Strange Functions

Mrs. Rancipopple

2012-01-28T07:00:00.000Z

Mrs. Rancipopple was talking to the yeast. The yeast was talking back, though rather slowly. It seemed to be a poor conversationalist, but that wasn't stopping Mrs. Rancipopple. It had taken her thirteen years to learn how to cast this spell, and she was going to make the most of it while she could.
Jermander sighed. Like most of the rest of the class he was bored; talking with yeast was a trivial application of the spell, which allowed a person to converse with anything that presently had a mind. Some of the lecturers at Gorillamumps had become legendary for their uses of the spell: they'd spoken with the nascent crystalline minds of mountains, they'd spoken with the titanic, pattern-obsessed mind of El Niño, and they'd even managed to talk with the hive mind of a hornet swarm. And here he was, sat in a crumbling classroom in a draught, listening to Mrs. Rancipopple talk to yeast.
Mrs. Rancipopple was not one of the great minds of Gorillamumps, and was largely employed so that the careers master could point to her and hold her up as an example of what would happen to you if you didn't apply yourself to your studies and pass your exams. She was also, though she quite possibly didn't know it, one of the first lines of defence at Gorillamumps: in the event of a supernatural intrusion or a supranatural attack she was considered a disposable unit who could be used as a shield, a distraction, or a sacrifice.
"Have you reproduced today?" asked Mrs. Rancipopple, seeming engrossed in her conversation.
"Have you?" whispered Jermaner to the Young Mummy sat next to him. The Young Mummy tried hard not laugh, and ended up shaking tomb dust everywhere, causing the Fungi of Yuggoth behind him to start sneezing, and everyone else to look at it, trying to work out where its nose, or even its mouth was.
"Pay attention, students!" snapped Mrs. Rancipopple looking up from her yeast. The answers to these questions will form part of your exam. What... What is that noise?"
"H'brr'k, miss," said Nadine, one of the left-aligned Ancients of Mu-Mu. The Fungi from Yuggoth held a wet, dripping appendage up in what might have been an apologetic fashion, but actually sent chills of horror through everyone who looked round at it. "He's sneezing."
"Swearing," said Mrs. Ranipopple. Everyone stopped looking at H'brr'k and looked at her instead, mostly puzzled. "She's swearing," said Mrs. Rancipopple, looking slightly puzzled herself. "Quite... inventively."
"You can understand its sneezing?" asked Jermander, knowing that he probably shouldn't draw attention to himself. The faculty were still trying to track down who had let Taurus loose on the campus last Janusday.
"Her," corrected Mrs. Rancipopple. "And yes, she's not sneezing, she's swearing. Something about... mummy dust all over her good frotcockle."
"What's a frotcockle?" asked Nadine. The whole class was entranced now.
"I don't know how to translate it," said Mrs. Rancipopple. "It's like... it's like vagina-carrier, but you have to have a frot first, and it needs to be cold enough that it's partially collapsed, and needs to be far enough away from a knertrudle that there's no frilletting, just cockling."
"You're making this up," said Nadine, but she didn't sound certain, and the Fungi from Yuggoth was undulating in a way that made everyone feel nauseous but was generally agreed to be their way of saying Yes, yes.
"No," said Mrs. Rancipopple. "The yeast has always been able to understand the Fungi, it thinks she got a lovely fruiting body."
The silence in the classroom was thick enough to cut up and build igloos with.
"Um." said Nadine, trying to break it. The word hung in the air as though unable to fall to the ground and slink away in shame.
"Oh my," said Mrs. Rancipopple. "Have I just found a way of decoding Yuggothian?"
Somewhere on the other side of campus, as though resonating psychically, the careers master let out a scream of anguish.

The forty-third folder

2012-01-27T07:00:00.000Z

Always rotate.

The filing cabinet was institutional green, the kind of colour that reminded him of hospitals. His grandmother, a fantastically difficult woman, had managed to die in one. A hospital, and an institutional green filing cabinet. He barely remembered her, just remembered the colour of the walls as he held his mother's hand while they walked along the echoing corridors that seemed to never end. Finally they would come to some double doors that led onto a ward, and at the start of the ward were the private rooms. The smell of disinfectant, always strong, was strongest outside the double doors as though trying to prevent the miasma of death from creeping out. His mother would open the doors, and her hand would always be shaking, and they would venture on to the ward. The matron would stop them, a clipboard in her hand and a stern look on her face. His mother would face her and a strange look would cross the matron's face and she would usher them into the second private room, where his grandmother would be lying in bed, staring out of the window and waiting to die.

There were never any flowers in the room, because his grandmother hated unnecessary colours. She had worked on a dairy farm when she was younger, and considered things that grew to be either food for the cows or things for the cows to trample on. Or crap on, as she once said in a loud voice while he was listening, and he giggled and his mother looked angry. The bedsheets were beige and the blanket was grey and had little holes in it here and there that he'd stick his fingers through, wiggling them around, while his mother tried to make conversation with a woman who didn't want her there. They never stayed very long, and he never knew who was more relieved that the conversation was over.

If there are long periods of inactivity, it is better to adjust the bilateral hinge downwards with a sharp motion. If the hinge snaps, the motion was too sharp.

The filing cabinet was institutional green, the same green found in mental health retreats and state-funded hospices, where the nurses will tick you happily off a checkboxed list but won't pick you up off the floor and put you back in the chair because of the Health and Safety at Work Acts. Luckily the floor in the hospice was heated, so lying on it was kind of pleasant until they could get Old Lou, who didn't know anything about his rights, or health benefits, or lifting people back into chairs, to come and pick them up again. Some people preferred the floor.

He opened the filing cabinet. The top drawers held many manilla folders suspended on little rails. There were dividers between some of the folders, thick navy-blue pieces of card with numbers written on the little tabs to help with the filing. He didn't recognise the order of the numbers, which started 4, 6, 9, 21, 22, 25....

Still rotating?

Someone had crossed out the number 46 and written 43 in its place. He didn't know whether they'd corrected a number in the sequence, or if the number 43 was somehow more important than 46. His grandmother had died in room 46 of the hospital, somehow half-squeezed into a low drawer of an institutional green filing cabinet. She looked happy when they found her, which is more than she'd ever done when he'd seen her while she was still alive.

The cause of death was registered as misadventure, and his mother held his hand while they went to the funeral. In the big car with too many seats on the way there, a big man with a red face who kept crying suddenly sat bolt upright and giggled.

"Let's put the fun back into funeral!" he said in a too-loud voice, and the people next him began to shush him, but this was the most interesting thing that happened for the whole car ride. At the cemetary there were hundreds of people and the vicar had to stand on the headstone to make himself heard by them all. When he finished talking, everyone walked past the grave, casting in a handful of soil, so that the gravedigger barely had anything left to do by the end.

Inside the forty-third folder were some birth certificates and some very old, sepia-toned photographs. His grandmother was not his mother's mother.

Insufficient rotation may cause the bilateral hinge to misalign.

"She's not dead, you know," his mother said quietly as they walked away from the graveyard. They weren't going in the big cars, so they were catching a bus back home. His mother seemed relieved that no-one had stopped them and asked them to go to the wake. "They all think she is, but they didn't see her in that hospital."

He put the folder back in the filing cabinet and slid the drawer closed. He didn't miss the sound of the door opening behind him, for all that the arrivee had tried to hide it by the filing cabinet's noise. He didn't want to turn round, but he knew who had to be behind him.

Always rotate.

No blame

2012-01-26T07:00:00.000Z

Charles Asciugimento, Head of Building Security, stared at the plaque on his desk. He didn't know where it had come from, but was certain that the hidden CCTV cameras in his office would have recorded the visitor and the time that they delivered it. He would check it later, for now he was amusing himself by trying to decide who would have left it there for him to find. He'd discarded a lot of the security force on the grounds that they would have no way of gaining entry to his office when he wasn't there unless someone else let them in, in which case he considered the person letting them in to be more guilty that the deliverer of the plaque. Because disloyalty was something he absolutely would not tolerate in his staff.
The plaque was polished mahogany, rectangular, about the same size as a typical letterbox. A small gold-ish plate had been mounted in the middle of it, and engraved on the plate were the words No Blame. Charles allowed himself a small smile as he read it again. Someone had clearly done something they feared being found out to be suggesting that he pay attention to such trite words.
Someone knocked on his door, so he pressed a button on the left-hand side of his desk. The flat-screen monitor, recessed into the top and back of the desk so that people stood in front of him couldn't see it, changed its display to show the outside of his office. Anita, a third-level staff sergeant stood, arms folded yet looking alert outside the door. He pressed another button and the door buzzed. Anita unfolded her arms and pushed it open.
"Staff Sergeant," said Charles, not getting up. He waited while she walked across the large expanse of smooth, tiled floor to his desk, and came to attention in front of him. Then he stood up and saluted, and checked the rapidity of her return salute, and the angle her hand made as she raised it. He nodded approvingly and sat back down again.
"Staff Sergeant?" he said again, this time letting her know that she could speak.
"We turned the hoses on the mariachi band on the ground floor, Sir," she said, reporting on recent events. "Two shoppers attempted to stop us, so we hosed them down too."
"And?"
"And... and when they were unconscious from the water-blast we took them into custody, Sir." Anita's face was wooden. "They are waiting to be released from the cells now, Sir."
"How are their clothes?"
"We stripped them and put their clothes into ice water, as per standard procedure, Sir."
"Then return their clothes to them, ban from the mall for two months and have some plainclothes guards delay them all the way out of the building," said Charles. "Security is, as ever, a priority, and those people who would challenge it without thought must be re-educated."
"One of them claims to be related to one of the mariachi singers," said Anita. Even her voice was perfectly neutral, concealing whatever her private feelings might be.
"Then they were as much a risk as the mariachi band," said Charles. "Who vetted that band initially?"
"Sergeant Clare," said Anita. There was a fractional pause before she gave the name, as she wrestled with not wanting to betray a colleague and knowing that Charles probably already knew and was testing her own loyalty to him.
"Ah yes," said Charles. He tapped a thin, white finger against his lips. "This was her first time, as I recall. I shall impress upon her the importance of knowing everything about the family of such bands before they are allowed into the mall. Desperate times breed desperate people and we must be ever-vigilant. No-one shall die in here because we did not attend to security."
"No blame," said Anita.
"What?"
"The plaque on your desk, Sir, says No Blame. And you're telling me that if anything were to go wrong here, it would not be security's fault. No blame could attach to us because we've done everything we can to prevent it."
"Yes," said Charles, feeling that Anita sounded rather glib. "Although I think this is a reminder to us all of the I Ching."
"The what, Sir?"
"The I Ching. It is a means of foretelling the future, and it regularly ends its little predictions with the phrase No Blame. I think it's trying to excuse itself in advance."
"Does it work, Sir?"
"Of course not, Staff Sergeant. If we could predict the future then security would be a very different job."
"Very good, Sir."
"Indeed. What has happened with the band?"
Anita swallowed hard, and managed to keep staring dead ahead, her eyes unfocused. "Unfortunately, Sir," she managed, "they attempted to escape after being hosed down and broke through a door inappropriately secured by the contractors on the first basement level."
"They fled down an escalator?" Charles sounded unhappy.
"Not exactly, Sir. When we were subduing the members of the publ–"
"Vigilantes," corrected Charles.
"–vigilantes, Sir, the mariachis made a run for the stairs. We turned the hoses back on them, and they... they used the pressure of the water to speed their descent, Sir."
We hosed them into a twenty-foot fall, is what she thought while she described things using Charles's approved terminology. Then we chased them to a door we knew the contracting firm wouldn't have locked, even though they're supposed to. And we knew that there was a bloody big hole behind the door, and that they'd not see it before they were falling.
"I see," said Charles. "Well, I shall certainly review our understanding with the contractors. What happened when they were through the door?"
"They fell down a pit, Sir," said Anita. "They mostly broke their arms, trying to break their fall."
"Ah, so no more mariachi?"
"No, Sir."
"Ah well," said Charles. He picked the plaque up, and turned it to face her momentarily.
No Blame.
"You may go now, Staff Sergeant."

Ronald and Melissa

2012-01-25T07:00:00.000Z

The walk from the carpark to the house was short and leafy. Miss Flava lifted some of the leaves up – glossy, broad deep green leaves that reminded her of those of a rubber plant, only smaller – and checked. The plant was growing over a red-brick wall that defined the passage. Ahead of her, Playfair was unconcerned about the route, and seemed intent on getting to the house. Behind her (she checked when she didn't hear the click of claws on the paving stones) Calamity had decided to wee on the wall and the plant. Given that Calamity's bladder apparently held enough to flood small rooms (and Miss Flava was sure that Playfair had been teaching her tricks about holding it in as well) she was relieved that the dog was relieving herself outside.
She came to the end of the passage and turned a corner. The wall stopped and a short lawn spread out before her, leading to white-painted, glass-panelled French-doors. A very shallow flight of steps led up to the doors, where Playfair was rapping impatiently on the glass. As the doors opened, Calamity came galloping up behind her, brushed past her at full speed, and charged towards Playfair. Miss Flava said nothing, knowing that her boss would somehow be expecting this.
"Who are y–" said a man in an angry voice. He cut off as Playfair stepped neatly aside and Calamity leapt at him, her paws landing heavily on the shoulders of his suit and bowling him over. He fell backwards, letting go of the door, which Playfair caught and held.
"That's my dog," he said in his best outdoors voice. "Please stop molesting her. Now!"
The man on the floor, who was being frantically licked by Calamity, stopped trying to push her off him and submitted to her cleaning. A thin woman in an uncomfortable-looking blue and mauve dress hurried over from a table against the far wall of the room. She was still holding a china cup of tea, and its matching saucer.
"Oh, dear! What...? What...? Ronald? Are you under that dog?"
"Don't start!" snarled the man on the floor, turning his head to the side to try and escape Calamity's tongue.
"Well, I'm only asking!"
Playfair gestured, and Miss Flava walked in. The room appeared to be a function room of some kind: it was large, with a wooden floor that seemed highly polished. Seats were stacked against both end walls, and a few large, simple tables were pushed up against the front of a small stage. The stage curtains were drawn across, so that only the apron could be seen. When she looked up, she could see lighting gantries across the ceiling, and tracing them across with her eyes she found a black-painted ladder in the shadows of one corner, obviously the way up there. Underneath the tables were large packing cases and trunks, and on top of the tables were a tea-urn, some china cups and saucers, a plastic half-litre carton of milk with a blue top, and a couple of foil trays of rather dry-looking sandwiches with the cling-film pulled half-back.
"No-one seems to have come to your party," said Playfair, who'd come in silently behind her. "Calamity, dear, please leave the man alone. He's stopped attacking you now."
"Are you Calamity?" said the thin woman, turning to Miss Flava with a terrifying smile. Her teeth were varying shades of yellow and brown and looked badly decayed.
"No," said Miss Flava coldly. "That's Calamity." She pointed at the dog, who had started to get off the man on the floor and then found something interesting to sniff. "Calamity!" The dog lifted her head, saw the expression on Miss Flava's face and quickly retreated behind Playfair.
"Oh, I'm so sorry," said the woman. "I assumed, with that name, that Calamity must be human. Calamity Jane, I'm sure?"
If you're so sure, thought Miss Flava, why are you making it a question? But she held her temper in check. "Yes, Calamity Jane."
"My favourite Crimean nurse," said Playfair, as he always did when someone asked about Calamity's name. The thin woman nodded and smiled, not seeing anything wrong with this statement, which made Miss Flava hate her even more.
"Who are you?" she said pointedly, realising that the woman wasn't going to offer her name.
"She's Melissa," said the suited man, finally up off the floor. "She's my sister-in-law. I'm Ronald Verges." He emphasized the last syllable of his surname. "And who the hell are you two? You'd better not be part of the act."
"What act?" said Playfair quickly. Miss Flava pulled her warrant card out anyway.
"If you don't know that, you'd better be quick at explaining why you're here," said Ronald, his face hardening and his eyes tightening into a squint.
"I was rather thinking the same myself," said Playfair, sounding cheerful. "You see, we're the police, and the Great CumuloNimbus is dead. So: who let you in, and why the hell are you here?"

Dr. Verfuegbar

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000Z

Instruments clatter in the tray, the kidney-shaped tray. The nurse is holding it an angle, an angle slightly less than thirty degrees, and the instruments have obeyed the implacable law of gravity and slid to one side. They have clattered together as they have done so. Dr. Verfuegbar looks angry, and I wish he didn't. He's holding a marker pen.
"Nurse!" he says. She starts, and I wonder how she can look so unsexy in a nurse's uniform. The fabric is cotton, and it's stretched in all the right places, but yet it does nothing for me. Then the doctor's pen comes back into my eyeline.
"Try to be quieter," he continues, now that he's got her attention. "I am drawing on the patient. These will be incision lines, and it is important that they are in the right place."
The nurse looks at me, and there's something cold and alien in her eyes. She looks like she thinks I'm not real.
"Dr. Verfuegbar?" Her voice is glutinous, like the words are caught in mucus in her throat and have to pull themselves free. "Dr. Verfuegbar, you're half-way through drawing a copy of 'Portrait of the Artist as a Spoon'."
That would explain why he seems to have been using the marker-pen on me for ages.
"What? Oh. That can't be right," says Dr. Verfuegbar. "How invasive is the surgery this patient is having? Am I removing a particularly difficult tattoo?"
"No-o-o-o." There's a pause while the nurse finds my notes; she'd put the kidney-shaped dish down on top of them. "Ah. He's here to have a verruca removed."
"Really?" Dr. Verfuegbar looks puzzled. "Why have we given him a general neural block then?"
"We haven't," says the nurse. "It's a partial block from the neck down. He's still awake, just insensate."
"Hmph. Makes me feel like a vet when you do that," says Dr. Verfuegbar. "Do we have any of those worming pills left?"
"I'm afraid not," says the nurse. "The last delivery was blown-up a half-mile from the hospital."
"Land-mines again?"
"No, just shelling. It might have been bad luck."
"Everything's broken here, nurse," says Dr. Verfuegbar. "Do you even remember why the war started?"
"I can't remember why the war's continuing," says the nurse, and things beneath her tight cotton jacket shift. The wrong way.
"Do we have an eraser?" asks Dr. Verfuegbar, staring at me. "I think it might be wise to remove some of these incision lines in case I don't perform the surgery. It would be bad if we removed healthy tissue."
"What's so unhealthy about a verruca?" I suddenly realise that I hate the nurse.
Dr. Verfuegbar stops looking on the tables for the eraser and stands very still. I hope he's thinking.
"That's a very good question," he says slowly. "Perhaps we should be removing the patient from the verruca? After all, keeping the verruca alive is cheap and easy, whereas the patient is costly and will take weeks to recover."
I really want to say something now, but my throat won't work. I can just about breathe fractionally more heavily if I try very hard. No-one seems to notice.
"How big is the hospital incinerator?"
"I'll have to go and measure it, Dr. Verfuegbar," says the nurse. She sets my notes back down, unfolds an extra pair of insectile arms from the front of her nurse's shirt, and leaves the operating theatre. Dr. Verfuegbar looks down at me, and his eyes are cloudy with cataracts.
"What was I doing?" he asks to the room in general, his hand reaching out for a scalpel.

Mantrae

2012-01-23T07:00:00.000Z

My great-aunt had a mantra that she liked to run out at pretty much every family gathering. Sooner or later there would be a majority of people gathered in one room, usually the conservatory where we could lurk among the plants and quietly eavesdrop on each other's private conversations. Then she would provoke someone into saying or doing something, and at the top of her voice she would wheel out her mantra.
"Take something with you!" she would bellow happily, like a bull in heat spotting a cudding cow standing out in the field. "If you're going from the bedroom to the kitchen, pick up that laundry and put it in the machine. If you're going from the bedroom to the kitchen, pick u–"
She was always silenced, drowned out, or on one occasion severely injured, by one of the other adults present, so I never got to find out what it was she wanted from the kitchen to use in the bedroom. We children did spend a fair amount of time guessing though. Kate thought it would be chocolate to eat in bed before you went to sleep (she's been on the Biggest Loser three times now and has a whale-doctor as her personal physician), Tim thought she wanted to take matches with her to set the bed on fire and dance around it (he's head of some Wiccan cult out in the back-woods. Rumour has it that he's surprisingly rich and on several watch-lists), and Joe always giggled weirdly when he said he thought it was vegetables. No-one will tell me what's happened to him.
Sadly she's not been at the last couple of gatherings, because it seems she took her mantra to heart. She was arrested for shoplifting by the police because, as she was leaving a major department store she took her mantra too literally and tried to take something with her. Without paying for it. After she was arrested she broke down and confessed to have two storage garages full of shoplifted items, and they've put her away for a few years.
My best friend's mantra is "Bang the rocks together!" He claimed that it was a variant mantra on "Smaller, smaller," and was about breaking large problems down into much smaller ones that are easier to solve, and that, when separated from the main morass can be brought back together with other sub-problems that they weren't joined to initially thus making new, easier-to-solve problems. I've seen this technique applied very successfully in the mathematical arts, and I was coming round to the idea of it until he switched from theoretical physics to experimental. Then the rocks he chose to bang gleefully together one frosty October morning turned out to be two sub-critical lumps of plutonium, and the resulting critical masses irradiated him like a microwave on over-power.
My half-sister constantly mutters "This, too, shall pass," and is thought of as a saint of patience by the people in the hospice she works at. I happen to know she suffers a lot from constipation.
My cousin, Joachim, likes "Assimilate, don't complain." I have trouble with that one myself, as it's hardly mellifluous and I couldn't really work out how assimilation would stop you wanting to complain. So, a couple of years ago, when we supposed to be passing in an air-port in Toronto, we both caught a slightly later flight and sat down in a Tim Horton's to eat far too many doughnuts, wonder why everyone was drinking the coffee, and talk about it.
"Assimilation," he said, "is the process of taking new information on board and working out how you can make that part of your life. So, when someone drops ice-cream on your polished shoe just before an important interview, what do you do? Do you scream at the child until it bursts into tears? Do you scream at the child's guardian until both they and the child burst into tears? Both of these will increase your tension and stress going into an important interview, and that's not good. But what if you wipe the shoe off, and then use the stain on the shoe as a turning point for a story you tell in the interview? They ask you to describe a problem that you've overcome, and you bring this one out: it's a tiny problem in the grand scheme of things, but it's one that easily blown out of proportion, and you can demonstrate patience, resourcefulness, and courage all in one short, fresh-in-the-mind story."
I confess, I stopped listening after he mentioned the ice-cream because I was trying to decide if I should suggest moving the ice-cream shop across the aisle, but he looked very fervent when he finished, so I assumed he'd told me something worthwhile.
Cancer is currently assimilating him though, and I've heard through the grapevine that he never stops complaining about it, so perhaps it's not quite the mantra he thought it was.
As for me? My mantra is simply that "With sufficient thrust, even pigs may fly."
Job? Rocket scientist.
Obviously.

Mom-blot

2012-01-22T07:00:00.000Z

"I'm not very comfortable about this," said Mr. Tees. He was wearing a pin-striped suit and patent leather shoes, sitting with one foot resting on the knee of his other leg, and holding a clipboard defensively in front of his chest.
"Why? It's twenty minutes of your time." Dad could be brusque if he'd not had any coffee, and this morning was almost this afternoon, with no sign of coffee yet.
"It feels like a violation of trust."
"How? It's a mom-bot, what possible trust could there be? She an artificial intelligence, but that's all she is. There's no artificial emotion, or artificial emotional response unit in there. There's barely enough processing power for her to register on a standard EQ test, and babies show up with an EQ of 30–70 most of the time."
"Babies show up at 30–45," said Mr. Tees, frowning at Dad. People often did when they found out how much he knew about the area they were supposed to be the expert in.
"Human babies do," said Dad. "Kings have a study on alligator babies that made it pretty consistently up to the 60s."
Mr. Tees looked horrified, and I wondered then if Dad had baited him just a little bit too far. The man looked ready to say no.
"Alligators can't possibly be more empathic than humans!"
"I can pass on the details of the paper if you like," said Dad. "After you've had a little chat with the mom-bot, of course."
"Well, yes, of course," said Mr. Tees, clearly not listening to Dad. "The paper must be wrong, and it'll be easy to refute. People will be looking for the holes in it, and they'll need an expert to help them along...."
"The mom-bot," prompted Dad, pushing Mr. Tees in the direction of his office. "I'll write the details down for you while you're chatting."

"How are you feeling?" asked Mr. Tees. Dad and I were watching him through the half-silvered mirror on one side of his office.

"Creaky," said the mom-bot. "My oil has not been changed recently."

Mr. Tees looked down at his notes, and then used his finger to trace across a row of text. "Your oil was changed this morning," he said, a little hesitantly. His voice wavered, then got stronger as his confidence returned. "You were given top-of-the-range Norwegian fuel oil."

"I was given cheap heating oil, two months ago," countered the mom-bot. "I think I might have started to rust in places."

"You seem in fine condition to me," said Mr. Tees in a neutral tone of voice. "You're running more smoothly than my own mom-bot, in fact."

"People abuse mom-bots," said the mom-bot. "You should seek therapy for it." It took all my self-control, and a glare from Dad, not to laugh out loud at the look on Mr. Tees's face when the mom-bot said that.

"I see." said Mr. Tees, his tone now clipped and business-like. "I'd like to show you some pictures now. Just tell me what you see when you look at them. There are neither right nor wrong answers here, just whatever you see."

"Ink on card," said the mom-bot when Mr. Tees held up the first Rorschach card.

"A little less precise," said Mr. Tees. "What does the ink on the card depict?" The first one was a woman in a rocking-chair, and Dad had explained that the first two cards were simple calibrators to try and find cheats.

"A map of Venice before the inundation," said the mom-bot after looking at the card again. Mr. Tees looked slightly puzzled, but he laid the card face-down anyway and presented the second one, a formula I racing car.

"A cassette tape containing transcripts from the Watergate hotel," said the mom-bot. "Partially rewound. You should take better care of these things, they'll be antiques soon."

The third card was genuine, and when I looked at it all I saw was a splodge at first. Then I realised that it looked a little like an apple pie.

"A close-up of the smile of Adam's first wife, Lilith," said the mom-bot. "Before the dental surgery."

"What the hell was that?" asked Mr. Tees, sitting back in his office. His suit looked somehow shabbier, and he had laid the clipboard down on a table.

"That's a psychotic mom-bot," said Dad. "It was working in a foster-home and killed twenty-four children in an eight-hour period."

"Then it should be scrapped!"

"Not until we know how it became psychotic," said Dad. "It wasn't built that way, we've checked. We've built new mom-bots from the same patterns and specifications, and less than two percent go psychotic. So, we need to know how that happens."

"So you've brought her to a psychiatrist?"

"The best I've been able to track down," said Dad. "Were any of her responses any use this time?"

"Well," said Mr. Tees, frowning again as he remembered the session. "Curiously the F1 racing car does get described as a cassette tape by humans too, now and then."

"Which humans?" Dad sometimes sounded altogether too clinical, and Mr. Tees looked sideways at him before answering.

"The ones we execute."

Buddy service

2012-01-21T07:00:00.000Z

Hi, welcome. Wipe your feet, sit down. That's your chair over there, the one with your name on it. Yes, we know your name. We've known your name for a long time, we've been expecting you too. Me? Oh, you can call me Buddy. I'm your spiritual advisor in this corporate climate, your life-coach for the long-run, your buddy for the time you spend holding your breath underwater... that might be taking the metaphor a little too far. Maybe.
Today I want you to think about the people around you. Can you do that? Can you picture them in your mind's eye? Think about the office you work in, think about the people closest to you. Think of the woman who's a little too old for the clothes she wears, who catches your eye and titillates you with a mixture and of desire and disgust. Think about the guy two desks over with the sinus problem that means he's always sniffing. And I mean always. Think about the receptionist who's clearly only been hired because of how she looks. The other one, the guy? Yeah, he was hired for how he looks too. You can see that now you think about it, can't you? Think about them all.
Scream if you like. Let it out.
They're filler. They're life's extras, they're the walk-on players and the bit parts. They've never had coaching, they've never been given any lines to learn, or any time in the limelight. When the spotlight transfixes them, they freeze. They don't know that the only reason the audience is watching them is because it's time to leave. Messily, usually. Remember the guy from accounts who drank so much whiskey his liver burst in the toilets on a Thursday afternoon?
Bit player.
Hack.
Not like you. You're here to hear what the director has to say, you have a role to play in this life, you're getting your name in the credits. You're already a success, you just don't know it yet. And the first piece of advice from the director? Stop picking your nose when you're on the toilet at work. It's not a good use of your time and it makes your hands dirty. Did you notice that I didn't shake hands with you when you came in? Now you know why.
There are hundred and thousands of people who are just filler, who don't realise that their mundane lives are dull and boring because they're not part of the plot. When you overhear them on the bus and their conversations are so proletarian and dull, that's because you're listening too hard to them saying "Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb," over and over again and you're mistaking it for thought. There's no thought, their mouths are just running away, turned on but without the engine turning over.
But they're still waiting and watching, some of them intend to steal your part if you're not looking after it properly. You can tell; the moment they become interesting they become a threat. Act decisively and fast whenever you spot someone becoming interesting. Cut them down, cut them out, cut them up. Figuratively, not literally. We know about the knives, ok? Put them back in their place. They're filler, it's only what they deserve.
Who? Well, you know that guy on reception? Yeah, the good-looking one I was talking about earlier. Well, he's just started sleeping with the woman who dresses ten years younger than she is. That's already interesting, isn't it? And you know what? If you asked him, he'd do you too. He's on his way up, he's becoming noticeable. He's becoming a player.
What should you do? Sleep with him, of course. You need to become more interesting to compete and to be blunt, nuns have a better time of it than you do. So sleep with him, find out something better about yourself. And read the script; someone's got to die in six pages time.

