Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

  In among the nettles, something moved.

  One of the more upbeat aspects of being a chicken was amazingly heightened senses. The faintest noise, the slightest movement. He stopped, assessed his tactical position, decided he had a clear escape route if he needed one and peered a bit closer to see what had attracted his attention.

  The nettle heap turned out to be masking a heap of old junk, the usual accumulation of valueless non-recyclables that you’ll find in a corner of any farmyard in the northern hemisphere: various bits of discarded or clapped-out farm machinery, a rusty old bike with twisted wheels, an old fridge, some plastic sacks, a tangle of wire, the corroded wreck of a galvanised watering can. It was hardly like finding a lost city of the Incas buried in the undergrowth of the rainforest. On the other hand, it was just the sort of place where a predator might hole up and wait for a very stupid chicken to come strolling by. Suddenly Kevin lost his taste for nettles. He backed away a step or two and saw it again: something was moving about in there.

  What to do? Permeating chicken DNA like the lettering in seaside rock is a disinclination to turn one’s back on danger, to break eye contact with the source of a potential threat. He backed away a few steps more, then stopped. The door of the battered old fridge was swinging open. A man was getting out.

  The extraction process was so fascinating that Kevin had to stay and watch, in spite of a million years of avian evolution screaming at him to get the hell out of there. First, a very long leg appeared, rather in the style of John Cleese doing a silly walk. Then an arm, snaking round the fridge door and groping for something to grab hold of. Unfortunately for the arm’s owner, the only grabbing-suitable articles in the vicinity were nettles. The hand unclenched and pulled back sharply, and the human said something extremely vulgar. Then the fridge wobbled a bit, and the man sort of rolled out of it, straight into the heart of the thickest clump of nettles in the patch.

  When you’re two feet high, all humans look big, but this was a big human by any standards. He was tall and powerfully built, with a shaved head, wearing a blue suit and what looked like hand-made shoes, and when he knelt on the coil of rusty barbed wire he jumped up with the speed and single-mindedness of a swooping falcon. Once on his feet, he dusted himself down and looked round, a what-the-hell expression on his finely chiselled face.

  I can talk to him till I’m blue in the face, Kevin thought sadly, but he won’t understand a word I’m saying. Pity. He had the look of a man who knew what he was doing, a resourceful type, the sort of man who might just possibly know how to turn a flock of metamorphosed lawyers back into human beings, although (Kevin couldn’t help thinking) he couldn’t be all that smart if he’d managed to get himself trapped inside a derelict fridge. Not that it mattered. Without a means of communication, nothing could be done.

  The man reached into his jacket and produced a phone, a smart phone presumably, since he didn’t use it to make a call. Instead, he tapped buttons, scowled at the screen and looked very unhappy. A built-in satnav, perhaps, or maybe he was just checking the latest commodity prices on Wall Street.

  “Look,” said a voice behind him somewhere. “Look, he’s got a phone.”

  The whole flock started shouting at once. (A phone! Look, he’s got a phone! Did you see that? Isn’t that a Nokia 776Z?) But the man didn’t seem to notice that he’d just become the centre of attention. Just chickens clucking, he must be thinking. Accordingly, when Ms Byron yelled, “Get him!” he failed to grasp the nature of the clear and present threat, at least until it was too late.

  A terrible sight to see, a man suddenly overwhelmed by poultry. Ms Byron, leading by example in the manner of Alexander and Henry V, flew straight at his face. Others went for the hands, pitching on his forearms and pecking at his wrists, while Charles the ex-conductor perched on his shoulder and sank one substantial claw in the poor bugger’s ear. Sheer weight of birdflesh on his arms meant he couldn’t lash out or defend himself. Ms Byron had her beak firmly clamped on his nose and was hanging from it, wildly flapping her wings. It was only a matter of time (three and a quarter seconds, in the event) before the man dropped the phone. It fell on the toe of his left shoe, bounced twice and landed within easy pecking distance of where Kevin, the only flock member not participating in the general assault, was standing.

