The Better Mousetrap

by Tom Holt

  ‘All right, good point,’ Emily agreed reluctantly. ‘But I still don’t see what—’

  You’ve never met his mother, have you?

  ‘What, Dennis Tanner’s mother, you mean? No. At least, I don’t think—’

  He hesitated, then wrote: Trust me.

  ‘Sorry, but your handwriting—’

  He frowned, crossed it out and wrote it again, this time in capitals: TRUST ME.

  ‘Oh.’ She shrugged. ‘Fine. And in return, you can bloody well stop writing and talk to me. Agreed?’ Frank nodded, and flexed his cramped fingers.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said.

  Emily glowered at him. ‘Do you really want us to run away together and start a new life in Vancouver?’

  ‘Oh for crying out—’

  ‘Sorry. I was just a bit puzzled. I mean, why Vancouver?’

  ‘First place that came to mind. And yes,’ he added, ‘I think that’d be a very good idea, but we’ve already been into all this, and you don’t want to run away, and I respect your reasons for not wanting to, and—’

  ‘Yes, all right. It’d bad enough just one of you talking quickly.’ Emily shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But this means something to me, that’s all. So do you,’ she added, and it wasn’t an afterthought. ‘But the two aren’t-well, mutually exclusive.’ She paused. ‘Please?’ she added.

  Frank was quite shocked at what a difference that word made.

  ‘All right,’ he said.

  She grinned. ‘Can I have that in writing?’

  ‘Look, if you’re going to—’

  ‘Sorry. Not the right time. So, if we’re going, let’s go.’

  Frank nodded, and spread the Door against the wall. ‘Mostly,’ he said, as the lines appeared and spread, ‘I want to see if he can clear up a question that’s been bothering me.’

  She reached for the handle. ‘Right. What’s that?’

  ‘How did the Door come to be in that bank vault when you killed the dragon?’ Right on the threshold, Emily stopped. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘that’s a good question.’

  ‘Isn’t it, though. Do you know the answer?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fine. In that case—’ Frank turned the handle. ‘We’re off to see the wizard. Well, are you coming, or what?’

  He thought Mr Tanner’s office and stepped over the threshold. At the precise moment when he had one foot in Sixties suburbia and the other in south London forty-five years later, he called back, ‘Please just come on and walk through the Door, will you?’

  And he heard Emily’s voice behind him saying, ‘Which one?’ ‘What do you mean, which—?’ he said, and then something bashed him on the head and he went to sleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Frank woke up and opened his eyes. Looking down at him was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen.

  She was pale and fair, with eyes the colour of clear spring skies and a perfect heart-shaped face. She was wearing a flowing white dress that seemed to shimmer faintly, and she was gazing at him with a look of pure, deep compassion. An angel, he thought. I’ve died, and—

  He thought again. ‘Knock it off, will you?’ he said.

  The angel grinned at him. ‘Had you going there for a moment, didn’t I?’ she said, as she transformed into a reassuringly hideous goblin. ‘Couldn’t resist. Anyhow, you’d better go in and see our Dennis while he’s free.’

  Frank rubbed the back of his head. ‘What hit me?’

  ‘I did,’ said Mr Tanner’s mother.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Thought you were someone else,’ she explained.

  ‘Let me guess. Amelia Carrington.’

  The goblin grinned approvingly. ‘You’re smart,’ she said. ‘Not like your dad, bless him. I always reckoned he was like confectioners’ custard, sweet and thick.’

  ‘You thought she’d got hold of the Door.’

  ‘It was a possibility,’ Mr Tanner’s mother said. ‘And not a risk worth taking, if you follow me. Bash first, look to see who it is at your leisure. It’s the goblin way.’

  ‘So I imagine.’ Frank stood up. His head hurt and he felt woozy and a bit sick. Had Mr Tanner’s mother finally hit on the elusive secret of the alcohol-free hangover? he wondered. ‘Emily’s in there already, I suppose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Emily. Emily Spitzer, the girl who was with me.’ A horrible thought struck him, though not quite as hard as Mr Tanner’s mother had done. ‘You didn’t bash her too, did you?’

