by Tom Holt
Today he woke up, opened his eyes and stared at the silent alarm clock beside his bed. Eight a.m. He blinked at it – he believed in the existence of eight a.m., but only in the sense that he believed in Alpha Centauri: it was out there somewhere, but he’d never live to go there – and remembered.
“Oh God,” he moaned.
Yesterday, here in this very flat, his home, magic had happened. He had done magic. A lifetime of rational scepticism had gone gurgling down the toilet. He could almost hear sleigh bells.
Imagine the feelings of a dead atheist as he gazes into the smirking face of St Peter. He cringed. It was all so bitterly unfair. Out there in the world, he knew, there were millions of poor credulous, benighted fools who’d give anything for the knowledge that was burning him up like refluxed acid. And what next? If there was magic, where was the line to be drawn? Aliens? The Loch Ness monster? How about the Tooth Fairy? They couldn’t actually force him to believe, could they?
No need. He’d seen for himself. Existence, as he’d known it, was over. All he could do was pick himself up and start again. He’d start, he decided, by putting on his underpants.
He opened the drawer. An arm, sleeved in white samite, reached out and handed them to him.
He jumped – a crane fly doing a Basil Fawlty impression – and his back hit the wall. He stared. The hand (slender, pale, feminine) was perfectly still, with his pants – ironed, he couldn’t help noticing, and neatly folded – draped over its palm like a posh waiter’s white cloth. But his pants, nonetheless. Present from his mother, birthday before last.
Mum, he thought, there’s a strange lady in my underwear drawer. He thought about that. Well, for one thing, a very brave strange lady, and presumably not afflicted by claustrophobia. He cleared his throat nervously and mumbled, “Hello?”
(Then he thought, No, not possible. What’s the cubic capacity of a pants drawer, even when empty? Say a metre by half a metre by twenty centimetres. In his weakened state the mental arithmetic was too much for him, but it was not a lot. Not enough for a whole human body, not even if cut up and squashed in. But then, he added quickly, it’d be dead, in which case it couldn’t pass me my pants. Not, oh God, without magic.)
No reply. One of those strong, silent disjointed magic arms? No, that one was obvious. Of course it couldn’t answer him – unless, of course, the head, larynx and lungs were in his sock drawer. That was a possibility he didn’t feel up to investigating straight away. That said, he needed his pants.
How frail is our grip on our lives, how easy it is for a determined supernatural terrorist to hold us hostage. Deprive a man of his underwear and you’ve got him pinned down. Even if he’s brave enough or scared enough to run out into the street in his pyjamas, he won’t get far, and he knows it. Don had no illusions about his mental fortitude. Faced with a choice between embarrassment and arrest on the one hand, and the other hand (magic, clad in white samite, holding his boxers), there was only one way he could go. Very slowly, like a nervous city dweller in a red shirt approaching a bull, he edged forward, snatched the pants off the hand’s extended palm and shot back up against the wall, breathing hard.
“Thanks,” he heard himself mutter.
The hand snaked back inside the drawer, which slid quietly shut, just as the sock drawer crawled open. Another hand, also in white samite but this time fringed with a tasteful lace cuff, rose out of it like a snake, holding a pair of socks. Maybe it took pity on him: it lobbed the socks with an easy underarm throw. He fumbled the catch, retrieved the socks and fled to the bathroom, bolting the door behind him.
You do realise, said a voice in his head, as he perched on the edge of the bath and hyperventilated, that it’s trying to be helpful. Saving you trouble. It’s somehow sensed that you’re an idle git, too lazy to get dressed in the morning unless you absolutely have to, so it’s helping out. Like, sort of, Jeeves.
Yes, Don countered, that’s fine. On balance, though, a some-assembly-required Jeeves that jumps out at me from inside the furniture isn’t really an improvement in my quality of life. Nice thought, but no thanks.
Don’t tell me that, replied the voice. Tell it.
