by Tom Holt
Julian thought for a moment. His mind was full of strange things, none of which had been there a while ago, though it felt as if they’d always been there. It was like going up in the loft for the first time when you’ve been in the house five years, and finding a whole lot of cardboard boxes left behind by the previous owners. In this case, Julian got the impression that the cardboard boxes had things like GELIGNITE — HANDLE WITH CARE stencilled on the side, which didn’t exactly help.
Somehow he’d suddenly become aware of the fact that he was in a story. What a story was, or what being in one actually meant in practical terms, he wasn’t exactly sure; there were little bits of information stuck to the insides of his mind like the shreds of paper that come off on your windscreen after you’ve pulled off a sticky-backed car park ticket, enough to make him realise that there was something important here to know, but not enough to make sense of any of it. It was as if he’d known the story once, but forgotten ninety per cent of it; fairly significant bits, like the beginning, the middle and the end. If he’d had any say in the matter he’d have deleted them at once, but that was out of the question. It was a bit like having someone tell you who the murderer is about halfway through a detective story you’re really enjoying; you wish you didn’t know, but you do and that’s that.
And then he thought: detective story? What’s a detective story? And it was almost as if he could see fragments of the memory rushing past him and gurgling down the plughole of oblivion, winking maliciously at him as they vanished.
This is silly, he muttered to himself. Get a grip. Pretend it isn’t happening. Otherwise, at the very least, these two are going to have you put away in the bewildered pigs’ home. At worst, that might possibly be the right thing to do.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘just thinking aloud, don’t mind me. All I was trying to say was,’ he went on, sneaking a surreptitious glance over his shoulder to check that the way was clear if he had to make a run for it, ‘why don’t we carry on building houses, for now, and wait and see what happens? I mean, something’s bound to turn up. Something always does.’
Eugene and Desmond looked at each other warily. ‘I think he’s trying to say he isn’t crazy,’ Eugene said. ‘I’m not sure I believe him.’
‘Nor me,’ Desmond replied. ‘I reckon we ought to tie him up ma sack and have him seen to. You know, take him somewhere where they know about these things. A fair, or whatever.’
‘A fair?’
Desmond nodded. ‘Heard about it once. There’s people at fairs who know all about pigs. They can even tell you how much you weigh just by looking at you. They’d know what to do, I reckon.’
Still smiling, they advanced, and Julian started to back away. At precisely the moment when Eugene, having assured him that it was all for his own good, made a grab for his hind legs and Desmond, explaining that they were only trying to help, tried to knock him silly with a chunk of wood, he darted between them, dodged their flailing trotters, and ran for it.
The accountant sat down and stared into the bucket.
He’d taken all the precautions he could to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed (and caution comes as naturally to an accountant as fleas to a rabbit); he could take his time, do the job properly, as it ought to be done. Opportunities like this, he knew, only come once in a professional lifetime, and it would be sheer folly to waste this one by rushing it.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out again, but it didn’t work; he was still tense and jumpy, not at all the right frame of mind for tackling such delicate work. He needed something calming, familiar, soothing, soporific. He opened his eyes again, reached up to a nearby shelf, and pulled down a volume of tax statutes at random.
‘One of the characteristic features of Schedule D case III,’ he read aloud, allowing his tongue to caress each solid syllable, ‘is the provision under sections fifty-two, fifty-three and seventy-four of the Taxes Act 1970 for the deduction and collection of tax at source from the payer. The payee will receive a net sum from which tax has been deducted at source…’ Better; much better. He could feel a sort of benign numbness creeping upwards from the junction of his neck and shoulders, a sort of delightful narcosis; now he’d have to be careful he didn’t drift into that unique kind of half-sleep that anybody who has much to do with tax legislation spends so much of his life in, somewhere in the middle of a triangle formed by boredom, sleep and death. He needed to be relaxed, but not that relaxed.
When he felt the moment was right he closed the book carefully and laid it down slowly on his desk, taking great care to line the edges of its cover square with the desktop; then, with the slow deliberation of an hourly paid sleepwalker, he took another deep breath, exhaled and leaned over the bucket.
