by Tom Holt
Okay, so he couldn’t leave the country. Nothing to stop him leaving the century. He phoned his usual firm of time-travel agents and asked for a reservation for the fifth century BC, first-class, non-smoking, not too near the engine.
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Lundqvist, but we’ve had instructions. No credit till further notice.’
‘But I’ve got an account,’ Lundqvist screamed. ‘Dammit, I’ve been travelling with you since five hundred years before you first set up in business. I’ve got a goddamn gold card. Doesn’t loyalty count for anything?’
‘I’m afraid your account has been suspended, sir. Court order. Injunction. Terribly sorry, but we can only help you if you can make it cash in advance.’
‘Tell you what,’ Lundqvist was physically shaking with rage by this point, hardly able to hold on to the receiver. ‘Take me back to last Thursday and I’ll pay you anything you like. My credit rating’ll be fine then, I give you my word. Only for Chrissakes get me out of here.’
‘Sorry, sir, but I’ve got my orders. If you’d care to come round to our offices with the money, we’d be only too pleased . . .’
He slammed down the phone and snarled impotently. Then he pulled open his desk drawer, slipped something under his shoulder and walked out.
He couldn’t withdraw anything from the bank, huh? We’ll soon see about that.
‘Stick ’em up,’ he hissed across the counter. ‘This is a forty-five automatic and I don’t care if I use it. Fives and tens, and take it real easy.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ replied the cool and efficient girl behind the till. ‘Please bear with me a moment while I get your money for you.’ She leant back and called to someone behind the scenes. ‘Yvonne, could you bring me some more fives, please? Gentleman robbing the bank.’ An unseen hand passed her a wad of currency notes, which she dropped into the little perspex shuttle thing and passed over. ‘Thank you for calling,’ she said. ‘While you’re here, can I perhaps interest you in our new range of personal equity plans, specially tailored to meet your individual investment requirements and help you plan for a secure and prosperous future?’
Lundqvist had got through the door and had his hand on the door-handle of the getaway car when a discreet cough at his elbow made him freeze in his tracks.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a weazel-faced man in a grey suit, ‘but I trust you’re going to declare all that? Let me see.’ He took the money from Lundqvist’s unresisting fingers, counted it and handed it back. ‘I make that fifty thousand dollars which, seeing as how it’s the profits of a crime, malfeasance or illegal enterprise, is taxable at your highest applicable rates under Schedule Nine Case Six. Plus, of course, grossing up to allow for notional basic rate tax deducted at source, leaves you with . . .’ The young man produced a calculator from thin air, pecked at it with a moist fingertip and nodded sagely. ‘I make that a deficit of two hundred and sixty-three dollars, sir. If you’d just sign here, please.’
Dazed, Lundqvist signed the receipt, allowed himself to be relieved of the money, and fell limply into his car, where he sat for about twenty seconds until the police arrived and he had to drive like buggery to shake them off. By the time he’d done that, he’d used up all his remaining petrol and had precisely one dollar and two cents to his name.
He dumped the car and walked home.
‘That’s all very well,’ said Lucky George, ‘but I’m buggered if I’m staying here. I mean, look at it.’
He waved his arm in an histrionic gesture and scowled.
‘I think it’s very nice,’ said Helen. ‘A bit suburban, maybe, but—’
‘Suburban!’ George turned up the malignity in his scowl. ‘For pity’s sake, woman, the only difference between this and where I’ve just come from is you don’t have to die to get a visa.’ He threw himself into a chair and grabbed a can of beer out of the coolbag. Helen gave him a disapproving look.
‘You’re exaggerating a little, I think,’ she said coolly. ‘No little men with pitchforks, for a start. No roaring flames. No—’
‘You’re wrong there,’ George interrupted. ‘Except here they shove bits of raw meat in front of them and call it a barbie. When I was a boy in Nurnberg we had a thing, I think it was called an oven. Wonder if the patent’s expired, because you could make an absolute fortune . . .’
