“Is that who I think it is?” he asked, looking toward the front of the store. I followed his gaze. Standing next to the cushioned-linoleum display was a man in a long dark coat. When he saw us watching him, he reached into his pocket and flashed a badge of some sort.
“Shit,” I murmured under my breath. “Flanker.”
“He probably wants to buy a carpet,” said Bowden with a heavy helping of misplaced optimism.
Commander Flanker was our old nemesis from SO-1, the SpecOps department that policed other SpecOps departments. Flanker had adapted well to the disbanding of the ser vice. Before, he made life miserable for SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt, and now he made life miserable for ex-SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt. We had crossed swords many times in the past, but not since the disbandment. We regarded it as a good test of our discretion and secrecy that we had never seen him at Acme Carpets. Then again, perhaps we were kidding ourselves. He might know all about us but thought flushing out renegade operatives just wasn’t worth his effort-especially when we were actually doing a ser vice that no one else wanted to do.
I walked quickly to the front of the shop.
“Good morning, Ms. Next,” he said, glancing with ill-disguised mirth at my name embroidered above the company logo on my jacket. “Literary Detective at SO-27 to carpet layer? Quite a fall, don’t you think?”
“It depends on your point of view,” I said cheerfully. “Everyone needs carpets-but not everyone needs SpecOps. Is this a social call?”
“My wife has read all your books.”
“They’re not my books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content-for the first four anyway.”
“Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”
“Did you come all this way to give me your wife’s analysis of my books?”
“No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”
“It isn’t working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”
“Axminster.”
“We can certainly help you with that,” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices-and we’ve a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”
“It was Axminster Purple I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn’t a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably was an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I’d been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA-the Cheese Enforcement Agency.
“You’re not here for the carpets, are you?”
“I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in ’86, and you’ve been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”
“Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”
“No. I’ve come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it’s considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That’s all changed.”
“It has?”
“I’m afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There’s a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user’s head vanish in a ball of fire.”
“That’s a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,’ right?”
“No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim’s head really does vanish in a ball of fire. It’s a killer, Next-and addictive. It’s apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”
This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I’d furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I’d tried most of what I’d flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone-until now.
“Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there’d been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.
“It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it’s so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”
He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.
“The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”
He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I had seen some X-14. It’d been chained up in the back of Pryce’s truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I’d traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn’t snitch on him, not yet-not before I had more information.
“I don’t know anything,” I said at length, “but I can make inquiries.”
Flanker seemed to be satisfied with this, handed me his card and said in a stony voice, “I’ll expect your call.”
He turned and walked out of the store to a waiting Range Rover and drove off.
“Trouble for us?” asked Bowden as soon as I returned.
“No,” I replied thoughtfully, “trouble for me.”
He sighed. “That’s a relief.”
I took a deep breath and thought for a moment. Communications into the Socialist Republic of Wales were nonexistent-when I wanted to contact Pryce, I had to use a shortwave wireless transmitter at prearranged times. There was nothing I could do for at least forty-eight hours.
“So,” continued Bowden, handing me the clipboard with the list of people wanting quotes on it, “how about some Acme Carpets stuff?”
“What about SpecOps work?” I asked. “How’s that looking?”
“Stig’s still on the case of the Diatrymas and has at least a half dozen outstanding chimeras to track down. Spike has a few biters on the books, and there’s talk of another SEB over in Reading.”
It was getting desperate. I loved Acme, but only insofar as it was excellent cover and I never actually had to do anything carpet-related.
“And us? The ex-Literary Detectives?”
“Still nothing, Thursday.”
“What about Mrs. Mattock over in the Old Town? She still wants us to find her first editions, surely?”
“No,” said Bowden. “She called yesterday and said she was selling her books and replacing them with cable TV-she wanted to watch En gland’s Funniest Chain-Saw Mishaps.”
“And I felt so good just now.”
“Face it,” said Bowden sadly, “books are finished. No one wants to invest the time in them anymore.”
“I don’t believe you,” I replied, an optimist to the end. “I reckon if we went over to the Booktastic! megastore, they’d tell us that books are still being sold hand over fist to hard-core story aficionados. In fact, I’ll bet you that jar of cookies you’ve got hidden under your desk that you think no one knows about.”
“And if they’re not?”
“I’ll spend a day installing carpets and pressing flesh as the Acme Carpets celebrity saleswoman.”