A very shiny car

2012-01-20T07:00:00.000Z

"I would have thought that one was his car." Miss Flava pointed at the shiny, vintage car. "Given the size of the house, and the fact that he's clearly a very popular magician, I'd expect him to have a noticeable car if only to attract more attention when he's out. The other car... well, I guess a wife or a daughter, I think."
"Hmph," said Playfair, letting Calamity out of their car. She bounded joyfully back the way they'd come and disappeared up the drive. "Squirrels, probably."
"What?"
"She's probably heard a squirrel," said Playfair. "Gone to investigate. They make a vile noise, you don't expect it from something so small."
"What's that got to do with the Great CumuloNimbus and his car?"
"Nothing. And it's still not his car."
"What? Playfair, will you stop being so damn annoying and tell me why you don't think it's his car?"
"Too clean."
Miss Flava looked at the car again, and saw that it was spotlessly clean and so shiny that if she walked over to it she was sure that she'd be able to see her face in it. How on earth could a car be too clean? She looked at Playfair, who was standing there with a smug smirk on his face – well, that was practically his only other expression apart from the furious one when he had to deal with the general public. She looked back at the car again, trying to see what Playfair could apparently see.
The wind rustled the leaves in the trees, and a single yellowing leaf detached itself from somewhere and bounced lazily off the car, landing on the ground. Miss Flava stared at it, knowing that she'd just seen the answer, but it had run off again to hide in the back of her mind.
Calamity barked behind her, but it sounded muffled. She turned, and to her horror saw that Calamity had a mouth full of still-moving squirrel.
"Told you," said Playfair. "I hope that's the only one she's going to catch though, we don't want any of them in the car on the way back."
"She's not getting in the car with a dead squirrel in her mouth!" Miss Flava was horrified, both at the thought of the dead squirrel and of a half-dead one squirming around on the back seat next to Calamity.
"You going to try taking it off her?" Again he smirked, looking even more smug, and for a moment she knew why he thought the car couldn't be the magician's. Then Calamity dropped the squirrel and the thought fled again.
"She's let go of it," said Miss Flava, feeling a little weak. The squirrel looked broken somehow.
"Yes," said Playfair, stepping on its neck. There was a sad little cracking sound and its eyes seemed to glaze over, though that might have been her imagination.
"Was that real–?"
"Yes," said Playfair firmly. "She broke its back and I'm not finding a vet that'll fix squirrels. It'd be cheaper and easier to find a new squirrel."
"Never have children, Playfair," said Miss Flava, rallying a little. "Not with those cost-benefit analyses."
"No cost-benefit analysis justifies a child," said Playfair. "Not in the Western world. Right, I think there's probably a side-door round here somewhere."
"What's wrong with the front door?"
"Can't be bothered walking."
He walked over to the shiny car, and then past it, disappearing into what looked like a solid hedge. A couple of moments later he reappeared, looking at Miss Flava like she was stupid.
"Are you coming then?"
"How did you know?" said Miss Flava, walking across the car-park. "That one had to be a guess."
"The car was probably parked near the door," said Playfair. "If the door were round the front it'd have been on the other side of the car-park. Everyone's lazy really."
"Oh!" Finally the idea that she'd been chasing for the last five minutes settled into the front of her mind. "I see! The car's too clean. The magician's been dead for days, if it was his car there's be leaves and... and..."
"Pollen, dust, dirt from any rain," said Playfair. "Certainly wouldn't be a shiny car left out under trees in an open car-park like that. That car's been cleaned today, probably before it got here."
"Then whose car is it?" Miss Flava asked the question anyway, more as a way of talking to herself. "Do you think he hired a very rich cleaner?"
"Hah!" said Playfair. "That's when I know I'm in the wrong job!"

After Clemethtine

2012-01-19T07:00:00.000Z

Clemethtine had gotten the chop. Over a cream tea in Miss Angry's tearoom, Janet O'Steen's agent had explained to her why Clemethtine had to go.
"She's just too much of a downer," she'd said, slurping her tea. Janet forced a smile on her face, and stabbed her scone with a butter knife.
"What do you mean?" Janet asked. "She's different, she's an outcast, and she provides a reason for the family to leave the countryside."
"Yes, and that's the problem," said her agent, still slurping her tea. "She's far too interesting and vibrant. Your readers will have conniptions when they read about her."
"They'll have to look up what conniptions are first," said Janet, still bitter that her language and erudition were considered too high-brow for her readers. "Then they might be able to have some. If they try hard. For a long time."
"Janet, darling," said the agent putting her teacup down at last. Janet was furious to see that it was still half-full. "Look, you're a very clever girl, and you could write some very interesting books, but would they sell? Would anyone want to read a book that, at a fundamental level, tells them just that you're very clever? No. They want to read about mild families with problems they can relate too, they want to read about daily drudgery and the monsters that are locked up behind smiling, happy, child-abusing faces. When they're not reading you they're tsking over stories in the Daily Mail that you and I know are fabricated out of whole cloth using a cookie-cutter and big plastic safety-scissors, but that they think are the real thing and genuine threats to society. Some of them have had their window-cleaners sacked for being not-English-enough!"
"Clemethine is a modern-day issue," said Janet obstinately. "She's got all the classic problems with a modern twist. She's Juliet in a world where Romeo deals meth and death to the landed gentry, she's Smurfette when the Smurf village gets an anthrax infection and they have to repopulate, she's... she's... she's Lady Gaga to a gay nightclub!"
"And your audience think that Shakespeare was too difficult and fail to understand how he enriched the English language; they think that anthrax is something that you post to your MP when he tries to put you in the congestion zone; and they have conniptions, whether or not they know it, when they hear the word gay. Damnit Janet, you're writing pastoral! Your characters are supposed to suffer in bucolic agony. Read some James Herriott, for God's sake!" She picked her cup up and slurped her tea, not noticing Janet once again stabbing her scone with a butter knife.
"Fine," said Janet in the tone of a woman severely put upon. "Fine. I'll lose Clemethtine. I was going to suggest conjoined twins with the whey-faced Emma, but I imagine that would be a step too far, even in the countryside where miscegenated animals are a fact of life."
"Even a small teratoma would be too much," said her agent. "Look, give me the Waltons the way I ask for it, and I swear we'll write the book you want to next. We'll pick a pseudonym for you so you don't damage your brand, and I'll push it to every other publisher you can think of. You want to do rough animal bondage? I'll see if that erotic Mills&Boon imprint will take it. You want to do political humour? I'll see if Private Eye will review it. You want to do a Jacobean tragedy? You're pretty much on your own there, but I'll be nice about it, I promise."
"Really?" Janet laid the butter knife down, but mostly because her scone was just a pyramid of crumbs. "You mean it?"
"Yes," said her agent. "But finish the Waltons first."
"Why?" asked Janet. "It's a thoroughly miserable novel, and I'm looking forward to most of them dying of tuberculosis at the end."
"I think we all are," said her agent with unwarranted honesty. "But I've already sold the film and television rights."

Black boxes

2012-01-18T07:00:00.000Z

She was looking the other way and never saw the ambulance. It didn't have its sirens on, it wasn't going that fast, but she ran out into the road and though the driver tried to stop in time, she still hit her. It threw her thirty feet along the street, and when she landed she bounced. A couple of times. The ambulance driver, all credit to her, was first to her broken body and checking for a pulse. Susan walked up much more slowly.
"I didn't see her," the driver was whispering over and over again, like a mantra against bad karma. "I didn't see her." She laid her fingers at the pulse-point on her neck, and there was a tense moment where everyone was holding their breath, and then the driver relaxed a little, her shoulders sagging back, and Susan knew that she was alive.
"Are you with her, miss?" It was the ambulance driver's partner: a tall man, probably in his mid-thirties, with salt'n'pepper stubble and grey eyes that seemed understanding.
"I don't know," said Susan. "I was, but then I don't think I was for very long."
The man looked at her closely, while his partner, still murmuring "I didn't see her," to herself loosened articles of clothing and checked for broken bones.
"I see," he said suddenly, and bent down. There was a whispered conversation between him and the ambulance driver, which Susan couldn't hear enough of to understand, and then the ambulance driver did something inside the clothing of the broken woman. When the man stood up again, he was holding a clear disc, about the size of his palm.
"It's from the black box recorder," he said. "It's just a copy, they only last about four hours before they break down. But if you want to know if you were really with her...."
Susan thanked him and walked a little way away to lean on a lamp-post.

The orange sodium blaze of light made the disc sparkle internally. She turned it over and over in her hands, wondering if it was a breach of privacy to look at it. Normally you only got any access to the black box recorder when someone died, or when a relationship ended. It was the easiest way of obtaining closure, it let you see exactly what someone had been thinking and feeling about you. It was brutal – there were plenty of businesses sprung up that specialised in giving you somewhere to recover from learning that your relationship was a tissue of deceit and lies and helping you get back on your feet. And, not entirely coincidentally putting you in close proximity to other people who might be looking for someone a little more trustworthy. But it was always done at the end of something, not at the start.

She looked over at the ambulance staff, who were now getting a stretcher out. The only way she could know if she should ride to the hospital with this woman was to read the disc. Otherwise, she'd have to throw the disc away and pick a choice: take a chance and go with her, or walk away and assume that it was never meant to be.

Of course she should throw the disc away. Of course she should.

She slipped it into the side of her own black box recorder, and rested her finger on the touch-sensitive Play pad.

She was in a taxi, putting make-up on. Not too much, she kept thinking to herself, not too much. My date is called Susan, which is a terribly sensible name, and if she's a sensible person then too much make-up won't impress her. And if she's not a sensible person, then I can just drink a little too much and show that I'm bubbly and fun as well. Not too much make-up. Crap, is that the pub already? Oh well, let's hope this isn't too little make-up.

The taxi-driver was a bitch and wanted more than the meter stated, muttering about having to clean the back of the car with all the make-up spilled there. She paid exactly what was on the meter and resisted the urge to poke her tongue out at the taxi-driver as she left. The pub was brightly-lit, both outside and inside, and there were people already sitting at the pavement tables and standing in the smoking area looking relaxed and cool. She wanted a cigarette, but she didn't know if Susan smoked. She went in instead.

Look around, look around, try not to look around too fast, mustn't seem desperate. Or lost. Lost might be worse. Oh look, they have a pool table, don't play pool with her. You hate losing, they hate it when you keep winning. Ah, there, at a table near the bar. Oh! She's drinking a cocktail. Damn, I wasn't expecting her to be so sophisticated.

"Hi, you must be Susan! I'm Daphne." Smile, shake hands, lean in for a little kiss on the cheek. Hmm, she smells nice, and I think that's shampoo and not perfume. That's bold, leaving off the perfume! I wish I was that capable.

Crap, did I overdo the perfume?

Crap, I know I overdid the perfume.

Make an excuse, get to the bathroom and wash some of it off, before she realises that you're drowing in the stuff.

Oh holy crap, why did I run straight off to the bathroom without even getting a drink? What's she going to think of me?

Oh my god, the taps aren't working! There's no water! What the hell do I do now?

Wait, there's more bars across the street. Climb out of the window, it's not really that small – where did that shoe go? Oh hell, could this evening go any more wrong? Get to a bar across the road, wash off the perfume and –

Susan slipped the disc out of the black box recorder and looked over at the ambulance. They were almost done loading her into the back of it. She straightened up, smoothed down her skirt and made her decision.

Nightmare

2012-01-17T07:00:00.000Z

Hopward missed the bank robbery, but the Sergeant interviewing him refused to believe it. Hopward was quiet, introspective, and forgot to finish his sentences. The Sergeant felt like he'd been working non-stop for thirty years without so much as a gold-plated tear-gas cannister for his trouble, and was determined to find out what Hopward was hiding. He snarled, a little theatrically, and Hopward flinched, his head ducking down as though he were going to hide beneath the table.
As the Sergeant began his aggressive questioning again, starting this time with what Hopward had been doing for lunch, Hopward struggled to give answers that would appease the man and at the same time not deviate from the truth. The problem was, as far as he could tell, that the robbery had happened in front of him, where no reasonable person could be expected not to have noticed. But he really hadn't.
It had been lunchtime, and he'd sat on the first free bench he could find, which was outside a brick building with little planters at the windows and net curtains. The front door had a heavy, solid look to it, as though you'd have to lift weights for a few years before you'd be strong enough to open it, and the grass verges around it were neatly trimmed and had no visible weeds. It seemed like a dependable building, the kind that stayed put and didn't change much. Hopward had liked it immediately.
Sitting on the bench put his back to the building, and so he'd had to look across the road, where there wasn't much traffic, to a newer building that had more glass and steel in its construction than the one behind him, and so was instantly less interesting. There were also people going in and out sporadically, and that made him feel a little nervous too, so he carefully looked slightly away from them, and let himself drift into a dreamworld. As always, he immediately imagined himself standing in a small courtroom, with his parents squeezed into the box that was called the stand, looking uncomfortable and unhappy. His mother was wearing her Sunday dress with her corsage covering up the little stain that she'd never been able to get out. His father was in a shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, and there was a hint of flour around his wrists. The judge was listening to Hopward's magnificent summing up speech that gave all the reasons why his parents should be punished for his name. The fact that Hopward had been living through this fantasy for nearly six months now and still had no idea when he was going to finish summing up didn't bother him in the slightest. He imagined himself straightening his back, looking the judge in the eye, and starting on point one-hundred and fifty-seven regarding the name 'Hopward'.
He never noticed the car pull up outside the bank, despite that it was right in his line of sight. He never saw the two men get out of the car, wearing dolphin masks and go into the bank. He never saw the two men come back out of the bank carrying small leather sacks that looked heavy and get back into the car, and he didn't see the car drive off. When the bank alarm started ringing fifteen minutes later, he didn't hear that either, as he was preoccupied with explaining why neither Hopward with the stress on the first syllable, nor Hopward with the stress on the second was a good name for a shy five-year-old with an imaginary friend who was a duck-billed platypus.
The first time he noticed anything was when he stood up to go back to his office and the police-man who was supposed to be keeping people away from the crime scene saw him for the first time and demanded to know who he was. Hopward, hating his name, had said "Mr. Bagthard," and things had just gone downhill from there.
The Sergeant glared at Hopward again, and suggested that a night in the cells might jog his memory. Before Hopward could say anything at all he had been picked up under the armpits and frog-marched out of the interrogation room and down towards the cells.

Posturetalk

2012-01-16T07:00:00.000Z

Master Licko was in one of his bad moods again. Around his sculptury were fragments of stone and from inside there was a cacophony of crashing, bashing, and thumping. Every now and then some luckless piece of statuary would fly through a window, whose glass had much earlier been shattered and scattered, and dive to the earth, throwing up loose soil and losing parts of itself in an ignominious partial burial. Squashed vermiforms either lay splattered beneath stone or squirmed uneasily, trying to detach their broken parts and wriggle away from the zone of destruction.
I paused at the door, wondering if this was really the right time to visit Master Licko and tell him that his Income Tax was overdue, but even though I could hear what sounded like an overworked lump hammer, I reminded myself that I was a Lawyer-at-arms and not frightened of people like Master Licko. Despite his enhanced musculature and his days spent lifting hundredweights of stone. I knocked on the door, and then went in without waiting for an answer.
Master Licko was topless, as he often was, and wearing a heavy hessian wrap-around apron around his lower half, which he didn't always do and left me wondering where to rest my eyes for decency. In one hand he was holding a lump hammer, in another a metal chisel, and in his third a powder-welding tube. He glared at me.
"Worthless worm," he said, but without much rancour. "I knew it had to be you. Everyone else has patience."
"Talentless hack," I countered. "All of my other clients have learned to appreciate me."
With the pleasantries out of the way, I looked at what he'd been doing when I came in. A humaniform woman was crouching atop an anvil, her legs splayed out but supporting her nonetheless, her arms stretched out to the sides, and the top of her head flattened to support a tray or slab. Her eyes moved constantly, scanning back and forth, but there was no sign of consciousness behind them.
"It's new," said Master Licko putting the powder-welding tube down. "It's so damn new I'm having trouble getting to the essence of it."
"What is it?" I asked, genuinely intrigued. I knew that Master Licko had real talent and didn't just churn out minor variations on a theme like so many artists I had dealings with.
"Posturetalk," he said. "These humaniforms... they have so many different ways of presenting themselves, their very posture tells you something of what they're thinking. If you sit and watch their soap operas you can see it: their lips say one thing, but their body language says another. So. I'm creating humaniform objects that can communicate with you, that can recognise your mood and adjust themselves accordingly. There's really not much structure required to maintain a flat surface for a table, for example. If we freeze this womanform's head, then the table is perfectly stable, and she can use her limbs to indicate a mood. She can adjust her face to show her mood. She can even tremble slightly if there's nothing spillable on the table."
"I'm... interested," I said, despite knowing that Master Licko always put his prices up if he thought he had a sale. I rather liked the idea of a table that trembled when you came near it, or a lamp-holder that could vary between sexy and functional depending on the guests.
"As you should be!" Master Licko calmed shouts down quickly. "Except I'm having real difficulties getting the humaniform to recognise our moods. It's like they don't realise that we're real here."
"Perhaps you're flattening their heads too much?" I suggested. "I seem to recall that they keep squishy stuff in their heads and they break if it leaks out."
"Hmph," said Master Licko, but he frowned the way he does when he's thinking. "Perhaps I could build the head up instead. Or use the hands, they're easy to take off and put back on again at the right angle, and the wrists lock in place with no trouble if you use long enough locking pins. I saw a soap opera of theirs I think, they were all walking like Egyptians, and that would probably be a good posture for posturetalk."
"What's an Egyptian?" I asked, but Master Licko shrugged, already uninterested.
"Are you still here?" he said.
"Yes," I said, pulling the paperwork from a pocket. "I have your Income Tax papers here."
I watched, mildly impressed, as the humaniform's head sailed off her shoulders and through the window, bouncing in the flower-bed outside, and Master Licko howled.

The house on Beechwood Drive

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000Z

As she drove, Miss Flava marvelled at the exactness of Henry's directions. Everything, down to the location of traffic lights and roadworks was exactly as Henry had said, and even sparked recollections of things she'd said that Miss Flava had forgotten. Though that was mostly because of the sheer amount of information that Henry had provided.
Playfair was being quiet in the passenger seat, which was because Miss Flava had pointedly said nothing about the car being about twenty-feet further down the road than she'd left it, having a length of torn tow-rope hanging from the front bumper that matched the one hanging from Calamity's collar, and the hand-brake being off when she'd been careful to put it on when she left the car. Even when they passed an elderly woman pushing a wheeled shopping basket in front of her he only glared at her until she cringed back, and didn't start on his usual rant about inconsiderate people with wheeled accoutrements.
"This is it," said Miss Flava, turning in at a gap in a high green hedge. The hedge was neatly trimmed into a rectangle that did a good job of acting like a wall, reaching well above the roof of the car. There was a small fence in front of the hedge, though it was hard to notice with the hedge extending over the top of it. The fence was wooden posts but wire rails, and Playfair looked at them thoughtfully. Miss Flava looked at him, with growing impatience.
"Aren't you going to get out and open the gate?" she finally said, and Playfair looked up at the wooden gate blocking their way into the Beechwood house's drive.
"Don't they have automatic openers for these things?" he said, not moving.
"Probably, if you own the place, or are visiting," said Miss Flava.
"Well, tell them we're visiting then," said Playfair.
Miss Flava was about to sigh in frustration and get out and open the gate herself, but then she spotted that the intercom was, for some inexplicable reason, on the passenger side. "You'll have to do that, Sir," she said, managing not to grit her teeth. She pointed.
"Oh, right. Yes, that is interesting," said Playfair. He wound the window down, and Calamity promptly sat up on the back seat and tried to get past him to stick her head out. He twisted in his seat to push her back, and then leaned out of the window to push the button on the intercom. It buzzed.
"Are you expecting an answer?"
Playfair looked at her, and then had to push Calamity back down on the seat as she spotted a chance to get past him and to the open window.
"Maybe," he said. "Who knows, his elderly parents might have escaped from the basement where he was keeping them now he's dead. Or, he might have a housekeeper we don't know about. Or a friend, of some persuasion. And failing that, if there's anyone in the house who shouldn't be, they're now nervous and more likely to do something stupid."
"You just don't want to open the gate," said Miss Flava, but then the intercom crackled and the gate swung slowly inwards. She stared at it.
"Go! Go!" said Playfair, gesturing imperiously with a finger. "The gate is open!"
"You knew, didn't you?" said Miss Flava accusingly. "You spotted something and decided that there must be someone in the house. You couldn't possibly have known otherwise. You just couldn't."
"It does look that way, doesn't it?" said Playfair, smiling mostly to himself. "I'd say go right here."
The drive forked, the left-hand branch looking like it would go to the front of the house, and the right-hand branch appearing to lead round behind it. Trees lined the drive, but kept a strict eight inches back from the drive's edge, and cast long shadows in the afternoon sunshine. At the fork the house came briefly into view, and Miss Flava was slightly startled to see how big it was. There was the main body of the house, built from red-brick and three storeys high, and then there was a wing that looked much more modern, with steel and glass construction reaching up to a fourth-storey. It looked, from here, like an overgrown conservatory. On the other side there was another red-brick wing, but not much could be seen of that, and it looked like it might be mostly only two storeys. She took the right-hand fork, and the house disappeared from view again. The tires crunched steadily over gravel, and after twenty seconds the path widened out into what was basically a small car-park. There were two cars already there; one a small two-person run-about with the high roof and almost-lacking back-seat that reminded Miss Flava of the bubble cars briefly popular in the seventies. The other was a classic car that looked like it had had its hey-day in the fifties, but was polished so that it shone even in the dim, tree-shadowed gloom of this car-park and was spotlessly clean. Miss Flava parked several car widths away from it, and turned to Playfair.
"Don't let Calamity anywhere near that car," she said. "That looks like it would be an expensive problem, even if this guy is dead."
"Oh, I don't think it's his car," said Playfair.

Breakfast

2012-01-14T19:00:00.000Z

The Blonde was in the bathroom doing something complicated with tongs, pins and the occasional screech, and I was surveying the kitchen with dismay. There were two crates of champagne stacked in front of the oven, there was a Christmas pudding sitting in a puddle of some liquid on the side-counter, and there was a rather brown looking banana in the fruit-bowl. The fridge fared little better: we had butter, mustard and some wilted spring onions, but otherwise even all the cheese was gone. I checked the lower cupboards in case there was any pasta left, but all I found were two tins of kidney beans in chili sauce and a duster that turned out to be a dead mouse on further inspection.
"Darling?" I called, trying not to sound phoney.
"Busy!" she yelled back, followed by a sharp "Ouch!" and a stream of cursing.
I checked the bread-bin again, just in case the bread had come back from holiday while I was hunting through the cupboards, but it was still empty.
"What do you want for breakfast?" I called.
"I'm not eating breakfast," she yelled back. "New Year's Resolution, remember? No food that doesn't taste good dunked in Champagne."
Ah, well that explained the crates of champagne and empty cupboards then.
"I'm going to get myself some breakfast then!" I called.
Something thunked twice and then shattered, and I fled the cursing before I could be accused of being responsible.
I very nearly got the car out and went to McDonald's, but as I was checking my pockets for my keys I remembered that one of my New Year's Resolutions was to walk more and to add more than just evening restaurants to my column. I left the keys where they were, walked the end of the street and caught a bus the seven stops to a café I passed a lot at lunchtime when it was always busy. Perhaps they'd serve breakfast.
"Did you read about us in the London Sandwich Review?" asked the waitress. Her teeth were crooked and yellow, as was her wig. She reminded me of Nora Batty, although she was clearly a few days younger, so much so that I had to fight the urge to look down and check her stockings.
"No," I said, peeling the menu from my fingers. It seemed fairly rudimentary: so long as I was happy with fried food, or possibly a boiled egg, I could get something to eat.
"Good," she said. "Horrible publication. Now love, what can I get you?"
"Darjeeling?" I said, wondering if this was optimistic.
"Bless you."
There was a moment of silence while I readjusted my mental perspective, and then I tried again.
"Er, tea, please, white, no sugar, ducks." I said. She scribbled on her pad and smiled at me, making me feel slightly nauseous. "Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, beans, black pudding, fried slice, fried tomato and a waffle," please I said. More scribbling, and that expectant smile again. "That'll be all, thanks, ducks," I said.
"Not a problem, twattercock," she said pleasantly, disappearing back to the kitchen and making me wonder if I'd just been insulted. I decided that perhaps 'ducks' had been going a bit too far.
I'd barely started looking out of the window at the council's eternal roadworks before a chipped white mug filled with orange liquid thumped down on the table in front of me. I assumed it was my tea, though it was too hot to actually taste and blowing on it just seemed to create clouds of steam. I looked out of the window again, sure that there were fewer workmen there all of a sudden, and then the waitress reappeared.
"Sorry, loveyduck," she said. "I completely forgot to ask: how do you like your eggs?"
"What choices do I have?" I said, holding back a joke.
"Boiled, fried, poached, scrambled, Benedict, over-easy, on a raft and a Lavallette" she said. "Or a combination."
I shrank from the idea of boiling a fried egg, but was intrigued by the last option, which I thought had ceased to offered a hundred years ago and basically poaches the eggs in double cream and then serves up the lot. It's delicious.
"A Lavallette," I said.
"Lovely jubbley," she said, disappearing again and making me certain that she was taking the piss.
Five minutes later, and I had breakfast in front of me. The cream from the eggs Lavallette was invading the beans and submerging the tomato, though the fried mushrooms and black pudding had created a serviceable levee behind which the bacon was hiding. The fried slice was somewhere beneath the tomato, and the waffle was... well. It came on its own, on a side plate, and appeared to have been boiled. I eyed it suspiciously, not least because it appeared to be eyeing me back.
"I gave you a bit of sausage," said the waitress, from somewhere behind the counter. "I thought you'd probably just forgotten to ask for it."
Indeed, there it was, underneath the aggressive waffle.
"Thank-you," I said weakly, wondering how I was to review this.

Secondary recursion

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000Z

"Dr. Verfuegbar? Dr. Verfuegbar? That's not the right patient, Dr. Verfuegbar."
"What are you talking about nurse? The man is clearly on the operating table."
"Yes, Doctor, but he's not the right patient. He's male."
"I can see that, thank-you nurse."
"How do you propose to give him a hysterectomy then, Doctor?"
"The surgery plan is on the table over there, nurse. You can see what I'll be extracting, and how I'll be putting things back in again."

Miss Snippet held the struggling woman back from the child on the floor. She had her arms wrapped around the woman's rib-cage and was squeezing slightly more tightly than was really necessary to try and cut down her breathing and make her easier to control. The pair of them seemed to be attempting some complicated dance move, as the woman kept trying to rake Miss Snippet's shins with her high-heels, and Miss Snippet kept stepping away. The headmaster, an indecisive man except where it came to nepotism, looked on vaguely anguished, but made no attempt to help the scalded and bruised child on the floor. Miss Snippet glared angrily at him.

"Headmaster!" she said, jerking her head back to avoid being reverse-headbutted by the struggling woman. "Headmaster, can you please help Michael up!"

"I don't think I should be touching the child," said the Headmaster, his voice trembling with nervousness. Miss Snippet noticed that a tic had started up in the corner of his right eye. "I think we need a medical professional here now."

"Then call one." Miss Snippet's tone was as acid as her thoughts, as she stepped back again to avoid another high-heel raking and realised she'd backed up against a wall.

The radio's still playing but I've left it in the bedroom.

Bedroom.

Bare doom.

The radio's still praying, and I've left it to it's bare doom.

The radio's still.

What?

Dr Verfuegbar lifted the scalpel, and the blade glinted in the bright, cold light of the operating theatre. On the table, the patient murmered something and tried to roll over. Dr. Verfuegbar sighed, set the scalpel down again, and tightened the thick leather bands that restrained the patient. They'd been laid across his throat, chest, wrists and ankles, leaving enough space for him to get into the patient's abdominal cavity and hunt for a womb.

The nurse, stood at a small steel side table, read through Dr. Verfuegbar's operating plan. Part of her admired the beauty of his handwriting, another part was impressed by the elegance of his grammar. A third part of her, that she was trying very hard not to listen to, was screaming that the operating plan had nothing to do with humans, and was in fact a wiring schematic for a telephone.

A soft bing sounded in the operating theatre, and she looked up.

"What was that?" The Headmaster looked even more panicky, and Miss Snippet could see that his hands had started shaking now, and little beads of sweat were standing out on his forehead. The last time she'd seen him like this she'd been killing herself laughing as his nephew nearly immolated himself in front of three hundred parents at the nativity play.

"The doorbell," said Miss Snippet. "It's how people request entry to the school when we're closed."

She stepped sideways smartly, unexpectedly, and ducked as much as she could. She buried her nose in the woman's back, just between her shoulder-blades, and the woman's attempt to reverse head-butt her again missed and her head bounced off the wall with a solid thunk.

"Let them in," said Miss Snippet in her best tone of control, the one that calmed wild animals at the zoo and could reduce an entire class of small children to tears.

Something goes bing where I can't see it, and I know that there's a wave coming. There's pressure somewhere around my legs.

Something goes thunk and there's a door opened in the wall. I think I can see a way out.

What does Verfuegbar mean?

"The lip reader has arrived," says the Nurse, answering the intercom. Dr. Verfuegbar lays down the scalpel again, and looks confused.

"Don't we normally feed them to the landmines?" he asks.

"No Doctor, it's just that the last four hundred have been taken by the landmines," says the Nurse. "It might just be that all the landmines have been found now. The lip-reader has arrived."

"Do we still need a lip-reader?"

The nurse thinks about this. "I think we might have given the patien–"

Miss Snippet lays the unconscious woman down on the floor next to her son, and checks the child's pulse. It's there, but it's not strong. The Headmaster comes back into the room with a man who reminds her of a cruise-ship and purchasing replacement children from a third-world country.

"She's not allowed in here," he says flatly, pointing at the unconscious woman. "I have a restraining order."

I'm not allowed out of here. I have a re-training order.

"Put the lip-reader on the table," says Dr. Verfuegbar. "I have a maiming order."

