Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

  “Excuse me,” he shouted. “Have you noticed anything odd?”

  The driver looked at him as if to say, Yes, you. “Odd?”

  Obviously not. “Sorry,” Mr McPherson said. “Forget about it.”

  He drove on, past the long, wide right-hand curve with the lay-by, past the stack of silage bales, past the track to Priory Farm, past the oak tree Charles II couldn’t possibly have hidden in.

  He stopped. On his right, the mouth of Attractive Drive. He swore loudly and drove on; through the village, past the pub, church, new development, round the bend, over the little bump, back to his own front bloody door.

  He stopped, put on the handbrake, let go of the steering wheel and began to shake all over. He was still quivering when his wife banged on the window. He wound it down.

  “Well?” she said. He shook his head.

  He’d never seen her look like that before. “I tried ringing the council,” she said, “but the phone’s out of order.”

  “Try your mobile.”

  “No signal.”

  Forty years in the road haulage business, twelve of them as regional manager, Mr McPherson reckoned he was pretty well bombproof, and with good reason. Spilled loads on the M6 hadn’t phased him, nor snowdrifts, Operation Stack, fuel excise duty, not even the French. He knew better than most the risks of setting tyre to tarmac. Just as mariners gathered together in dockside bars whisper strange tales about the mysteries of the deep, hauliers have their own Flying Dutchmen, Marie Celestes, sea serpents, islands that turn out to be giant turtles. They know that geography isn’t such a set of absolute constants as they’d have you believe. He’d heard about the demon motorway junction in Pembrokeshire that swallows up those unwise enough to take it, leaving no trace; of the phantom Lutterworth bypass that only appears for six hours every five years and leads to a place that nobody who’s been there will ever talk about; of the M25 tailback in ’92 that became so dense it achieved critical mass and collapsed into a black hole. He’d raised more than one glass to honour a driver who’d set off into the vast uncertainty of the highway and never been seen or heard of again. There were worse things out there than feedback loops, and he’d met men who’d faced them down and lived to tell the tale.

  “Sod it,” he said. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I may be some time.”

  “Trevor, don’t be so bloody stupid,” his wife said, but by then he’d turned the ignition key and put the car in gear. The last she saw of him was his brake lights, as he slowed to a halt at the T-junction. Then he was gone.

  Mrs McPherson went back into the house, made herself a cup of tea and turned the TV on for her afternoon soap. All she got was a black-and-white snowstorm. She tried channel-hopping, but they were all the same. She had another go at ringing the council, but the line was still dead.

  She went next door and rang the bell. When her neighbour came out, she said, “My telly’s on the blink. Mind if I watch with you?”

  A shake of the head. “Mine too. I was just about to come round to your house.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “It’s not working.”

  They looked at each other, and each of them saw no panic, only resigned, irritable acceptance. Intuitively, both of them knew that whatever this strange inconvenience might be, the root cause must lie with some man somewhere, trying to fix something he didn’t understand rather than send for a proper engineer and pay the call-out fee. Hence, no cause for concern, since sooner or later the man’s wife would make him see sense, the proper authorities would be sent for, and normal service would eventually be resumed.

  Then an ugly thought occurred to Mrs McPherson, and she asked, “Where’s Dave?”

  “He went into town to get some plywood,” her neighbour replied. “He’s been ever such a long time. Still, once he goes in one of those DIY places, he loses all track of time.”

  Mrs McPherson replied that Trevor was just as bad, but her heart wasn’t in it. If asked, she reckoned she could advance a pretty good theory about why Dave was so long at the fair. The point was, though, that she hadn’t been asked, and it’d serve no useful purpose to scare her neighbour out of her wits when, for all she knew, council workmen were at that precise moment swinging into action and sorting it all out; whereupon the roads would be open again, the TV and the phones would start working, and she’d be able to ring the council offices and have a good moan about why it had taken them so long. Until then the only sensible course of action was to keep quiet and spirit-of-the-Blitz it out.

  She went home and did some vacuuming. About half an hour later the electricity went off.

  That, she felt, was taking things just a bit too far. Unfortunately, there was absolutely nothing she could do about any of it – not unless she fancied trying to walk into Malvern, assuming she could get out of Norton, which she felt fairly sure was impossible.

