Cabal turned. Even behind his blue-tinted spectacles, you just knew that his eyes had narrowed. “I called you ‘Rufus,’ Rufus. Perhaps I made a hash of the pronunciation? Let’s see, that’s ‘Rufus,’ pronounced ‘egotistical, megalomaniac, half-arsed, half-witted, half-baked, swivel-eyed, bubble-brained, slack-jawed, slope-browed, prattling, porcine, dimwit Scheißkopf.’ There, was that better?”
“You shouldn’t have said that,” whispered Rufus in a knuckle-whitening fury. If one imagines a tyrannosaurus appearing in light opera and delivering a line sotto voce, that was the effect. “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
“I don’t like you anyway, so it makes few odds. I don’t like you happy, sad, beamish, or maudlin. The only way that I will like you is if you take yourself and your friends there away to where you came from.”
“I should have dealt with you years ago, Cabal, when we first met. You never understood the powers that I was acquiring, never understood the cosmic influences that ran through this mortal frame. I have magic that you cannot begin to comprehend.”
“You’re talking about the one where somebody signs a playing card, you burn it, and then it reappears whole, rolled up in the middle of an orange, yes? You’re right, that one’s always baffled me.”
Some of the Maleficarian Army sniggered. Rufus was too angry to notice. “You’ve had your warning, Cabal. Now, prepare to face the terrible arcane wrath of Maleficarus!” Somewhere, a sheep bleated and quite ruined the effect. Maleficarus tilted his head forward and glowered at Cabal through bushy eyebrows. Placing his index and middle fingers on each temple, he started to mutter diabolical incantations.
Cabal blew his nose again. “You haven’t got anything that works on colds, have you? I think I may be coming down with one.” Rufus doubled the intensity of his mumblings. Seconds passed. Cabal checked his watch. “Could you speed this up, please? I’m a busy man.” Rufus redoubled. Cabal waited. The only effect he could feel was that his damn nose was itching. Perhaps he intends me to sneeze myself to death, he wondered. He clapped his handkerchief to his face as another sneeze came, and so missed Rufus’s magical incantation working.
After a momentary sense of falling, Cabal hit the ground going backwards, trailing heels striking the grass first. Belatedly, he realised that something had bodily picked him up and thrown him. He lay on the wet grass for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. He felt all right, although he knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Still, he could feel his toes, the dampness soaking through his clothes, the fine rain falling on his upturned face. He was just starting to formulate some really unpleasant things that he was going to do to Rufus and his troop when he thought, But it wasn’t raining a moment ago.
Suddenly somebody was standing over him, a sad, grey man with thin, grey hair plastered to his skull and eyes like failed experiments in egg poaching. “Hello,” said the man. “Would you like some tea?”
Cabal sat up. He was most definitely no longer on the moor. Instead, he seemed to have landed in a garden — the sort of large, carefully designed garden that stately homes have resting in several acres. He couldn’t see any stately home, though. Just an expanse of slightly undisciplined lawn pocked with bushes and the rotting remains of summer-houses and gazebos. They were in the middle of a large shallow bowl of land that hid the true horizon, the false one itself being obscured by copses of trees that ran in a broad circle about him. Here and there, he could see people sitting in the little buildings or walking, slowly, between them. Nearby, three men and a woman played a very sedate game of croquet. Cabal knew enough about croquet to know that it is a game with undercurrents: calculating, ruthless, and with a cold-blooded desire to destroy the opposition. Not here, though. Here they were just puttering around, shunting balls through hoops. Very odd.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked the man again. Cabal looked at him and then at the bone-china cup and saucer he was proffering. The rain had filled the cup to the brim and made it overflow into the already flooded saucer. The only evidence of tea was a faint sepia tinge in the rainwater.
“No, thank you,” said Cabal. “I would like to know where I am, however.”
“Oh,” said the man. “Oh.” He had to think for a moment and then added, “Oh. You’re in the garden.”
“And where precisely is that?”
The man gestured with the teacup, spilling some. “Why, it’s here. Where we are.”
