The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘Oh, screw you,’ Emily replied. ‘Frank, get him.’

  There’s something about the way a dog growls. Even if it’s just one of those little yappy self-propelled-toilet-brush jobs with no visible legs, it makes you stop and think, if only for a split second. Erskine, of course, was an unknown quantity. If he’d been human, the two of them rushing him would’ve probably been a justifiable business risk. But he wasn’t, was he? Human beings can’t make a noise like that.

  ‘You’re pathetic,’ Emily said, sounding rather unconvinced. ‘You’re not scared of a stupid dog, are you?’

  ‘I’m not if you’re not.’

  She had the grace not to reply. Erskine shifted slightly. The Door, of course, was still there on the wall, slightly ajar. If Frank peered past Erskine’s shoulder, he could just about catch a glimpse of forty-five years into the future.

  ‘I really am very sorry,’ Erskine said.

  ‘Are you?’ Emily scowled at him, but stayed where she was. ‘Fine way you’ve got of showing it.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Erskine practically whimpered. ‘I’m not enjoying this, you know. I like to be nice to people, I want to be friends with everybody. But I can’t not do what She told me to. I just can’t.’

  Frank looked at him. ‘Let me get this straight,’ he said. ‘That dog that kept following me around. That was you.’

  Erskine couldn’t help smiling as he nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I had a great time, too.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Oh yes. We went to all different places, with lots of really great smells. You even bought me a little ball that squeaked.’

  ‘Did I? Oh, right, yes. And I saved your life just now,’ Frank added sternly.

  ‘Yes. You did.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you, don’t run out in front of the cars.’

  No tail to put between his legs, but Erskine managed to convey the same thing by facial expression alone. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I should’ve guessed earlier,’ Emily was saying. ‘I mean, it was pretty bloody obvious, now I come to think of it. I told you, didn’t I, about not being able to hear him.’ She gave Erskine an extra-special scowl, and he slumped a little.

  ‘And you were nice to me too,’ he said.

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘Oh yes. We went to see the spiders together, and then we met that nice troll sort of person, and you let me carry the suitcase and everything.’

  ‘True,’ Emily said carefully.

  ‘And in the taxi, you let me sit on the seat.’

  ‘Yes, I did, didn’t I?’ Emily replied, in a slightly strained voice. ‘That’s got to count for something surely. In terms of pack loyalty, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  Frank was about to ask her what she was talking about, but she shushed him. ‘Really,’ she went on, ‘there are times when a person’s got to think about stuff like that, and decide for himself exactly whose dog he really is. Isn’t that right, Frank?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Just think about it,’ she went on quickly. ‘We didn’t turn you into a human and leave you to fend for yourself.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ Frank said. ‘That’s cruelty, if you ask me. A dog is for life, not just for—’

  ‘We didn’t send you off trailing someone on your own, not even caring if you came back or not. Surely that’s part of the deal. You fetch the stick, we’re there to take it when you come back, it’s the basic ethical contract between the species. But I don’t think she sees it like that, somehow.’

  ‘Bet she never bought you a squeaky rabbit,’ Frank added scathingly.

  ‘Ball.’

  ‘Whatever. It’s the thought that counts.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ Erskine wailed. ‘She told me, I’ve got to leave you here and bring the Door back. I’ve got to do what She says, or I’ll end up in the place where bad dogs go. I don’t want to go there, it’s scary.’

  Emily took a deep breath. ‘You could come with us,’ she said. ‘You could be our-Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this-you could be our dog. We’d look after you. Your own basket by the radiator. Chicken. We’d let you drink dirty rainwater from puddles.’

  It was tearing Erskine apart. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Could I sleep on the bed?’

  ‘No.’ Both of them together, like a well-trained chorus. ‘But you can roll in all the smelly stuff you like, and we won’t make you have a bath.’

  There were big fat tears in Erskine’s eyes now, and Emily thought, While he’s distracted we could probably jump him. Probably. Possibly. Possibly not. ‘I’m sorry,’ Erskine said with a sniff like tearing calico. ‘I really, really am. I do like you, both of you, very much.’

