by Tom Holt
“It’s perfectly all right,” the hair assured him. “Linear development in the t axis won’t be permanently affected. You get a little breathing space, that’s all. If you’re interested, there’s a handy ready-to-use application you can buy – Slow-Me-Down from Zauberwerke, just seventy-nine ninety-nine for a packet of twelve. I can order you some, if you like.”
“No, please don’t.” Don groped for a chair and sat down. “You can do that. Stop time.”
“Of course.”
“Oh God.” He shook his head, which made him feel dizzy. “All right,” he said, “since we’ve got a few minutes, you can start by telling me what’s going on.”
“Certainly.” The hair thing cleared its throat. “You and your sister Polly are in the flat above your own. The young lady over there is the sister of the man who lives here. It would appear that she works for the same company as your sister, though paradoxically neither of them is aware of the fact. The young lady, whose name incidentally is Briggs, seems to have formed the impression that you and your sister are lying to her – which, to be fair, is not entirely without foundation. Will that be all, or can I help you with something else?”
Two more pints and an ouzo chaser; now do it all again in base six. “You call that explaining?”
“Yes.”
“But I know all that.”
“Yes.”
Don sighed. “In other words, you don’t know, do you? You’re as much in the dark as I am.”
“With respect.” The hair gave him a reproachful look. “Please bear in mind that I am no more than a hair from your head, into which you have temporarily channelled the supernatural abilities you’re currently drawing from the T317G transponder unit. I can do magic, but I can’t work miracles.”
“Oh. Can’t you?”
“No.”
He thought about it for a moment. “You can do stuff I can’t, but you only know what I know.”
The hair beamed at him. “Correct. And very well put, if I may say so.”
“Fine.” He didn’t feel quite so drunk. Instead, he felt hungover, which was worse. “All right,” he said. “Granted you don’t know, but would you care to speculate? Hazard a guess, maybe?”
The hair formed a chin for itself and rubbed it. “If you ask me,” it said, “something isn’t quite right around here.”
Don waited in case there was more, but there wasn’t. “Thanks ever so much,” he said. “I guess I won’t be needing you any more. Can you…”
The hair thing shrank, smaller and shorter, and vanished. Without counting Don couldn’t be sure, but he had an idea he now had an extra hair on the top of his head.
“Police,” the Briggs woman said. Normal service had evidently been resumed. Pity.
“Don’t do that,” Don said quickly. “Look, you’ll have to forgive my sister. Sometimes she gets these fixations on people.”
“Shut up, Don. And you, whoever you are, you go ahead and call who you like. Come to think of it, I’ve got Alan Stevens’ number on my mobile.” She paused and glared at the Briggs female. “You know Alan. Short bloke with a neck like a turkey.”
“I should think so,” she replied icily. “He’s my boyfriend.”
The rest of the suggestion (Get Alan over here. He’ll vouch for me and tell you you’re an imposter or you don’t exist.) suddenly lost its appeal, so she didn’t make it. Ms Briggs, meanwhile, was feeling about in her handbag, presumably for her phone. There was just one last thing she could think of to try, so she said, “Did you write HELP in my diary?”
She had the phone in her hand, but she wasn’t pressing buttons. “What did you just say?”
“Someone wrote HELP in my diary,” Polly said. “In big red letters.”
“Green.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Not big red letters. Green letters.” Ms Briggs was frowning, not anger this time, but concern. “Was that you?”
Polly shook her head. “I promise you, it wasn’t,” she said. “All right, how about this? Do you make cups of coffee for yourself, and then, if you leave the room and come back, someone’s been and drunk them?”
Ms Briggs’ face suddenly went very pale. “No,” she said.
“Oh.”
“No,” she repeated. “But quite often, if I leave the room, when I come back there’s a coffee on my desk, and I know I didn’t make it.”
Polly found she could scarcely breathe. “Milk and one sugar?”