‘Mirror,’ he said.
His own face, a Spitting Image caricature of a living prune, blinked back at him, stifled a yawn, twitched its nose and mumbled ‘Running DOS’ in a soft, bleating voice before closing its eyes and sliding forward an inch or so on its neck. For a moment, the accountant felt a deep-seated sense of confusion, as if acknowledging that the face in the water was rather more like him than he was himself. Then, as the reflection began to snore, he tightened the muscles of his throat and produced a tiny dry cough. The reflection opened its eyes again, looked up at him as if to ask why he’d thought it necessary to spoil such a beautiful dream (I know that dream, the accountant thought sympathetically, it’s the one about offsetting the costs of a sale of associated property against gains incurred on a series of linked sales of business assets spanning two consecutive fiscal years) and mumbled, ‘Please wait.’
A tiny spurt of excitement flared inside the accountant’s brain, but he called on a lifetime of professional training and suppressed it, in a way that only an accountant could. The effects of excitement and emotion are about as desirable among members of the profession as a hungry rat in a mortuary, and the majority of their long, gruelling apprenticeship is spent learning how to prevent them. It’s often said that the only way to get an animated reaction out of an accountant is to kill him and attach two electrodes to his feet; what’s less well known is that when accountants say it, they do so with pride.
He waited as he’d been told, and just as he was about to nod off himself, he noticed a minute degree of movement on the surface of the water; tiny ripples, as if a little splinter of gravel had fallen in the bucket, except that these ripples started at the circumference and moved inwards, instead of the other way round. The circles gradually closed up, until the rings dwindled into a dot in the very centre of the meniscus, where they stopped, formed themselves into a minuscule waterspout, hung in the air for about two and a half seconds and then slowly subsided, sending another series of ripples back across the surface, this time proceeding in the conventional manner. When this process had repeated four or five times, the accountant nodded, muttered screen-saver under his breath, put the tips of his fingers together and settled down to wait.
‘Ready.’
The accountant jumped; the words had summoned him back from the place where the good accountants go before they die, and for a moment he couldn’t quite remember where or who he was. Then he caught sight of the reflection and sat up a little straighter in his chair.
‘Mirror,’ he said.
The reflection looked at him, expressionless.
‘Mirror,’ he repeated, ‘compile a database of all financial records relating to the following. One: Ali Baba. Two: Aladdin. Three: Babes in the Wood, The. Four—’
It was a long list; but eventually he reached the end, double-checked and then triple-checked against the handwritten ledger entries, cross-checked the list against another list he kept locked in the top drawer of his desk, checked once again for luck and one last time because he didn’t believe in luck, and then whispered the words ‘Delete files.’ There was another slow outbreak of ripples, a gurgle and a faint plop, and then the reflection sighed, bobbled its head sleepily and murmured ‘Done.’ The accountant asked f
or confirmation, received it, and allowed himself the luxury of stretching his arms and legs until the joints creaked. Then, with a smile of modest satisfaction at having removed every last trace of his most valued clients’ affairs from the records of the Revenue Service, he leaned forward over his desk, cradled his head on his elbows and went to sleep.
The reflection stayed where it was. It didn’t appear to mind; staring vacantly into space seemed to suit it very well. It was just about to dissolve into the pretty ripples effect when something disturbed the surface of the water. The face changed; it was no longer the reflection of the accountant, but a cute little face, a bright pink, shiny, painted face, with two black dots for eyes, a daubed line for a mouth and a length of wooden dowel radiused at the end for a nose. As the head swivelled from side to side, its movement was awkward and somehow mechanical. It wore an Alpine hat with a feather stuck in it.
‘Help,’ it said.
Nothing happened. The face looked round with that same artificial movement.
‘Help,’ it repeated.
The accountant twitched and grunted in his sleep. In his dream, someone was telling him to do something he’d prefer not to, and when he asked how much whoever it was had in mind for a suitable fee, there was no answer. He grunted again and his lips moved.
