Barking

by Tom Holt

  ‘Duncan Hughes.’ Saying his name made him feel nervous, as though he was giving away more than mere information. ‘Can you ring through and tell her I’m here?’

  Pause. In order to prove it he’d need one of those stopwatches they use for timing races at the Olympics, the ones that are accurate to a hundredth of a second; but he was convinced that each of her pauses was precisely the same length. ‘Ringing through for you now,’ she said, and reached for her phone. ‘Ms Bick? A Mr Duncan Hughes is in reception.’ Pause. ‘Very well.’ She put the phone down, then said, ‘Ms Bick will be through shortly, please take a seat.’

  Duncan felt a bit uncertain about setting out across the carpet desert without a string of supply camels and a compass, but he didn’t feel up to explaining why he’d rather stay where he was. He got there eventually, and just had time to sit down before a door he hadn’t even noticed opened in the back wall and a woman appeared. She was very tall and thin, with long straight black hair, a pale complexion and bright red lipstick, slightly inaccurately applied, so that she looked as though she’d been eating a toffee apple. ‘I’m Imogen Bick,’ she said. ‘You’re Sally’s ex, right?’

  Duncan nodded. ‘I need to see her,’ he said.

  She frowned. Either she wasn’t getting enough sleep or she had poor taste in eye make-up. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘She’s not in today. And even if she was—’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  The eyebrows raised, but the eyes beneath showed no sign of surprise; maybe a little annoyance. ‘What a strange question,’ Ms Bick replied. ‘She’s perfectly healthy, if that’s what you mean. Maybe a little jetlagged still after her trip, but fine otherwise. Why?’

  ‘Will she be in tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t seen her diary. What do you want to see her about?’

  Duncan had an imagination, though he used it about as often as he used his appendix. He was relieved to find that it still worked. ‘An old friend of hers is very ill,’ he said. ‘Her daughter rang me up; apparently she hasn’t got her new address or phone number. I said I’d find it out for her.’

  ‘I see.’ Total lack of belief in her eyes. ‘You could have phoned, you know, instead of coming here in person.’

  ‘I happened to be passing.’

  ‘Ah.’ The eyes flickered a little, and Duncan found himself wondering how old Ms Bick was. Could be anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘leave me this friend’s daughter’s number, I’ll pass it on to Sally and she can ring her tomorrow, when she gets in.’

  ‘So she will be in tomorrow?’

  ‘I assume so. If not, I’ll ring her on her mobile.’

  ‘You could ring her now,’ Duncan said.

  Her smile was like a swim in the North Atlantic in January. ‘Bad idea,’ she said. ‘She’s in court. Won’t have her phone switched on.’

  Duncan nodded. ‘You’re sure she won’t be back in today?’

  ‘Absolutely sure.’

  ‘Fine.’ He smiled. ‘I don’t happen to have that phone number on me right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll come back with it first thing in the morning, all right? Who knows, maybe Sally’ll be in then, and I can talk to her myself.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Ms Bick said, ‘but don’t make a special journey. I’m sure your time’s worth something.’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ Duncan said sweetly. ‘Nice place you’ve got here, by the way. A bit cold and dark for my liking, but definitely not cramped.’

  ‘We like it,’ said Ms Bick. ‘Goodbye.’

  No matter how he looked at it, there was no denying that it had been a defeat. He walked slowly back to Mortmain Street, trying to convince himself that he’d made any progress at all. Additional data gleaned; well, there was definitely something going on, though he couldn’t begin to guess what it could be. If everything had been fine and normal, he’d have expected a degree of frostiness and hostility, appropriate for a rejected ex-husband turning up unannounced and making demands, but that hadn’t been the thought in Ms Bick’s mind. Not fear, because she hadn’t seen him as a competent threat, but annoyance that he’d touched on a sore subject, and a great desire for him to go away and never come back. There was also the smell, of course. He couldn’t place it, but it had been pretty strong, and it wasn’t anything you’d expect to find in a civilised London office. It made him think of school, but that was as close as he could get.

