May Contain Traces of Magic (25 page)

The door slammed shut behind him, and he knew without trying it that it wasn't going to open for him. Pity.

Make himself at home. Right. No need. It looked exactly as it had done when he'd left it that morning, right down to the cup he'd left on the table and the TV listings magazine on the floor next to the sofa. Which meant that either she'd lifted it straight out of his head or else she'd been there; neither of them exactly comfortable thoughts.

‘I get it,' Chris said. ‘An Englishman's home is his—'

She sighed. ‘Don't tell me,' she said, ‘it's one of those things that aren't supposed to be taken literally. Metaphors?'

He nodded. ‘I imagine they're buggers if you're not used to them.'

‘Quite. Where I come from, we say what we mean.'

He sat down; not in the armchair, where he usually sat. ‘And where would that be?' he asked.

She perched on the edge of the table; slim, elegant, a vision. ‘You don't know,' she said. ‘I'd have thought
she
'd have told you. Your friend.'

‘She said you were a—' Stupid word had slipped his mind. ‘Sort of an elf who lives in trees.'

‘Did she now.' Those perfect lips compressed into a line as thin as the blade of the tapemeasure. ‘Fancy that.'

‘It's not true, then? You're not a—'

‘Dryad,' she replied, pulling a face, as though she was anxious to get the word out of her mouth as quickly as possible. ‘Well, you aren't to know, I suppose. But for your information, dryads are six inches long and covered in knobbly grey bark, though not all of them have beards. No, I'm not one of them, thank you very much. I,' she said - very slight pause; melodrama - ‘am a princess of the Fey.'

Not fair; just because he hadn't been to Loughborough. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I don't know what that means.'

‘Oh.' Her eyes opened wide. ‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh, right. Well, in that case—' She broke off. ‘Stay there. I'll be back in a minute.'

Didn't like the sound of that at all. ‘What's the matter?'

‘The kettle just boiled.'

Whoever the Fey were, they made good coffee. He said so, and she grinned.

‘Beginner's luck, then,' she said. ‘We don't use the stuff. In fact, we're allergic to it.'

‘What, even decaf?'

She shook her head. ‘What does coffee do? I mean, its most notable side effect?'

He had to think. ‘Keeps you awake?'

‘That's right.'

Broad, slightly patronising smile. ‘That doesn't suit us at all,' she said. ‘The Fey only exist in dreams, you see; on this side of the line, at any rate. We have our own place, on the far side. But we prefer it here. It's warmer. Also, over there we don't really
exist
; not like we do here.' The smile didn't fade. On the contrary, it froze. ‘People use coffee to stay awake so they don't dream and we can't come through. You can see why we aren't keen on the stuff.'

Chris couldn't think of anything to say.

‘Actually,' she went on, ‘my particular subsection of the Fey have evolved past that. Well,' she qualified, ‘“evolved” implies progress; let's say we mutated, to fill an otherwise neglected ecological niche.'

She was still just as beautiful as she'd been a moment ago; but now, as he looked at her, he couldn't help thinking about other images: things with too many legs and eyes, pincers, carapaces; things that moved very fast, and laid their eggs in their prey. ‘Is that right?' he mumbled.

‘You don't like the sound of that.' She was grinning. ‘You think it's creepy.'

Quite. And crawly, for that matter. ‘No,' he whimpered. ‘I don't know the first—'

‘My sect of the Fey,' she said, ‘cross the line in music. Think about it,' she added, presumably reacting to the look on Chris's face. ‘That's what music does, it takes you away from here and now to another place. In our case, literally. Instead of travelling through dreams, we ride the music into your head; and once we're through, we exist.'

It was as though someone had just turned on the light. Music; the CD player in the car. Every time he'd talked to her, had a conversation, it had been just after he'd played music; usually one of those compilation discs that seemed to breed in the glove compartment, none of which he could ever remember putting there. And just now, after the drive:
turn the radio on
. And she'd deflected his hand towards the CD player, and -

‘Hang on,' he said. ‘
Now That's What I Call Really Bad Music 56
?'