  She read a book until it was too dark to make out the words, then sat quietly in front of her silent TV and her stone-cold-dead gas fire.

  Just gone nine, Trevor came home. He was limping and his back was bent. He’d run out of petrol, he explained, and he’d had to leave the car at the top of Burridge Lane, which was incidentally about as far as it was possible to get before It sent you back home again. He’d tried everywhere, he went on, every road or lane out of Norton, and it was the same story all over. Eventually, when the petrol gave out, he’d tried walking up the footpath that wound its way through the woods to Bawton. He’d trudged on for well over an hour, and he’d been on the point of letting himself hope when he’d climbed over a stile to find himself back in Attractive Drive, two doors down from home.

  “This is no good,” his wife told him. “We’ve got to tell someone.”

  He no longer had enough energy to be irritated. “They’ll find out soon enough,” he said, dragging off his shoes and collapsing into a chair. “I expect the electric being off’s going to get their attention.”

  “But somebody’s got to do something.”

  He looked at her. “Such as?”

  “Oh, you’re just useless,” she said, storming off and colliding with the rocking chair, and, although he felt she was maybe being a bit harsh, he wasn’t inclined to disagree. He’d come to the end of his resources when the petrol tank ran dry. All his life he’d been a man of action, and now he was faced with the depressing fact that there was nothing he could do. His wife, by contrast, was a – what was the word? A catalyst. She suggested, urged, mithered, complained until someone else, the properly constituted authorities, took action. But with no phones, no roads by which postmen could come to collect letters, no means of communication whatsoever, she was as ineffectual as he was. They couldn’t even have a nice cup of tea, with no electric. Still, he thought, it wasn’t as though it was going to last very long. By now the outside world must have noticed. Rescue was on its way, and any minute now the lights would go on, the phones would ring, the roads would reopen and all would be well.

  For now, however, he was sitting in the pitch dark, and it bothered him. Without visual stimuli to distract him, he found it hard to keep his mind from coming up with increasingly bizarre and disturbing theories about what was going on: alien invasions, nuclear catastrophies so violent they’d buggered up the laws of physics, stuff so weird and wonderful he’d never take any of it seriously for one second in the light but which spawned and grew alarmingly in the darkness. Bugger that, he thought. It had been a cloudless blue-sky day, so the moon and stars would be out; hardly a substitute for a hundred-watt bulb, but surely better than no light at all.

  He got up and felt his way slowly and carefully to the back door. Outside, the night was still and warm. An owl hooted sleepily in the distance. The air was sweet and rich with the heavy scent of lavender and night-scented stocks. But it was dark.

  He craned his neck to look up at the sky. Clouds, he said to himself. Please let it be just clouds.

  No stars. No moon.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN />
  “Where is he?” roared Jack Tedesci, as he surged through the front office like a tidal wave and broke against Reception. “I’ll kill him.”

  The receptionist smiled at him. As luck would have it, Mrs Hacksmith had just started a two-week holiday, and the temp who was filling in for her was young and beautiful, and Jack Tedesci noticed things like that, the way a spy satellite notices troop movements. His anger and sense of purpose both dissipated a little. “Is your boss in?” he said.

  Still the smile. “Sorry, I’m new here. This is my first day. Who were you wanting?”

  “Mr Huos.”

  “I’ll see if he’s available for you.”

  Four minutes went by, during which Mr Tedesci learned some really quite interesting stuff about Wayne and Colleen from a nine-month-old copy of Hello!. He was holding the magazine sideways and grinning when Mr Huos came out and apologised for keeping him waiting.

  “No bother,” Mr Tedesci replied, absent-mindedly folding the magazine lengthwise and stuffing it into his coat pocket. “Good of you to see me at such short notice.”

  “Come on through,” Mr Huos said, and ushered him into the lift. “So, Jack, how’s things?”

  The use of his first name may not have quite woken the sleeping tiger of Mr Tedesci’s wrath, but it nudged the tip of its tail. Why was it, he wondered, after all the deals they’d done together, that Mr Huos called him Jack, but he didn’t even know what Huos’ first name was. A bit stand-offish, he’d often thought, a wee tad superior; like at school, where the teachers can call you any damn thing they like, but you’ve got to call them sir. He’d toyed with hailing Mr Huos as Huey or Huzza, but decided that would be going too far, so he’d shelved the matter and let it fester as a class-three minor grudge.