Ms Briggs nodded. “Bit too much milk for my taste, actually.” Her frown deepened, and it looked like she’d forgotten about the phone completely. “Listen,” she said. “Sometimes I open a file to do a job, and—”
“You find someone’s already done it for you,” Polly said in a rush. “Or you get a call from a purchaser’s solicitor about a letter—”
“I know I haven’t written yet. Oh God,” Ms Briggs said solemnly. “This is so creepy.”
“Excuse me,” Don said.
They both shushed him precisely simultaneously; in context, creepier still. At least it had the effect of shutting them both up long enough for him to say, “Ms Briggs. Rachel. Your brother plays the guitar, right?”
She nodded.
“Just a hobby?”
“Yes,” she replied, “he’s terrible at it. That’s why he works in insurance.” She hesitated then added, “But when he was a kid, he really wanted to be a musician. Why?”
“Musician,” Don replied. “As in playing in a band, that sort of thing?”
She nodded. “Actually,” she added, “he really fancied writing songs, but Dad insisted— What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I write songs,” Don said quietly. “Or at least right now I’m doing more sort of jingles. But writing songs is what I’ve always wanted to do. Ever since I was small.”
Little wheels were going round behind Ms Briggs’ eyes. Eventually they stopped, and – “Where’s Kevin?” she asked. “He should be here.”
Silence, brittle as an icicle. Then, “Yes,” Don said. “Yes, he should.”
“Something’s going on, isn’t it?” There was a distinct change in Ms Briggs’ voice. Anger was turning into fear, the way sugar ferments into alcohol. Probably not good. “It’s all right,” Polly said, and realised as soon as the words had passed the gate of her teeth that if any statement could make matters worse, that was it. She added, “Honestly,” but for some reason that didn’t help. Ms Briggs had remembered that she was holding her phone. Indeed, she was covering both of them with it, as if it was a gun.
“You’re weird, both of you,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”
Later, Don was rather proud of what he said next, or at least the way he said it. Calmly, reasonably. Not tripping over his words. “Really,” he said. “And what are you going to tell them?”
Like a fish hook in her lip, the point had caught her for a moment. “That my brother’s missing, and you two freaks—”
“He’s out,” Polly said. “That’s not quite the same as missing, is it? I mean,” she went on, “you don’t say, ‘I’m just going missing to the shops. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ Just because he’s not here right now doesn’t mean anything bad’s happened.”
Gradually it dawned on Ms Briggs that her phone wasn’t loaded. She lowered it. “What about you?” she barked at Polly. “You’ve been spying on me at work. That’s harassment.”
Polly sighed. “Please,” she said, “will you just listen to me for a moment? I haven’t been spying on you, or stalking you, or anything like that. I really do work for BRHD. And clearly you do too. Look, can’t you see there’s something really strange happening, and we’re both caught up in it? So really we should be on the same side, not snarling at each other. Together, we might be able to figure it out.”
Ah, Don thought, the United Nations approach. And if only it worked, what a wonderful world this would be. As it was, he could see that Ms Briggs had a severe case of weirdness poisoning, and any
moment now she was going to do something all of them would end up regretting. In which case there was really only one thing he could do.
“Hey,” Ms Briggs snapped. “What are you—”
But by then Don had yanked out one of his hairs and spat on it, and it was starting to grow.
“Won’t take a jiffy,” he said cheerfully, and it didn’t. When the hair was the size of a small French stick, with dear little arms and legs and the funniest little bobble for a head, he said, “Freeze time,” and the hair just looked at him.
At which point it occurred to him that it probably wasn’t the same hair as last time. In fact, the odds were several hundred thousand to one. A frantic rummage through his memory produced a phrase. “Slow-Me-Down,” he added quickly.
“Oh, right,” the hair said, and time froze.
“That’s a tenner you owe me,” said the hair.
Under other circumstances Don would have pointed out that twelve into seventy-nine ninety-nine wasn’t ten, even allowing for VAT and carriage, but just then he was in no mood to quibble. “Fine,” he said. “And thanks. Now, how do we get out of here?”