Well, he could see the logic in that approach, he supposed. He put on the pants and socks, wrapped himself comprehensively in his towelling robe and went back into the bedroom.
The sock drawer had closed again, but he didn’t feel inclined to get any closer to it than he had to. Instead, he said, in a loud, clear voice, “Excuse me.”
No reply, naturally. See above.
Yes, but just because it couldn’t talk back didn’t mean it couldn’t hear, or at least understand. “Excuse me,” he repeated, “but if it’s all the same to you I’d really rather get my own clothes, thanks ever so much. OK?” Pause. “If you can hear me, open a drawer or something.”
Nothing moved. That’s a bit rude, he thought. Or maybe it can’t hear me after all.
Maybe, but his situation now was, if anything, even worse than it had been. Whereas before he’d been in his pyjamas, now he was standing there wearing nothing but pants and socks. Escape simply wasn’t an option. He inched towards the wardrobe, watching the line where the doors met like a hawk. He was no further than two feet away from it when the doors swung open, and a hand, a third one, held out a hanger. His saved-for-best jeans and his light blue shirt.
Oh, he thought.
To be fair, though, he’d taken and put on the underwear the other two hands had offered him and nothing bad had happened. Maybe he was looking at this the wrong way. Admittedly, he didn’t think that shirt and those jeans went at all well together, but he was perfectly prepared to admit that fashion sense wasn’t one of his greatest assets. Not his strong suit, ha ha. Oh God.
I will not crack up, he commanded himself. I am the captain of my soul, and if they want to break me, they won’t do it by handing me my own clothes in my own bloody flat. On the contrary. I will be strong. I will take these clothes, put them on, check I look all right in the mirror, then leave the flat, run like buggery to the nearest travel agent and book myself on the first available flight to Sumatra.
My best jeans, he thought. My best shirt, now I come to think of it – best in the sense of least tatty, anyhow. Sod it, the samite female is trying to tidy me up. Like my mother. Or a wife. The thought made him shudder. If he left the flat now, when he came back would it be all neat and tidy, his stuff put away where he’d never be able to find it again, his comfortable scruffy clothes bundled up in a black bin bag and spirited away? Jesus, he thought.
Going to Sumatra wasn’t the answer, he knew. It was magic, for crying out loud; it couldn’t be cheated of its prey by mere geography. It could follow him or bring him back. There was, he knew, only one course of action open to him.
He took the hanger, went into the bathroom again and got dressed. On his way back to the bedroom, the doors opened for him. “Don’t do that,” he pleaded. They shut behind him too.
Logic: if Samite Girl didn’t have ears to hear him with, it followed that she didn’t have eyes to watch him get dressed with. Indeed. But in the presence of magic, logic is a chocolate frying pan and a Zimbabwean government stock. He slithered into his dressing gown, turned his back on the chest of drawers and, hopping energetically on each leg in turn, put on his trousers. He had to doff the dressing gown to get inside his shirt, but he didn’t mind that so much. He slid his keys off the bedside table and stuffed them into his trouser pocket. A hand reared up from under the bed, holding his shoes. The laces had been undone and they’d been polished till they shone – a pity, that, since they were trainers. He sat on the bed and dragged them on. Something touched the back of his head like a wasp, but noiseless and tugging gently. His hair was being combed.
(He thought, I wish I used an electric razor.) “I’m growing a beard,” he said loudly, then counted to ten under his breath. Nothing happened. He breathed a sigh of heartfelt relief, just as a white-sleeved hand shot out through the bathroom door and stu
ck his toothbrush in his mouth.
He held perfectly still while the hand brushed his teeth. It seemed to be the sensible thing to do. He thought, I really need to go to the loo, but maybe I’d better not. To be fair to it, the hand proved to be quite competent with a toothbrush. Toilet paper, however, was another matter entirely.
