by Tom Holt
He thought, I just killed someone. Did I just kill someone?
But I can’t have done, he reasoned, because if I’d killed someone, there’d be a body, and there isn’t one, that’s the whole point. He checked the carpet again, just to make sure. No blood. No shrivelled scraps of hair or skin. Well, he thought, if there’s nothing to show, at least they can’t prove anything.
Wash your mind out with soap and water. A fellow human being has just been vanished – by magic, by me – and the important thing is to get him back, as quickly as possible. That had to be possible, surely? Well, of course.
He thought. He thought hard. Nothing happened.
This was where the instruction manual would have been so useful. Another quick glance up and down the hall. Then he said, “Magic? Are you there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I think maybe we can forget about the sir business,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you or anything. All right?”
“Yes, master.”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “The man who was here just now,” he said, “what happened to him.”
“Master sent him away.”
“Quite,” Don said. “Now, can you bring him back again, please?”
“No, master.”
Like when you’re hanging off a strap in a Tube train, and some clumsy idiot elbows you in the pit of the stomach. “No?”
“Alas, master, it cannot be done.”
So that was that, then. Murder. Just one stupid little passing thought, and he’d killed a man. He hadn’t meant to, not really. Trouble is, I didn’t realise it was loaded is a pretty poor excuse at the best of times. “Is he… dead?”
“No, master.”
“Will you please stop calling me that.”
“Yes, boss.”
He knew he was getting angry but he couldn’t help it. “You will address me,” he said, “without any form of title. Got that?”
( Which meant, of course, that it had won, but that hardly mattered any more.) “Yes,” rumbled the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Smug rumbling is a rare skill, but Magic seemed to have a flair for it. Now, back to the matter in hand.
He realised he was still standing in the doorway, where anybody passing could see him. He went inside and shut the door.
“Magic,” he said, trying to sound pleasant, “if he’s gone away but he’s not dead, where is he?”
No answer. It was, however, a silence he recognised – from way back, from school, when the teacher asks you a question to which you ought to know the answer if you’ve done the homework, but you haven’t, so you don’t.
“Do you know where he’s gone?” he asked.
“No.” This time it was a very subdued rumble, barely a quiver.
“You sent him somewhere, but you don’t know where.”
The awkward silence that, in the same context as the example above, means yes. At the back of Don’s mind a tiny silver bell tinkled. He asked it to hold the line.
“But he’s still alive somewhere,” he said. “You’re sure of that.”
A faint architectural shudder gave him the impression that Magic wasn’t a 100-per-cent proud of itself. A certain degree of embarrassment, maybe even a suggestion of guilt and remorse. And quite right, too.
“Is he all right, do you think? I mean, has he got food and water? You don’t know,” he pre-empted. “Fair enough, let’s move on. Is there any way of finding out where he’s got to? Anybody you could ask, perhaps?”
The silence that means no, and another fragment of the puzzle dropped into place. Not, unfortunately, the important problem, namely the fate of his upstairs neighbour; the lesser mystery, about the nature of magic. He rather thought he might have a line on that.
“Magic,” he said, “come out here where I can see you.”
No apparent movement. He was about to repeat the command when a familiar voice called out, “I’m in here,” from the bedroom.
Progress of a sort. “Hang on, I’m coming,” he replied. In the bedroom. “Where—”
“Under the bed.”
Does not compute. There wasn’t anything under the bed apart from dust.
Dust, and his suitcase. And in his suitcase various items from his earlier life, things he couldn’t bring himself to bin but which he didn’t want to have anywhere where he could see them and be reminded of what they represented. His teddy bear, for example. His Blue Peter badge. Stuff like that.
He knelt down, pulled out the suitcase and opened the lid. “In here, right?”
“Yes.” He should have guessed. The voice was coming from his old photo album, the tatty one with racing cars on the front cover. The voice had been familiar because once, long ago, it had been his own.
If his theory was correct (and he had a nasty feeling it was) he ought to be able to figure out where to open the album. He turned the pages, stopping every now and again to wince and shrivel at the images of his past self, until he found what he was looking for.
It was, needless to say, his mother’s favourite picture of him, the one she’d had framed on her mantelpiece. He’d always hated it. In it he was seven years old, wearing a bobble hat his gran had knitted, sitting on a bench in the park feeding ducks on a pond. He remembered the day it had been taken. It was the day he’d stopped believing in magic.
A small, simple thing, it had happened about an hour after the picture was taken. He’d got it into his head that there were fairies living in the clump of nettles at the bottom of the pub garden. According to well-established precedent, if you gave the fairies saucers of bread and milk for a period of fourteen days, they were obliged to grant your dearest wish (a games console with joystick and GoreFest II loaded as standard). That day had been the fifteenth day, and he’d trotted down the garden path with his saucer of milky pap and a review of the console from his computer magazine, just to make sure the fairies had ordered the right model. But there weren’t any fairies after all. He trampled about in the nettles getting stung, trying to flush them out, but all he found was a dead blackbird and next door’s cat, predictably irritable about being disturbed. No fairies, no magic. From that moment on, his world had changed for ever.
