Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

  Clearly, more to it than that. Rubbing his shoulder (his arm had gone numb), he retreated to the start of his run-up and tried to analyse the problem sensibly.

  Kicking it was a non-starter; he established that very quickly. Just as well, in fact, that he was wearing his brown shoes and not his slippers, or he’d have a broken toe to contend with as well as everything else. So, what else did the heroes in movies do? Well, if they were policemen, they shot off the lock, but he wasn’t a policeman and he didn’t have a gun, so that was out of the window straight away. What else? In Robin Hood films he’d known them to batter down doors with benches. That, however, was strictly a two-man job. Slowly it dawned on him that, after a lifetime of subconsciously believing in the movies, he’d reached a sort of anti-road-to-Damascus moment, and his faith was gone for ever.

  In which case, he’d have to get by with just plain common sense and basic engineering. He thought, All right, what would a professional do? A burglar, say.

  Easy. Burglars had jemmies; they carried them, presumably, in their bags marked SWAG. Needless to say, he didn’t have a jemmy; he wasn’t even sure he’d recognise one if he saw one, let alone know how to use it. But the principle was quite simple, and he did have a long stout screwdriver and a hammer.

  As he closed the lid of his toolbox, he checked his watch again. Twenty-one minutes past ten. She’d been in there for six minutes already, with It. Furious with himself, he charged back to the door, located the screwdriver blade as close as he could get to the point where the latch entered the mortice, and started bashing with the hammer.

  Turned out to be a piece of cake. Once the blade was in, he leaned his hip against the screwdriver handle and the door just popped open.

  Eileen was sitting on the toilet, unharmed as far as he could tell, an unopened magazine in her lap. She didn’t look round as he came crashing through the door, and when he called out her name, she answered, “Sh.” He opened his mouth defiantly, but then he followed her line of sight and his tongue froze, leaving him standing perfectly still and deathly quiet, like a statue. Stiller, even, than a statue. As still as one of those whitened-faced mimes who stand around pretending to be statues, and you can’t get much stiller or quieter than that.

  Where the back wall should have been, there was landscape, loads of it, rolling downland undulating away as far as the eye could see. More or less centre, about where the toilet-roll holder used to be, he saw an old, fallen-down sort of a building, yellow stone with a grey slate roof and a distinctly churchy sort of air to it, though it was a bit small and didn’t have a spire or anything like that. Bigger than a shed, smaller than a house, very old-fashioned and quaint, the most remarkable thing about it was that nobody had converted it into a tea shop.

  “Eileen,” he heard himself whisper, “what’s happened to our wall?”

  “Sh,” and he could see her point. Standing in front of the building’s massive nail-studded oak door was a knight in armour, shiny but black, which covered him from head to toe. George wasn’t one to jump to conclusions, but he was fairly sure the knight wasn’t a stray customer who’d taken a wrong turning, even though his clothes were most definitely dry clean only.

  “What’s he…” he hissed, but Eileen glowered at him and he subsided, just in time to see another knight striding round the corner of the building.

  The newcomer was fully armoured too, but his steelware was mirror-bright and gleaming, and he was leading a Persil-white horse by the bridle. If this was anything at all like the movies (and George had just seen how fallible they could be), Mr Sparkles here had to be the hero. The horse alone practically guaranteed it. None of which explained what either of them thought he was doing trespassing in someone else’s unnaturally distended bog.

  With a shrill grating noise (So that’s what that is, he thought) the black knight drew his sword and waggled it – supposed to be threatening, presumably, but George thought, He could put his eye out with that thing if he’s not careful. The white knight, however, responded at once by drawing his own sword, and a moment later they were bashing at each other like panel beaters. It can’t have been something either of them had said, because not a word had been spoken, but it was fairly obvious they didn’t like each other. On the other hand, thanks to all the sheet metal, neither of them seemed the slightest bit affected by the clobbering he was getting. It all reminded George a bit of Jeux Sans Frontières, except that they were using swords instead of water-filled balloons.

