Hannah Green and Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Looking for the bathroom,’ Hannah said quickly.

  The man poked his sweaty face down towards her. Thinning hair was plastered to his scalp and he looked both furious and pleased at being furious, as if in his ideal world he’d be paid to be furious for a living. ‘The bathroom?’

  ‘We took a wrong turning,’ Zo said.

  The man bellowed at one of the cooks toiling nearby. ‘Hey, Pez – this look like the bathroom to you, huh?’

  ‘No, chef.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Hannah said.

  ‘Go,’ the man shouted, pointing imperiously. ‘Go!’

  Hannah and Aunt Zo hurried away through clouds of rich-smelling steam and past smirking cooks and washers. At the end of the room they found a pair of swinging doors. They went through and into the relative calm of a corridor.

  Then they were in a restaurant. ‘OK,’ said Zo, bewildered, ‘this is … what?’

  The dining room was spacious and had big windows, yielding views on to ornamental trees in dappled sunlight. It was crowded, tables and booths filled with people eating and drinking and chatting, all in couples or groups apart from one old lady with long grey hair sitting happily by herself, everyone attended to by willowy waitpersons in sage-coloured uniforms and neatly starched white aprons. The ambience was just so. The plates on which the food stood poised were needlessly large and modishly rectangular.

  It looked very nice. Upmarket and expensive. It looked …

  ‘I know where this is,’ Hannah said. They ground to a halt near the centre of the room. ‘It’s Bistrotechnical. In Los Gatos.’

  ‘Los … are you serious?’

  Hannah totally recognized it now. This was where they used to come for lunch. The place with the pastries. The restaurant where she’d seen her mom staring into the far distance, as if—

  ‘Scuse me, ladies …’

  A waiter shoved past, carrying a tray loaded with entrées. Aunt Zo watched him go, baffled. Hannah grabbed her hand and led her towards the lobby, where a smartly dressed lady was standing behind the desk. Hannah had known exactly where it would be, which proved it. This was definitely Bistrotechnical, a name she’d found hard to remember until her dad explained that it was a play on words, something to do with French restaurants and discos and Los Gatos’s proximity to Silicon Valley, and in his opinion the person who’d come up with it should be forced to go and stand in the corner until they were sorry for what they’d done, even if that took a thousand years.

  ‘So … how did we get to Los Gatos? That’s like … thirty miles from Santa Cruz, right? And how can it be daytime?’

  ‘I don’t know how,’ Hannah admitted. The woman behind the desk was smiling at them with big bright eyes. ‘But the rollercoaster put us here. So maybe this is where Mom is.’

  Aunt Zo spotted the big doors at the end of the lobby. ‘Let’s go outside and look there.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  They hurried down to the doors and banged through them into the wide, friendly stone-paved square. Except it wasn’t there.

  They emerged instead into trees. Not small, pretty trees like the ones visible through the windows in the restaurant, but massive, serious trees. They were slap in the middle of a deep redwood forest.

  They looked back at the restaurant. In Los Gatos it was part of a block of buildings which had either been restored from old ones or artfully built to look that way. Now it stood by itself, the edges of the building jagged, as if it had been torn from its position and placed here in the forest. There were redwoods right up against the walls, so tall that they reached up until they became lost in the canopy far above. The forest stretched away forever in all directions. There were no roads or paths.

  ‘This is not … working for me,’ Aunt Zo said.

  They went back into the building. ‘Can I help you?’ the girl behind the desk asked immediately.

  ‘Um, we’re good,’ Hannah said. ‘But I’m looking for my mom. Have you seen her?’

  ‘No,’ the girl said. She was somehow managing to keep smiling while she talked. Her grin was so wide it looked weird. ‘I have seen no moms. You have a great day.’

  ‘I don’t need a great day,’ Aunt Zo muttered, ‘just one I can understand.’

