by Tom Holt
An hour after the cat incident, they reached a castle. By now they were starving hungry, and it was coming on to rain. They hammered at the door, but nobody answered it.
‘Maybe they’re out,’ ventured Hussain.
‘Slice of luck for us, then,’ replied Achmed, pulling his cloak over his head. ‘Breaking and entering is our speciality, after all.’
Aziz looked up at the lofty battlements and rubbed his chin. ‘Bugger of a wall to climb,’ he said dubiously. ‘Must be twenty, twenty-five foot if it’s a yard. You checked out the gates, Faisal?’
‘Tight as a pawnbroker’s arse, Skip. If we had the big jemmy we’d maybe stand a chance, but without it…’
‘Just a minute.’ Hakim grabbed Aziz by the shoulder and pointed. ‘Some fool’s only left a beautiful great rope hanging out the window. Look, that tower over there by the gateway.’
He was right. ‘Stone me,’ said Aziz, impressed. ‘What a stroke of luck! All right, then, Faisal, Hakim, Shamir, up that rope quick as you like and open the gates. Anybody tries to stop you, scrag ‘em.’
It was an odd sort of a rope, being golden-yellow and made from some very soft, fine fibre; but it was plenty strong enough to take Shamir’s twenty-odd stone. He vanished through the tower window, and a moment later the rest of the gang heard a shriek, a scream, a female voice using words that even the thieves didn’t know (although they could guess the general idea fairly well from context) and a loud, heavy thump. Five minutes later, the gates opened.
‘What the hell kept you?’ Aziz demanded. His three faithful henchmen looked away. Hakim blushed. Shamir hastily wiped lipstick off his cheek.
‘Well,’ Hakim mumbled, ‘there was this bint, right…’
‘Two of’em,’ Faisal corrected him. ‘One right little cracker, and a raddled old boiler with a face like a prune. Really snotty about it all, she was. Told us our fortunes good and proper.’
‘She fell off the wall,’ admitted Shamir. ‘It was an accident, honest.’
‘The other one didn’t seem to mind, though,’ Hakim went on. ‘In fact, she seemed dead chuffed. It was her hair we climbed up, by the way.’
‘Her hair?’
Hakim nodded.
‘Stairs fallen down or something? Fire drill?’
‘Search me, Skip,’ Hakim replied, with a shrug. ‘Weird bloody lot they are in these parts, if you ask me. What now, Skip? Do we loot the place, or what?’
The castle proved to be well worth the effort of getting in. Apart from food and dry clothes and plenty of books and things to make a fire with, there were whole chests and trunks full of jewels and precious stones. The girl didn’t seem in the least put out by their depredations; in fact, she kept trying to kiss them, and seemed puzzled by the fact that they were rather more interested in the contents of the kitchen and the counting-house. Finally she got Achmed in a sort of half-nelson and started nibbling his ear, until Aziz managed to prise her off. Even then, she kept following them around, sighing embarrassingly and murmuring ‘My hero!’ That part of it worried Aziz no end, although he kept his concern to himself. His grasp of theory was tenuous at the best of times, but even he knew that villains doing hero stuff was bad news, liable to upset the balance of supernature. Rounding up his men like the headmistress of a Borstal kindergarten, he shooed them out of the castle, promised the girl they’d write, and quick-marched out of it as fast as possible. In their haste, one of them trod on a frog that’d been hanging around the castle for weeks, ogling the girl and saying ‘Give us a kiss, give us a kiss,’ in frog language; but they weren’t to know that.
‘Not another one!’
Michelle, or her spiritual essence, goggled at him as if she’d just swallowed a goldfish. ‘Another what?’ she asked. ‘Hey, this anaesthetic of yours doesn’t seem to be terribly good.’
‘Look down,’ Ali Baba replied.
Curiously enough, Michelle’s next words - ‘Who’s that in the chair?’ - were precisely the words that Daddy Bear, now prematurely deceased, should have spoken on discovering that Goldilocks had broken in. How they got there is a matter for the fabulonometrists to determine, but the answer is probably something to do with random catalyst dispersal and chaos theory. It’s probably not significant that she said them twice.