  Then, for no obvious reason, the black knight suddenly keeled over and landed on his back, flump, making the floor shake and the toothbrushes rattle in their mug. Without knowing the rules it was hard to know precisely what had been achieved, but the white knight stepped back and sheathed his sword in a let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you manner, so presumably he’d won. Quick glance at watch. All that had only taken five minutes, which meant an hour and twenty minutes still to go.

  “Here,” Eileen muttered, “d’you think he’s all right? The one lying down. Maybe we should call an ambulance.”

  His turn. “Sh.”

  “Yes, but if anything happens to him, what’ll it do to our insurance?”

  Valid point, made irrelevant by the disappearance into thin air of the black knight. The white knight either hadn’t noticed or thought nothing of it. He was standing in front of the door, belting it with his clenched fist. Three massive thuds and the door was opened by a monk in a hoody, sorry, cowl, who beckoned to the knight in slow motion, whereupon…

  They were inside the building, which was a bit disconcerting. The walls were pale grey stone, the roof was high and vaulted, and directly ahead was a church altar. (Last time he’d been this close to one of them, he’d been saying, “I do,” while Eileen’s mum’s eyes had been blistering the back of his neck. The parallel comforted him rather. That had seemed strange and disconcerting at the time, but it hadn’t turned out too badly.)

  It’s all just It, he told himself. It doesn’t matter, as long as we can get away from It, which we can do at any time, just by running to the toilet door. With that reassurance firmly in mind, he admitted to himself that he wouldn’t mind finding out what was going to happen next.

  The monk led the knight to the altar and pointed at it, then bowed low and backed away. George took his eye off him for a moment, and then the monk wasn’t there any more. That didn’t seem to matter. The knight went down on one knee, as if proposing. Somewhere offstage, a choir started singing monksong. The knight clasped his hands together in prayer. Eileen suddenly gasped, as if in pain.

  “What?” he whispered.

  “Pins and needles,” she replied, and rubbed her leg.

  Gradually, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, the altar began to glow. The unseen choir hit a high note and held it. The glow was now too bright to look at comfortably (Bloody hell, he thought, Steven Spielberg in our downstairs toilet) and he looked away. Then the plainsong stopped, and he looked up.

  The altar had stopped glowing. The knight, who’d turned away to avoid the glare, started to get up, then froze, then dropped down on both knees with a creak of straining rivets. George felt a stiff breeze on his face, in his hair. A cloud of dust was slowly rising from the altar, swirling, forming a double helix. Definitely Spielberg, he thought, and then the helices collapsed, and there on the altar, sitting next to each other, were a chicken and an egg.

  He stared at them, and then movement from the knight caught his eye. The knight had jumped up as if starting a race, then he stopped, paralysed, then he raised his right hand, balled his fist and crashed it with terrible force against his armoured thigh and yelled, not with pain but desperate frustration and despair. The vaulted roof caught his yell and played tennis with it, backwards and forwards from wall to wall, and that set the choir off again, chanting their slow measured harmonies. The knight lunged at the altar, whereupon the chicken and the egg both vanished. The knight stopped dead in his tracks; they reappeared, and he took another step; they vanished,
and he juddered to a halt. The knight sank to his knees again, moaning softly, and this time George could just make out the words.

  “Which came first?” the knight whimpered. “Which came first?”

  Then the whole toilet shook, as a great voice that seemed to draw its power from the very stones boomed out in perfectly modulated quadrophonic sound, “You are not worthy. Go, and never return.” The knight bowed his head, stood for a long time as if unable or unwilling to move, then turned on his heel and walked slowly out of the chapel.

  Outside again. No sign of the white knight, but the black knight was back on duty in front of the chapel door. (“Oh, he’s all right, then,” Eileen muttered. “I was a bit concerned.”) The white knight appeared round the corner of the chapel, leading his horse.

