by Heide Goody
“Our other candidates,” said Vivian, “claimed that they felt compelled – against their will – to tell nothing but the truth in this interview.”
Omar nodded but said nothing.
“Are you perhaps under a similar compulsion?” she asked.
Omar considered this, opened his mouth, croaked a little and then closed it.
“Yes. Although I still stand by the answers I’ve just given.”
“As you should,” said Vivian, who approved of his pragmatism. “Care to speculate on the cause of this sudden honesty?”
“Tea,” he said.
Vivian was not going to rise to enigmatically monosyllabic responses. “Go on, professor.”
“Nina Seth went out of her way to provide us all with refreshments this morning. I know from certain sources that she confiscated a vial of rehpat viarr from a visitor to the Black Barge yesterday. Nina’s animosity towards me is well known. It all seems probable.”
Vaughn threw down the paper he held. For a man who was usually about as extroverted as a corpse, this was a dramatic gesture.
“One of our own staff attempting to sabotage the recruitment process!” he said to the air above them.
“Quite!” said Cheryl, attempting to be equally incensed.
“I think it’s been enlightening,” said Vivian. “We should even consider making it policy. But while we have you in this condition, professor…”
“Yes, Vivian?”
“Why do you want this job?”
“I’m seeking new opportunities,” said Omar.
“That’s an empty statement. Are you not happy with your current job?”
“It’s a means to an end.”
“Then to what end is the tech support role with the consular mission a means?”
“Morag Murray,” said Omar and then pursed his lips and looked savagely aside.
“Morag Murray?” said Cheryl.
He stood, furious with himself and half-turned away. “I can’t speak about this. Please ignore what I just said.”
“I think it’s fair to say that the professor has an ulterior motive in coming here today,” said Vivian.
Omar said nothing, perhaps knowing any further comment would be incriminating.
“Smash it down, freakishly large man!” yelled Steve the Destroyer from within Junior’s bag.
“Nearly there,” said Rod, probing his tie clip lock picks in the padlock on the shed door.
“You should have left Steve at home,” said Senior. “You were meant to be at home too.”
“I was working this case,” said Junior. “And getting results.”
“We got here before you,” said Senior.
“It’s not a race, girls,” said Nina. “Come on, Rod. Haven’t you done that yet?”
Rod growled, grabbed the padlock and, with a savage twist, ripped it – lock, latch, hasp, screws and all – off the rotten shed wall.
“It’s done,” he said and pulled the door open. The interior was dark and musty with an unwholesome stink that crept up on Junior and then leapt at her like a repellent ninja.
“Smells like an open drain,” she said, wafting a hand in front of her nose.
“Smells like fish,” said Senior, doing likewise.
“Be prepared for more happy tissues,” said Nina.
Rod stepped carefully inside. The damp floorboards creaked under his weight. “I think it might actually be fish.”
The three women followed him into the cramped space and regarded the tanks, tubs and other paraphernalia: fifty-percent occultism and fifty-percent aquarium supplies, the laboratory of an alchemist trying to turn base metals into goldfish.
“Aren’t these Dinh’r eggs?” said Rod.
“They are,” said Nina, “and this stuff is khei-ba drel.”
“What’s that?”
“Dried fish jizz.”
Rod grimaced. “This Jeffney kid needs to get out more, get a hobby.”
“Oh, he has hobbies,” said Senior, crouching beside Junior to inspect a tank. “I think that’s the problem.”
Junior tracked one of the little swimming creatures with her finger. Limbs and fins, mandibles and claws. The agility of a fish and the armour of a lobster.
“You know what,” she said, “I don’t think these are the mummy and daddy ones.”
“Me neither,” said Senior.
There were damp and empty spaces on the shelves nearest the door. Senior tugged at a sodden label that had fallen off. “Lu’crik oyh – Handle with Care. Isn’t that just badly-phrased Venislarn for ‘big fish’?”
