by Tom Holt
“Changed my mind. Look, I’ve had it up to here with the weird stuff. I just want it to stop. This Gogerty bloke…” He sighed. “If he can’t help us, maybe he can tell us who can. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what I can do. That’s it, basically. That’s me finished.” He sat down and slumped forward, elbows on knees, a picture of despair. Not a Rubens or a Titian or a Degas or even a Picasso of despair; other works by this artist you might enjoy include Gypsy Dancer and Lady of Spain, and can be bought off the railings in the Bayswater Road.
“Pack it in, Don,” Polly said crisply. “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve been doing magic?”
“I haven’t,” Don growled back. “Only the hair trick. I got us away from that horrible Briggs woman with it. Otherwise, it’s been useless.”
“But you can do it.”
“No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. Don’t want to know, either.”
“But Don—”
“For crying out loud,” he yelled at the floor. “This isn’t some handy labour-saving gadget. It killed that stupid idiot upstairs. We can’t use it, Polly. It’d be like trying to use a nuclear bomb to shift stubborn stains.”
“You just did.”
Polly had a real gift for that sort of thing: being right in teeny-weeny matters of detail, while being utterly wrong about the big stuff. “Yes,” he said.
“You sent magical creatures to abduct a perfect stranger and drag him here.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be late for appointments,” Don replied. “If I ran my business like that, I’d be—”
“You’re never on time for anything. You told me yourself.”
Once, when he was young, on a visit to the aquarium he’d stood in front of the piranha tank and wondered what it’d be like to be nibbled to death by hundreds of tiny jaws. Since then he’d had many lively debates with his sister, and reckoned he could guess just fine. “All right,” he said. “You suggest something. Got any bright ideas?”
Polly was quiet for about a second. “Yes,” she said. “Where’s that thing?”
Amazingly, he was able, through long experience, to translate. “You mean the pencil sharpener?”
“Yes. Fetch it here. I want to see it.”
Another man might have asked why. Another man might have put his foot in the apparently calm and placid waters, only to have it stripped to the bone in a millisecond. “All right,” he said. “Hang on, I’ll get it.”
He’d hidden it, after much internal debate, in the carrier bag in which he stockpiled his used underwear until such time as supplies ran out and laundry became inevitable. Nobody, he reasoned, not even the most determined thief, would go in there after it. He reappeared with the bag, took the pencil sharpener out, wiped it on the tail of his shirt and put it down in the exact centre of the living-room table.
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “It’s just an inference I draw from the fact that my life started going down the toilet the moment I first set eyes on the bloody thing. It’d probably be better if you didn’t…”
She already had, and was turning it over in her hand. “Oh look,” she said. “There’s writing on it.”
“Which I’m hoping this Gogerty bloke will be able to read. I can’t. You can’t.”
“Yes, I can.”
Freewheeling too fast downhill on his bicycle and suddenly finding the brakes didn’t work, the same sudden feeling of Oh. “You can?”
“Mm. It says—”
“But you can’t,” Don insisted. “It’s magic writing. Probably you’ve got to chuck it in a fire or something, to make the letters show through.”
“It’s Russian,” Polly said calmly. “I did Russian GCSE, remember? It says…”
“Well?”
She put the pencil sharpener back on the table. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only got a D. But that’s all right,” she went on brightly. “I’ve still got my dictionary. I can look it up.”
“Russian?”
She nodded. “Cyrillic alphabet. What did you think it was?”
He pretended he hadn’t heard that. “No reason why they shouldn’t have magic in Russia if we’ve got it over here,” he said grudgingly. “You sure you can’t make out what it says?”
“Hang on, I’ll have another look. It’s something something and then I think it’s just initials. Oh.”
“What?”
“Really I’m just guessing, but…”
“What?”
“Made in the USSR,” she said, and dumped the pencil sharpener unceremoniously on the table. “Oh well.”