He waited. When he’d said he was growing a beard, the hands had refrained from flying at his throat with a razor. That was reason to believe, surely, that they were able to hear and understand him after all (also that they could be lied to, come to that). Their earlier failure to obey or acknowledge… He thought about that, and the phrase Nanny knows best popped neatly into his mind like merchandise from a vending machine. Well, he thought, we’ll see about that. Until such time as I can figure out how to make it stop, go away, leave me alone, I’m going to have to come to terms with it, sure. But I’m not going to smarten myself up; I’m not going to write my thank-you letters and I’m sure as hell not going to eat up my nice greens.
“You got that?” he said aloud.
No reply. Something told him, however, that they’d heard him just fine. There was that very faint but unmistakable tension quivering in the air, the sort he knew only too well from his childhood, the sort he’d been so very keen to get away from. This way to the battle of wills, it said to him, and he felt his muscles clench. He was the sort of man who’d rather bite off his own toe than get involved in scenes and melodrama, and ever since he’d escaped from the family nest he’d done his best to design his life to be scene-proof and melodrama-free. All that, he had a nasty feeling, was about to change. Oh well, he thought. Back to the trenches.
He looked round the room, letting his eye rest in turn on all the dark and hidden places that had produced hands at him since he woke up. He cleared his throat as though about to address a hostile board meeting.
“Maybe,” he said, “we should sort out a few ground rules.”
God, but he felt stupid, talking to the furniture. Quite probably they were counting on that. He hardened his heart and his skin and went on, “Rule one. No doing stuff for my own good. OK?”
Nothing stirred. But that was all right. He’d tuned into the appropriate wavelength now. He knew the room was listening. Almost, in the disposition of the furniture, the interplay of light and shadow, he thought he could make out an expression – a grim expression, corners of a metaphorical mouth turned down, eyes cold and hard, and was that the faint clicking of a virtual tongue? Never mind. He hated this sort of thing, but he was rather good at it. “Next,” he said. “I know you can hear me, so it’s only good manners if you answer me when I talk to you. Well?”
Reluctance. The room was…
“Rule three,” he said briskly. “No sulking.”
Had the curtains moved? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so. It was just the shifting of the balance between light and shade as the sun went behind a cloud that gave the impression that the room was scowling at him.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t quite catch that.”
And then the room spoke to him. It was the creaking of floorboards, the groan of drawers not sitting perfectly square on their runners, the squeak of the hinge of a door overloaded by the weight of coats hung behind it, the flatulence of plumbing and central heating, the whimper of a chair as you stand up and the compressed foam-rubber cushion reflates, the whistle of curtains on their tracks, the click of switches, the hum of a CPU fan. Blended together, a symphony of sounds so familiar they’re never heard, they said, “Yes.”
It was a moment or so before he realised what he’d heard, or that he’d heard anything at all. You know how sometimes you pick something up on the beach, a slightly different shape among the pebbles, and you can’t immediately tell if it’s just another small, rounded stone or a human artefact, smoothed and sanded and ground down by the infinite patience of the sea until it’s virtually unrecognisable. To be on the safe side, he said, “Sorry?”
The room said, “Yes.”
Briefly he found himself thinking, It was bad enough when I was talking to the room, this must be very bad indeed. But that sort of thing wasn’t likely to help. So, baby’s first word. Talking of which, all the experts stress the value of starting as you mean to go on.
“Yes, what?”
Maybe it was the room thinking, very slowly, or maybe it was the pause while the unwilling speaker grits his teeth and forces himself to say the magic word.
“Yes, sir.”
He wasn’t sure if he’d been expecting that or not. Anyway, it’d do. “That’s better,” he said. “Now, the rules. Do we have an agreement?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Any questions?”
Pause. “No, sir.”
One step at a time, he told himself. We’ve established a dialogue, which is a major step and exactly what Captain Picard would have done. We can deal with attitude tomorrow, maybe. “So,” he said, “how does all this stuff work, exactly? Do I get a specified number of wishes, or is it more open-ended?”