  His mind was still locked on to the mystery of the smell when he strolled into the front office of Ferris & Loop. The reception committee, therefore, took him somewhat by surprise.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Luke yelled at him.

  They were all there, standing beside the reception desk; all except Pete. They surged round him as he came in, and for a moment he was definitely scared. But they didn’t bite. Instead, they sniffed.

  ‘Well?’ Luke snapped. ‘I’m waiting.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Duncan mumbled. ‘I did phone in—’

  ‘Too bloody right you did.’ Micky, this time. ‘Said you were ill. You don’t look ill to me.’

  They were all glowering at him. ‘Not ill exactly,’ Duncan mumbled. ‘Just, well, you know. Under the weather.’

  But that just seemed to make things worse. ‘We don’t get under the weather,’ Luke growled (and Duncan felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck). ‘And we almost never get ill. And when we do, it’s usually very serious. Which is why I’ve had Pete running backwards and forwards to that revolting little flat of yours, to see if you’re still alive. He’s been over there twice already this morning. Poor sod’s on his way back there again.’

  Aaargh. ‘I’m really sorry,’ Duncan said, ‘it was very thoughtless of me. I should’ve—’

  ‘I mean,’ Luke went on, ‘fine, if you want the morning off, just say so. But making out you’re ill is not acceptable behaviour, all right? I mean,’ he said, scowling horribly, ‘quite apart from the fact that we were worried sick about you, because we thought you could be dying and we’re your friends and we care—’ (Luke managed to make that bit sound like the list of charges at a war crimes trial.) ‘Quite apart from that, just think of the implications, if you’re capable of it. One of us dies, when the rest of us aren’t there. They find the body, there’s an inquest, an autopsy. Have you got the faintest idea what one of us looks like, inside? Well, here’s a hint for you. Gray’s Anatomy wouldn’t really be much help. Assuming they could get you open in the first place, which isn’t likely. Twenty busted scalpel blades, and then they’d be yelling for angle grinders. We’ve worked bloody hard for a very long time to make sure that the humans don’t believe we exist. All it’d take would be one stupid, careless mistake—’ He paused, for breath and to pull himself together. ‘You just didn’t think, did you? And anyway,’ he added, after a long sniff, ‘you haven’t answered my question. Where have you been?’

  Years of law school, vocational training, practice, and Duncan couldn’t manage to tell one simple little white lie. Call himself a lawyer? Yeah, right. ‘Crosswoods,’ he muttered.

  ‘Cross—’ Luke’s eyes were as wide as dinner-plates. He was scared. Just for a moment, until the penny dropped. ‘What, you mean sniffing round after that bird of yours? Is that what you’ve been doing?’

  ‘Yes. No.’ Duncan managed to fight back the urge to roll on his back, but only just. ‘There’s something wrong,’ he said, ‘if you’d only back off and let me explain.’

  Well, he had their full attention, and he did his best to make the most of it. But it’s always the same: you tell the story and no matter how hard you try, it comes out sounding silly. It’s no good saying you had to have been there; they won’t get it, particularly if they’re furious with you to start with. He knew they believed his data but not the conclusions he’d drawn from them. Well, fine. Screw them.

  ‘Well, it’s obvious what’s happened,’ Micky said, when Duncan had finally ground to an unsatisfactory halt. ‘Y
our ex went off for a week’s sun and shagging with some bloke, she’s come back worn out and hung over, and the miserable cow in the office doesn’t want you to know in case you’re madly jealous and you start making trouble. Can’t say I blame her, considering how badly you’re overreacting. You want to get a grip on yourself.’

  ‘Fine,’ Duncan snapped. Micky he could get angry with. ‘So what about the phone call, last night? Help, remember?’

  ‘Probably not her at all,’ Micky said scornfully. ‘Probably a wrong number, or someone playing games. Or if it was her, there’s bound to be a perfectly reasonable explanation. Besides, no matter what, you shouldn’t be getting mixed up with those people—’

  Funny thing to say; but before Duncan could ask him what he meant by it, Luke said, ‘Look, it’s not your fault. You didn’t know we don’t do sickies like the rest of the British workforce. If you’d known, you wouldn’t have been so bloody stupid. Fine. We’ll say no more about it. Just don’t do it again, all right?’

