Deep Secret (34 page)

“Not sister – cousin,” Nick said. “
How
long?”

“I won’t kid you,” Stan said gently. “Sometimes they can drag on for years.”

With another scramble, Nick was glaring into my face. The orange lights of the empty bus station caught the darkness of his eyes so that they shone into mine like spots of red agony. It was like having my own pain glare into me. “You said there was another way!” he blared at me. “What are you waiting for?
Do
it – do it
now
!”

“I’m not sure I… it’s a deep secret,” I said wretchedly.

“I won’t say a word,” Nick said. “Just
do
it!”

“It isn’t that,” I protested. “It takes quite a time. It might not work. I’ve never done it. It needs at least one other Magid and someone to go with her, and I’m not sure we’ve got—”

“You don’t
understand
!” Nick roared in my face. “I wasn’t
alive
until Maree came to live with us! She makes that kind of difference – she’s that kind of
person
!”

“I
know
she is,” I said. “But we may not have—”

“Rupert,” said Stan, “the lad’s right. Use the Babylon secret. You have to get this girl back because the more I see, the more I think she’s Intended to be your new Magid.”

How was I to tell him that I was hesitating mostly because I wanted so badly to do it myself? Half the way I hurt was because I wanted to use Babylon. You are not supposed to use a deep secret if you think you are only doing it because you want to. And the thought of using it and getting it wrong was unbearable, almost as bad as the thought that I might be doing wrong because I wanted Maree so much. I took some of my feelings out by shouting at Stan. “Intended! Then why have they gone through all this trouble if it was what they Intended anyway? Why bring
me
into it at all?”

“You know they can’t work directly,” Stan said reproachfully. “It’s not allowed. You can have my verse when you want it. It won’t be the same as yours.”

“I hope you realise just what you’re asking, both of you!” I said. I think my voice cracked like Nick’s. “You’re asking me to do a risky major working, a working that can
kill
, in a place where I’ve got another major working already set up, and a wounded centaur to hide from two murderers, one of whom keeps tampering with the node. And the node’s so strong that, even with Will to help, I’m not sure I can do all the rest
and
keep the road open
and
look after Maree on the way—”

“
I’ll
look after Maree,” Nick put in. “I’m the one doing that.”

“…and then there’s Andrew as well as everything else!” I finished. “Yes, I think you’ll have to, Nick. I can’t do it all!”

“You’re forgetting what I always used to tell you, Rupert,” Stan said. “Take things one by one, as they come. There’s no need to load yourself with the lot. You just get your knickers in a twist.”

“I’ll do everything I can to help,” Nick said. “Anything. I promise.”

“All right,” I said. “All right.” I sat back, feeling a clean blast of relief. “As soon as we get loose from this bloody bus shelter then.”

We waited. It was not really long. Once anything is growing, it doubles in size steadily. The metal rails had taken on the segmented look of bamboos and were spreading, gracefully, out and up, carrying the fluted, leaf-like plastic canopy with them. This had turned darker and buds in it were thrusting long, half transparent fronds up. We could hear them rattle in the slight wind. The shelter was quite quickly taking on the aspect of an arcade of interlaced trees. My hands shook on the steering wheel while I waited for it to finish growing. Nick truly did not know what he was asking, of himself or me. But Stan
did
. The fact that I had wanted Stan to ask it only made me all the more nervous.

“About ready to go?” Stan suggested at length.

I turned on my headlights again and restarted the engine. The shelter was suddenly green, and not only green overhead. Spear-shaped green plastic leaves were actually beginning to sprout from the joints in the rails, translucent in the headlights. The whole growth rustled and creaked and swayed as the car crawled along inside it. I was rather impressed. The whole thing was so graceful that I felt quite regretful, when we came sliding out through the end of it with long shining leaves brushing the windows, because I then had to turn and suggest to the shelter that it went back to its former shape. I had to suggest with precision and concentration in order to leave Maree out of this part.

“Pity,” Stan remarked as the green foliage began to wilt. “I’d love to have seen their faces when they found it.”

“Are you going to do the working now?” Nick asked.

“In the hotel, in my room,” I promised him. “I need to talk to Will first.”

I drove to the hotel as fast as the one-way system would let me. My poor car rattled and seemed to limp a little, with a clank underneath in the chassis somewhere. As we rattled into the market street, Nick said, “They keep a wheelchair behind the reception desk. Shall I get it?”

We stopped outside the main entrance for Nick to do that. His door would not open. I had to do a small working to spring the lock, and after that the door would not shut. We limped into the staff car park with the offside door swinging and stopped beside Will’s pseudo Land Rover. I was heartily glad to see it there. I needed Will. I could not even express to Stan how much. I sent off a strong call to Will to meet me by the lifts and then set about forcing the other doors open.

“You need my verse?” Stan asked.

“Please,” I said, with one foot up on the driver’s door. It took a severe kick to open it.

“Here it is then,” Stan said. His creacking voice recited:

“There,” he said. “Does that make any sense with what you’ve got?”

“Quite a lot,” I said. “My verse suggests it’s like that too, but mine’s got a warning in it as well. I’m hoping Will’s verse is going to be the missing link.”

I had just wrenched the rear door open (bent, dented and scratched) when Nick arrived with the wheelchair. Together we manoeuvred Maree out of the back seat and sat her in it. I could tell that my accidental working was still operating on her. She seemed heavier than she had been. She sat slumped in the chair, looking very small, waving her hands and muttering. I made Nick walk ahead in case she fell out, waved to Stan, and wheeled her cautiously and carefully into the hotel.