  A puzzled look in those small, round red eyes. ‘Sorry, dear, who are you talking about?’

  Emily woke up.

  ‘Frank?’ she called out. Her voice echoed in the darkness. Not a reassuring sound. Something snagged her attention, and she sniffed.

  Some smells are unmistakable.

  Instinctively, she reached for her tool kit, which wasn’t there. A pity. Never go on a job without the proper equipment-it was the first rule of pest control. It’s a bit humiliating to have to tell the client that you’re just nipping back to the office for a reel of electric cable or a mass spectrometer or an RPG-7 anti-tank rocket. It’s really humiliating to get killed.

  But she wasn’t on a job, was she? Her head was spinning a bit, but not so much that she couldn’t remember. She’d been with Frank. They’d been marooned in the Sixties, but they’d talked Erskine into giving them the other Door (what other Door? Skip that for now) and they’d been on their way to see Dennis Tanner, for some reason that she was sure she’d understood at the time. So what was she doing in a dark underground cavern that smelled disconcertingly of dragon?

  Interesting question.

  Calm down, Emily told herself. Just because a place stinks of dragon, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there’s a live one in there with you. The pong tends to linger quite some time after the dragon’s gone. This could be the strongroom of any one of a number of banks she’d disinfested over the last six months. No way of knowing in the dark, of course.

  As if on cue, a light flared, showing her curved rock walls and a low rock ceiling, on which droplets of water sparkled as they dribbled down encrustations of limestone slurry. Being able to see her surroundings should’ve made her feel better, but it didn’t; mostly because the light was red.

  When dragons snore, theorists claim, the plasma flares are as hot as the surface of the sun.

  She listened, and heard the plop-plop-hiss of droplets of molten stone falling and cooling on the cavern’s damp floor. Sooner or later, the walls of a dragon’s bedchamber turn to glass, giving their living quarters a decidedly retro-Seventies look.

  Oh, Emily thought.

  Even in situations as desperate as this, it’s possible to keep calm provided you can anaesthetise your mind completely. Let’s think, she ordered herself. If there’s an unblocked exit in this place, it should be possible to locate it, even in the pitch dark, by the presence of a tell-tale cool draught. A match or lighter flame will quiver slightly, and there you are. Of course, even the slight glow of a match, combined with the smell of burning phosphorus, would wake the dragon up as effectively as a radio alarm clock tuned to Terry Wogan …

  Her phone. Of course. All she had to do was ring the office, and they’d trace her by her signal and send someone to …

  All right, Emily thought, weapons. Improvised weapons. Kurt Lundqvist had once killed a dragon in the vaults of the Vatican by forcing it to swallow a crystal-and-gold reliquary from its own hoard, on which it had obligingly choked to death. St John Xavier Willoughby, under similar circumstances in the strongroom of the Credit Lyonnaise in Dijon, had bashed a fifty-foot bull dragon to death with a hastily scooped fistful of krugerands stuffed inside one of his socks. And hadn’t Graziano Fiocchi poisoned the dragon in the stacks of the Uffizi with a lethal cocktail of white lead, cobalt and lapis lazuli scraped from the borders of late-fifteenth-century religious paintings?

  Well, she thought, bully for them. They’d had the raw materials to work with. This dragon,
by contrast, didn’t appear to have acquired a hoard. She reached out and scrabbled on the floor, but felt nothing under her fingers but grime and wet stone. The flare, she remembered, hadn’t lit up the whole place with the stunning warm orange of fire reflected in polished gold. No hoard. Very unusual.

  (But not, she remembered, unprecedented.)

  So: if it wasn’t guarding precious metals or artwork, what was it doing here? Emily thought about that for a bit, but soon gave it up as too difficult and also irrelevant. More to the point: what was she doing here?

  The logical assumption was that someone had brought her there so that the dragon could kill her. Furthermore, given her trade, death by dragon would be readily put down as an unfortunate industrial accident-her own fault, of course, since she’d somehow neglected to bring her tool kit. That fitted in quite neatly, since all Colin Gomez’s previous attempts on her life could equally have been passed off as death in the line of duty-the spider, the spectral warriors, not to mention rescuing old Mrs Thompson’s cat.