It was a deal. Acme was on a trading estate with about twenty or so outlets, but, unusually, it was the only carpet showroom-we always suspected that Spike might have a hand in scaring off the competition, but we never saw him do it. Between us and Booktastic! there were three sporting-goods outlets all selling exactly the same goods at exactly the same price and, since they were three branches of the same store, with the same sales staff, too. The two discount electrical shops actually were competitors but still sp
ookily managed to sell the same goods at the same price, although “sell” in this context actually meant “serve as brief custodian between outlet and landfill.”
“Hmm,” I said as we stood inside the entrance of Booktastic! and stared at the floor display units liberally stacked with CDs, DVDs, computer games, peripherals and special-interest magazines. “I’m sure there was a book in here last time I came in. Excuse me?”
A shop assistant stopped and stared at us in a vacant sort of way.
“I was wondering if you had any books.”
“Any what?”
“Books. Y’know-about so big and full of words arranged in a specific order to give the effect of reality?”
“You mean DVDs?”
“No, I mean books. They’re kind of old-fashioned.”
“Ah!” she said. “What you mean are videotapes.”
“No, what I mean are books.”
We’d exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went into default mode. “You’ll have to see the manager. She’s in the coffee shop.”
“Which one?” I asked, looking around. There appeared to be three-and this wasn’t Booktastic!’s biggest outlet either.
“That one.”
We thanked her and walked past boxed sets of obscure sixties TV series that were better-and safer-within the rose-tinted glow of memory.
“This is all so wrong,” I said, beginning to think I might lose the bet. “Less than five years ago, this place was all books and nothing else. What the hell’s going on?”
We arrived at the coffee shop and couldn’t see the manager, until we noticed that they had opened a smaller branch of the coffee shop actually inside the existing one, and named it “X-press” or “On-the-Go” or “More Profit” or something.
“Thursday Next,” I said to the manager, whose name we discovered was Dawn.
“A great plea sure,” she replied. “I did so love your books-especially the ones with all the killing and gratuitous sex.”
“I’m not really like that in real life,” I replied. “My friend Bowden and I wondered if you’d sold many books recently or, failing that, if you have any or know what one is?”
“I’m sure there are a few somewhere,” she said, and with a “woman on a mission” stride led us around most of the outlet. We walked past computer peripherals, stationery, chocolate, illuminated world globes and pretty gift boxes to put things in until we found a single rack of long-forgotten paperbacks on a shelf below the boxed set of Hale& Pace Outtakes Volumes 1-8 and The Very Best of Little and Large, which Bowden said was an oxymoron.
“Here we are!” she said, wiping away the cobwebs and dust. “I suppose we must have the full collection of every book ever written!”
“Very nearly,” I replied. “Thanks for your help.”
And that was how I found myself in an Acme van with Spike, who had been coerced by Bowden to do an honest day’s carpeting in exchange for a week’s washing for him and Betty. I hadn’t been out on the road with Spike for a number of years, either for the weird shit we used to do from time to time or for any carpet-related work, so he was particularly talkative. As we drove to our first installation, he told me about a recent assignment.
“…so I says to him, ‘Yo, Dracula! Have you come to watch the eclipse with us?’ You should have seen his face. He was back in his coffin quicker than shit from a goose, and then when he heard us laughing, he came back out and said with his arms folded, ‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’ and I said that I thought it was perhaps the funniest thing I’d seen for years, especially since he’d tripped and fallen headfirst into his coffin, and then he got all shitty and tried to bite me, so I rammed a sharpened stake through his heart and struck his head from his body.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, man, did that crease us up.”
“My amusement might have ended with the sharpened-stake thing,” I confessed, “but I like the idea of Dracula falling flat on his face.”
“He did that a lot. Clumsy as hell. That biting-the-neck thing? He was going for the breast and missed. Now he pretends that’s what he was aiming for all along. Jerk. Is this number eight?”
It was. We parked, got out and knocked at the door.
“Major Pickles?” said Spike as a very elderly man with a pleasant expression answered the door. He was small and slender and in good health. His snow white hair was immaculately combed, a pencil mustache graced his upper lip, and he was wearing a blazer with a regimental badge sewn on the breast.
“Yes?”
“Good morning. We’re from Acme Carpets.”
“Jolly good!” said Major Pickles, who hobbled into the house and ushered us to a room that was devoid of any sort of floor covering. “It’s to go down there,” he said, pointing at the floor.
“Right,” said Spike, who I could tell was in a mischievous mood. “My associate here will begin carpeting operations while I view the selection of tea and cookies on offer. Thursday-the carpet.”