Traffic wardens

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000Z

Miss Flava went back inside the police station to ask for the address, turning the engine off and taking the keys with her. She was tempted to take DI Playfair with her as well, just to make sure that he didn't try hotwiring the car while she was gone, but finally she decided to try trusting him. Which left her with a sense of foreboding all the while she was walking away from the car and back into the police station. Henry looked up as she came back in.
"By yourself?" she asked, sounding polite and disinterested.
"Playfair didn't bother to find out where Beechwood Drive was before we left," said Miss Flava. "Can you tell me?"
"Neither did you," said Henry quietly. "Well. Beechwood Drive is about five minutes drive away, it's in the posher part of Little Haversham. They film period dramas round about there from time to time, but I don't think we've issued any permits this week, so you shouldn't be seeing anyone wandering around in what looks like their nightie...." Her instructions were careful and detailed, so much so that Miss Flava was wondering if Henry spent her time memorising road atlases by the time she'd finished.
"By the way," she said, "on the way here we passed a really badly parked car. Well, I say parked, it was more abandoned than anything else."
"Oh, I'm sure the traffic wardens will be on that in no time then," said Henry, turning the pages of a manilla folder casually, as though trying to suggest that Miss Flava was interrupting valuable police business.
"What traffic wardens?" Miss Flava's voice was like an icicle in mid-summer, unexpected, sharp, and frosty.
"Little Haversham traffic wardens." Henry had looked up when Miss Flava spoke, and was looking surprised.
"You don't have any," said Miss Flava. "I checked before we came here. You have vacancies for two, after the last two eloped together."
To her surprise, Henry's face suddenly screwed up. "Tom and Paul," she said, her voice getting higher. Her shoulders trembled. "They were... they were my housemates."
"They were both male?" Miss Flava tried not to sound too interested.
"Yes! Yes, they were, and they were in love and they wanted to do something romantic. So they eloped to Gretna Green to get married, only when they got there Tom's ex was there getting married as well, and then, and then Tom tried to stop the wedding because he said he still loved his ex, and then Paul got all upset, and now they're still up in Gretna Green and sulking and won't talk to each other, and whenever that happens they need me to mediate, only I can't take any time off at the moment, and now I think I'll never get any time off because the magician died and no-one knows why."
"Breathe," said Miss Flava, watching Henry get redder and redder and hearing her getting squeakier and squeakier. "No really, breathe. Before you pass out."
"Eeeep!" said Henry, finally complying. She panted a little as she finally started to get some breath back.
"That's a lot to take in," said Miss Flava carefully. "But I'm sure that now that DI Playfair is here there'll be some kind of resolution fairly quickly. One way or another he does solve crimes very well, even if he alienates everybody else in the process. So you'll be able to get up to Gretna Green in no time and bring Paul and Tom back to their senses, the altar, and then Little Haversham. I'm sure of it."
Henry sniffed, and looked at her through reddened eyes. Miss Flava wondered for a moment if she'd considered auditioning for vampire movies.
"Are you sure? DI Playfair seems like he's just going to make things worse."
"He seems like that, yes. All the damn time. But somehow, even when the rest of us don't have a clue what he's doing or why, he's finding out who did the crime and getting ready to pounce."
"Is he like Columbo then?"
"I've never seen him in a raincoat," said Miss Flava thoughtfully. "But no, he wouldn't waste his time pursuing the criminal and tricking him into confessing. He'd just set Calamity on them and claim that it was her own doing."
"Calamity?"
As if on cue Calamity raced into the police station with a tow-rope tied to her collar. The other end appeared to have torn off from something else.
"Oh good lord!" Henry regained her composure quickly and produced a large plastic net from under the counter. "Don't worry! I trained with the dog unit for a week, I'm sure I can catch that dog."
Miss Flava eyed the net, and then whistled piercingly. It seemed to resound throughout the police station, and Alf appeared from the interview room in a cloud of tobacco smoke, just as Calamity bounded back from the canteen clutching an egg-and-cress sandwich in her mouth. She lay down at Miss Flava's feet and started eating the sandwich.
"Calamity," said Miss Flava, pointing.
"My sandwich!" yelled a moustachioed policeman from the canteen doorway.
"Not any more," said Henry, slightly perplexed that Calamity seemed to have got more of the sandwich around her muzzle than actually in her mouth.
"It's alright," said Miss Flava. "She doesn't really like egg."

Penelope

2012-01-11T07:00:00.000Z

The day-squid's tentacles flexed lazily, flickering across the sky, tasting the clouds. Birds squawked in outrage as they darted around and past them, avoiding their touch, not wanting to surrender their taste in case the day-squid liked it. Light darted across the landscape below like a kaleidoscope, patches of bright colour racing side by side along a burned road until suddenly they darted off at oblique angles and vanished in the scrub grass.
A charred and oxidised smell rose on a breeze, and there were overnotes of old rubber and rotting fish. A car with scarlet tyres appeared over the brow of a hill and crawled along the road. Pieces of ash like sloughed skin launched themselves into the air behind the car and fluttered around like zombie butterflies, meeting and mating briefly here and there before falling back to the road again to return to the dust from whence they came. The driver of the car was a woman with ice-white hair and sunglasses so dark it was like night was travelling with her wherever she went.
She reached up and tapped the pair of fluffy dice that were hanging from the rear-view mirror, setting them swinging. They were ice-white with orange numbers embroidered onto them; 7, 11, 15, 132, 288 and 1063. On the driver's side of the windscreen someone had once stuck letters at the top spelling out the name Jennifer. The driver was called Penelope. She was trying to smile, but her teeth weren't agreeing.
Under the driver's seat a gun rolled from side to side. It thumped against the side of the car, then rolled back and clattered against the central transmission column. Penelope was hoping that it might break itself apart before she had to reach down and pick it up again. Being an assassin was getting on her nerves. Too late though, she could smell the flames in the distance and see the road going from burned to embrous before her.
The car stops and smoke starts to rise from the tyres. It is etiolated and grey and leaks upwards in thin, twisting columns. Penelope stands up on the driver's seat and looks out to the horizon, looking all around her. The world seems empty, deserted. She sits back down again and pulls the gun out from under the seat. It is, depressingly, not even scratched. Then she opens the glove-compartment, which is almost as empty as the world, as her soul, as the words that whisper her new instructions to her when she fails to stay awake. Inside is just a black blindfold, four inches deep and eighteen inches long. She ties it round her eyes, rests her finger on the trigger of the gun, and stands back up on the seat.
The day-squid twitches as the thin wisps of smoke reach it now, and it sneezes, a noise like thunder. It masks the report of the gun, the roar of the bullet leaving the barrel and twisting through the air, miniature fins guiding it, holding true to its path. Behind it is a scent of ozone as it ionises itself a path; it is but the messenger, and the payload comes later. It's target stares at it, disbelieving, secure in the knowledge that it is invisible, at least to mortal eyes.
The bullet strikes, and it is nothing; its impact dissipates harmlessly and nothing penetrates.
Electricity races along an ionised way, following the path of least resistance, launched from a secondary source by something else, of which Penelope has no knowledge. It strikes, and the damage it does is awesome.
Penelope stares as first her bullet disappears and then the air explodes into a messy sphere of red, blue and green. Something that wibbles as it flies through the air splatters on the windscreen, and she knows that Jennifer will never be the same again. The wind rises quickly, racing to fill in a vacuum where something dense once waited on a burned road in a desolate world. It tugs at her at it rushes past. She sits down again, starts the car, and turns it around.
The day-squid sneezes again and writhes its tentacles in annoyance.

Mary Virgin

2012-01-10T07:00:00.000Z

"You once dated a girl whose surname was Virgin?" Dave sounded incredulous. "Why would you date anyone with a name like that? That tells you what you're getting, up front! Nothing."
"Well, her mum knew my mum," said Vince between mouthfuls of lager. "And her mum thought that it was a bit odd that no-one was dating her daughter, and my mum–"
"Thought you were a bit odd."
Vince looked a little hurt and put his pint down on the table. "No, my mum loved me, Dave. Don't interrupt. My mum thought that dating me might help her realise there's plenty of opportunity out there–" Vince waited while Dave's explosion of laughter died away. Dave rested his head on his arm, his shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter, and he waved a hand to indicate that Vince should continue his story. "Yeah, so I dated her. For nearly a year."
There was a pause while Dave got himself under control and Vince sipped at his lager, looking thoughtful as he remembered the girl from nearly twenty years ago.
"What happened at the end of the year then?" asked Dave carefully, odd little pauses between words indicating where he was trying very hard not to laugh again.
"She told me she was a lesbian," said Vince. Dave stared at him for a moment, his eyes wide with disbelief, and then he dissolved into giggles.
"Look," said Vince. "It explained a lot of things, alright? Like why she'd only let me kiss her breasts, and why she insisted on me shaving right before we had a date and why she owned more suits than me."
"She only let you kiss her breasts?" Dave's giggles subsided suddenly. "You spent a year kissing a girl's breasts? Sweet Jiminy Vince, I don't know how you do it: I spent eighteen months dating Theresa Wilson and took her out to movies every weekend and bought her dinner twice a month and I still never got more than a bit of over-the-sweater action and no-tongue kissing. You date a frigging lesbian and get more action than me, for a year!"
"Yeah, alright Dave, keep it down a bit," said Vince looking a little bashful. "I dated a girl called Theresa once too."
"Might have been the same one?"
"Nah doubt it," said Vince. "Not unless yours is called Terry now and lives in the Midlands with a wife and two kids."
"No...," said Dave. "No, I think mine died a couple of years ago. Drug overdose."
"Oh yeah, I hate when that happens. Especially when the cameras just keep on running."
"...what, Vince?"
Vince drained his lager glass and belched. "Yeah, it was Carrie, she was working as a porn-star at the time, and she died of a drug overdose at the start of a scene, but they just kept on going without knowing she was dead. Really put the price of the film up!"
"How did they not notice? She was dead, right? A corpse?"
"Yeah, but they said she wasn't doing much active in that scene, it was more about how much they could get in her, if you get my drift. They said they thought it was odd she wasn't complaining, but that was about it."
"Dear God," said Dave. "You're a never-ending source of worry, Vince. I liked it better when you were dating lesbians called Virgin."
"Mary Virgin, Dave. I think her mother was hoping for a miracle."
"What, like a grandchild?"
"Nah, they've got the kids thing sorted out already. They got a bunch of sperm donors, mixed all the contributions up together and used that. That way, no-one knows who the biological father is."
"...sounds disgusting, Vince. Just what I'd expect from you. You getting another round in?"
"Yeah right, but not here. That last one was flat."
"Where do you fancy then?"
"How about the Weeping Nun?"
"Sure thing, Vince. I wonder why it's called that?"
"Oh, I know this one! I knew the nun as well, actually...."

Clemethtine

2012-01-09T07:00:00.000Z

Janet O'Steen, Ireland's foremost logodisciplinarian, stared at the white powder laid out neatly in lines on her desk. Her OCD was making her twitch like an underdressed epileptic in a snowstorm and her fingers kept pinching together in a claw-shape. She badly wanted to clean the table, then clean the cleaning cloth, and finally clean her hands. She struggled to resist, also wanting to try and get inside the mind of one of her characters.
She had been listening to the radio earlier in the day and a Radio Four documentary about Negro Spirituals had come on, and as she'd half-dozed in her chair, her cup of Ovaltine placed carefully on a placemat on the floor by her feet, she'd started day-dreaming a little about the circumstances which the radio presenter was claiming brought about the songs. She had a feeling that she might not have woken up until after the first documentary had finished and a second one had started, but she also didn't think that was worth worrying about. She'd woken up with a new back-story for a minor character in her novel The Waltons. To her annoyance, her agent was insisting that she add another sister to the brood that had a broader appeal.
"Think sex appeal, but without the sex," said her agent, sounding depressingly chirpy on the phone-call. "Or possibly without the appeal."
"Wouldn't that be unsexy and unappealing?" asked Janet, aware that her agent had only a passing acquaintance with sarcasm.
"Yes, but you've already got two sisters like that," said her agent breezily. "The butch lesbian and the one that becomes a prostitute."
"How can an unsexy woman become a prostitute?" asked Janet, astonished by the very thought of it. "Surely there has to be some attraction there for her cust–, her cli–, whatever you call the men who visit prostitutes."
"Sex on demand, if you've got the cash," said the agent. "That's got sex appeal. Your whore can have one leg and birthmarks all over her body so long as she's cheap enough. In fact, didn't you already write about that?"
"There's no lesbian in The Waltons," said Janet, not wanting to get side-tracked. She had made her main character's mother essentially a cheap whore in Bride of Prejudice and she was still sensitive about the reviews that book had received.
"Well ok, make the lesbian the new character," said her agent, and the call drifted aimlessly on a little longer before Janet gave in.
So when she'd awoken, she did so with the knowledge that the new sister was supposed to be called Clementine and was named for her mother's favourite Negro Spiritual. There was a nagging thought in the back of her mind that since the mother had grown up in rural Bath she might never have encountered such songs, but she was trying not to think about that until she had the character right. The vicar, at the girl's baptism, had had a bad cold and a lisp and so the child was actually named Clemethtine, and in a fit of nominative determinism when she turned fourteen, as she would at the start of the novel, she would run away from home and shack up in a meth lab with a young man who had abandoned his dreams of becoming a groom (second class) to peddle drugs to the local landed gentry. Between them they would mix up a patent cough mixture that contained the active ingredient methamphetamine, which, though not fixing the cough at all did at least give the user the energy to get things done even when their cough turned out to be consumption.
The lines of white powder on her table were castor sugar, but she was trying to get a feel for how Clemethtine would react when Philbros, her ex-groom, showed her that he'd crystallised the cough mixture and intended to press it into tablets.
"Look, Clemmy!" he said, forgetting that she hated any diminuation of her name. "The calexis worked! All those bottles for the cough-mixture – we don't need them any more! You don't have to lug hundredweights of glass around on your back now! We'll just press the crystals into tablets and people can eat them like sweets."
Clemethtine, whose back ached abominably every night and every morning, actually sighed with relief at the thought of not having to work like a donkey any more. "Is it safe?" she asked. "How much cough-sryup do you have to evaporate to make one tablet?"
"Of course it's safe! It's just energy in a more convenient form! We'll be rich!"
Clemethtine, being more practical than Philbros picked a tablet up and handed it to him. "Show me," she suggested.
Philbros would die in a couple more pages, and then Clemethtine could discover her lesbian tendencies with Philbros's mother, thought Janet. Then she needed to find a way to getting the story back to Janet and the family living in Bath still, some way that seemed natural. Although their departure now to the city could be in part because they were fleeing the heavily addicted clients that Clemethtine was no longer supplying.
The white lines were too much for her now. She swept them quickly off the table and went to start the cleaning process.

Recursion

2012-01-08T07:00:00.000Z

The song is playing on the radio again and I'm half-listening to it, half trying to fall asleep. The bed is comfortable, my wife is lying next to me, and someone's left the microwave on. I can hear it humming away to itself.
I recognise the song now, it's called Intervention. The singer is nearing the end, and he sings words that resonate oddly with me. The microwave pings, something's done, and the singer sings:
"Been working for the church/While your wife falls apart...."
I puzzle over that for a moment, then I roll over and lift the covers to check. Sure enough, he's right: my wife has fallen apart and there is a jumble of limbs and jigsaw-pieces of torso in the bed with me. Her head is missing.

*
"Do you see? He responds to stimulus." Dr. Verfuegbar points to the patient who is strapped to a table. He is trying to turn over, and his lips are moving as he mouths words. "Did you find the lip-reader yet?"
"All our lip-readers are dead," says the nurse, straightening surgical steel instruments on a movable trolley. She tsks as she realises that she cannot get the forceps parallel to both the left and right hand sides of the tray. "The war is proving costly."
"That's a lot of lip-readers," says Dr. Verfuegbar sounding a little shocked. "Are we getting more?"
"We've put in a requisition," says the nurse. Dr. Verfuegbar nods, his white coif bobbing up and down and he does so, and he pops the collar on his white coat. He has an orange fake-tan. "Form 7C," says the nurse.
"Oh no," says Dr. Verfuegbar. "I've told you before, form 7C is for the naughty children."

*
"Do you see? He responds to stimulus," says Miss Snippet, pointing at the twitching child on the square of carpet in the nursery's naughty corner. The headmaster looks worried and scans the room hastily, wondering if Miss Snippet has been tasering the children again, but he can't see anything incriminating.
"What stimulus?" asks the headmaster, his face ashen. After the fiasco at the Christmas play he can't afford for any more children to be hurt at the school, or they might take away his right to select students by competitive entrance exam.
"Coffee, in this case," says Miss Snippet. "His mother spilled some on him. She's in the cloakroom now, trying to sober up where she can't inflict third-degree burns on her child."
"We can blame the mother?" The headmaster's face lights up.
"Possibly," says Miss Snippet. "I still don't understand what set him off in the first place."
"Isn't he epileptic?"
"Not that I was aware of, and anyway, we didn't have the strobe lights on."
The headmaster pauses, aware that he should ask Miss Snippet what possible educational use strobe lights could have, why she should have any in the classroom, and where she's hidden them, but he decides that any answers to those questions would only mean more work for him.
"So what were you doing?" he asks.
"Listening to the radio," she says.

*
Working for the church/While your family dies...."I don't really want to get out of bed, but the lyrics of the song are explicit, and besides, the microwave is humming again. Do I have any family any more? I'm sure I just found the remains of my wife, but the more I think about it, the less I can remember anything about her. I don't even remember getting married.
Every spark of friendship and love/Will die without a home....
Well, isn't that obvious?

*
"Dr. Verfuegbar? Dr. Verfuegbar? The lip-reader has arrived, only... well, he was caught by a landmine. Well, actually, he kind of caught a landmine. I suppose, if you want to be pedantic, a landmine caught him. Well, he's in a few more pieces than we were expecting. Dr. Verfuegbar? Dr. Verfuegbar?"

*
"Do you see? He responds to stimulus!"
"Yes, Miss Snippet already said that." The headmaster is feeling worried, because the boy won't stop twitching. Miss Snippet looks altogether all too innocent. "Stop kicking him will you?"
"I'm his mother! I'll do as I please!"

*
The song is playing on the radio again, and I'm half-listening to it, half trying to fall asleep....

Conversations

2012-01-07T07:00:00.000Z

"You're being obstreperous," said Miss Flava to Playfair as they walked past the front desk. Manning the front desk was a young woman in a very smart uniform, standing rigidly upright and organising files while she waited to be of assistance.
"Henry?" said Playfair, stopping in mid-stride and causing Miss Flava to stumble as she tried not to collide with him.
"And who might you be, Sir?" asked the woman behind the counter.
"DI Playfair," said Playfair. "You're Henry?"
"Short for Henrietta, Sir, it was my Aunt's name."
"You should be careful she doesn't decide to take it back then," said Playfair. "Come along, Miss Flava, we have a house to look at, possibly before it burns down!"
"You stopped!" Miss Flava stared after him as he walked out of the station and turned towards the car-park round the back. "That man...." she said, partly to herself, but partly also to Henry, who didn't even crack a smile.
By the time she reached the car Playfair was stood expectantly by the driver's door, and so she raised an eyebrow and sighed loudly.
"Oh come on," he said, holding his hand out. "It can't be far, and there's no traffic on the roads, and no-one will ever know."
"Yes they will, because you'll find a way of stripping all the teeth off the gearbox," said Miss Flava. "Or you'll drive into something, probably livestock, or someone will drive into you. These accidents are why you're not allowed to drive the car any more, boss."
"I am your boss, aren't I?" Playfair still had his hand out.
"Which you won't be if anyone finds out I let you drive."
They stared at each other, eyes locked and a silent battle of the wills playing out. Miss Flava blinked first, but Playfair let his hand drop fractionally later, and walked round to the passenger side of the car.
"I can think better when you're driving," he said, as though nothing had happened. "Fewer people seem to do stupid things in front of you."
Calamity barked her enthusiasm at seeing them again as Miss Flava unlocked the doors, and she attempted to bound over into the front seats and get out of the car. Playfair pushed her back, and Miss Flava had to wait till he'd finished wrestling her on to the back seat before she could get in.
"Should we take her for a walk first?"
"No," said Playfair. "I'll need her up at this house to sniff around. She'll get her exercise then."
"Don't let her widdle on things," said Miss Flava, starting the engine. "Forensics didn't stop complaining about you for weeks last time."
"Last time?"
"You gave Calamity one of the bones from the scene of the crime to play with. It took three of them half-an-hour to get it back off her!"
"Yes, but it wasn't one of the human bones, it was just some old bone that had gotten mixed in with the rest. It didn't matter."
"Maybe, but no-one else knew that, Playfair. And since you won't explain how you knew, there's still no-one else who knows how you knew."
"It's obvious, really, you know. If any of you would just sit down and think about it properly for half-an-hour you'd know too. Really."
Miss Flava pulled out of the car-park and turned left. "Which way is this house then?"
"I don't know," said Playfair. "I didn't ask. Beechwood Drive, I think."
"Yes, I remember that, but where is Beechwood Drive? I can't go there if I don't know where it is!"
"Oh," said Playfair. "It looks like you're lost then!"

Impasse

2012-01-06T07:00:00.000Z

The doctors called me at 8:21 and asked me to come into the hospital. Julie was still in her private room with the guard on the door, and her baby was now in a private room in the maternity ward, also with a guard on the door, but for different reasons. No-one was allowed in to see the baby unless they went in pairs, as apparently it was having odd effects on people. I couldn't say I was all that surprised.
The receptionist at the desk caught my eye as I came in and told me that I was to go to the fourth floor and the John Philcock room. I nodded, though I was expecting just to go to the maternity ward which I thought they'd named after some suffragette. I considered using the lifts, but when I stopped outside them and pushed the buttons I noticed that the lifts had been named as well – clearly some NHS mandarin had over-ordered on signage – and these were the Icarus lifts. I decided that boded ill for anyone using them, and opted for the stairs instead.
The stairwell had plenty of glass, and I could see the hospital car-park as I spiralled round and up, with occasionally glimpses of the smoking garden for the nurses and recidivist doctors. At first, I'd not expected to see anyone in the smoking garden except maybe the odd porter or student, but at times it looked like there were more staff outside smoking than there were inside working. A junior doctor had looked at me with eyes as old as some of the things I'd found in the desert when I'd asked him about it and told me to think about the stress they were under and the likelihood of finding a bar anywhere in the hospital. I did think about it, and decided that the smoking garden would be my preference too.
The John Philcock room turned out to be a meeting room of some kind. The floor tiles were cold and icy-blue, the light was a fluorescent strip that flickered just on the edge of vision, the table was formica-topped and too low and the chairs were old wooden school chairs and both too low and too wide. I could only imagine that they'd originally been constructed for a class of midget Billy Bunters. No-one was sitting down when I knocked and entered, and the only thing on the table was a manilla folder with some A4 pages inside.
The doctors were patient and careful, but the upshot of the conversation was that they wanted me to take Julie home with me. I explained that I'd sooner volunteer as a major-organ donor, and asked why they wanted to separate her from her baby. That's when they all looked at each other and tried not to answer.
They also, it seemed, wanted me to agree to a nil-by-mouth order, followed by a nil-by-any-route at all order, all of which would be carried out under extreme secrecy.
I sat on the table at that point, struck by a memory from the desert.
I found out quickly in the desert that it's very important to keep an eye on the weather. When the wind blows it might be a gentle breeze that sometimes even cooled you, but it could evaporate sweat much faster and use up your water dangerously fast. And if it was stronger than a breeze then you would be wise to consider finding shelter, for it doesn't take long for the wind to pick up loose sand, and then at best you get a skin-peel that would cost an arm and a leg in a Harley Street clinic, and at worse you would lose an arm and a leg to the highly abrasive qualities of lots of tiny grit being hurled at you at thirty miles an hour. I had my tent of course, but when I could I would pitch the tent in the lee of a dune, or sandstone, or on one occasion in the hollow trunk of an enormous tree that I think must have died before the desert even came into being around it. And crouching there inside my little protective skin while hostile nature howled around me, it occurred to me that this was life in the midst of death. No sooner had I thought that than there came a tapping on the taut nylon fabric of the tent. I nearly had a heart attack.
I lowered the zip cautiously and found that there was a man outside, his face cut and bleeding, his clothes tattered, and a nylon rucksack on his back. He wasn't carrying a weapon, and he had four days stubble, so I took a chance and let him inside. He gasped a little, sat down heavily opposite me, and took his rucksack off.
He either said his name was Dane or told me that he was a Dane, but I wasn't paying a lot of attention as the zip was getting stuck at the top and not quite closing. I struggled with it a little while he talked about a motorcycle repair shop in Stockholm for some reason, and finally I gave up and accepted that there might be a small trickle of sand coming into the tent. I looked back over at my guest.
He gave me a sepulchral smile and asked me how I intended to die.
And so, for the next hour and a half, until the sandstorm died down and I could leave the tent, we talked about the merits and demerits of the forms of death that we knew, arguing for and against pain depending on the circumstance, and bringing the circle to closure: we were life in the midst of death, talking about death in the midst of life, and accepting, at least for the duration of the conversation that there was no separation of the two.
When the wind finally dropped from a howl to a moan, then to a whimper, I left the tent to stretch and eyeball the horizon, to see if this was the eye of a storm or a storm in a teacup. And I stared at the motorcycle that my guest couldn't possibly have ridden across the desert or that could have survived the abrasive embrace of the storm.
I told the doctors the truth; Julie had left me and attempted to abort the baby all of her own accord, and that I didn't believe it was mine. They shifted their feet and fiddled with their lighters and agreed that the baby wasn't mine. I offered to sign the papers, but they pointed out that I couldn't do that while Julie was in the hospital, and so I left the room at an impasse. It felt familiar.

Stormclouds

2012-01-05T07:00:00.000Z

"We all learn something new every day," said Playfair, his words gravid with irony. He half-smiled, showing more teeth than was perhaps necessary. "Now, tell me what we know about this magician."
"Not much, so far," admitted Alf looking down at the table. "I've got Jamie trying to track his parents down, 'cos like you says, everybody has them, but we've not had much luck so far."
"Well, who did he know in Little Haversham?" asked Playfair. "Did he live in Little Haversham, or did he have more sense? Wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, goat he was unnaturally attracted to?"
"Here!" Alf got a little agitated again. "There's no need to be talking like no-one would want to live here! He did live in the village, he's got the big house at the end of Beechwood Drive. Lived there pretty much by himself, didn't have that many visitors. Didn't keep any goats." There was a touch of emphasis on the last sentence that Playfair was oblivious to.
"Have you sent anyone out there to look round the place yet? This Jamie, perhaps?"
"Not yet," said Alf. "He wasn't killed there and he lived alone, so I didn't see that there was much point breaking into his house before we'd found any relatives."
"Pets?" Playfair leaned back on two legs of his chair again. "Visitors? There's always a reason to investigate, even if it's only thinking that you can smell gas."
"That might be how you do things up in the City," said Alf, "but we're a little more civilised down here." Miss Flava had to suppress a snigger at the look of blameless innocence that crossed Playfair's face. "No-one's been round to his house. When we track down his parents, or his next of kin, we'll take it to the next stage."
"Too slow!" Playfair's chair slammed back down to the floor and he leapt from it as though he'd been launched. Alf flinched away from him, and Miss Flava straightened up and looked alert, ready to stop whatever her boss had in mind. "This is a murder investigation, not a run-of-the-mill death! The killer isn't going to be hindered by niceties like this. If he's after something that Stormy owned he's probably already broken into the place, if there's any clues left in there that might tell us who he is then he could be pouring petrol all over the curtains right now and giggling to himself over a box of matches. You're not thinking like a murderer, you're thinking like a police officer!"
"That would be because I am a police officer," said Alf slowly. "When did you decide that the killer was a man, Sir?"
"Probabilities favour it being a man," said Playfair. "And you've not told me that he exclusively associated with women, or was surrounded by nurses and protectors who were all women. In fact, ignoring the indirect reference to his mother, I don't think you've mentioned any women in his life at all."
"So you think it was probably his father what did him in then?"
"Statistically that would be a good place to start," said Playfair. "But you can't find his parents, so unless he killed them first and their bodies are rotting in his house, which you won't search until you've found his parents, we're probably looking at someone else. What did he do? What did he do when he wasn't being Stormy the Spellcaster? Where did he drink? Who did he talk to? Why can't you answer any of these questions?"
"Why won't you just shut up?" said Alf, and in the silence that followed he looked a little sheepish. "Well, perhaps just give me a chance to answer," he said. "We're working on it, Sir, we were going to ask his parents when we found them."
"Right," said Playfair. "If you find them. Ok, enough. Miss Flava, come on. Let's go look at this house, maybe that'll provide me with some answers to my questions."
"Er Sir, I can't condone you breaking and entering–" started Alf, but was cut off by Playfair walking past him.
"Then don't," he said. "But it won't be breaking and entering because it's police business, and I'm on the case."
As he opened the door and walked out Miss Flava stood up and laid a little white business card down in front of Alf.
"The list on the front are the people who are expecting you to complain about him," she said. "The address for all of them is on the back."

The Great CumuloNimbus

2012-01-04T07:00:00.000Z

Playfair's chair clattered back to the floor on all four legs, and he leaned diagonally forward across the table towards the office.
"A magician?" he said, his voice raising slightly. "As in, a stage magician? Someone who does card tricks, or someone who does grand illusions? Grand Guignol, even?"
"Isn't that a type of sausage?" When Playfair refused to answer, or even to remove his gaze from the officer's face, he continued after swallowing hard. "He calls himself the Great CumuloNimbus and he does a lot of illusions and disappearances. He made the town-hall disappear last year, and the year before that he made the Mountgarden's garden bloom in winter. Just for the one night, mind you. He's very good."
"Did he bring the town-hall back again?" It was impossible to tell if Playfair was being sarcastic or not, and the officer decided not to chance it.
"Yes, it came right back, right after the show. Just like it had never been away," he said.
"At least he keeps the place tidy then," said Playfair sitting back at last. "How many of his shows have you seen?"
"Uh, well, I don't know," said the officer. "I mean, he usually does one every Christmas, and there's often a summer one, unless he's travelling of course, but then he'll usually do a Spring one before he goes then... and of course, he's a local boy, so you try and show a bit of support, don't you?"
"Do you?" said Playfair. "You certainly sound like a fan. Are you bothered that he's dead, then?"
"Now look here," said the officer, his voice getting gruff. "Anyone dying round here is a cause of bother. You can come here with all the attitude you want, and think that we have pigs living round the back and no internet connections, but we still do the job, and we do it right." He rose to his feet while he was talking.
"I'm sure Playfair didn't mean–" said Miss Flava trying to step tactfully in before Playfair could speak again, but the officer cut her off.
"I'm sure he did mean it."
"I still mean it," said Playfair. "And I'm glad that you're bothered that he's dead, as it means you'll have looked all the harder into who might have killed him. So what you need now is someone who didn't know the victim, who can stand back with a little bit of objectivism and help sift the wheat from the chaff. Or the pigs from the sheep, or the shit from the sherbert, or whatever else you might sift out here beyond the barricades."
"...Ayn Rand?" asked Miss Flava. The officer sat down, looking a little calmer, although also a little puzzled as people tended to be after one of Playfair's monologues.
"Yes," said Playfair. "Very odd woman. I recommend you study her."
Now it was Miss Flava's turn to get annoyed. "What, so I can be a very odd woman too?"
"No. So that you don't end up like her." Ignoring the look of fury on Miss Flava's face he faced the officer again. "Look,... er... whatever you name is, from the report I've read, and I know that it's incomplete, you have a murdered magician and so far no suspects. That can't possibly be right; if nothing else he must have had parents, and most murders are family affairs. You've done a lot of digging, you've turned up a lot of evidence–"
"Tortoise shells," muttered Miss Flava, still fuming, but Playfair ignored her.
"–and now it's time to find out what that evidence is telling us. I've been sent to help out, and that's what I'm going to do. Now, tell me all about Stormy the Magician."
"Who? And my name's Alf, Sir." The Sir was delivered meaningfully, with a strong intimation that it could be taken away again just as quickly.
"The Great CumuloNimbus," said Playfair not quite patiently. "CumuloNimbuses are stormclouds."
"I never knew that!" said Alf.

