by Tom Holt
The lantern stopped. ‘What’s up?’
‘Have you, sort of, noticed something?’
‘Like what?’
Pause.
‘Like,’ said the voice from the back- and if there had been any light it would have been possible to see the speaker looking extremely self-conscious - ‘put me straight if I’m not on the right lines, but we are going down the stairs, aren’t we?’
‘So?’
‘So, why are the stairs going upwards?’
Pause.
‘Not that I’m the slightest bit bothered myself, one way or the other,’ the voice continued. ‘All the same to me, really. Just thought I’d...’
Grating sound of grounded lantern. A distant scraping sound, which could be a man scratching his head.
‘You know,’ said Iphicrates, ‘he’s got a point there, hasn’t he?’
Shuffling of footsteps, and the sound of seven people waiting for somebody else to be the first one to say something. Eventually—
‘Excuse me.’
‘Yes, Your Majesty?’
‘Someone be terribly sweet and pass me the lantern. Ah yes, got it, thanks ever so much. Now then, let’s just have a quick look, shall we?’
The lantern flickered and then started to blaze out light like a beacon. It showed up seven very nervous men, a composed but frowning woman with golden hair, and a spiral staircase. Going up.
‘Perhaps,’ suggested Iphicrates, ‘it would help if we all turned round. Then surely...’
Then the world disappeared. As the perceptible parameters of reality faded away, there was an audible sigh of relief. The lantern went out.
‘Has anybody got a match or something?’
Fumbling in pockets noise. Scraping sound. The hiss of flaring sulphur.
‘Oh look,’ said the Queen, ‘we would appear to be in a corridor. Now, anyone, how did that happen?’
Before the light died, it had a chance to explore a patch of what looked like a straight, flat passageway with tiled sides. Perfectly normal looking for, say, a walkway in an Underground station; but a bit counter-intuitive for a staircase, unless you’re very heavily into lateral thinking.
Pause.
‘Oh well, everybody, looks like we’re here. Anybody mind if I lead the way?’
There was a muffled chorus of Fines and Greats and, rather more accurately, Right behind you, Your Majestys, and then a sparkling flash of yellow light as the Queen of Atlantis lit the end of her sceptre and walked purposefully down the corridor.
Transmitting ...
There was a grinding noise, rather like a crate of milk bottles being run over by a road roller, and then a bleep. Turquine, Bedevere and ten hackers fell out of the fax machine and on to a plain rough plank floor.
The fax machine whirred on for a moment, gave its customary hiccup, and wound out its little slip of paper. Then it realised what it had done, and whimpered.
‘Well,’ said Bedevere, picking himself up and brushing a fair quantity of dust off his knees. ‘It worked, then.’
Nobody seemed to be listening. The hackers were staring with open mouths and eyes like compact discs at this small, unfurnished, bare-walled, scruffy room. Turquine was feeling in his pocket for something.
‘Got it,’ he said, producing a rather grubby peppermint. ‘Knew I’d lost one in there a while back.’ He popped it in his mouth and crunched it.
‘So this is it,’ Bedevere was saying. He was aware that, for all intents and purposes, he was talking to himself; but what else could you do if you wanted an intelligent conversation around here? ‘Pretty smart thinking on my part, that, I thought. Yes,’ he agreed, ‘a neat piece of detection, though I say it myself as shouldn’t. Now then.’
He looked around. Apart from the fax machine, himself, eleven men, an empty styrofoam milkshake carton and a small cardboard box, the room was empty.
‘The way I saw it,’ Bedevere went on, ‘it was all down to relativity. Relativity? Yes, relativity. Because although you could say that the world stays still and the registered office moves about, you could also say that it’s the registered office that stays still and ...’
Turquine had picked up the milkshake carton. He looked into it, turned green and dropped it.
‘And then you said,’ Bedevere went on, turning to one of the hackers, who wasn’t listening, ‘that nobody had ever found the door to the registered office. They’d looked hard enough, you said, but never actually found it. Almost, you reckoned, as if it only existed on the outside, not the inside. And it was that, you see, that set me thinking.’
