May Contain Traces of Magic (11 page)

Chris said something vulgar and indicative of a limited vocabulary. It was an open secret that several of the other reps had spent their own money on the Kawaguchiya NZ3000
Open Book
, which didn't have all this interactive shit but did have an index. He cleared his throat again, sat up straight and did his best Alec Guinness impersonation, and this time got—

He closed the book with a snap. Oh, he thought.

Back at the office Chris had a desk. On his first day in the job he'd gone through the drawers, the way you do, and one of the bits of stray useless junk he'd found in there was a tapemeasure; something he hadn't got but would soon be needing, since Karen wanted new carpet in the bathroom. So he'd slipped it in his pocket and promptly forgotten all about it, until the next day, when Julie from reception came crashing in asking if he'd seen a tapemeasure anywhere. Rather than confess that he'd stolen it, which would have been embarrassing, he'd said no, but Julie had insisted on turning the whole room upside down looking for it, and when the search proved futile she gave him ever such a funny look and went off in a foul mood. Later, when carpet day arrived, Karen had already gone out and bought a tapemeasure, and the stolen one had ended up in the kitchen drawer where hammers, screwdrivers and other DIY-related hardware went to hide; and he had no reason to believe it wasn't still there.

Unlikely, of course. Probably it was just the office tapemeasure, and Julie had been all pissy about not finding it because Julie was all pissy about everything. Even so.

‘Was it all right?' the girl asked him as he emerged from the staffroom.

Chris shook his head. ‘I'll give you a returns note,' he said, stowing the book in his jacket pocket. ‘Mind you send it in with the next invoice. Any other problems, while I'm here?'

He drove straight home and hurried into the kitchen. It was there, buried under a dense seam of Rawlplugs, little metal things and bits of wooden dowel left over from various flat-pack assembly sessions. He picked it up nervously (
exceptional power, capable of cutting through practically anything
) and put it down gently on the worktop. Just a tapemeasure, yellow, with the name of a big DIY chain printed on it; except, he noticed for the first time, the name was spelt wrong—

Chris knew about that: the fundamental law of physical metamorphosis, by which any object magically transformed into something else will always have one slight flaw or mistake in it - a piano with one too many keys, a nine-legged spider, or anything produced by Microsoft . So, whatever the hell it was, it hadn't been a tapemeasure originally. Which proved nothing; could just as easily be that someone in the office, needing to measure something and being too idle to go round the building looking for the tapemeasure, had magicked a box file or a stapler. That was far more likely—

He stared at it. A magical weapon of exceptional power; sounded really cool on the page, but maybe not so cool if you had one lying on the table in front of you, lethal, illegal and almost certainly very dangerous to use. On the other hand, if he really was being followed about by demons, it'd be reassuring to think that he had some sort of an edge—

Ouch; no pun intended. He looked around for something expendable, and assembled a carrot, a pencil and (for the hell of it) a heavy glass floral paperweight that Karen had been given as a leaving present by her enemies at her previous job, and which had so far resisted all efforts to smash or chip it. The carrot and the pencil he set up trestle-fashion, their ends perched on the rims of coffee mugs. Couldn't do that with the paperweight, so he rested it on the tiled floor.

‘Here goes,' Chris said aloud, nestled his thumb against the small chrome tab that stuck out of the body of the tapemeasure, and pulled.

It looked just like a tapemeasure: yellow steel strip, with numbers printed on it. This is silly, he thought; I bet it's exactly what it looks like, a thing for measuring things with. In which case, argued his malicious inner voice, you can whack the carrot with it and nothing will happen, and then you can get a grip on yourself, forget all this dark magic stuff, and—

He didn't think he'd actually touched the carrot with the edge of the steel tape, just brought it very close; but the carrot halved, and the two pieces fell on to the worktop with a gentle thud. He froze, too scared to move; oh shit, he thought, it's real, it works, now what the hell do I do? For one thing, how do you get the tape back inside the plastic case without strimming off all your fingers?

Chris tried the pencil, which subdivided instantly. He was holding the tapemeasure at arm's length now, his head craned back and away, and he thought, what kind of dangerously irresponsible lunatic would disguise something like this as a tapemeasure and then leave it lying about in a desk? And then he remembered the way the demon had grinned at him, and the feel of its arm brushing against him as it leaned forward; he relaxed just enough to move, and addressed the paperweight, squaring up to it the way he'd seen samurai do in films. Then, very carefully, he nudged the glass with the edge—

Fuck, he thought; and then, Karen's going to kill me when she sees this. The tapemeasure hadn't just gone through the paperweight (the halves of which had rolled away across the floor) but the tile as well, which had cracked in two. Thanks to the handy numbers printed on the side, he knew precisely how deep it had gone: nine inches, and he'd barely touched it.

