Faust Among Equals

by Tom Holt

  ‘Can I have another go, please?’

  The rat-head gave him a look of three parts pure terror, two parts unmitigated hatred.

  He shrugged. ‘Pity, that,’ said George. ‘I was enjoying myself.’ He stepped down off the platform, weaving his way round the bodies of six or seven fiends, all curled up like woodlice with their hands clamped firmly over their ears.

  ‘Philistines,’ he remarked. ‘Okay, Larry, Mike, last one to the bar gets them in.’

  Three minutes or so after he’d gone, an assistant fiend with the toes and claws of a lizard crawled down the nozzle of the giant bagpipe and collapsed at rat-head’s feet. He’d nearly perforated his own eardrums by sticking his claws in his ears, but that was a small price to pay.

  ‘Stone me,’ he muttered. ‘That was bloody horrible, wasn’t it, chief?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, that was bloody horrible, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I SAID THAT WAS BLOODY HORRIBLE, CHIEF, WASN’T IT?’

  Rat-head shook himself and shuddered. ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ he said.

  Links Jotapian had found a helicopter.

  We use the term loosely. What he’d in fact found was a sort of walking tree with hideous branches like dry bones and a goat’s skull growing out of its left armpit; it had taken the eye of youthful enthusiasm to see that if you climbed up the thing’s trunk and prodded it viciously with a penknife, it could be persuaded to whirl its branches fast enough to achieve a rotor effect. Sikorski wouldn’t have approved, but no matter.

  ‘Nothing as yet, Mr Lundqvist, over,’ he reported into his two-way radio. ‘Results so far are one-hundred-per-cent negative.’

  ‘Keep looking, Links, he’s down there somewhere.’

  ‘Roger and out.’ Links peered through a screen of small twigs and jabbed at the tree to go lower.

  This is fun, Links said to himself, much more fun than school. I mean, compared to this, school sucks. I mean, this is, well, Life. He brushed cinders out of his eyes and lifted his feet clear to avoid the pincers of a bored-looking anthropomorphic lobster, positioned on the top of the horse’s skull swimming pool area.

  ‘Quark!’

  Not, said something inside him, that it’s not also a tad scary. Like, it’s a very long way down, and this tree could get cramp in its branches any minute. And falling a long way is bad enough at the best of times, without taking into account some of the really weird things a guy can land on in this place.

  ‘Quark quark!’

  ‘Get down more, you sucker,’ Links yelled into the knot-hole which he hoped was the tree’s ear. ‘And when you start feeling tired, for Chrissakes rustle a leaf or something.’

  The tree wobbled. Links looked up, to see two seagulls roosting in the branches. They looked decidedly nauseous, as well they might.

  ‘Shoo!’ Links yelled, and waved his arms. ‘Go lay an egg or something.’

  ‘Quark.’

  ‘You crazy dumb birds, you’ll make this thing crash.’

  ‘Quark.’

  ‘Oh.’

  His last thoughts, before he hit the frozen ice of the boating lake and disappeared in a cloud of ice-shards, spray and match-wood, were Never mind, this is still better than school. His first thoughts after the fiends had fished him out and pumped half a gallon of stagnant Styx water out of his lungs, were On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for double geography.

  ‘And another thing,’ said Machiavelli.

  With a tremendous effort, the barfiend in the Hellza-Pop-Inn refreshment area ground his head round until he was facing his most regular customer. Sure thing, these were the Torments of Hell, and this was the spot reserved for married men who forsake their wives to go boozing every evening, and as a happily married fiend with a mortgage and three wonderful imps he reckoned those drunken bums deserved everything they got, even this; but, dammit, he was staff, not a customer, and he had to bear the brunt of it.

  ‘All this acid rain,’ Machiavelli was saying, ‘and all these volcanoes and stuff, sodding up the weather. You aren’t going to tell me that’s all a coincidence, now are you?’

  ‘Anything you say, Nick,’ yawned the barfiend.

  ‘’Cos,’ Machiavelli ground on, ‘it’s a matter of cold fact that on the day JFK was assassinated, the weather forecast for the whole of Texas was Mainly Dry, Some Light Cloud Clearing Early. But of course, that’s what they wanted us all to think, because . . .’

