Faust Among Equals (31 page)

He tried to conjure for some, and then remembered. Magic doesn't work here, because of interference from the tannoy system.

‘Hi,' he said. ‘You got any washing-up needs doing?'

Seven pairs and three trios of eyes turned and stared at him. ‘You what?' said a voice from behind the bar.

‘I said,' George repeated, sitting on a bar stool, ‘any washing-up you want doing? In return for a cup of coffee, something like that.'

The barfiend cackled through its twisted beak. ‘Listen, chum,' it said. ‘This is Hell, right? No problem getting washing-up done here.'

‘Fair enough.' George nodded. ‘Plenty of unhelpful husbands, you mean. All right, then, will you take a cheque?'

The fiend scowled, and pointed with its wingtip at a notice over the fireplace, which said:

‘I think I've been here before,' George said. ‘Well, sorry to have bothered you. See you around.'

The door through which he had just walked swung shut. Worse than that, it folded its arms. George sat down again and surreptitiously pulled a bowl of peanuts towards him. Before his fingers could close around any of the contents, they jumped out of the bowl and scurried for the ashtray.

‘Where d'you come from, anyway?' demanded the fiend. ‘Haven't seen you in here before, have I?'

‘I'm with the preview tour,' George replied. ‘Actually, I'm a bit lost.'

‘Who isn't?'

‘Good point.' With a deft flick of his wrist, George brushed a slower-than-average peanut into the palm of his hand and swallowed it quickly. ‘Could you direct me to the main gate? The bus leaves in ten minutes, and . . .'

The fiend wrinkled its beak. ‘I know who you are,' it said. ‘You're that Lucky George character. Well, sunshine, this time you won't be so bleeding lucky, because . . .'

Out of the corner of his eye, George caught sight of something nice. Niceness, like beauty, is very much in the be-holder's eye, because all he'd seen was two more bird-headed monsters. But these ones were different.They were seagull-headed.

‘Here,' the barfiend was saying, ‘you two. Are you from Security?'

A seagull head nodded.

‘Took your bloody time, didn't you? Here he is. Now get him out of here.'

George waited till they were past the Knight Eaten By Dogs and out on to the hard ice of the pond before breaking the silence.

‘Like the thing said,' he muttered. ‘You two took your bloody time.'

Larry shrugged. ‘It's not easy, you know,' he said. ‘We had to find costumes.'

‘And they had people in them, too,' Mike added. ‘So we had to get rid of them, and then we had to find you. And people kept stopping us and asking where the lavs are. We did our best.'

George nodded. ‘No problem,' he said, ‘just so long as you can find the way out. To be honest with you, I don't like it much here. Don't let Ron know I said that, by the way.'

‘It's over there,' Larry said, pointing. ‘Up past that big head thing with the plate on top. Better still, there's a fire escape just below the Burning Cities. We could go through that.'

George nodded. ‘Where's Helen?' he asked.

‘Waiting out front with the car,' Mike answered. ‘She insisted on coming.'

‘Quite right too. Now then, I left Lundqvist under a fish, but he's probably on the loose again by now, so we'd better get a move on.'

As they made their way up the bank away from the pond, a rabbit-headed demon shuffled up and asked them if they wanted to go on the Man-Eating Lute. They shook their heads and walked on.

‘
Freeze!
'

‘Oh for pity's sake,' George muttered, clicking his tongue and dodging a bullet from the .40 Glock. ‘Come on, we'd better make for that thing over there.'

‘Just a minute, boss, you don't want to go there, it's the—'

‘Come
on
, Larry, and don't dawdle.'

 

‘I see,' George whispered, ‘what you mean.'

Larry acknowledged the remark with a tiny dip of his head. The rest of him was frozen with terror.

‘It's all right really, Larry, the worst that can happen is they'll ask you to sing. What's so terrible about . . . ?'

George caught sight of the seagull's face and decided that this was a topic best left alone. He folded his arms, looked straight in front of him and set his lips in a slight smile.

 

Lundqvist woke up.