Cabal had a sinking feeling that he might have been abducted by Dadaists. He tried again. “No, I mean what’s beyond the garden?”
The man smiled gently, and Cabal had a sudden urge to punch him. “The garden,” said the man.
“More garden.”
“No. The garden.”
“How big is this garden?”
“It goes from the trees” — the man pointed in a random direction — “to the trees.” He pointed in the opposite direction.
“And what lies beyond the trees?”
“The garden.”
Cabal succumbed to his urge. He left the man sitting on the grass nursing his bloody nose and set off for the tree line. Nobody raised the slightest objection, nobody even seemed to notice. He walked in long, rangy strides — all the better to be out of this place of the dull — past a decaying bandstand, overgrown statuary, and the croquet players. He noticed in passing that one was crying. Great shuddering sobs made his shoulders quake with misery as he leaned on his mallet for support. The other players were apparently waiting for him to finish his breakdown and get on with the game. They watched him with long, grey faces without a flicker of animation, and Cabal realised that such incidents were common here. No matter. He had a carnival to get back to.
“Fun, fun, fun,” he said to himself as he climbed the shallow slope to the trees. When he had reached them, he stopped and looked back. It was slightly odd that there was no pond or lake in the middle of the depression. It must have remarkably good drainage. He shook his head and entered the trees. The copse was dense and dark, and great drops of water never stopped percolating their way down from the dismal sky. He actually seemed to be getting wetter as the stuff managed to get past his hat and scarf and inside his long coat. This couldn’t be doing his cold any good. Actually, his cold seemed to have vanished. He paused and wiggled his nose experimentally. There was no itch, no impending sneeze. This was odd, too: Cabal didn’t often get colds, but when he did, they stayed. He was starting to have a very bad feeling about his whole situation. He shoved his way through the trees with renewed vigour.
When he finally burst out into the open again, he was disappointed not to be surprised. There, before him, lay the garden, exactly as he’d seen it just before going into the trees. He sighed, found a new entry point into the copse, and tried again. He wasn’t optimistic; he knew his course might have deviated some way from a straight line while he was negotiating his way between the trunks, but there was no possibility that he’d performed a complete about-face without being aware of it. Still, he owed it to himself and the scientific method to try again. Several minutes later, he was again rewarded with a vista of grass, garden furniture, and very depressed people playing croquet the way it isn’t supposed to be played.
Of course, he’d heard of pocket universes, but he’d always imagined them as rather larger than this. More interesting, too. Rufus seemed to have spent his institutional time on something other than macramé potholders. It didn’t look like the sort of place he’d have created as a dump for his enemies; Rufus liked his tortures to involve spikes and straps. Some long-dead sorcerer or thaumaturgist might well have crafted this garden originally as a place for contemplation. Rufus then found it lurking somewhere between the planes and hijacked it. Yes, thought Cabal, that would seem to fit the facts. Well, there had to be a way out. Its original creator must have designed an exit of some description after all. Stifling his displeasure down to a downward cast of his mouth, he made his way back to the heart of the garden.
The ma
n with the cup of tea was waiting. Not especially for Cabal, but just standing around with the cup and saucer in his hand. “You punched me,” he said without rancour.
“I broke your nose,” said Cabal in a tone of mild disbelief. The man’s nose was looking very unbroken. He tapped experimentally at it. Either the nose had healed itself at incredible speed, or the man was taking stoicism to extreme lengths.
“Oh. I suppose you did. I don’t think it was meant to be at that angle.”
“How quickly did it heal?”
“How quickly?” asked the man with wide-eyed incomprehension.
“How long?”
“My nose?”
“No,” said Cabal with an implausible impersonation of patience. “I can see how long your nose is. How long did it take your nose to heal?”
“How long?”
“Yes.”
“My nose?”
“Yes.”
The man placed his thumb beneath his nose, where it joined the upper lip, and the index finger upon the tip. He carefully preserved the distance between the fingertips as he showed it to Cabal. “About an inch.”