He drew it slowly out of the crack in the tile. There was the usual button on the side of the casing - press it forward and the tape would snap back into the handle. He didn't fancy trying that, for some reason, but (maybe it was because he was nervous, which made him grip too hard and press the button accidentally) it did it anyway. There was a cracking noise, he felt the recoil as the chrome stop slammed against the plastic case, and - well, there it was, lying in the palm of his hand, a simple, inoffensive tapemeasure. He could almost have convinced himself that none of it had happened - if it hadn't been for the carrot, the pencil, the paperweight and the bloody great big crack in the kitchen tile, which Karen would notice the moment she set foot through the front door, and she was going to be so mad at him—

Glue, Chris thought desperately; or Polyfilla and some of her make-up stuff, to make it the same colour as the tile. It was a good idea, by his standards, and it should have worked, except that nothing he tried would make the Polyfilla stay in the crack. He even tried looking up mending enchanted cracks in the
Book
, but all he got was an error message and please try again later; and when he tried again, what he got was—

 

 

N
eedless to say, Chris didn't tell Karen about the pantacopt, or the demons. He said he'd accidentally knocked the paperweight onto the floor, and it had busted the tile and broken in two. She sulked about it all evening, then swept off to bed like a diplomat walking out of peace negotiations. It disturbed him to discover how little he cared.

He was pretty tired too, but he didn't want to go into the bedroom while there was any chance that she'd still be awake, so he settled down in the armchair with
The Book of All Human Knowledge
. For some reason, the stupid thing kept wanting him to read about Gandhi, but he really wasn't in the mood, so he used his master key and looked up satellite navigation systems, magical—

(Yup, Chris thought, that's me; five out of five.)

Oh, he thought. More or less what Ben had told him, and if it was in the
Book
it had to be true. Although there wasn't much there that he hadn't already known, reading it had left him feeling shaken and upset; he closed the
Book
and switched on the telly, but he had to keep the volume so low, in order not to wake Karen, that he couldn't follow the plot, and soon gave up. He'd decided it was safe to go to bed when the phone rang.

‘Sorry to call so late.' Jill's voice. ‘I'm not disturbing you, am I?'

‘Just a second.' He'd bought an extra-long flex for the phone so that he could take it into the kitchen if anybody rang after curfew. ‘That's better. OK, fire away.'

‘I was thinking,' she said. ‘About your demon. Are you absolutely positive you haven't left something out? Only I just can't account for why it didn't attack.'

Chris almost told her; about how the demon had reached past him and touched the SatNav button. Things were different now, he could see that. Before, the captive spirit's enchantment had made him want to protect it; now he knew the awful truth, so why shouldn't he tell Jill? Sure, she'd probably lecture him about being vulnerable, weak-willed, impressionable, of below average intelligence and starved of affection, but he could handle that - he'd never had a high enough opinion of himself to be upset by the truth. Telling her would be the sensible thing to do. But he didn't.

‘You're really, really sure?'

‘Yes, for crying out loud.'

‘Oh,' Jill said, ‘right. In that case, it's a mystery. Look, about the car, and Norman's clothes . . .'

You had to hand it to Jill when it came to making arrangements. She'd spoken to Mr Burnoz personally - he'd sounded very impressed when he found out who he was talking to - and of course Chris mustn't dream of coming back to work until after the weekend. Gerald from the department would call round in the morning to bring back his car and pick up the BMW and the designer clothes, and there'd be a statement for him to sign; just routine, nothing heavy.

‘Oh, and one last thing,' she said, sounding rather too much like Lieutenant Colombo for Chris's liking. ‘That packet of biscuits.'

‘What pack—'

‘In my carrier bag, you remember. Don't suppose you've had any further thoughts about that, have you?'

‘No.'

‘Only . . .' Hesitation; very unlike her. ‘Only, that's another mystery, and I hate them. Oh well, never mind. See you Tuesday, as usual?'

Fine, Chris thought, as he put the phone down and carried it back into the hall, but that wasn't what she'd started to say.
Only
, he'd be prepared to bet money on it, had been the preamble to an explanation of why the stupid biscuits mattered so much, and she'd started and then changed her mind. Why? Because she didn't trust him? Out of the question, after all these years; except, of course, that he'd been lying to her, and he had a nasty suspicion that she knew it. For two pins he'd have called her back and told her about the demon and SatNav. But he didn't.