  The dining room was even busier than before, and noisier. Everyone was talking and laughing at the same time, so much so that it seemed hard to believe anyone was actually listening. The waiters and waitresses were darting between tables so quickly they were nearly running. Hannah noticed that a few of the people at the tables looked anxious and pale.

  They hurried past a line of booths filled with people laughing raucously. Hannah saw an old man picking up great gobbets of Shrimp Louis salad – the entrée her dad always had when they came here – with his hands, instead of a fork, and pushing it into his mouth. Pink dressing was dripping down his wrists and into the sleeves of his jacket. A couple of tables along, a thin woman, the age that moms are, tipped a huge glass up to her mouth. She kept tipping and tipping until red wine started to spill out either side of the glass, pouring down her cheeks and on to her blouse. She didn’t stop. She kept tipping.

  ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘Me neither,’ said Aunt Zo.

  They hurried through the swing doors back into the kitchen and started into the billowing vapour, looking for a path towards the refrigerator. There was a smell of burning now – like sometimes happened at home when Dad or Mom got distracted and forgot something under the broiler and it started smoking and the alarm went off, at which point whichever of them hadn’t been cooking would always make the same joke: ‘Dinner’s ready.’

  Back then. Back when there were jokes.

  It was hot, too, really hot, and as they made their way through the chaos Hannah caught glimpses of cooks, looming out of the steam like tall ships in a mist. The cooks were all very big, with huge muscles in their bare and tattooed arms, and they looked down at her in a way that made her feel … hunted. Inspected too hard and too long and for reasons she didn’t understand. She didn’t like it. She wanted to be …

  ‘Ha!’

  Aunt Zo skidded to a halt. Hannah crashed into her.

  ‘And theeeeeeere you are,’ the chef crowed. He was blocking the way. He was also holding a large cleaver.

  ‘Move, please,’ Aunt Zo said. ‘We need to get past.’

  ‘Still looking for the bathroom, are you?’ He pouted. ‘Do you need to go pee-pee?’

  He started towards them, slapping the flat edge of the cleaver against his hand. Some of the steam and smoke and smells seemed to be coming from him, as if escaping from his sleeves and the collar of his chef’s whites.

  ‘I think we should go back out,’ Hannah said urgently.

  ‘Screw that,’ Zo said. ‘Look, asshole – move.’

  The chef slashed out at her, ripping the knife through the air in a sudden, vicious arc. It missed Zo by less than a foot.

  ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ he said, ‘try, try again.’

  ‘Get out of our way.’

  ‘Can’t. The menu’s set. You’re on it. Today’s special is going to be … very special indeed.’

  Hannah grabbed Zo’s arm and pulled. ‘Let’s go.’

  The chef kept advancing, pulling back his arm for another slash. ‘Prime cuts,’ he said in a wet, gloating voice.

  ‘Please,’ Hannah shouted. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  This time she heard the cleaver cutting through the air. It missed Zo’s face by a bare two inches. ‘Yeah, OK,’ Aunt Zo said, hurriedly. ‘Let’s do that.’

  They turned and ran back the way they’d come. ‘Raw,’ the chef murmured as he strode after them. ‘Lady sushi. Very raw.’

  Hannah grabbed Zo’s hand, yanking her faster towards the swinging doors. Her aunt seemed dazed. They slip-slided to the doors across the wet floor and crashed out into the corridor.

  The restaurant was worse now, though.

  Most of the people were still talking, but
some looked strange. Their hands were moving in short, jerky movements. As they ran through the room Hannah saw that some people’s skin looked sallow, yellow or grey. One woman, so emaciated that you could see bones sticking out of her shoulders, had pulled her lip in too far and her teeth were slicing down into it again and again. What was coming out of her gouged lips looked like wine.

  They were nearly at the lobby when suddenly all of the strange-looking people stood up.

  ‘Oh God,’ Aunt Zo said.

  None of the other diners seemed to notice that someone had risen from their table. They kept chatting and eating. The people on the move were slow at first, like zombies in a video game, but once they’d fought free of the tables and chairs they began to move faster.