For the second time in a short while, Cabal felt he had no choice but to repeat an experiment. The man, cup, and saucer went flying in disparate directions. He lay on his back for a few moments, blinking. “You punched me again,” he said, bemused at such strange behaviour.
“Yes, I did,” said Cabal. He watched the freshly broken nose with interest as he fished his watch out of his pocket and made a mental note of the time.
The blood stopped flowing almost immediately, after a few seconds the ugly contusion that had started to form was already in abeyance, and then, astonishingly, the nose straightened itself with no external help at all until it snapped back in place with a slight pop. The whole process had taken — Cabal consulted his watch — no time. He shook the watch and checked it again. Its hands stayed defiantly still. His first thought was that he had forgotten to wind it, but, thinking back, he’d definitely done so earlier, back on the train, while he’d been waiting for Horst to make a move in their chess match. Then he wondered if water had got into it, but, no, it had been bone-dry when he’d produced it from his pocket, and he’d sheltered it in his hand while he watched the man’s nose repair itself. “Have you got the time?” he asked the man as he helped him back to his feet.
“Time?” said the man. “Oh, no.” He held out his hand to show Cabal his wristwatch. Its hands were still. “Nobody has any time here. No time at all.”
* * *
Never had relativity seemed more pertinent. Cabal could count up to sixty if he liked, but that didn’t really prove anything. It seemed like a minute, but that was all. “Seemed” didn’t seem to butter many parsnips in the garden, and he said as much to one of the croquet players. “No,” agreed the woman, “it’s not a vegetable garden.” Nor could anybody tell him how long they’d been there. Before long, Cabal realised that everything was “before long.” He made the rounds of the twenty or so other inmates, asking them questions to which they had no answers. Objectively, there was no possible way he could have conducted that number of interviews in that depth in less than a couple of hours. Yet, subjectively, it still felt as if he’d been there only a couple of minutes, and this was beginning to do unpleasant things to his psyche. The temptation was to withdraw, perhaps indulge in repetitive behaviour so that it didn’t matter when you’d done something — you’d done it lots of times before. Trying to smooth out reality by making each passing moment a tree in a forest of identical trees.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked the man. Cabal looked at him, appalled. He suddenly felt like a condemned man seeing a body swinging in the gibbet.
“No, I don’t want a cup of tea.” He gripped the man by his upper arms. “Listen. This is an artificial pocket universe. Do you understand what that means?” He went on, regardless of the man’s silence. “Somebody created it. That means they must have put in an exit, an escape route, so they could get out. Do you understand that? Somewhere here, there must be a way of getting out.”
For the first time, a gleam of intelligence entered the man’s eyes. “Oh!” he quavered. “Oh, yes! An escape route! The way out! Oh, yes! Oh, yes! How I wish, how I wish, how I wish!”
“Good. I’m glad I’ve engaged your enthusiasm. Now, I’m going to talk to the others, but you have to do something for me. You’re going to have to remember how important it is to find the exit and keep remembering it. Is that clear?”
“Oh, how I wish, how I wish, how I wish!”
“Good, keep it up.”
Cabal had taken perhaps two steps when the man continued, “How I wish I’d remembered to put the exit in!”
Cabal stopped for a long, subjective moment. He turned slowly to address the man. “I beg your pardon?” he said with awful calmness.
The man paused to take a sip of rainwater. “Oh, how I wish, how I wish, wish, wish … Oh!”
Cabal had grabbed him by the lapels. “How you wish you’d remembered to put an exit in? Is that what you said? Is that what you said?” He realised that he was shouting, shaking the man, that he’d badly lost his temper. He pushed the man away. “Who are you, anyway? Why did you create this place?” The man blinked at him. “How could you forget to put an exit in, you damned fool?” Cabal spat venomously.
“Just … forgot,” said the man, his voice breaking in despair.
“‘Just forgot,’” hissed Cabal, and walked quickly away, before he lost his temper again.