  The door opened, a man came in, sat down on a barstool and said, ‘Hiya, Nick, what’re you having?’

  ‘And then,’ Machiavelli went on, ‘when you compare the records for seismic activity for the day of the Kennedy murder with the night of the Watergate break-in, you find that exactly the same level of activity was recorded in Chicopee Falls, Iowa, on both occasions, which makes you think.’ He paused, as if trying to remember something he’d just heard, and then said, ‘Dunnit?’

  ‘Sure thing, Nick,’ said the barfiend, polishing a glass. It just wasn’t fair, he said to himself. All the inconsiderate husbands are out there in the back bar playing pool and getting pissed as rats, I’m stuck in here listening to the floorshow. They’ve gotta do something about this.

  ‘Hiya, Nick,’ the stranger repeated. ‘Same again?’

  Slowly, Machiavelli turned his head and stared.

  ‘George?’ he enquired.

  ‘Been a long time, Nick,’ replied Lucky George. ‘I was very interested in what you were saying just now, by the way. I expect you were discussing that new book by that journalist bloke, the one who got himself killed not so long back. Bunnet or something, I think he was called.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here, George? I thought you’d—’

  ‘I have, Nick, I have. And a Michelob and a toasted cheese sandwich for me,’ he called through to the barfiend, ‘when you’ve got a moment. So,’ he said, turning back to Machiavelli, ‘how’s things with you?’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Machiavelli replied, flushing slightly. ‘They’ve made me a trusty now, actually.’

  ‘Have they really,’ George said. ‘Well my goodness.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Machiavelli looked down. ‘I got this job as a saloon bar bore.’

  ‘And what’s it like, Nick?’

  ‘Boring.’

  ‘Uh-huh. Anyway, I interrupted you. You were saying.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Yes. About Bunnet’s book.’

  Machiavelli cringed slightly. ‘Oh, that. His theory is,’ he went on, without expression, eyes fixed on floor, ‘that the Martians have been behind all the major political cover-ups of the post-war era, which they have stage-managed by clever manipulation of the climate. This also,’ Machiavelli concluded wretchedly, ‘accounts for deforestation, acid rain, the greenhouse effect . . .’

  ‘I see.’ George scratched his ear. ‘Enjoy your work, do you?’

  ‘Not a lot, no.’

  George’s beer and sandwich arrived - the latter slightly charred and served on the tines of a pitchfork - and he devoted his attention to them for a moment. Then he looked up.

  ‘You know,’ he said with his mouth full, ‘funny, isn’t it, the way things pan out.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I mean,’ George said, ‘think of what we were like back at school. Me the quiet, studious one. You the guy with the big ideas of everything you were going to do, big career in politics, get on the pundit circuit . . .’

  Machiavelli made a noise; part agreement, part shame and part pain. Surreptitiously he bit a corner off George’s sandwich.

  ‘And yet here you are,’ George went on, ‘stuck in this dead-end job . . .’

  ‘No pension to look forward to,’ Machiavelli interjected.

  ‘No fringe benefits.’

  ‘No travel. No input into the fate of nations.’

  ‘Bet you don’t have your own reserved parking space.’

  ‘The hours are bloody terrible, George.’
/>
  ‘I’ll bet they are, Nick.’

  Machiavelli sobbed slightly. ‘It’s not just the hours, George,’ he snuffled, ‘it’s the hours and hours and hours of it that get me.’

  ‘They would,’ George agreed. ‘I wouldn’t stand for it.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got to stand,’ Machiavelli replied unhappily. ‘Stools are all reserved for the customers. I’ve worn this damn brass rail paper-thin, George, I could stick my finger through it any time I like.’

  ‘Yes.’ George blinked. ‘What I meant was, I wouldn’t put up with it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t?’

  ‘Not if I were you, Nick. Not the Nick Machiavelli I used to know. By the way, seen anything of Kurt Lundqvist lately?’

  Machiavelli shook his head. ‘Last I heard,’ he said, ‘he was in business assassinating redundant gods. Good line of work to be in, I should say.’

  ‘Yup.’ George nodded. ‘Good steady work.’

  ‘Must be interesting.’

  ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Lucky little sod,’ said Machiavelli bitterly. ‘When I think how he used to burst out blubbering every time we took his stiletto away from him.’

