Saint George returned and the dragon gone. ‘There’s two possible explanations, and one of them demands that we believe in the existence of a practical joker with access to helicopters and heavy lifting gear, who’s capable of swapping enormously heavy statues round in the centre of Birmingham at dead of night without anybody noticing.’
‘That’s absurd.’
‘Obviously. Therefore,’ Mike continued, ‘we’re dealing with the boring old supernatural. You’ve got to tell someone, otherwise it’ll invalidate your insurance.'
Bianca scowled. ‘That’s absurd too,’ she said.
‘Tell you something else that’s absurd, while I’m at it,’ Mike responded, shoving the folded tarpaulin into a cardboard box, ‘and that’s bloody great statues playing hide and seek with themselves in a public place.’
‘We can’t tell anyone,’ Bianca objected. ‘They’d never believe us. They’d lock us up in the nut house.’
‘Maybe.’ Mike shrugged. ‘At least then, this’d be someone else’s problem. Right now, I could fancy somewhere dark and cool with bendy wallpaper.’
Bianca was silent for a moment, then she started to rummage in her toolbag. ‘I know one thing I am going to do,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘I’m going to chip off that ridiculous moustache.’
Dismissed without references for gross breach of confidentiality, the dragon swished its tail dispiritedly and flew east.
En route it had a run-in with three F-ills, hastily scrambled by a gibbering controller out of Brize Norton and armed with everything Father Christmas had left in the RAF’s stocking for the last six years.
In due course the pilots ejected and, save for a broken leg and some bruises, landed safely. Most of the bits of aeroplane came down in the sea. Which, the dragon mused as it continued its flight, only makes the business with the tax woman all the more disturbing.
‘Guy,’ said Mr Kortright, having heard the tale, ‘believe me, you were right to trust your instincts. You just don’t tangle with those people, not ever. Shame about the job, but you did right. Besides,’ he added with a shrug, ‘there’s the morality of the thing to consider. The forces of Evil gotta stick together, right?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Mr Kortright gave him a puzzled look. ‘Evil,’ he said. ‘Your team. You represent the forces of darkness, and so do they. You go welshing on your own kind, you’ll never work in this business again.’
From Colchester — Mr Kortright promised him faithfully to let him know as soon as anything suitable came up — he flew fast and high to the Midlands, found his plinth and parked. Getting out of the cavern had used up most of his fuel supply, and dealing with the aircraft had polished off the rest. He was tired, and upset, and he needed a rest.
Evil? What did the little creep mean, Evil?
George woke up.
Deep down in the very marrow of the stone, his head hurt. He felt sick. What, he asked himself, would come up if I was? Probably gravel.
There was something underneath him. Slowly — moving his head was a wild, scary thing to do, comparable to setting off in three small boats to find the back way to India — he looked down. He looked up again, rather more quickly.
Oh God, he said to himself. Please let me be hallucinating.
A tentative prod with a toe persuaded him otherwise. Horribly solid. Sphincter-looseningly real. And I’m directly above it!
He waited. When the dragon didn’t make a move, he risked breathing. Still no reaction. With extreme diffidence he reached down and prodded with the point of his sword. Chink. Nothing. It was only a statue, nothing more.
Fuck that, George reflected, so’m I. And people who live in marble overcoats shouldn’t prod dragons.
He waited a little longer, each second dragging by like a double geography lesson. He wasn’t at all sure that he understood how this statue business worked, but either the dragon simply wasn’t at home, or it was waiting for him to make a move. In the latter case, staying put was simply prolonging the inevitable. He braced himself, took a deep breath and jumped.
The ground rushed up to meet him like a long-lost creditor; he landed, swore and rolled. His head protested in the strongest possible terms. The dragon didn’t move. He stood up.
‘Gotcha!’
He had now, of course, shed the marble and was back in a conventional human skin; but not for very long, because Bianca’ s voice and the slap of her hand on his shoulder made him jump out of it. He said ‘Eeek!’ and turned white, all in an impressively short space of time.