She shrugged. ‘Each of us has what you might call a master key, a piece of music that can get us through, no matter what.'

‘“Shake It Loose”, by the Lizard-Headed Women?'

‘Well,' she said, a trifle defensively, ‘it's go to be something that doesn't get played a lot, or it'd be like living in Piccadilly Circus, portals opening everywhere you look. I chose a song nobody in their right mind would play deliberately. Sorry,' she added with a dazzling smile, ‘for any inconvenience.'

That's why I chose it, of course
. Well, at least she was consistent. ‘Jill said you're stalking me,' he said. ‘She said it's happened before, with SatNavs. And you tried to kill me.'

‘No, I didn't.'

‘Yes, you did,' Chris shouted. ‘When I was in that car in the Ettingate Retail Park. You tried to kill me, but you cut the seat belt instead and I managed to get away.'

An oh-for-crying-out-loud look on her face; one he'd inspired in many people over the years, but never so intense. ‘I was
rescuing
you, you halfwit,' she snapped. ‘At great personal inconvenience, let me add; I had to arrange for “Shake It Loose” to be played on the Jeremy Vine show, and he never does requests, it was sheer luck one of the technicians happened to fall asleep at just the right moment, and a friend of mine managed to get into his dream. That's why I was a bit late,' she added. ‘Sorry about that. But really, you shouldn't have got yourself into such a mess in the first place.'

Oh, Chris thought, it's all my fault; should've known, it always is. ‘I don't believe you,' he said. ‘Jill told me—'

‘And if it comes to her word against mine,' she said coolly. ‘I see.'

He was mildly startled by that. ‘Well, yes,' he said. ‘She's one of my oldest friends, we've known each other since we were kids, and she's never lied to me or—'

‘And you're in love with her,' SatNav said, all matter-of-fact, as though she hadn't just said out loud what he'd been not-thinking for dear life for the last sixteen years. It caught him off guard, like a sudden kick to the balls from a lollipop lady on a level crossing, and he didn't interrupt as she continued: ‘I know, it clouds your judgement, doesn't it? Just ask yourself this, though.
Has
she ever lied to you? Led you astray?'

No, Chris tried to say; but the word wouldn't come out of his mouth. It had launched itself when she said
lied
, but sort of bounced off
led you astray
; because there was one thing, one silly little thing - trivial, like Jill always having a plastic carrier bag, completely unimportant in the larger scale of things. But
led him astray
; she had a point there.

Jill was the world's worst navigator. Standing joke among all who knew her, endearing rather than infuriating, given that in all other respects she was so utterly competent. But stick her in a passenger seat and hand her a map, and you were practically assured of a long and interesting ride to places you'd never even heard of before. It was a miracle, they said, that she didn't starve to death through getting lost between her living room and her kitchen. Of course, nowadays, with satellite navigation and stuff, it really didn't matter, and naturally Jill had the latest state-of-the-art outfit on her dashboard, and the slight character flaw no longer mattered. But led him astray? Yes, loads of times. But that was silly, completely unimportant, nothing to do with trust and integrity and all those great big things. It
was
. Really.

‘Not like me,' she said softly. ‘You always know where you are with me.'

It was, Chris had to concede, a very eloquent appeal to someone who was always on the move. His life revolved, after all, around two questions: Where am I? What's the time? And no, she'd never led him astray; never lured him up a dirt track with grass growing up the middle or stranded him on a deserted airfield and told him he was in the centre of Wolverhampton, never tempted him to drive the wrong way down a one-way street or off the edge of a gap in the middle of an unfinished flyover; and when she told him he was four miles from his destination and he'd be arriving there in eight minutes, he could rely on that absolutely, a tiny island of reliability in the great ocean of doubt. Even so.

‘What do you want from me, anyhow?' he said.

Her eyes glowed faintly. ‘Your help,' she said. ‘Please.'

That didn't sound right. ‘Really?' he said. ‘What could I possibly do that'd help you? I'm just a rep, and you're a—What did you just say you were?'