William Shakespeare was a great describer of sleep, referring to it as (
inter alia
) balm of hurt minds, knitter-up of the ravelled sleeve of care, great nature's second course and the season of all natures. Kurt Lundqvist, who had always taken the view that the pen may be mightier than the sword but is still no match for a twelve-gauge Remington Wingmaster with an eighteen-inch barrel loaded with Double-O buckshot, preferred to think of sleep as a right bastard, particularly when induced by an outsize expanded polystyrene fish.

It didn't help matters that the first thing he saw on opening his eyes was Links Jotapian, who said, ‘Are you all right, Mr Lundqvist?'

‘Yes. Get this bloody thing off me and raise the alarm.'

‘Straight away, Mr Lundqvist.'

‘Links.'

‘Yes, Mr Lundqvist?'

‘Try pushing it the other way.'

‘Gosh, sorry, Mr Lundqvist, I wasn't thinking. Did it hurt?'

‘Not nearly as much as what I'm going to do to you if you don't get a goddamn move on.'

‘I'm doing the best I can, Mr Lundqvist.'

‘Yes,' Lundqvist replied bitterly, ‘you probably are.'

A few minutes later, every alarm bell in the complex was howling its head off, producing a volume of noise so great that it was almost audible over the sound-effects from the various rides. On the Karaoke stall, however, it had about as much chance as a Bic disposable against Lundqvist's Remington.

‘Every time I say goodbye,' Larry was singing, ‘I die a little.' He didn't carry absolute conviction, because to judge strictly by appearances he was already dead; more than that, he'd been steeped for a week in formaldehyde and inexpertly stuffed.

‘He's really very good, isn't he?' hissed the other seagull under his breath. ‘Mind you, he gets that from his mother.'

Larry carried on singing until the rat-headed fiend in nominal charge of the proceedings eventually took the microphone away from him and passed it on to a circular nun with light shining out through her ears. All right, so this was Hell; but there are limits. The nun started to sing ‘My Way'.

‘Come on,' George hissed, ‘let's get out of this. I really do fancy something to eat.'

Before he could make good his escape, however, the rat-head snatched the mike away from the nun, and jabbed it into George's hand. He smiled, as if receiving a bunch of flowers from a welcoming committee, took a deepish breath and sang.

It took the rat-head less than seven seconds to realise that he'd made a serious mistake; but by then the damage was mostly done. When he tried to take the mike away from Lucky George, all he got for his pains was an expertly placed elbow in his solar plexus. Thereafter he confined his energies to switching the whole plant off at the mains and biting through the mike cable with his teeth. The difference it made was negligible.

Finally, having assured the world at large that he'd done it his way, George handed back the mike and sighed contentedly.

‘Can I have another go, please?'

The rat-head gave him a look of three parts pure terror, two parts unmitigated hatred.

He shrugged. ‘Pity, that,' said George. ‘I was enjoying myself.' He stepped down off the platform, weaving his way round the bodies of six or seven fiends, all curled up like woodlice with their hands clamped firmly over their ears.

‘Philistines,' he remarked. ‘Okay, Larry, Mike, last one to the bar gets them in.'

Three minutes or so after he'd gone, an assistant fiend with the toes and claws of a lizard crawled down the nozzle of the giant bagpipe and collapsed at rat-head's feet. He'd nearly perforated his own eardrums by sticking his claws in his ears, but that was a small price to pay.

‘Stone me,' he muttered. ‘That was bloody horrible, wasn't it, chief?'

‘Pardon?'

‘I said, that was bloody horrible, wasn't it?'

‘Pardon?'

‘I SAID THAT WAS BLOODY HORRIBLE, CHIEF, WASN'T IT?'

Rat-head shook himself and shuddered. ‘You'll have to speak up,' he said.

 

Links Jotapian had found a helicopter.

We use the term loosely. What he'd in fact found was a sort of walking tree with hideous branches like dry bones and a goat's skull growing out of its left armpit; it had taken the eye of youthful enthusiasm to see that if you climbed up the thing's trunk and prodded it viciously with a penknife, it could be persuaded to whirl its branches fast enough to achieve a rotor effect. Sikorski wouldn't have approved, but no matter.