‘Maybe,’ Ali Baba was saying meanwhile, ‘there’s a leak in the pipe and I’ve been inhaling the stuff without knowing it. Never heard it caused hallucinations, but you never know.’
‘Pardon me,’ Michelle replied, affronted. ‘If there’s anybody hallucinating around here, I should think it’s me. I can see my body down there. Shouldn’t there be a strong bright light or something?’
Ali Baba sighed. ‘I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that,’ he said. ‘Obviously you don’t know. On reflection, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you, either. It’d only worry you.’
‘Thanks a heap. That’s really set my mind at rest, you know?’
‘True.’ Ali Baba leaned back against the radiator and took a deep breath. ‘If my theory’s right,’ he said, ‘and I have this really depressing feeling that it is, you’re not actually real. I mean, from Reality, don’t you know. I think you’re someone out of a story.’
‘A story
‘Before you start yelling for two doctors and a white van,’ Ali Baba continued, ‘maybe I’d better tell you, if you promise not to breathe a word. What am I saying, they wouldn’t believe you anyway, not when you tell them you only know I’m crazy because I started gibbering at you while your astral body was floating three feet up in the air. I’m not from these parts, either.’
‘A story,’ Michelle repeated. ‘Do you know, you’re the second person to tell me that in twenty-four hours.’
‘Really? Who was the first?’
‘My fridge freezer.’
‘Right. Fine. Now then, this may hurt a little but if it does I really couldn’t give a damn. Say Aaah.’
‘No, wait, listen.’ Michelle frowned, and crumpled her astral hands tightly into a ball. ‘Listen,’ she repeated. ‘For some time now I’ve been convinced I’m going crazy, ever since my great-aunt died. I inherited this ring, and it makes me think I can understand machines talking. All the electrical gadgets in my flat have been talking to me.’
‘Understand machines,’ Ali Baba repeated, in a voice as flat as the square at Edgbaston. ‘A ring. Silver.’
‘Yes.’ Michelle stared at him. ‘How’d you know?’
‘Quite plain, with a jewel or a bit of coloured glass stuck in it. Really ordinary, ugly-looking thing.’
‘That’s it. Where did you say you were from?’
‘Where did you say you got it?’
They regarded each other warily, like two undercover Klingon agents meeting by chance in Trafalgar Square. Ali Baba broke the silence.
‘You inherited it from your great-aunt, you said.’
Michelle nodded. ‘If that’s who she really was. Apparently, I’ve only got the word of an old-fashioned Bakelite telephone for that. According to my labour-saving kitchen utensils, I was an orphan or something, and they brought me up. You know, like Mowgli or Romulus and … Mr Barbour, are you feeling all right? Why are you sitting on the floor?’
Slowly, with as much dignity as he could muster (enough to fill a small matchbox, but only if the matches were still inside) Ali Baba climbed to his feet, brushed off his knees and washed his hands. It was, he felt, what Doc Holliday would have done.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Slipped on something. Could you just go through that last bit again, because Damn! Yes?’ he barked into the intercom. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘Sorry, I’m sure,’ replied the receptionist. ‘It’s just to ask if you got Mr Smith’s details, because I think he’s feeling better now and he’s just about to go home.’
Ali Baba flicked off the intercom, snapped, ‘Stay there!’ at Michelle in the chair, and darted out into the waiting room. Akram - is it my imagination, or does he seem smaller somehow? - was halfway to
the door. He turned, looked at Ali Baba and then looked away.
‘Just off?’
‘Mhm.’
‘I hope there won’t be any more trouble now.’
‘Mm.’
‘Right.’ For an instant, Ali Baba felt rather foolish. He wasn’t at all sure why he’d felt the need to come running out here just to see Akram leave. As far as he was concerned, he’d done everything he could to neutralise the threat; if it worked, it worked, and if not, not. He’d done the right thing, he felt sure. It was just starting to dawn on him that if his gamble did pay off, then the threat that had been terrorising him across twenty-odd Real years and distances too vast to be measured was now over and done with.
Hold that thought.
He could stop running.
He could go home.
‘Mm.’
Ali Baba parachuted back from his reverie. ‘Sorry?’
‘Cn I g hm nw?’ said Akram, moving his battered jaws with perceptible discomfort, ‘M ring mch bttr nw tht v hd uh rst.’