  George sighed. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘look at him, and look at you. No, if I were you, Nick, I’d do something about it.’

  Machiavelli looked up. There were the first ripe buds of tears sprouting at the edges of his bleared eyes. ‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Like what?’

  George finished his sandwich and drained his glass. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘first off, I’d start a diversion.’

  ‘Mr Lundqvist.’

  ‘Hi, Links.’

  ‘He’s not in here, Mr Lundqvist.’

  Lundqvist looked down into the pit, narrowing his eyes. ‘That so, Links?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure of it, Mr Lundqvist.’

  ‘You’d better come back up, then.’

  Pause. ‘I’ve got a slight problem with that, Mr Lundqvist.’ Lundqvist sighed. The term ‘idiot’, he decided, fitted Links Jotapian like the proverbial glove. ‘I thought you might say that, Links,’ he replied. ‘That’s why I got this rope.’

  ‘Gee, Mr Lundqvist.’

  Lundqvist unslung his rope and lowered it down into the pit. It was a very long rope, and when he’d paid it out completely and was just holding the end, he leant forward again and said, ‘Got it?’

  ‘Not yet exactly, boss.’

  ‘Jeez, Links, how deep is this pit?’

  ‘I think,’ Links replied faintly, ‘it’s more sort of bottomless. Like, I am in fact still falling.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘I believe so, yes, Mr Lundqvist. And Mr Lundqvist, there’s all sorts of really weird things down here, like—’

  ‘Fine.’ Lundqvist stood for a moment, thinking. ‘Links,’ he said, ‘I want you to think basic physical and mathematical theory.’

  ‘I’m doing just that, Mr Lundqvist.’

  ‘Okay. The universe is curved, right?’

  ‘If you say so, skip.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Lundqvist, straightening his back and blowing the dust off his trouser knees, ‘if you keep falling, then sooner or later you’re gonna end up exactly where you started. The trick at that point is to grab hold of something and haul yourself clear. Is that okay with you, Links? Save me having to clamber down with ropes and things.’

  ‘Anything you say, chief.’

  ‘It may take some time, you realise.’

  ‘I’m game, Mr Lundqvist.’

  ‘Thousands of years, maybe.’

  ‘No problem, Mr Lundqvist. I can catch up on my written coursework while I’m down here.’

  ‘Good lad. Well, if you do get free in the next hour or so, I’ll be around here somewhere.’

  ‘Okay, Mr Lundqvist. Message received, over and out.’

  And, of course, in Links’ case, down as well. We down, we gone, in fact. Lundqvist stood up, stretched his cramped muscles, and walked off in the direction of the refreshment area.

  ‘You ready, Nick?’

  Machiavelli nodded grimly. Since resolving to do this thing, he’d been bought several large brandies and a double measure of the native infernal liqueur, Evil Spirit. The result was that he was bloody, bold, resolute and quite incapable of standing up on his own. Standing up was not, however, a prerequisite for what George had in mind.

  ‘You got everything?’

  ‘Think so, George. In fact . . .’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Looks like I got two of everything,’ Machiavelli burbled. ‘Looks remarkably like, acshlky, because . . .’

  ‘That’s fine, Nick,’ said George firmly, ‘that means you’ll have a spare. Ready, you two?’

  Two hovering seagulls dipped their wingtips in acknowledgement.

  ‘Okay.’ Lundqvist straightened his back, blew into the loudspeaker a couple of times to check it was working, and took a deep breath. The fires of EuroBosch glinted off his mirror sunglasses, miraculously unbroken.

  Around him, six concentric circles of apprehensive fiends crouched slightly lower and wished they were somewhere else.

  ‘OKAY, GEORGE,’ Lundqvist amplified, ‘I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE. IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING I HAVE THE AREA SURROUNDED.’

  Pause. No sound, except for the background screams, groans and hisses of hot iron on perpetually renewed flesh. You could have heard a twenty-foot molybdenum steel pin drop.

  ‘GEORGE,’ Lundqvist boomed, ‘IT’S TIME TO CALL IT A DAY. COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS . . .’