Interview room A

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000Z

"Bugger what?" said Playfair, still emptying pockets. He'd found one that appeared to contain just a large amount of lint, which he happily strewed over the counter.
"What?" said the officer behind the counter.
"It sounded like an instruction," said Playfair. "And given that we're out in the blasted wastelands here, I wondered if you were expecting it to be followed."
"What?"
"Playfair, I think he believes that you're you," said Miss Flava, marvelling at the junk in her boss's pockets, and also noting that he'd not produced any other card than an Oyster card, despite producing about five different ones when interviewing the priest earlier. "Can you stop emptying pockets and let's get on?"
"Dead bodies don't get any deader," said Playfair, but it was relatively gentle. He stirred the large pile of junk on the counter and fished the string and sealing wax out of it. "I don't want the rest," he said. "You have a bin, I suppose? Or does it all get fed to the pigs?"
The officer behind the counter went pink, but picked up a plastic waste-bin lined with a translucent white plastic bag and swept everything Playfair had dropped on the counter into it. He put it back down on the floor, then leaned on the counter, his fingers interlinked in front of him.
"This is about that man what they found in the church, isn't it?" he said. "You'd probably better come into the interview room then. Door over there, it's not locked." He pointed, and Miss Flava looked, and nodded. "I'll just have to get Henry out from the back-room to man the counter. We don't like not having an officer visibly on duty." If Playfair noticed the jibe he paid it no attention.
The interview room was rectangular and cold. There was a table with two plastic chairs on one side and a third on the other. A couple of sheets of white A4 copier paper lay scattered on the desk, and a cheap plastic pen was on the floor under the table. Small windows, high-up, let in a begrudging amount of rather grey light and the room smelled of disinfectant.
"Now the murder happened in the church," said Playfair, sitting on the single chair and leaving Miss Flava to choose which of the other two chairs she disliked least. She opted for the blue one, leaving the orange one free. "That will cause them problems, spilled blood can deconsecrate churches if I remember right."
"I think it takes a fair amount of spilled blood," said Miss Flava. "But I don't think he meant that the murder took place inside the church building, just on the church grounds."
"Then he should say so!" Playfair leaned back, balancing the chair on two legs. He wobbled.
"Who should say so?" The officer from behind the desk came in, closing the door behind him. He pressed a switch on the wall next to the door. "Just letting people know that the room's in use," he said. "Probably don't need to lock you in, heh?"
"You should say so," said Playfair. "You said that the murder happened inside the church, while the report I've read says that the body was found in some woods. That would be what I like to call a discrepancy."
"The body was found in the woods," said the officer sitting on the free chair. He seemed uncomfortable sitting on the same side as Miss Flava, and shuffled and scooted his chair round until he was at the end of the table, facing both of them. "But it looked like he'd been murdered several times over, and then dumped in the woods. For him to bleed out like that, we think he must have been murdered quite close by, and the only building nearby is the church."
"You see–" started Miss Flava, but Playfair leapt in and spoke right over her.
"I've not seen the coroner's report yet. What do you mean, he was murdered several times over?"
"Well, strangled, stabbed, beaten and hanged," said the officer, looking apologetically at Miss Flava as he tried to acknowledge that she'd been speaking first. "It seemed a bit excessive if you ask me."
"Perhaps he was well-hated?" Playfair was being a little flippant, but the meaning was clear.
"Not that we've been able to find out. His name was Iain MacLeod, and up until three days ago he was drawing a capacity crowd to the Mountgarden theatre every weeknight. Seems like he was a pretty popular guy."
"He was an actor, then?"
"No. He was a magician."

Little Haversham Police Station

2012-01-02T07:00:00.000Z

Little Haversham Police Station had a car park that was three times larger than it needed to be for the number of cars in it so Miss Flava pulled easily into a space that was one of a bank of six. She turned the engine off, and looked at her boss, who had unbuckled his seat-belt but so far not got out. Since he often managed to get the passenger door open before she'd finished parking, she was wondering what the matter was.
"The barrier should have been down," said Playfair. The barrier to the car-park had been up, allowing anyone to come in and park. Or, as Playfair was now considering, come into and plant bombs underneath police cars.
"I think that's more of a London worry," said Miss Flava. "Out here I don't think they have to worry too much about terrorists. Lost livestock, pensioners, and a lack of traffic wardens seem to be Little Haversham's main concerns this year."
"If you start sloppy you stay sloppy," said Playfair. "And that applies to many areas of life."
Miss Flava got out of the car rather than ask him what he meant by that, and he slowly followed suit. The car-park was black tarmac with painted white lines, and a space near the door had the letters CC painted in front of it. There were six cars already there, not counting her own, and they all lined up neatly as close to the door without infringing on the labelled space as they could get. Four were patrol cars, and the other two were unwashed and looked as though they hadn't been driven in a while. Three sides of the car-park were lined with trees, with the fourth side being the side of the police-station and the short drive they'd come up. Birds sang and whistled in the trees, and there was a rustle and a scamper that might have been squirrels. Miss Flava found herself feeling oddly relaxed.
Playfair strode across the car-park and examined the door in the side of the building.
"Locked," he said, with some satisfaction. "Though I think I can probably get it open if you've got a credit card...?"
"No, Playfair," said Miss Flava. "Let's go round to the front desk and introduce ourselves. You're not here for an inspection, we're here to solve a murder."
Playfair looked a little disappointed, but fell into step alongside Miss Flava as they walked round the building to the front door. His gaze constantly swept the path, the side of the building, and the fence that separated the drive from the road, but didn't find anything else to comment on. The front doors opened with a squeak, and Playfair rang the bell on the counter several times with the flat of his hand. The officer who'd been stood at the front desk had to wait, with his mouth open, until the ringing died away.
"I'm right here, Sir," he said, his voice indicating disapproval. "There was no need to ring the bell, was there?"
Miss Flava cringed inwardly. Telling Playfair off might have worked, but asking him to agree with the telling off was an invitation to an argument.
"I was testing it to see if it worked," said Playfair. "I know what you provincial lot are like, you put a dummy bell on the counter and then all go off down the pub for lunch, and lunch ends slightly after your shift."
"I wasn't at the pub though," said the officer, with what Miss Flava felt was commendable patience.
"And the bell worked, so there's two surprises in two minutes," said Playfair.
"What can I help you with?"
"Detective Inspector Playfair," said Playfair, producing his Oyster card from his pocket and looking at it as though it had deliberately become the wrong card.
"Now him I can't help you with," said the officer. "You'll have to sort that out yourself."
"No," said Miss Flava while Playfair sorted the contents of his pockets onto the counter. 'He is DI Playfair, and I'm Miss Flava." Her warrant card appeared like magic, while Playfair had only managed to find string and, by the looks of things, sealing wax.
"Oh," said the man behind the counter, his face visibly falling. "Bugger."

Janus day

2012-01-01T19:00:00.000Z

Jermander walked towards the Singleton Quad not really paying attention to the things around him. He knew most of the buildings on the way, and they were predominantly lecture halls and administrative buildings, so there wasn't very much activity either inside or outside of them. He automatically detoured away from the Dragonlair, where Gorillamumps's Chancellor lived, but everyone did that. The Chancellor was much-rumoured, much-feared, and never seen. He skirted a small cluster of Mushroom Pups, the young of the Fungi from Yuggoth. They smelled strange to him, a kind of chemical, preservative odour that made him think of embalming fluid gone somehow wrong, and when he was a bat they had a completely different shape in sonar than they did to his eyes. They were otherwise popular though, as they always had the latest versions of the latest gadgets. Sometimes ahead of the shops. Finally he felt the ground vibrating through his feet and knew that the Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu were having one of their late-night chanting sessions. He sat down to think.
Janus day. Janus day was tomorrow, and he'd not even considered what he was going to do for it. He had a vague memory of someone, a teacher probably, telling him that Janus day was also known as New Year's Day, but he couldn't remember which of the many New Years that the humans celebrated it was. He rather hoped it was the one with the colourful paper dragons and fireworks as it was very easy to find prey on that one, but he had a feeling it was one of the duller ones instead. For the undead, and the students at Gorillamumps, Janus day was something else entirely.
On Janus day lots of the portals and doorways between worlds opened. Exactly which ones opened depended on the year, or more precisely, the Earth's location relative to everything else. There were some that always opened: the portals to the Astral Realm were hard to keep closed at the best of times and impossible on Janus Day, and the Elemental and Astrological Houses were just as keen. Some hardly ever opened: the portal to the Minion Realm opened once every thirty years and so the Minion Market only happened that frequently too, but equally the doorway to the Throne of Elder Things only opened once every fifty-thousand years and no-one really wanted to be around when that next happened. The problem was never so much things coming through, as being able to push things back, and fifty-thousand years was a long time to improvise a prison for. They still had another twenty-thousand years to wait before they had a chance to push all the humans back to where they came from, after all.
Normally Jermander liked to celebrate Janus day by hopping up to the fourth dimension and meeting up with his extended family; in the fourth dimension they could all travel just a short distance from anywhere in the world and meet up, making it very convenient. Sometimes he and his cousins would pop over to the Elemental realms and borrow a couple of Elemental Pets to let loose in the houses of enemies and friends as a little Janus day prank, and sometimes everyone would just drink heavily until closing hour, and then they'd try and remember the way home. Someone would always get lost and end up on the wrong continent, and Jermander looked forwards to the letters from home telling him who'd done it this time and how long it had taken them to get back.
This year was his first at Gorillamumps though, and he really wanted to do something that would let the campus know that Jermander was here, that he was someone to keep an eye on, that he was going places. The Blistermas Herpes prank was a good start, but he couldn't stand out in the open and claim that one, he'd have to let people work it out for themselves, and although underground praise was good, it wasn't enough. What could he do for Janus-day that would be remembered for years to come?
Still musing he turned himself into a bat, and felt dizzy for a few moments. Thankfully, this time it wore off, and he fluttered up to the eaves of the dormitory of the Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu and listened in to their conversation.
"...the cobordism of souls necessarily requires an unbarrelled space and a pointed group," said a deep, resonant voice. There was a noise like the tapping of a wooden stick on paper. "In fact, the homological integral over seven fractal dimensions doesn't exist unless the group is pointed."
"Are you really integrating with respect to a Solomonic Seal?" asked another voice, which though just as deep had feminine qualities. "Is that completely justified?"
Hah! thought Jermander. I should totally find a Solomonic Seal and let that loose on the campus!
A moment later he fluttered down from his perch in the eaves and transformed back into himself on the lawn. As usual, his clothes transformed back with him but in piles on the ground, and he had to hurriedly dress himself before anyone looked out of a window and saw him. But that was it, that was what he could do for Janus day. Go the Astrological Houses and 'borrow' Taurus for the day and leave him on campus while he went drinking!

Knowing what to ask

2012-01-01T07:00:00.000Z

"Did you see all those tortoise shells?" said Miss Flava as they drove away. Calamity, sat on the back seat, barked now and then, mud still sticking to her nose.
"Yes," said Playfair. "But Bartle barely noticed them. What did you say he was?"
"A Reverend," said Miss Flava. "You've got the case notes already, you only just read them! You're... in fact, you're sitting on them now!"
"Oh really?" Playfair didn't sound interested, but he did pull the notes out from underneath himself, tearing them only a little in the process. He made a show of going through the pages once again while Miss Flava peered at the road names and traffic signs and tried to work out where she was. For a small village, Little Haversham seemed to have a lot of very short streets.
"Can you believe where that idiot has parked!" she snarled as she braked hard coming round a corner to find a midnight blue, sleek, sporty-looking car several inches out from the kerb and dangerously close to the corner. "See, Playfair, this is what traffic wardens are for! Stopping people doing idiotic things like this!"
"That's not enough to justify their existence," said Playfair flatly. "The Nazis did good deeds now and then as well, you know."
"You're never comparing traffic wardens to the Nazis!" Miss Flava braked again just so she could stare at her boss in wonderment. "What the hell have traffic wardens ever done to you?"
"It says here that Bartle is a Reverend," said Playfair innocently, "but it doesn't tell me what church he's part of. Did no-one think that was important?"
Miss Flava gently eased her foot back on to the accelerator and the car moved forward again. At the cross-junction at the top of the street she finally spotted the road she was looking for: Potsdam Drive, about fifty yards the wrong way down a one-way street. Looking for traffic, and finding that they were the only car on the road, she indicated and drove down the one-way street regardless.
"He's attached to St. Samuels," she said. "That's the church we saw, in whose grounds the body was found. I think it's a C of E church."
"Hmph." Playfair shuffled the papers again. "Just because he's using a C of E church doesn't mean he's Anglican. A lot of those happy-clappy places use churches that have been sold off, and you sometimes have to look pretty closely to find out just what you're walking into. I want him checked out properly, get me some background on him."
"We could just ask him, of course," said Miss Flava. "We're in Little Haversham, I've no idea if they've heard of the internet this far outside of London."
"Fine, write it down as a question for later, then," said Playfair. "By the way, you're going the wrong way on a one-way street."
"Not any more," said Miss Flava, making her turning onto Potsdam Drive. Astonishingly, given how short all the other streets had been, this stretched into the distance. She kept her speed low so that she could see hidden entrances; there were lots of trees and high hedges on the sides of the road.
"Also," said Playfair, and Miss Flava mentally sighed a little. Her boss had clearly found things wrong in the investigation of the case so far, and not only would she hear about it now, she'd have to step in when he started on the luckless souls who'd not met his standards. "Also, it says here that the body was found in the woods next to the church, not on the church grounds."
"The woods actually belong to the church," said Miss Flava. "Though woods is perhaps a bit generous, it's more of a large copse."
"The corpse was found in the copse," said Playfair, gazing off into the distance again. "I wonder if that's just coincidence. You should have turned there, by the way."
Miss Flava restrained a snarl, having just spotted the sign announcing Little Haversham Police Station half-hidden behind a hedge, and too late to turn in. She braked, and started a three-point turn. This was not how she'd hoped to arrive.

Staff surgeon

2011-12-31T19:00:00.000Z

The young mummies were taking up most of the beds in the Gorillamumps infirmary. From what Jermander could gather, eavesdropping on Nurse Hearse's conversation with the staff surgeon, Nurse Hearse had a bad case of corpse-worms and the young mummies had been playing pass the parcel and come a little undone in the process. The way she talked about it made it clear that the woman had sex on the brain and probably shouldn't have been working in a school, but Gorillamumps was unusual in many respects, and the corpse-worms would probably keep her celibate, if not chaste, for a while.
"And what are you here for?" said Nurse Hearse sharply, stalking back into the examination room. She was tall and thin and had incredibly long arms, so long that she could actually touch her ankles without bending. Her face was pinched and red, partly because she washed it every time she walked past a sink and partly because she was partial to the medical ethanol.
"I don't feel well," said Jermander reflexively. It was a lie, he had already accomplished what he'd come there for. While Nurse Hearse had been attempting to seduce the staff surgeon and, from the sounds of things, he'd been beating her off with a chair, Jermander had opened the basic medications cabinet and added a few drops from the Blistermas Herpes vial to everything in there. He wasn't sure what most of it was for, but he was pretty certain it would all have the desired effect.
"Be specific!" Nurse Hearse glared at him as though he'd told her that he had wet himself.
"Well, just after dinner in the hall today I started having these headaches," said Jermander. "So I thought I'd better go and have a lie-down, only then I started getting all itchy as well."
"Dinner in the hall? You're a vampire?" Jermander nodded to each staccato sentence. "You're also an idiot. Dinner today included a side of roasted garlic." Jermander had to stop himself nodding to that and giving the game away. "Go away."
He left, glancing through the small head-height windows in the ward doors at the young mummies. He had no idea if mummies could catch herpes, so it would be interesting finding out.
The infirmary building was one of many erratically laid out buildings that made up the Gorillamumps campus; their erratic layout was something Jermander had learnt quite intimately just a few days earlier when he'd clipped a wing on the Engineering building and then crashed face first into the Modern Persecutions block. He'd had dizzy spells every time he turned into a bat after that, but he didn't want to tell Nurse Hearse about that in case she came to ask why he was flying so fast through the buildings in the first place. Or, he thought now, decided to treat him from the basic medications cabinet.
He walked down the steps at the front of the building, and turned left, intending to go to the Singleton Quad and try turning into a bat again. The Left-aligned Ancients of MuMu had their dormitory there, and eavesdropping on their conversations always made him feel like he'd just heard something deeply significant and yet impossible to fully understand. He was quite surprised, then, when he almost walked into the staff surgeon.
"Watch it," said the staff surgeon, then recognising Jermander, "Wotcha!"
"Uh, hi," said Jermander backing off a little. The staff surgeon, who'd never apparently shared his (or possibly her, maybe its) name with anyone was about three feet tall, covered in long, thin, greasy hairs that seemed to move in breezes that no-one else could feel, and had eight arms, all of which terminated in surgical steel claws. Sometimes an arm had more than one claw at the end of it.
"You were just up in her office, weren't you? Sweet Mephistopheles but that woman's unstoppable. Did she try it on with you?"
Jermander wondered for a moment how desperate he'd have to be before the staff surgeon would look attractive to him, and then he realised what he'd been asked.
"Oh, no!" he said, slightly shocked. "I don't think she likes me very much."
"You must be the only one then," said the staff surgeon, giggling in a way that suggested he/she/it might actually be drowning in their own mucus instead. "Lucky you."
"What are corpse-worms then?" asked Jermander, figuring that he might as well ask someone who knew. When the staff surgeon had finished explaining Jermander was glad that he wasn't capable of vomiting, sorry that he'd asked, and felt that he wouldn't be getting too close to any of the zombies for a while.
"So, what were you in there for then?" asked the staff surgeon. "You don't seem ill."
"Food poisoning," said Jermander. "I ate some garlic at dinner."
"Yeah, right," said the staff surgeon. "And I'm a monkey's uncle."
Jermander considered this until he realised that his silence was telling the staff surgeon exactly what he was thinking. "No, really," he protested.
"Doesn't bother me," said the staff surgeon. "Whatever you're up to, it just means work for me, and I enjoy my job." He snipped his claws like maracas and laughed in his horrible, gurgling, drowning way as Jermander flinched.
"Enjoy Janus-day!" he called as Jermander walked away, trying to look vampire-cool and not really succeeding. Janus-day. How could he have forgotten that it was almost upon them?

Reverend Bartle II

2011-12-31T07:00:00.000Z

"Er, isn't that one of those martial arts?" Reverend Bartle looked rather confused by Playfair's sudden change of tack, and Miss Flava sympathised. She looked over at Calamity who'd by now dug up nearly half of the tomato plants. At a guess, she'd say that a good half-a-morning's work had been reduced to so much scattered soil and half-dead plants. The green, meaty smell of tomato plants drifted towards her, and she wrinkled her nose a little. She'd never much liked tomatoes, preferring to hide them under salad leaves or pull them out of her egg-salad sandwiches and drop them in the bin. From which Calamity would invariably retrieve them, if they were in the office, and then eat them.
"No. That would make it respectable." Inspector Playfair was definite. "It's the art of re-arranging furniture for large sums of money. And I use the word art, rather than science, to indicate in particular that it is funded solely by people who think that the effect something has is more important than the cause responsible for it and who can't see when a painting is, in fact, just the result of the artist having a seizure in front of a canvas while holding paint. Rather than heal the poor bugger who's just chewed through eight tubes of paint they pay ridiculous sums of money for his canvas and hope he doesn't think of getting treatment himself."
"Er. Right," said Bartle. "So Feng Shui is redecorating with furniture is it? Is that something you do at IKEA?"
"I hope not. You're not a follower, or a fan of Feng Shui then?"
"Sorry, Inspector, I'm rather not. I don't do much interior design, my partner looks after all that kind of thing. I'm more of a cook and a gardener."
There was a pause while they both looked at Calamity who had now dug up all of the tomato plants and was frantically digging in the rockery, unearthing rocks, more soil, and the occasional tortoise shell.
"It looks like we might have to buy tomatoes this year," said Bartle with a hint of reproval. Playfair ignored him.
"What's your opinion of the dead then? You're a priest, right, you must have to do the odd funeral. Do you play with the bodies a bit first?"
"What?!" Bartle reddened and his eyes opened wider, he puffed his chest out and looked more than a little ridiculous in his dress. "What are you suggesting, officer?"
"I think he's suggesting that you tampered with the evidence," said Miss Flava, who was turning over the tortoise shells with a foot. They all seemed to be free of dead tortoise, fresh or decomposed, and there was no sign of the shells being broken into.
"What?" Bartle turned to face her now, still red in the face and his voice was increasing in pitch.
"How did you know it was a screwdriver sticking into his neck?" said Playfair, his voice suddenly soft and coercive. "If all you could see want the handle, and the man was hanging, so necessarily higher up than you because he's got to be off the ground, and the ground's all soft with blood, so you wouldn't get too close; if all this is true, how did you know he had a screwdriver in his neck?"
Bartle stared at Miss Flava, then at Playfair, and finally at Calamity, who was now in a hole almost the same size as her and still digging.
"They told me," he said weakly. "The policemen, when they came to ask me about things. They told me there was a screwdriver in the side of his neck. They wanted to see what tools I have, so I showed them. I keep them all in the greenhouse anyway, and screwdrivers aren't really gardening tools, are they? Where is you dog going, Inspector?"
"Down," said Playfair. "Don't worry, she wont' dig so deep that she can't get out again. So, you claim that you know about this screwdriver because someone else told you. Why are you telling me about it like you saw it at the time then?"
"I didn't know this was an interview! You just came over and let your damn dog loose to ruin my garden and started asking weird questions!" Bartle was tripping over his words now and looked extremely agitated; his hands were trembling and he kept smoothing down the front of his dress, unconsciously rubbing mud into it over and over again.
"Calamity! Car!" Playfair's voice was stentorian, and Calamity lifted her head, regarded him for a second, then bounded out of her hole and galloped back to the car. Miss Flava nudged the fifth tortoise shell into line with the others with her foot, and then strolled over to the car as well to open the door and let Calamity back in.
"I'll have more questions for you," said Playfair. "But I'll need to decide what they are first. Enjoy your gardening."
Bartle stared after them in astonishment, watching as Playfair made a stab at getting the driver's seat and was neatly cut-off by a very rapid Miss Flava. He grimaced, but went back round the to the passenger side and got in there while Miss Flava made sure she was in the driver's seat before he'd even opened his door. The dog, the enormous Rottweiler that had completely ruined his gardening, barked a couple of times, and then the engine started up and the car drove away, leaving him with no tomatoes, a huge hole in the rockery, and a ridiculous number of tortoise shells. He was pretty certain that neither he nor the previous priest had ever even owned a tortoise.

Reverend Bartle

2011-12-30T07:00:00.000Z

"Why are you wearing a dress?" It would be unfair to describe Detective Inspector Playfair as snarling as then one would run out of words to describe his increasing levels of aggression too quickly. The priest looked up, a little startled, and smoothed the front of his Jane Asher exclusive down.
"Do you like it?" he said. "It's for the summer play. We're doing Streetcar."
"Never heard of it," said Playfair automatically. Miss Flava, stood next to him, and who thought that the priest seemed far too comfortable in the dress, equally automatically disbelieved Playfair. She'd come to the conclusion that her boss worked very hard to give everyone the impression that he was like a wasp-stung bulldog on a short chain: ferociously aggressive and dangerously short-sighted, while in fact the brain of a classics scholar worked like a well-oiled machine in the background to discover the real facts of any given case. All she had left to prove was the brain of the classics scholar was in fact his own, and she'd be free to admire him and his incredible depths of cynicism.
"Oh? That's a shame, it's a fantastic play. I do confess, I've been having to work on my Deep South accent a little for it though." The priest giggled, and Miss Flava looked away, feeling a little uncomfortable.
"Right, Stanley," said Playfair. "We're here looking for a Reverend Bartle. Derek Bartle. What have you done with him?"
"Oh, hah, that's me, I've done nothing with him! Well, maybe hidden him in a dress. Who are you?"
Playfair produced a bus pass, then his wallet, then a hip flask, and finally his warrant card. "DI Playfair," he said. "This here is the lovely Miss Flava, she's my gorgeous assistant and makes people disappear while I keep the audience entertained."
Miss Flava glared at Playfair and produced her own warrant card on the first try, since she kept it ready in an inside pocket. The priest peered at both cards, and then at their respective owners.
"Yes, well that seems in order," he said. "Perhaps I ought to change then, if this is official business?"
"It is, and don't bother," said Playfair. "You're wearing more than some people I've interviewed in the past, and that's a relief. Oh, Calamity!"
"What's the ma–" started the Reverend Bartle, but his words were lost as Calamity leapt on his back and pushed his face into the gardenias. She leapt up at Playfair a couple of times, pawing the air and landing each time with her paws unerringly on Bartle's head. After the first occasion he stopped trying to lift his head until the weight of the dog was off his back. Miss Flava hurried forward to pull Calamity off, still wondering how the dog managed to do just what Playfair wanted despite that no-one ever saw him training her.
"Thank-you," said Playfair to Miss Flava as she hauled Calamity away from the priest and his now-awry gardenias. "I'm sorry about Calamity," he said to Bartle. "She does depend on the kindness of strangers."
"Urghh." said Bartle wiping compost from his eyes and mouth. "That was... why is she called Calamity?"
"Calamity Jane, my favourite Crimean nurse," said Playfair. "Why do you sign letters as Melpomene?"
"What?" Bartle looked confused.
Playfair stared off into the distance instead of answering, looking at the length of the garden, the scattering gardening tools: tiny forks, trowels, lengths of dowel, string and unpotted plants waiting for embedding into the spring earth. Beyond the garden was a cottage of sorts with heavy stone walls, huge doors and tiny, leaded windows, and behind them was a solid, Saxon church that looked as though it could withstand a siege. The church had a campanile, at the top of which Playfair could see at least three bells, and after that trees obscured the view of what was very probably the graveyard.
"Someone killed a man here," he said at last. "You found the body, and someone sent a letter to the local paper claiming the kill and calling themselves Melpomene."
"I didn't send the letter! I just found the poor soul, hanging from a tree with a screwdriver sticking out of the side of his neck. The ground all around him was soggy with blood! It was dreadful!" The man had whitened a little, but seemed to be otherwise retaining his composure. "Why are you here? We have a police-force of our own, and they've been and talked to me already. And they were much nicer about it too!"
"That's why I'm here," said Playfair. "They didn't get anywhere with their tea and cupcakes approach."
"So you come with your monstrous dog and your veiled threats? I shall write to your superior officers about this!"
Miss Flava silently handed Bartle a business card.
"His immediate superior is the first name on the list," she said after a moment. "Each name after that is one rank higher. The address for all of them is on the back. I can supply you with a form letter to copy from if you'd like, his superiors prefer to be able to identify the complaint quickly these days."
"You... you mean he gets a lot of these complaints? Why's he still a policeman?"
"He gets a lot of results," said Miss Flava. "Actual results, and not just convictions that are overturned as unsound or wrong, months or years later."
"I'm still complaining."
"Then here's the form letter."
Bartle stared at first her, then at Calamity who was now frantically digging up tomato plants, and then at Playfair.
"Do you use bonemeal for your plants?" asked Playfair. Bartle nodded. "That's why she's digging."
"How can I help you then," said Bartle finally, sounding depressed. "You won't go away until I do, will you?"
"How much do you know about Feng Shui?" asked Playfair.

