Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘It’s half a lid,’ Mia said.

  ‘I pull it off.’ Sam tapped the drawing before anyone could stop him.

  ‘No!’ A protest from all the other players.

  ‘The lid won’t come off. Sir Algernon nearly jerks the object out of Nicodemus’s hands while trying,’ Mia said.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ John picked up the page and pored over it. ‘To me it looks exactly . . . like . . . a . . . thing.’ He slapped it down.

  ‘Those footsteps are getting close,’ Mia noted.

  ‘Barricade that door!’ I ordered.

  We barely had it closed and barred before the first blow landed from the other side, shaking all the timbers in their frame.

  ‘Come on, guys,’ John said. ‘What is this thing? Simon never forgets anything and Nick’s got the biggest brain in Britain. The two of you must know the answer between you.’

  We didn’t.

  While Sir Hacknslay and Mia’s cleric held the splintering door closed, we argued back and forth about the weird object for ten minutes before, with the most annoyingly over-the-top laugh ever, Sam solved the puzzle.

  ‘It’s half of an oil lamp. It’s a bit like the one we used in Aladdin.’

  ‘I give it a rub,’ I said recklessly, irritated at being out-thought by a trainee actor.

  ‘There’s a puff of smoke and a half-genie appears,’ Mia said.

  ‘Which half?’ asked John.

  ‘A half-genie, not half a genie.’

  ‘So what does that look like?’ I asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ Mia scanned her notes. ‘You know how the books show them as a turbaned man with the lower half of his body a wisp of smoke?’

  We nodded.

  ‘This one is a turbaned woman and the lower three-quarters of her body are a wisp of smoke. She looks right at Nicodemus.’ Mia placed a figure for the half-genie and moved her own character, the cleric, possessively in between Nicodemus and the new arrival. ‘She looks right at Nicodemus as if she has been waiting forever to see him and she says, “Master, your limited wish is my command.”’

  ‘Limited wish?’

  ‘She’s only a half-genie.’ Mia rolled a die. ‘Also, the other door to the room you’re in starts shaking as multiple blows rain down on it from outside.’

  ‘A limited wish?’ Across the table John slumped. ‘What good is that then? They’re coming at us from all sides and when Mercuron gets here . . .’

  Simon nodded. ‘It would be better if she granted full wishes. Three would be nice.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘You’re all seeing the half-empty glass, guys. Let’s have some positivity. This glass is half full. A limited wish could come in very handy.’

  And as much as I hated to do it, I had to nod. Half a wish was much better than none. Life had been coming at me from all sides for some days now, and frankly any help, no matter how limited, would be welcome. Some situations are beyond fixing, but still there can be something to salvage. As Demus put it: there’s always hope. It put me in mind of a song my father used to love, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ by the Rolling Stones. In it Mick Jagger sang a lot of sense about compromise.

  Simon’s mum came in, opened a window, offered tea and observed that it would be much healthier for all of us to be out in the sunshine on a beautiful day like this instead of closeted in the twilight of a bedroom. Sam agreed a little too eagerly for my liking. He went downstairs with her, offering to help and clutching a teabag of his preferred brew, which seemed to be flavoured mainly with ill-smelling smoke.

  Mia laid her Dungeon Master’s screen over her books and maps, then made for the door. ‘Be right back. No peeking.’

  We grunted our agreement. Dungeons & Dragons was a game where cheating really made no sense at all.

  ‘What even is a limited wish?’ John asked, still seemingly unconvinced that our genie was even half useful.

  ‘A seventh-level magic-user spell,’ Simon said. ‘It works like a wish spell but . . . less so. You don’t get everything you want, or you do but it’s only temporary, or you get what you ask for but there’s a twist in the tail of it.’

  John pursed his lips, then perked up as he remembered something. ‘Tell us about this sword fight you lost then, Nick!’

  I touched my side without thinking, and winced. ‘Oddly, almost getting impaled on a navy officer’s sword was only the third or fourth strangest thing to happen to me yesterday.’ I remembered something myself, and frowned. ‘You don’t recall if Ian Rust had any brothers, do you?’ John and Simon had both been at Maylerts from preparatory school days and had a longer association with the place than I did. ‘An older brother, to be specific.’