‘George.’ In this light, George thought, with her hair curling like that in the evening breeze and exactly that tone of voice, she’s just like my mother. And no, I will not eat up my nice parsnips. ‘It’s only temporary,’ she went on. ‘Until—’
‘Temporary.’ George grinned. ‘I don’t think so, love. This is one case where you can’t simply outlive the bastards. You know what that pompous little toad of a Finance Director told me the other day? You can hide but you can’t run. He was right. And,’ he added, draining the last of the beer and crumpling the can in his fist, ‘there’s no percentage in hiding, none whatsoever. It’s exactly the same porridge, only with a slightly different tin.’
Helen sighed. ‘That’s just culture shock, George,’ she said. ‘We don’t have to stay in Sydney, you know. It’s a huge country. There’s bits of it not even properly explored yet. We could go anywhere.’
‘Marvellous.’ George rubbed his eyes wearily. ‘We can go and live in the middle of the bloody desert. Hell may not be all fun and games, but at least they’ve got hot and cold running water.’ He considered for a moment. ‘Hot water, anyway. All the hot water you can use, free. Bit like an Aga.’
‘Give it a try.’
‘What, go straight, you mean?’
Helen nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘We could start a sheep farm or something. It’d be fun, George, really it would. No more magic and being chased about, just you and me and—’
‘A sheep farm.’
Helen frowned. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For my sake, George, please.’ ‘You’re serious?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve heard some pretty daffy suggestions in my time,’ he said, ‘but this has got to be one of the daffiest. You’re really saying we should set up a—’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, then.’ He stood up, closed his eyes for a moment, and then smiled. Positively beamed.
When he opened his eyes again, they were standing in the middle of a huge, fenceless, featureless wasteland; a wasteland covered in white, seething bodies. From the air it would have looked just like a big, manky, sheep skin rug.
‘You got it,’ said George. ‘Now, what precisely do you do with the little buggers to make them grow?’
It was three months later.
Australia is an old country; very old. At a time when Paris was a soggy fen and Rome herself little more than a select new development of starter homes for Sabine commuters, the sun-bleached immensity of the Outback was already cross-hatched with a hundred thousand intricate songlines, scored on the folk memory and linking the Dreamtime to the nebulous future as directly and reliably as fibre-optic cable.
Stare at this brain-curdling immensity long enough and your eyes will play tricks on you. You’ll start to imagine that, just at the destruction-test limit of vision, you can make out a tiny black dot, moving as slowly as an hourly-paid glacier, dawdling across the infinite. You might even take it for a human being.
Which it is. This is Tjakamarra, humming and mouthing his way along the line with the precision of a wire-guided missile and the sense of urgency of a holiday postcard. Around him the Ancestors, perceptible to all the senses except five, crowded in a happy, shuffling mass, passing him on from hand to hand like a parcel.
The song takes him across the flank of a long, low escarpment and to the crest of a ridge overlooking a few thousand acres of dead ground . . .
‘Stone the flaming crows,’ said Tjakamarra under his breath.
In front of him was . . . Well, now. Yes.
A man on a quad-bike roared up out of the shadow of the crest and stopped, leaning on his handlebar
s.
‘Can I help you?’ he said. Tjakamarra stared at him.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he replied. ‘I think we got a crossed line.’
The man with the bike raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he said.
‘Too bloody right,’ Tjakamarra answered. ‘How long’s this lot been here?’
The man grinned. ‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Oh, that reminds me. Is your name . . .’ He dug a scrap of paper out of his pocket and consulted it. ‘. . . Tjakamarra?’
Tjakamarra nodded.
‘Carpet Snake clan?’
‘Yeah. How did you know . . . ?’
Lucky George nodded. ‘Message for you from the Ancestors. It says, “Temporary interference with reception, please do not adjust your reception, we apologise for any inconvenience, C sharp minor, F natural, A sharp with a dot, rest, G natural.” That make any sense to you?’
Tjakamarra nodded, relieved. ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘It means, turn left at the gully and watch out for low-flying aircraft.’ He paused, wondering how to phrase his next question tactfully. ‘What the fuckin’ hell are you doing, anyway?’