Blistermas

2011-12-29T07:00:00.000Z

"I'm cold," said Nicky, and when Jermander looked at her she was looking a little bit opaque. Being an undine, a magical creature made entirely of water, this suggesting that she was near freezing point. Jermander shrugged.
"It's Blistermas, Nicky, it's bound to be cold. Especially here at Gorillamumps, the campus has psychoactive weather you know. Why don't you put a heater in?" There were very few undines at Gorillamumps, but the clever ones – that is, all the ones that weren't Nicky – carried small electrical heating elements with them in the cold weather. Like the element of an electric kettle they could dip them into their bodies and heat their water up quickly.
"I know the campus weather is psychotic! I experience it nearly every day. What other campus has regular sunshine to the point of inducing a drought?"
Jermander shrugged again, not really interested in correcting Nicky or pointing out that psychoactive weather reacted to the students' unconscious expectations. The regular parching heatwaves that Nicky experienced were a consequence of everyone's dislike for her.
"Why are we out here?"
Jermander actually groaned, and since he was a vampire it was an impressive, deep, resonant groan. "I told you Nicky, three times already. It's Blistermas, and Old Man Vinegar does his rounds tonight. If he finds anyone sleeping who hasn't left him a gift out he gives them Herpes. I want to see how he does it. I want to find out how he manages to get round so many people in just one night."
"Franchise."
"What?"
"It's a franchise, Jer, that's how he does it. My uncles have been running the undine franchise for years now."
"A franchise. So there's lots of Old Men Vinegar then? And... wow, that's why you don't have Herpes, isn't it? I wondered how you'd managed to avoid it all these years."
"I don't understand," said Nicky. "How did I manage to avoid what?"
"It's ok," said Jermander. "I get it now. So who's the local franchisee then, do you think?"
"Can we go in yet? I'm cold!"
"No! I want to find out who the franchisee is. They must have the vials of Herpes all year round, they must have to keep them somewhere safe. This is potentially useful information, Nicky."
"I can get you vials of Herpes from my uncles," she said, sounding sulky. "We don't have to sit up here on this roof in the cold all night."
"It's not the same," said Jermander, though he was wondering if Nicky's uncles might not be a good back-up plan. Do you think it's a student or a teacher?"
"Did you leave a gift out?" asked Nicky. "You could just put paint or something on that. My uncles hate it when undines try and booby-trap their Blistermas gifts."
"GPS tracker," said Jermander. "But this is more fun, trying to catch Old Man Vinegar in the act."
"But it's co-o-o-o-old!"
Jermander was going to reply, but while he was thinking about what to say there was a distant crack and purple lightning licked the underside of the clouds. Then there was a small sonic boom that rattled the tiles, and an ancient Rolls Royce Silver Phantom screamed from a silver portal and roared down to the campus grounds like a dazzling meterorite. It levelled off just above the playing fields, and came to a halt at the door of the dormitory block. There was another sharp crack as air rushed into the space where Jermander had been a second before and a whiff of the charnel house, and Jermander had turned into a bat. He fluttered his wings and launched, accelerating downwards towards the car at a speed that would have ripped the wings off a normal bat.
"Don't leave me!" yelled Nicky, but she was too late, she was alone on the roof.
As Jermander whooshed past the car, not slowing down in case the franchisee saw what he was, he was gratified to find he'd timed things just right and the franchisee was getting out of the car, a sack in one hand that rattled as though it contained many glass vials.
"Myrilla Chinchilla!" he whispered to himself, realising too late that he was travelling too fast amongst the erratically-laid-out buildings of Gorillamumps.

The White Tower

2011-12-28T07:00:00.000Z

Elkie waited until she was sure that no-one was looking, then she knelt by her chest and rested both her hands on its lid. She relaxed her mind, clearing her thoughts, and moments later she could smell the tang of ozone from the sea as though she were hovering over it, and hear the cries of the gulls as though they were lazing on air currents next to her. Her fingers tingled as she gripped something unseen and felt it flex, then she moved her hands just so and wrapped thin strands of air around the chest. They bent and strained, pulling against the knot that she tied, and when she opened her eyes again the chest was floating just above the ground. She waited, feeling dizzy, for the disorientation of being one moment in the air and the next on the ground to subside; the world seemed to spin before her eyes for a few moments like it did when she was horribly drunk. Then it settled down, with just a metallic aftertaste in her throat, and she stood up again.
"Twenty epha to carry your case to your destination," said a light, even voice. She turned to see the speaker, one of the handlers she'd been watching earlier carrying cases ashore. She smiled,
"I'm sorry, it's really very light," she said, and gave it a little kick. It jostled forwards a touch, not quite sliding but not obviously floating either. The handler shrugged, and started to leave.
"Wait! I'm looking for–" she started to say 'Magister' and then thought about what Captain Jerriss had said. "I'm looking for somewhere to stay," she said. "Somewhere... respectable." She'd been thinking about saying that she had money, but quickly realised how dangerous that could be. "Somewhere a lady might be seen in without any ill being thought of her," she added.
"The higher up the hill, the more expensive the room," said the handler gesturing. Elkie looked, and saw that on one side of the harbour Wharfhaven rose upwards, while on the other side it was much flatter and seemed to spread out.
"Would there be any that you could recommend?"
"I don't stay in inns or hotels," said the handler. "But I've taken luggage up to the White Tower a few times, for people posher than you. So maybe you could ask there where you should stay?"
"Right," Elkie felt her cheeks heat as she blushed. "Could I ask for directions...?"
"Follow the road there," he pointed, "and keep going left when you have a choice. The White Tower's about fifteen minutes walking; it's white, and it's got a tower."
"Thank-you," said Elkie, now too embarrassed to ask anything else.
The streets of Wharfhaven were clean and narrow, wide enough for three people to walk side-by-side but not then for anyone to pass them. The houses were densely packed together, usually terraced though often of differing heights, with painted doors and large, airy windows. Most of the windows had window-boxes, though they grew herbs rather than flowers, and the windows all had curtains, often half- or quarter-drawn to preserve some privacy. Apart from the briny sea-smell there were occasionally whiffs of ammonia that got rarer as she walked higher up the hill, earthy scents from gardens, and a soft, cinnamonny scent that seemed to drift in when the breeze dropped. The hill was steep, but not impossible, and Elkie was very glad that she didn't have to carry the weight of the chest as well as her travelling bag.
The White Tower was easy to find, and when she walked up the gravelled drive and through the arched front-door, a young woman with a severe face and pulled-back hair hurried over to her, high-heels clicking angrily on the tiled floor.
"You're late! And you're inappropriately dressed! What are you thinking!"
"I'm sorry?" said Elkie, trying to put her travelling bag down. The severe woman grabbed it and forced it back into her hands.
"You should be sorry! Stop stopping and get moving! They're all waiting for you!"
"Who are?" said Elkie, still trying to put her bag down. "How can I be late? I've only just arrived."
"You were supposed to be here an hour ago! It was made very clear in the contract."
"What contract?"
The severe woman stopped trying to push the bag back into Elkie's hands and peered closely at her face. "You are Melissa, aren't you?"
"No," said Elkie. "I'm not. I'm looking for a room to stay in while I visit the Magister."
"Oh. What? Who? Why are–? What is–?" The severe woman's face lost its hard set as she struggled to understand who Elkie was. "The Magister?"
"Yes," said Elkie. "I'd like a room please. If you have one."
"The Magister's here today," said the woman. "Are you a guest then?"
"Yes," said Elkie, hoping that this would help the woman out and get her room sorted out.
"Oh. Oh! I'm so sorry, I'm so very sorry, but I've – well, we've – been expecting Melissa and she's so late now. Oh. Oh, look leave your bags here, and of course we have a room for you. Just go through, through the double doors over there to the terrace, that's where everyone else is. I'm so sorry."
Elkie set her bags down, and laying a hand gently on the chest unlaced the knot of air that surrounded it. It settled on the tiled floor with a gentle click.
"Those doors?" she said, pointing. The severe woman nodded, and then hurried to the front door to look for the luckless Melissa.
"These doors," said Elkie to herself as she walked towards them.

Perpendicularity

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000Z

The post-box asked me how I was feeling, and commented that I had a slightly-elevated temperature. I thanked it, and walked off feeling a little disconcerted. Then the fire hydrant on the corner, where I paused to wait for the traffic to clear before crossing, called me things I'd rather not write down and assured me that a place in Hell was being reserved for me even now. I asked it, politely, if it meant the Norwegian town, and it cackled with delighted laughter. After I'd crossed the street I dug my mobile phone out of my pocket and called my psychotherapist.
"Dr. Fraud's not available right now," said his receptionist, a pleasant young man with a fear of teeth. My sister had dated him for a few weeks until he admitted that the only way they could have a relationship was if she had all her teeth removed and wore dentures, but not when he was around. She gave it serious consideration before dumping him, so I was reasonably certain he was a nice guy. "He's... well, since it's you, he's screaming in German about squirrels and keeps hitting his desk with a broom. He's got a three o'clock with a near-catatonic, and that always calms him down, so I'd call back after four."
I thanked him and hung up. I wasn't really sure that a session with Dr. Fraud would make me saner, but it would certainly make me feel saner. Even while the urban furniture talked to me and commented on my health and future.
I arrived at the university about twenty minutes early and found the rest of my physics class in the coffee-hall. The architect who'd designed the campus could clearly remember his student days well as there was a coffee-hall, a beer-hall, six lecture-halls and a Mensa rumoured to be capable of seating the entire university, albeit over seven floors, if it needed to. My group were sitting by the windows that looked out onto Anneliese Quad, near coffee-station six where they served specialty coffees and the baristas hand-selected blends and beans. I ordered the latest Kenya single-estate, black, no sugar; and sipping its slightly fruity, earthy liquid, sat down next to John. He grinned at me, and dropped a text-book into my lap.
"Ouch! Watch it, muffmonkey!"
"Yeah, you too Mr. Handcuffs," he said. "Look what chapter we're up to."
I put my coffee down, carefully out of John's reach, and turned to the bookmarked page. 'Perpendicular AIs' I read. "What're they then?"
"Don't you ever do the pre-lecture reading?"
"Not when I've got you to do it for me."
"Hah! I should completely tell you the wrong thing now, so you can look stupid in front of Professor Clerihew. It's all about... chickens! Purple chickens, that they breed in the Large Hadron Collider so that they can have eggs that are poached forty minutes before they're laid. The chickens are too heavy to escape of course, because they have a diet of Higgs Bosons."
"Yeah, very funny. Purple like your sister's rug?"
"Oh the shame!" John's eyes twinkled. "My sister's far too proletarian to look after herself like that. It gets mown once a year at Easter; at any other time I leave a machete by her bedroom door for would-be explorers."
I laughed, despite myself. "So what are perpendicular AIs then?"
"Hah, that's the thing, no-one really knows any more."
"Any more? They knew once then?"
"Sort of. You know that we've located nine dimensions so far?"
"Yes, that was the first week of lectures, pinhead. They're numbered from -1 to 7 and we all pretend that was deliberate and not a cock-up."
"Yeah, well, about twenty-years ago they were doing some experiments with computers to see if they could discharge heat into one of the other dimensions. The idea was that if the heat could all be dissipated into a different dimension then you could improve the efficiency of chips and circuits, although you'd still run into the quantum barrier at some point. So they're building these chips with these odds little fins on them that cross the dimensional barriers, which they can do at microscopic scales but no larger."
"Like now," I said, knowing John hated to be interrupted. He glared at me, I sipped my coffee and pretended to be innocent.
"Yeah. Well, that's kind of because we stopped trying. The computers with these chips with their special fins... they somehow slipped through the dimensions altogether and disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Yeah, I don't quite get it, but Clerihew might explain it in the lecture. I can ask him if he doesn't."
"So what happened to these computers then?"
"Well, at first we thought they were just gone, but then they started connecting up to computers in our dimensions. It was kind of hard to work out what happened, but there's now a branch of cross-dimensional mathematics that gets used to do it. The computers were still working in this other dimension, and they could connect to our dimension. At first it was just computers, but then they started connecting to like, everyday objects. Fridges, and toasters, and dolls. And they'd seem to start talking to people, only no-one believed them at first. And they went a bit odd, which might be because all dimensions are at right-angles to each other, but I don't know how that's supposed to work either."
"A fire hydrant spoke to me on the way here," I said quietly, putting my coffee down. John looked at me hard, trying to work out if I was joking or not.
"Just a fire hydrant?" he said, sounding like he was about to start laughing.
"And a post-box. It said I was running a temperature and asked me how I was."
"Oh crap." John just looked at me. Everyone around us starting packing up and standing up to go to the lecture. "I think we'd better try and catch Clerihew before the lecture then," he said. "It sounds like you witnessed the start of an incursion."

Salamander

2011-12-26T07:00:00.000Z

Ash rains down on Tal Mallan slightly less frequently than water does, and on occasion they mix together and the grey, sticky rains happen. To the north there are volcanoes and heavy geological activity, and though Tal Mallan sits on a peninsula, the sea between here and the mainland is not enough to prevent ash clouds blowing over and depositing their load. The volcanoes were erupting today, and up in the sky, in the distance, the cloudbase had turned an angry orange, reflecting in the heavens the fires of the earth below. Without a doubt it meant that we were in for another rain of ash in the next couple of days.
The guards were out in force in the streets in the first and second zones as well; in their dusty ochre and brown uniforms they blended in well with the walls of the houses. They were walking around alert and bright-eyed, hands resting on the da they carried at all times, and their eyes scanning the streets for disturbances.
A sudden scream, cut off in the middle energised all of them, and they broke into a run, converging towards the place the scream had come from. I was sat on a balcony three stories up, drinking cha and listening to the proprietor of this little café bore another patron with tales of his time as a scrimshaver, so at the sound of the scream I set my cup down on the little ceramic-tiled patio table and went to the balcony to look out. From my vantage, I could see the salamander in the Square of the Third Soldier, and the char-grilled remains of the screamer. I admired the guards then; if it were me I would be running as fast as I could away from the salamander, not towards it armed only with a knife.
The salamander was a kind of lizard, its skin ash grey and reportedly as tough as old leather. Its eyes, and it had six, were spaced equally around its lumpen head and were glittering amber orbs with split pupils. Below its eyes were pits, which few people knew about, which detected temperature and effectively allowed it a kind of thermal imaging, an ability to see without light. Natural philosophers up at the university in the sixth zone hypothesized that in the volcanic caves being able to tell which way is hotter is important, especially when the difference is between intolerable and barely-tolerable. It's mouth was still slightly open, and I could see a grey tongue flickering from side to side as it tasted the air. It scrabbled for a moment on the cobbles, trying to dig a hole with powerful, spatulate feet, and then the first guard arrived.
The salamander turned its head alarmingly fast, and exhaled in the guard's direction. A blast of scorching air hit her full on and her hands flew up in front of her face as she turned away, taking the brunt of it on her back. Her uniform, padded and treated to withstand heat, still began to smoulder, and she collapsed to the cobbles and didn't stand up again. While the salamander was doing that though, more guards had arrived, from several streets now.
The salamander's eyes prevented anyone from sneaking up on it, but now it was swinging its head heavily back and forth, trying to evaluate the danger and decide who to attack first. The guards, now that they could see each other, advanced steadily, keeping pace and closing a human net around the creature. When it finally chose and exhaled again, going for a young man directly in front of it, blocking the most direct escape, he was ready, ducking and turning, finally barely touched by the flame-hot air at all. And as he did so, the rest charged, leaping in, stabbing with their das and ripping through the salamander's hide. The blades, like skinning knives, had a hook at the end for ripping, and as the guards pulled away again strips of skin tore from the salamander like a banana opening. Oily pink flesh glistened momentarily in the sunlight, then was covered over by a green ichor that oozed out and puddled on the cobbles. The salamander howled and thrashed, its tail swinging wildly and crashing into a shop-front destroying benches holding tableware and scattering household goods everywhere. It lowered its head, readying to charge, and the guards, moving almost as one, ran in again, leaping agilely, dodging the ooze even as the salamander shook, spattering it everywhere, and drove their das home once more.
The salamander roared again, hot breath playing over the first, luckless guard once more and its legs drove it forward anyway, but the damage done now was too great and at the fourth step its front legs buckled and it collapsed to the ground. The guards, still wary, approached it from behind and quickly cut through the corded muscles in its back legs, ensuring that if it wasn't dead it wasn't going to get up and start again. Then, and only then, I noted, did they attend to their fallen colleague.
And no-one paid any attention to the salamander's first victim, now a blackened effigy on the cobbles, amazingly untouched by the salamander's death throes or its ichorous blood.
I returned to my seat and sipped my tea.

Wharfhaven

2011-12-25T19:00:00.000Z

Elkie came to Wharfhaven on a passenger boat. The money she'd found in the house when her grandmother had died paid for passage in a stateroom, which sounded far grander than it had turned out to be. The walls were thin and her neighbours were noisy, but she had a proper bed, and a desk at which to write and to look through the trinket-box that she'd found at the back of her grandmother's closet. She'd been thinking about complaining to the Captain when she took a wrong turn and chanced upon the standard accommodation: a large room where families and men staked out small patches of deck to themselves, laid blankets over it, and then sat there looking hunted and hostile in case anyone tried to take any of their space. Children cried, screamed, ran around, and from time to time went to the toilet in the corner. The smell was noisome and the noise was deafening. Elkie had gone back to her stateroom and appreciated it for the first time.
When they landed she waited in the stateroom for the other passengers to disembark first. She knew little of Wharfhaven; it was a coastal town where the fishing was good and the fishermen highly praised in the city. There were cliffs, there were seagulls, and somewhere there was a Magister. She looked out of her porthole, which chanced to be looking inland, and found she could see the cliffs. Above them wheeled seagulls, dancing on the thermals and calling to one another with harsh, guttural cries. 'If only the Magister is as easy to find,' she thought. On the quayside she could see the passengers coming off, milling around in small groups as they got in each other's way. Cases and chests were stacked around them by the handlers, a group of men paid by the passengers or the Captain to unload luggage. They were rugged, tall and heavily muscled, with tousled thick hair that cascaded down their necks and hung down to their waists, tied loosely back with cords. They lifted chests that Elkie was sure she'd never even be able to budge as though they were empty, or made of paper. Now and then one might grunt, or two might lift an end of a particularly large chest between them, but otherwise they worked silently and swiftly.
"Are you paying for the return voyage already then?" Captain Jerriss had opened her door without bothering to knock and was leaning against the doorjamb. His smile was mostly hidden by his thick, brown beard, but his eyes still twinkled as he spoke.
"No," she said, sighing a little as she did. "I have business here."
"I'll be back in six months," said Jerriss. "If your business is done by then you can always come by and purchase passage with me again."
"I might," she said, meeting his eyes and surprising herself by meaning it. "Certainly I'll look for you when my business is done."
Jerriss hauled himself from the doorway, and gestured with a hand. "Would you need a hand with your luggage? Or would you prefer to be carried ashore by the handlers?"
For a moment she entertained the notion of being picked up by broad, strong arms and carried down the gangplank like a china doll, but she pushed it firmly from her mind. "Thank-you, Captain," she said, perhaps just a little stiffly. "Only my luggage needs carrying."
He looked past her and saw her travelling bag and the miserably small chest that all her belongings still only half-filled. "If that's all you have I'll save you the cost," he said. She left the room, and he stepped in to pick up her bags himself and bring them after her.
"Should a Captain be seen to be carrying my bags?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder. Captain Jerriss was carrying them as though they were no weight at all.
"The crew will think I'm sweet on you," he said. "And that won't hurt my reputation at all."
'Will it hurt mine, I wonder,' she thought, but she said nothing, and concentrated on climbing the narrow stairs to the main deck, and then leading the way across the gangplank. There were a couple of whistles, which she ignored, and then she'd stopped slightly to one side of the path and Captain Jerriss placed her bag and chest down beside her.
"You've been here before," she started.
"This is part of my regular trading route, yes," said Jerriss. He didn't sound contemptuous, but she still realised that she'd been gauche.
"Yes," she said, smiling, lowering her eyes. "Do you know of the Magister?"
"Hah, everyone knows of the Magister," said Jerriss. "If you mean, do I know him, then no, I've never had the pleasure of his company. He buys and sells through factors."
"These factors–"
"Will be here this afternoon, but I wouldn't get your hopes up. I don't think any of them would be able to introduce you to the Magister."
"Why not?"
"They do business with him, they don't sit down over a cup of chai and chat about the weather and women," said Jerriss. "Most of them won't have met him either, they'll simply put goods where they're told, and the Magister's own men will collect them and make payment."
"This all seems a little complicated," said Elkie. "Is all business like this?"
"Yes."
There was silence, and then Jerriss saluted her. "I shall be getting back to my ship now. Enjoy your stay in Wharfhaven."
She watched him walk away, heading back to the ship, and then looked down at her bags. She needed somewhere to stay while she looked for the Magister, and she needed somewhere that wasn't filled with the other passengers from the ship.

The Seven Riders

2011-12-25T07:00:00.000Z

The librarian who hated me lifted the Letters of the Eidolon Queen from its bed of crushed velvet with great care, and carried it over to my desk as though he were carrying a sleeping child. He set it down, placing it precisely and squaring the corners. Then he moved some lever or armature set into the back of the desk and the book's far end lifted up to an angle of thirty degrees or so, an ideal pitch for reading. He regarded me for long seconds, his hazel eyes seeming faintly luminous in the shadows of his eye sockets, and then laid a hand very gently on the cover of the book.
"Be very wary with her, Mr. Debraun," he said. "The gentleman on the wall brought her here, and she is... restless still."
With that he left, taking slow, measured steps across the thick golden carpet, opening the door silently and closing it behind him equally quietly. I looked up at the portrait on the wall once more, the reason why this was called the Derleth reading room, and shuddered. The implication of the librarian's words was clear to me.

*
Later than evening, as I sat in the Bar of the Seven Riders, I had two glasses in front of me: one of Psaltrum and one of Deinore. Psaltrum was a fortified wine made two hundred miles south of Crécy and usually brought up via mule train, across inhospitable desert scrublands and broken hills that occasionally hid salt-basins and ghost-mines. Deinore, served in a much smaller glass, was made from pressing the must of the local grapes and fermenting what was left with a botrytis yeast. The yield was small, hence the serving size, and was something of an acquired taste. Both were more expensive that I could normally afford, but I needed my nerves settling.
"Debraun!" Henrix was the first of our crew after me to arrive, and as he did so he spied the glasses in front of me. His eyebrows rose fractionally, and he hove to the bar without saying another word. Only when he'd returned with a glass of port for us both did he sit down and look around him, checking habitually that no-one was listening in.
"You were admitted?"
I nodded. I hadn't spoken since I'd thanked the librarian and left.
"You saw... well, you saw why it's called the Derleth reading room."
I nodded, and couldn't help but shudder a little, no matter that I tried hard to suppress it. Henrix nodded, and I realised he'd been looking for just that reaction.
"What did you think of the egg?" he asked next, and he looked hungry. Finally I had reason to speak again.
"I never saw an egg," I said. "There was very little ornamentation in there."
"Well done," he breathed. "You have been admitted. Damn, but you're doing well."
"What do you mean?" I said. Now that I was speaking again it felt like I'd spent a lifetime in silence. I needed to hear voices around me.
"I... well, I was crying when I came out; took me two days to dry up and talk to normal people again. Constant, he's the one with the obsession with the Librum Nox, he was shaking like an Aspen tree and wouldn't see anyone for a week. You look like you've been on a date with the Lords of Hell, but you're talking, you're drinking... you're doing well."
"I don't feel like I'm doing well," I said. "The book was–"

*
The book was haunted. It was probably the wrong word for it, but there was something about the book that there isn't about ordinary books. When I touched its cover it was warm, and if I left my fingers there I began to feel a pulse. It wasn't mine, I checked, holding two fingers firmly at my wrist and feeling my pulse there completely out of time with the one from the book. I almost stood up then and left. But I only needed a few references to complete my paper and so I told myself that this was a trick of library, a mean-spirited little antic played by the librarians to keep up the reputation of the place. I opened the book.
I would have been happier if it had howled, or if blood had spilled from its pages and flooded across the desk, or even if demons had leapt down from secret hiding places in the walls and stabbed me with pins and tridents. All of those things would have made sense, in a way, they'd all be easier to deal with. Instead. Instead a voice started reading the letters to me, a soft, feminine voice that sounded as though it had been trained to read. There were stress and intonation patterns that suggested the owner of the voice was used to giving orders, to being understood. And the things it was saying... they were just the words on the page.
At first.
When I turned the first page the voice paused, and then said 'Wait. There is text missing.' I froze, my fingers still holding the corner of the page, feeling that dreadful pulse begin anew at my fingertips. 'Curse Aloysius,' said the voice. 'I shall have him skinned when I find him, and his skin shall be used to record the missing text.' Then it started reading words that weren't present on the page, words that fit with everything I'd read previously and added a whole new dimension to what had been recorded. I let the page fall at last and scrambled for the paper and pens in the drawer so that I could write down what was being said.

*
"She spoke to you?" Henrix's voice was awed. "The Eidolon Queen?"
"Someone, someone spoke to me," I said. I gestured to the barman, and held up the glass of port. I really wanted more Psaltrum, but I knew I couldn't afford to keep drinking it. "Someone who knew what was missing from the book."
"Do you believe her?" Henrix gripped the table so hard that his fingers were turning white.
"I think I have to," I said. "She told me who the Seven Riders are."
The barman laid the port down on the table; I noticed he'd doubled the measure for both of us.
"No-one knows who the Seven Riders are," he said. "It's just a name, one of those historical things. Nothing special."
I let him go before I looked at Henrix and toasted him with the new glass of port. "Eight people know who the Seven Riders are," I said. "And I don't know why she told me."

Dragonbride

2011-12-24T19:00:00.000Z

"I won't put it on! I won't wear it! Get away from me!" Smaragd flailed her arms around, slapping maids away from her as she tried to get away from them, and they tried to get her to put her wedding clothes on. She caught one maid a glancing blow to the cheek-bone and she stumbled back, tripping over her own feet and landing in a crumpled heap on the floor. Smaragd gave a cheer of triumph, flinging her arms up and knocking another maid's attempt to get a veil on her head to the ground. Then someone or something, she didn't see what, cannoned into the back of her legs and toppled her as well. She landed by the first fallen maid, and then ten maids all jumped on her at once.
They hauled her off the floor and tied her hands and feet to the four posts at the corners of the bed, and worked hard and steadily, untying only one limb at a time as they pulled clothes on and pushed them into place, never letting her get free or thrash around enough to damage the clothes. As her throat finally grew hoarse from her screaming, swearing and shouting and her volume decreased, the Queen appeared in the doorway of her room.
"Not dead then?" she said. Without waiting for an answer she walked in and sat down on a couch by the window. The couch was essentially a long bench with a few cushions laid on it for comfort, but other than the bed and the wardrobe was the only furniture in the room. "With the noise you've been making I'd assumed that your father had sent to down to Cole to see reason." Cole was the torturer, executioner, and manicurist. No-one had dared asked him why he provided nail-care as an additional service, though many of the maids took advantage of it.
"I hate you!" said Smaragd, trying to spit despite facing the ceiling and only succeeding in covering her own face in slightly-greenish spittle.
"You appear to hate everybody today," said the Queen. "Which makes a pleasant change from loathing us, rejecting us, and ignoring us. We feel privileged."
"You're marrying me to a dragon! I'm supposed to be grateful?"
"I'm not marrying you to anybody," said the Queen. "Your father made a rather curious deal regarding your future when you were just a baby, and before you say anything, that's just traditional for royalty. If it had gone another way you'd be marrying Baron Harald, and he's over seventy."
"At least he's human!"
"That's one way of looking at it," said the Queen. "Though not a very practical one. Harald would definitely want a wedding night."
"The dragon might want one too!"
"Really? Do you honestly believe that dragons want humans for that? Oh well, if that's what you think...."
"Well, what else would the dragon want me for?" Smaragd was almost dressed now and was physically exhausted from the struggle. The maids didn't look much better off.
"Food?" The Queen stared out of the window thoughtfully. "Decoration? Perhaps a princess would go well on a hoard of gold. Barter, maybe? Going to another human domain and offering up the princess in return for something?"
"Those are all horrible!"
"And sex with dragons isn't? My, I can see that all this fight is just a pretence then!"
"Is she ready?" The King walked into the chamber and found his daughter sprawled on the bed in her wedding dress, looking tired and red-eyed. "My, I'm sure the wedding night is still some hours away, darling, mmm, you probably don't have to be, mmm, ready for that quite yet."
"See! See! He thinks I'll be having sex with the dragon!"
"No, dear, he just thinks that all young women think of is sex," said the Queen, wishing that her husband were a little more interested in it. He seemed to prefer telling stories of sex he'd had as a young man to actually trying it out any more.
"The dragon is downstairs," said the King. "Come along now."
Smaragd had to be forced down the stairs and into the courtyard by all ten maids, with the Queen following behind. In the courtyard was an enormous blue dragon with a wing span that was easily as long as the banqueting hall and a tail that was longer still. With her was another, smaller dragon that was turquoise and kept shuffling its feel and curling and uncurling its tail.
"Dragon!" called the King. "I am keeping my side of the bargain! Here is my daughter, for your son to marry!"
The dragon tilted her head slightly to one side and squinted at the King. He stood there feeling nervous, wondering what was coming.
"Son?" The dragon's voice was whispery yet loud, like being caught in an articulate hurricane. "This is my daughter."
"Oh?" The King thought about this for a few moments, and then said, "But the marriage... the... well, the..."
"The sex?" The dragon pulled its lips back from its huge triangular teeth and blew smoke from its nostrils. This was, the Queen realised, dragon laughter. "How would dragons and human have sex?"
"Well, I imagine it's easier if they're both lesbians," said the King, apparently thinking hard about this. "Much easier than any other way I should imagine. Do dragons have particularly hot tongues?"
"Dragon marriage is not like human marriage! It is not some antiquated ritual designed to increase the power of a lazy, unworking caste of mystical layabouts! Dragon marriage has significance, it bonds souls together. It is used to form alliances and forge futures."
"Sounds like human marriage to me," said the Queen quietly, unaware that dragon's have excellent hearing. "Except maybe for the souls bit."
The dragon did its smoke-snorting laugh again. "Perhaps," it said. "However, given the size difference I think we shall forgo the sex part of human marriage and stick to the dragon parts."
"Unlucky, my dear," said the King to Smaragd, who stared at him in utter disbelief.
"You think I'm a lesbian?" she managed, though it was clearly hard for her to speak.
"I wouldn't be surprised if he thought you were a lemon," said the Queen quietly, quite aware of how deaf her husband was. "Still, looks like you've got your wish: your father can still marry you off to someone human now."
"He thought I was a lesbian?"
"I would expect he still thinks you're a lesbian," said the Queen. "Expect to be introduced to lots of eligible princesses from now on."

