by Tom Holt
It was fairly engrossing stuff (maybe he’d been wrong to focus exclusively on the penguins-in-June angle after all) and he’d read fifteen pages before he looked up to discover that there was someone sitting next to him. Mr Gogerty didn’t do double takes or sitting high jumps. Instead, he put the report back in his briefcase and clicked the locks shut before turning his head, taking a long, steady look at the newcomer and saying, “I’m Stanley Gogerty. Who the hell are you?”
He’d gone with who mostly out of politeness, but what would have been more appropriate. It was humanoid, more or less. It had arms and legs and a perfectly spherical blob for a head, snowman eyes in an otherwise blank face. A six-foot 3D gingerbread man badly rendered in CGI.
“Hello,” it replied.
The voice told him what it was. Unlike the body, the voice was packed with information. It had a slight London accent; it sounded male and early thirties, diffident, self-conscious, a bit like it needed to go to the lavatory very soon indeed. Its master’s voice, Mr Gogerty concluded, which meant it was some form of trfade artefact, a golem or Henderson projection, or possibly a good old-fashioned spat-upon hair.
“How long have you been sitting there?” Mr Gogerty asked.
“Oh, about five minutes,” it replied. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”
Probably not an assassin in that case. “Who sent you?”
It opened the slit in its face, but no words came out, and since it had no lips Mr Gogerty couldn’t lip-read. It had been a trick question, in any case. Animated proxy artefacts can’t do proper nouns.
“I see,” Mr Gogerty said. “Well, what can I do for you?”
“You must come with me at once,” it replied. “Life and death. If convenient.”
Mr Gogerty smiled. “I’d like to do that,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’d be possible. This train is…”
This train was, in fact, slowing down. Mr Gogerty glanced through the window and saw VICTORIA in a red circle with a bar through it. As the train drew smoothly to a halt, he checked his watch. Three dials.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
It smiled. “I have no idea,” it replied. “Follow me, please.”
Out onto the platform, up the escalator, out into the street. Oddly enough, none of the hundreds of people swarming about in Victoria station seemed to notice that Mr Gogerty’s companion was a featureless, asexual, biscuit-coloured nude, or that it didn’t have a valid ticket. Outside, it raised its arm above its head and a taxi immediately drew up beside it – driven, Mr Gogerty noticed, by what could only be the thing’s identical twin brother. His escort didn’t specify an address, but the taxi drove off anyway.
Neither of the gingerbread men said a word after that, so Mr Gogerty took the opportunity to read a bit more of the Mendoza report. He didn’t feel in the least apprehensive, which was good. His only regret was that his boyhood promise to his mother, not to get into a motor vehicle with strange men, was now completely and irrevocably broken. On the plus side, according to his watch he’d re-entered conventional linear time only three minutes after he’d left it. To a self-employed man who charged by the hour, that was a small mercy worth being grateful for.
The taxi stopped, and Mr Gogerty looked up and put the report away in his briefcase. He frowned. If he didn’t know any better…
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Here,” the thing replied, with as beautiful a smile as it’s possible to produce without a conventional mouth. The taxi door swung open, and Mr Gogerty got out.
Briefly, in the time it would take a photon to travel twenty yards, Mr Gogerty considered running for it. After all, it hadn’t been precisely established whether he’d been (a) rescued or (b) abducted, though he suspected it was really (c) both. It was possible – more than possible, given the vicissitudes of his trade – that he’d been brought here by an enemy, though presumably not the enemy who’d marooned him briefly on a Tube train in the future, and that if he now went where he was led, he’d have cause to regret it. It didn’t feel like that, however, and Mr Gogerty was quite good at sensing impending danger, a talent which explained the fact he’d lived long enough to own more than six pairs of shoes. Also, he was confoundedly curious, and if he was right about where he’d been brought to…
“Follow,” said the thing. “Please,” it added. So Mr Gogerty followed.
A glimpse of a street name, and then of the number on the front door, confirmed at least part of his hunch. The interesting question now was which flat in the block he’d be taken to. It also occurred to him to wonder what his enemy – his original enemy, the one who’d planted on him a tracking device which he hadn’t so far been able to identify and remove – was making of all this.