  Kevin looked at the phone. Well now, he thought, that’s convenient. We deliver. It was even facing the right way. All he had to do was stoop, the way he’d been doing on and off ever since the Great Change, and use his hard pointy beak to peck the keys. Using a mobile phone is simple, piece of cake. If teenagers can do it, so can a reasonably intelligent chicken. The problem, the one and only problem, was that he hadn’t got the faintest idea who to send a message to, let alone what to say.

  His not to reason why, though. Kevin’s duty, plainly enough, was to secure the phone and remove it to a place of safety before the human had a chance to beat off the chickens. For now they had him at their mercy, but that was mostly due to the element of surprise. It couldn’t be long before he drove off his persecutors and came looking for his phone, and if he managed to recover it, the whole exercise would have been a waste of time. Kevin’s responsibility, therefore. The whole team, in fact, was depending on him to do his bit.

  He looked at the phone and stayed exactly where he was. An overwhelming desire not to get involved surged over him like floodwater. Something wasn’t quite right about all this: that he’d been the one who first noticed the human, that the phone had fallen at his feet, right way up, switched on, all ready for him. Maybe having been a chicken for a while had kick-started his basic animal survival instinct, dormant for so long in the comfortable, complacent security of being human. He couldn’t bear to think what Ms Byron would do to him if he let the phone get away – something extremely violent, he assumed, and along the lines of the French method of producing goose-liver pâté. That sort of put paid to the survival instinct theory, but it made no difference. However hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to do what was obviously required of him.

  This is hopeless, he thought, as a chicken flew backwards past his ear, thudded into the side of a building, scrambled to its feet and scuttled away squawking. The human was starting to fight back, which meant it could only be a matter of time. He’d failed. Simple as that.

  “You,” he heard Ms Byron scream, “get that bloody phone, quick.” Too late for that now. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have time to shove and nudge it to a place of concealment. Two more chickens whizzed past him, hurled by a furious hand.

  Suddenly, he knew what to do. He dipped his head and pecked four keys, just in time. He’d just finished setting beak to the fourth one when a giant hand descended from the sky, swatted him aside, grabbed the phone and swept it away. He picked himself up and watched the human walk away, the phone almost lost in his enormous hand. Oh well, Kevin thought, I screwed that up real good.

  Then the human stopped and slowly swung round to look at him.

  What he’d written was, “help.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The old man sighed and looked out of his bathroom window. The view from there was always the same – blue skies, bright sunlight – just as the sitting-room window always looked out on thick white cloud. Usually he kept the curtains drawn out of consideration for passing airliners. The effect on a pilot of a glimpse of the old man brushing his teeth at thirty thousand feet could easily be catastrophic.

  He pottered down the stairs into his tiny kitchen and made himself a strong cup of tea the hard way, using a kettle instead of a word and a snap of the fingers. Theoretically, the result should be the same either way, but he fancied that short-cut-made tea always came out a little bit too milky and pale. He conjured up a cinnamon biscuit, changed his mind and transformed it into a small slice of lemon drizzle cake.

  Something was missing, he realised – missing, presumed wrong. He wandered back into the sitting room and immediately realised what it was. There was an emp
ty space on the mantelpiece, and behind it a rectangle of paint slightly less faded. He pulled open a drawer and took out the framed photograph he’d hidden away when he realised young Stanley was on his way to pay him a visit. A large woman in early middle age, with a huge smile. He put it back where it belonged.

  To Theo, with all my love, from Corinna. Innocuous enough, but probably just as well if Stanley didn’t see it. A boy’s mother should be above suspicion, and Stanley had remarkable powers of insight and intuition. Got them from his old man, the old man thought fondly.

  He glanced at the clocks on the wall, made the necessary conversions effortlessly in his head. Above all, he wished he could be sure he was doing the right thing.

  “help.”

  Help?