  “Not so good,” he replied. “You know that land you sold me?”

  “Mm?”

  “It’s gone.”

  Whatever the reply he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been “Oh,” or at least not “Oh” in that tone of voice. “I’m sorry to hear that, Jack,” Mr Huos went on. “I can see why you’re probably a bit concerned.”

  A bit concerned. Like describing the Vietnam War as “a bit of a scrap.” “You don’t sound all that surprised,” he said.

  “I’m not.” The lift stopped. Mr Huos made an after-you herding gesture. “Truth is, you’re not the first person I’ve heard that from today, not by a long chalk.”

  Mr Tedesci walked a few steps, then stopped dead, like a mule. “Are we talking about the same thing? When I said it’s gone—”

  Sigh. “I should think so, yes. Let’s see, you went out there to take a look at it, and you couldn’t find it.”

  “If you’re suggesting I can’t read a map…”

  Mr Huos didn’t seem to have heard him. “Nothing to see, I don’t suppose. No great big gaping hole or anything like that. Just, well, not there any more. Like all the surrounding fields had sort of healed up around where it used to be. Well?”

  “Pretty much,” Mr Tedesci said feebly. “Look, what the hell’s going on? You’re making it sound like it’s normal or something.”

  Mr Huos just looked tired. “Naturally, you’ll get your money back,” he said. “And it’d only be fair if I covered all your out-of-pocket expenses: surveyors, architects, planning consultants and so on. If you’ll get your people to mail me a breakdown…”

  “Listen.” Mr Tedesci realised he’d grabbed Mr Huos’ arm. It was like stone. He quickly let go. “Listen,” he repeated. “Screw the money.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Jack.”

  “Tell me,” Mr Tedesci shouted in his face, “what’s going on.”

  Mr Huos shifted his head a degree or so and looked straight at him; at which moment, if he’d been offered the choice, Mr Tedesci would cheerfully have torn up the contract, forfeited the money and undertaken never to mention the deal ever again, just as long as Mr Huos stopped looking at him like that. “And why not?” he sighed. “You know what: I might just do that. I’ve never told anybody, you see, not even Stan Gogerty. Sorry, you don’t know him. Just forget you heard the name. But what the hell.” Suddenly he was alive again, alert, almost crackling with energy. “In here,” he said, pushing a door open. Not an office, Mr Tedesci noticed. More a sort of—

  “That’s a toilet,” he pointed out.

  “Fine. I’ll stand, you can have the seat.” Mr Huos sort of nudged him, only a little gentle pressure, but so expertly applied that Mr Tedesci had no choice. He lost his footing, stumbled a yard or so, backed into something solid, flumped down onto it and found he was sitting on a closed toilet lid. “Are you sitting comfortably?” Mr Huos asked cheerfully as he closed and bolted the door. “Then I’ll begin.”

  * * *

  It was bad enough facing a crowd of thirty women, all staring at him expectantly and impatiently. It certainly didn’t help that, although they were definitely human, he could also see them as chickens. But what was really screwing him up was the knowledge that all of them were lawyers.

  He cleared his throat. “Ladies,” he said. All thirty of them glowered at him. That was the moment when he realised that if he’d been born a fox, he’d have starved to death years ago. “Um,” he said, and then his voice stopped working, a failure so abrupt and total it was hard to believe Microsoft didn’t have anything to do with it. He looked back to see if his fellow male was going to help him out, but that didn’t seem likely. Charles Mynott-Harrison, former conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic, slayer of rival cockerels and currently the coop’s designated alpha male, was hiding behind him, shaking like a leaf.

  Fortunately, that was when Ms Byron took charge, stepping in front of him and gently edging him out of the way. “Listen, everyone,” she said. “Will everybody who’s really a human please raise their wing. Hand. All right,” she went on, as a forest of wings lifted into the air, waited to be counted and then, from sheer force of habit, flapped. “Looks like that’s all of us. All right,” she continued. “Wings up, anyone who’s not a lawyer.”