The room seemed to shudder, as though at some ghastly lapse of protocol, and he decided he wasn’t going to get an answer to that one. Pity. He took a deep breath and reformulated the question. “Um, is there a manual or a user’s guide or anything like that? Only—”
A book lifted an inch off the bookshelf and flew at him across the room. He had to bat it away with his hand or it’d have smacked him in the face. It fell, pages spreadeagled, on the floor, and he picked it up quickly before it could have another go at him.
Not a book he’d seen before. It was thick enough, something in the order of a thousand pages at a guess, and handsomely bound in red leather with loads of gold leaf. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in English. Damned, in fact, if he knew what it was in. Instead of words made up out of letters there were pictograms – squat, chunky, rather menacing symbols that reminded him of old-fashioned arcade game Space Invaders. Ah, he thought. Like that, is it?
“Excuse me,” he said. “Is there a translation?”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
At that he could feel his attitude starting to shift. It came, he later rationalised to himself, from the contrariness of his own nature. Magic, it appeared, was only doing what he himself would have done in its position: messing him about to make him go away, because it didn’t like him. That put a new complexion on the whole business.
It was just like, he realised, the coffee frother, one of those little plastic battery-operated whisk things which had come free with something or other. Don was take-it-or-leave-it-alone when it came to cappuccino and foamy hot chocolate and the like, and being able to concoct such things in his own kitchen was way down in the southern hemisphere of his list of priorities, only just ahead of voting in local elections and dusting. But when he’d tried it, the coffee frother didn’t work. Press button, no dice, nothing; so he’d taken the batteries out and put them back in again, making sure they were the right way round, and it still didn’t work; so he’d opened the casing up and checked for visibly loose connections, and there weren’t any; which left him with no alternative but to call the supplier of the something or other the coffee frother had come free with, who referred him to a distributor, who put him on to an importer, who turned out to have gone bankrupt three weeks earlier, but whose liquidators suggested he take the matter up with the manufacturer. By the time the trail finally went cold, he was on oh-it’s-you-again terms with four different officials at the trade delegation at the Chinese embassy, and the first thing he’d done after finally admitting defeat was go out and buy a proper coffee frother, one that actually went whizz when you pressed the button.
That, he’d long since acknowledged, was simply the way he was, and it was too late to do anything much about it now. Anybody could sell him anything, if only they knew about that aspect of his personality. Just tell him, “You can’t have it,” and immediately he couldn’t live without one.
First things first, however. “Magic,” he sa
id. “Did you give me the last note of my jingle, or was it all my own work?”
“Yes, sir.”
He sighed. He was a patient man, but some coffee frothers come at too high a price. He was wondering whether he could be bothered to rephrase the question when his train of thought was derailed by a furious hammering at his door.
It was his upstairs neighbour, the amateur guitarist, and he was obviously upset about something. “You,” he snapped. “What the hell are you doing in there?”
Good question. “Me? Nothing.”
“Balls,” replied the guitarist. “You’re up to something all right. It’s making the walls shake. There’s plaster coming down off my ceiling.”
Don smiled pleasantly. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” the guitarist replied, and Don thought of the evenings he’d spent with cotton wool stuck in his ears to protect him from the sound of his favourite tunes being murdered. Also, now he came to think of it, when the guitarist wasn’t being a guitarist, he was something to do with insurance. “You think it’s funny, do you?”
Oh go away, Don thought. And he did.
Don couldn’t be sure whether the guitarist had just vanished, or whether, a split second before he disappeared, there’d been a sort of blurry shimmer and a very faint crackling noise. Not that it really mattered; the net effect was the same. One moment there’d been a stroppy loss adjuster standing in his doorway, the next moment there wasn’t.
Ah, Don thought. This is quite bad.
He found himself looking at the patch of carpet the guitarist had been standing on. No scorch marks, which was something. Next he glanced up and down the hall: mercifully, no witnesses. Everything seemed to be happening very, very slowly, with the sound turned right down, but he was confident that was just plain ordinary natural shock, bewilderment and terror.