‘I think,’ Ali Baba said slowly, ‘that going home would be the best possible thing you could do. Cheerio.’
‘Auf wdrshn.’
And then the door closed behind him and he was gone. Ali Baba stood for a moment, as if trying to remember how to make his legs work, and then went back into his surgery.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Right, where were we? Tell me,’ he added, sitting on the desk and folding his arms, ‘all about it.’
‘All about what?’
Ali Baba bit his lip; he seemed ill at ease, as if he was a guest at an Embassy function who wasn’t sure his fly was done up but daren’t have a quick fumble to find out. ‘What you were telling me. Being brought up by your kitchen.’
‘Well.’ Michelle told him. He listened. When she’d finished he sat in silence for fifteen seconds, a very long time under the circumstances, before standing up, sitting down again, fiddling with a pencil, breaking it, putting the corpse in a drawer and finally clearing his throat.
Stow away in the pile of a magic carpet crossing the Line, and jump off over Old Baghdad. Because timescale here is relative, depending on which showing of the picture you’re in, don’t clutter your mind up with notions like ‘twenty-seven years earlier’; it’d only confuse the issue. Better just to recognise that this is a flashback, and leave it at that.
You’ve been here before; the long drive, the wide lawn where one day there will be big stripy tents and a band, the big house, the french windows opening inwards, the dark, dramatically furnished study, the desk behind which the Man sits. Having tidied away the tents and the band, Continuity reckon they’ve done a day’s work, and accordingly nothing else is different. For his part, the Man doesn’t look a day younger. His type never do.
Take a good look, anyway. Here’s a face that nothing will ever be able to shock or to frighten. You could bring yourself to believe that God looks like this, if you’re comfortable with the idea of a god who sends the boys round after dark to pour petrol through the letterboxes of other gods’ temples.
‘And the girl,’ he says. ‘Who is she?’
His voice is quiet, soft and slightly bored, like a casualty doctor examining his seventh knife wound of the night. There’s a certain degree of contempt in there as well, the scorn of the truly great sinner for the peccadilloes of regular people. There’s a cigar clamped between his thin lips that burns but never seems to grow any shorter; rather like Moses’ burning bush, except not quite so homely.
The man on the other side of the desk looks down; it shames him to have to admit to what he’s done. ‘Her name’s Prudence,’ he mumbles.
Something exceptional happens; the Man’s eyebrows lift, admitting surprise. ‘Prudence?” he says. ‘This, you will forgive me for saying so, is a curious name for her to have, in the circumstances.’
‘Yes. Well.’ The man on the wrong side of the desk lifts his shoulders; not quite a shrug, because that wouldn’t be fitting. ‘They all have names like that, where she comes from.’
‘You don’t say.’ The Man’s voice is back to normal, and his face is once more Mount Rushmore’s big brother. ‘And where might that be, precisely?’
The other man doesn’t speak; he tilts his head slightly sideways, indicating the direction of the Line. He waits for a reaction - anger, surprise, disgust, amusement. All he gets is an imperceptible nod, as if to reassure him that the person he’s talking to is still awake.
‘A visitor,’ the other man continues. ‘Or you could say a tourist. One of those head-in-the-clouds types who somehow get across the Line from time to time.’
‘Sure.’ The great head nods again. ‘A Wendy.’
The term, as used by Storybook folk, is highly derogatory, but the Man uses it as a straightforward noun; he means nothing by it, it’s just a convenient piece of shorthand. The other man nods, relieved that he doesn’t need to explain further. ‘That’s right,’ he says, ‘a Wendy. Apparently on the other side she runs a small specialist bookshop and makes handmade silver jewellery in her spare time.’
The edges of the Man’s lips curl ever so slightly as if to ask, What else can you expect from such people? He sucks on his cigar and breathes out a thin plume of smoke.
‘And now what?’ he says. ‘Tell me what it is you want I should do for you, and then we can sit out in the sun and drink a glass of wine together.’ He smiles; a Great Khan’s smile, derisively merciful. The other man takes a deep breath.
‘There’s a problem,’ he says at last.