‘And where the hell do you think you’re going?’
His brain reported back off sick leave and mentioned to him that the creature holding his arm was not a dragon so much as a defenceless girl. That’s all right, then. He put the palm of his hand in her face and shoved. Then he ran.
A moment later he was lying on his nose; a state of affairs he was able to trace back to someone grabbing hold of his feet. ‘Gerroff!’ he screeched. ‘There’s a bastard dragon after—’
Then Bianca hit him on the head with a two-pound mallet.
Chapter 4
'Maybe,’ said a guest, ‘they’re being thrown out for antisocial behaviour.’
He was looking at a long, scruffy coach, state of the art passenger transport from around the time Bobby Charlton was England’s leading goal-scorer, which was spluttering patiently in bay 3a of the bus station in Hell.
‘Quite possibly,’ replied a fellow guest, who happened to be on his tea break. ‘Look what they’re wearing.’
The first guest, also on his tea break, peered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see what you mean.’
As a matter of fact, these two guests were always on their tea break. In life they’d been builders, and the cruel and unusual punishment reserved for them in the afterlife was that they’d be allowed out as soon as they’d had a quick brew; two thousand years of frantic slurping later, the meniscus on their cups was, if anything, half a millimetre higher up the china than it had been when they arrived.
Everybody, no matter how depraved or evil they may be, is entitled to a holiday, and the first three weeks in August are traditionally the time when the staff of Hell, your cosy, centrally heated home from home under the ground, get to pack their suitcases, dig out their plastic buckets and pitchforks from the cupboard under the stairs, put on silly hats and get away from it all. They choose August because…
— well, you know what the beach is like then. They feel more at home that way.
‘If so,’ observed the second guest, ‘I reckon we’ve had a lucky escape.’
His colleague nodded vigorously, his eyes fixed on the white denims, broad-brimmed hats, synthetic buckskin fringes and spangled waistcoats of the party boarding the coach. Not, of course, that either of them had anything against country music as such; in its place, they’d be the first to declare, it was all very fine and splendid. Except, of course, its place was — most definitely — here. So far, the Management hadn’t twigged this. When they eventually did, they’d be able to maintain the same uniquely high standard of torment (BS 199645; always look for the kitemark) while saving themselves a fortune on pitchforks and firewood.
Had the guests been a few yards closer to bay 3a, they’d have been able to read the poster prominently displayed in the coach’s back window. It read:
HELL HOLDINGS PLC
STAFF COUNTRY & WESTERN CLUB
ANNUAL OUTING
Nashville Or Bust!
‘Okay,’ George said. ‘It’s like this.’
‘Just a minute,’ Bianca interrupted, switching on the pocket dictating machine. ‘I want this on tape.’
George looked at her. ‘What’s that little box thing you’re playing around with?’ he said. ‘Look, th
ere’s no need to get nasty.
Bianca explained, as briefly as she could, about tape recorders. Perhaps she didn’t express herself very well because George made a couple of high-pitched noises and renewed his pointless struggle with the stout ropes that attached him to Earth Mother VI, the most solid piece of statuary in Bianca’s studio. Playing back the tape just seemed to make things worse. She sighed and slipped it back in her pocket.
‘You were saying,’ she said.
Once upon a time (George explained), long ago and far away, in a remote land called Albion, there was a dragon.
In fact, there were a lot of dragons. And that wasn’t a problem for the people who lived there, because they’d long since based their entire economy on dragons; they ate dragon, wore dragonskin, used the wing membrane to make their tents and burned the bones for warmth. And, since there were more than enough dragons to spare — great herds of them roamed the empty moors, grazing placidly and from time to time accidentally setting fire to hundreds of thousands of acres — there was no reason why the system shouldn’t work for ever.
That, however, was before the coming of the white men and the iron horse.