* * *
Cabal didn’t know how long it took him to calm down: it felt like half an hour, but that didn’t mean anything, either. He sat in some sort of faux-Oriental gazebo and watched the croquet match. After a while, they got through all the hoops, but instead of going for the home stake, they just set course for the first hoop again. It was a game that could never end, and that seemed to sum the garden up all too well.
I can’t believe it will end this way, thought Cabal. I can’t believe that I will be trapped here for eternity in the garden. There has to be a way out. The stupid bastard was too absent-minded to put in an exit; he must have made other errors in this place, exploitable errors. If only I could see them. He looked at the sky. If only it would stop raining. The light behind the low clouds never changed, the drizzle never altered in intensity.
The gazebo was shared with a young man in spectacles who was sitting on a wicker chair, playing with brass discs on a wooden board shaped like an arched window. Straight lines had been burnt across it. The young man held out one of the discs to Cabal. “Shove ha’penny?” he asked. Cabal told him to shove something else entirely and walked out.
He found himself in the middle of the endless croquet game. The players had ground to a halt, confronted by the ugly apparition of making a tactical decision. One of them had unaccountably won a roquet and was unsure how to proceed. He placed his foot on his ball, took it off again, made as if to replace it, wavered. This was an unusual situation, and the variation in routine was forcing them to think.
“Allow me,” said Cabal, taking the mallet from the vacillating man when the sound of grinding thought processes became too much to bear. The man seemed grateful to have been released from the spectre of the roquet, although having strangers abruptly take his mallet away was also disturbingly new. He looked at Cabal, blinking foolishly. “Tricky shot,” said Cabal cheerfully. He eyed the ball, carefully placed his foot on it, and then smashed the vacillating man’s brains out with a single powerful blow to the side of the skull.
The other players were stunned for a moment. Then they applauded uncertainly, no longer able to recall whether or not this was actually in the rules. “Well played, sir,” said one.
Cabal ignored them. He was already on one knee by the body and checking its pulse. None; the blow had killed him outright, which was just as it should be. But he waited. His own heart sank as the corpse’s stuttered back into life, fibrillated, and stabilised. The rapid
reconstruction of the broken skull and presumed re-formation of the liquidised brain within predictably followed. By the time the former dead man’s eyes had flickered open and he’d said, “Ouch,” Cabal had already lost interest. So — there was no death here, either.
He walked slowly in the rain, collar up and hat brim down. He mustn’t despair. With despair came acceptance, and with acceptance came the inevitable dulling of his faculties. The vacillating man was already back at his game of croquet, his recent brush with death — less of a brush and more a full-on head-butt — having changed nothing. Cabal couldn’t, mustn’t allow the same to happen to him. So lost in deep concentration was he that he almost walked into the sundial.
The sheer incongruity of it made him smile bitterly. A sundial in a place where the sun never shone. Ridiculous. Beads of rain stood on the engraved bronze disc or ran down the gnomon. At its edge he noticed some writing. He wiped the drops away with his fingertip and read “TEMPUS.” That was all. After it, the metal seemed disturbed in faintly familiar patterns, almost as if another word was trying to force its way through. In slow distraction, he drew his watch again and looked at the face. The hands still hadn’t moved even so much as a second. Time, he thought. Time’s the key somehow. An idea started to crystallise in the melt of his imagination. It might not work, of course, and there was always the possibility that he might have to upset or hurt a few of these excuses for people. So it wasn’t all bad news.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” said a familiar voice.
“Thank you,” said Cabal, accepting the cold china. He gave the saucer back, poured the contents of the cup on the ground, and put it in his pocket. “Thank you very much.”
He walked away, leaving the garden’s architect and first inmate looking at the saucer, the slightly damper part of grass where the liquid had fallen, and Cabal’s receding back. “You’ve got my cup,” said the architect plaintively.
The vacillating man was still lining up for his roquet. His ball was now slightly submerged in the turf, having been tentatively stood on so many times. “Allow me,” said Cabal cheerfully, and took his mallet. The man immediately shied away, protecting his head. Cabal reached down and drew a croquet hoop from the ground. “You weren’t using these, were you?” he said, and walked off.
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