The hair looked at him, then at the two motionless women. “I’d run for it if I was you,” the hair said.
“What about Polly? I can’t just leave her here.”
The hair grew shoulders and shrugged them. “If you say so,” it said. “Don’t see the problem myself, but you’re the doctor.” It thought for a moment, then said, “You’ll just have to carry her.”
“Oh.” Not the reply he’d been expecting. “You couldn’t…”
“No.”
The hair seemed pretty definite about that, so there didn’t seem to be much point trying to negotiate. “Fine,” he said sadly, and considered the best way to do it.
Several false starts. At the moment of freezing Polly had just taken a step back. One arm was by her side, the other was sticking out at an inconvenient angle. You couldn’t call her fat exactly, not if you didn’t want shouting and tears and angst for a fortnight. Big bones. Anyway, when he tried just grabbing hold and lifting, he got little coloured lights in front of his eyes and had to stop for a moment to catch his breath. In the end he managed to tip her sideways until she sort of fell across his shoulder, then straightened his legs and staggered towards the door, which was shut. He didn’t dare loosen his hold on whatever it was he was holding on to (he really didn’t want to know), so he looked round for the hair, which was examining itself in a mirror, and said, “Excuse me.”
“What?”
“You couldn’t just get the door for me?”
“What? Oh, right.”
On the stairs he almost collided with the middle-aged lady who lived on the top floor. She stared.
“Afternoon,” he said brightly. “Sorry, can I just squeeze past?”
The woman shuffled sideways, and as he crept by her, his shoulder in agony, she said, “What—”
He sighed. “I’ve told her a thousand times,” he said. “I told her, if you do that, one of these days you’ll stick like it. But would she listen? Oh sorry, was that your foot?”
He hurried past, straight down to street level, propped Polly up against the front door and said, “All right, you can unfreeze.”
Whereupon Polly squeaked and fell over him, and he felt a tiny tingle in his scalp, which he hoped meant the hair had gone back where it belonged. Polly stood up, looked at him and said, “What the hell just happened?”
He sighed. “We escaped,” he replied. “Which is good. On the other hand, that Briggs woman now knows who I am and where I live, so I can’t go back there any more, and it looks like this whole mess just got weirder. Come on,” he added, grabbing her sleeve. “Let’s get away from here before she comes looking for us.”
They caught a bus at the end of the road. The top deck was empty, so they were able to hold an extended council of war without the risk of being overheard. “That was magic, wasn’t it?” Polly said. “You did magic to get us out of there.”
Little Miss Tact. “Not necessarily,” he said. “Look, forget about it, will you? And tell me what that stuff about Blue Remembered Hills was all about.”
She frowned, not at him but past him. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve got a theory about that. Trouble is, it’s so utterly bizarre I don’t even want to admit I’m capable of thinking of it. If it’s true…” She shuddered. “Don, let’s pretend none of this is happening. It’d be so much better.”
“If only,” he replied sadly. “But I can’t. I disappeared that miserable cow’s brother, remember? Let’s hear your theory. It can’t be screwier than the one I’ve got.”
“Well.” She took a deep breath. “Suppose you’re an employer,” she said, looking past him out of the window. “Your biggest overhead is the wage bill, right? Say you employ five people at forty-five thousand a year, plus pension and National Insurance contributions and all the trimmings. So that’s around a quarter of a million quid. Lot of money, yes?”
Don nodded. “So?”
“So,” Polly said, “all that expense comes about because these people are working for you…” She screwed up her face with the effort of getting her head around what she wanted to say. “In parallel” was the best she could come up with. “Five people in five offices drawing five wage packets. But what if you could have those five people working for you simultaneously? For example,” she said quickly, as though the words tasted really bad and she wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible, “suppose you had your offices on the site of an interdimensional rift, where alternative realities somehow intersect. Suppose you had five different versions of the same employee, in five different dimensions, all sitting at the same desk in the same chair at the same time, but each one of them doing different work?”