  John and Simon’s faces changed as they always did at any mention of Ian Rust. We had all known instinctively that he was capable of murder during our shared time at school, known it long before he actually beheaded a man. John’s cheeks stiffened, his lips narrowed, his eyes became guarded. ‘He did have a brother in the sixth form, the upper sixth, just when we joined the school. Charlie. A high flier academically, I heard, but a bit of a nutter. Had all sorts of rules, and woe betide anyone who broke one. He hated little Ian though. Wasn’t scared of him, but never raised a hand to him either. Got expelled over some run-in with the form teacher.’

  ‘He went to the teacher’s house, I heard.’ Simon shuddered. ‘Broke in when she was asleep.’

  ‘Crap. Well, now he’s one of the goons I’ve got on my case to make sure I do what the big boss says. They want me not to publish my work and they want to drive on with the experimental side of things before we really know what we’re doing.’

  ‘Sounds like the guild has its claws in you.’ Simon tipped his dice from one fat-fingered hand to the other. ‘Should we start calling you Mercuron now?’

  I snorted but it wasn’t really funny. ‘Oh, and I found the anomaly. The real one. And she is much stranger than we imagined.’ I reached into the pocket of the coat hanging off the back of my chair and pulled out Eva’s photo. ‘There she is.’

  ‘Hot!’ John leaned in, leering. ‘That’s the girl who you fainted over.’ He nodded sagely before adding, ‘I’d do her.’

  I pulled my daughter’s photo back before John could snatch it off me and dig himself a deeper hole. He was all mouth and no trousers, as Mrs B would say, but his casual declarations of lust seemed more shallow and less funny when the target was someone I cared about. Which in turn showed how shallow I was, I guess.

  ‘What’ve you got there?’ Mia returned from the loo just as I was pressing Eva’s photo to my chest to keep it from John.

  Like a guilty schoolboy caught by his teacher doing something he shouldn’t, I showed her the picture.

  ‘Pretty.’ Mia arched an eyebrow. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Eva.’

  ‘Well.’ Mia narrowed her eyes. ‘I hope you’re both very happy together.’

  ‘It’s not like—’ I was going to say that it wasn’t like that. But more questions would lead to the truth, and the truth would make one of them ask who Eva’s mother was. And right now the last thing I wanted to tell Mia was that I had doomed two Earths to be torn apart, and had done so by having sex with Helen. Especially as I hadn’t done it yet. ‘She’s just a friend.’

  Sam chose that moment to return carrying a tray laden with mugs of tea, glasses of squash and Hobnob biscuits.

  ‘Cute girl!’ he said as I tried to hide the photo. ‘I like what she’s done with her hair.’

  Mia’s lips pressed into a hard line. I hoped Sam was going to pay for the comment, because I already knew I was going to.

  CHAPTER 16

  The morning after D&D I had to confess about the leukaemia. I call it a confession, as if I were guilty of something, because that’s how it felt. The sun shone in through the kitchen windows, Mother was pottering about, getting her first of many cups of tea; it was peaceful, normal. And here I came with my big black bundle of bad news. Your son is sick. Probably goin
g to die this time. How could I not feel guilty telling any mother that? And this was my mother that I was having to hurt on a sunny morning over tea and toast. But as much as I knew about time, and that was a lot, I knew of no good time to tell her.

  I went to stand beside her as she reached for her cup. Closer than I normally would. She paused and looked up, questioning. I looked away, towards the back garden, the bright rooftops. I’m not good with strong emotion. For most people, if you plot how their emotion grows in response to increasingly stressful situations you have some kind of a ramp – make things twice as bad and they get twice as anxious, tearful, sad etc. With me it’s more like a step function. You get nothing, nothing, nothing, and then suddenly all of it, too much. We had a tap like that in the bathroom. Broken washer. So I try to steer my life away from situations where I might suddenly break down. It can be embarrassing watching movies, too. One minute everyone thinks I’m a heartless bastard for not even sniffing when something sad happens . . . then it gets just that bit worse and I’m hitching in my breath, trying to stifle sobs, and the people who thought I was heartless now think I’m too soft.