  A figure appeared, silhouetted against the background flames, in the doorway of the refreshment area. Its hands were above its head. Lundqvist relaxed perceptibly, until he was only as tense as a steel hawser at breaking point.

  ‘Hi,’ the figure said.

  The fiends edged back slightly. Sure thing, they were fiends, fiends are incapable of fear. It’s just that there’s no point in being bloody daft, that’s all.

  Lundqvist jumped up. ‘C’mon, guys,’ he yelled, ‘what are you waiting for? Grab the sucker.’

  A fiend turned its bird’s head and gave him a look. ‘What, us?’ it cheeped.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you take us for, cocker bloody spaniels?’

  Lundqvist glanced round the various shoulder-ornaments around him. ‘Some of you,’ he said, ‘yes. Now get on with it.’

  With a whimper, the fiends threw themselves forward and sprang at the outline in the doorway. When they were within about ten paces . . .

  . . . The figure suddenly went whoosh! and burst into flames.

  Screaming with frustrated rage, Lundqvist shoved his way through the throng of gibbering, terrified fiends and hurled himself at the human torch; who hit him quite hard in the stomach, winding him, and grinned.

  ‘Hiya, Kurt,’ he said. ‘Long time no see.’

  Lundqvist rubbed the ash from his eyelashes out of his eyes and gurgled. ‘Machiavelli!’ he howled. ‘You’ll burn in hell for this!’

  Machiavelli shrugged a pair of incandescent shoulders. ‘You really think so?’ he said. ‘We’ll see.’

  Meanwhile, Lucky George, who had spent the last ten minutes breaking open all the disposable cigarette lighters from the display pack behind the bar and emptying them over Machiavelli’s head, grinned and slipped quietly away down the fire escape. Every permanent structure in the complex, by the way, has to have a fire escape, because of the building regulations. Where on earth the fire is supposed to escape to is anybody’s guess.

  A quick dash across the frozen lake brought George out at the foot of the Try-Your-Strength machine. A nice idea, this; you push hard against a huge lever shaped like a flute, which sends the marker on the dial of the machine up the calibrated scale. If you’re strong enough, the marker hits a little bell, and assorted nightmarish fiends spring out of a trapdoor in the side of the machine and carry you off to everlasting torment. Serves you right for showing off.

  A seagull floated down from the top of the machine, came in
on the glide, turned into the slight breeze and dropped on to George’s shoulder.

  ‘Thanks,’ George said.

  ‘It waff noffing,’ replied Mike through his badly singed beak. ‘Pief of duff, onfe I’d got the matcheff lit.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  The seagull turned its head. ‘Ofer there by that horfe’f head fing,’ he replied. ‘No more idea of tracking than my granny’f cat.’

  ‘Fine,’ George said. ‘Found the emergency exit yet?’

  ‘Larry’f ftill looking. Af foon af he’f found it, we’ll let you know.’

  ‘Good stuff,’ George replied. ‘I’ll go over there and make myself inconspicuous for a bit. Ciao.’

  ‘Here, boff . . .’ But George had gone, stepping quickly and silently across the scorched grass. The seagull shrugged.

  ‘Big enuff and ugly enuff to look after himfelf,’ he muttered, hopefully.

  Over there turned out to be the activity described in the brochure as the ultimate in paintball games.

  ‘That was good timing,’ remarked the round-bodied, owl-headed gatefiend as George strolled in. ‘Just in time for the next detail. You get the stuff from that shed over there, and they tell you what to do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ George replied.

  You must remember this; a shed is but a shed, a hut is but a hut. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by. True, it was apparently constructed out of a giant mother-of-pearl pumpkin with a hole smashed in the side for a doorway, but inside it was pure Portakabin.

  ‘What size?’ demanded the attendant fiend.

  ‘Dunno,’ George replied. ‘You’re the man with the experienced eye, you tell me.’

  ‘67D,’ the fiend replied. ‘You can change over there.’

  He handed George a plastic carrier bag, and George retired into a sort of sub-shed, or cubicle, where he opened the bag and inspected the contents.

  ‘Hey!’ he said, with admiration in his voice. ‘Now that’s really something else.’

  The bag contained a full-size replacement skin, with fitted scalp and all matching bits. He hoped very much that it was designed to be worn over one’s existing skin. It was.