I sighed and surveyed the room, which was decorated with stripy green wallpaper and framed pictures of Major Pickles’s notable war time achievements-it looked as if he’d been quite a formidable soldier. It seemed a shame that he was in a rather miserable house in one of the more rundown areas of Swindon. On the plus side, at least he was getting a new carpet. I went to the van and brought in the toolbox, vacuum cleaner, grippers and a nail gun. I was just putting on my knee pads when Spike and Pickles came back into the room.
“Jaffa cakes!” exclaimed Major Pickles, placing a tray on the windowsill. “Mr. Stoker here said that you were allergic to anything without chocolate on it.”
“You’re very kind to indulge my partner’s bizarre and somewhat disrespectful sense of humor,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” he said in a kindly manner, “I’ll leave you to get along, then.”
And he tottered out the door. As soon as he had gone, Spike leaned close to me and said, “Did you see that!?!”
“See what?”
He opened the door a crack and pointed at Pickles, who was limping down the corridor to the kitchen. “His feet.”
I looked, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. There was a reason Major Pickles was hobbling-just visible beneath the hems of his trouser legs were hooves.
“Right,” said Spike as I looked up at him. “The cloven one.”
“Major Pickles is the devil?”
“Nah!” said Spike, sniggering as if I were a simpleton. “If that was Mephistopheles, you’d really know about it. Firstly, the air would be thick with the choking stench of brimstone and decay, and we’d be knee-deep in the departed souls of the damned, writhing in perpetual agony as their bodies were repeatedly pierced with the barbed spears of the tormentors. And secondly, we’d never have got Jaffa cakes. Probably rich tea or graham crackers.”
“Yeah, I hate them, too. But listen, if not Satan, then who?”
Spike closed the door carefully. “A demi-devil or Junior demon or something, sent to precipitate mankind’s fall into the eternal river of effluent that is the bowels of hell. Let’s see if we can’t get a make on this guy. Have a look in the backyard and tell me if you see anything unusual.”
I peered out the window as Spike looked around the room.
“I can see the old carpet piled up in the carport,” I said, “and an almost-brand-new washing machine.”
“How does the carpet look?”
“It seems perfect.”
“Figures. Look here.”
He pointed to an old cookie jar that was sitting on the mantelpiece. The lid was half off, and clearly visible inside was a wad of banknotes.
“Bingo!” said Spike, drawing out the hefty wad. They were all fifty-pound notes-easily a grand. “This is demi-demon Raum, if I’m not mistaken. He tempts men to eternal damnation by the sin of theft.”
“Come on!” I said, mildly skeptical. “If Lucifer has everyone that had stolen something, he’d have more souls than he’d k
now what to deal with.”
“You’re right,” agreed Spike. “The parameters of sin have become blurred over the years. A theft worthy of damnation has to be deceitful, cowardly and loathsome-like from a charming and defenseless pensioner war veteran. So what Raum does is stash the real Major Pickles in a closet somewhere, assume his form, leaves the cash in plain sight, and some poor boob chances his luck. He counts his blessings, has a good few evenings out and forgets all about it until Judgment Day. And then-shazam! He’s having his eyeballs gouged out with a spoon. And then again. And again…and again.”
“I…get the picture. So this Raum guy’s a big deal, right?”
“Nah-pretty much a small-timer,” said Spike, replacing the money. “First sphere, tenth throne-any lower and he’d be in the second hierarchy and confined to hell rather than doing the cushy number up here, harvesting souls for Lucifer and attempting to engineer the fall of man.”
“Is there a lot of this about?” I asked. “Demons, I mean-hanging around ready to tempt us?”
Spike shrugged. “In Swindon? No. And there’ll be one less if I can do anything about it.”
He flipped open his cell phone and dialed a number, then pointed at the floor. “You better get those grippers down if we’re to finish by lunchtime. I’m kidding. He doesn’t want a carpet; we’re only here to be tempted-remember all that stuff in the backyard? Hi, Betty? It’s Dad. I’ve got a five-five in progress with a tenth-throner name of Raum. Will you have a look in Wheatley’s and see how to cast him out? Thanks.” He paused for a moment, looked at me and added, “Perhaps it wasn’t Felix8 at all. Perhaps he was…Felix9. After all, the linking factor between the Felixes was only ever his face, yes?”
“Good point,” I said, wondering quite how Spike might be so relaxed about the whole demon thing that he could be thinking about the Felix problem at the same time.
“Betty?” said Spike into his phone. “I’m still here… Cold steel? No problem. Have you done your homework?…Well, you’d better get started. One more thing: Bowden said he’d do the washing for us, so get all the curtains down… Love you, too. Bye.”
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