“Lu’crik oyh,” said Nina. “Wait. I’ve heard that recently.” She blinked several times. “Yes! The Mammonite woman. She was going to give me a muffin but Vivian said no.”
“You’ve slipped into gibberish mode,” said Rod.
“No,” said Nina. “It was on Monday. Yes. The Smith-Mammonson woman, the Mammonite in Dickens Heath. She said they had one in their garden.”
“Coincidence?”
“Or the latest designer pet, cooked up right here by this amateur,” said Nina.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” said Rod. “I think I’m starting to dislike this guy.”
“Get in line. There’s a queue.”
Vivian spoke with Vaughn outside meeting room three while the two remaining candidates waited inside to hear their fate.
“Cheryl made her feelings clear,” said Vaughn. “Illegally administering a truth drug to the candidates invalidates the whole process. And yet we have successfully discounted Professor Omar as a viable candidate.”
“We have him held in room two so we can question him about his apparent interest in Morag. He might still be the best man for the job,” said Vivian.
“You would trust him with our most exotic and dangerous treasures?”
“Trust has nothing to do with it. Trust can be engineered and extorted. I would argue that, right now, we cannot afford any delays in appointing someone to this post. The Vault and the Dumping Ground desperately need an organising hand and we have a significant number of OOPArts and relics that even I cannot identify.”
A thought occurred to Vivian.
“I have a further assessment activity for Mr Barnes and Ms Kaur,” she said. “This afternoon, we will decide if Professor Omar is disqualified or not, conduct another round of interviews and make our selection.”
Vaughn shifted uneasily. “You are aware that I am the senior member of staff here?”
“I am, Mr Sitterson.”
“And that any decision on this matter is mine to make?”
“Of course.”
There was a moment of silence. Vivian looked at Vaughn. Vaughn looked at his shoes.
“Very good,” he said. “I’ll be in my office.”
Vivian went into room three. Cameron and Kathy looked up at her with the half-expectant, half-fearful “dog at the pound” look of interview candidates everywhere. Vivian produced a photocopy she’d made of the Kal Frexo runes and put it in front of the two of them. They looked at it and then at her.
“Tell me what you can,” she said.
“These are Kal Frexo summoning runes,” said Cameron.
“All of them?”
“There are only twelve known runes,” said Kathy.
“So, five of them don’t belong or are fakes or are lost no longer,” said Cameron.
“And yet I think I’ve seen some of the supposedly lost ones elsewhere,” said Vivian. “I’m wondering where? Any ideas?”
Kathy gave Vivian an arch look which Vivian did not approve of.
“Is this part of the interview or are you just getting us to do the tech support role?” asked the woman with a twitch of her improperly expressive eyebrows.
“Yes,” said Vivian. “For one of you, this is just an interview exercise. For the other, this is your first task in your new role.”
“Because I know one place where the lost runes can be found,” she said with slow th
oughtfulness.
“Where?” said Vivian.
“The Bloody Big Book. You have it in your storage vault, don’t you?”
“We do.”
“Have you ever read it? Any parts of it, I mean.”
“Several thousand pages,” said Vivian. Kathy had a point. “Perhaps we should all go down and inspect it.”
Mrs Lee-Mammonson may have been desperate enough to take delivery of her lu’crik oyh at Ray’s convenience but, now that she had him, she was going to get her money’s worth from him. She had him inspect the pond at the bottom of the long rear garden that backed onto the canal. She had him check the lining and the filter pump and then demanded a detailed description of the creature’s dietary requirements, which Ray really had no expertise in. Ray had no choice. He had very little time in which to raise a further one hundred pounds and get it to the Black Barge but he couldn’t risk infuriating a Mammonite.
These creatures might look human (he suspected Mrs Lee-Mammonson had too many teeth or was it that the corners of her mouth were too elastic?) but humanity was just a face they wore, a fashion they had chosen. The warning signs were everywhere in the house as he came through: a cellar door with a padlock, the sculpture of their unholy mother Yoth Mammon in the hallway, the oven bigger than anyone would need to cook the largest of Christmas turkeys, the sigil-surrounded mirror in the lounge that Ray avoided looking in. Ray trod carefully.
