Possibly, fuck you.
Our current mission in the game was to find Mercuron while evading or killing the guards set to watch him by the guild who backed his work, the Guild of the Hidden Eye. We were to convey our employer’s relocation offer to him and convince the old alchemist to transfer his loyalties to the Guild of Golden Truths – either that, or just steal his work. If we brought him back with us, the task would earn us enough gold to finally purchase ourselves degrees and graduate from The University. Which appeared to be the only way to leave while still carrying the same number of vital organs that you entered with. I couldn’t see that towing a self-righteous paladin around with us was going to make the job any easier.
Simon slipped a note to me under the table. Can I kill him?
I gave a small shake of my head, though I thought I would probably regret the decision.
It took about five minutes to regret the decision. Sam clearly considered the game an audition for some TV part and threw himself wholeheartedly into the role assigned to him. He was irritatingly nice, unbendingly honourable and subject to frequent dramatic flourishes that a lesser man than me might have called ham acting.
Sir Algernon even objected to us killing the alchemist’s guards, despite the fact they might be better described as prison warders. Fineous’s plans to creep around the shadowy margins of one abandoned feast hall, then backstab the particularly huge guardsman defending the far door proved to be a sticking point.
‘But, my dear Fineous!’ Sir Algernon declared in an overly loud voice. ‘Surely you are a trespasser here, an interloper, a miscreant. You have broken and, sir, you have entered. How then, prithee, is it just that you attack yon gentleman without provocation or even warning?’
I looked longingly at the place on my character sheet where the traces of the erased Power Word Kill scroll could still be seen. ‘We may have entered in a . . . non-traditional . . . manner, Algy, but you were kidnapped and subject to involuntary medical experiments. Which in my view makes the whole organisation that kept you here guilty of . . . um . . . war crimes. So that man at the end of the hall is guilty by association, and Fineous is merely proposing to serve justice to him.’
‘Vigilante justice!’
‘Of course, we could just put you back where we found you,’ I said, on behalf of my mage, Nicodemus.
Mia narrowed her eyes at me.
In the end we had to compromise by approaching openly and giving the guard the opportunity to surrender. Which of course led to a bloody sword fight that John’s warrior and the paladin barely survived.
The real trouble would start when we found Mercuron. The guilds regarded the alchemist and his fellow scholars as unruly geese of the golden egg-laying variety. Both the carrot and the stick were employed to keep them on side. As ever, when mountains of money were involved, things got dirty fast. The stick could be simple threats, fear and intimidation, but frequently included finding dirt in their backgrounds with which to control them, or capturing family members to hold as hostage. We had a sealed scroll – for use in emergencies only – that contained dark deeds from Mercuron’s past that he would definitely not want to have made public. And when you considered that Mercuron’s present included vivisecting holy knights, then it took quite some imagination to think up what might be written on that scroll. In any event, having Sir Algernon standing over us would make turning the screws on Mercuron rather tricky.
‘Hoorah! Victory! A veritable victory!’ Sam clapped John on the shoulder, oblivious to the fact that both their characters were walking wounded now.
I pursed my lips and rolled my dice. All ones. While waiting for Sam’s speechifying to end I mused about making money from my talent at rolling a one on any die. Maybe at a casino.
Finally Sam ended with a ‘What ho, chaps!’ and advanced his paladin through the now unguarded door. I had to hand it to him, he had great skill at staying in character. At least when the character was a dick.
We stumbled on in this manner until Simon’s mum mercifully made us break for lunch. She took orders for drinks. Sam announced that he only drank lapsang souchong, which turned out to be a type of tea rather than a village in Tibet. He produced a teabag from his pocket and offered to go down to supervise the brewing. John, Simon and I breathed a collective sigh as he left the room hard on Mrs B’s heels.
‘Sorry,’ Mia said, as the footsteps on the stairs faded. ‘He kind of insisted on coming.’
‘No problem.’ I waved it off, then lied, ‘I like him.’
John nodded appreciatively. Simon’s look was blank amazement.