  That was it. “Come on,” he hissed, grabbing Eileen by the wrist. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But I want—”

  “Come on,” he repeated, and towed her after him towards the door – the real one, which he’d forced open with a screwdriver less than fifteen minutes ago, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of his onslaught now. There wasn’t a mark on it, and it was firmly shut. He reached for the handle and wrenched at it. It came off in his hand.

  Behind them, the two knights were at it again, crash-bang-wallop, like a car smash or a breaker’s yard. George stood quite still, looking at the plain brass doorknob in his hand, with two screws still in their holes in the mounting plate, and a shadow fell across him, and he turned to find he was looking into the gentle grey eyes of the monk, who shook his head sadly, and said, “You can’t leave. I’m sorry.”

  He was about to shout, quite probably something nasty, but Eileen beat him to it. She looked at the monk, and asked quietly, “So which did come first?”

  The monk shook his head again, and the folds of his cowl flapped like an elephant’s ears. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

  For some reason that made George very angry. “Look, you,” he growled. “My wife just asked you a civil question.”

  The monk sighed softly. “That information is not available. Also, you’re standing on my foot.”

  “What? Oh, sorry.” He stepped back quickly, and the monk smiled.

  “Thank you,” he said. “We apologise for any inconvenience. If you have further queries, say stop. If you would like to return to the chapel, say stop. If you would like to leave the room and return to your normal environment—”

  “Stop.”

  “That function is not available at this time,” the monk said smoothly. “Please try later. If you have further queries—”

  Under normal circumstances George wasn’t a violent man; in fact the last time he’d hit someone, it had been about a disputed conkers match and Harold Macmillan had been prime minister. He clenched his right fist and swung it at the monk’s face, which turned to mist and faded away.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Eileen said.

  “You’re not helping.”

  In the background, bloody plainsong again. “I want to go back in,” Eileen said. “I want to find out what happens.”

  That made him shudder. Got to get out of there; the question was how? Breaking down the door, been there, done that; on this side, however, the door opened inwards. Come on, he thought, this isn’t the first time in the history of the world someone’s got stuck in a toilet. He considered the handle, but the bit of square-section bar the handle fits over had vanished from the door, so just putting the handle assembly back on wasn’t going to solve anything.

  “Come on.” Eileen was tugging at his sleeve. “I want to know which came first.”

  “Don’t be stupid; it’s just a kids’ riddle,” he said (and as he said it, he knew he was lying). “There’s no answer, that’s the whole point.” Maybe there was something in the chapel he could use instead of the square bar – a bit of wood, a window stay, or what about the point of the knight’s sword? All he had to do was make the turny thing in the lock turn ninety degrees and they could be out of there, safe, gone. Oh, if only he still had his Boy Scout penknife.

  “Idiot,” he said aloud, and dropped to his hands and knees. It had to be there somewhere. True, things vanished into thin air around here, but not, he was prepared to bet, stuff that had been brought in from outside. There were rules, there had to be. Say what you like about It, there had always been rules, and they’d always been complied with.

  He felt something under his foot, stooped down and found what he’d been looking for: the screwdriver he’d used to jemmy the door. It was a wonderful moment, like finding yourself in a foreign city and hearing an English voice. He straightened up, stuck the blade of the screwdriver into the hole in the lock where the square-section bar should have been, and turned.

  The door opened.

  He grabbed it and pulled it wide open. Beyond the threshold, one small step, was the worn carpet of his downstairs back corridor, every frayed edge and tea stain as precious to him as life itself. The plainsong had stopped. Round about now the great voice was presumably telling the white knight to go away, which meant that any moment now the whole process would start again. He turned round to collect Eileen and saw to his horror that she’d got up from the toilet seat and was trotting determinedly towards the chapel door. Bloody woman, he breathed softly to himself. As quickly as he could, he jammed the screwdriver wedge-fashion under the bottom edge of the door, then sprang after her and grabbed her arm.