The thing led him up the stairs, with the other thing, the one who’d been driving the taxi, following on behind at a discreet distance. The number on the door they stopped at answered the most pressing question in his mind, so when the door was opened (by a tall, thin, pale young man with long, shaggy hair and glasses) he knew what to say.
“Hello,” he said, “you must be Donald Mayer. I’m Stanley Gogerty.”
Surprisingly, the young man didn’t seem to have been expecting that. “Um,” he said. “I mean, I’m sorry. You’re late.”
Mr Gogerty considered him. To survive for any length of time in the profession, it helped to be a good – and very, very quick – judge of character. Mr Gogerty’s very first impression was that Mr Mayer was a pretty gormless young man. No, not just gormless, but a black hole into which gorm falls and is utterly consumed. Why he revised that opinion a fraction of a second later he wasn’t entirely sure, but once the revision had been made he was quite happy to abide by it. Gormless, yes, but inside the oyster of his gormlessness lurked a tiny seed pearl of something else, which was why, accused of lateness, Mr Gogerty nodded gravely and said, “Sorry about that. I was held up. This—” He nodded at the thing.
“I know,” Mr Mayer interrupted. “I sent them. I think,” he added. “Hair?”
The two things nodded enthusiastically, then jumped into Mr Mayer’s hand, shrinking as they went. By the time they landed on his palm, they were two carrot-red hairs, which Mr Mayer put back with an embarrassed look, like a man doing up his fly in public.
“I hope they didn’t—”
“Not at all,” Mr Gogerty replied briskly. “In fact, they rescued me from a temporal vortex, so I’m much obliged to you. Shall I come in?”
Mr Mayer looked at him as though he’d just been told he’d been chosen to lead the human race in its crusade against the Marshmallow People. “Um,” he replied. “Sorry. Yes.”
“After you, then.”
“What? Oh, right. This way.”
Mr Gogerty followed, and as he crossed the threshold he felt it, the presence of a trade artefact: something like having your skull squeezed in a bench vice while ants run riot inside your clothes. Strong. In fact… He paused to steady himself on the door frame.
There aren’t any Oscars in the profession – no Emmys, no Pulitzers, Nobels or Bookers. There’re the Siegfrieds, but they’re really only for dragon slaying, vampire kebabbing and the like, while these days the Merlins are little more than a popularity contest, a means of recognising the fact that so-and-so’s managed to complete thirty years in the trade without being killed, transfigured or imprisoned for ever in the heart of a glacier. The only meaningful accolade left is the four-yearly Shumway Award (nowadays it’s the Carlstein Lager-Bank of the Dead-Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits-Shumway Award), presented to the practitioner responsible for a truly significant advance in professional research. Past winners have included Arne Mortensen, Li Huan-Chi, Theo van Spee, Frank Carpenter and the Shaftgrave sisters, and it’s widely recognised as the only gong in the biz that money or threats can’t buy. The irony is that nine times out of ten, the recipient is some otherwise run-of-the-mill individual who happened to be in the right place at the right time: Mortensen on th
e steps of the Smithsonian at the exact moment when Krakatoa erupted, Li history-kibbitzing in Sir Isaac Newton’s garden when the apple parted from the tree and slowly floated upwards, Molly Shaftgrave inadvertently trapped inside her own suitcase at Heathrow Terminal 5 and shipped across the interdimensional void to the parallel universe where Bing Crosby was cast as the Man With No Name in A Fistful of Dollars. In the past Mr Gogerty had felt bitterly aggrieved at the sheer dumb luck that had brought these losers the trade’s most coveted accolade, knowing full well that he’d never get that lucky. Or maybe (the waves of pressure emanating from whatever-it-was made his ears hum like an extractor fan) not.
“My sister Polly,” said Mr Mayer, wobbling his hand in the general direction of some female.
