Maybe this was meant to happen, Alison thought vaguely. Then, shocked, she analysed the thought. Do I mean that maybe it was a good thing that Sparks died so I could meet Joseph? she thought.
Just as she was about to pay up so she could go home and spend the rest of the evening feeling guilty and wrong about things, she noticed a small electronic display by the till. It was flashing up a message. goodbye hope, it said, and then goodbye hope again. Alison felt even more deflated.
“Bloody thing,” said the checkout girl. She whacked the display. “It’s always doing that.”
goodbye hope, the display announced once more. Then it hiccupped out goodbye hope to see you, and finally goodbye hope to see you soon. It repeated goodbye hope to see you soon. And again goodbye hope to see you soon, clearly happy to go on like that all day.
Alison picked up her purchases, feeling immensely cheered for some inscrutable reason. “Goodbye,” she said to the checkout girl. ‘Hope to see you soon.”
The checkout girl smiled, just in case.
Jeff woke up. Duncan was asleep, dreaming about headless meerkats running around being chased by his mother. Jeff lay awake, listening to Duncan murmur “no, mum, no,” softly to himself. He was in a very good mood. He had a plan, and it was an unpleasant one that would not only sort out all the difficulties that were plaguing him, but it was a plan where at least one person would be hurt and probably killed.
Maybe two, he thought happily.
The next day, Joseph Kaye woke up and found that he was thinking about Alison. The sun streamed approvingly through his bedroom windows, covering various drawings of bugs and weapons with golden light. He went downstairs to the kitchen, where his father and mother were having their breakfast.
“Drink your coffee before it gets cold,” said his mother.
“I think I’m in love,” said Joseph.
His father snorted. “Gay sort of remark,” he said.
It was, oddly, the first of May.
Sparks woke up. Jeff was standing over him.
“Get up,” said Jeff. “Jesus, I spend my whole life telling you to get up. I ought to have GET tattooed on one set of knuckles and UP on the other.”
“You’d have a lot of knuckles left over,” said Sparks.
It was the first of May.
Alison got up and thought about Joseph Kaye. She made a cup of revolting instant coffee and drank it with a smile on her face.
It was the day before the second of May.
“What did you wake me up for?” said Sparks.
“Shut up,” said Jeff.
“You say that a lot, too,” said Sparks.
“Maybe I should have that tattooed on my knuckles instead of GET UP,” said Jeff, breathing oddly.
“You could have GET UP on one hand and SHUT UP on the other,” said Sparks. “Except you’d have to have the S on one hand as well.”
“Pardon?” said Duncan.
“Don’t listen,” said Jeff. “He’s trying to annoy me.”
“Which would mean you’d have GET UPS on one hand, and HUT UP on the other,” said Sparks.
“Oh for God’s sake,” said Jeff. “Next time we’ll open his head up and put in a remote control device.”
“No,” said Duncan. “That’s assuming you start with GET UP. If you started with SHUT UP, you could have SHUT U on one hand and – ”
“Shut up!” Jeff shouted. “Get up!”
“See?” said Sparks as he got to his feet. “It’s much quicker if you just shout it.”
Jeff and Duncan pushed Sparks into a black cab (Jeff did most of the pushing). The car ploughed through London like a dead pig through syrup.
“Can’t you go any faster?” said Jeff, clutching his case to his angry chest. “We’re on important business.”
“It’s these traffic lights,” said the driver as he slowed down to avoid some air.
“We’re not tourists,” said Jeff. “Drive properly or I’ll report you, you pointless Cockney chuff-tickler.”
The taxi stopped abruptly, or as abruptly as a slow cab can stop, which is almost imperceptibly.
“Get out,” said the cabbie. “I’m not putting up with that.”
“Drive on!” shouted Jeff. “It’s important!”
The driver got out of the cab and walked round to Jeff’s side. He opened the door.
“And I want £20 for the cost of cleaning my cab,” he said.
“Cleaning?” shouted Jeff, twitching like a preying mantis in a suit. “What cleaning?”
“Blood,” said the driver, punching Jeff in the nose. Jeff went down like a cocktail stick on a slope, and Sparks jumped out between him and Duncan and ran off.
“Come back,” said Duncan, but quietly so as not to attract attention.
“Heeb’s gob my bab,” said Jeff, through most of his nose.
Sparks had no computer, no portal, but he did have Jeff’s bag, and that was the core of his plan. If Jeff and Duncan were travelling through portals, and clearly they were, then they must have some way of knowing how to find them. Therefore they must have a computer. The only luggage Jeff and Duncan had was this attaché case. There must, therefore, be a laptop in it. Sparks would go online, find the Random Life Generator, and head off home. He didn’t know where home was, but that was part two of his plan. Sparks would let Jeff and Duncan find him, and then offer to trade them their laptop back for directions.
He prised open the case. There wasn’t a laptop in it.
Duncan wiped what he hoped was the last of the blood from Jeff’s nose.
“There,” he said. “Good as new.”
“Not quite,” said Jeff, as they sat on the kerb. “That dick has escaped, he’s got my bag, he thinks there’s a laptop in my case and he almost certainly wants us to find him and be blackmailed into sending him home.”