  “Let go,” she snapped. “I want to see.”

  “Not now,” he barked at her (thirty years and never a cross word). “Come on. I’ve got the door open. Please. It’s not safe.”

  She was looking at him like he was simple or something. “Don’t talk daft,” she said, as to a small, timid child. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a…” She frowned, trying to find the right word. “It isn’t really real,” she said. “It’s more like a recording or something. They can’t hurt us, because they’re not really here.”

  He could see where she was coming from, but there was a lethal flaw in her reasoning; he knew it was there, but he couldn’t think clearly enough to pinpoint what it was. Briefly he considered knocking her out and carrying her through the door over his shoulder, but then he thought about his back and, being a realist, decided against it. But if the caveman approach wasn’t viable, what was he supposed to do?

  “Eileen,” he said, “I’m ordering you to…”

  She wasn’t listening. The black knight had reappeared outside the chapel door, and she was heading straight at him.

  “Eileen.”

  Then, far away but quite distinct, he heard the ting of the shop bell. She heard it too, and for a moment she stood quite still, like a comet exactly halfway between two black holes. Then she turned round, smart as a soldier on parade, and hurried past him, through the door and into the corridor. He closed his eyes, let go of a breath he’d been holding for rather longer than was good for him, and started after her, only to be intercepted by the monk, who was smiling pleasantly and holding a long-bladed screwdriver.

  “That’s the deal, is it?” he said to the monk. “She can go, but I’ve got to stay.”

  The monk shook his head. “Nothing like that,” he said.

  “Good. Then get out of my way.”

  The monk stepped aside. “Your screwdriver,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Just having the screwdriver back in his hand made him feel noticeably more secure. “All right,” he said. “What do you want?”

  The monk shrugged. “The time is drawing near,” he said, “and you have been found worthy. Have a nice day.”

  “Worthy of what?” he demanded, but he got no answer. Instead, the monk pushed him out through the door and slammed it shut.

  The alarm clock trilled, waking Mary Byron out of a most peculiar dream, in which she’d been a chicken, of all things. As she opened her eyes, it remained so vivid that she had to shake
her head to get rid of it.

  Shower, dress, breakfast (toast and black coffee), then half an hour being chewed up by the Northern Line, then work. She sat down at her desk and opened her diary to see what treats lay in store for her.

  HELP. In big red letters.

  She frowned. The bizarre poultry-haunted dream hadn’t been the only disturbing thing lately; far from it. For one thing, she had a nasty suspicion she had an admirer, or something equivalently creepy. It had started small – cups of coffee left for her on her desk when she came back from meetings or trips to the loo, difficult bits of work done for her in her absence. The latter narrowed down the list of likely suspects to the other solicitors in the office, and the thought of any of them fancying her made her skin crawl. Without proof, however, she couldn’t very well start firing out accusations or go to Mr Huos with a formal harassment complaint, and so far her attempts at amateur sleuthing had got her nowhere. When her unseen helper had sorted out the Attractive Avenue file, for example, all the possible suspects had had watertight alibis, vouched for by secretaries, office juniors, Reception and similarly unimpeachable witnesses, and she had been forced to admit that she had nothing to go on. That didn’t help. The thought that her secret stalker was rational enough and cunning enough to cover his tracks so well was hardly encouraging. It was so bad she’d even contemplated chucking the job in, though not for long, given the depressed state of the conveyancing sector. Now, apparently, whoever it was had gone a little bit further off the rails and had started writing pleading messages in her diary. It had to stop, she decided.

  As always, the day’s incoming mail was in a wire tray on the left-hand side of her desk. She leafed through it, a preliminary reconnaissance only, triage rather than OR. Nothing much. None of the outstanding items she was waiting for to wrap up ongoing cases. She opened her drawer and groped for the box of paper clips; found it; found it empty.