‘Anyway,’ said Mia, moving on swiftly, ‘I had a reporter asking about you at my aunt’s flat. How he found me there I have no idea.’
‘About me?’ I thought the story was old news now. And surely Creed and Halligan’s experiment was secret for the time being. Not much point to all the security guards, locks, fences and partitions if not.
‘About you.’ Mia nodded.
I tried to concentrate. It had been easy when she was the GM creating the world around us, throwing monsters and mayhem our way. But now it was hard not to see her as what she was, the only girl I’d ever kissed and beautiful to boot. I’d been trying to be an adult about the whole thing, throwing myself into my work with Halligan, but with her in front of me I just felt lost. I wasn’t an adult and, besides, from what I’d seen it’s a rare adult who’s ‘grown up’ about a break-up.
Ours hadn’t been an angry break-up, just a sad, strained one where the chemistry between us had been ground down beneath the heavy heel of destiny’s boot. I wanted her back. I could still feel her last kiss on my lips, and it lit me up the same as it ever had. My heart hurt. Literally hurt, as if it were being pulled along the line joining it to Mia’s by some force hitherto unknown to science.
‘Nick?’ Mia had been speaking and expected some response.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘I mean . . . he was asking about Elton and Elton’s dad. Where the hell would he have got that from?’
‘The reporter?’ A chill displaced the warm feelings Mia had been causing. ‘What about Elton’s dad? No, wait, don’t tell me.’ I couldn’t know the details of what happened the night Elton’s dad had died. Demus didn’t know them, and if I wanted to be Demus I couldn’t know them either.
‘Anyway, I didn’t like him,’ Mia said. ‘Dark-haired man, wiry, with a sharp face. Had a hard look to him. Reporters are supposed to have the common touch. This one looked like he got his stories using thumbscrews.’
‘Police?’ Simon said.
‘Nah.’ Mia shook her head. ‘They would just ask.’
‘Private eye?’
‘Hired by who?’ None of the Elton’s family would do that.
John rapped the table with a die. He looked troubled. ‘Mother bought home some woman from the art gallery a couple of weeks back. She invites the ones that look as if they might spend a lot of money.’
‘And . . .’ I said.
‘And this woman seemed more interested in speaking to me about you than she did in speaking to my mother about art. I remember it because she was really insistent. Also she was young and quite hot.’
I shook my head at John’s rather shallow insistence on categorising half the population as hot or not hot. ‘I wonder—’
Sam returned with a tray of drinks and I decided to keep my wonderings to myself. He sat beside me and handed me my Coke and a glass. I grunted my thanks and reminded myself that I was seeing him through the sourest of filters. Clearly, Mia liked him, and he probably wasn’t as much of an arse as I wanted him to be. It wasn’t as if he’d chosen to play a paladin, after all. It was Mia who threw that spanner into the works, and it was basically her job to do that sort of thing. Then Sam opened his mouth and began channelling Sir Algernon over the unpleasantly sharp aroma of his lapsang souchong, and I went back to hating him, all my mature rationale up in smoke.
‘What time is it?’ Mia glanced at the window with
a frown. The sky was paling, orange in the west.
‘I don’t know.’ Simon was our timekeeper. He was supposed to call a halt at eight. ‘Someone broke my watch.’ He gave me a dark look.
‘Crap, it’s nine already!’ John consulted his expensive Omega-something.
Mia called it a day. We’d been at it nearly twelve hours and despite a number of close calls, none of us had killed Sam or his character. She and ‘Sir Algernon’ had a party to go to. She thought she could get us all in if we wanted. Simon declined on principle. I declined on the basis that I didn’t want to spend the night nursing a can of Fosters and watching Mia smooch Sam. Also my mum would object, and remind me that I was only just sixteen and recovering from serious illness. John said it sounded like fun and would go along. I expected he’d need a stick to keep the girls off him. Ever since that first party at the Arnots’ house, John seemed incapable of walking down the street without getting a new girlfriend. He got one while walking past a girls’ college on his way home and another on the train to school. None of them lasted more than a week or two, but still . . . I had no idea how it happened.
