Only Human

by Tom Holt

  ‘Come on, spit it out.Why don’t you think we should get married?’

  ‘But I do, honestly,’ Artofel said vehemently. ‘I mean, in some cases the fact that the man’s twenty years older than the girl might well be a problem, but I’m sure it’s something you’ve both thought about and talked through, and you’re clearly satisfied in your own minds that it’s not going to make difficulties, so—’

  ‘Hang on,’ said the young woman. ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Hey, that means when I’m forty, he’ll be -’ she counted on her fingers ‘- sixty-two. That’s old,’ she added, frowning.

  ‘Sixty-three,’ the man said, with a hint of impatience. ‘Look, is that all, because . . .’

  ‘Actually,’ Artofel said, with a wry little smile, ‘the thought had crossed my mind that, what with Tricia having such a lively, outgoing personality and being a barmaid, and you being a professional pallbearer, perhaps you might not be, how can I put this, temperamentally quite ideally compatible, but hey, that just goes to show how wrong you can be.’

  The young woman scowled. ‘Don’t you take that tone about me being a barmaid,’ she said severely. ‘And anyway, Derek’s going to pack in the pallbearing and we’re going to have our own pub, so . . .’

  ‘No I’m not,’ the man interrupted. ‘I like pallbearing.’

  ‘Yes you bloody well are, excuse me, Vicar,’ the young woman replied. ‘I’m not marrying some miserable bugger who wears black suits and smells of embalming fluid. No, when we sell your house we’ll buy a nice little pub somewhere and . . .’

  ‘Sell my house? Who said anything about selling my house?’

  ‘Um,’ Artofel muttered. ‘Excuse me, but . . .’

  ‘If you think I’m living in that nasty dark shed of a house of yours, you need your plugs cleaning,’ the young woman retorted. ‘No, we’ll sell it and buy a nice . . .’

  ‘But what about my owls?’ the man said. ‘Best collection of stuffed owls in the West Midlands. I’m not having them stuck up in some lounge bar where people can pull their feathers and shove crisp packets between their legs, thank you very much.’

  ‘Too right you’re not, because they’re going in the skip,’ the young woman snarled. ‘Disgusting bloody things. Morbid, I call it, having dead things all over the place.’

  ‘Tricia,’ said Artofel soothingly. ‘Derek, maybe we should all just, um . . .’

  ‘They’re a damn sight more tasteful than your stupid teddy-bears,’ the man replied angrily. ‘You should see them, Vicar. Pink, the lot of them.’

  The young woman glowered at him. ‘I made them myself,’ she protested.

  ‘Yes, and can’t you tell,’ answered the man nastily. ‘The best of ’em looks like it’s just gone twelve rounds with Frank Bruno. Kindest thing’d be to have ’em all put to sleep.’

  Quietly, Artofel groaned. He had, after all, only been trying to do the right thing. That’s what vicars are supposed to do, surely?

  ‘You’re horrible,’ the young woman yowled. ‘And you’re ignorant. And you snore.’

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘Yes you do.’

  ‘No I don’t. Ask your sister.’

  A small ring, thrown with considerable force, missed the man by the thickness of the skin on a cup of tea and hit a china paperweight on the mantelpiece, reducing it to shrapnel. A door slammed.

  ‘If you go after her . . .’ Artofel suggested.

  ‘I might just get my head kicked in,’ the man replied. ‘This is all your fault.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘I got a good mind to smash your face, only you’re a vicar.’ The man sneered. ‘You’ll be hearing from my solicitor,’ he said. He retrieved the ring, which had embedded itself in the plaster, made a derogatory remark about the clergy in general, and left.

  As Artofel tidied away the wreckage, he reflected that if they’d got married, they’d probably have been utterly wretched for as long as it takes to get a divorce, provided they both lived that long. He’d done good. He’d done them both a favour.

  They didn’t seem terribly pleased about it.

  When their tempers cooled, and they’d had a chance to think it over . . . The teddy bears. The owls. Her sister. By the time they each got home, they’d probably be thanking their lucky stars he’d saved them from themselves.