  Those people? Which people? Crosswoods? Women? Humans? ‘Understood,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I—’

  Luke was scowling at him. ‘We’ll say no more about it,’ he repeated. ‘You included.’ He paused for a moment, and Duncan realised he was breathing hard, as though he’d been running. ‘I’ve got clients coming in any time now, so you’d all better hop it. Back here, six sharp. I thought we might try Battersea tonight.’

  Another unsatisfactory run; not so much as a sniff of a fox, and it came on to rain, suddenly and heavily. Duncan squelched back home in soggy shoes, arrived at his front door and realised he’d come out that morning without his keys.

  Not a major setback for a superhuman; he went round the back of the building, shinned up a drainpipe, trudged wearily along a three-inch-wide ledge and found the kitchen window was already open wide enough for him to crawl through. Careless, like forgetting his keys. On the other hand, he had an excuse. He’d been fairly preoccupied that morning. He sniffed, as he always did these days as soon as he got home. No unusual smells. He yawned and put the kettle on.

  Help. Would you care to enlarge on that? Maybe Micky had been right, and she’d done it just to wind him up - a pointless exercise, and not in keeping with her character as he remembered it, but maybe she’d changed since they’d split up - correction: since she dumped him, suddenly, without provocation, as though he was a used nappy. Well, quite. That had been out of character too, but she’d done it, hadn’t she? So: completely in character, once he’d shrugged off Love’s rose-tinted welding mask. Just the sort of thoughtless, cruel thing you’d expect—

  The click of the kettle switching itself off snapped him out of it, and he made himself a cup of what he’d come to think of as werewolf coffee (instant coffee granules, sugar and boiling water in equal parts by volume), which he took into the living room. If you could call it that; he hadn’t done much living in it so far. Much better to call it the dragging-out-a-pointless-existence room and have done with it.

  Definitely, he was going to have to move. In fact, he couldn’t understand (now he came to think of it) why he hadn’t done so already. He could afford better, or at least he assumed he could. Of course, Luke hadn’t bothered to tell him the fine details of when, how and how much he was going to get paid - it’d be in the partnership deed somewhere, it always was - but a sixth share of the net had to be a pretty awesome sum, even after overheads. Something large and detached in Walton-on-Thames, maybe (and then he thought, this isn’t me thinking, I’d hate Walton-on-bloody-Thames, it’s where rich people end up as a punishment for living too long). Anyway, a nice big house somewhere, not that he’d be spending much time there, what with work and then the evening run. He’d be much better off with something small but very central—

  There was someone - or something - in the bedroom. Duncan sat up very straight and sniffed, but still nothing out of the ordinary. He frowned. He wasn’t quite sure what it was that he’d heard; it had been very faint, almost but not quite faint enough to be dismissed as a figment of his imagination. Burglars? Unlikely, or he’d be able to smell them. Ditto mice and cockroaches. Not that it mattered particularly, though a burglar or two would’ve been nice. Far from resenting the intrusion, he was delighted by it. Right now, there was nothing he fancied more than flushing out and annihilating something.

  The body language of a normal householder preparing to confront a thing that goes bump in the night is a precarious fusion of synthetic aggression and genuine terror. He flattens himself against the wall, flings open the door and shrinks away, a scared rabbit playing at Starsky and Hutch. On this occasion, Duncan wasn’t a bit like that. He walked quickly but quietly to the bedroom doorway, opened the door without noise or fuss, and switched on the light.

  ‘Christ,’ he said.

  He couldn’t have been more surprised if his statement had been true. The noise, now he had all the information at his fingertips, could be analysed quite easily. It had been someone shifting very slightly on the bed, probably to relieve cramp.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Context is everything. Under other circumstances, walking into his bedroom and finding Sally there, sitting on the bed in a decidedly unregenerate black dress, would have been an unambiguously good thing. Instead—

  ‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re playing at?’ he said.