  Not a feather stirred, and Ms Byron nodded. “Now then,” she said, “wings up, anybody who hasn’t got a brother who’s a musician of some sort.”

  Chickens have no eyebrows, so Kevin couldn’t do a bewildered frown. All of them?

  “Something very screwy,” Ms Byron said, slowly and clearly, like a good teacher, “has been going on, but it looks like it may be getting better, though I can’t say that for sure.

  “Fine,” Ms Byron said, and her voice was quieter, as though she was trying to deal with a whole lot of implications all at once. “The question is, what are we going to do?”

  If she’d been expecting suggestions, she was out of luck. Kevin waited to see what she’d say next.

  “All right,” Ms Byron went on, and now she sounded like what she was, the duly-elected-leader-by-default. “So, here’s how I see it. Here we are, thirty-seven human beings who’ve somehow or other been turned into chickens. I don’t know—” She raised her voice to quell the incipient low hum of clucking. “I don’t know how it happened – none of us knows that. I don’t know why it’s happened to us, or why we’re all women lawyers with brothers who play musical instruments. To be perfectly honest with you, I really couldn’t give a damn, as long as there’s some way we can make it stop and get back to normal.” She paused. Dead silence. She had their undivided attention. “I suggest,” she said, “we get help.”

  It didn’t go down terribly well, but they were still listening. “And how, you may well ask,” she went on, “do we go about doing that? Good question. Obviously we can’t talk to humans, even if we could find a human to talk to. Anybody remember seeing one lately? No? Me neither. We can’t talk, we can’t phone, but –” she paused for effect “– we can text. Or send an e-mail. Agreed?”

  Thirty-odd pairs of round eyes were watching her intently, but nobody clucked.

  “Which means,” she went on, “we need to get to a phone or a computer. Which i
n turn means we need to get out of this coop. If we can do that—”

  A large brown Speckled Sussex in the front row interrupted her. “Just who do you propose we contact?” she said. “The police? The army? The RSPCA? Who the hell is going to believe—”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ms Byron replied, so firmly that the Speckled Sussex took a step back and stood on one leg. “Whatever we’re going to do, we can’t do it stuck in here. Put it another way: nobody could admire Gandhi more than I do, but I really don’t think passive resistance and non-violent protest is going to cut it for us, not in these circumstances. We’ve got to get out of here, get into the nearest house and find something we can type into. Now, has anybody got any ideas about how we can do that?”

  Thirty-seven chickens looked around. They saw a framework of twelve solid three-inch-thick seven-foot-high posts, to which had been nailed an impenetrable barrier of wire netting, the whole area covered on top with a tarpaulin, to comply with anti-bird flu regulations. There was one door, a wooden frame covered in inch mesh, securely tied top and bottom with baler twine. It was Alcatraz, and they were the bird women.

  Depression and despair, multiplied by thirty-six. But Ms Byron’s head was still held high, and her perfectly round eyes were still bright as she scuffed at the dusty floor with her triple-toed claw-ended feet.

  “Only one thing for it,” she said. “We dig a tunnel.”

  Back at his office, Mr Gogerty washed, shaved, changed his underwear and shirt and brushed his teeth. A cup of tea would be nice. He looked in the Tupperware box next to the kettle, but all the tea bags were gone. There was, however, half a pot of cold tea left over from the day before yesterday, so he put the spout between his lips and glugged four times. Fine. Now he’d go and visit Kevin Briggs.

  First, however, he checked his messages, just in case. Sandersons; could he ring Mr Ibrahim at his earliest convenience about the Eye of Odin case? He frowned and made a note on the pad. The Massachusetts Institute of Thaumaturgy wanted to consult him about a potential product liability suit; could he call asap? He sighed. MIT was just the sort of client he was anxious to attract, but right now he couldn’t spare the time. Schlager & Chang; any progress with the missing ten years from the seventeenth century? He was quite glad he’d missed that call. Someone by the name of Don Mayer wanting to consult him about some really weird stuff which he couldn’t explain on the phone; please could he ring back on this number (he wrote it down out of force of habit) or else he could reach him at this address—