  A chicken had written that, pecked it with its beak; he’d watched it do it. Of course, it could be entirely random, and if his phone had been an old-fashioned typewriter, and if it had been monkeys rather than chickens and the message had read “To be or not to be that is the…” he’d have dismissed it from his mind and thought no more of it. But a chicken; that was different. He looked round and identified the bird in question – easily done, since it had been a cockerel and all the others he could see were hens. It was standing on one leg about ten yards away, looking at him. Small, scrawny-looking, its comb pale and drooping. His mother had kept chickens for a while, so he knew a bit about them. This one was a pretty poor specimen, one for the pot rather than for breeding, and it was holding unnaturally still. Help, he thought. He cleared his throat.

  “Chicken?” he said.

  The bird seemed to hesitate. Then, very cautiously, it came towards him, watching him with furious concentration. “Chicken,” he repeated, “can you understand me?”

  No, probably not. To a bird’s ear his voice would come across as a huge, shapeless roar, drawn out and booming. He cleared the screen of his phone, typed in “hello,” and laid it slowly on the ground. Then he backed off four strides and waited.

  It took the chicken a long time to make up its mind, but in the end it came, stood over the phone, looked down at it, pecked the casing, scratched a little dust over it, pecked its own wing feathers, then looked at the word on the screen. Mr Gogerty waited, taking long, deliberate breaths. Then the chicken pecked the keypad four times, scuttled away, stopped and turned round again.

  Mr Gogerty sighed. In a way it was rather wonderful, this unique moment of cross-species diplomacy. On the other hand, unless they found a way of doing without all the preliminaries, it could take a very long time.

  “help.” A chicken with a limited vocabulary. He tapped in “yes, how?” put the phone down and waited.

  Peck, peck, peck – much quicker this time. He peered down at the result.

  “don’t know.”

  A chicken that could do apostrophes – impressive. A thought suddenly struck him, rather as though Newton had been sitting under a coconut palm rather than an apple tree at the relevant moment. He retrieved the phone and tapped in, “are you human?”

  Mercifully, the chicken had got past all that backing-away-and-acting-scared stuff. Three pecks. “yes.”

  Mr Gogerty’s mouth had gone dry. Usually it was a joyful thing, the sudden, unexpected impact of intuition; the gleam of light, the flash of gold in the mud-filled pan of routine analysis.

  This time it made him feel shaky and slightly sick.

  Impossible, he thought. It wouldn’t count. It’d be cheating.

  On the other hand, “what happened to you?” he tapped in quickly.

  The reply took a while. “no idea.”

  He grabbed the phone and started to type. He got as far as “who are yo,” then stopped, erased all that, and wrote, “are you kevin briggs?”

  He didn’t need the confirmation of the reply. Quite suddenly he knew, not just how Mr Briggs had got here or where this was or why he’d been turned into a chicken. Far more than that. It’s no good guessing, he’d told Don and Polly Mayer; you’ve got to know. And now he did. After all the fuss, it was simple really. And cheating, of course.

  The chicken who was also Mr Briggs was typing again. “can you get me out of here? please?” That brought him up short. He took the phone and wrote, “what about all the others?”

  “human too. well, lawyers.” The chicken was looking at him with those round red eyes, a plea he somehow couldn’t resist.

  The answer could wait. He took the phone, hit a few keys, inadvertently struck the wrong one and started a game of Minesweeper, cleared it, got back to the message screen, and finished typing, “it’s all right leave it to me.” He thought, just briefly, about calling up his tariff of charges and standard new client agreement, but what the hell. If he was right about all this, Mr Huos would pay. In fact, money would never be relevant again.

  “Maybe he was feeling hot,” Don said.

  Polly looked at him. “He’ll suffocate in there,” she said. “You’ve got to get him out.”

  Don stayed exactly where he was. He’d seen the way the fridge had bulged, the sheet-metal sides ballooning, until the doorway was big enough for Mr Gogerty to scramble in. And then he’d watched it deflate. It couldn’t do that of course. Steel has a tensile strength and a shearing point; he could find them in a book or look them up through Google. Stretched that far, it’d stay stretched. Only it hadn’t.