Simon came out to watch me unchain my bike. Shadows filled the street; the summer sun lingered only on the rooftops. I had one of those moments when you become suddenly hyper-aware of your surroundings. A car went past and birdsong filled the space it left behind, a sharp complexity of tweets and trills, pretty little threats levelled against all the world. The wind in the leaves, ten thousand almost separate sounds. All of it underwritten by the ever-present rumble of distant traffic. I stood with the chain in my hand, noting every gleam and glint from the cars lining the street, seeing the green flutter of the stunted cherry trees planted at twenty-yard intervals, and the houses themselves, bland 1940s terraced homes slowly succumbing to double glazing and central heating.
‘It’s all going to change,’ Simon said.
‘Yes, I imagine so.’
‘Us too,’ he said. ‘This work you’re doing. Everyone is going to want a piece of you. And now it’s experimental, too, everyone is going to want a piece of that. How much do you think all those computers and capacitor banks and atomic clocks cost? And it seems like they’re going to have to buy new ones after today . . . You heard your professor though. Money isn’t going to be a problem going forward. Who do you think is providing that money? If it was me handing it out, I’d want to safeguard my investment as much as possible.’
‘Safeguard how?’ This was more interest than Simon had taken in the actual world for an age.
‘You, Nick. All this rests on you. What if you decided to stop? What if you went off to farm yaks in Tibet or . . . got another girlfriend . . . or something else crazy? If someone is putting in millions then they can’t afford to let anything happen that stops you producing.’
‘So this reporter that went to Mia’s . . .’
Simon shrugged. ‘Just watch yourself. And follow the money.’
I got about a mile from Simon’s house, thinking about what he’d said, before I realised it was me that was being followed. It didn’t take any great feat of detection on my part. The black BMW came up right behind me and flashed its lights. I glanced over my shoulder but couldn’t make out much of the driver through the gathering gloom. A man with dark hair. Mia’s ‘reporter’ had had dark hair . . .
I swerved off the main road into a side street, half-thinking that the driver was just trying to get me out of his way. But no, the BMW turned off too and flashed its lights again. Was it the guy from Mia’s, some other investigator or clandestine agent . . . or just a common or garden murderer who’d happened to pick me for his next victim? Despite my status as a statistical outlier, my bizarre series of near-fatal accidents had yet to include any deliberate attempts at murder.
‘Shit.’ I veered between two parked cars and mounted the pavement, yanking on the handlebars to hop the curb. Now at least I had a screen of parked vehicles and the occasional tree to stop the driver squashing me so easily.
I had no hope of outrunning the pursuit so I played to my mode of transport’s strengths instead. I stopped and wrenched the bike around, one foot on the ground, before heading back the way I’d come. Behind me, the possible-reporter possible-murderer started on his three-point turn.
I made my next turn before the car re-emerged on to the main road. He couldn’t have seen where I went, but somehow those headlights appeared behind me before I’d made it to the next corner. Fear started rising through me, lending fresh energy to tiring muscles. What if it really was a murderer? Far more unlikely things had been happening to me lately. A falling flowerpot might be no less fatal, but somehow it lacked the horror of a man with a knife who wanted to hurt me.
I needed to lose him, but my options were limited. I didn’t know the area well enough to find an alley that might fit a bike and not a car, or some useful patch of waste ground where two wheels would fare better than four. I could turn into someone’s driveway and crouch in the dark. But then I’d be trapped if he found me.
It’s funny how fear squeezes common sense from your mind and freezes you into a narrow set of paths. There were plenty of ways out of my dilemma. I could literally have knocked on any of the scores of front doors I was passing and asked for help. I could have abandoned my bike in a driveway and escaped across the back fences of gardens. I could have doubled back endlessly until he got tired of turning.