  He put it out of his mind and set about making himself a light supper. He was just taking the steak and kidney pie out of the microwave when there was a sound of breaking glass and a heavy thump. He ran back into the front room to find a brick lying in the middle of the floor. Wrapped round it was a sheet of paper, on which was written:YOU RUINED MY LIFE YOU BASTARD YOU’LL

  PAY FOR THIS.

  which suggested that one of them had indeed thought it over and come to a rather different conclusion. He shrugged his shoulders, hoping vehemently that at least the other one would realise the truth of the matter, and started buttering bread. He’d done two slices when he heard the letterbox snap shut, and smelt something burning.

  Fortunately, his host had one of those small kitchen-fire extinguishers they sell for dealing with self-igniting chip pans, and the petrol-soaked carpet in the hall hadn’t really got going properly by the time he arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, it was a rather depressing reaction to his first genuine good deed. It was enough to put you off righteousness for life.

  However, he reflected as he ate his supper, even if they didn’t appreciate what he’d done for them, at least he’d done it. The potential disaster had been averted. Who needs gratitude when you can have a sense of achievement?

  The meal was all right, if you happened to like dead cow in scrunched-up grass seeds with more scrunched-up grass seeds coated in cow fat, but he couldn’t help wishing he was back in the staff canteen in Flipside. Oh, those mixed grills! Oh, those barbecued spare ribs! He washed it down with a can of ancient lager, which tasted of three parts dissolved aluminium and one part yeast, and went to bed.

  It was while he was lying on his back, wide awake in the darkness, that an unpleasant thought struck him. The reason he wasn’t sleeping, apart from the dead cow and scrunched-up grass seeds, was that he was quite understandably worried about how, when and where the witness elimination program was going to get around to him; but what if he’d got it all wrong? After all, why were they biding their time? Not like Flipside to let the embers cool under their feet. Perhaps it wasn’t as straightforward as he’d first thought.

  Perhaps someone was doing this on purpose.

  Not just an ordinary cock-up, the sort of thing that happens every day here in Entropy’s backyard. Maybe it was part of some deep-laid scheme, with himself as one of the cogs in the infernal machine?

  Paranoia, he told himself as he bashed the pillow. Comes with the monkey suit. On the other hand, it would explain a whole lot of things, answer a whole lot of questions that he admittedly hadn’t thought of yet but which were undoubtedly out there somewhere, prowling around in the dark and ripping open dustbin bags. A conspiracy . . .

  But why? How would it help anybody to have a Duke of Hell catapulted into the body of a minister of the Church? Not for sabotage or inside information; we’re all on the same side, remember. Unless, of course, it’s being done in what you might term an unofficial capacity; and that would suggest that someone had managed to get inside Mainframe and play about with it, and that was of course unthinkable.

  Well. He’d done it, of course, but that was different. He’d only gone in to snoop about, not fiddle with the cosmic order. If any fool could play musical bodies just by hacking into the Web, it’d have been a piece of cake for him to get himself out of here and back home where he belonged. No, you needed really high-level codes to do things like body-swapping.

  Somehow, that only made it worse. Suppose there was a conspiracy - a coup in Heaven or just someone trying to rip off a large sum of money - and it involved the sort of people who had access to that sort of code. Didn’t bear thinking about; because t
he only people that could be were the Family itself.

  Eeek.

  No. Forget it.Too much dead cow and milk residues late at night.

  Unless . . .

  So. Maybe he was right; what exactly did he propose doing about it? Inform the proper authorities? And besides, if the Big Boss really was omniscient like they all said, then He’d know about it already.

  Unless . . .

  Maybe he did. Now that really was a scary thought.

  He was still thinking that one over at half past ten that morning; at which time, Tricia and Derek phoned him from the local register office to tell him, among many other things, that they’d just got married and so he could (to paraphrase slightly) go jump in the lake. Nothing, they informed him, could stand in the way of true love.

  Well. Quite.

  Oh for a muse of fire (and a pair of asbestos gloves), to be able to do justice to the strange and wonderful adventures, the desperate dangers, the razor’s-edge escapes, the fabulous encounters that Dermot Fraud had to endure before he reached the telephone box. Or rather, oh for a thirty-million-dollar budget, a cast of thousands, Harrison Ford in a lemming outfit and a team of accountants working round the clock to help decide what to do with the profits.