Turquine drew a finger along a wall until the build-up of dust grew too thick to be ploughed any further. ‘This place could do with a good clean,’ he observed. ‘Not like any office I’ve ever been in before, really. No phones, for a start.’
‘And what I thought was,’ Bedevere continued, staring hard at the cardboard box, ‘if nobody’s ever seen the door, maybe there isn’t a door. And what do you know,’ he concluded triumphantly, ‘there isn’t a door.’
Nobody was listening; but that didn’t mean to say he wasn’t right. There was no door. No window, no ventilation shaft, no cat-flap, nothing. Just four walls of immaculate integrity.
Bedevere knelt down and felt in his pocket for a penknife to cut the string which held down the lid of the cardboard box. ‘Like the man said,’ he muttered, ‘eliminate the impossible and you’re left with the truth. I wonder where the light’s coming from, in that case.’
The room went suddenly dark.
‘The map, somebody.’
In the corridor, it went very quiet.
‘One of you,’ said the Queen, sweetly, ‘did remember to bring a map, didn’t you?’
‘Did you say something, Bedders?’
Bedevere, who couldn’t find his penknife, grunted. It was that strong nylon string that burns your hands if you try and break it.
‘Something,’ Turquine went on, ‘about the light.’
Around him, Turquine could hear strange, soft noises coming from the hackers. At the back of his mind, he could understand why; after all, they were in the registered office, the holy of holies of all Atlanteans. And they’d just found out that it didn’t have a door. And it was dark.
‘Odd,’ Turquine went on, thinking aloud as much as anything, ‘the way there’s no way in or out of here, just walls. Makes you think, really.’ He passed his tongue round his mouth, searching for a tiny residual taste of peppermint. Nothing. ‘Not surprising nobody’s dusted it in yonks, I mean, how’d they get in, let alone get a hoover up here as well. In fact,’ he added, ‘makes you wonder how the air gets in. I mean, those walls look pretty airtight to me ...’
In the darkness, a hacker choked.
‘Well, then, a compass maybe. Any of you boys got such a thing as a compass on you?’
No answer. The Queen tutted briskly.
‘Well really,’ she said, ‘no offence, but isn’t that a bit feeble on somebody’s part?’
In a dead straight, level, tiled corridor that stretches away for miles in either direction, there is only one place to hide; behind somebody. Without apparent movement, the rest of the PAs formed an orderly queue behind Iphicrates.
‘Sorry,’ he said. The Queen looked at him and smiled until he could feel the skin start to peel on his cheeks.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘We all make mistakes. Well, anybody, what do we do now? Any bright ideas?’
The Queen waited for a moment, tapping her nails very gently against the tiled wall of the corridor, until you could find yourself believing that the whole place was vibrating like a drumskin.
‘Nobody? Pity.’ she licked her lips. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s just as well I’m here, then, isn’t it?’
The PAs relaxed slightly. Terrifying she undoubtedly was, and nobody much liked the idea of having her along - why was she here, by the way? - but there was no question that Madam would get them out of the tunnel somehow. The dodgy bit wa
s what would happen afterwards.
You can get to like it down a tunnel.
‘How would it be,’ the Queen said, ‘if we all had a cup of tea?’
Bedevere’s teeth were in remarkably good shape, considering.
At school, of course, they’d made fun of him. Hidden his toothbrush. Put chalk in his dental floss. But he’d stuck to it - he’d promised his mother - and now he understood why she’d been so insistent.
‘Gotcha!’ he said, and spat out a few strands of nylon thread. A moment later, he found the lid of the box, and opened it.
This is not going to be easy to describe.
At the root of the problem are the lingering effects of the catastrophic outbreak of Adjective Blight which hit the Albionese-speaking world shortly after King Arthur was deposed. Remarkably little known, the blight (later found to be transmitted by fleas carried on the back of the Lesser or Journalistic Cliché) did to descriptive prose what phylloxera did to the French vineyards. Whole classes of similes were wiped out. Generations of authors have been left poking awkwardly at raw wounds in the collective subconscious where extinct metaphors once grew.