As soon as we were under the lights and among the ubiquitous mirrors, I saw what a weird trio we made. Nick was covered with golden dust, hair and all, with streaks of it on his face, and he had a ragged, slightly bloody hole in both knees of his jeans. I was not much better, and I was charred into the bargain. My good suede jacket was black and crisp in front. Holes had been burnt randomly in my trouser-legs. The front locks of my hair had frizzled off short and my face was red and blistered, except for the white rings where my glasses had kept the heat off. As for Maree, she was like a mad little dowager over whom someone had emptied a bag of flour.

Then Nick pushed open the doors into the Grand Lobby and we were not out of place at all. I had forgotten the Masquerade. There were people wandering about there in every conceivable kind of dress, including a large shiny caterpillar with at least five sets of human legs. There were Vikings, aliens of all sorts, Grim Reapers, people in cloaks, several blood-soaked corpses, and scores of stunning girls in robes with strategic holes in them. Some were in next to nothing. One, whose costume consisted of two leather straps and thigh-high red boots, caused Nick’s head and mine to whip round after her. We nearly lost Maree over that.

The sudden laughing, vivid crowd seemed to make Maree very restless. She stirred from side to side of her chair and made several attempts to get out of it. While Nick and I were distracted by the straps and red boots, she succeeded. Nick ran after her frantically, diving among aliens and tripping on the train of a queen. He caught her beside the caterpillar.

We had just got her back, coaxed her into the chair and set off again when we found ourselves face-to-face-to-face with Rick Corrie, as himself, and two young gentlemen tightly laced into bright silk crinolines, each carrying a fringed parasol.

“Those are interesting costumes,” one of them fluted at us. And the other asked, in a strong counter-tenor, “What section are you three entered in?”

Nick, who appeared to know them well, answered airily. “Extra-terrestrial, of course. We’re victims of a mining disaster out in Tau Centauri.”

“Oh,” said Rick Corrie. “Maybe that accounts for the rumour. I heard you were coming as a centaur, Nick.”

“Er,” said Nick. “I was – but the legs wouldn’t work. We did this instead at the last minute.”

Nick was sweating as we finally pushed Maree out into the corridor beyond. He wiped golden dust around his face with his sleeve and said he hoped we didn’t meet anyone else. Naturally the next turn in the corridor brought us slap up against Ted Mallory and Tina Gianetti, who both stared.

“Nice idea, shame about the execution,” Ted Mallory said. “You all look terrible. What have you done to yourself, Maree?”

Maree recognised him. She mumbled and shifted. I said hurriedly, “She’s the Moon Dowager from that short story by H. C. Blands.”

Mallory of course had never heard of the story but, as I had hoped, he did not like to admit it. He took Gianetti’s arm and moved on, saying, “Well, on with the motley, Tina.” But he was faintly suspicious, enough to turn and look at us over his shoulder and to add in a slightly puzzled way, “I like that costume even less than the centaur get-up, Nick. Don’t expect me to award you any prizes.”

We rounded the corner to the lifts, feeling limp, both of us. Neither lift was there. Nick pounded his thumb on the call buttons. “This is almost worse than everything else!” he was saying, when both lifts arrived together. “I can’t bear to meet anyone else I know,” he said, watching a crowd of people surrounding an angel with a harp surge out of the lift on the right.

The lift on the left contained Janine.

Rupert Venables continued

I
f Janine was disconcerted, you could have fooled me. She stood in the doorway of the lift and stared pleasantly down at Maree. “Dear, dear,” she said. “What can have happened to my niece?”

She was still wearing that bloodstained jumper. I noticed it the way you do notice things, vividly, when something this shocking happens. The apparent blood, from this close, resolved itself into a cluster of moistly shiny red strawberries. I tore my eyes from them and met Janine’s. “I don’t know what happened to Maree exactly,” I said. “You tell me.”

A perfectly horrible little smile flitted on Janine’s face, gleeful and secretly gloating. It took in my blistered face as well as Maree’s blanched little figure. “I’ve no idea,” she said. “But I think she ought to go to her room and lie down.”

Janine clearly thought she was quite safe. She had no notion, of course, that I knew she had been on Thalangia. But surely, I thought, seeing Nick was with me would show her – Here I began to wonder what mixture of feelings Nick must be having. If it was bad for me, meeting Janine like this, it was surely ten times worse for Nick. I looked round for him and there was no sign of him. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. But Will was standing a few feet away, staring at Maree in evident horror. And Maree knew Janine. Her bleached hands were flailing limply and she was trying to say something.

Janine, still smiling, cocked her face sweetly down towards Maree. “What’s the poor little thing trying to say, do you think?”

Seeing Will standing there made me feel better. I wanted to hurl accusations at Janine. I wanted to show her I knew what she had done. But it would have done no good. She knew as well as I did that there was no kind of Earthly evidence to connect her with Maree’s condition. Instead, I leant forward over the handle of the chair, across Maree’s head. “She’s trying to tell you,” I said, “that someone has sewn six rabbit’s testicles to your right breast.”

Janine’s head jerked upright. She stared at me for a second, obviously wondering if I had said what she thought she heard. Then she settled for looking puzzled and distant, turned and stalked gracefully away.

Will pounced forward. “My God, Rupe! What the hell—?”

“Get in the lift with us,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.” I looked round again for Nick, but he was still nowhere to be seen. It was the deftest vanishing trick I had ever come across. I just hoped he would turn up again. Will and I crowded into the lift beside the wheelchair and its drooping white occupant, and I gave Will a summary of events as we hummed slowly upwards.

“Lord!” he said. “No wonder you look such a mess! And I’ve never heard even you be that rude to a strange woman before! I couldn’t think what – and what about the centaur, Rob?”