  ‘We like you too,’ Emily snarled. ‘Really we do.’

  ‘But I can’t.’ Erskine stepped back and put his hand on the knob of the Door. Oh well, Emily thought, and tensed herself for a flying tackle. She was just about to let herself go when Erskine said, ‘I could give you the other Door, I suppose, if that’d be any help.’

  It was one of those moments when everything seems to stop dead. Nothing moved, no bird sang and the only noise was the faint whine of the Everley Brothers from a distant wireless.

  ‘The other Door,’ Emily said.

  Erskine nodded. ‘Mr Gomez gave it to me when She wasn’t looking. I was going to ask him why but he sort of scowled at me, so I didn’t.’

  ‘But there can’t be another Door,’ Frank objected. ‘You told me, everybody knows there’s only the—’

  ‘Quiet, Frank.’ Emily pulled herself together so smoothly that for a moment Frank forgot all about the context and was lost in admiration. ‘I think that’d be all right, don’t you, Frank? I mean, she didn’t say anything at all about the other Door, did she?’

  ‘Nope,’ Frank managed to say.

  ‘She just said, take them to nineteen sixty-three and bring the Door back. Not both Doors. Just the Door.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Frank put in. ‘I heard her say it.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d have said both Doors,’ Emily went on pleasantly, ‘if it’d been important.’

  Erskine frowned. There was something wrong there, he couldn’t help thinking. Maybe, he thought, She hadn’t known about Mr Gomez giving him the other Door. But no, that couldn’t be right. She was, well, Her. It went without saying, She knew everything.

  ‘I suppose it’d be all right,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I mean, I’d still be doing as I was told.’

  ‘Of course you would,’ Emily said, trying hard to keep the hunger out of her voice. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s what she wants you to do, or else she’d have said bring back both Doors, instead of bring back the Door.’

  ‘But maybe She didn’t know that Mr Gomez had given me the other one.’

  Emily managed to synthesise a look of shocked amazement. ‘But Colin Gomez is on her side,’ she said. ‘So, naturally, he wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want him to do. You must see that, surely.’

  Despairingly, Erskine looked at Frank, who gave him a slight nod. That decided him. After all, Mr Arkenstone was a nice man, he’d given him the squeaky ball.

  All in all, Erskine wished that he could be a dog again. Being human was very exciting, and obviously it was a great honour to be promoted and allowed to walk on his hind legs and wear clothes and everything. But being human was so difficult. People made demands of you, and forced you to make awkward choices, and some of them told you one thing and some of them said another, and he couldn’t remember the last time anybody had thrown a stick for him or taken him for a walk. Perhaps the simple truth was that he wasn’t worthy of promotion.

  ‘All right,’ he said miserably, and from his pocket he took the roll of plasticky stuff. A voice at the back of his mind told him that he ought to carry it over in his mouth and lay it at Mr Arkenstone’s feet, but he decided to keep it simple, for now. He held it out, and Ms
Spitzer snatched it out of his hand.

  ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘Good boy.’

  Now that he’d actually done it, Erskine felt much better. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and turned to walk through the Doorway in the wall behind him. ‘I’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘See you.’

  ‘Just a moment.’ Emily held out an arm to stop him. ‘When you get back, I wouldn’t bother mentioning giving us the spare Door.’

  That didn’t sound right either. ‘Really? Are you sure?’

  ‘Better not.’

  ‘Oh.’ Erskine wondered about that. ‘Why not?’

  Ms Spitzer seemed lost for words, but Mr Arkenstone said, ‘Well, you know how busy she is. And she doesn’t need to be told all the fiddly little details. Just tell her you did as she said, and that’ll do fine.’

  ‘Oh. All right, then.’ Erskine was still thinking about it as he stepped over the Door’s threshold and came out in the twenty-first century.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ She asked, sitting upright in her chair with her hand over the mouthpiece of her phone. ‘Never mind. Sit still while I finish this call.’