“But there isn’t a laptop in your case,” said Duncan. “There’s…”
Duncan paled.
“Yes,” said Jeff. “There’s. Quite. There’s.”
He folded his more than adequate legs up like a spider.
“We’re stuffed,” said Jeff.
“Look,” said Duncan.
“What do you mean, look?” said Jeff. “Do you have an idea?”
“No,” said Duncan. “Look, like look up.”
Jeff looked up. Sparks was standing above them, with the empty attaché case and a piece of paper.
“There’s no laptop in here,” he said, and threw the case down.
“We don’t need a laptop,” sneered Jeff.
“We’re the Society,” said Duncan. “We know the codes and passwords, so…”
“There’s just this piece of paper,” said Sparks.
“Have you read it?” said Duncan. He didn’t sound happy.
“Yes,” said Sparks. He didn’t sound happy either.
“It’s just a form of words,” said Jeff. They were in a cafe that was meant to be French, in that it served milky coffee and was staffed by the apparently undead.
“It doesn’t look much like just a form of words,” said Sparks.
“A turn of phrase, then.”
“Not that either. Nor something that’s a bit ambiguous, or a joke, or a misprint. It’s very clear.”
“It’s not ours,” said Duncan hopefully. “There’s been a terrible mistake and someone’s switched briefcases.”
“Bollocks,” said Sparks. “It’s signed by Jeff and it says Dear Duncan at the top. It’s yours.”
“All right,” said Jeff. “You can have that one. I don’t see what you’re moaning about, anyway.”
“You don’t?” said Sparks. He unfolded the piece of paper. It was a printed-out email.
“Dear Duncan,” he read out, “The only way we are going to save the plan is by getting that moron Sparks to kill the other troublemaker. Yours. Jeff.”
Sparks folded the letter. “You people are sick,” he said. “As well as inept. I’m not going to kill anyone.”
“Quite r
ight,” said Duncan. “Killing is bad. I try not to do any myself. All right, we’ll be off now. Can we have our letter ba…”
Sparks ignored Duncan’s reaching hand and put the letter in his pocket. “I’m keeping this. I might take it to the police.”
“Good idea,” said Jeff. “They’ll really know what you’re talking about. Ooh ooh officer, two men from another dimension or something want me to do a murder, I think, ooh ooh I don’t really know because I’m a bit stupid.”
Sparks sighed. There was no worse feeling than being right and being unable to win an argument. So he punched Jeff in the eye. Jeff fell back.
Then he took a gun out of his pocket.
“Right,” said Jeff. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m going to tell you who you’re going to kill. So shut up.”
Sparks shut up.
Joseph Kaye and Alison went to the library together. It was deserted apart from a ginger man working his way through several atlases, and a young girl with a stern brow. Kaye realised with a pleasant frisson of something – pleasure, probably – that he hadn’t been to the library for weeks. Nor had he turned on his computer at work to look anything up. He had in fact lost interest in the whole issue of… Kaye tried to drive the word “cockroach” from his mind.
“I’ve never enjoyed libraries…” said Alison.
“Nor have I,” said Joseph Kaye hastily, at exactly the same time as Alison finished her sentence by saying, “…so much.”
“So much,” Kaye said even more hastily, but Alison continued on.
“I mean, they’re not sexy places, I don’t mean sexy, I don’t know why I said sex, sexy, I mean, when you think of the vocabulary of, of it, of them, words like microfiche and ladder and shelf, they’re not very, well, I suppose microfiche is sort of sexy.”
“Please kiss me,” said Joseph Kaye.
Alison kissed him, and the ginger man with the atlases looked up and frowned. The stern girl also looked up, but because of her brow, it was hard to tell if she was frowning or not. Kaye didn’t care.
“Shall we go somewhere else?” Alison said.
“Oh yes,” said Kaye in a new deep voice that startled him.
“We could stay here and look things up if you like,” said Alison, “I know you’re working on an important project and I could help you…”
“No,” said Kaye. “By the way, I live with my parents, who are a bit Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century about things.”
“I’ve got a flat with a great big bed in it,” said Alison.
“All right then,” said Kaye, and they left the library.
“Get a room,” said the ginger man with the atlases, about five minutes after they had left, and then he realised that that was what they were going to do, and felt sad, and wished he was in love, and saw that the girl across from him with the stern brow was laughing, and laughing at his joke, so he went over and asked her out.
Alison woke up in her own bed with a different life. The sheets next to her were crumpled like hills of Dralon, and there was the sound of a kettle protesting that its very entrails were being boiled out of it from the next room. Alison didn’t care about the kettle, because one, it was a kettle and two, she felt so happy she also felt ridiculous. Everything made her grin, some things made her giggle so much she suspected that her dignity and poise and self-respect might never return, and this didn’t bother her.
In the next room, upsetting the kettle, was a man who had recently been released from jail for being mad and dangerous, and she had just spent all night having it off with him. And she had never felt better.
Clearly I’ve gone mad, she thought.
The thought did not bother her at all, she noticed, which was, she supposed, further proof that she had gone mad.