Don sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “At least we know something about it, even if that something is no bloody use at all.” He frowned. “If it’s Soviet era, maybe it’s some kind of spy stuff. You know, KGB department of dirty tricks.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. So what?”
“At least then it’d be proper technology,” he said, a bit more cheerfully, “as opposed to the sodding supernatural. Maybe it’s an experimental hi-tech device that went wrong. During the Cold War both sides were researching some pretty wacky stuff.”
She looked at him in mild disbelief. “I see,” she said. “So if it’s a dimension-bending, reality-skewing gadget, it’s all right, just as long as it’s not magic. Don, you’re strange.”
“Think about it,” he urged. “If it’s technology, then somewhere there’s some laws of physics it’s got to obey. In which case, maybe we could figure it out. At least it wouldn’t be cheating.”
“It really makes a difference to you, doesn’t it?”
A sad look spread across his face like melted ice cream. “Just kidding myself,” he said. “Even if it’s man-made rather than superbloodynatural, it can still vanish people and turn hairs into flying robots. We’re still screwed, unless this Gogerty bloke can sort it all out.”
Digging the tunnel hadn’t been nearly as hard as he’d imagined it would be. Chicken feet are designed to shift earth. Chicken feet motivated by human minds got the job done in no time flat.
Ms Byron organised them into teams: 10 per cent of the workforce (three chickens) worked the face, scrabbling dirt and stones backwards, to be cleared out of the tunnel by the rest of the flock, stationed in a continuous relay the length of a chicken leg apart. It was a bit like playing football in a narrow corridor, with only reverse passing allowed. Kevin quite enjoyed it; it reminded him of kicking up drifts of dry leaves when he was a kid.
Once they’d broken through and emerged warily into the vast, uncertain, fox-infested wilderness beyond the wire, it took all Ms Byron’s moral authority to keep them from scuttling back down the hole again, or wandering off in search of worms and protein-rich earwigs. She did it, though. Standing on one leg while scratching at dottles of mud in her belly plumage with the other, she was practically Churchillian as she urged them not to waver in their quest. A phone, she reminded them, all they needed was a phone, or a PC, or a fax machine, and before they knew it they’d be human again, and in a position to go back to their desks and their loved ones. If she believed that, nobody else did, but it sounded very fine when she said it.
She split them up into seven search parties and dispatched them to investigate the outbuildings. Kevin felt very proud when she chose him to be in her team, and it was pretty well inevitable that they should be the ones to make the discovery. It wasn’t what they were supposed to be looking for, of course. It was a mouldy old car. There’s one in every shed in every farmyard in the country.
“It’s exactly what we need,” Ms Byron said firmly. “All we’ve got to do is get it started and drive to the nearest town.”
It’s a clear sign that you’re a born leader when nobody agrees with you but nobody disagrees with you either, at least not out loud. Getting inside the car was no big deal, since the driver’s-side window had been helpfully left wound down. Keys in the lock were, of course, too much to hope
for.
“We don’t need keys,” Ms Byron said scornfully. “Get the bonnet open and hot-wire it.”
The bonnet opener, tucked down under the dashboard, was one small plastic lever for a man, but a giant immovable girder for chickenkind. They tried flying up and hanging on it with their beaks. They tried forming a poultry pyramid by standing on each others’ heads and leaning on it. One particularly resourceful Buff Orpington flew out of the car window and came back with a yard of baler twine clenched in her beak. They tied one end to the lever (a small miracle in itself ), looped it round the gear lever as a capstan and hauled on the other end till the lever snapped off, leaving a half-inch stub. Only then did a small, nervous Maran bantam point out that there was a whole mess of wires hanging down where the dashboard had come loose, and maybe they could trace them back and figure out which two connected to the ignition. Once they’d done that, it was a simple matter of pecking off the insulation and holding two ends of bare copper twist together. Incredibly, the battery wasn’t flat. With a roar that sent two nervous Warrens into a premature moult, the engine started.