‘Always there’s a problem,’ the Man replies, with a faint trace of impatience. ‘You want her to go, but you can’t get rid of her. You want her to stay, but the immigration people say no. You want to marry her, but her father is the Sultan. So many problems.’
‘She’s going to have a baby,’ the other man whispers.
Silence. The Man draws deep on his cigar and expels the smoke through his nose, like a dragon. ‘That,’ he says at last, ‘is different, I’ll say that for you. I didn’t even know it was possible.’
‘It’s possible, believe me.’
‘All right. So, what’s the problem?’
The other man seems to collapse, just a little, as if the secret inside him had been the only thing holding him upright. ‘Padrone? he says, ‘what am I to do? We have nothing in common, in fact we can’t stand the sight of each other any more. If we try and talk about it she gets hysterical. She seems to think the child’s going to be born with green skin or pointed ears or something. Now she says she wants nothing to do with it; she just wants to get back to her own kind and lead her life, she says.’
‘So what’s wrong with that?’
‘My child,’ the other man blurts out. ‘What’s going to become of it, brought up on the other side by a mother who thinks she’s carrying a Martian or something? Padrone, can you do anything? You have friends over there, people who might know what to do. I thought maybe …’
His words dry up, like water in a hot season. In the face of so much scorn and pity, it’d be fatuous to try and say anything else.
‘You want that the kid should be looked after,’ says the Man. ‘That it should have a decent home, maybe be raised among its own kind.’ He frowned. ‘This,’ he says, ‘is a big thing you’re asking me for. Arrangements will have to be made, it’ll cost money. And you’ Without so much as the movement of an eyeball, he looks the other man over, from charity-shop turban to camel boot sale shoes. ‘However,’ he continues, ‘I have a soft heart, your story touches me. It’s good that a man should be concerned about his children and not want that they should grow up like savages. I tell you what I’ll do.’
And, in that same calm, deadly voice he explains: how no humans on the other side could be trusted, but there were things - telephones and vacuum cleaners and alarm clock radios - that had originally come over from the Old Country, and…
‘From here?’ the other man interrupts. ‘We export consumer goods over the Li
ne?’
The Man’s brow tightens a fraction. ‘Because you’re young,’ he says, ‘I forgive that you interrupt me. And yes, we do. Over there, these machines need electricity. The ones we make here don’t, they’re alive. On the other side, therefore, they’re a hell of a lot cheaper to run. Anyhow, I have contacts. They will find a nice respectable household where your child can grow up and get a good start in life. I do this for you,’ continues the Man, regarding the other as if he had a hundred legs and had just walked out of a salad, ‘because I like you. And one day, perhaps, I may come to you and give you three wishes; just simple wishes, nothing very much, and probably that day will never come. Who can say?’
The other man looks perplexed. ‘Sorry,’ he said.’ You’ll give me three wishes? Don’t you mean the other way round? I mean…’
Through the cigar smoke, two eyes burn fiercely. ‘What’s the matter? You have a problem with that? Maybe you think that’s a lot to ask in return for such a trifling favour as you ask me.’
The other man goes stiff, as if he’s only just realised that the words on the notice boards he’d been walking past for the last couple of miles mean DANGER - MINEFIELD. ‘Of course not, padrone,’ he replies hastily. ‘I just thought - I mean, shouldn’t it be me doing something for you?’
And now the Man does laugh; it sounds like the cracking of hard rocks, and the joke is clearly private. ‘Don’t you worry about that,’ he says. ‘You leave the accounts to me, I’ll make sure they tally. And now,’ he sighs, ‘that’s enough business for one day. Let’s go out into the sun and have that glass of wine. Enrico! Bring a bottle of the good stuff for our guest.’
And the man
‘Was you?’
Ali Baba nodded. ‘Not long after that,’ he said, ‘by local time, at least, I got into - well, I came into money and then I had to leave, for the good of my health. I went to see Him again; he was a bit less sympathetic the second time but I managed to buy a passage over the Line with a rather valuable piece of kit I owned at the time. Your silver ring, actually. It’s funny; hardly a day’s passed since I came here when I haven’t wondered what became of my Prudence’s baby, and all the time the answer’s been staring me in the face, so to speak. Usually,’ he added, ‘with her eyes shut, saying Aaah. Funny old thing, life, don’t you think?’