‘Help,’ said the face a third time; and the accountant made a snarling noise and sat up, eyes still closed, still fast asleep.
‘Please wait,’ he grumbled.
The wooden face’s range of expressions was necessarily limited, but he was able to register joy by waggling his head from side to side. ‘Oh come on,’ it said. ‘I haven’t got long, and those two loonies could come back any minute. Please hurry. Please.’
But compassion’s a hard enough commodity to get out of an accountant when he’s awake, let alone asleep; in terms of difficulty of extraction, somewhere between his teeth and his money. No dice.
‘You’ve got to help me, really,’ implored the face. ‘My name is Carl Wilson and I don’t belong here, really I don’t. I’m stuck actually inside this wooden puppet thing in this horrible laboratory, like something out of a bad horror flick, they’ve been connecting me up to the mains and electrocuting me, and all I did was try to hack into a computer game for free. Not even Microsoft do that to people. And really it was my sister’s idea, not mine, so if anyone should be in here.’
‘For Help topics,’ the accountant said in a flat, droning voice, ‘select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’
‘Oh right,’ wailed the little wooden face, expressing exasperation and despair by waggling its head from side to side in the other direction. ‘You tell me how, with no mouse and no keyboard.’
‘For Help topics, select the appropriate mirror or press F1.’
‘Oh no, I haven’t got time for this,’ the little wooden face snarled. ‘No, wait, all right, let’s try something. Execute voice prompt.’
The accountant didn’t move. ‘To execute voice prompt, select the appropriate mirror or press F9.’
The face waggled so furiously that its feather nearly came loose. ‘Yes, but how?’ it demanded. ‘Oh go on, give me a break.’
‘Bad command or file name.’
‘All right, all right.’ The face leaned over sharply to the right to convey Concentration.
‘Let’s start with the obvious. Select appropriate mirror for voice prompt.’
The accountant’s lip curled half a millimetre before it replied. ‘Error,’ it intoned. ‘Path not found.’
‘You lousy—’ The face twisted round through 180 degrees, a manoeuvre that would have snapped a human spine; then it swivelled back. ‘They’re coming,’ it hissed. ‘The Baron and his creepy friend. Come on, you’ve got to… Oh, exit Mirrors.’
The face disappeared with a plop! and the surface of the water slowly filled with more ripples; first one way, then the other, like the tides of the oceans of a tiny flat planet. The expression on the accountant’s face softened into something approximating to a smile, while a tiny spider, dangling from the end of a long gossamer thread, dropped into his ear.
More so than the frog, the human itched.
Also, Fang muttered to himself as he stared balefully at his reflection in a puddle, it looked silly. There were of course times, he admitted to himself, when any self-respecting animal found it useful to stand on his hind legs; pushing open a door, or reaching things dangling from the lower branches of trees. But a species that spent its entire life reared up on its back paws was a gimmick, pure and simple, as contemptible as the circular teabag — some marketing executive somewhere deciding that since it hadn’t been done yet, it was probably worth a try. It’d be bad enough if he were some naturally dim-witted, demoralised kind of creature, such as a bird or a fish; but for a wolf of all creatures to be violently and unexpectedly sewn up in a monkey suit and condemned to waddle about on half the proper number of feet was nearly unbearable. Although he knew it wouldn’t work, he had a terrible desire to jump in the puddle and roll around just to see if the Human would wash off.
So: priority number one, get rid of it. And to do that, all he had to do was find a witch.
Hah!
It was typical, Fang reflected as he trudged sullenly and bipedally along the dusty road. Under normal circumstances, you could hardly move for witches in this neck of the woods. Shake any tree, and a witch’d fall out. Spit, and a witch’d get wet. It was that easy. Now, when he was actively looking for one, were there any? Were there hell as like.