“Right,” Ms Byron said. “You four, perch on the steering wheel. You two, stand by to shift the gear lever into first. You two, see what you can do with the rest of the gear lever. I’ll do the accelerator myself.”
By the time they hit the side of the shed they must have been doing at least fifteen. The plank wall didn’t stand a chance. After that, things got a bit out of claw for a while, but (as Ms Byron maintained later) they were just getting the hang of it when they hit the stupid barn and stalled the engine.
“Look,” Kevin said. “Humans.”
Man or chicken, he was used to people not listening to him. Fair enough; he never had anything important to say. This time, though, he couldn’t help feeling, was different. He raised his voice quite a lot and said, “Excuse me.”
Ms Byron was pecking angrily at the tangle of wires drooping out of the dashboard. “What do you mean, you can’t remember which ones go to the battery?” she clucked. “Here, get out of the way. Let me do it. Honestly, you’re hopeless. One little thing goes wrong and you’re all fussing around like a lot of headless—”
“Excuse me,” Kevin repeated. Nobody paid him any attention. A bulky Leghorn cross had got her claw on one wire and another in her beak, just as a Plymouth Rock connected two other bits of wire together. For a split second the Leghorn was hanging in mid-air with no visible means of support, and when it finally landed, its plumage was fluffed wildly out like a feather duster.
Kevin looked back. The humans were still there, but they could wander off at any moment. Nothing for it. He stuck his chest out, threw his head back and crowed for all he was worth.
It got him noticed, at any rate. The hens all stopped what they were doing and stared, while Ms Byron gave him a filthy look and said, “What are you making that ridiculous noise for?”
“Humans,” he replied, as soon as he’d got his breath back. “Over there.”
To her credit, Ms Byron didn’t need to be told twice. Spreading her wings, she flew up off the dashboard, through the window and quite some way across the yard before touching down, and as soon as her claws met the concrete, she started running, with thirty hens in close pursuit. For some reason, Kevin didn’t follow her. He stayed where he was and watched as Ms Byron hurtled towards the humans, yelling, “We come in peace! Take us to your leader!”
It was a valiant effort, he thought, but he had a feeling she’d forgotten something.
“Oh look,” Eileen said. “Chickens.”
Her husband had already seen them for himself. Though a townie to the core, he’d seen chickens before. When he was a kid, just after the war, several families in their street had kept a few hens in their back gardens, and he could remember being allowed to poke bits of wilted cabbage through the wire at them, that being what passed for excitement in austerity-era Britain. So, although he hardly regarded himself as an expert, he reckoned he knew a little bit about poultry – enough, at least, to be fairly sure they weren’t supposed to charge at you making bloodcurdling squawking noises. Also, he’d seen The Birds when it first came out, and it had made quite an impression on him.
“Come on, Eileen,” he said, trying to sound calm so as not to alarm her. “Let’s go, shall we?”
“Why are those chickens…?”
Indeed. Why did the chicken cross the yard? One of life’s mysteries. “I said come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He didn’t have to argue his case any further. The feathered horde was sweeping towards them like an incoming wave, and Eileen had seen Hitchcock’s masterpiece too. In fact, they’d seen it together, in the back row of the one-and-nines, which was why there were large chunks of the film they were quite hazy about. But they remembered the gist of it.
“Let’s run,” Eileen said.
Trouble was, the chickens could run faster. Quite soon, the horrible things were flowing round their ankles, clucking and flapping their nasty wings, and they didn’t seem inclined to take “Shoo” for an answer. George and Eileen couldn’t bring themselves to tread on them, and if they’d had the dexterity to kick moving chickens while running they would have been playing in the Premier League instead of running a dry cleaning business. In fact, things could’ve turned quite nasty if Mr Williams hadn’t spotted—
“Quick,” he said. “In here.”