“I couldn’t say if Kobe beef or wagyu beef would be best,” he said. “They will eat anything.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mrs Lee-Mammonson, “but I have asked the man at Waitrose to put aside the best cuts for…? Oh my. I don’t even know what his name is.”
“He hasn’t got a name yet,” said Ray. “Why don’t we get him in the pond and then you can think of a name for him.”
“All by myself?” said Mrs Lee-Mammonson, eyes wide. “Such responsibility.”
Ray hoiked the tub to the edge of the pool. The lu’crik oyh inside thrashed and nearly toppled the tub straight in. But Ray held it steady. If this one was like any of the others, it would come out hungry and angry. The trick was to open and tip the tub at the same time. Ray was very mindful of his fingers at the edge of the lid as he tipped and opened. The lu’crik oyh had sharp pincers and powerful jaws, even at this size.
The lu’crik oyh flopped into the pond with a meaty splash. Mrs Lee-Mammonson jumped up and down doing excited little handclaps like an over-emotional Japanese schoolgirl.
“He’s so big!” she exclaimed passionately.
“He’ll get bigger if you let him,” said Ray.
“We’ve already got plans for a bigger pond. Maybe one day we’ll just cut a channel into the canal so he can stretch his fins when he likes.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Ray.
The lu’crik oyh circled the edge of the pool with casually powerful flicks of its segmented and armoured tail. Its legs clicked on the hard plastic lining of the pond, testing it.
“The Lodge-Mammonsons have already had to rescue theirs from the canal several times. It just keeps climbing out.”
“It’s done what?”
“Anyway,” smiled Mrs Lee-Mammonson (yes, too many teeth), “the hard work is done. You must come in for a drink. A lie down perhaps?”
Slag, he thought.
“Um, no thank you, Mrs Lee-Mammonson.”
The Mammonite woman laid a hand on his chest, fingernails tensing slightly against him.
“But you look tired,” she said in a voice that was probably meant to be sultry but was as creepy as hell. “I could do something about that.” She smiled.
Yes, thought Ray. The creepy slag would do something about his tiredness all right, something permanent. She’d paid him. All he needed to do was get out of there.
“I really must be going…”
“Is that the fish man?” called a voice. A head peered over the fence to next door.
“Audrey Bell-Mammonson!” snapped Mrs Lee-Mammonson. “Can’t you see we’re in conversation here?”
“I need the services of Mr Ray.”
“Hello, Mrs Bell-Mammonson,” said Ray. “Nice to see you.”
“You had better not be touching that fence, Audrey,” Mrs Lee-Mammonson snarled. “That is our property.”
The other Mammonite held up her hands to show that no contact was being made. “Mr Ray, I demand that you come here at once and take a look at my lu’crik oyh.”
“I’m kind of busy at the moment. I’ve got another lu’crik oyh to –”
“At once.”
Ray grimaced and stepped back from Mrs Lee-Mammonson’s touch. “I’d best see what she wants,” he said and backed away as quickly as possible.
Vivian led Kathy and Cameron towards the Vault. Its accumulation of new pieces plus Morag Murray’s demolition of local time-space with her mishandling of the Berry Mound vase of multiplication had made it a place of chaos: no longer an austere museum but a junk shop of artefacts.
“There is a lot of work to be done here,” Vivian said. “We’ve not really had the time or expertise to properly catalogue or store some of the new acquisitions. And there have been a lot of late.”
“Any reason for that?” said Kathy.
“There has certainly been a sharp increase in items being found in places they couldn’t possibly have been placed. Inside trees. Within entirely inappropriate strata of soil. It’s all very whimsical and I can’t say I like it.”
“I wrote my dissertation on OOPArts,” said Cameron. “Non-Venislarn ones. I recall there are burnt mounds alongside one of the rivers in Birmingham that are, archaeologically, quite anachronistic.”