George shrugged. ‘Earning a living,’ he replied.
‘Any money in it?’
‘It’s early days yet,’ George replied. ‘Once it catches on we’ll be laughing, you wait and see.’
Tjakamarra pursed his lips. ‘Best of luck, mate,’ he said guardedly. ‘Well, I gotta be making tracks. You sure it was C sharp minor?’
‘Pretty sure. Is it important?’
‘You bet. One wrong note, I could find myself in bloody Tasmania. Much obliged.’ He waved solemnly and continued on his way . . .
. . . Through a shallow valley full of sheep. And each sheep was tethered to a post, from which hung a scale and a pair of scissors. And in the middle of the valley was a big, brightly-painted notice, which said:GEORGE’S SHEEP FARM
SHEAR YOUR OWN
The one comforting thing about Hell is knowing that it can’t get any worse. Once you’re there, you can’t actually get in more trouble.
Unless, of course, you run the place.
‘It wasn’t,’ grumbled the senior accounts clerk, ‘like this in the old days.’ He tucked three overfilled box files under his arm and scurried off down the corridor. His assistant followed on with a heavily laden trolley.
‘Sodding auditors,’ the senior clerk went on. ‘In the old days, all we had to put up with was the Bursar. And he was one of us. You knew where you stood.’
‘Better the devil you know, huh?’ hazarded his assistant.
‘Yeah.’ The senior clerk stopped to adjust his grip on a file and plunged on. ‘What they want with this lot beats me. It’s just old lost souls registers.’
‘We should put all this on computer,’ mused his assistant.
‘Then they’d be really lost.’
‘Shut up and wheel the bloody trolley.’
It had been a long day in the suite of offices assigned to the visiting audit team, but they were damned if they were going to let anyone see it. Mr Price, Mr Vincetti, Ms Khan, Mr Kowalski and Ms Gould of Messrs Moss Berwick Flintlock had worked long and hard to secure the second most impressive prestige client in all accountancy, and they were determined to do the best job they possibly could.
‘Thanks,’ said Mr Kowalski. He hadn’t removed his jacket, let alone loosened his tie, and he had a shrewd suspicion that his feet had melted and were seeping out through the eyes of his shoes. ‘Just put them on the table over there and bring us the green purgatory chits for the last twenty-five years. There’s a few anomalies here we’d better get to grips with.’
The senior clerk shuffled his feet. ‘Actually,’ he said.
‘Yes?’ Mr Kowalski raised his head. ‘Any problems?’
‘Might be tricky,’ replied the senior clerk. ‘For the whole period, like. I mean,’ he added wretchedly, ‘we just don’t have the storage, and . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s the economy drive,’ the clerk confessed. ‘I mean, the furnaces have got to run on something, so when they said—’
‘You’ve destroyed them?’
A look of panic flitted across the clerk’s eyes. ‘Some of them. I mean, I’m not sure precisely which, it’s just . . .’
Mr Kowalski gave him a nasty look. Although he didn’t know it, he was running a severe risk of being the first man ever to be chucked out of Hell on the grounds of excessive unpleasantness. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Mr Price will come with you and look for himself. I’m sure we’ll find the ones we’re looking for.’
Sure enough, he did. How the files in question had found their way into the roofspace, buried at the bottom of a disused sulphur tank and guarded by a fire-breathing dragon and a triple-headed dog, the senior clerk was at a loss to explain, although he mumbled something about Health and Safety and storage of bulk inflammable materials. The fire-breathing dragon didn’t quite ring true there, but Mr Price was too polite to say anything. Instead he looked down about half a mile of nose and snickered.
As they trudged back to the file store, the senior clerk stopped from time to time to bang his head against the wall. ‘I knew we should’ve shredded them,’ he said. ‘Bloody liability. It just goes against the grain, that’s all, shredding files after all these years. I mean, this is Hell, it’s about the only place in the sodding universe where they actually respect paperwork.’