  The second Door-now she remembered. Just as Frank had been about to go through, a second Door had opened in the wall. Emily had stopped to stare at it, it had opened, and that was as far as she could recall. Erskine, tortured by conscience and neglected duty? A Colin Gomez quadruple-cross? It could just as easily have been Amelia herself, or one of her many obedient servants. Didn’t matter, in any event. It was as obvious as a lorry in a salad bowl that she wasn’t getting out of this one, not unless Frank came and rescued her yet again; and in order to do that, he’d have to know where she was, and how, pray, was he supposed to find that out? Another advantage of death by dragon is that there’s no body. No corpse, no paperwork, no inquest, no insurance claim. She’d simply vanish in a puff of smoke, and the poor lamb wouldn’t have a clue where to start looking for her.

  Her own stupid, stupid fault, needless to say. If she’d listened to Frank, they’d be in Vancouver right now, with a new life to look forward to. As it was; even if he somehow managed to find out what had happened to her— the picture was clear and sharp in her mind. Frank, stepping through the Door into the cavern, to be greeted by twin blasts of heat so murderous that Arctic pack ice thawed and the sea level rose a quarter-inch all round the world. It’d be mercifully quick, yes, but agonisingly final.

  Oh well, she thought. That’s that, then.

  Emily sorted and catalogued her regrets. They came in a wide variety of sizes and priorities, ranging from not having a child of her own some day down to never finding out if it was really true that dragons set their tails on fire every time they ate beans. Never getting to be a partner was in there, as she’d anticipated, but to her surprise it found its level about halfway down the list, sandwiched between never having been to India and not getting to discover whether Frank snored. So, she reflected, more wryly than bitterly, it really was nothing more than a means of earning a living to her, after all. That said, never landing her toe forcefully on Amelia Carrington’s designer-clad arse was in there too, so high up it was practically at the top.

  Practically; but not quite. In fact, it had only just scraped bronze. Both the gold and silver medallists, she noted, were directly Frank-related, and Vancouver would’ve been as good a setting for them as any.

  But then again, too few to mention. Now then: should she, out of pure professional pride, carry on hoping and improvising and hiding right to the bitter, fiery end? Or would it be far less hassle just to cough loudly and get it over with?

  Then the dragon spoke.

  All it actually said was ‘Gwmphmtm’, followed by a snort and a sharp contorted wriggle, for all the world as though it was trying to yank more than its fair share of a diamond-studded cloth-of-gold duvet. But what it also said was, She’s here.

  Fine, Emily thought. Who’s she, then, the cat’s mother?

  The dragon snuggled its muzzle under its left forepaw and grunted. It also said, You are here. Well, yes. I know that, thank you so much. Look, can we please just get on with it, before I get cramp?

  No researcher has ever recorded an instance of a dragon talking in its sleep. By the same token, no researcher has conducted the relevant tests on a dragon born in a vat of green goo and raised to maturity in the time it takes to boil a kettle.

  It’s all right, the dragon said, I don’t mind. You can only kill this body, which is more of a hindrance than a help. The essential part of me can never die, since it has already dreamed the dream. Please, carry on. In your own time.

  Emily frowned. It struck her that the dragon was a wee bit confused about who was supposed to be killing who.

  Oh, there can only be one possible outcome. I have seen it, after all, one single intersection on the circumference of the dream. You are Emily Spitzer. How could you possibly fail?

  At this juncture, Emily felt constrained to point out that she’d taken the same attitude to her Biology GCSE and therefore done no revision, with the result that she’d barely scraped a C. Once bitten, no pun intended—

  Don’t you know? The voice inside the sleepy, grumbling noises sounded faintly amused. Everybody knows. I’ve only been alive for a week, and I know.

  Know what, for crying out loud?

  The prophecy.

  Sorry, you’ve lost me. What pro—?

  Not, perhaps, the right word. Prophecy is a vague, unreliable glimpse through the keyhole of sequential Time. In the dream, it’s simply another solidly historical event, something we have known about ever since the day in the mid-Cretaceous period when a reckessly whimsical time traveller fed steroids to a pterodactyl and dragonkind was born. We have preserved it, analysed it, looked back on it in both sorrow and anger. Surely humans know it too.