Ancient Albion called them the white men because they wore white surcoats over their armour; and the horses weren’t actually made of iron, they were just covered with the stuff to protect them from arrows. The newcomers were knights, followers of the code of chivalry, searchers for the Holy Grail. They’d been slung out of their own countries for being an insufferable nuisance and had headed west.
When they arrived in Albion they decided it would do nicely and they set about getting vacant possession. The natives, however, were no pushover and the white men were getting nowhere fast when one of their leaders hit on a sensible, if drastic, course of action.
The natives, he argued, live off the dragons. Get rid of the dragons and you get rid of the natives.
Of those wild, exciting frontier days many stirring tales are told; many of them about the greatest dragon-hunter of them all, Dragon George Cody, who single-handedly cleared all of what is now Northern England, Wales and Scotland of dragons. He it was who first justified the clearances by saying that the knights stood for good and the dragons stood for evil, and, in his own terms, he was right. The knights were, after all, soldiers of the Church, ultimately searching for the Grail, and the dragons were getting in the way and, by deviously getting killed and eaten by the locals, giving aid and comfort to the hostile tribesmen. Besides, George pointed out, dragons burn towns and demand princesses as ransom.
The dragons, referring to the Siege of Jerusalem, the Sack of Constantinople and a thousand years of dynastic marriages, said, Look who’s talking. But rarely twice.
And then there was only one dragon left; the biggest and fiercest of them all, twice the size and three times the firepower of anything the knights had come up against. He had seen his race eradicated, the corpses of his kin heaped up beside the white men’s newly built roads and carted off to Camelot Fried Dragon bars the length and breadth of Albion. He had also learned that he and his kind were the Bad Guys, which puzzled him quite a bit initially but eventually came to make some sort of sense. After all, if dragons were the Good Guys, then these people wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to wipe them out. Would they?
Well, said the dragon to himself. If the cap fits, and so forth.
In the event, wearing the cap was fun.
‘I see,’ Bianca said. ‘So that’s why you weren’t particularly keen to meet the dragon. Figures.’
‘It had to be done,’ George growled defensively. ‘Out of that rough and ready cradle, a mighty nation sprang to life. Civilisations, like grapevines, grow best when mulched with blood. You can’t make an omelette...’
Bianca’s brow furrowed. ‘You’ve made your point,’ she said. ‘But you haven’t explained what you’re doing in my statue. Or,’ she added savagely, ‘why you keep moving the blasted thing about.’
‘I’m coming to that.’ George paused and licked his lips. ‘All this explaining,’ he went on, ‘isn’t half making me thirsty. You couldn’t just give us a glass of water, could you?’
Bianca nodded silently and went to the kitchen. As soon as her back was turned, George, who had been quietly fraying the ropes against an aesthetically necessary sharp edge on the statue’s shin, gave a sharp tug.
Of Sir Galahad it is told that his strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure. George’s heart had approximately the same purity quotient as a pint of Thames water, but he did press-ups instead. The rope snapped.
‘Hey!’ Bianca dropped the glass and came running, but George was already on his feet and heading for the door. When she tried to stop him, he nutted her with a plaster-of-Paris study for Truth Inspiring The Telecommunications Industry, clattered down the stairs and legged it.
‘Finally,’ said the Demon Chardonay (ironic cheers and cries of ‘Good!’) ‘let’s all remember, this is a holiday. We’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves. Okay?’
At that moment the coach rolled over a pothole, jolting it so forcefully that Chardonay, who was standing up, nutted himself on the roof, thereby demonstrating to his fellow passengers that, even in Hell, there is justice.
‘Pillock,’ muttered the Demon Prodsnap under his breath. ‘What’d he have to come for, anyway?’
On his left the Demon Slitgrind grunted agreement. ‘I think Management shouldn’t be allowed on outings,’ he said. ‘Ruins it for the rest of us. I mean, fat chance we’ve got of having a good time with one of them miserable buggers breathing down our necks. If I’d known I wouldn’t have bothered coming.’