  ‘We have nothing available, I’m afraid,’ a perky voice said. It was the woman behind the desk. Her grin now looked as though someone had put it there with a knife. It was far too wide. ‘I’m sorry. We are fully booked forever.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Zo said. ‘We are so leaving.’

  The grey people were lurching towards the lobby, knocking over tables, plates and glasses crashing to the floor.

  ‘But I can’t let you go,’ the woman said, moving to block the doors. ‘You have no reservation.’

  ‘We don’t want one. We want to go.’

  ‘You can’t leave without a reservation.’

  ‘Just watch us,’ Aunt Zo snarled. She grabbed the woman by the arm and pulled at her, hard. The woman’s arm came off. Zo shrieked, and threw it to the floor.

  The woman looked down at her arm. ‘That’s not very kind, is it,’ she said disappointedly. ‘However will I write in the reservation book now?’

  The grey people were now only twenty feet from the lobby area. They weren’t fast. But they weren’t going to stop.

  ‘Help me,’ Zo shouted to Hannah.

  Hannah put her hands around the woman’s middle and pulled. The woman tottered forwards, away from the door, still looking peevishly down at her arm on the floor.

  ‘You are very silly people. I’ve told you. We have nothing under the name “Kristen”. You will have to starve.’

  ‘“Kristen”?’ Hannah said. ‘You said you hadn’t seen her. That’s my mom’s name.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ another voice said. A man’s voice.

  The chef was shouldering his way through the shambling people. He still had the cleaver in his hand, which was big and white and pale, mottled with liver spots that seemed out of place on a man his age.

  ‘You have no mom,’ the chef said. ‘You never did.’

  ‘I did so!’

  ‘No. That woman was only pretending.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Zo shouted. ‘Pull. Hard. NOW.’

  The chef raised his cleaver. His face did not look angry any more. He looked as if he was trying to help, and was using his other arm to hold back the grey people. Behind them, in the restaurant, everyone else was still happily eating as if nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

  ‘It’s better this way,’ the chef said. ‘The future is hungry and unkind. It’ll gobble you up, little girl. It will eat your heart.’

  ‘PULL.’

  Just as the chef’s arm started to swing down, Aunt Zo yanked at the desk woman with all her might. Hannah pulled too, and the woman fell into them.

  Zo dodged right and Hannah to the left, and the woman went crashing past them on to the floor, next to her arm.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said warmly to it. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  Hannah and Zo slammed out through the doors. The chef watched them go, his hair slowly turning white.

  ‘Over to you, imp,’ he said.

  As soon as they were outside everything was silent. It was darker in the forest than earlier, but there was still a soft, golden glow between the trees, enough to see their way.

  If they’d had any idea where to go, that is.

  Hannah was panting, her eyes still on the restaurant doors, watching carefully. You could see shadows of the grey people right up against the inside, filling the frosted-glass panes. ‘Can they get out? Can they still get us?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Zo said, backing away as more and more figures gathered on the other side of the door, scratching at it with bloody fingers. ‘But I think we should run anyway.’

  ‘Which way?’

  ‘I don’t care. Let’s just run.’

  Chapter 39

  Meanwhile, other things were happening. They always are, and that’s why it’s so damned hard to keep track of the world. You put someone down and think, I’ll come back to them later, but when you do, they’ve run off to be part of some other story. One of the perilous things about being an adult is there comes a point where the doors of your mind open far wider than required by your own concerns. There’s no ceremony when this occurs, and no warning. It simply happens one day and suddenly you find there are seventy things going on at once and you’re flinching amidst a maelstrom of love and lost opportunities and hard choices and the tenacious grasping hands of the past, not to mention tidying the garage. Adults are not distracted for the sake of it, so cut them a little slack. They’re all searching for the brake to stop the world spinning, so they can take a moment and catch their breath.

  Standing with his hand on an actual brake, and surrounded by clanking and banging sounds as the Giant Dipper hurled the carriages around its rickety track, Hannah’s father was nonetheless able to hear the siren approaching.