Anyway, here goes. As the lid folded back, something like light in that it was bright and insubstantial and assisted vision, but unlike light in that it jumped out and rushed around the room banging into people, hopped out and whirred through the air like a released balloon. Wherever it made contact with anything it left a big orange phosphorescent glow. It smelt awful.
Air swelled up out of the box like the biggest extrusion of bubble-gum you could possibly visualise, and whacked the hackers and Turquine smack up against the wall. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to affect Bedevere. Perhaps that was because he was still holding on to the box.
Time ... You want to know what Time looks like? Time that’s been trapped inside a one-time baked-bean carton ever since prehistory, and which is then suddenly released into an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide, looks rather like a very expensive Roman candle. Having burnt out, it leaves behind a floating, sparkling yellowy-red ash, rather like gold dust.
Time is money.
Time is, of course, also of the essence. It is the first, the only pure element. Everything else is made up of Time, in one form or another. When Time burns in carbon dioxide, however, it precipitates deposits of that extremely rare and highly volatile element known as Gold 337. Which is why the fax machine suddenly started to glow, steamed, melted and changed shape. It became a jar.
Bedevere, kneeling beside the box and wondering what on earth was going on, slowly began to understand. Gosh, he said to himself, as simple as that...
He turned back to the box, which contained a heavy metal seal, a sheaf of share certificates and some old-fashioned ledgers. He picked out a ledger at random, opened it, and began to read. From time to time he smiled knowingly.
‘Excuse me,’ Turquine said, ‘but when you’ve quite finished, some of us are being squashed to death over here.’
Bedevere looked up. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I was miles away. It’s not here.’
‘What isn’t here?’
‘That personal organiser thing,’ Bedevere replied. ‘All we’ve got here is the statutory books of Lyonesse Ltd. Tremendously interesting stuff, all of this, but not what we’re actually after. Shall we be getting along?’ He stopped talking and lifted his head, with an expression on his face like Archimedes seeing the pattern of the universe in a damp bath-mat. ‘Oh,’ he muttered to himself, ‘I think I see.’
Turquine tried to reach out a leg and kick Bedevere, but a lot of air got in the way. ‘Look,’ he said.
‘All right,’ replied Bedevere, engaged in the ledgers once more, ‘you lot go on ahead and I’ll catch you up.’
Exercising more self-control than he ever imagined he possessed, Turquine replied, ‘How?’
‘Sorry?’ said Bedevere. ‘Oh, yes. Why not try going out of the door and turning left? If I’ve got my bearings right, that should bring us out—’
‘What door?’
Bedevere pointed to where the fax machine had been.
‘Excuse me,’ Turquine answered, ‘but that is not a door.’
Bedevere grinned. ‘Bit slow today, aren’t we, Turkey old man? Correct, that is not a door. When is a door not a door?’
‘Oh I see...’
As if by magic; or rather, by magic, the air pressure dropped away to normal, and Turquine slid himself off the wall, squared his shoulders, took a brief run-up and gave the jar one hell of a kick.
‘Happy?’
‘Yes,’ replied Turquine from the corridor. ‘Coming?’
Bedevere smiled. ‘In a minute,’ he said.
The main thing to remember if you are ever offered tea by the Queen of Atlantis is that you should accept, without question or hesitation. Never mind if you can’t take the tannin or if you’d rather have coffee; when the Queen offers you tea, you have tea.
Six of the seven PAs knew this. The seventh had no objection to tea, but didn’t quite understand where it was going to come from, seeing as how they were standing in a bare, deserted corridor that extended as far as the eye could see. In the grip of what, with hindsight, he identified as a subconscious urge to self-annihilation, he pointed this out.
The Queen smiled.
‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘aren’t you the clever one. You’re quite right, we’ll have to improvise.’ She closed her eyes, clenched her elegant white hands and said:
‘Let there be tea.’