  Some humans, maybe. Not this one.

  It is recorded in the dream, the dragon said, that the greatest dragon of all shall be born not of dragon but of a vat of something a bit like undercooked pea soup; that it shall never see the sun but shall live out its brief span in a cavern, guarding the avatar of wealth known as bauxite; that its dream came to be only because a woman whose name is too unimportant to be remembered wanted to— Here the words faltered, and instead Emily saw in her mind’s eye a complex diagram, colour-coded and plotted on five axis, annotated with notes of commodity prices, hostile takeovers and sine-waves representing mining stocks on the Hang Seng. Anybody else would’ve assumed it was Damien Hirst trying to be funny with a pack of felt tips, but Emily saw it and understood.

  ‘The bitch,’ she said aloud.

  Mistake. The dragon quivered, lifted its head, opened one eye and shut it again. By the red glare of its accelerated breathing, Emily watched as it slowly relaxed back into sleep.

  Where was I?

  The diagram. Amelia Carrington cornering the bauxite market.

  Oh yes. It is also recorded in the dream that Emily Spitzer will face the greatest of all dragons in a dark place, and when they fight, she will win. There is no more, since the circle of the dream curves away.

  That’s, um, fascinating. Does the dream also record how Emily Spitzer manages to kill the greatest dragon of all time armed only with a mobile phone and a roll of peppermints?

  Of course.

  Well?

  The dream also ordains. Don’t spoon-feed the lazy cow, make her figure it out for herself.

  Ah. The dream sounds suspiciously like my mother.

  The dream is all our mothers, and our daughters, and ourselves. How perceptive of you, as a mere human, to have worked that out for yourself.

  ‘Thank you,’ Emily said, not really knowing what she was thanking the dragon for, but politeness never does any harm. ‘Look, can I have a moment to think about this? It’s—’

  Of course. Oddly enough, I am in no hurry to be killed. Take all the time you need.

  Prophecy, she thought. Well, there were two schools of thought in the profession about prophesy. One held that it was effectively impossible, since nobody could get information from the future without going there, and that could only b
e done with a Portable Door. The other school replied, Don’t ask how, but we just knew you were going to say that.

  But supposing there really was a prophecy, clawed down from generation to generation of dragons, and that she was the Emily Spitzer referred to in it, and this was the dragon. If so, she was going to have to fight the bloody thing, and somehow or other she’d win—

  No, rewind. What had it actually said? When they fight, she will win.

  Maybe just sloppy wording, garbled in oral transmission; but— Excuse me, she thought.

  What? Oh, you again. I was circling.

  Yes, well, sorry to be a nuisance, only—

  I was turning inside the circle of the dream, revolution and evolution within a closed system. Has it never occurred to you that nature abhors a straight line? Throw a stone into the air, and it will rise and fall in a curve, modified by gravity. Is it not mere sloppy thinking to believe that time runs in straight lines, when nothing else in nature does?

  Only, Emily interrupted grimly, I was thinking. About the prophecy.

  Time runs rings around us all, so that the precise moment of death is also the instant of birth. Can it be a coincidence that we are born screaming? Surely the newborn’s howl is nothing but a reaction to the terror of the previous moment, the closing of the diaphragm that will open again a mere moment later

  Yes, Emily insisted, quite, but about this wretched prophecy. You’re sure it said when they fight, not if?

  A pointless quibble, since there is no If, in an infinite universe. If implies that something may or may not happen, but in Infinity every possibility is realised, and therefore sooner or later, everything happens. If, therefore, is just another way of saying When, and accordingly—

  Whatever. Look, Emily insisted, if it says when, then we don’t have to fight at all, which means I don’t have to find a way of killing you, and you don’t have to die. Wouldn’t that be better all round, don’t you think?

  You assert that you may not be my foreordained doom after all? You would contradict that which is established in the patterns of the circle?

  Well, I suppose so, yes.

  Dream on, girlfriend. It’s established, there’s nothing anybody can do—