Or so he’d thought at the time. Apparently not. He concentrated on the horrible photo, and after a moment the boy in the stupid bobble hat turned and looked at him.
“Hello,” said the boy, wretchedly.
“Hello,” he replied.
“You got it worked out then.”
“Yes.”
“Took you long enough.”
He ignored that. It was, after all, fair comment. He should have guessed as soon as the room started calling him sir in that particular tone of voice. It was of course his own speciality. He’d refined it over an extended period of time to aggravate his parents, teachers at school, anybody who insisted on being shown respect. The same perfectly attuned ear that made him able to write the world’s best jingles had led to the creation of the most irritating sarky-bolshy-snotty voice the human race had ever known. It was brilliant in its way, unique and unmistakable. He should have recognised it instantly the first time he heard it.
“It’s me,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
The boy in the picture shrugged. “Who else would it be?” he said, and Don could see his point. “I mean, what did you think it was? Spells and stuff ?”
Put like that, his preconceptions did seem a bit silly. “Is that all it is, though? Just believing?”
The boy pulled a scornful face. “No, of course not,” he replied. “Else, everybody could do it.”
“So what is it then? The pencil sharpener?”
The boy grinned unpleasantly at him, and he understood for the first time what a particularly loathsome child he must have been. “It’s not really a pencil sharpener,” he said; “that’s just what you turned it into.”
“Ah.”
“Could be anything,” the child went on. “When Mr Huos had it, it was a ring.”
Shrug. “Don’t ask me. Wasn’t my idea. I think having it as a pencil sharpener’s really stupid.”
Time, Don decided, to move on, rather than get bogged down in minutiae. “So how did I get it?”
Another shrug. “Don’t know,” the child replied. “Happened before I was awake. You should know, you were there. Don’t you remember?”
A whole new world of respect for his parents. The patience of saints, evidently. “So,” he said briskly, “I come into possession of this thing, whatever the hell it is, and it starts from there. That’s when you—”
“Woke up, yeah.” The child really didn’t look happy about it.
He thought back. “The first thing you did was break my desk.”
“Sorry.” Mechanical, resentful, typical child’s apology.
“That’s quite all right,” said Don. “So then you fixed the desk.”
“That’s right.”
“And then you got Polly’s dress from wherever…” He paused, frowned. “Exactly where did you get it from?”
“Not allowed to tell.”
Sigh. “All right, that’s fine. Then I asked you for a ten-pound note.”
“Mphm.”
“Which you took,” he went on, “from my bank account.”
“That’s right.”
He nodded. “Because,” he said, “you didn’t know where you were supposed to get it from, and you were afraid of getting in trouble if you took it from someone else.”
The child scowled at him. “You can’t go taking other people’s money,” it said. “That’s wrong. It’s stealing.”
“Quite,” said Don. “We couldn’t have that, could we? Whereas sending my upstairs neighbour somewhere and not being able to get him back, that’s perfectly all right.”
The child looked up. “Is it?” it said hopefully.
“No,” Don replied. “It bloody well is not all right. What in God’s name were you thinking of ?”
Nasty look from under the hat. “You were the one doing the thinking,” it pointed out. “Go away, you thought.”
“Yes, but I didn’t mean it—”
“How’m I supposed to know that?”
He knew the answer to that one. “Because you’re me.”
“Uh-huh.” Shake of head, patronising smirk. “I was you. Or you were me. Whatever. Anyway, what that means is, you don’t think like me any more.” Short pause. “So it’s not my fault, it’s yours. Right?”
Well, to be fair, yes. “Tell you what,” he said. “Instead of getting bogged down in whose fault it was, why don’t we concentrate on figuring out how to get him back? Well? How does that sound?”
In a sense it was cheating, because he knew how the child’s mind worked. Subconsciously, no matter how strenuous or justified its denials, it believed that it had to be to blame for the bad stuff happening, simply because it always had been to blame for everything. Appearing to let it off the hook, therefore, was a sure way to win its heart and mind. “Yeah, all right,” the child replied. “So, how do we do that then?”
“I don’t know, do I?” He stopped. Just then he’d sounded like, well, a grown-up. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to snap at you like that. Only I’d assumed you’d know.”
Shake of head.
“All right,” Don said, trying to sound unflustered and unconcerned, “let’s try another approach, shall we? What did you do to make him go away?”
“Magic.”
“Yes, all right, but what kind of—”
“I don’t know.” The child looked away, angry with itself. “I don’t know how it works; I just think of stuff and it happens. But thinking about bringing him back won’t work.”
“How d’you know that?”
“Tried it.”
Naturally. The scientific approach even then. “Try it again.”
“Why? It won’t work.”
Because I say so. But he couldn’t bring himself to say that, not to himself, so instead he tried, “Please?”
“All right.” The boy in the bobble hat screwed up his slightly faded eyes, pulled a rather vague face (low resolution, cheap and grainy special-offer film, Dad’s crappy old camera) and held it for about seven seconds. “Didn’t work. Told you.”