The gate was tied with a strand or two of heavily frayed baler twine, but it came loose when he yanked hard at it. They darted through and slammed the gate behind them, scattering chickens like sea spray. Eileen leaned against it, while he fumbled to reconnect the bits of string into a coherent fastening.
“That’s all right,” he said, breathing heavily. “For a moment there…”
“George,” said Eileen, “there’s a pig in here.”
So there was. A great big thing, pink with black spots and a ring through its nose, like a teenager. On the other hand, it wasn’t a chicken. “Don’t tease it,” he said. “It’ll leave us alone.”
“I’m not teasing it,” Eileen replied. “George, do something.”
It wasn’t quite his finest hour, but it made the shortlist. Stepping carefully round the pig and grimly not looking down at what he was walking in, he went to the other end of the highwalled concrete enclosure, opened a little gate and held it for her while she scuttled through. Not a word. The parfait gentil knight.
“Let’s go home,” he said.
They took a long detour to make sure they stayed well away from the other side of the yard, just in case the chickens reappeared, but they got back to the road without any further trouble. They didn’t talk much on the walk back. The view didn’t seem quite so charming, now they knew the sort of savage creatures likely to be roaming about in it. They had a nasty moment when they came round a bend and saw a cow’s head sticking over a gate, staring at them, but they crossed over to the other side of the lane and ignored it, and nothing bad happened.
“George,” said Eileen, “those chickens. They were driving that car.”
“I know.”
She didn’t say any more, but she didn’t need to. Chickens that drove old Cortinas and mobbed humans didn’t belong in the normal world; they had to be another manifestation of It, which meant It didn’t stop at the shop door, and they couldn’t just walk away, even for a little while. Clearly there was no point complaining, making a fuss; no point ringing the local paper or You and Yours, or writing to their MP, even if they ever stopped still in one place long enough to have one. All they could do was knuckle down and put up with It, and hope that eventually, one day, It’d stop of Its own accord. Not much of a hope, but still…
“George.”
They stood rooted to the ground. Here, in this lay-by, next to this gate, opposite that double helping of landscape, was where their ill-starred walk had started. Here was where the shop had been when they set out. Here was now where the shop wasn’t.
“O
h God,” George said.
The shop had moved on again, and this time it had left without them.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Anyway,” said Mr Huos, “that’s all I know about my early life. Sad, isn’t it?”
Jack Tedesci nodded vaguely. He’d never thought of himself as a timid sort of guy before. If anything, he was a bit concerned about coming across as a trifle bumptious, a little on the loud and aggressive side, maybe just a mini-tad scary to people who didn’t know him. It was only now, wedged into a cramped men’s toilet with Mr Huos looming over him and telling him all this crazy stuff with that wild look in his eye, that Jack realised he was at heart a frightened little animal who wanted nothing more out of life than to find a nice safe hole in the ground and burrow right down into it as far as he could go.
“Very,” he mumbled. “Very sad indeed.”
It would have been all right if he hadn’t believed what he’d been hearing. The ravings of a loon, even a big, tall loon like Mr Huos, wouldn’t have disturbed him particularly, any more than if he’d been screamed at in the street by a wino. It was the content, not the manner of presentation, that was messing with Jack Tedesci’s head. At first he’d assumed he was listening to an amnesia story – found unconscious on a Georgian mountainside, pockets stuffed with money, couldn’t remember his own name – but as the narrative went relentlessly on, details jumped out at him and hung like bats from the inner fabric of his mind. The steel earrings, for example; the ability to understand any language immediately. The fact that his internal organs weren’t where Gray’s Anatomy reckoned they ought to be. Really, he didn’t like the sound of that at all.
Mr Huos was looking at him contemplatively, either like an artist considering a work in progress or like a spider checking out its silk-wrapped larder, he wasn’t quite sure which. “I expect,” Mr Huos said, “all that stuff sounds pretty screwy to you.”
When all else fails, honesty. “Yes,” said Jack.
Mr Huos grinned like a dog. “You ain’t heard nothing yet. Listen.”