  ‘Fantastic,’ he said.

  ‘Aha,’ Granddad said. ‘Look!’ He pointed up through a gap in the machinery.

  Hannah’s father looked up in time to see the carriages hurtling past at the beginning of their second lap. ‘What the …’

  Both carriages were empty.

  ‘Where … where did they go?’

  ‘Behind.’ Granddad grinned, looking relieved. ‘Heck of a machine, this. I’d love to have met the man who built it.’

  ‘What is this “behind”, Dad? And don’t just say it’s hard to explain. I’m not ten years old any more.’

  ‘Well, it is hard. It’s … Well, it’s the Hell you can get to without dying. It’s where we are who we don’t want to be. But in fact it’s rather more complicated than that.’

  ‘More complicated?’

  Granddad kept his eyes on the control panel, making minor adjustments. The sound of the police siren was getting louder.

  ‘Seeing things isn’t only about the eyes,’ he said. ‘We see with our minds, too. If we care, that’s a kind of seeing too – you see with your heart. To glimpse the Behind, or fall into it, or be dragged, a place – or a thing, or a person – has to be wholly outside the human mind and spirit, for a moment truly alone. Wild animals see it, often. The homeless, sometimes. The Behind used to be much bigger, and easier to find. Now you need to tear edge points to access it, via devices like this one. It’s where you go to be afraid, and lonely. But also where fate’s currents come from, the nudges that shape our lives.’

  Hannah’s dad nodded thoughtfully. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Didn’t understand a single word.’

  ‘I’m not good with words,’ Granddad admitted. ‘I’ve always preferred machines.’

  The siren outside now sounded very close.

  ‘That stuff you said at the house – that can’t be true.’

  Granddad made a face that said it was.

  ‘You’re over two hundred years old?’

  ‘Time’s a tangled road, Steve. In the Behind it runs in loops, like the track above our heads. We’ve no way of knowing how long it’s been for them in there. Could be years, it might be only a few seconds. We just have to give them as much time as we possibly can.’

  ‘Did Mom know? About you?’

  Granddad shook his head sadly. ‘The rules of the deal were firm. That was one of them.’

  ‘But … but you used to look younger. I remember. There are photographs.’

  ‘Tricks, I
’m afraid. Courtesy of my employer.’

  ‘And he’s really the …’

  ‘Yes. He really is.’

  They heard the police vehicle pulling up the slip road that led to the entry gates.

  ‘How long have we got?’

  ‘Depends,’ Granddad said. ‘I locked the door. If they have to go off to find keys, maybe ten, fifteen minutes.’

  ‘If not? If they just break it down?’

  ‘Oh, about five. At the most.’

  ‘You can’t … freeze them, or stop time, or …’

  ‘I’m an engineer, son, not a magician.’

  They held their ground.

  A few minutes earlier, a battered truck had parked in a side street opposite. Nash killed the engine and watched as, a hundred yards away, the cop car pulled up in front of the boardwalk. Two officers got out and ran in.

  ‘Hell are they doing here?’ Jesse asked nervously.

  ‘I’m thinking it’s probably to do with the fact that rollercoaster is running by itself in the middle of the night.’

  ‘How is that even happening?’

  Nash slowly turned to look at him. Jesse was deeply unnerved to see his boss’s eyes looked as though they’d become black, with a hint of gold around the edges. Couldn’t be. They just looked that way because they were sitting here in the dark. Probably. Hopefully.

  ‘OK,’ Jesse said hurriedly. ‘Whatever. So are we going to go try find this guy who can open the case?’

  Nash turned back to the front. Was silent for a while. The cops at home, you knew what you were dealing with. There was a system. There were relationships, usually involving money handed over discreetly in brown envelopes in bars.

  But they were a long way from home. And their mission tonight, he knew – though he’d be lying if he pretended that he wholly understood it yet – was too important to be derailed by a dumb confrontation with local cops.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘We’re going to wait and see what happens next.’