May Contain Traces of Magic (17 page)

 

‘Hang on,' he panted, moving the stepladder. ‘OK, the human race wi—'

 

LL PERISH. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU

 

His right hand was starting to go numb. He rested it for thirty seconds, then scraped some more:

 

I WILL HELP YOU, AS I HAVE ALWAYS DONE. HOWEVER, SINCE

 

The tapemeasure slipped out of his hand again. This time, luckily, it missed the fixtures and fittings and flumped down on the floor. He snatched it up, and—

 

YOU MISSED A BIT

 

He blinked, then looked up. Sure enough, there was a little patch of paper that had escaped the blade. He flicked it off, then went back to where he'd got to.

Nothing there.

He did the rest of the wall. Nothing. Just plain, uninscribed plaster as far as the eye could see.

By the time Karen got home he'd done the whole of the bathroom, every last square centimetre. Also, he'd been over the whole lot with sandpaper and a wire brush; to get off any loose plaster, he explained, and make sure there was a firm surface for the new paper to stick to. She did manage to find fault with some dark smeary marks, like badly erased chalk, but her heart clearly wasn't in it, and she barely sulked at all about him not being back by one as he'd promised.

 

That night, Chris didn't sleep at all well. A dream kept going round in his head, repeating like a loop.

There was the demon, edging towards him; in the dream it was light in the box formed by the faded car, and he could see it clearly. It crawled on all fours as far as his feet, then looked up at him with fiery orange eyes, and whimpered, ‘Help me, please.' As it said the words, a shadow fell across it, so he couldn't see it any more; and then an egg the size of a rugby ball split open, and SatNav jumped out, golden and shining, and said, ‘Leave her alone, she's just a baby,' and then popped back into the egg, whose shell flew back into place like a rewound film. Then he stood up, and the egg was in his pocket, and it was saying, ‘At the end of the world, turn right.' And then Jill popped up out of nowhere, grabbed him by the hair and laid the blade of a tapemeasure across his throat, at which point he woke up.

Being awake wasn't much better; he had that extra-creepy feeling he hadn't experienced since he was a small child, that there was something in the room, watching him. As if that wasn't enough to be going on with, something was nagging away at his mind, and he couldn't pin it down; something to do with water polo, and websites. When he drifted off to sleep, the dream came back again, waking him up. And so on.

Chris spent Sunday hanging wallpaper, but no more messages came. Just after lunch, he got the
Book
out and looked up pantacopts; same entry as before, but he'd missed a bit where it said about the disorientating effect of handling such a powerful magical object if you weren't used to it. Delusions and hallucinations were common side effects, it said, and recommended the wearing of gloves, eye and ear protection and a surgical mask.

So maybe he'd imagined the whole thing; the writing on the wall, talking back to him. It was a comforting thought, and since he'd scrubbed away the chalk (if there'd ever been any to start with) he had no verifiable evidence; or, in other words, nothing to contradict the must've-imagined-it hypothesis. Magical radiation leaking out of the tapemeasure and driving him nuts; add to that the delayed shock of his meeting with the demon - or had he imagined that too? No, because Jill had been to the car park, and her instruments had picked up the burn of demonic body heat all over the place. So that had definitely happened, unfortunately.

The dream was waiting for him as soon as he went to bed, and the pattern repeated as before. He woke up for the third time just after three a.m., and thought the hell with this, I'll get up and make myself a cup of tea, and perhaps that'll disturb the cycle.

It was while the kettle was boiling that the mystery resolved itself; it sort of popped out, like a loose tooth. Where he'd been going wrong, of course, was water polo. Not water polo after all. What he should have been thinking about was polo shirts; to be precise, the one he'd been lent by the government man, with the letters DS on the pocket.