Instead I aimed for what I knew. Somewhere I would find other people. Nobody gets murdered in public, right? I would have gone for the McDonald’s on the Redland Road high street but my legs were failing me. Sweat-soaked and panting, I steered a course for the much nearer Tony’s Cabs. From the outside, the place was a blank white door in a featureless wall. It lay several blocks back from the high street in a road half-occupied by rundown houses and half by tiny businesses, most of which seemed to have been mothballed years ago.
A swift double-back and a final burst of speed got me there, out of sight of my pursuer. I let my bike clatter to the ground outside and ran up the trio of concrete steps. The door sat beneath a neon sign where only the ‘T’ worked, and gave access to a tiny room sporting a grille window where you could allegedly order a cab, though I had never seen anyone do that, and three slightly beat-up video machines. I’d dropped several hundred pounds’ worth of ten-pence pieces into those over the past few years. They had a street fighter game where bashing ‘foot sweep’ repeatedly would get you through the first five one-player enemies, an elderly Pac-Man machine with a tiny screen that fuzzed at the edges and Robotron: 2048, my favourite, in which an insane number of robotic foes would flood the screen from all sides and electronic mayhem ensued.
Empty. Tony’s was never empty outside school hours. All that changed was the age of the kids slotting their coins into the machines. Right after school it was the ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-olds. At 3 a.m. on a Friday night it was drunk eighteen-year-olds coming back from parties, trying in vain to summon the hand-eye coordination to play the games.
‘Hello?’ There wasn’t even anyone in the taxi office behind the grille.
A squeal of tyres outside. A car door slamming. I cast about wildly for some other exit as if Tony’s might magically have grown an extra door since my last visit. In desperation, I threw myself at the door I’d come in by and wedged myself against it. Someone outside pushed hard. I held firm but not firm enough to support the illusion that it was locked.
‘Hey—’
Whatever else the man outside had to say was lost beneath a wave of electronic sound, as all three arcade machines behind me started up new games as though someone had just fed them money. I pushed harder against the door and seemingly the music from the machines swelled in proportion, growing louder than any design spec had ever called for. Already frenetic games scores grew into wild, discordant assaults on the ear.
The push from outside became a shove that jolted the door open an inch or two. I set my back to the wood and drove into it, heels skittering a
cross the tiles. The whole of Tony’s was lit now with sliding colour, as if the game screens had become projectors. Fuzzy Robotron robots swarmed across the walls overlaid by Pac-Man and his dots.
The man outside was shouting, but all I caught was my name. The street fighter game blew first, the screen going black, acrid smoke rising from the back vents. Robotron went with a pop and an ominous sizzle. Venerable Pac-Man was the last to go. The game screen cracked, something in the casing sparked, and silence reigned.
I sat with my back to the door, gasping. The lights had all died too. I could see nothing.
‘Open the door, Nick.’ There was something familiar about the voice.
‘Who are you?’
‘Take a look.’
I stood slowly, taking care not to release the door, then edged to the side and allowed it to open an inch. Pieces of thin, curved glass littered the steps, catching the orange glow of the nearest streetlight. The neon sign had fared no better than Tony’s arcade games. A black-haired man in a dark trench coat stood at the foot of the steps, his face in shadow.
‘Who are—’ I bit off the question as ghosts began to fill the gloom. Echoes of scores of teenagers streaming through us both, up the steps, coin-laden and eager, down the steps with empty pockets and reluctant feet. The echoes of taxis coming and going. Pedestrians passing by. The man stepped back, letting the street lights illuminate him.
‘Demus!’ I gasped. ‘You have hair!’
CHAPTER 7
‘You have hair!’ I repeated. It had been an enduring worry ever since our first meeting. I know it’s pretty shallow, given that the other things to worry about had included my imminent death, my death at age forty, Mia’s survival and how to twist the fundamental laws of physics in our mutual favour. But still, young men are vain, emotionally delicate creatures, and the idea that I would be the owner of a shiny head by 2011 had plagued me. When would it start? Was the chemo responsible? Would I be bald from now on? The intervening four months had seen a tentative return after the chemo hair loss, but I still worried how long it would last. ‘Wait . . . does that mean you’re not Demus? You’re another me from the future?’
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