  “He’s a professional,” he muttered. “I’m sure he can look after himself.”

  “Yes,” Polly snarled, “but a professional what? He didn’t actually say.”

  Don shrugged. “I don’t know. Magician.”

  Polly made a noise like a bursting tyre. “Sorry,” she said, “but I think we’ve gone way past rabbits out of hats and the seven of clubs is in your top right-hand pocket. He could be dying in there.”

  “I don’t think so,” Don said. “Surely he’d bang on the door or something.”

  “Open the bloody fridge, Don.”

  “You do it.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not my fridge.”

  “You have my unqualified permission.”

  They stood and looked at it. A fridge is just a fridge.

  “I’m guessing,” Don said, “that it’s some kind of interdimensional portal.”

  “Could be. What’s an interdimensional portal?”

  “I have no idea.” He took one step forward, then stopped. “He took the pencil sharpener.”

  “So?”

  Don shrugged. “He’ll be all right if he’s got that with him. We don’t need to worry. It’s none of our—”

  Polly pushed past him and reached for the fridge door handle. “Don,” she said, “it feels warm.”

  “When he comes out,” Don said thoughtfully, “he can tell us if the light stays on.”

  “Mr Gogerty.” Polly waited; no reply. “Don, he’s not answering. He must be in trouble.”

  “Not if I’m right and it’s an interdimensional portal. He could be anywhere by now. In a completely different space/time continuum, for all we know.”

  Polly took her hand away from the handle and stepped back. “You’d better open it,” she said.

  He had to ask. “Why?”

  “Don,” she said, “a human life is in danger.”

  “Yes. Mine. Didn’t you hear what I just said? If that thing’s what I think it is—”

  “It’s a fridge, Don. What are you afraid of ? Frostbite?”

  “If,” he repeated slowly (their father used to do that when she interrupted him, and she’d always hated it), “that thing is what I think it is, I could end up anywhere. Or anywhen, come to that. I think Mr Gogerty used it to go somewhere, probably somewhere he couldn’t get to by any other means. I think this fridge leads somewhere, maybe the place I sent Kevin Briggs to. The difference is, Gogerty’s a professional and presumably knows what he’s doing. If I go there, how in God’s name am I ever going to get back?”

  “Don,” said his sister, “open the fucking fridge.”

  A man c
an argue only so long. Sooner or later, he does what he’s told, if only to get some peace. But there was more to it than that. To boldly go where no man has gone before – except Mr Gogerty, of course, and maybe Kevin Briggs and perhaps some other people he didn’t know about – to boldly go where not many people have gone before. To see what’s out there. To know. Up till now he’d been fighting the stuff whose name began with M for all he was worth, because it wasn’t natural, it wasn’t right, because it was totally unfamiliar and so, quite reasonably, he was frightened of it. But no longer. He wasn’t sure why, but suddenly his personal safety didn’t seem quite so all-important, not compared with the opportunity that Life was seeing fit to rub his nose in. Well, he thought, why not? He’d just take a quick look, to satisfy his curiosity.

  He reached out and took hold of the door handle. Polly had been quite wrong about it. Not hot, cold as ice.

  “Don,” he heard her say, “be careful.”

  Oh for crying out loud, he thought, and opened the door.

  He opened the door and, before her very eyes, it did it again. The fridge swelled up like a bubble, like a paper bag you blow into and then burst. “Don, don’t,” she shouted, but it was too late. Like a man in a trance, her idiot brother took a long step forward, and went inside.

  She lunged for the door, but too late; it had already shut behind him, and the fridge was back to its normal proportions. “Don,” she yelled, and yanked it open.

  Inside she saw half a dozen eggs, six cans of Stella Artois, two tomatoes, a pat of butter, a few crumbs of Stilton cheese in cling film, a half-empty jar of olives and an elderly-looking cucumber.