  No offers? The film rights are, inexplicably, still available. Very well, then. Be like that.

  Having reached the telephone box, Dermot Fraud sighed, closed his eyes and collapsed into a small furry ball in the shelter of a discarded crisp packet. He was exhausted, starving, emotionally drained and bleeding from a small cut over his left eye, the result of not ducking quite fast enough when he felt the shadow of a cat on the back of his neck. But he was here; only a few feet away from a telephone, at the other end of which was safety.

  Only a few feet; straight up. With a sudden hollow feeling inside that had nothing to do with the fact that he hadn’t eaten for two days, he lifted his head. Through the glass door of the phone booth he could see the receiver, perched in its cradle. Even if he managed to get the door open - a feat comparable to raising Stonehenge single-handed, for a lemming - how was he going to climb up to the receiver, lift it, dial a number and put a coin he hadn’t got into the slot?

  How indeed?

  He allowed himself a ten-minute interval for utter despair, and then forced himself to think positive. From the depths of his memory he dragged out examples from history of desperate obstacles overcome, astounding feats achieved in the face of overwhelming odds. Hannibal and the Alps; Bruce and the spider; Cortes and the conquest of Mexico; Rorke’s Drift; the rescue of the Apollo 13 astronauts; Neil Kinnock managing to lose the 1992 general election. All right, he said to himself, if they could do it, so can I.

  Except . . .

  Well, yes. They were human, and I’m a . . .

  No I’m not; I’m not a lemming. This is just a phase I’m going through, that’s all. Rodenthood is only skin deep. Inside every lemming there’s a human being struggling to get out.

  First, there was the question of the door. It was one of the last few surviving red telephone boxes, with the heavy glass and metal doors - when I’m out of this nightmare and safely back in Number Ten, Fraud vowed, there will be a great purge of all red telephone boxes the length and breadth of this great country of ours - which meant that in lemming terms it weighed roughly the equivalent of Nelson’s column. In order to get in, he’d have to open it at least two inches. On his own. With nothing but his four bare paws.

  All right. Let’s think about this.

  Archimedes. Give me a firm place and a long enough lever and I could move the Earth. What was the technical term? Mechanical advantage? Something along those lines. Me for some of that.

  A lever; and something for it to pivot round, a fulcrum. Oughtn’t to be too difficult.

  The fulcrum wasn’t. It took him only a few minutes to locate a flat stone roughly the size of his head, which would do admirably. Having first looked under it for reporters (old habits die hard) he managed, by dint of extreme effort, to shove and lemmingpaw it up against the foot of the door. Short exhaustion break; then he began the search for a lever.

  There was a piece of wood, two by four and a foot long, which could have been specially made for the purpose; after half an hour of the most painful effort of his life, he’d managed to move it a quarter of an inch at one end, just far enough to get it jammed against a stone.

  There was a bicycle spoke, which he found he was able to drag, about a sixteenth of an inch at a time between twenty-minute intervals, and ram into the gap between door and frame.That done, he scuttled wearily to the other end, put his weight against it and shoved.

  The spoke bent. Then it sprang back. Fraud was catapulted eighteen inches through the air and landed in a puddle. Back to the drawing board.

  The hell with this, he muttered to himself, as he crawled out and shook the mud out of his fur. It can’t be all that difficult, surely. After all, if we can dig a tunnel under the channel and put a lemming on the Moon, then we ought to be able to . . .

  But we didn’t put a lemming on the Moon. Did we?

  Fraud cringed. The voice inside his head telling him to jump had been bad enough; if he was really beginning to believe he was a lemming, he might as well curl up and die now, and save his party the trauma of a mid-term by-election.

  I AM NOT A LEMMING, he reminded himself. I AM A HUMAN BEING.

  So. Bugger leverage. Damn silly idea in the first place. The trouble with levers, he realised, was that he was being over-ambitious. What he needed was a little-and-often approach; little drops of water, little grains of sand.

  Wedges.

  Drive enough wedges into the crack, and eventually you’ll open it up enough to crawl through. Much better idea; not so flamboyant, but far more realistic. Practical. Pragmatic. British.