‘Hooky, was it?’ enquired his assistant. ‘Someone been cooking the books or something?’
The senior clerk grimaced. ‘Worse than that, son,’ he grunted. ‘That’s all the Lucky George stuff they’ve just asked for. If they spot that and cross-reference to the Visitor’s Book, the sods’ll realise he’s flitted and then where’ll we be?’
His assistant glanced round. From each of the dingy cells leading off the corridor came the muffled souls in various ingenious but cost-effective permutations of everlasting torment.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought we already were.’
His superior sniffed. ‘Son,’ he muttered, ‘don’t you believe it. That’s just the stuff they give the customers.’
The third dustbin contained the end of a stale loaf, a sardine tin with a little grimy oil left in it, a rotten tomato and the carcasses of two smoked mackerel. Lundqvist sighed with relief and made himself a sandwich. The neighbourhood alley-cat gave him a poisonous look, but he ignored it.
Nobody loves you when you’re down and out. Admittedly, nobody had loved Lundqvist when he was absolutely loaded, but at least he’d been able to raise the price of a hamburger whenever he felt his ribs prodding their way out of his shirt-front. Not that he was a luxurious person by any means; but there is a subtle difference between surviving on roots and grubs because you’re under deep cover five hundred miles behind enemy lines, and pigging it because the Revenue have garnished every last cent you own.
The bailiffs had even seized his entire collection of Ninja throwing-knives and death-stars, despite his objection that they were tools of the trade and therefore exempt. The most lethal object left to him was a toothbrush. When you’re Kurt Lundqvist, however, a toothbrush will do nicely. It’s all a matter of knowing how to use it.
Once he’d finished his meal, therefore, he walked the five miles to the private airstrip on the outskirts of the city and wandered into the first helicopter charter establishment he came across.
‘Hi,’ he said to the youth behind the desk. ‘I want a chopper, now.’
The youth looked at him, observing the dusty jacket, the slept-in trousers. ‘You want a helicopter,’ he said. ‘Fancy.’
Before he could go on, Lundqvist had vaulted the desk, landed beside him and thrust the toothbrush handle hard into the small hollow just below the lobe of his ear.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Is that a problem?’
The youth made a low, guttural noise, like a man gargling with custard; then he raised one shaking hand and pointed.
‘Keys in the ignition?’
&nbs
p; ‘Yug.’
‘Much obliged to you.’ He hopped back over the desk and strode quickly across the tarmac to the helicopter indicated. Nobody even tried to stop him. He jumped in and slammed the door.
A moment later he opened it again.
‘Hey, you,’ he shouted to a cowering mechanic. ‘Which one of these goddamned levers is the handbrake?’
As he flew, Lundqvist rationalised. He’d found an ancient bar of fruit and nut chocolate in the glove box - a bit grey and fluffy, but the sudden surge in his blood sugar level made his brain roar like the engine of a drag-racer on the starting line.
If I was Lucky George, he asked himself, where would I go?
Yes, well, if I actually was Lucky George, I’d cut my own throat this minute, because I’d know Kurt Lundqvist was on my trail, and it’s only a matter of time, and I don’t want to be sentient when he finds me. That guy is completely something else . . .
So, I’d go somewhere he’d never dream of looking. Three alternatives:
(a) Somewhere with lots of people, where I’d melt away into the crowd.
(b) Somewhere so far away and godforsaken, nobody even knows it exists.
(c) I’d stay exactly where I am.
Yes. Well, (a) was a non-starter, because wherever Lucky George went, the one thing he could never be was inconspicuous. His habit of turning things into other things saw to that.
Likewise, (c). The Amsterdam authorities are famous for their ability to look the other way when expedient, but even they would have trouble overlooking armies of marauding windmills and giant attack-cheeses.
Which left (b), and very good thinking it was, too, because the chances of finding him by guesswork were very remote indeed.
He was just coming to these conclusions when the radio crackled and addressed him; peculiar in itself, since it wasn’t switched on.
Hey, Kurt, my man, gimme some skin.