And tea there was, in Snoopy mugs, with a matching milk jug, sugar bowl and biscuit jar.
‘There,’ said the Queen, ‘it’s surprisingly easy so long as you aren’t too ambitious to start with.’
Closer inspection revealed that there were seven mugs for eight people. That, as even the PA could recognise, was a Hint.
When they had finished their tea, the Queen beamed at them, vanished the mugs (‘Saves washing up,’ she explained) and rapped hard on the biscuit jar with her sceptre. There was the necessary quantity of blue light and burning sulphur, and the jar turned into a door in the wall.
‘Explanations wanted, anyone?’ she said sweetly. Silence. ‘Fine,’ she said, nodding in approval, and loosed off a small but powerful burst of personality at the doubting PA. ‘After you,’ she said.
Some are born brave, others achieve bravery and some are forced into acts of great courage by the unimaginable terror of what might happen to them if they refuse. The PA closed his eyes, reached for the door handle, turned it and pushed.
Nothing. Wouldn’t budge.
‘I think you’ll find it opens better if you pull,’ said the Queen.
The number of native-born Atlanteans who have been inside the registered office is small, but not nearly as minute as the number who’ve ever wanted to be inside it. As to the number of those who have ever got out again, there are no reliable statistics. The PA smiled sheepishly at the Queen, mumbled something about a far, far better thing and preferring to be in Philadelphia, and stumbled in.
‘Name.’
‘John Wilkinson.’
‘Occupation.’
‘Tax inspector.’
‘Thank you, please take a seat over there, we’ll get back to you in just a moment. Right then, next, please. Name.’
‘Stanislaw Sobieski.’
‘Occupation.’
‘Revenue official.’
‘Thank you, please take a seat over there, we’ll get back to you in just a moment. Right then, next, please. Name.’
‘Li Chang-Tseng.’
‘Occupation.’
‘Customs officer.’
‘Thank you, please take a seat over there, we’ll get back to you in just a moment. Right then, next, please. Name.’
‘François Dubois.’
‘Occupation.’
‘Revenue official.’
‘Thank you, please take a seat over there, we’ll get back to you in just a moment. Right then, next, please. Name.’
Th
e fourth man smirked.
‘Guess,’ he said.
The desk clerk didn’t look up. She had another twelve thousand, five hundred and seventeen more management trainees to deal with, and already she could feel a headache coming on. ‘I don’t guess,’ she said. ‘People tell me. Name.’
‘Weinacht,’ said the fourth man. ‘My name is Klaus von Weinacht.’
‘Occupation.’
Von Weinacht laughed. He laughed so loud you could hear him all over the reception area, and twelve thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine revenue officials looked up and stared. What they saw took them back an average of thirty years ...
... To a child, half-delighted, half-terrified, peeping out from under the blanket at the knife-blade of light under the door. To the sound of silence audible, darkness visible, stillness palpable; and a half-imagined clattering of hooves and clashing of bells in the unspeakable enigma of the night.
‘Well now,’ von Weinacht said, throwing back his hood, ‘how about delivery man?’
The Queen stood in the doorway and stared.
‘You!’ she said.
Bedevere looked up and smiled vaguely. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’
For a moment, the Queen hesitated; then she turned and yelled for the guard. Bedevere shook his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t going to work. You know your trouble? Bloody awful management relations.’ He indicated the stunned PA curled up by the door. ‘All the rest have scarpered,’ he said, ‘and I don’t think he’s in a fit state to be of much use to you. I hit him,’ he added, ‘with the door.’
The Queen looked down and saw a few shards of smashed porcelain. Then she smiled.
‘Never mind,’ she said, ‘plenty more where that came from.’
‘Doors or heavies?’
‘Both,’ replied the Queen, ‘although I was thinking more of the jar. Actually, I was rather fond of that one. Been in the family for ages and...’
Bedevere was impressed. ‘That old, huh?’ he said. ‘Oh well, never mind. You can’t make an omelette, as they say.’