“Thanks for trying, anyway,” he remembered to say because nobody ever had, and he’d hated that; instead they said, You can’t have done it right; do it again. “You got any ideas?”
A different kind of thoughtful look. “We could try looking it up in the book.”
Yes, but I can’t read those— Hang on. “You can read that stuff ?”
Disdainful stare. “Course I can. I’m not stupid.”
A few dribbles of relief started to seep through at the seams of his mind. “Excellent. Let’s do that then.”
Two-dimensional erstwhile Don turned full face and frowned at him. “How?”
Ah. The boy was in the photograph. The book was out here, in the room. “How about if I held it up for you to see? Would that work?”
“Suppose it might.”
Just as helpful as he remembered himself being. “Where do I start? Which page?”
Shrug.
And then he thought, magic. Open it anywhere, and it’ll be the right page. “Here,” he said, cutting the pages like a deck of cards and holding the book parallel to the album (he didn’t half feel silly doing it, but that, apparently, was what his life had devolved into). “What does it say?”
“Mm. Mmmm mm mmm m.”
“What? Oh, sorry.”
He lifted the book away. The child glowered at him, then said, “That was a spell for getting rid of warts.”
“Oh.”
“You got the wrong page.”
“Evidently.”
He could feel the will to carry on ebbing away. It was all a bit too intense for him, a bit too energetic. What he wouldn’t give for a nice lie-down.
“Do you want me to translate it for you?”
It was a friendly gesture, practically a unilateral declaration of peace. As it was, he only just managed to keep himself from saying something unkind and brusque. “You can do that?”
“Course I can.”
“But you said—”
“Said there wasn’t a translation. You didn’t ask if I could make one for you.”
He smiled. It was the only thing he could think of to do. “So I didn’t,” he said. “Silly me. Can you start with the index?”
The boy in the photograph nodded, then, “What’s an index?”
“The bit at the back. Lots of names, with page numbers next to them.”
“Oh that. Hang on. Right, all done.”
Don flipped through the pages, all still covered with those vaguely malevolent-looking hieroglyphs, until he got to the end. Nothing there he could understand, just—
“Hold on, will you? Don’t be in such a rush all the time.”
The pictograms seemed to smudge, like watercolour when a raindrop falls on it. They blurred, ran, reformed themselves into pixels, into letters.
Magic, he thought. You know, it’s not right; it shouldn’t work. It ought to take twenty years and a supercomputer to decipher this lot. “Thanks,” he said, as he realised he had no idea what to look for.
“Try bringing people back,” suggested the child.
He was about to explain patiently that indexes didn’t work like that when he caught sight of one of the entries, under B.
Bringing people back. See under; Back, bringing people
A blank moment. Then he said, “I see. The book’s not real; it’s just…” He scrabbled in his head for what he actually wanted to say. “It’s just an externalisation of what’s in your mind.”
The child gave him a classic well-if-you’re-going-to-use-long-words look and said, “You going to read what it says, or what?”
Page 743. Of course, all the page numbers were still pi
ctograms. He pointed this out, and got looked at for his trouble, but it did get him proper Arabic numerals at the foot of each page.
“Got it. When you’re ready.”
Page 743 did the blurring and refocusing bit, and he was looking at a page of normal English text, with a bold sub-heading about a third of the way down: Bringing People Back. Under which, the single word: Can’t.
CHAPTER SIX
Lack of sleep more than anything else finally made his mind up for him. Mr Huos had always slept soundly, nine hours a night for as long as he could remember, from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.; out like a light, a selection from his extensive repertoire of strange and disturbing recurring dreams, then instantly wide awake without the need of an alarm. Insomnia was a new one on him, and he really didn’t like it, not even for one night. So, he decided, Yes, I suppose I’ll have to.
At nine sharp he made a call. At nine thirty-five Reception buzzed him to let him know Mr Gogerty was here to see him.
Mr Huos closed his eyes. “Show him in.”
He’d only ever spoken to Stan Gogerty on the phone, so all his assumptions were based on the voice. He’d been expecting a short man, probably fat, quite possibly bald and with thick glasses. He was, therefore, mildly disconcerted when Reception ushered in seven feet of lean muscle. He’d been right about bald, but only because Mr Gogerty shaved his head.
“Stan,” he said, “thanks for coming round so quickly.”
“No bother.” Mr Gogerty folded his tremendous limbs and sat down. “What’s the problem?”
For a moment Mr Huos felt sure he wouldn’t be able to go through with it after all. To his surprise, he found he was stronger than that. Or just plain desperate. “I need you to find something for me.”
Mr Gogerty nodded. “That’s what I do,” he said. “What am I looking for?”
Mr Huos smiled. “I don’t know.”
“All right. What sort of thing?”
Mr Huos shrugged. “That’s it,” he said. “I don’t know. It could be anything. Thimble, twelve-millimetre wing nut, bottle top, belt buckle, doorknob. There’s a fair chance it’s either brass or gold, but I can’t guarantee that. I’ve got no idea how it might react to somebody else, you see.” He paused, then said, “You think I’ve gone mad, don’t you?”