It was somewhere in this room. “Pleased to meet you,” said Mr Gogerty, trying not to be too obvious as his eyes flicked from table to floor to ceiling. “You wanted to see me.”
“That’s right,” said Mr Mayer’s sister Polly. “There’s something really screwy going on, and we want to know how to make it stop.”
It took Mr Gogerty quite an effort to remember how to smile. “Screwy is my business,” he said, sitting down on the sofa and only just managing not to groan at the pounding of blood in his forehead. “Tell me all about it.”
So she did, and to his credit Mr Gogerty managed to concentrate just enough to get the gist of it. A pencil sharpener.
“Excuse me,” he interrupted. “A brass pencil sharpener?”
Mr Mayer nodded eagerly. “Could be brass, yes.”
“In a box?”
“What? Sorry. No, there wasn’t a box.”
“I see. Please, carry on.”
( Why not ask to see it? He wasn’t sure. Maybe it was simple fear. Any closer to the source of all that energy and the fillings in his teeth would start melting. Maybe subconsciously he was prolonging the moment of triumph, quite possibly the crowning glory of his entire career. Or maybe, before he actually confronted the thing, he needed to know what had become of the box. The Lifetime Achievement Shumway would look just right on his mantelpiece, in between the alabaster Minoan vase and his uncle Desmond’s clock, but boxes don’t just vanish. Something, he felt it in his scar tissue, wasn’t quite right.)
Something bad had happened. The upstairs neighbour gone without a trace. Mr Gogerty twitched in his chair. He’d forgotten all about the occupant of the flat above.
“That’d be Mr Kevin Briggs,” he said calmly.
He’d scored a few points with that one. Both of them stared at him, and the female said, “How the hell did you know that?”
Other members of the profession reckoned a little showmanship was perfectly legitimate and good for business. Fair enough, but not when it gets in the way. “I know about Mr Briggs,” he said. “He took some laundry to SpeediKleen in Clevedon Road, shortly before—” He paused. Reading his clients’ faces was an important part of his business. “The name rings a bell, I take it.”
“More like an international festival of campanology,” the young man muttered. “That’s the place where Polly took her dress, and then it—”
“Disappeared.” Mr Gogerty nodded. “I know. Let me be perfectly frank with you, Mr Mayer. SpeediKleen is the main reason I’m here.”
The sister – he’d suspected all along she was the brighter of the two – was looking at him. “You’re searching for it,” she said.
“I found it,” he replied.
He’d intended to be impressive – force of professional habit – and he’d succeeded, to the point where he was afraid he was laying himself open to charges of self-indulgence. “I think I’d better level with you both,” he said. “My client – you’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you his name, I’m sure you understand why – is extremely anxious to trace a certain object he lost recently. He has reason to believe that it was in the pocket of an overcoat he took in to SpeediKleen in Clevedon Road. I should point out that this object is capable of doing very strange things.”
“Magic,” the sister said.
Mr Gogerty winced as though he was an admiral and someone at a party had asked him what kind of boat he drove. “For want of a better word,” he said. “The important point is, this object is potentially very dangerous. In fact,” he added, as Mr Mayer’s face went the colour of ten-year-old white gloss paintwork, “there’s evidence to suggest that it’s already been responsible for some extremely unfortunate events, quite apart from the disappearance of your upstairs neighbour. I would therefore urge you most strongly—” (Damn it, Mr Gogerty thought, I’m starting to sound like a policeman at a press conference.) “If you can help me find it,” he said, “you’d be doing me a favour, and my client, and possibly a great many other people as well.”
The sister was looking at him again. “You think Don’s pencil sharpener’s this magic thing.”
“There is that possibility, yes.” (Damn it, he’d slipped back into rozzerspeak.) “If I could just…”
“You seem to know a lot about it. What it does.”
Sharp as a bramble, that one. “Mostly guesswork,” he said. “Even my client, its owner, doesn’t actually know what it is or where it came from.”
Ms Mayer nodded. “But you know, don’t you? Or you’ve got a pretty good idea.”