  ‘I saw Dr Pritchard in Cambridge. I have to go back on chemo.’ I managed to say it all without my voice breaking, though it trembled at the end. I was close to that step function, right on the edge. A single kind word from my mother and I would fall apart.

  Thankfully, whatever she had going on inside, she managed to respond in a bright, albeit somewhat brittle, businesslike voice. ‘Right then. When’s the first session? I’ll call in to work and drive you.’

  She phoned Dr Parsons, the doctor who first broke the news to me back in January. I was booked in for a session that evening, an overnight stay the first time. The same ward where I met the other Eva, on day one of my treatment.

  I had been scheduled to return to Cambridge on the midday train, but instead I retreated to my room and lay with pen and paper, alternating between doodling in the margins and recreating some of the theory my daughter had sketched out for me two days before. I’ll admit that I played my Sisters of Mercy tape too loudly, daring Mother to complain, and wallowed in the darkness of the lyrics. But frankly I felt by that stage that I deserved some self-indulgence and self-pity.

  Eventually, after the third run through my mixtape of concentrated nihilistic angst, Mother’s voice made it up the stairs. I spun the volume knob and Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Temple of Love’ dwindled to a whisper.

  ‘What?’ I yelled back, full of unfocused anger and ready for a fight.

  She surprised me. ‘There’s someone at the door for you.’

  I came down with a mixture of reluctance and curiosity. I didn’t want to see anyone and nobody had said they were coming over. The thought that it might be Mia or Eva got me down the stairs. My best guess was that it would be John, though. Whatever his faults, he seemed to have a sixth sense for when his friends were hurting.

  ‘Hello, Nick.’ Charles Rust stood framed by the front doorway, his sharp black eyes finding me on the stairs before I could retreat. He beckoned me forward as though I were a reluctant child, his smile narrow and malicious.

  With mounting anger I descended the remaining steps. The bastard was here, an inch shy of actually being in my house, again, talking to my mother. The cancer news had burned through me now, leaving behind it a reckless sense of being beyond other threats. This grinning monster on my doorstep had picked the wrong day to fuck with me.

  As I set foot on the tiled hall floor I noticed the Harrods bag in his left hand, bulging with its own threats and promises. It gave me pause, but still my anger lent me the momentum to reach him with harsh words on my lips, albeit delivered in a strained whisper so Mother wouldn’t be dragged into this. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Is this because Guilder wanted me at that experiment? You can tell him I’ll quit entirely if I see you here again.’ I found myself poking my finger accusingly at his chest to help make my point.

  Rust reached up, snake-quick, and caught my finger in his hand, twisting it. The pain was so excruciating it paralysed my chest and escaped as a hiss.

  ‘Nick and I are going for a short walk, Mrs Hayes,’ Rust called out to my mother, who had retired to the front room. ‘I’ll bring him back in a minute.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Tell her.’

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I called out in as normal a voice as I could manage.

  ‘We have bigger fish to fry than your failure to keep appointments.’ He led me off, prisoner to my trapped finger, all my dark thoughts and pondering on bleak futures blown away by the agony of the here and now. A lesson of sorts. Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse.

  We halted in the shade of a tree just beyond the garden gate. Rust eased his hold but didn’t release my finger. It was an oddly intimate sensation, deeply unpleasant and underwritten with the imminent threat of sudden pain. ‘You want to remember your place in the food chain, young Nick. You have a debt to my employer, and thus to me. I have no debt to you.’

  I glared at him, but didn’t dare contradict him. If he broke my finger they would probably have to delay the chemotherapy. And besides, I really didn’t want to find out what someone breaking my finger felt like.

  ‘Now, in my capacity as investigator of all things “you” on my employer’s behalf, I’ve had occasion to sit down with the collated information gathered so far.