‘Nothing as yet, Mr Lundqvist, over,' he reported into his two-way radio. ‘Results so far are one-hundred-per-cent negative.'

‘Keep looking, Links, he's down there somewhere.'

‘Roger and out.' Links peered through a screen of small twigs and jabbed at the tree to go lower.

This is fun, Links said to himself, much more fun than school. I mean, compared to this, school sucks. I mean, this is, well, Life. He brushed cinders out of his eyes and lifted his feet clear to avoid the pincers of a bored-looking anthropomorphic lobster, positioned on the top of the horse's skull swimming pool area.

‘Quark!'

Not, said something inside him, that it's not also a tad scary. Like, it's a very long way down, and this tree could get cramp in its branches any minute. And falling a long way is bad enough at the best of times, without taking into account some of the really weird things a guy can land on in this place.

‘Quark quark!'

‘Get down more, you sucker,' Links yelled into the knot-hole which he hoped was the tree's ear. ‘And when you start feeling tired, for Chrissakes rustle a leaf or something.'

The tree wobbled. Links looked up, to see two seagulls roosting in the branches. They looked decidedly nauseous, as well they might.

‘Shoo!' Links yelled, and waved his arms. ‘Go lay an egg or something.'

‘Quark.'

‘You crazy dumb birds, you'll make this thing crash.'

‘Quark.'

‘Oh.'

 

His last thoughts, before he hit the frozen ice of the boating lake and disappeared in a cloud of ice-shards, spray and match-wood, were
Never mind, this is still better than school
. His first thoughts after the fiends had fished him out and pumped half a gallon of stagnant Styx water out of his lungs, were
On the other hand, there's a lot to be said for double geography
.

‘And another thing,' said Machiavelli.

With a tremendous effort, the barfiend in the Hellza-Pop-Inn refreshment area ground his head round until he was facing his most regular customer. Sure thing, these were the Torments of Hell, and this was the spot reserved for married men who forsake their wives to go boozing every evening, and as a happily married fiend with a mortgage and three wonderful imps he reckoned those drunken bums deserved everything they got, even this; but, dammit, he was staff, not a customer, and he had to bear the brunt of it.

‘All this acid rain,' Machiavelli was saying, ‘and all these volcanoes and stuff, sodding up the weather. You aren't going to tell me that's all a coincidence, now are you?'

‘Anything you say, Nick,' yawned the barfiend.

‘'Cos,' Machiavelli ground on, ‘it's a matter of cold fact that on the day JFK was assassinated, the weather forecast for the whole of Texas was Mainly Dry, Some Light Cloud Clearing Early. But of course, that's what they
wanted
us all to think, because . . .'

The door opened, a man came in, sat down on a barstool and said, ‘Hiya, Nick, what're you having?'

‘And then,' Machiavelli went on, ‘when you compare the records for seismic activity for the day of the Kennedy murder with the night of the Watergate break-in, you find that exactly the same level of activity was recorded in Chicopee Falls, Iowa, on both occasions, which makes you think.' He paused, as if trying to remember something he'd just heard, and then said, ‘Dunnit?'

‘Sure thing, Nick,' said the barfiend, polishing a glass. It just wasn't
fair
, he said to himself. All the inconsiderate husbands are out there in the back bar playing pool and getting pissed as rats, I'm stuck in here listening to the floorshow. They've gotta
do
something about this.

‘Hiya, Nick,' the stranger repeated. ‘Same again?'

Slowly, Machiavelli turned his head and stared.

‘George?' he enquired.

‘Been a long time, Nick,' replied Lucky George. ‘I was very interested in what you were saying just now, by the way. I expect you were discussing that new book by that journalist bloke, the one who got himself killed not so long back. Bunnet or something, I think he was called.'

‘What the hell are you doing here, George? I thought you'd—'

‘I have, Nick, I have. And a Michelob and a toasted cheese sandwich for me,' he called through to the barfiend, ‘when you've got a moment. So,' he said, turning back to Machiavelli, ‘how's things with you?'