  Which only left the trivial problem of what he could use for wedges. Unfortunately, as he found out after a couple of hours of frustrated searching, wedge shapes don’t occur all that often in nature, or at least not on a scale that would be of any use to him. In the end he tried driving small bits of gravel into the crack with a larger bit of gravel used as a hammer. After he’d bashed himself in the ribs for the seventh time, he gave it up.

  All right, he conceded, point taken. I’m failing because I’m thinking in human terms. If I was a lemming wanting to get into this phone box, what’d I do?

  Easy. I’d tunnel my way in. Great burrowers, lemmings. Somewhere in the species memory there were some fascinating statistics about lemming earth-moving capacity which, if he was translating them correctly, suggested that the average lemming digs the equivalent of the Bakerloo Line once every nine months. Or something of the sort. Anyway, he could dig.

  He dug.

  To his surprise, the technique came remarkably easily. It was like doing the breast-stroke through nearly set concrete while running up an extremely powerful down escalator; but the mighty lemming forepaws were up to the task, and even in his rather dilapidated, unfed and unrested state, he realised he had reserves of stamina that a human being could only dream of. Under the onslaught of his keenly scrabbling paws, the heavy clay soil seemed to melt away like snow. Half an hour or so more at this rate of progress, and . . .

  Ouch!

  He diagnosed the cause of the horrible jarring pain in both forearms as the after-effect of trying to burrow into solid concrete, the sort they used to put down on the floors of old-fashioned red telephone boxes. So disconcerted was he by this unforeseen setback that he was still standing there cursing and hugging his injured paws to his chest when the unshored sides of the tunnel slowly began to cave in . . .

  Marvellous excavator, your lemming. Thanks to his superbly adapted paws and impressive inherent stamina, it only took him two hours to dig himself out again.

  If at first you don’t succeed, take the hint. Fraud sank gasping on to the top of his newly dug mound of earth, stared up at the Everest-high phone-box door and whimpered a little. All that effort, all that ing
enuity and application, and here he still was, slumped on the wrong side of a poxy door. He’d tried everything he could think of and—

  Except, apparently, trotting round to the other side of the box and crawling in through the broken square of glass an inch or so above the ground; the one he’d been too busy to notice earlier. Easy enough mistake to make. Particularly if you happen to be a pillock.

  Because he’d been working so hard for so long, it took him ninety-five per cent of his remaining strength just to crawl through the conveniently placed lemming-sized hole and collapse in a heap on the other side. With the five per cent change, he rolled on to his back and gazed upwards at the telephone, as high and unattainable as the furthest star.

  Bloody but unbowed and never say die are, perhaps, just a more upbeat way of saying too thick to learn from experience; but being so near to a telephone, so close to it that he could almost feel its hard smoothness pressed against his ear, sent the adrenaline gushing into his bloodstream. One last enormous convulsive effort would be all it would take, and he would be free. More; he would be human again.

  His back ached. His four legs felt as if the bones within them had turned to tagliatelli. Every muscle in his body was pulled, strained or wrenched. Even his whiskers hurt. Never mind. The sooner you make a start, the sooner you’ll be there.

  How long it took him before he finally managed to scramble up on to the lower doorhinge, he had no way of knowing, either at the time or in retrospect. It seemed a very long time, and every time he failed and fell back to the concrete floor with a bone-jarring thump, a little bit more determination crystallised into obsession inside his brain. Standing on his hind legs on the doorhinge he was just able to reach the ledge above him, where a Perspex pane had been fitted to replace a shattered glass one. Somehow he hauled himself up. Somehow, in defiance of gravity and everything it stood for, he managed to balance, turn round and stretch up as far as the next ledge. Twice his back legs slipped away from under him, leaving him dangling from a ledge by his front paws. Both times he contrived to scrape and scrabble his way up, find a footing where no footing ought to be and address the next stage. For each two stages up, he scrambled one stage sideways, edging his way round the box towards the corner. When he got there, of course, he realised there was no way he could cross the corner and land on the ledge opposite. It was, quite simply, impossible. Which meant he would either have to work his way down again - only that was impossible too - or just let go and fall to the ground (which was very possible indeed) or else make an enormous leap, halfway across the box from the corner he was crouched in to the top of the plastic-covered table on top of the directories shelf.