Although in his heart Prodsnap reciprocated these sentiments, he was beginning to wish he hadn’t raised the subject, because if one thing could be guaranteed to lay a big fat oil slick over the whole weekend, it would have to be listening to Slitgrind’s opinions.
‘I mean to say,’ Slitgrind went on, ‘least they could do would be to have different coaches for Management and us, bloody cheapskates. Wouldn’t be surprised if they’d done it deliberately, just to spoil it.’
There are, appropriately, more opinions in Hell than anywhere else in the cosmos; and most of them, sooner or later, belonged to Slitgrind. Innumerable and diverse —contradictory even — though they were, in the long run they eventually boiled down into a single, multi-purpose, one-size-fits-all opinion; namely that the Universe was an upside-down pyramid of horseshit, with Slitgrind pinned down under the apex.
‘Oh well,’ replied Prodsnap, trying to sound positive (it came as easily to him as smiling to a bomb, but he did his best), ‘never mind. Still better than work, though, isn’t it?’
‘Depends,’ Slitgrind said. ‘I mean, with frigging Management along, don’t suppose it’ll be any different from work. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if...’
Oh yes, muttered Prodsnap’s soul, it’ll be different from work all right. At work, I torture other people. ‘Oh look,’ he said, pointing out of the window. ‘I can see a cow.’
‘That’s not a cow, you daft git, that’s a bull-headed fiend goring impenitent usurers. That’s another thing, they get uniform allowance, but we...’
Prodsnap closed his eyes. Another difference, he noted; the guests have all done something to deserve it. What did I ever do, for crying out loud?
At the front of the coach Chardonay, knees smothered in maps, tickets, bits of miscellaneous paper and other props on loan from the Travel Agents’ Department, had dropped his red ball-point. This was bad news; he was using the red pen to mark emergency itinerary B (second fallback option in the event of missing the Styx ferry and the 11.35 helicopter service to Limbo Central) on contingency map
2. Scrabbling for it under the seats, he found himself inadvertently brushing against the slender, hairy ankles of the Demon Snorkfrod. Embarrassing.
‘Oh,’ he said, blushing bright grey. ‘Sorry.’
Not that there were many shapelier hooves in all the Nin
e Circles. One-time Helliday Inn cocktail waitress, former centrefold in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, twice Playghoul of the Month in Hell and Efficiency magazine, Snorkfrod was just the sort of ghastly apparition any green-blooded demon would want to see jumping out of a coffin at his birthday party. It was just... Well, whenever he saw her, the phrase ‘rough as guts’ did inevitably spring to Chardonay’s mind. And (not that he’d had an infinity of experience in these matters) the way she stared at him sometimes was ...
‘Hello,’ Snorkfrod replied, looking down and smiling like a crescent-shaped escalator. ‘Lost something?’
‘My red biro.’
‘Don’t think you’ll find it there, pet. But you’re welcome to look.’
After a split second’s thought, Chardonay decided the safest course would be to say nothing at all and get the Shopfloor out of there as quickly as possible. Which he did.
Recovering his seat — as he sat down, he heard something go snap under his left hoof; no point even bothering to look
— Chardonay reflected, not for the first time, that maybe he wasn’t really best suited in this line of work, or indeed this whole sector. It was, he knew, a viewpoint shared by many.
The polite term, he understood, was upsiders; talented high-fliers headhunted (so to speak) from outside at the time of the Management buy-out; new brooms; fresh pairs, or trios, of eyes. As an experiment it hadn’t entirely worked. True, it had shaken things up; the bad old days of jobs for the fiends and living men’s hooves were gone for ever, and next year there was a one in three chance they’d get the balance sheet to live up to its name for the first time ever. On the other hand, the inertia of any really huge corporation is so great that it takes more than a few college kids with stars in their eyes and Gucci designer horns to change anything that really matters. And as far as he personally was concerned — well, he never thought he’d ever hear himself saying this — maybe law school would have been a better bet after all.
Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt Page 5