But there was an unmistakably self-satisfied look on her face, a unilateral declaration of victory, that told him she reckoned she'd won. ‘A princess of the Fey,' she said. ‘Are you ready for your explanation now, or would you like another coffee first?'

 

Where I come from (she said) is very different from here. Everything on this side of the line is so
solid
; it's like it's made up its mind what it's going to be, and that's all there is to it. It's not like that back home. Things change. Everything changes. Between pulling out a chair and sitting down on it, there's always the risk it might melt away, or turn into a bottomless pit, or a crocodile. Well, you know what it's like in dreams. The laws of logic and physics are different there. Oh, it's an exciting, challenging environment, but it can all be a bit fraught. Every time someone gets up to make a speech or a presentation, he discovers he can't remember his lines and he's got no clothes on, and you can't even walk down the street without being chased by wolves that look just like your old geography teacher. It's a miracle anything ever gets done at all, and as for the trains running on time, forget it.

I guess that's why we like it here; more as a place to visit than somewhere you'd actually want to live, but there's definitely an appeal in knowing that if something was a cement mixer two minutes ago, it'll most likely still be a cement mixer in five minutes' time. You've got clocks and watches that actually make sense, and as for maps—Don't get me started on maps. They're just so amazingly
cool
.

My lot - the music Fey - like I said, we're niche creatures. The other Fey don't like us very much. It's not right, they reckon, messing with this-side people when they're awake. It's sort of a religious issue, really. They say that if God had intended us to cross over in the daytime, He'd have given us a human race made up of shift workers and sleepwalkers. As you've probably guessed, we don't agree. We wanted to be able to get across any time we felt like it, and so we invented music.

Well, where did you think it came from? It's not something that occurs naturally, after all - it's completely artificial, like maths. We sort of bred it into human DNA, gradually, over the millennia; a little trapdoor inside every human head.

Parasites? That's a bit harsh. I think ‘symbiotic' sounds nicer. Like the little birds who pick bits of meat out of crocodiles' teeth. After all, you get something in return. You get music. Not such a bad deal, is it? Especially since only one in a billion of you knows we even exist.

Anyway, that's us. We think we're harmless, inoffensive creatures who just wanna have fun. Your lot don't seem to see it that way. Admittedly, there have been times when our lot have gone too far. Only a few years ago, the queen of the orthodox Fey tried to invade your side of the line and exterminate the lot of you, which I'm prepared to admit was entirely uncalled for, and it's no thanks to us that she failed. But it cuts both ways. Your lot have done some pretty unpleasant stuff too. I mean, look at PCE—

Oh come
on
, you must've heard of—

Fine. PCE. Pandemonium Consumer Electronics, since you've clearly been living in a cave for the last twenty years. PCE was the pioneer in metaphysical variable state cybernetics, and you know how they did it? Right. They built a new generation of intelligent, intuitive, non-Boolean electronic gadgetry by trapping our people in dreamcatchers, mutilating them and using them to power their products. Computers, yes, but not just computers: dishwashers, DVD players, microwave ovens, air-conditioners, games consoles, you name it. Basically, it was slavery. They caught us, crippled one side of our brains so we couldn't ever get back to our side of the line, suspended us in stasis fields in sealed boxes - well, I'd rather not go into it, if that's all right with you. It's not something any of us like to dwell on. But it kind of explains why Queen Judy felt the lot of you needed wiping out, and why so many of us went along with it.

Anyway, that's all water under the bridge as far as I'm concerned, and yes, PCE doesn't do that stuff any more, though they're still in business; very much so. Who do you think made me?

 

‘You?' Chris said. ‘You mean you were—'

She smiled and shook her head. ‘No way,' she said. ‘After the Queen Judy business, our lot and your lot sat down round a table and actually talked to each other for a change. PCE agreed to end the abductions and the brain surgery and the stasis fields, and in return we supply them with a certain specified quota of Fey every year. It's not perfect, but—'