  She smiled. Not, however, that sort of smile. ‘It’s lovely to see you too, Duncan,’ she said. ‘How are you, anyway? This place is an absolute tip, by the way. When did you last change your pillowcases?’

  Oh no, she didn’t; not this time. ‘How in God’s name did you get in here?’ he asked.

  She shrugged. ‘Kitchen window,’ she replied. ‘Talking of kitchens, are you starting up in the penicillin business, because there’s a pot of jam in your cupboard with enough mould on it to cure half of South-East Asia.’

  Kitchen window? In that get-up? He leaned back against the door frame, and in the back of his mind a small voice asked, So how come you can’t smell her? ‘Sally,’ he said quietly, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘Stupid,’ she replied. The voice she used to say the word with was velvet and chocolate mousse and a sort of dark, soft purple, but the sparkle in her eyes was rather familiar. It was Pete, scenting a cat. The voice put forward a pretty convincing case, but the eyes had it. ‘What do you think?’

  Something different about how she looked; well, lots of things, but for the moment, let’s focus on the lipstick. It wasn’t something she’d ever gone in for, back in the old days. It really suited her. ‘Haven’t a clue,’ he replied. ‘Look, what was that phone message all about? I’ve been worried sick. I went round to your office but they told me—’

  In a movement so slick that he couldn’t remember seeing it, Sally stood up and glided towards him. Presumably she put one foot in front of the other, but from his point of view it was as though the camera had zoomed in, until her face filled his mind’s screen. Maybe I’m asleep and this is a dream, Duncan thought, which would account for the fact that I can’t smell her. If so, it goes some way to answering the nagging old question of what sleep is actually for. Also he thought: definitely approve of the lipstick, but she’s using way too much eyeshadow.

  Then her arms were round his neck, her grip surprisingly strong. First her hair and then her cheek brushed against his face, so that his eyes automatically closed and he was thinking, really, it’s a shame this is only a dream, because it’d be so nice if it was real—

  She purred like a cat, or something. And then she opened her mouth and bit him savagely on the neck.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Ouch,’ Sally said. ‘Oh shit, I think I broke a tooth.’

  Not a dream after all. Duncan snapped out of it, shoved with the flat of his hand and forced her away, or tried to. He pushed quite hard, but she wouldn’t budge.

  She’d bitten him (so much for twice shy) but of course he was invulnerable: unbreakable skin. He had an idea, t
hough, that it had been a pretty close run thing. Those teeth had been sharp—

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  She was looking at him. The same sort of profound irritation he’d seen in the eyes of Ms Bick, when he’d shown up uninvited in her front office—

  - Which suddenly made sense. ‘That explains it,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your office,’ he replied. ‘Why it’s underground. No windows. No windows, no daylight.’

  The frown deepened, then shattered into a rather nice smile. ‘You and South-West Trains,’ she said. ‘Slow, but you get there in the end. And no, there’re no mirrors in the ladies’ loo, either.’

  ‘No point?’

  ‘That’s right. Look, you wouldn’t happen to have a couple of aspirin, would you? Your stupid neck’s hurt my tooth.’

  ‘What? Oh, right, aspirin.’ He crossed to the cupboard and found some. They’d gone a bit powdery and soft, but they dissolved in the water just fine. ‘So,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘how long have you been—?’

  ‘Never mind me, what about you? Oh, it’s OK, I should’ve guessed as soon as I saw you. The beard suits you, by the way, hides your chin collection. And you’ve lost weight. All that chasing after cats, I suppose.’

  ‘A fortnight,’ Duncan replied, a little hazily. ‘Since I joined Ferris & Loop.’ He stopped and frowned. ‘You know about—?’

  She nodded. ‘Werewolves, yes,’ she said. ‘I get the impression you didn’t, not till you got—’ She hesitated. ‘Recruited, or however you’d describe it. Come as a bit of a shock, did it?’

  ‘Yes. Answer my question. How long—?’

  Only for a split second it was as though a visor had lifted, and he could just see her in there, behind the toughened safety glass. ‘Not while we were married, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I see,’ he lied. ‘Is that why you dumped me?’