Spot of tea

2011-12-24T07:00:00.000Z

"A spot of tea, vicar?"
"Where?"
"Just there, on your... trousers." Colin winked.
"Oh my, that won't do! What will the other parishioners think?"
"Well vicar, I do have a washing machine. I mean, the wife has a washing machine."
"What a jolly good idea; I'll just slip them off and if you could pop them in there for a cycle–"
"CUT!"
Miss Snippett stared aghast at her class of seven-year-olds, who were supposed to be performing a scene from A Man for all Seasons, and were apparently about to start undressing. Not that she felt there was anything to get excited about there, but she was aware that the parents who would be attending the Spring Play might get a little excited by it. And not in the applauding frantically and writing to the headmaster to recommend her way, either.
"What is going on? I left you with Act two, scene three to rehearse, and although Thomas More was deeply religious, I don't believe he could have been a vicar. Especially since the play deals with the events that led Henry VIII to found his own church."
"Er, we couldn't understand the words, miss," said Colin, looking angelically unrepentant. Miss Snippet, who'd found his with a different copy of Hustler every time he'd had a tea-break when she was using them as navvies to build a school garden, was not deceived.
"And?"
"So there was this other script that was easier to follow, miss."
"And where did this script come from?"
"There miss." He pointed, and several other children in the class nodded, suggesting that he might be telling the truth. She looked where he was pointing, and frowned. It was Miss Flebbers desk.
Miss Flebbers had joined the staff just after the nativity play, when the headmaster was keen to hire people who clearly weren't related to him, or looked like they were likely to drink copiously and then catch fire in front of the parents. She was broad, tee-total, claimed to be vegan and allegedly went and built houses for homeless people on her weekends. She wore wellies to school which she didn't always remember to change out of, and she had her own teabags in the staffroom that smelled like mildew. Miss Snippet had been instantly suspicious of her, and had spent the first few days spreading the rumour that she didn't build houses for homeless people, but instead built houses out of homeless people, until Miss Davenport told her that she felt that she wasn't really giving the newcomer a chance.
Miss Snippet held her hand out for the script, and George, who was playing the vicar, surrendered it. It was a handwritten manuscript and when Miss Snippet turned the page to see what happened after the vicar took his trousers off she dropped the manuscript in surprise.
"How much of this did you read?" she asked, hurriedly picking the manuscript back up again.
"Just the pages you saw, miss," said Colin. She suspected he was lying, but she wanted to believe the lie. Except that she couldn't resist asking: "And why aren't you playing the vicar, Colin? I thought you liked to have roles with titles?"
His silence, the very faint hint of a flush to his cheeks told her that he was well aware of what the vicar was about to invite in just a couple of pages time, just as the look of bewilderment on George's face suggested he'd been in for a surprise.
"Right," she said. "I don't think this is appropriate for your parents, but a Man for All Seasons is, so we will return to rehearsing that. Colin, you may hand out the correct scripts and we shall start from the top. That is, the start of the scene."
She walked over to Miss Flebbers's desk as she spoke, intending to put the manuscript back. When she opened the desk though, she saw that the manuscript was one of at least eight, and paused for a moment. She flicked to the back of the manuscript she was holding. It certainly looked complete, so perhaps Miss Flebbers wouldn't notice it missing for a few days.
She closed the desk and shoved the manuscript into her handbag. She really ought to know what kind of woman she was dealing with here.
"Right, children," she said. "Action!"

Smaragd

2011-12-23T07:00:00.000Z

"Darling, what's the matter now?" The Queen was trying to sound interested, but actually she was just irritated. Teenage daughters were a lot more trouble that she'd expected, and it wasn't even as if the wretched child were her daughter. Just part of the baggage of marriage, it seemed, like a husband thirty years older than her who preferred reminiscing about sex to actually having any, a duty to appear to the general public far more often than was good for her, and having to re-learn all the etiquette she'd managed to ignore at finishing school.
"I hate my name!" Smaragd, the King's eldest daughter, was having a tantrum. She beat her fists on the bed, and kicked the bedposts making the canopy above sway dramatically. "It's a stupid name! Why did you call me it?"
"Don't ask me," said the Queen, her own frustrations rising to the surface. "Ask your father."
"Mmm, ask me, mmm, what?" The King, attempting to hide from the Court Magister who wanted more solomonic decrees from him, came into his daughter's bedroom. He sat down on the bed, narrowly missing sitting on her head, and then looked down for her.
"What's the mmm-matter, dear? Aren't you well?"
"I hate my name!" yelled Smaragd. "I hate, hate, hate it!"
"She wants to know why she's called Smaragd," said the Queen, sighing just a tiny little bit to herself. "I think it's lovely," she lied. "It means Emerald, you know."
"And we didn't, mmm, have a lot of mmm, choice, either."
Silence greeted this pronouncement, and the King looked a little surprised. "Has it, mmm, really been so long? Oh, mmm, that could be a problem-mmm soon then."
More silence, this time with both women in the room staring at him in what he suspected was not adoration or respect.
"We had a com-mmm-petition to name you, mmm," he said, thinking his way back through his memories. "We were, mmm, fighting a rather depressing war at the time you see. Mmm. Mmhmm. Back then there were Svingotts to the south of us, and they were mmm, aggressive. Every mmm, two or three years mmm, they'd start another mmm fight. And that would escalate, mmm, into a war. It was mmm, exhausting. So I decided, mmm, that we needed to crush them-mmm absolutely. So we had an mmm, competition to name you. Whoever provided me with the best mmm increase in army size mmm won the right to name you."
"I think I remember the Svingotts," said the Queen. "Very... virile men as I recall." She smiled, unnoticed by the other two.
"You let someone else pick my name? I could have been called anything!"
"Well, not really, mmm. There were only three Barons at the mmm time who could raise armies mmm, so you'd have been named by one of mmm, them. And they would all want mmm my favour."
"So you liked Smaragd?" Smaragd couldn't have looked any more aghast or appalled.
"Not really. But like I said, I didn't have mmm-much choice."
"Which Baron won the naming right then?" asked the Queen. "It can't have been Harald, he'd have named her Haradette or something like that."
"That's worse!" Smaragd hurled a cushion at the Queen, who caught it and threw it back.
"Um. None of them," said the King. More silence and stares met that announcement, so he reluctantly continued.
"A dragon turned up and offered its services. It pointed out that it effectively gave mmm-me air-power and mmm, trebled my effective army size. Mmm. It won straight-away."
"You named me after a dragon?" Smaragd's face had gone pale white with shock. "That's so uncool!"
"Umm. Not quite. Umm. We named you the name the dragon wanted, hmmm, wanted to be the name of the person mmm its son married."
"Wuh?" said Smaragd, not believing her ears.
"You betrothed her to a dragon and named her so that the dragon would marry her?" said the Queen, who was a lot quicker on the uptake.
"Umm. Yes," said the King deciding that the Court Magister was far preferable to the screaming that was now issuing from his daughter's mouth.

Arranging a meeting

2011-12-22T07:00:00.000Z

The flame from the lighter was a bright, tungsten white and leaped nearly eight inches into the air. He had held the lighter what I'd considered a ridiculously long way below his cigar, and now I understood why. The flame played across the end, tickling the tightly-rolled leaves, warming them with a lethal embrace, and when he snapped the cap down on the lighter there was a tiny red glow indicating that ignition had been successful.
He put the lighter in a pocket, flicking his wrist casually so as to cause his sleeve to slide back down over his watch. I'd not asked about it, but only because I was an amateur horologist and had recognised it immediately. It had sold at auction four months previously for eighty-five thousand, which people like me considered to be a bargain. Even though I didn't have eighty-five anythings.
"You're looking for advice?" he said, his voice deep and amused-sounding. "Did you think that my only advice might be that you ask someone else?"
"Oh no," I said. "I'm not looking for advice, I'm offering advice."
He eyebrows knit together, his forehead wrinkled. "Why would I want to listen to your advice?" He lifted a wine glass, and I knew that the nearly colourless liquid in there cost more to buy per bottle than my tuxedo had to rent. He sniffed the wine briefly and sipped from it. He was still watching me, he hadn't turned away yet.
"It's about your watch," I said. "You might not want to listen to it, but the best advice is usually something we don't want to hear."
He sipped his wine again, and scratched his left temple. Then the glass was placed down on the table and he leaned forward from his seat a little. I could smell the fragrant tobacco of his cigar as he returned it to his mouth, could hear the crackle of the smouldering leaves as he inhaled. "There is a smoking lounge here called the Abattoir," he said. His hand dipped into an inside pocket and he produced a white rectangle of card. "Find it, show the steward at the door this card, and you'll be allowed in. I'll be along in about twenty minutes."
I took his card and walked away from the table while he turned to a woman who had been oohing and aahing over baby photos with an ugly couple and laid a possessive hand on her shoulder. She turned her head slightly and smiled, and then I lost sight of them as a waiter crossed between us carrying a salver of terrines.
The Abattoir. Not what I'd have called a smoking room, and perhaps a little sinister for the name of a place to be invited to by an important man with more money than Croesus. I looked at the card and it was blank, on both sides. I rubbed it experimentally with my thumb and felt the weave of the paper. It was expensive, and it looked like it kept secrets as well.
I had to ask directions to the Abattoir eventually and the waiter who directed me looked me up and down twice before he asked me to repeat what I was looking for. "I'm a jeweller," I said, "I've been asked by a client to meet them there." He didn't look like he believed me but he pointed me to a lift and told me to press button -2. The lift seemed ordinary enough, but nothing seemed to happen when I pressed button -2. I was wondering if I'd pressed it hard enough and if I should press it again when the doors suddenly closed and the lift descended smoothly. The doors opened again after maybe ten seconds, and I found myself looking at a man in a steward's white jacket who was carrying a very large, serious-looking knife. I recognised it after a moment as a machete. Without a word, I offered the business card and the steward glowered at me. He took it after a few seconds of intimidation, and turned away from me.
When he turned back he looked less ferocious, but no more friendly. He gestured with the machete, and I quickly left the lift and went down a short corridor to a steel door set into a plain white wall. The door opened at a touch, and revealed only a rectangle of darkness beyond it.
"You should turn the lights on first," said a deep voice behind me, and I looked over my shoulder to find the man I was to meet walking towards me. "The Abattoir isn't the kind of smoking room you'd like to be surprised by."

Tabitha

2011-12-21T07:00:00.000Z

The Excess Café was busy; there were five people sitting at tables, each at different tables, pointedly ignoring each other. There were three people queuing at the counter, and the one that Lehar was serving at the moment was unusual. The two behind her in the queue were just plain weird. And then the door opened, and another person came in.
I was sitting in my customary table one row in from the window where I could see the street outside without being dazzled by the glare of the sunshine. It was a beautiful day, wintry cold but clear, deep, blue skies as far overhead as you could see. It made me want to stand outside, tilt my head back, and stare upwards as though I were forever falling into its blueness. I could hear most of the conversation up at the counter as well.
"Can you burn the beans?" said the woman at the front of the queue. She had stringy blonde hair poking out from underneath a knitted cap and was wearing some kind of smock that looked muddy. It smelled worse though, and I was currently hoping that there was just mud on it. "I like the beans to be a bit crispy, if you get me." Lehar nodded, though I knew perfectly well she didn't get the woman.
"Tea or coffee?" she asked, her voice bordering on the insolent.
"Both, please," said the woman. "In the same cup. Milk for the tea, none for the coffee."
I almost turned round in my seat to stare at her then, and it was only by dint of great effort that I held myself in place. I heard Lehar murmur something that was probably only borderline polite, and then the hiss of the hot water urn as she mixed the drinks together.
Across the aisle from me, the man at the table there turned the pages of his newspaper. It was an Arabic language one, but I think only I'd noticed. I knew who he was and why he was here; like me he was waiting for the real customers to leave.
"Is there anything else?" asked Lehar, her voice lilting softly.
"Oh well, I don't really like to ask," said the woman and I couldn't stop myself from thinking So don't!, "but, well, could you run the sausage under the cold tap after you've cooked it? Only I don't like them hot and greasy."
"She's in the wrong place, really, isn't she?" said a soft voice opposite me, and I opened my eyes and started. If the plastic chairs weren't all part of the table to stop people picking them up and throwing them about I'd have shot backwards by a foot. As it was, the whole table jerked with me and a little of my Assam tea spilled on the formica surface.
"Who are you?" I said, looking at the woman who'd come in most recently. She had small, soft features like a child or a manga-character, a spray of freckles across her nose, and a turban wrapped tightly around her head. Her skin was milky white away from the freckles, and her coat's high collar was turned up against the cold of winter.
"Tabitha," she said. "You're the writer, aren't you?"
I openly stared at her now; there were no writing materials on the table in front of me, no dictaphone or its iPhone substitute, not even an interesting National Geographic with bookmarks of pictures that were inspirational or holiday locations that were aspirational.
"Who says?" I asked, my voice a little tight.
Tabitha didn't answer me at first. Instead she started unwrapping her turban, pulling the long fabric away from her head with slow, steady strokes, letting it unwind at its own pace. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Dax had laid down his newspaper and was watching with professional interest. Somewhere behind me I heard a male voice say, "I don't like seeds in my tomato, can you ask the chef to scrape them out please?" As the turban unwound, a soft grey smoke emerged, smelling of the souk, of spices and heat, underlying notes of sweat and acrid tones of humans and animals mixing. The smoke seemed to hang a little way above Tabitha's head, spreading out to form a quiet cloud over the whole table, me included. I didn't need to sneak a glimpse sideways to know that Dax would be tensed now, wound like a steel spring, ready to act.
"I say," she said, her voice sounding as though it came from a long way away. "I've met you before, on a road less-travelled. You're Anna's friend."
"Anna has no friends," I said. She could only be referring to Anna-Mix, and she was so many worlds of trouble that I'd lost count of all the reasons for not spending any time with her.
"Anna doesn't see it that way. I have a warning for you, which is why I've sent you Tabitha. Noura has found ink for her pen, and she will be writing in the book soon."
"And I must stop her?" I couldn't have controlled the sarcasm if I'd wanted to try.
"No. But if no-one stops her then we must at least know what it is that we're accepting."
There was a click, the sound of the hammer of a pistol being cocked. My vision suddenly returned, though I'd had no idea that it had gone; I was no longer in a grey fog listening to a distant, but familiar voice, I was sat in the Excess Café with a woman called Tabitha wearing half a turban sat opposite me.
"I want a name," said Dax. "Now. Or I pull the trigger."
"Names are power," said the voice.
"These bullets are inscribed with the nine-thousand names of God," said Dax. Somehow that was parry and riposte.
"...very well. You may call me Djina, though the writer will remember me better as Violet."
Dax looked at me and I nodded. I definitely did remember Violet.

Ms Angry's Tearoom

2011-12-20T07:00:00.000Z

"It was supposed to be called Angie's Tearoom. After all, she was Angela and she owned the place; she served tea and the occasional cake or toasted crumpet, and she threw people out if they asked for coffee. She'd liked the idea of drifting around a room with little tables and chairs and clumps of people sipping tea from bone china and talking about the consequential things of the world since she was a little girl. Her teddy-bear's teaparties had always involved dressing the teddy-bears up in suits and having them sit very upright at the tables while they discussed whether Britain should remain on the gold-standard or switch over to the Plutonium standard instead. So when she was twenty-six and her best friend committed suicide in a public swimming pool in Loughborough she inherited a surprisingly large sum of money and decided to open her teashop after all.
The sign-writer apparently misheard her and didn't see any reason to question what he'd heard, so her tea-room, with the paint still drying on the walls and the new not yet worn off her tea-cups, became Ms Angry's Tearoom.
And the locals loved it so much she couldn't change it back without offending them all dreadfully.

*
She was staring morosely at the picture of Oswald Moseley that she'd hung on the wall of the little tea-room when three men in business suits came in and sat gracelessly down at a table. One of them, whose face was acne scarred and a little more stubbly than she considered respectable, made a fuss of pulling his chair out, dragging on the thick-pile carpet like it was the hardest thing he'd ever had to do. When he sat down, he bunny-hopped it back up to the table, as close as he could get it, and put both his elbows on the table. Angela's heart sank.
She picked up three menus and approached the table with a measured tread. Behind her, at the till, the waitresses trembled. She offered menus to the other two men first, and then stared at the third man, holding his menu just out of reach. He still tried to take it, and missed.
"This is a tea-room," she said firmly. "It is not a bar, nor a dive, nor a night-club, nor some disreputable sordid hole of a place that you go to in the hopes of spending money on taking people away with you."
"Can I see the menu, love?" said the acne-scarred man pleasantly. His voice had an accent that Angela was sure she recognised but couldn't quite place. Perhaps it was Irish? She lowered the menu so that he could take it at a stretch, which he did, and allowed herself a tight line for a smile.
"Alison will take your order," she said. "There are no Eccles cakes left."
"Bloody good thing too," said one of the other men sotto voce as she left. "Who the hell puts cheese in a sweet cake?"
Angela sat back down at her table, satisfied that she'd made her position clear, and let her thoughts drift away again. She sat like that for three minutes before Alison, the luckless waitress assigned to that table, nudged her gently.
"They've ordered fourteen teas, miss," said Alison, dropping a little curtsey. Angela stopped herself from smiling with pleasure just in time.
"Fourteen teas? Between three of them?"
"Each, miss."
"What?"
"They said they wanted everything on the menu miss, except the Eccles Cakes."
"Which are off," said Angela automatically. "Everything on the menu?"
"Which is fourteen types of tea, miss, two kinds of chocolate cake, and the sardines on crumpets."
"Is it Tuesday?"
"Yes miss."
"Oh. That explains the sardines then. Well, serve it to them, I suppose. Ask them if they'd like the teas brought out one at a time though."
"Thank-you miss."
Angela turned slightly so she could see the three men at the table, and the acne-scarred man caught her eye and waved at her. She blushed, and turned away again. The cheek of it.
But why had they ordered all the teas on the menu?

Memento Mori

2011-12-19T07:00:00.000Z

"I've got an app for that!"
Jermander looked over at Nicky, who was supposed to be doing their Poisons homework. He harboured a slightly guilty hope that she would accidentally absorb some of the poisons that they worked with so that he could hang around with the cooler kids at Gorillamumps without his mum getting upset, but despite her natural klutziness, her trouble with the curvy letters of the alphabet, and her obsession with Harry Plotless films she seemed to be able to avoid poisoning herself.
"Got an app for what?" he asked, hating himself for talking to her when he was supposed to be solving horror-dimensional equations with pan-Lovecraftian coefficients.
"The book-thingy, here, says that this is a Memento Mori, and I've got an app for that already! I don't need to make this poison!" Nicky looked thrilled with herself. She was a naiad, a creature made of water, and when she was happy like this she threw off rainbows in random directions. Jermander, a vampire, was not terribly keen on them as they burned his skin a little if they hit him. He pulled his cloak around himself and regretted, not for the first time, that bats were incapable of directed thought about higher mathematics.
"A Memento Mori is a reminder of the transiency of life," he said, shuddering slightly as memories of his childhood came back to him. "Father was very keen that we understood that when we were growing up, he always said that being creatures of unlife we needed to know what effect we would have on the lesser classes. Well, actually, he always called them scum, but that's a bit de trop these days. So anyway, whenever one of the estate workers died, whether they were shot in the back by some idiot who can't tell the difference between a grouse in the air and a man on the ground, or fell into the combine harvester when Father was playing jokes on people, or just caught a bad chill one winter which turned into galloping pneumonia and drowned them in their sleep, their bodies would be brought up to our house for a three-day vigil. Which meant, really, that we'd have this dead body on the kitchen table for three days."
"How horrible!" said Nicky, her mouth hanging open and dripping slightly. "How did you eat?"
"We just piled the bigger dishes on the body, and tucked the rest around," said Jermander. "Except for the combine harvester guy. We think he got quite a bit eaten actually, so we stuck some chicken carcasses in the coffin with him."
"Oh wow," said Nicky. "I don't think I could eat a Memento Mori. I'd chip my teeth."
"You've got teeth?" Jermander's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline with surprise. "I thought you filtered krill or something?"
"I have teeth for special occasions," said Nicky brightly. "They're shiny! But I'd definitely chip them on this app. It runs on my phone, you know?"
"Let's see?"
Nicky passes her phone, a slightly corroded black smartphone with a scratched glass touchscreen and little colourful stickers on the back. Jermander peered at it, and tapped hestitantly at the screen, eventually finding the right icon and bringing it to life. It purred happily, a bell dinged and donged, and then the screen filled up with information.
"Oh right," he said, reading quickly. "This is just a death-clock, Nicky, not a Memento Mori. It tells you when you can expect to die, based on your online data."
"When are you going to die then?"
"I'm already dead," said Jermander. "I'm a vampire. This thing expects me to have stopped trending on Twitter by the end of February, and to be... oh! Staked through the heart, apparently, by the end of the century. That's a tad brutal!"
"It says I've died three times already," said Nicky in a small voice. "It said that voided the warranty."
"You're not dead though."
"That's what I keep trying to tell it!"
There was an awkward pose, broken finally by Jermander.
"The poison can't be a death-watch though. Where's the text book?" Nicky pushed it over, glad to be away from it.
"Oh right, this potion is just intended to force you to relieve parts of your life again, until you've moved on from it. It doesn't actually kill you, but it looks like it'll hurt a lot."
"What should I do with it then, Jer?"
"Drink it?" suggested Jermander sitting down and sighing as he looked at his paper. The Lovecraftian variables were writhing around and trying to hide.

A cure for cheese

2011-12-18T07:00:00.000Z

Laura slipped into her lab-coat, noting that again it looked like it had been part of a dark's wash. Instead of being pristinely, gleamingly, white like Dominic's, hers was a kind of cheesy yellow shading to orange at the cuffs and collar. She pulled it tight and sighed as one of the press-studs pinged off and vanished into a corner of the vestibule.
"Ah Laura, good of you to join us," said Dr. Watford as she came in with her lab-coat now buttoned askew to keep it properly closed. He was a greying man with several major awards for biology and biochemistry, piercing grey eyes, and a handle-bar moustache that she hated. "Dominic has just finished telling us about his week spent working with naphthalene derivatives and what sounds like a lot of washing of glassware." Dominic hung his head, ashamed. "Your turn, I think, to tell us about your week. As I recall, you are attempting to sequence the genome for your cress?"
"Well," said Laura, wondering if this was how major scientific discoveries were always announced. "I was supposed to be, yes. But then I discovered the cure for cheese."
Dominic sniggered, and across the lab the new grad student, whose name might have been Helena, stopped moving and started listening intently. Laura shrugged, looked directly at Dr. Watford, and said, "It's true. I've discovered the cure for cheese."
"Very good," he said, as though she'd announced she had successfully tied her own shoe-laces. "Where is the cure for cheese now?"
"In my lab," she said. "I can go and get... it..." Her voice trailed off as Dr. Watford noticeably failed to smile.
"That can't be right," he said slowly, his voice deep and sonorous. "None of the quarantine hoods are in use, I noticed when I came through earlier. Surely you've not abandoned lab protocol and put a potentially infectious bacterial agent out unattended?"
"Well, no," said Laura. "It's in the fridge."
"With the cheese perhaps?"
Dominic sniggered again. He'd lifted his head, his earlier shame clearly forgotten and was paying close attention. The new grad student had resumed collecting bits of glassware together.
"Er no. It cured the cheese that was in the fridge, so it's now in a sealed petri dish with biohazard markings all over it."
Dr. Watford grimaced but nodded. "It will do," he said. "However, I can see that we need a quarantine fridge as well. What happened to the cured cheese?"
"It was eaten." Laura's voice was very small and she was staring at her feet now.
"I beg your pardon?"
"It didn't look anything like cheese any more," said Laura, wishing she didn't have to tell this part of the story, "and I wanted to know what had happened to it. So I put it in a sandwich and sold it to some undergraduates. Then I followed them around for three days, checking up on them."
"And what happened to them?"
"They seemed a little more popular than normal, and one of them started using mouthwash," said Laura. "It was very boring, but they both survived, and they both said they liked the sandwich."
"How fortunate," said Dr. Watford, sarcasm almost visibly dripping from his words. "Killing undergraduates, though not strictly against school policy, is likely to cause some problems for you. Is this it then? Do we now have the cure for cheese safely under lock and key?"
"No," said Dominic, staring out the window. "No, we don't."
"Yes we do," said Laura, trying to see where he was looking. "In my fridge."
"No, my dear," said Dr. Watford. Domininc is pointing out that our grad student Helena is currently running across the quad carrying the cure for cheese.

Clementsy

2011-12-17T07:00:00.000Z

The newspaper article was terrible. Janet was so upset by it that she tore the page into even one-inch squares and stirred it into her porridge, and then ate it. Twenty minutes later she went out and bought another copy of the paper so that she could read through the article again and wonder what had ever possessed her to talk to the interviewer in the first place.
The interview had happened in a coffee-shop that dated back to the late seventeen hundreds, and she'd been quite proud of herself for finding it and picking it for the interview. The deep wing-back chairs were easy to sink back into and come across as a mysterious and deep thinker. The ancient tables, though sticky beyond belief, conveyed an atmosphere of intellectualism. The coffee – well, the coffee had been plain dreadful in her opinion, but she'd not wanted to ruin the interview, so she'd drunk it and pretended to like it, while despising the poor taste of the interviewer who apparently did like it.
"Your first review," the interview had said, slurping her coffee, "was perhaps not entirely positive."
"Not positive?" Janet had had to control herself not to scream. "The reviewer was a dyslexic illiterate nitwit whose only talent lay in stringing together insults and epithets from a thesaurus, presumably a big one with pictures and bright colours!"
"Your reviewer," said the interviewer patiently after writing that down, "was none other than Lady Agnes Scaggs, author of fifteen romance novels, twelve criminal fiction novels and three novels that are... perhaps of a somewhat delicate nature. Her review dwelt at length on what she felt were the matricidal and homicidal overtones of your novel. How would you answer her charge that you must have a deep-seated complex and mother-issues?"
"Scaggs? Is she the one who writes about the talking horse that solves crimes?" Janet had been distracted by that initially, but had eventually returned to the question. "I have no mother issues, I have no bloody mother for that matter. The syphilitic whore abandoned me, for which I'm very grateful, at the age of six, leaving me out with the empty milk bottles while she went on a whore-tour of Canada. I'd prefer never to be reminded of her again, but my characters wouldn't be humans without mothers, so I'm forced to confront their relationships with their own mothers. Not all of us write about the animals we've taken as lovers, you know."
The interviewer had been silent for a while as she scribbled to get Janet's words down verbatim. Then she'd sat back in the chair, her face disappearing in the shadows, and said,
"Your second novel was considered by many reviewers to have Clytemnestric themes, which you, slightly surprisingly, referred to as 'no bloody tea, thank-you.' Do you still feel that that was an appropriate response?"
Janet had had to look up Clytemnestra after that review, and while being annoyed for being made to appear stupid by the reference had not forgotten it since and was delighted to be able to answer the question.
"The themes of the unheeded warnings of the future are commonplace in my work," she said. "So yes, I do think they were relevant, but as I said at the time, and I was misquoted, it's no cup of tea to follow those themes."
"Really? They seemed rather facile to me," said the interviewer picking up a copy of Bride of Prejudice from her bag.
"That's the calexis," said Janet smugly, having no idea what facile meant. The interview looked puzzled, so Janet egged her on. "Do you have any more questions?"
"Lady Agnes Scaggs also reviewed your fourth book, Coathanger Abbey, which her family famously claimed brought on her heart-attack and subsequent death. The book was found with a marker just after the now-infamous lesbian root-vegetable orgy between the staff and in-patients of the eponymous abbey."
"Good," said Janet.
"What?"
"Good. I'm glad she's dead. If you tell me where they buried the old bag I'll go over and dig her up and play drums with her femurs and her skull."
"How very Samuel Clements," said the interviewer. Her face was drawn and pinched, and she slipped Bride of Prejudice and her tape recorder into her bag. "I think that's enough questions really." She left her card behind when she left, and Janet only now thought to find it in her own handbag and read it.
Patricia Scaggs.
"Oh bugger," said Janet. The newspaper headline screamed at her as she stared at it: Novelist to desecrate society grave! All of her treacherous words were there, listed, cited, and the audio-recording allegedy available online for readers to hear for themselves. And they'd excerpted the lesbian vegetable orgy scene from her book. It was clearly a defamation of her character, an assassination of heinous proportions. Lady Agnes Scaggs was reaching out from beyond the grave, her wretched skeletal hand grasping Janet's throat and choking her out of this world!
"Dammit," she muttered under her breath and went out back to find the shovel. She was pretty certain that Scaggs was probably buried in the nicer part of the churchyard.

Bounty Hunter II

2011-12-16T07:00:00.000Z

"Tell me about this woman and her children, then," I said a little slowly. I was wondering what was going on here. Even Ma Dodd wouldn't intimidate the Sheriff into setting her boy up like this, no-one held a grudge against Dodd. It's hard to hold a grudge against a guy who can't even reliably tell a man what day of the week it is. "She been seen around these parts then?"
"I dunno," said Dodd, his face falling a little, sadness creeping in at the edges. "I was just trying to find her, and I figured I'd go around and ask a bunch of folks. She's mean, and she's mean to children too. I figured people are bound to notice that."
Maybe, I thought to myself. And maybe people who notice that are careful not to notice themselves noticing that; folks round here know what their own business is and are mindful to keep it that way. Same as me, my business is my own, and I don't rightly like people asking deep questions about it, so I don't go asking any deep questions about anyone else's business. And is that the kind of thing that lets a woman get away with stealing children? I wasn't much sure I liked the kinds of thoughts that Dodd was bringing up.
"I think you gotta be mighty careful asking questions like that," I said. I gestured at the house. "Might be I can get you something to drink, Dodd? Seems like talking's making me thirsty."
"Uh." Dodd looked puzzled.
"Lemonade, maybe? Your Ma lets you drink lemonade doesn't she?"
"Have you got Dandy-lion and Burr-dock?" Dodd drew the words out like they were two words each, clearly liking the sound of them.
"Sure thing," I said. I did too; not for me, but some of the visitors I got had old-fashioned tastes and liked the stuff. I thought it made you wet the bed at nights, but that surely wasn't my problem if it affected Dodd like that. "Sit yourself down while I go fetch."
When I came back outside Dodd was still standing by his car, so I hiked on down the path and handed him a tall glass with ice and a straw in. He sucked the drink greedily, and he looked a little happier again when he took his lips away from the straw.
"Any clue what this woman looks like then?" I still wasn't sure I wanted to know, but I sure as hell wanted to know why Dodd had a Sheriff's badge and was asking questions of decent, god-fearing folk.
"She has children with her, but they're not her own." Dodd sucked his drink a little more and I waited, seeing if he had anything else to say. "She's mean to them." Another slurp. The straw rattled a little in the glass. "She's always cold."
Now that was a surprise. The temperature out here in summer doesn't fall much below 70 and right now it was in the high 80s. "How do you know she's cold, Dodd? She telling folks that?"
"She's always wearing a coat," he said, sounding sly and proud at the same time. "It's a long one, brown, and comes down to her ankles and up to her neck. She's always wearing it. She must be cold to wear a coat all the time."
"That's a mighty fine piece of thinking," I said, and despite the temperature a chill had just run all the way down my spine and was making me want to shiver. I controlled myself, pressing my shoulders out and my chest forward, forcing myself to notice the sun beating down on me. "Maybe she's got no other clothes though, Dodd."
"Hadn't thought of that," he said. He sucked on the straw again, getting the last of the drink up. Then he looked up, his eyes bright and a smile on his face once more. "But then she's only got the coat and she'll be easy to find!"
"That's true," I said, nodding and holding my hand out for the glass back. "You should go and ask people if they've seen the woman in the coat. Tell them it's a brown coat, that'll help."
"Right! Right!" Dodd pushed his glass back into my hand and ran round his car, tripping and catching himself on the hood in his haste. He righted himself and got in, and started her up on the first try. He waved to me as he pulled away, and I waved back with my free hand.
"Holy crap," I muttered to myself as I turned back up the path to wash up the glass and wait some more for my parcel. "Dodd's going looking for Clarissa Kay? That can only end one way."