  So Erskine sat, while She uncovered the phone and said, ‘Sorry about that, now where we? Oh yes. Right. All right, this is what we’re going to do.’

  Colin Gomez stirred in his chair. For more years than he cared to remember, he’d been happy in that chair. When he was sitting in it, it was like being the captain of a starship, that same balance of being in control and facing a whole galaxy of uncertain but wonderful possibilities, never knowing what extraordinary opportunities the next day might bring. It could be just another day at the office-the bread-and-butter work, the reliable bedrock customers; it could just as easily be the day he made first contact with strange new clients, sought out new work and new ways of charging for it. To that chair for their orders came his loyal crew, hand-picked, dependable, almost as essential to his well-being as the punters themselves, but ready (whether they knew it or not) to be sacrificed for the greater good without a moment’s hesitation. As for himself: he liked to tell himself that it was better to be a captain than the admiral of the fleet, anchored to the big desk instead of skirmishing the galaxy questing for new people to do business with. And if he didn’t actually believe that, the self-deception was his own precious secret, something to take out and love when nobody was looking—

  Now everything had changed. Colin reckoned (though with Amelia Carrington you never knew) that he’d got away with it so far. By turning in his unexpected and unwanted allies, he’d clawed back a little bit of her trust. Letting them have the other Door (assuming that Erskine could be relied on; which was a bit like putting your weight on a spun-glass stepladder) meant they’d be back again to help him, any moment now. At which point he’d have to do it: stage his coup, overthrow the government and get himself crowned as the God-emperor of Carringtons.

  It wasn’t what he’d wanted, except in the safe privacy of his daydream. For one thing, he wasn’t entirely sure he was up to the job. Oh, he knew how to win clients and keep them happy, and surely that was all there was to it. But supposing it wasn’t? He was dimly aware that there was rather more to it than just doing a good job and finding ways of charging twice as much as it was worth without letting the client find out he’d been scalped. There was-well, politics: diplomatic relations with other firms, industrial relations inside the firm itself, all manner of things that called for approaches more cynical and brutal than he was comfortable with. More to the point, he had to get there first; and that would mean bloodshed.

  All in all, a bit of a pickle; which was why, for the first time that Colin Gomez could remember, his chair didn’t feel right. It sort of caught him in the small of the back.

  To distract his mind he turned on his screen and scrolled through the latest news update. The headlines hit him right between the eyes like a stone from a slingshot.

  Biggest-ever bauxite find shut down by dragon infestation.

  Dennis Tanner was reading the same headline.

  He took it well. Instead of falling off his chair or screaming, he stayed perfectly still, as if the screen was a predator who’d pounce on him at the slightest sign of movement.

  The bitch, he thought. The clever bitch.

  The screen told him how the vast new bauxite deposit recently discovered at an undisclosed location on New Zealand’s South Island had attracted the unwanted attention of a dragon also, by some strange coincidence, the largest of its kind ever recorded-bringing the whole project to a standstill. Because of the location’s unique geology, access to the deposit was only possible through a large natural cavern, in which the dragon had made its nest. Pest-control teams from leading firms had so far failed to deal with the problem and a halt had been called to further attempts in view of the high attrition rate (follow the hypertext link to find out more about job vacancies in this exciting sector). The implications for the market—

  Dennis thumbed off the screen. He didn’t need to be told about them.

  First, the wonderful investment opportunity into which he’d persuaded his wealthy but vindictive relatives to pour their money now had a bloody great big lizard sitting on it. Wonderful. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was inevitable that the world bauxite market (in which his relatives were already catastrophically committed) was poised to dive like a cormorant. A vast new source of the stuff had been discovered, threatening to flood the market, but for the time being it couldn’t be got at; so, until the dragon was dead, only a gibbering idiot would touch bauxite with a ten-foot lance, since there was no way of knowing when the new strike would finally be unlocked. Dennis turned the screen back on and checked out the latest prices in Jakarta and Brisbane. As he’d thought: for the price of a pie and a pint, anybody stupid enough to want to do so could buy himself the bauxite mine of his choice.