  ‘It seems that a friend of yours, one Elton Arnot, lost his father recently. The gentleman in question met a violent end in a factory. This may seem a matter of no great importance. Fathers die all the time, don’t they, Nick?’ Another twist. ‘But by strange chance, I happen to have a particular interest in this factory. Mr Arnot was not the only person to be found dead when the cleaner arrived the next morning. One of the corpses was my own rather dim little brother, and the third was what the Americans like to call a John Doe – an unknown person. He was then, and still is now, a mystery. This despite fingerprints and photographs.’

  A car drove slowly by and Rust levered me around the tree to shield us from unwanted attention. Even in my suffering I found it amazing how much control he was able to exert over me by taking possession of just one finger. I made a mental note never to poke anyone again. It would be a fist to the face or nothing.

  ‘Anyway, I must let you get back to your mother.’ He offered that narrow, predatory smile of his, very reminiscent of his brother’s. ‘Only, although I never liked young Ian, it’s not really something I can let stand, if you see what I mean. It’s something in the debit column, and that always has to be accounted for.’

  ‘Could you—’ I wanted to ask for my finger back but Rust just bent it further, and gazed down the street without seeming to see it.

  ‘Actually the little shit nearly killed me with a kitchen knife on my twelfth birthday. If the blade had been an inch longer it would have taken my eye . . . Even so, he was my blood, so it’s as if somebody took something from me, and when somebody takes from me they have to pay. Rules have to be obeyed. You can see that, can’t you, Nick? Otherwise it would be chaos out there.’ He pressed his fingertips along his cheekbone just below the eye he nearly lost. ‘On the other hand, if he had managed to stab me in the face I would probably be thanking whoever killed him for making an end of him. That’s how the world works, see? Debts and obligations.’

  ‘Uh.’ I tried to distract him if only to lessen the pressure and the pain. ‘You’d have killed him yourself if he’d done that. Stabbed you in the face, I mean.’

  Rust eased up a little. ‘You’ve not met our father.’ He shook his head, eyes narrowing, perhaps with a touch of fear at the corners. ‘Debts and obligation. I would never have laid a finger on that boy. No sir. Not even then.’ He paused. ‘Speaking of fingers . . . Tell me about this John Doe that died in the same room as my brother.’

  I fought the need to kneel as he increased the twist, sending white-hot pain streaking through my whole hand. ‘I don’t know anything—’

  ‘I think maybe
you do, though,’ Rust said. ‘You see, the file I got to study had police photos of the corpses. Poor Mr Arnot. Dim little Ian. And a bald man. And there was something about baldy that made my brain itch. Itched for a long time. You know how that is. Then finally you can scratch it. See, he looked a bit like you, Nick. About the age your dad would be if he wasn’t dead. Your look around the eyes . . . the nose . . . the mouth. I have the photos here if you’d like to see . . .’ He patted at his pockets. ‘So, what do you know about our John Doe, Nick?’

  ‘Nothing.’ It was a one-word lie, but I managed to make it sound unconvincing, even to me.

  ‘Do you know what DNA is, Nick?’

  I grunted my yes.

  ‘Of course you do, you went to a fine school. I happen to know it well. I’m sure you got a solid education. But what you are less likely to know about unless you pay close attention to the news is that earlier this year, for the first time ever, police were able to secure a conviction on the basis of what’s called a DNA fingerprint. Linked two murders together just like that.’ He twisted my finger, only a fraction, but enough to make me gasp. ‘Stop me if I go too fast for you, Nick.’

  I gritted my teeth against the pain. I couldn’t believe he was getting away with this in a residential street, in front of my own house, with my neighbours going about their lives on the other side of a few dozen windows.

  He relented, reducing the pressure. ‘So, this DNA, it always tells the truth. Reliable science instead of unreliable witnesses. My employer owes me some favours. All I need is a little of your blood and to lean on the right people and we can soon find out if this John Doe is related to you. But that would be slow, and boring and costly. More fun to just hurt you until you tell me yourself.’

  He twisted and I cried out. ‘S-stop!’ I hated to beg, but the pain was past bearing.

  ‘Who’s the John Doe, Nick?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Did he kill my brother?’ A savage twist that would have wrung the truth from me if I still remembered it.

  ‘I don’t know!’