Quietly as a little mouse, so as not to wake Karen, he crept into the living room, turned on the computer and plugged in the phone jack. Doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou dot delendisunt (all one word)—

Eventually, the home page of the Department of Metaphysics shimmered onto the screen, and there, in the top left-hand corner, was their departmental logo; a hand clutching a badly drawn sword, and under it a scroll with the words
delendi sunt
—

Whatever that meant; but now at least he knew what DS stood for. Not that much of a mystery. Chris went back into the kitchen and made his cup of tea; then, since he wasn't feeling sleepy any more, he clicked on the links page to
Supernatural Entities of the British Isles
and scrolled down to
dryads
. He read what it had to say, but there wasn't really anything that Jill hadn't already told him, so he switched off and disconnected.

So she'd come home, had she? One less weirdness to worry about. Presumably they'd keep her there and find some way of breaking into the casing, and then dissect her or whatever you did with stroppy entities. He didn't feel terribly wonderful about that; but then, she'd tried to cut him open, hadn't she? In which case, serve her right.

From there, his thoughts strayed to the demon itself. Logically, he supposed, he ought to be in a right old state about that. His escape had, after all, been as narrow as a country lane; if SatNav hadn't turned up when she did and chased the demon away, he was fairly sure it'd have killed him, and it was still out there, and it had deliberately targeted him, going to all that trouble and effort. True, now it knew that he didn't have the information it wanted, so presumably now it would leave him alone, go and hassle someone else - he remembered poor Mr Newsome and winced - but even so, he couldn't help wondering:
where is she?
Odd question to ask. At the time, he'd been stone-cold certain he didn't know the answer, and it was on that presupposition that his belief that he was now safely out of it rested. But suppose he did have the answer, but without knowing it? Possible, since he hadn't got a clue who
she
was. He did know a fair number of women, after all, and one of them could be the person the demon was after; could be Jill, for example, or anybody - Karen, Angela the trainee (all this stuff had only started when she arrived in his life), Julie at the office, Karen's cousin Melanie, anybody at all. Until he could be absolutely certain that he didn't know the answer to the demon's question, it really wouldn't do to get complacent.

Well, fine; now he had something to worry himself sick about all over again, very well done indeed, but without knowing who
she
was, he had no way at all of either setting his mind at rest or confirming that he was squarely in the demon's cross-hairs. Naturally, he'd told Jill all about what the demon had asked; she'd just frowned, then shrugged, no suggestions or explanations, and she was the only person he could think of who might possibly know. So: dead end.

Chris picked up his teacup, and noticed it had left a ring on the cover of the
Book
-

The Book
. Supremely advanced technology but a total dead loss commercially, because it told you what you
needed
to know, not what you
wanted
to know. Well, he thought; if ever there was a case of genuine, not to say desperate need, surely this was it. He shifted the cup to the table, rested the
Book
on his knees and opened it, as stated in the instructions, at random—

He used a word his mother wouldn't have liked, and closed the
Book
. No wonder they couldn't give the bloody things away. It crossed his mind that the demon was simply behind the times and not particularly well up in current affairs; but it had specifically said
she
, not
he
, so that ruled Gandhi out as the object of its search. He yawned, and went back to bed, and dreamed he was back at school and having to do the reading in assembly with no clothes on; which, compared to the dreams he'd been having lately, was practically a lullaby.

 

‘I heard about what happened,' said Angela the trainee as they drove through the outskirts of Telford. ‘It must've been terrible.'

She really did have a little Suzuki jeep, which showed the sort of attention to detail that demons were capable of, but they'd picked up on things like the
US Out Of Kiribati Now
sticker in the back window and the door compartment stuffed full of used tissues. You had to admire good fieldwork. He had to admit, though, the demon Angela had been a much better driver.

‘Oh?' Chris said. ‘Who told you?'

‘The government people rang to find out where I was,' she explained. ‘Mummy answered; she told them I'd been in my room all day. They told her.' She went to change up into third and got fifth instead. ‘Sounds like you were really lucky.'