Gorillamumps

2011-12-15T07:00:00.000Z

It was assault day. At any other school it would have been illegal, but at the Gorillamumps Academy it was mandatory. Even notes from your mother wouldn't be honoured on assault day, and anyone failing to turn up on the day would be best off never turning up again, as the punishments for missing assault day were arguably worse than asssault day itself.
There were some rules though; as Gorillamumps was the premier destination for the offspring of the world's mighty and powerful undead, there were rules about the amount of assault that was allowed, and the degree of the assault. The zombie children could be assaulted as much as you like, but not assalted or in any other way attacked with salt. Fire was also out, not just for them but also the vampire kids, the young mummies, and the Sporelets of the Creeping Mould. It was also banned for the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, but no-one at Gorillamumps would admit to having met any of the Dark Young, so it was still a questionable point as to whether any were currently attending. Skeletons, ghouls, Gelatinous Cubs and flame-efts were all fair target for fire, though if you were daft enough to attack a flame-eft with fire you deserved the consequences of your actions.
Nicky, an undine, stared at the piece of plastic in her hand and wrinkled her face again as she tried to understand the rules of assault day. Little droplets of water splashed from her onto the plastic and trickled off onto the ground.
"Oh give it up, already," groaned Jermander, her vampire best friend. He was dressed, as usual, like a New Romantic, having decided that the eighties was an iconic era and fitted somehow with his parents Victorian ideals. He ran a hand through an impossibly stiff quiff and adjusted his lacy white shirt a little. "It's simple, right? On assault day we all try and kill each other with things we know won't have a big effect. No-one's really supposed to die, but it's good training for after school when we go out into the real world and run the risk of discovery all the time. Like, you're probably fine because you dissolve in a rainstorm, but for me, if I'm caught creating an army of pawns or influencing politics through blood, I might have to disappear for a few decades. And no-one's going to just let me walk out of there, or trickle down a drain into the nearest body of fresh-water."
"But... but it's not like this in the films!" protested Nicky. "In the films the humans all want to go the magic schools and join in!"
"You've got to stop watching that rubbish and start paying attention in lessons," said Jermander. "You've failed every class you've taken so far. We're only friends because our parents are neighbours."
"You're so mean!" Nicky dropped the paper, giving up on trying to read. She'd mastered about half of the alphabet, but the curvy letters all looked much the same to her. The teachers felt she was lazy, the headmaster thought she was probably retarded and regularly told her so, and even her best friend was mandated.
"Look, what's your plan for assault day? Maybe if you work out now what you're going to do you won't end up as a claim on everybody else's list."
"I don't have a plan," said Nicky hopelessly. "What's yours?"
"Tridents," said Jermander looking pleased with himself. "I did a bit of research and I reckon that most years everything's just improvised, which is a bit silly if you ask me. I mean, that gives the edge completely to the Gelatinous Cubs, the Werewolves, and the Dark Young."
"Are there really Dark Young at Gorillamumps?"
"Absolutely definitely. There's too many kids get admitted to the Mental Injuries Clinic each month for there not to be."
"Oh. What's a clinic, Jer?"
Jermander ignored the question and got back to his tridents. "See, a trident can pin the skeletons in place, pin down the mummies without hurting them. Well, much. The werewolves will be fine being stabbed so long as there's no silver or wolfsbane... by the way, did I tell you that I spotted wolfsbane growing the herbarium? I reckon one of the teachers is going a bit rogue again."
"Again?"
"Dear Gods, Nicky! Haven't you noticed? It's like your Harry Plotless films, every year another teacher goes completely bonkers and murders a few students before someone works out what's going on and brings him to justice."
"Is that what happened to Dr. Pumpkinhead?"
"No, definitely not. He just got a bit carried away with his barbecue and decided his own head would taste good." Jermander stared at Nicky, remembering that sarcasm was something she had trouble with. A bubble slowly rose through her face and popped at the top of her head, and he wondered how she ever remembered to breath. "Anyway, Nicky, I've got myself some stashes of tridents set up and I'm going for the record this year. The current record is by Miimelak back when the Frost Giants were allowed in Gorillamumps; he stamped on seventy-nine students and only two of them were disqualified for being actual kills. I reckon I can do eighty with a bit of planning."
"I don't think I can hurt anyone, Jer," said Nicky plaintively. She gurgled a little; instead of crying she just fell apart and splashed on the ground, and the gurgle was a fairly reliable indicator that that was about to happen.
"I thought you'd say that," said Jermander quietly. "Don't worry, I've got an ice trident as well. I figure that if I get you cold enough you'll be stuck in one place too, but you'll be fine when you thaw out."
"What?"
"Oh, just meet me here tomorrow," said Jermander. "Assault day starts at nine, so let's get here for eight-fifty-five, yeah?"
"OK," said Nicky sounding a little more cheerful. "Maybe tomorrow will be fun after all! We're a team!"
"Yeah," said Jermander, smiling with his teeth. "Now, what kind of trident do you think will stop a Dark Young?"

Hip to the max

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000Z

They were the poster couple for a fashion that desperately wished it could be forgotten. She had knitted white wrap-around boots that she'd bought in a little boutique shop in West London for more than her monthly salary. The shop assistant had tsked sadly at her, and asked her which diet she was trying at the time, and she'd sighed just as miserably and talked for an hour about the relative benefits of Cambodian peasant food versus Atkins-assisted cabbage soup and roasted fish bones. They'd compared wrist sizes (she'd won, of course) and she'd left carrying the boots like a prize. She never looked back, and never saw the shop assistant slamming her own head against the glass in the door, trying like a tortured horse to commit suicide in the confines of her stable.
Above the boots she wore burgundy jodhpurs that didn't quite fit around the waist or her bottom, and she held this up to her friends as proof that she was size zero. Her friends, of course, sympathized with her over cocktails at lunch, over canapés in the evening, and now and them over ironic shots in overpriced bars that she thought were edgy and underground. They tittered to themselves as they ordered Old Fashioneds and knocked them back, not seeing the bartender's wince or the looks of pale disgust from people with little enough money to actually want to appreciate a drink. Behind her back though, her friends talked about how over-hard she tried, picking out clothes that didn't fit in an effort to appear thinner. They all agreed that she should just try stripes, though it might make her look like an anaemic prisoner, or that other tragically hip people might try chaining their bikes to her. Which would be terribly ironic and thus raise her hip credibility rather well.
Her coat was fluffy and white and was worn by reality-television stars, bought from the high-end of a ubiquitous high-street chain and so was naturally ironic as she rejected all such trappings and determinedly disavowed any knowledge of those shows, except that other people talked about them. People condemned to eavesdrop on her high-decibel, ear-hurtingly screechy conversations shouted out in uncrowded tube-cars and near-deserted buses marvelled that someone who allegedly knew nothing about the X-Factor could somehow talk about it for twenty-five minutes.
Her t-shirt had been ripped by a girl who'd dated a guy who'd tried bisexuality out with one of Madonna's dancers at her last London show, and so was clearly iconic and only worn on special occasions.
He was sat next to her, wearing black-plastic rimmed spectacles that harkened back to the National Health Service Issue of 1972, only with plain glass in the lenses as he was far too vain to admit to a little short-sightedness. He'd been assured that designers and writers and illustrators wore exactly these kinds of glasses, but hadn't been listening when some wit with actual taste in wine had wandered past with the only good bottle in the kitchen and commented that they wore such things because they couldn't afford anything better. That was the house-party in Camden where they'd met each other, and he was wearing the same pair of skinny jeans again today, because she liked the way his legs looked in them. Other people wondered how legs that thin succeeded in supporting him, especially since he clearly had a paunch better suited to someone fifteen years older and his knees splayed out a little unless he remembered and carefully stood with his feet together.
The paunch was being covered by his baggy white scoop-necked t-shirt that showed his unshaven chest, which to his eternal regret was still as smooth as a hard-boiled egg. He'd experimented briefly with a chest-rug, but the glue holding it in place had come off on his trip to the sauna with an old school-friend, and he'd ended up on his knees feeling around for it under the wooden benches while his friend asked him awkward questions about leprosy. He might have felt better if, after the sauna and in the showers, he hadn't realised that his old school friend had a much bigger penis.
His boots were pleather, but only because he didn't know that there was such a thing and believed that they were genuine leather. His scarf was Gucci, a present from his mother at Christmas, but he lied and told people it was stolen from a tramp lying unconscious in a pool of someone else's vomit in a doorway at New Year.
Together they sat patiently on the tube, waiting for their stop, oblivious to the fact that they'd missed it five minutes ago and were being briskly whisked out to the Zones where people wouldn't control their laughter until they'd walked past, and where blood on the streets was considered to be a fact of everyday life rather than a chilling description found in National Geographic Magazine.

The commission of Feng Shui

2011-12-13T07:00:00.000Z

"I wouldn't try moving that," said Deadneck quietly, her voice barely audible over the clatter of her typewriter keys. Miss Girard stopped pushing Janet's desk and looked over.
"Why not?" she said. "Look, I'm being paid to do a job here and it seems like you're all determined to stop me! Your Chief Constable has hired me to do this, you should be helping me, not saying stupid things about how you think things should be done!" Her voice rose steadily as she spoke, and because it all came out in a torrential flood of words she ran out of breath at the end and found herself gasping and squeaking like a cat toy.
"The desks are bolted to the floor," said Deadneck, not stopping typing. "That's why you can't move it."
Miss Girard gave the desk another futile push, and then knelt down to peer at its legs. Sure enough, they were bolted to the floor by two different bolts on each leg.
"Why?" she said plaintively. "Everywhere else in the police station has been fairly easy. Of course, people complain when you move things but they see the sense in the new system fairly quickly. I've improved the filing system, I've made the hot-desks places it's nice to spend time, I've even made the ladies toilets something less than a horror movie. Why is so hard when I try and deal with Inspector Playfair's side of the office?"
"Probably because we all know what he's like," said Deadneck. "And we know what's likely to happen when he comes back, and because none of us want to take the blame for it."
"What is he, some kind of monster?"
"Oh no," said Deadneck pulling a sheet of paper from the platten and getting a new one ready. "Monsters can be killed."

Miss Girard's response to that disappeared behind the opening of the door to the rest of the police-station again, which heralded the arrival of her handyman, Oliver. He was wearing his usual blue overalls with the paint splashes down one leg, a white t-shirt with a frayed collar, and carrying his metal toolbox. He looked around the room, nodded at Deadneck, and wrinkled his nose.
"Smells like dog in here," he said.
"I don't care," said Miss Girard. "I need these desks unbolting so that they can be moved."
"That don't sound right," said Oliver. "You just pushes a desk, Missus."
"Not these," said Miss Girard, pointing. Oliver followed her finger, but still looked puzzled, so she knelt down to show him the bolts. There was a low discussion down by Deadneck's feet as Oliver wanted to know why the desks were bolted down and Miss Gerard made wild guesses. Eventually they both stood up again.
"It'll take a while," said Oliver. "Someone's sheared the heads off all the bolts." Deadneck just nodded quietly. "And it might get a tad noisy, we'll have to drill the bolts out in a number of places."
"That's fine," said Miss Gerard with the casual arrogance of someone who doesn't have to be there listening to the noise.
"Er," said Deadneck who felt it wasn't fine.
"Right then, let's get started. You might not want to stay in here, miss." Oliver looked at Deadneck, who shuddered and typed a little faster and a little harder.
"It's the energy of this room!" said Miss Girard suddenly. "There's a strong negative energy here, so strong that I can almost feel it! It comes from... she swung around, her eyes tightly closed and her finger outstretched. Oliver stepped back to avoid it. Deadneck never stopped typing, but her eyes were also on Miss Girard, fascinated to see where she'd stop. There was nothing for a few seconds but the squeak of Miss Girard's heels on the floor. Then she stopped, somehow facing Playfair's door. Without saying anything, she swivelled slowly until she was facing Miss Flava's door, and then she shivered.
"Warring factions," she said, her voice thick and slow. "There is a powerful energy here, but it runs into opposition before it can gather real momentum. It is tamed temporarily. We must direct the energy to a better source, we must guide it into productive lines."
She opened her eyes again, and seemed to recover herself a little.
"We must bring in tokens of disillusionment!" she declared enthusiastically. We must re-route the energy around the contestants, so that they are calmer within and withof themselves!" There was a noise from Deadneck's direction that might have been a stifled laugh. "I have just the things in the car!"
"Is she always like that?" asked Deadneck after Miss Girard had left, struggling womanfully with the door.
"Not really," said Oliver. He opened the toolbox and took out a power-drill and started looking for a socket to plug it into. "I think the police station's getting to her a bit."
Deadneck just nodded, wound the sheet of paper out of her typewriter and picked up the next report. She wondered, just for a moment before returning to her job, what Playfair would decide to arrest Miss Girard for when he discovered what she'd done to his office layout.

Bounty Hunter

2011-12-12T07:00:00.000Z

Dodd wasn't quite all there, most folks would agree with that. He was a nice guy, and there wasn't no-one who would say he wasn't, specially not when his mother was down at Martin's bar and drinking heavily again. She had a heavy fist and she kicked a man when she got him down. But he actually was a nice guy, wouldn't hurt animals or insects, and cried for half the day when he found a roadkill squirrel outside Martin's. His mum was inside at the time, and Lady Agnes stuck her head round the door and let it be known at the top of her voice that Dodd was screaming and pounding on the road outside, holding up the traffic. Then she disappeared back to the chauffered car and Dodd's mum looked up from her pint of dark, made a face like one of them gargoyles on the top of the church where the reverend thinks no-one looks no more, and went outside. I wanted to follow her, and I'm sure every man in that place did, but there ain't none of us had the courage. We sat and we waited, and we heard what might have been the slap of a meaty hand meeting flesh, and then we waited some more and finally Ma Dodd came back in, and put the squished squirrel down on the counter and gestured to it.
"Cook it," she said. "Cook it good."
No-one said a word, though we were all wondering who was going to be eating it, and Martin gave the nod to his niece who was tending bar that afternoon as well, so she gets a page of newspaper, wraps the squirrel up all careful like and takes it back to the chef. Twenty-minutes later the squirrel's back out, on a plate now and shaved or somesuch; there's a pickle shoved in each eye socket and some fries and a bit of spiky salad on the side, and Martin sets it down in front of Ma Dodd as careful as you please, and she picks it up and takes it outside.
Hell if we weren't all dying to go and look and see what she did with it. But none of us would move, and so the rest of us were all sitting still, not wanting to be the first, not wanting to be the one out of place when she came back in. She came back in with the plate, though the fries were all missing, and puts it back down on the bar.
"He'll stop crying now," she said. "It's food. He understands about food."

*
A few years later I was a bit further out of town dealing with little jobs and bigger jobs, some of which needed other jobs that kind of wrapped around them and kept them from prying eyes, the kinds of jobs that need doing but need doing quietly, in shadows and becurtained rooms with people who're somehow slightly allergic to light, as they like to tell it. I was sitting out at the front, minding my own business and watching the world go past, waiting for it to deliver a little package to me, when Dodd pulls up in a battered old car, the kind of thing that'll run forever because when they made it it was all iron and steel and chrome and they didn't have anything better or lighter. When he stopped I could see it start to sink into the gravel.
"Merry afternoon," he said gravely, getting out of the car and picking a hat up off the seat next to him. He put it on; it was a hunter's cap, with the ear-flaps and the peak, and it looked a little odd on a guy I was used to seeing in shorts. He was wearing a jacket and trousers that were all taupe, and I was impressed with myself for knowing what that colour was, even if I didn't think it was a colour a man should be wearing.
"Dodd," I said, not too friendly but definitely not hostile. I'm not a hostile kind of guy unless I'm provoked. "You got yourself a nice car?"
"My car," he said, patting the hood and wincing when he left his hand there too long. "My car. It takes me home, to Mummy."
"I bet it does," I said. Dodd wasn't that easy to talk to. "It brought you here too, right? Why did it do that?"
"We're looking for people," said Dodd, trying for serious now. I made myself stop smiling and forced myself to listen. "I've got a job, and I look for people. Have you seen any of them?"
"I don't think I rightly know who you're looking for," I said, thinking that I rightly knew everyone he might be interested in talking to. "There's only me and you here right now, Dodd. I reckon you've found both of us."
"It's my birthday tomorrow," said Dodd, but it was always his birthday tomorrow. "For my present you could just tell me where the people are."
"That sounds like a mighty good present to give you," I said, "but I still don't know who it is you're looking for, Dodd.."
"There's a woman–"
"Hah!" I laughed. "If it's a woman you're after Dodd, you've come out of the wrong side of town. You want Katerina's, but there's a membership fee."
"No, I'm looking for a woman. She steals children."
That gave me a pause for a moment, I don't have anything to do with that kind of illegal. Children are strictly off-limits as far as I'm concerned, but it also meant I didn't know who he was after.
"Children?" I said, now curious.
"She steals children," said Dodd again. "And she takes them home with her, and then she makes them leave her again so she can do it with others."
"She sounds bad," I said. "Shouldn't you let me deal with that problem, Dodd? I can have a word with the Sheriff, see what he wants to do about it all.
"He appointed me!" Dodd sounded very proud now, and produced a badge. "See? I'm a bounty hunter!"
I stared at the little badge, wondering where our Sheriff's sense of humour had come from.

A little more rain

2011-12-11T07:00:00.001Z

Rain scours the streets. The wind drives it on, hurling it against the cobbles so that it bounces back up again. It's coming down hard enough and fast enough that there's a thin film of water on top of the stones and it's a little like paddling when you have to splash your way through it. William is sheltering under a tree, its spreading branches and still-green leaves holding the water at bay near the trunk. Further out though the leaves pour steady trickles of water down that find their way down collars and necks, a quick, cold shock to the passer-by halted by the weather.
There's a roar in the distance, at the end of this street the cobbles yield to tarmac and lorries and trucks race each other to see who can leave the city first. William shivers a little, he's worrying that the rain will become a thunderstorm and then he'll have to leave the shelter of the tree. He fears the lightning more than he fears getting wet, even though he's wearing his only suit and he needs it for tomorrow when yet another client will be visiting the office.
A woman walks by, high-heels clicking on the stones, her head held high despite the rain side-swiping her in the gusts of wind. Her hat is a pill-box, black, with little bits of fashionable netting draped here and there and offers her no protection at all; her blouse is thin and revealing in the rain, and her skirt is short. William forgets for a moment about where he's stood and just gawks, his mouth hanging unconsciously open. If she sees him she doesn't acknowledge him, and in a staccato succession of clicks she's gone again, another soaken-beauty walking the drabs streets of the city, brightening a rainy day with her presence.
William shivers again and decides that waiting here is pointless penance; the sky is a uniform grey and the rain looks set to carry on forever. He will run out, run to the metro station and find a train home. He will hang his suit in the bathroom and hope that it dries before the morning. He will wonder about the woman all the way home, wishing he'd had the courage to step out and join her.

A lift full of rain

2011-12-11T07:00:00.000Z

I staggered into the tube station reeling from the concussions of the raindrops against my head. I've been caught in bad hailstorms before, where you stagger in from them bruised and bleeding, but that's the sky throwing lumps of ice at you: you expect a little collateral damage. This time I was bruised and aching from the sky throwing water at me, and I didn't think it was entirely fair.
I got through the barriers with only the usual trouble. I have one of their little cards named for some kind of seafood; a Kalamari-card or somesuch, but apparently being anywhere on my person is enough for it to corrode. When I pulled it out of my pocket to press it against their cheepy, cheery little reader it had brown, rusty streaks on it, and it's made of plastic. The reader squawked, and when I pull the card off and slapped it down again it cheeped like someone had set it on fire. I tried a third time and this time it wailed a little but the barriers parted and I could get through. I noticed as I did that there was rainwater swirling around my feet and I was paddling my way to the lifts.
I didn't bother waiting for the lift, I get impatient and claustrophobic when people stand near me. I headed round the corner for the stairs, and thanks to a slight incline in the floor, left the water behind. I had to dodge a wheelchair rolling backwards at one point, but I was mostly relieved that the occupant wasn't trying to go down the stairs in it. There are some tight, hairpin bends when you get below street-level.
There are one-hundred and twenty four stairs at the this station, and they break up into six flights of stairs, three landings, one hidden corner, four extra steps in places you're not expecting them, and a long corridor in the middle that makes you think you're almost at the platform when in fact you've still got three flights of stairs to go. I figure the Victorians and Edwardians must have loved spending the day trying to figure out how to find the trains more than they wanted to travel on them. I was the only person on the stairs, so I dripped my way along the corridors and down the flights in a squelchy kind of non-quite silence.
I was four steps from the bottom and in sight of the lift when it reached the floor and opened its doors. No people came out, just a wall of water that sprayed past me down the tunnel to the north-bound platform. It slowed its gush after a minute, but it didn't stop, and I realised that the rain must have managed to flood the station.
It slowed after another minute, and stopped after two more, but the lift looked dead and damp, and I figured that no-one else would be coming down now. I thought about going back up, but my knees hurt at the best of times and climbing the stairs now would make me regret it. I headed off to the south-bound platform, wondering what I'd find.

The Imperial Bridge

2011-12-10T07:00:00.000Z

Tal Mallan, City of Walls. Two rivers run through it, both are wide and tempestuous by the time they reach the city and they force their way through to the sea like bullies in a bar. There are high and wide levees in the richer parts of the city; there are streets that function as flood-plains and houses that are regularly filled with mud and water in the poorer parts. There hasn't yet been a winter where people haven't died, either because the melt-water caused freezing floods or because the icing of the rivers split the barricades set up to hold them back. Their names were Twivix and Lernal, and they were named after fractious twins in a local legend.
I was on the Imperial bridge which crosses the Twivix, having been walking for half the night. I'd been woken by noises; the scraping of chitinous claws against the fabric of reality, the sounds of frail curtains tearing, and the heavy, wet breathing of things that shouldn't have lungs, shouldn't have dragged themselves out from the depths, things that are jealous of the brightness and the warmth of the life they dimly perceive just out of reach. I'd been eating haruspice the evening before, Tal Mallan's most important spice, the one you have to cross the seven walls to find. The one that is policed and regulated so fiercely that almost no-one will attempt to smuggle it out or deal in it. The one that allows a limited glimpse of the future and demands payment by later on showing you the present as it really is.
I shivered, my skin was still clammy and I could taste the aniseedy, cinammony headiness of the haruspice again. It was slowly seeping out of my pores, and I knew that I should be alone, washing regularly, not contaminating the outside world with it, but I couldn't face going back into that house and seeing the things on the other side of the walls; well, the other side if you could count your dimensions correctly. I leaned on the metal railing that edged the Imperial bridge and looked down on the Twivix.
The water was foaming and racing, building up momentum as it approached the shallow falls, a twenty-yard drop that coincided, not at all coincidentally, with the second of the seven walls. You could try and climb the wall, persuade the gatekeepers that you should be allowed passage, or try and find a wall up sixty feet of angry waterfall. Or you could turn back and learn some common sense.
I had walked out from the fifth wall to here and I could get back again; my badge of office would get me through the third and fourth gates, and I could command the guardians of the fifth gate though it was painful and difficult. Which was, of course, why I couldn't venture through the sixth or seventh gates, the guardians would seize me and consume my soul, slowly over the years, luxuriating in my pain and prolonging my death.
The Imperial bridge was a filigree structure of bronze, tantalum and carbon-fibre that glittered in the afternoon sunlight and was like a bridge of white fire in the stronger morning sunlight. Here, just after dawn, the bridge was drinking in the light as the sun rose, and I could feel it getting warm beneath my fingers. I estimated that I had perhaps another hour before it was too hot to stand on, and perhaps an hour and a half before the bridge was lethal to approach. But here, above the Twivix, surrounded by air, surmounting water, embracing arising fire, and with pockets filled with grave-earth, I could direct the haruspice hangover, free myself from the visions of what really was and wander astrally for a time, seeing what was to come.
Of course, as is always the case when I've come prepared, the only vision of the future I could see was me leaving the bridge in half-an-hour's time, walking calmly down the steps on the left-bank and heading for my favourite coffee-house where I would buy a coffee and a buttery, flaky pastry.
I shook suddenly, leaving the vision behind. The water beneath me roared hungrily, and I stared into it, wondering what had shocked me.
Then I realised: my favourite coffee-house had burned down three days earlier during a riot in the second wall district. So what on earth was the vision telling me?

Book of Miracles XII

2011-12-09T07:00:00.000Z

The bacon was tolerable; no-one really understands it like the United Kingdom do and it was closer to crispy pancetta – which I happen to like – than to real bacon. The sausages were more Germanic than anything else, I thought, and the eggs were definitely Spanish, I could taste garlic and chorizo in there. A thorough hodge-podge of a cuisine then, still intended to keep where we were a mystery.
James was unhappy with the bacon but cheered up when he got to the eggs and hash browns; Irene seemed quietly happy with her bacon rolls, but then she put more ketchup on them than anything else. After she asked for a second bottle I figured she was making ketchup sandwiches and the bacon was just there for a little bit of texture. Isabella's omelette was crepe thin but filled with buttered new potatoes, slices of ham, slivers of garlic and something green that I think was leek.
The coffee was excellent though, and I was on my third cup when Isabella looked at me warningly and told me that we had at least an hour's drive to the safe-house still. I paused, the cup half-way to my lips, steam rising from it and making me blink.
"I'll pop to the toilet now then," I said, unwilling to stop drinking the coffee.
When we were all done Isabella paid with a credit card that appeared to be a jet-black plastic slab, no numbers, no name on the front; just a way of transferring funds in unlimited amounts. I was envious. Then we were leaving by the doors and, to my astonishment, walking to a different car than the one we'd arrived by.
"Our actual car has arrived," said Isabella, leading the way. "It has all our luggage from the plane."
"We had a little extra luggage in our boot," I said, trying to be discreet.
"Don't worry about him," said Isabella. "I mentioned it back in the café. He'll get a breakfast, on me of course, and reassurance that he just slipped on some oil in the car-park and banged his head."
"Efficient," said James sounding pleased. He opened the rear door of the long black car with, I noted with a little dismay, tinted windows. I got in, and discovered that the car was long because the back contained a little horseshoe of seats, enough for six people to sit in comfort, eight to sit if they knew each other well, and anywhere up to twenty students to squeeze in.
The car moved off as soon as the back door was closed, and not only could I not see out of the windows, but the window between the driver and the passengers was up and there were no visible controls for it. Irene sat forward and slid a small table out from one of the unoccupied seats. "Scrabble?" she said brightly.
We drove for probably an hour and a half, but my guess was based on us playing three games. Irene and Isabella were tough opponents, but James was out of his league. When I set down BOLUS, making six words and a little over fifty points in the first game his jaw dropped, and when Irene followed that up with SPICY making three words but sixty-three points I thought he was going to stop playing. His final scores were usually a fifth of what myself, Irene and Isabella obtained, and a couple of times he clearly wanted to challenge a word he'd never seen before. When Irene finally played EUOUAE he actually did lay his rack down and announce he wasn't playing any more.
"Well, we're almost there anyway," said Isabella, her eyes not leaving the board. "We should really put this away."
Almost as she finished speaking the car slowed and I heard the crunch of tyres on gravel.

Pouffe

2011-12-08T07:00:00.000Z

The door to Playfair's office opened slowly as Constable Wright leaned heavily on it, needing his whole weight to push it open. The limiter on the top of the door, the triangular armature that on normal doors slowed down the closing to prevent them from slamming, was configured to slow down the opening of the door because Inspector Playfair tended to race through the office and slam anything (and anyone) in his way until it got out of his way. When the door was this hard to open he had to go through it at what other people considered a normal rate.
Miss Girard watched, a little puzzled, but understanding now why she'd thought this door was locked when she'd been exploring the police station the previous week. Beyond the door was a medium-sized room with three desks and two more doors. Deadneck and Janet were sitting at desks, both typing and the third desk had a little nameplate for someone called 'Calamity' and a large bowl of water. Neither of the other doors were open; one was labelled 'Playfair' and the other 'Flava'. Both Deadneck and Janet were staring at her wide-eyed and pale. Janet lifted a pale hand to her lips and looked as though she might throw up.
"Miss Girard," said Constable Wright waving a hand in her direction. "This is Janet," he pointed at the ill-looking woman, "and this is Deadneck. They're Inspector Playfair's secretaries; they look after any paperwork that survives him, handle his expenses, phone-calls, and try to intercept people like you before they can get to him. His office is through there," and he pointed at the door labelled 'Playfair.'
"Deadneck?" said Miss Girard as politely as astonishment would allow.
"Yes," said Constable Wright, and Deadneck raised a hand a little way, almost shyly, to indicate that she was the person with that name. Janet burped, her mouth still hidden behind her hand, her eyes still wide with dread.
"I'm here to–" said Miss Girard and stopped abruptly as Janet turned a deep green colour.
"Commit Feng Shui!" she gasped, and ran for the door, pulling it open with an herculean effort.
"Is she alright?" asked Miss Girard peering after her through the rapidly closing doorway.
"Probably," said Constable Wright, who hadn't a clue. "Might be bird flu."
"Bird flu?"
"Miss Flava says the secretaries are like canaries. Dunno what she means myself."
"Twit twit, tweet," said Deadneck without looking up from her typewriter. Miss Girard suddenly realised that there was no computer equipment in the office; the most modern looking thing was an electric fan.
"The layout's all wrong," she said, looking around, letting her professional expertise come to the fore. "Look, it's obvious that so much of the energy in this room will be obstructed with the desks like this, they should be better spaced out and back against the walls so that people can look into the room from where they're sat. That plant should be over in this corner, nearer to the light so that it can lend it growth, and life-giving green as the light comes in. We need curtains, not blinds, and a token to shield the room from the eye of the Dragon of Disturbance."
"Calamity?" asked Constable Wright, screwing his face up as he tried to follow what she was saying.
"Isn't Calamity another secretary? She has a desk here."
"Calamity's a dog, miss," said Constable Wright smiling now that he knew the answers. "A Rottweiler."
"Dogs don't need desks!"
"Are you going to be the one to tell her, then?"
Miss Girard fell silent as she considered how one went about telling a Rottweiler called Calamity that they weren't allowed a desk any more and decided that it was outside the realm of her experience.
"I'll leave you to get on with it, then, Miss," said Constable Wright. "Deadneck here'll keep an eye on you. Don't get too... floral, though."