  He closed his eyes. Dennis wasn’t a natural clairvoyant (unlike his Uncle Garforth, banned from every bookmaker’s in the Western hemisphere) but he was prepared to predict that by close of trading someone would’ve been round buying up all those worthless and unwanted mining shares, giving that same someone the next best thing to a world bauxite monopoly and, with it, effective control over that useful commodity’s selling price. After that, he had a shrewd suspicion, the dragon’s life would be very short. But by then his uncles and aunts and cousins and nephews and nieces would’ve sold out and be too busy disembowelling Our Dennis to notice they’d been had—

  Bloody woman, he thought. And then, in a moment of perfect clarity, the screen inside his mind cleared, and he understood.

  He jumped up out of his chair, scuttled across the room and hauled down a dusty old book from the top shelf of his bookcase. Index: dragons, prophecies concerning—

  Dennis snapped the book shut, filled his lungs with air and yelled (as all good boys eventually must) for his mother.

  At least thirty seconds, possibly forty-five, had passed since Erskine had walked through the wall, but neither Frank nor Emily had spoken. There was too much to say, and not enough of the right kind of words to say it with. Also, as far as Frank was concerned, there was a problem with saying things to her that he couldn’t actually hear himself. Hard to pick exactly the right words, under such circumstances—

  ‘Well,’ Emily said eventually.

  Frank nodded.

  ‘I don’t like it here.’ She looked round. To Frank, there didn’t seem all that much to take exception to. It was just a suburban street, no big deal. But, he reflected, I’m used to being out of my time. Some of my favourite places are in the past: Renaissance Tuscany, Edwardian London, fin de siecle Paris. Of course, you wouldn’t want to live there.

  ‘Stuff it,’ Emily said. ‘Let’s go home.’

  She used the word assuming that Frank knew what it meant. But as far as he was concerned she might just as well have said, ‘Let’s go to the Hundred Acre Wood and see Pooh and Piglet’; because home was one of those places you grew up believing in, until you slowl
y came to realise it was just a pretty story. He opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it, fished in his pocket and took out a slightly grubby envelope and a pen.

  OK, that’s When, he wrote. How about Where?

  ‘Frank, why are you writing - oh,’ she added. ‘I see. That’s—’

  No offence. Two fs in offence? But right now I’d rather you didn’t.

  Emily frowned. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘whatever you like. But—’

  Thanks for being so under—

  ‘But,’ she repeated firmly, ‘it’s-well, it’s hardly a vote of bloody confidence, is it? I mean, what are you thinking that you don’t want me to hear?’

  Interesting question; and Frank could think of a lot of other questions that’d crop up sooner or later, if they spent their lives together: Do you really like my hair this way? You don’t mind if I switch over and watch the film, do you? Are you sure you don’t mind going to stay at my mother’s for the bank holiday?

  Do you still love me?

  He wrote: Where shall we go?

  Another frown. ‘Well, the office, naturally. We’ve got to catch up with bloody Amelia Carrington and help Colin with his Glorious Revolution. Well, haven’t we?’

  No, Frank thought. ‘I guess so,’ he wrote. So much easier, on paper. Then a thought struck him. He crossed out what he’d just written

  ‘Look,’ Emily said impatiently, ‘how long are you going to keep this up for? Because for one thing, it’s bloody inconvenient.’

  - and under it, wrote: Or we could get some allies first. Dennis Tanner.

  ‘Who? Oh, right, you told me about him. Your dad’s old boss. But why would he want to get involved? It’s none of his business.’

  ‘I don’t know any other magicians. Besides, I owe him money. If I can make him think we’re going to make a fortune out of this and I can pay him back out of the proceeds—

  ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. ‘But we don’t need him. I know loads of magicians.’

  Frank scowled, turned the envelope over and wrote on the back: Yes. At Carringtons.