He made a vague gesture with his arms. “I’ve never seen this thing,” he said. “I don’t know what it looks like. I haven’t seen a picture or anything like that. But—”
“Is that right?” Ms Mayer was after him now. He decided he didn’t like her terribly much. “This client of yours hires you to find something for him, but you don’t know what it looks like. But,” she added with a frown, “you think it might be a pencil sharpener. Sorry if I’m being a bit slow here, but didn’t your client say? I mean, to be or not to be a pencil sharpener’s hardly a grey area.”
“It changes shape,” he said. “That’s what he told me. It can be one thing one day and something else the next. He only knows it’s really the same thing because it’s always been kept in its box. Once it’s out of the box, I imagine there’s no obvious way of telling it apart from any old bit of brass junk you might find at a car boot sale. Unless, of course,” he added forcefully, “you happen to be a world expert on objects of that kind. Like me.”
She smiled sourly at him. “So you do know what it is.”
“Yes.”
“Fine.” By the look of it, she didn’t like him much, either. “So what is it?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.” Oh well, he thought, never mind. “You must understand, I have a duty to my existing client. And the object in question does belong to him, after all.”
“Oh fine.” A disapproving look, as though he was global warming, nuclear weapons, GM crops and the deforestation of the Amazon basin all rolled into one. “There’s this incredibly dangerous shape-shifting magic thing on the loose that might hurt loads of innocent people, but your lips are sealed because your very rich client wants his toy back. I don’t think that’s a terribly responsible attitude, do you?”
“Polly.” He’d forgotten about Mr Mayer. “Just shut up, will you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Shut up.”
And it worked, remarkably. Having achieved his miracle, Mr Mayer gave him a very sad look and said, “The man I sent away. Is he dead?”
Mr Gogerty shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he replied.
“So we can get him back?”
Mr Gogerty hesitated. He could lie and be reasonably sure of Mr Mayer’s full cooperation; he could give Mr Huos back his ring today (though without the box, that box) and be sure of his most lucrative client’s sincere gratitude and a cheque with noughts on it like a child blowing bubbles. He was in this business to make a living, not to right wrongs. The red cape and inside-out underwear, the blue phone box, the lobbing of enchanted bling into volcanoes; that sort of stunt he left to others, nobler men with ideals and private incomes. On the other hand, Ms Polly blo
ody Mayer had a point; furthermore, she’d taken her point and stuck it right up his conscience, and he didn’t like that one bit. Something, he knew, was badly wrong, and if Mr Huos’ ring was what he thought it was, feared it was, as long as the wretched thing was out there, it could only get worse. And furthermore, someone had burned down the Carpenter Library. Much as he’d have liked to, he couldn’t overlook that.
So, “I don’t know,” he said. “I believe that if your pencil sharpener turns out to be the item my client is looking for, we should be able to undo what happened to Mr Briggs.”
Mr Mayer looked as though he was about to burst. “We can get him back.”
“We can get back something,” Mr Gogerty said. “But not necessarily what you sent away.”
Which quite obviously wasn’t what either of them had wanted to hear. They looked at him helplessly, like would-be passengers gazing through the window of a bus pulling away just as they reached the stop. Then Mr Mayer said, “Oh.”
Mr Gogerty took a deep breath. “If this thing’s what I think it is,” he said, “it will all depend on whether we can provide the answer to a question. If we can, all may yet be well. If not…”
“A question.” Polly Mayer was back in town. “What do you mean, a question?”
“A question,” Mr Gogerty repeated. “That, if my theory’s correct, is what the artefact wants. If we can answer the question, there’s a good chance things will sort themselves out. If not…” He shrugged. “It’s not quite as clear-cut an issue as you’d like to think, Ms Mayer. If we can’t answer the question, my client might as well have the item as anybody else. He’s owned it for quite a while, and this is the first time it’s caused any trouble, and only because it managed to get away from him. It could well be that it’s as safe with him as it’s possible for it to be. And yes,” he added with a faint smile, “then I’d get paid my substantial fee, so at least someone’d be happy. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you, Ms Mayer? As it happens, I’ve worked very hard indeed to get this far.”