Vivian made a disapproving noise. Objects and people should stick to their proper place and time. The world was messy enough without things wandering off to places they didn’t belong.
She stopped at the edge of the magical barrier Omar had set up earlier in the week to contain the universes Morag had unleashed from the multiplication vase. Omar had been right. The separate realities had found their balance and settled, many had righted themselves and shrunk to accommodate their neighbours. The appearance of the whole thing had shifted from Escheresque nightmare to a simple maze of mirrors.
“As you can see,” said Vivian, “we’ve had a little accident. Resolving this will be another job for the successful candidate. The Wittgenstein Volume is this way. Do not wander off. Your safety cannot be guaranteed.”
“Oh good,” said Kathy.
Morag Senior let Nina take the lead with the Smith-Mammonson woman; Nina had experience with these people. There had been no Mammonites in Edinburgh but Morag could smell crazy on this woman like cheap cider on a doorway alcoholic.
“Good morning. How are you doing today? It’s Miss Nina Seth, isn’t it? And you and I have not met before. My name is Melanie.”
“This is Morag Murray,” said Nina. “She’s a colleague.”
“Have you come back for a muffin?” said the Mammonite. “I haven’t got any in at the moment but I could bake some if you’d care to come in and wait.”
Senior could see that Nina was resisting temptation. “We’ve come to talk about your lu’crik oyh.”
Mrs Smith-Mammonson’s slightly skew-whiff face lit up.
“It’s the absolute envy of the whole neighbourhood.”
“So we hear,” said Nina. “We’d love to take a look and talk about where you got it from.”
“Do come through, Nina. Morag. Can I call you Morag?”
The entryway of the house was tiled white. The walls were the wipe-down white of clinic walls. The scent of lemony disinfectant hung in the air. Just across the threshold, Morag could see a tiny, perfect circle of blood on the porcelain floor. Every fibre of her body screamed out that if they went inside that house they’d never come out.
“You know what,” she said, “we’ll just go round the side.”
“You can come through, Morag.”
“Muddy feet,”
said Senior. “This way, Nina.”
Vivian navigated a course through the Vault, never stepping across from the one true universe (or, at least, her universe) into any of the others. The tiles on ceiling and floor were her principal guide. The lines between universes were visible as breaks in the tiling pattern: ordered squares becoming diverging triangles of tiles. As they walked, they saw fallen shelves, smashed artefacts and even smears of blood: remnants of Morag’s time with the Whitehall visitor. Twice, Vivian thought she saw movement down the distant corridors of other dimensions. She looked but did not stop to investigate. Any dangers lay on the other side of the barrier.
Ten minutes of careful walking brought them to the room that housed the Wittgenstein Volume. The walls were lined with confiscated paintings by artists who had glimpsed more of the Venislarn than they should and committed what they had seen to canvas. The Wittgenstein Volume was housed in a modified pressure chamber which currently had an axe embedded in the porthole on its front.
“Naturally, this will need tidying up,” said Vivian, brushing crumbs of broken glass aside with her foot.
“Naturally,” said Kathy.
Vivian tapped a seven-digit code into the keypad beside the chamber door, struggled briefly with the locking wheel and pulled the door open. Inside, on a cubical pedestal, sat the Bloody Big Book.
“Tell me what you already know,” said Vivian.
“It has an infinite number of pages,” said Kathy, “each page has a thickness of just under fifty micrometres but the whole book is only twenty-one centimetres thick.”
“Twenty-one point three seven three centimetres,” cut in Cameron, “and it weighs –”
“One point oh six one kilograms,” cut in Kathy, “or two hehgn’u.”
“All of which is mathematically impossible but nonetheless true,” said Cameron. He moved forward to get a better view of the open pages. “The binding is thought to have been made by Roedelius in the eighteenth century and although the book can be closed and opened, it’s impossible to definitively turn to either the first or last page. Can I touch it?”
“I think, under the circumstances, we should take it out so that we might all have a closer look,” said Vivian.