‘I was,' he said. ‘I'm pretty sure it'd have killed me if—'

He hesitated. Had the government people told her about SatNav's intervention? Probably not. An escaped SatNav entity was just the sort of thing they'd classify, on general principles. He considered telling her anyway, but decided against it. Too much background to explain, and he didn't feel like going into all that.

‘I was going to ask you,' Angela said, as she swung out to overtake an ambling JCB. The brave little engine whinnied as she flogged it. ‘How did you get away?'

‘I don't know,' he replied. ‘There was this strap thing holding me in, where the seat belt had been, and it suddenly sort of gave way, and I fell out, and there I was on the tarmac, back in the real world. Otherwise - well, doesn't bear thinking about, really.'

He'd hoped that would end the inquiry, but apparently not. ‘That's odd,' she said. ‘Because if they took you into their dimension, presumably they'd be using a level seven containment spell to keep you there, and that's what would've been holding you down, and something like that wouldn't just break of its own accord. I mean, either they must've released it or something else must've disrupted it, one or the other.'

‘Is that right?' Chris said uneasily. ‘Lucky for me, whatever it was.'

There was definitely something very different about Angela today. It wasn't just that she was chattier, friendlier, more relaxed, less sullen and withdrawn. The way she looked had changed, too. She looked - well: the difference between scrag end of lamb and words is that words are better unminced. She looked nicer. Lots nicer. All the sharp edges seemed to have gone from her face, there was a bit of colour in her cheeks, if he didn't know better he could've sworn she'd filled out a bit. The result wasn't bad, actually, though of course that was none of his business. Even so; he couldn't help glancing sideways, while she was busy not mashing a cyclist into the side of a parked van. Make-up? He couldn't see any, but he was no expert—

Make-up, he thought; we sell that. Instaglamour cream, available in four handy sizes. One of the few advantages that the JWW product had over its rivals, one which he kept on forgetting to mention when he was pitching it in the shops, was that it didn't just spruce up the way you looked, it improved your personality as well; your voice sounded nicer, people believed what you told them, your jokes were suddenly funny, you were generally more fun to be with - though of course you had to be careful not to overdo it, as Tony Blair had found out to his cost. Still, it worked, which was more than could be said of everything in the JWW range—

It was like the old hairspray commercial: was she or wasn't she? Hard to tell. If she was, it could only have been a little bit, a quick dab on each cheek and the tip of the nose, but that was what they recommended in the little leaflet; just a little to start with, or people would notice, and gradually work your way up. Or maybe she was just that much more relaxed, or something had happened to put her in a good mood, and without the spiky attitude he was seeing her as she really was. Maybe it was just because she was driving her own car rather than being driven in someone else's. Whatever; it meant that today promised to be slightly less wearing than Thursday, and that couldn't be bad.

‘Is this the right road?' Angela asked. ‘I don't know this area.'

Chris nodded. ‘Straight on till you come to a T-junction.' For some reason, his voice faltered as he said it. ‘Then left and immediately right.'

‘Thanks.' She flicked hair away from her face. ‘I've got a rubbish sense of direction. What I could do with is one of those SatNav things.'

The tone of voice so carefully pitched, but still not good enough; he felt as though someone was running a wire brush over the soles of his feet. ‘They're all right,' he said. ‘But it doesn't do to rely on them.'

‘Really? I'd heard they were pretty good.'

‘They can let you down,' he replied. ‘You're better off with a map.'

(Not always true, he reflected, thinking of the jinxed map that had taken him to the Ettingate Retail Park. Basically, you couldn't trust
anything
; and then he remembered that a wall had recently told him that. And he'd been trying so hard not to think about it—)

They'd come to call on Mercian Magic, one of his better customers; whether or not the manageress fancied him, as some of the unkinder voices in the office had been heard to suggest, they always ordered in well on the new lines and, to do them justice, managed to get rid of them. Properly speaking, it wasn't the right day, but he'd phoned ahead and yes, they could see him at nine-forty; a nice easy call, he'd promised himself, to ease himself back into the swing.