Then, as he turned a bend in the road and found himself facing a spindly, rather run-down-looking tower that slouched among the trees like a spaceship playing at being an ostrich, the vestiges of his lupine sense of smell detected a faint but unmistakable flavour on the breeze. A rich, musty, unpleasant smell; stale cooking fat, unwashed human, iodine, cat-pee, onions and something from the cheaper end of the Giorgio Armani range of fragrances, all mixed together to produce something that, in concentrated form, was eminently suitable for use in trench warfare. Witch.
Fang breathed in deeply, then sneezed. Another definite black mark against human bodies was their truly awful sense of smell; to get any useful data at all, you had to breathe in enough air to float a large balloon.
The witch was up in the tower; and the tower, needless to say, was locked. Craning his neck, Fang looked up to see if there were any accessible windows, conveniently placed drainpipes, fire escapes, even (let’s not forget the blindingly obvious) an open door, anything he could use to effect an entrance. Nothing doing; the lowest window was five storeys up and the heavy oak shutters were resolutely shut. Ah well, Fang told himself, there’s plenty of witches but I’ve only got one neck. He shook his head sadly and was about to trudge on when something fell down the side of his tower and hung level with his armpits. A rope.
Now that was more like it; except, why would any sane witch throw down a rope when she could quite easily come down and unlock the front door? Laziness? A macabre sense of humour? He glanced up and saw that the rope was hanging from the very topmost window; it would be a dreadfully vertiginous ascent, and he wasn’t absolutely sure that as a human he knew how to climb ropes. Also, there was something peculiar about the rope itself. Instead of the customary coarse hemp fibres it appeared to be made out of some kind of very fine sandy-yellow thread. Or hair, even.
A rope made out of hair; well, witches are a funny lot, not to mention not terribly well off as a rule. It was also worth bearing in mind that anybody who lived in a small chamber at the top of a very tall, locked tower might well have nothing better to do all day than weave hairdresser’s salvage into a long, blonde rope. That would explain the composition of the rope itself, but not why it had suddenly descended right under his nose. Another factor worth considering was the old Wolfpack adage that if your enemy offers you a means of transportation, leave it well alone because it’s bound to be a trap.
Prudence dictated that until he saw evidence to the contrary he should assume t
hat any non-wolf he met was more likely to be an enemy than a friend. Just out of curiosity, however, he reached out a paw and gave the rope a sedate little tug.
‘Ouch!’
The voice came from far up above, and it didn’t sound in the least like any witch that Fang had encountered before. It was young and girlish and silvery, so presumably its owner was likely to be about as much use to him as a cardboard car-jack. What he wanted was something ancient and wrinkled and extra crone, not some long-haired kid.
‘Sorry,’ he yelled back.
The rope started to climb the wall; obviously its owner didn’t trust him not to yank it again. He looked up to watch it go, and was thus in an ideal position to observe the contents of the porcelain vessel that a pair of unseen hands tipped out of the window as they sailed down and landed on his head. Wet, and didn’t smell very nice. Eau de toilette, in a sense. He closed his eyes, swore, and started to walk away. An apple missed him by inches as he turned, closely followed by an old shoe and a coffee-mug. Taken together, they appeared to constitute hint.
‘All right, already,’ he shouted, as the hint was reinforced by a half-brick and a week-old portion of macaroni cheese, ‘I’m going…’
‘Help!’
The second voice froze him in his tracks; fortunately, as it turned out, because whoever it was who threw the old saucepan that narrowly missed him in front had obviously included a nicely calculated degree of forward allowance in the throw, and if he’d still been moving he’d have been clobbered silly.
‘Help! Help!’
Now that, Fang grinned to himself, sounds a bit more like it. A harsh, cracked, wheezy, gnarled old voice, not just extra crone but extra crone plus; the owner of that voice had to be a hundred and five if she was a day, and could easily be the Playmate of the Month from the current number of Witch Magazine. Ducking instinctively to avoid an egg so old it could easily have been laid by an archaeopteryx, he doubled back towards the base of the tower, where the overhang would afford him some degree of cover from the flying household ephemera, and he could formulate a plan of action.