Don’s eyebrows shot up. “It’d be the same as having five employees, but—”
“You’d only be paying them one wage,” Polly said, “one lot of NI stamps, one lot of pension contributions. Fifty K a year wage bill instead of a quarter-million.” Suddenly she grinned. “Job sharing,” she said, “taken to its logical conclusion.”
“That’s…” Don paused. “Actually, that’s pretty neat,” he said. “Or it would be, if only it wasn’t impossible. Which it is, thank God.”
“Not with magic.”
For some reason that really annoyed him. “Just shut up about bloody magic, will you? Forget about it, it’s just – well, technology. Pretty useless technology at that. It doesn’t work the way you think it does.”
“How do you know that?” she objected, sounding somewhat miffed. “Just because you can’t get it to work. You were the same about broadband when it first came in.”
“It’s nothing like—”
“You couldn’t get it to run,” Polly reminisced pitilessly, “therefore it was fundamentally flawed. It couldn’t ever be made to work, and in six months’ time everybody’d have forgotten about it and moved on to something else. And all the time you were plugging the yellow lead into the wrong socket.”
“Anyway,” Don said firmly, “so that’s your theory.” He pulled a deep-in-thought face, but it was hardly convincing, and Polly wasn’t convinced.
“Admit it,” she said. “You’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”
There was a world of relief in his single quick nod of the head. “Petrified,” he replied. “Not so much fear of getting killed or horribly mutilated, though those are experiences I could definitely do without. It’s more…” He paused, concentrating fiercely on the search for the right words. “It’s like I’m Columbus and I’ve reached the edge of the world and my ship’s just about to sail over it and drop off, and I’m saying to myself, This can’t be right, I know the world is bloody round so why is this happening to me? And also,” he added painfully, “I killed that aggravating woman’s brother.”
“You don’t know that. He could be—”
“And I came within a whisker of killing her too,” he went on, riding over her re
assurance like a tank crossing a fence. “Could’ve done it so easily, just because she was in the way and getting so far up my nose she was practically coming out of my ear. I had to stop myself.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “You know what? It took a real effort. It made me realise something about myself. There’s times when the only thing stopping me from doing bad stuff is being afraid of getting caught or found out. But suppose there was no risk of that. It bothers me a lot.”
“Glad to hear it,” Polly said crisply. “Look at me and tell me the truth. Did you use magic to get us out of there?”
He nodded. “Also, I tried to use it to look for clues. Did me a fat lot of good, though.”
“So you really can—” She stopped. “But you don’t want to. Fair enough.” The bus had stopped, and she looked out of the window. Snarled up in traffic. With magic you could do something about that. You could make the bus sprout wings, could you? Her intuition told her that you probably couldn’t, or if you did, they’d just flap up and down and the bus would stay resolutely earth-bound. Magic could get you out of traffic, but only if you vanished all the other road users. Of course, there were people who’d do that, and presumably that was why magic wasn’t used, and why it was kept a secret. “So,” she said, “what about my theory?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I guess it fits the facts as we know them, but it’s pretty hard to swallow. I mean, think about it for a moment. If you could access other dimensions and do all that stuff, would you really need to piddle about saving on wages? Surely you’d have better things to do.”
She looked down at her feet. “I suppose so,” she said. “Or you could ask, since we can put men on the moon and do micro-surgery and build amazing computers and manipulate DNA and I don’t know what else, surely it’s ridiculous to imagine we’d still be fighting wars and allowing millions of people to starve to death and poisoning the atmosphere; surely we’d have more sense, if we were that clever? But I don’t suppose it works quite like that. Suppose magic’s just better technology. What do people do with wonderful technology? They patent it, so they can keep it all to themselves, and then they figure out how to use it to make money. Maybe magic can do all sorts of wonderful stuff, but it’s not actually very useful commercially. Maybe it can’t turn base metals into gold or mass-produce dollar bills or anything like that.”