“His name,” said Jeff, “is Kaye. Joseph Kaye.”
“Like in…” said Sparks.
Duncan interrupted.
“He lives in London, this London,” said Duncan, looking nervier than usual, “and we’re very worried about him. The Society is, that is, is what I mean.”
“You must be worried about him,” Sparks said, “if you want me to top him. Which I’m not going to do.”
“Yes you are,” said Jeff. “Carry on, Duncan.”
“Kaye is about to discover everything about the Society,” said Duncan. “He came across something which it’s only a matter of time will lead him to… discover everything about the Society, yes.” Duncan trailed off, caught in the loop of his own sentence.
“Oh no,” said Sparks. “That would be awful. The world would end.”
“Everything would end,” said Jeff. “We’ve been through this. He’s a dangerous madman and we have good reason to believe that apart from the universe being in jeopardy and so forth, people here would die.”
“Wow,” said Sparks, “So not only will the universe be destroyed, but people will die as well. Because I’d been hoping that, despite the destruction of the universe, a few people might live on. You know, in the hills and stuff.”
“What hills?” said Duncan, interested.
“He’s being sarcastic,” said Jeff.
“It’s my turn,” said Sparks.
Just then their coffees arrived. In fact, they were someone else’s coffees, but life is short, so they took them. Duncan started blowing on his until Jeff pointed out it was an iced coffee.
“Look, this is all old stuff,” said Sparks. “All you’ve told me is his name. And I’m not killing anyone just because you’ve told me their name.”
“There is one other thing,” said Jeff. He looked at Duncan nastily. “You tell him,” he said.
“Which thing?” said Duncan. “The roach thing or…”
“Oh well done,” said Jeff. “I wasn’t going to tell him that.”
“What roach thing?” said Sparks.
“We could have just told him the other thing and it would have been fine,” said Jeff.
“Well, I didn’t know which thing you meant.”
“Obviously I meant the important thing. Not the thing which makes us look silly.”
“Which is the thing that makes us look silly? The roach thing?”
“Yes!” shouted Jeff. “The roach thing!”
“Does it make us look silly?”
“Oh yeah,” said Sparks. “Really silly.”
Jeff wiped his narrow forehead with a slim hand.
“You’d better tell him,” he said.
“About the roach thing? Or the other thing?”
Jeff’s slim hand left his narrow forehead and slapped Duncan’s thin cheek.
“All right,” said Duncan. “The roach thing.” He fingered his reddening cheek and leaned forward in his chair.
“It was a Friday,” Duncan began. “No, wait…”
“Start again,” said Jeff. “No one cares what day it was.”
“I do,” said Sparks. “I think setting is very important.”
“Thank you,” said Duncan. Duncan thought for a second.
“It was a Wednesday,” he said. “I remember because Wednesday is my day for excursions.”
“What are excursions?” said Sparks.
“Doesn’t matter, carry on,” said Jeff.
“Excursions are what we call forays or trips into other worlds. We’re not supposed to do them without per…”
“Get on with it,” said Jeff abruptly.
“Oh yeah,” Duncan said. “Anyway, it must have been a Wednesday. I was in the office that morning, and I was just going through some old notes. You know the sort of thing…”
“No,” said Sparks. “Tell me, it’s really interesting.”
“I suppose it is to an outsider,” said Duncan, sounding pleased. “I keep notes on my excursions. You have to, in case you have an accident or get eaten, you see, and they need to find out what you would have told them in your report, had you lived to write it. Of course, since we were doing it without…”
“Get on with it,” said Jeff.
“I was getting on with it,” said Duncan. “That’s why I said ‘well’. To indicate that I was about to get on with it.”
Jeff muttered something. Duncan ignored it.
“Well,” he said pointedly, “I was looking at my notes, and I noticed, in my notes, that there was a world I was supposed to have checked off, a couple of months before. Now this world, as it happens, is a pretty dull one. No presidents who didn’t get assassinated or world wars that got won by Germany, no governments of ants, that sort of thing…”
“Governments of…” Sparks said.
“It’s more common than you think,” said Duncan. “So this world is pretty much like the one we come from. I knew there wasn’t much going on there. But…”
“But,” said Jeff, “he’s incredibly anal.”
“Thorough,” said Duncan. “I’m incredibly thorough.”
“Not so thorough you remembered going there,” said Jeff.
“True,” said Duncan. “You see,” he said to Sparks, “that’s one of the problems of the job. You go to so many worlds that are virtually identical – a world where there’s no word for magenta, a world where cats love swimming, those kind of tiny differences – that you sometimes sort of forget you’ve been.”
“You forget,” said Jeff.
“I said you,” said Duncan.
“You as in you Duncan,” said Jeff. “Not you as in one. Not you as in me, or anyone else. I’ve never been to a world and forgotten it.”
“All right,” said Duncan. “I admit I do have a tendency to do it, more than some. But I always go back, you see. I always go back and check.”
“I wish you hadn’t,” said Jeff. “We’d be all right. Thorough. Yeah.”
Sparks was trying to hold on to the greasy and fraying thread of Duncan’s narrative.
“What does that mean, you went back and checked?”
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