Soft furnishings

2011-12-07T07:00:00.000Z

Miss Girard, the Feng Shui consultant, had turned up wearing a hat that Constable Wright had last seen in a film about the nineteen-twenties. It had to be nearly three feet across, most of which was a floppy brim, and the whole thing was cerise. Somewhere underneath it was a short, slim woman with the personality of a razor-blade. He was rather unsure if he should be arresting the hat for attempting to eat the woman, or arresting the woman for wearing a hat likely to cause a breach of the peace. He was also thinking wistfully of his plate of steak-and-kidney pie that was cooling in the break room behind him while he tried to deal with this woman at the front desk.
"Would you mind removing your hat, ma'am?" he said. "I think it's rather hindering matters here."
"How can my hat be hindering anything?" she snapped back, her voice high and waspish. "It's a hat."
"It's an obstruction," said Constable Wright slowly, "in particular, it is obstructing me from seeing who I am talking to."
"You don't need to see me!"
"Right ma'am, you see, I definitely do. You are asking for permission to come into a police statio–"
"I'm telling you that I have an appointment! You asked me to come here!"
"I can tell you right now that I didn't," said Constable Wright with heartfelt emphasis. "And you can't have an appointment with Inspector Playfair, and you're refusing to let me see who you are. You can leave now, or I can arrest you for suspicious behaviour."
"Susp–! Beha–!" The woman jerked with each cut-off exclamation, quivering like a mushroom about to release its spores. "Who are you? Who the hell are you? I'm here to see Inspector Playfair, and I want to see him now! How is that suspicious behaviour?" She was screaming as she reached her last sentence, and to Inspector Wright's gratitude the noise had summoned a senior officer to the front office.
"Asking to see Inspector Playfair is very suspicious behaviour," said DCI Alan Conner, coming out of an interview room where he'd been applying nicotine patches. "No-one who knows him, or knows of him would ask to see him, and people who don't know him wouldn't know to ask for him. So you're in trouble already. Take that stupid hat off and let's find out what your grudge is."
"This is a Zandra Rhodes!" Miss Girard's voice was getting very squeaky as rage pushed its pitch higher and higher, and listening to her now was like listening to fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. Both men shivered.
"It's a hat, and you have to take it off." DCI Conner cracked his knuckles and ignored the look of awe that he got from Constable Wright. "Or we can take it off you."
The hat was slowly removed. Miss Girard was actually too short to be able to reach the brim while wearing it, so she had to push it off her head, let it tilt forward, and then catch the rear rim before it hit the ground. She could only just hold it off the ground. Without the hat she looked business like but starved. Her black hair was tangled up with combs and other detritus artfully poked into it, and her make-up had been applied with more enthusiasm than skill.
"Bloody hell! You look just like–"
"Naomi Campbell, I know," said Miss Girard.
DCI Conner, who had been going to say "Amy Winehouse" with much more accuracy decided not to continue.
"Well, why do you want to see Inspector Playfair then?"
"I need to look round his office and talk to him, get a feel for who he is. I need to see how he approaches his space and interacts with it. You can't just go putting any old soft furnishings into a room, you know."
"Crap." DCI Conner looked at Constable Wright, who still looked very puzzled.
"This is the Fungus Shoe woman," he said, gesturing vaguely at Miss Girard, who despite not wearing it was still doing a very good job of hiding behind the hat. "She's redoing the office for some reason." Constable Wright sudden looked enlightened, and his mouth opened in an expression of comprehension. "She's not allowed anywhere near Inspector Playfair."
"What?" said Miss Girard at the same moment as Constable Wright said "Right!" DCI Conner pretended he hadn't heard her.
"She can be escorted round his office, but not left alone in there. She can talk to his secretaries, but someone has to be there at all times with her. And she is completely in charge of soft furnishings, except where common sense says otherwise."
"Right," said Constable Wright. "I shall escort her after lunch."
"Steak-and-kidney?" said DCI Conner, sniffing. "Good choice. Miss, please take a seat and someone will be with you shortly."
"The Shoe Fungus only affects the kawagina plant, you know," said Miss Girard putting her hat back on and sitting down. The view from the counter was 'talkative beach umbrella.' "What I do is called Feng Shui. And I do need to meet Inspector Playfair."
"We call that a death-wish," said Constable Wright cheerfully.

Rainy day

2011-12-06T07:00:00.000Z

It was missling; that fine rain you get before it turns into a drizzle when the water's really just hanging in the air and making you wet by making you walk through it. The taxis were on strike, the drivers holding out for the right to smoke inside their cars. On days like this, when the world soaked through your raincoat and ruined your shirt before you'd reached the end of your garden path, you could understand their sorrows. They were all huddled together under the porch of the convenience store, sharing roll-ups and stories about who they'd had in the back of their cab and what they'd do when Taxicab confessions came and asked them to be the star. Their placards were propped up in a corner, the poster-paint they'd used to make them starting to run and render the text illegible. The taxis were all queued up out front, blocking the bus-stop, all dark and empty and accepting no passengers.
They spat on me as I walked past. I considered spitting back, but my mouth was as dry as a nun's knickers, and I was already too wet to notice a little more. When the bus roared past, unable to stop and making good time as it aquaplaned its way down the road, it sprayed me with a sheet of dirty water thrown up from the surface of the road and I felt a little colder.
I walked down the street with a policeman's gait; slow and steady, saving energy for when I'd really need it. I'd spent four weeks wandering around behind coppers on the beat learning that walk and being stopped repeatedly by them; apparently it's suspicious to want police protection so badly that you're willing to hang around with police officers. I knew when I'd cracked it because they started ignoring me, assuming I was one of them but in plain-clothes, undercover. I'd never be one of them; they wouldn't let me on the force or even into the Specials. Even rats have standards in this town.
I passed the bus, tipped over on its side and its windows all smashed, a tyre exploded and scattered in rubber fragments across the road. Dazed people were sitting on the side of it, having just crawled from the shell, pulling themselves from under fatter, more concussed people. The driver was already sheltering in a doorway, lighting up a small cigar, a cigarillo as my Honduran father would have said. My French father would just have sneered that such a thing would be considered worth smoking, and my Ecuadorean father would have tried to convince the driver to share. My mother was a generous woman and I'd had many fathers, sometimes even for long enough to learn their names and well as their nationalities.
Car horns honked like lost seagulls, trying hopelessly to get past the bus. There was half a lane left, and the oncoming traffic wasn't surrendering their advantage. The roundabout at the top of the road was just visible from here and the queue of traffic coming towards the stricken bus was just starting to reach it. When the roundabout seized up all hell would break loose; it controlled access to too many places on both sides of the river. I allowed myself a difficult smile, feeling the scabs on my chin break open and start weeping; the underground system had an entrance up at the roundabout and maybe this was the way things were supposed to go. I tramped onwards, hearing my shoes get wetter and wetter, squishing and splishing through puddles that only appeared when you stepped on the irregularly-laid paving slabs.
I'd just reached the underground station when the thunder rolled and the clouds broke and the rain changed from being invisibly present but inescapable into a solid wall of water that hit me like a hod-full of bricks.

Kawagina

2011-12-05T07:00:00.000Z

The kawagina flowers bloom in a couple hours after sunrise, but only if it has rained overnight. They are many shades of blue, shading from delicate cyan near the the edges of the petals to a deep indigo at the core. The sepals are mostly lavender, and the stamen are a rich, bloody red. Though they are beautiful to look at, and produce a heavy, cloying perfume that is unmistakeable, they are highly prized as mordants.
Nicolai pushes through the saplings that protect the kawagina grove, bending the young trees aside and lifting his legs high to steps past their silver trunks. Each trunk is thinner than his arm, but they are whippy and pliant; if he loses his grip the tree will spring back with force and strike him leaving a red welt behind if he lucky, and drawing blood if he is not. His father, who sits all day in the vat room, smelling the changes as the dyes cook to completion, will laugh at him if he returns with welts and weals, and that will give his younger brother, Domal, license to laugh as well. Nicolai tenses very slightly when he thinks of that; Domal has many more freedoms at that age than Nicolai had, and they are both very aware of it.
The saplings are past at last, and he pauses on the edge of the grove. Ahead he can see the plants already, long blue spikes sticking out at all angles from a glossy-leaved plant. The leaves are such a dark green that they appear black in the shadows, save for the glossy glints that seem to slide across them like sunlight on rippling water. They are tightly packed; each thin branch puts out enough leaves to completely screen the branch from sight. When Nicolai first saw them he thought that the plants produced cylinders of dark green leaves out of which lanced the blue spike of the flower.
Insects buzz faintly, but it is still early and the sunlight has not warmed to the air enough for many to be awake. The first hints of musky perfume are just being carried on the breeze now; the kawagina plant howls mournfully in high winds as the air is funnelled down the cylinders of leaves. Some gardeners, Nicolai has heard from other children at school, plant kawagina plants to catch the wind, and then prune the leaves back so that sad, haunting harmonies arise from the corners of the garden where they're planted. It sounds awe-inspiring, and Nicolai would love to try it here in the grove, but his father would beat him to death if he thought that the plants were at risk.
He starts to step forward, lifting his leg high, never intending to let it fall, so when the Ninja appears in front of him, silent and dark, a knife with a blade the length of his forearm held in front of him, his other hand holding a spiked metal sphere that can explode on impact, pushing its vicious barbed spikes through skin, flesh and bone, he does not waver off balance or fall over. Instead he lowers his leg, and kneels down on one knee only. He lifts his head, and meets the Ninja's eyes steadily, holding his gaze.
The Ninja is motionless, even his eyes don't move, blink or even flicker. They match Nicolai's gaze as they do every time he harvests the flowers, and he knows that when he blinks the Ninja will leave and it will be as though he was never there. Then, and only then, will he be able to take the flowers as they open, harvest them for the vats.
He blinks.
The Ninja is still there in front of him, still looking at him. The hand holding the metal sphere has been put away though, hidden now somehow behind the Ninja. Nicolai realises for the first time that the tanto's blade is discoloured, and so he looks more carefully. There is blood on the blade.
He lifts a hand, slowly and carefully, making no sudden movements to his own throat, and checks. Is it possible for a knife to be sharp enough to cut a man's throat without him knowing?
His hand is dry, and he lowers his hand again. The Ninja's head inclines fractionally, perhaps a recognition that Nicolai understands the very real danger, and then the Ninja steps aside, turning his shoulder towards Nicolai and revealing what is behind him.
Domal's head is five feet away from his feet, but in the wrong direction. The head sits where it has fallen, on a couple of carefully arranged water-smoothed river stones, the eyes rolled back in the head so only the slightly-yellowed whites show. The mouth is closed, though the tongue protudes through the lips, blackened and swelling. Domal's body has fallen the other way and has crushed a small shrub. Nicolai steps forwards, and lifts it. Domal seems much heavier now that he's dead, even without his head. The crushed shrub is a tea-plant, and Nicolai sighs with relief that it is not a new kawagina plant.
The Ninja has gone now, at least gone from where Nicolai can see him, so he turns back to the flowers; four are now in full bloom, and begins the harvest. Domal can wait.

Enjambment

2011-12-04T07:00:00.000Z

Sylvia's sister was always beseeching her to keep her legs together. Like in nursery school when they sat beside each other on the little plastic chairs that were horribly uncomfortable and hard to stay on without slipping out. Sylvia would plant her feet firmly on the floor, one either side of the chair, and by barely sitting at all, but almost standing, could be bolt upright whenever Miss Snippet walked past. Fergie, her sister, however would poke Sylvia and tell her to keep her legs together. This despite that Miss Snippet was forever dragging Fergie into the naughty corner for not sitting upright and properly on her chair. When they went home, Fergie would sob to their mother, telling her that Sylvia hadn't been ladylike, and Sylvia would find herself on the naughty step for the evening.
It was eight years before Sylvia discovered that naughty was a word in its own right, and just part of a compound -step or -corner.
In senior school Fergie's insistence that Sylvia keep her legs together grew ever more histrionic as Sylvia became interested in boys and boys became interested in Sylvia. Not a day would go by without Fergie nagging Sylvia for sitting splay-legged on the bus, for sitting unlike a lady in class assembly, or for acting like a shallot in drama class. Fergie hinted that she was an appropriate rôle model for Sylvia, that she was an ideal of decorum.
Sylvia looked shallot up in the dictionary and puzzled over it for a while until they read Chaucer in English and she realised what Fergie had meant to call her.
"Keep your legs together!" hissed Fergie from the seat behind Sylvia's on the coach-trip to go Skiing in the Val d'Isere. Sylvia put her headphones on and tried to ignore her sister.
"Keep your legs together!" read the note that Fergie slipped into Sylvia's pocket while Sylvia was chatting to Gareth in the bar at the ski lodge, both pretending to be over eighteen. Sylvia found it only after she was dressing again, and since she was leaving Gareth's room to go back to her own she decided to stop by Fergie's on the way and tell her what she thought of her notes. When she quietly, and unnoticed, walked in on Fergie and Adele she backed out again, leaving Fergie's note in her coat pocket for her to puzzle over and worry about. 'Keep your legs together, indeed!' she thought.
"Keep your legs together," said Mr. Graham, the gynacologist, and Sylvia lifted her head and stared at him.
"What?" she said, nonplussed.
"Er, well," said Mr. Graham taking his half-moon glasses off and cleaning them studiously. "It's a message from your sister."
"Fergie died," said Sylvia. "In your offices, of some peculiar bacterial infection. Two months ago."
"Syphilis," said Mr. Graham polishing harder. "In that chair, in fact, but don't worry, I've had it wiped down since."
"She's still dead," said Sylvia, shuddering.
"Ye-e-es," said Mr. Graham.
"What?"
"It's her will," he said. "I have to tell you to keep your legs together every visit."
"That's going to make these examinations difficult then," said Sylvia. "Shall we try it out?"

interregnum

2011-12-03T07:00:00.000Z

Leslie daFox was thinking about ziggurats as he climbed the steps of the Stalinist Camberwick Community Centre. There was something about the sheer mass of the Community Centre that made him think of an ancient step pyramid whose top was reserved for human sacrifice. He could, if he tried, imagine a woman with coffee-coloured skin wearing a feathered and beaded headdress holding a bronze dagger aloft, poised above the virgin's navel, ready to descend and elevate the pure young man below to the heavens, to join the gods and bless his former people.
"Bronze is a silly choice for the dagger," he said, mostly to himself. "It would blunt in no time, probably while you're still trying to get through the rib-cage to reach the heart. Flint now, that would do the trick. Or possibly that black glass stuff, that might be available in the South Americas at that time."
"What's that sir?" said Policeman number one, who was huffing and puffing on Leslie's left side.
"He was saying that glass is better than bronze," said Policeman number two helpfully. He was having no trouble with the steps at all and was actually taking them two at a time. Both policemen were still dogging Leslie's every move while the death of two students in his class was investigated. He'd even had to let them bring their sleeping bags into his conservatory so that they could guard him from inside the house, which was tantamount to admitting that they suspected him. Though their pouncing on him last time he'd made a slightly off-colour remark was better evidence.
"Why... why is glass better than bronze?" gasped Policeman number one. They reached the top of the steps and he leaned his hands on his knees, bending forward and going puce.
"You can use it to make windows," said Leslie. "The trouble with bronze for windows is that it's too noisy; every time the wind blows it vibrates and either clatters or gongs, depending on how thin you made the sheets."
"Right," said Policeman number one, his chest heaving like a hyperactive blacksmith's bellows. "That... that makes... sense!"
No, it doesn't thought Leslie, leading the way to the main doors. Windows are made of glass because it's transparent, you nitwit. Bronze would never work for windows.
"Good morning, sir!" said one of the security guards at the towering portals that allowed entrance into the Community Centre. Leslie smiled, full of false bonhomie, and greeted the guard back. They were the most frightening clever and well educated body of men he'd ever met, and he was worried that they might actually be cleverer than him. He was also puzzled that they were exclusively male.
He led the way across the main hallway, initially heading for the lift. Then, feeling mean, he paused and turned left at a small door and took the spiral staircase up the three floors to the lecture hall he was using. Policeman number two took the front position, and Policeman number one gave up after about six steps and sat down. At the top Policeman number two looked puzzled.
"Where's Joe?" he said.
"He sat down," said Leslie. "He'll catch us up when he's caught his breath."
"There's got to be two of us guarding you at all times! You're a menace to society!"
"Thanks. For my script-writing? My short-story collections? Some of my novels?"
"For murdering two of your students in broad daylight, actually, sir. We know you did it, we just have to find the evidence."
"When I wrote police procedurals," said Leslie carefully, "I was told that it was the other way around. First you find the evidence, and then you hound the culprit. Not pick a culprit and hound him until he provides you with some evidence."
"You've never watched Columbo, have you sir?" said the Policeman sounding sympathetic.
"Actually I have," said Leslie. "And I turned down the opportunity to write for it too; I felt that any script with words longer than two syllables would be too far above the target demographic."
"Oh I see! You had your targets picked out even back then, did you sir?" The policeman produced a notebook from a pocket and started scribbling in it with a little black pencil. Leslie sighed and tried to go the lecture hall.
"No, wait there, please sir." Policeman number two extended a muscular arm and held Leslie in place. "There have to be two of us guarding you at all times."
"I'll be late for the class," said Leslie. "What if someone's been murdered by the time we get there?"
"That would be very clever of you, sir," said Policeman number two. "Murdering someone when I'm here watching you the whole time."
"Yes, wouldn't it?" said Leslie. He was starting to wish he'd never given up smoking, even though it was nine and a half years ago now. There was a wheezing noise from below, suggesting that Policeman number one was finally making the ascent. When he staggered the last couple of steps two minutes later Policeman number two finally let go of Leslie and he could lead them into the lecture hall.
In the middle of the floor, surrounding by aghast and appalled students, was a dead body and a lake of blood.

The Chinese room

2011-12-02T07:00:00.000Z

"Mary wants ice-cream," said the mom-bot. It opened the oven and peered inside.
"No I don't!" shouted Mary, the adorable red-headed rug-rat from the top of the stairs.
"Yes, you do," said the mom-bot taking a wooden spoon out of the oven and looking at it quizzically. "You have derived intentionality."
"Aaaargh!" shouted Mary, falling down the stairs as her accident-prone brother Maurice opened the bathroom door and knocked her over. She bounced on her head twice, her cries becoming more pathetic, and then Dad was stood in front of the television.
"What rubbish are you watching this time?" he said. "Can't you ever watch one of the educational channels?"
"It's teaching... me... about... derived intentionality!" I said, knowing that Dad might just miss the pauses while I worked out how to make Mom-bot and me sound like something more than cheap daytime television. Rumour had it that the show didn't even pay for it's own mom-bot, but used an old one that was supposed to have been returned to the mom-bot corporation.
"I would have thought that you knew by now that the newspaper doesn't have a mind of its own," he said. He was frowning at a piece of paper he was carrying and I knew that he wasn't really listening to me, he was just talking while he thought.
"Well, some newspapers do," I said.
"What?"

*
It turned out that Dad had missed the launch of The Chinese Room, a new national daily paper at the start of the week. I explained that the paper contained a thinstick, a wafer slice of memory that could hold an AI that would allow you to navigate with easy around the paper and tell it what kind of stories you liked. As it learned, it would automatically generate reading lists for you, and adjust the adverts that were available to the ones that best suited your needs. It's no mom-bot, but it's what you got! was the tagline that had been getting the most publicity. Dad was unimpressed.
"So, navigating the paper," he said, his tone heavy with sarcasm, "is now easier than turning the pages? Bizarrely I see that you still need to use your hands, so this doesn't even benefit people with no arms, or just plain lazyitis."
"You only buy the paper once," I said patiently. "So you don't have to stop at the news-stand every day."
"Unless you smoke. Or like to buy mints for the tube, so that you don't have to smell the smoker sat next to you. Or you want a different paper to the Chinese room, or–"
"OK, dad! Jeez, look, it's easier to read on a crowded tube because it's just one page and you don't have to keep turning it. It's like a Kindle! Or Fire, or Conflagration, or Hypercaust, whichever one you stopped paying attention at."
"I remember the Hypercaust," said Dad quickly. "Had more storage space for books than there were books to buy on the e-Store. That was kind of funny, really. Oh, and didn't it have that battery fault where every so often it would get red hot and set fire to soft furnishings? Only because they'd made it out of titanium it invariably survived the blaze?"
"Do you have to be so technologically negative? If you had your way we'd be living in the Dark Ages still."
"I think we are still living in the Dark Ages." Dad was suddenly quiet. "That's why I do my job and try to see that other people do theirs too."
I glanced at the quiescent mom-bot in the corner reflexively, I really didn't want to. That we still had a functioning mom-bot unit, even if Dad wouldn't allow it to be turned on, after the war-bot virus epidemic was testament to Dad doing his job and doing it well. Most other families in our neighbourhood were having to choose between replacing the mom-bot and repairing the damage it had done. And I found myself agreeing with Dad that it was somehow wrong that they all seemed to be opting for replacing the mom-bot.
"Look, the paper's convenient," I said. "It's new, it's nice."
"It's in this house without my permission," said Dad. "Hand it over." He held his hand out, and with bad grace I passed him my Chinese Room. It took him barely ten seconds to spot a seam I'd never noticed in the e-Paper, crack it open with his pocket-knife and remove the thinstick memory wafer. He turned it over in his hands, scrutinizing it.
"This is part of a mom-bot core," he said, pointing to a black-inked serial number on the wafer. "Before or after the virus, do you think?"
"I'm not betting against you, Dad," I said. "I haven't won yet."
"That's not true," said Dad. "When you were five you picked the swan over that child's mother and you won then."
"That was traumatic!"
Dad just chuckled, and passed me the dead paper back, keeping hold of the slice.
"Look up what a Chinese room is, sometime," he said. "It goes right back to your derived intentionality. Then come and tell me why you should be hoping that the paper is well-named."

Love in the time of lumbago

2011-12-01T07:00:00.000Z

Isadora was the most beautiful woman that Captain Amellio had ever seen. Her curvature of the spine was far less pronounced than was commonly found, and she could almost pass as walking upright. She often managed short journeys on foot without wincing, staggering, or supporting herself on either passers-by or street-furniture. Her eyes twinkled occasionally without the liquidity of tears behind them, and this alone would have been enough for Amellio to adore her. That she also played the piano, hockey and could peel a crab with a set-square just added to her appeal.
He approached her in the street one day, his good leg striding proudly forward, and his bad leg, his right leg, assisted by a powered exo-brace. He whined slightly when he walked, but he appeared an imposing figure of a man. Isadora could not help but be impressed.
"Perhaps I might be of assistance," he said, his tone suggesting that this wasn't a question. "You have many heavy bags to carry."
"Oh, they're not all mine," said Isadora sweetly. "My sister is shopping with me, and she is momentarily in the butchers. When she returns she will carry the majority of them."
"Your sister must be very strong, for there are bags enough here to tax a donkey!"
"Oh, but she is so bent-over that she could easily pass for a donkey in the evening. I shall drape these bags over her back like so many saddle-bags and we shall return home together. She is truly cursed with disease."
Captain Amellio was impressed with the practicality that Isadora showed, but was not so easily deterred. "Then I shall assist you and your sister nonetheless," he said. "Permit me to lighten your burdens equally."
"Well, if you insist," said Isadora. 'Oh look, here comes Hayley now!" And from the butchers walked a woman so stooped over as to be almost shaped like a lower case n, her face so close to the ground that the walk home through long grass must have been a real trial for her.
"Are you sure she's your sister?" asked Amellio, unable to reconcile how bent one sister was and how unbent the other.
"Oh yes. When we were little girls I used to ride her like a horse. Now though, I know better."
"You just treat her like a mule?"
"Well, Captain, what would you do with someone who is unemployable for normal labour and yet still desires to eat and reside and be kept warm?"
It was Captain Amellio's opinion that exactly that kind of person was sent to him to become part of the army, but he decided to keep that quiet. "I concede your point," he said, attempting to be humble.
"Oh hurrah!" Isadora cheered. "I have always wanted to beat a soldier, and today I have succeeded!"
"Have you ever wanted to be beaten by a soldier?" he asked, and then dismissed the question with a wave of his hand when her face indicated her puzzlement. "Is there nothing I can help you with, Mistress...?"
"Isadora," said Isadora quickly. "There may be one thing, but I'll need to think about it first.

Dental Palmistry

2011-11-30T07:00:00.000Z

Phlebitis paused at Madame Sosotris's door and re-read the sign on it. At first glance he'd thought it said Oriental Palmistry but now that he was closer he could see that it in fact read Dental Palmistry. He hesitated, his calloused fist a couple of centimetres from the door's surface, wondering what it could mean. Indecision wracked him for several seconds; his visits to Madame Sosotris were not made for pleasure but out of painful necessity and the opportunity to not visit was tempting.
The door opened just as he was deciding that madness was as good a reason as any to not knock and not find out his future from her. A small woman who barely came up to Phlebitis's waist walked into him and said, "Ow."
Phlebitis lowered his fist, seeing Madame Sosotris emerging from the gloom inside her house. Her eyes seemed dilated and unfocused, and there was a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.
"I said, 'Ow'," said the small woman, looking up at Phlebitis. He pulled his gaze from the slightly vampiric-appearing Madame Sosotris and looked down.
"Watch where you're going," he said. "If you were a sailor you'd be over the side in no time, making friends with the sharks."
"Are you saying I'm clumsy?" The small woman squeaked when she was excited or angry.
"No, I'm saying that the other guys would think it funny to trip you over and watch you fall over the side. Don't worry. You look like you'd float for quite a while."
There was a noise like a boiling kettle whistling, which Phlebitis slowly realised was the small woman. She was so angry that her face had turned a deep purple and she was standing on the very tips of her toes.
"Are you going to move?" he said. "Only I'm here to visit Madame Sosotris and you're rather in the way. You seem to be blocking the entire doorway."
The small woman was actually vibrating with anger now and was having trouble staying on her toes as she did so. Seeing an opportunity, Phlebitis stepped to the side and tugged gently on her shoulder as he did so. A spasm of panic passed over her face as she lost her balance completely, her hands reflexively pushing forwards to break her fall and pushing her center of gravity further out of alignment, speeding her fall. Phlebitis stepped over her and pushed the door shut behind him.
"I'b god a midderable code," said Madame Sosotris.
"You always do when I visit," said Phlebitis. "It's almost like it's been written about somewhere and we just have to play our parts out over and over again."
Madame Sosotris gave him a penetrating look and produced a lace handkerchief from one of her sleeves. As she lead the way into her drawing room, where she performed séances, table-turnings, read cards and ate dinner, she blew her nose. It was a long, drawn-out, mournful honking process, at the end of which she dropped the sodden handkerchief into a bucket
"What's dental Palmistry then?" asked Phlebitis sitting down in the high-backed chair that didn't wobble. Madame Sosotris glared at him but sat on the other one without saying anything. She rocked slightly as she tried to make it balance.
"A mistake by the sign-writer," said Madame Sosotris. Phlebitis could see that her eyes were red as though she'd been crying, and her wrinkles seemed to get deeper and dirtier everytime he came. "Although, a couple of nights ago I did get a visit from a man who had mouths in his palms. His future was very hard to read, but eventually I figured out that he'd misunderstood the sign and was hoping for Palmal Dentistry."
"Is there such a thing?"
"Ye–e–es," said Madame Sosotris trying not to look at the builder's wrap of hammers and chisels on the sideboard. "How have you been though? Surely another eight months alone at sea must give a man certain... urges?" She winked.
Phlebitis tried to ignore his stomach doing somersaults and forced a smile. "I'm not alone," he said. "I'll just have the usual please. The future for the next six months in strange images and dire pronouncements.
Madame Sosotris sighed softly, suspecting that Phlebitis was somehow mocking her, and leaned back in her chair. For many clients she would draw out cards or a crystal ball and use them to distract the customer while she engaged the trance, but she'd been trying and failing to seduce Phlebitis for years now. He could see it all done the real way, warts and everything. Her eyes rolled up back in her head, revealing jaundiced whites, and her fingers tensed until her hands looked like claws.
"I see a marriage," she said, and Phlebitis snorted.
"You tried this two times ago," he said. "You do not see me marrying you, you just wish you could."
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice now oddly thick. "I see you marrying a shape, an intelligence that is not moulded by earth into a human form. The ceremony is under a moon, and there are people and ... and un-people watching. There are boiled frogs for the wedding feast. There are... wait, the image is changing. There is a chair, a golden chair with eyes in the back. They are watching you, they are looking for you. Then they cannot find you and the chair warps and twists. It is angry. There are more chairs, and they gather around a table to discuss you."
She sat forward, her wispy grey hair spilling over her eyes and gasped for breath.
"Great," said Phlebitis standing up. "Married to something not human and it looks like one of the wedding gifts is going to be a carnivorous dining suite. You've outdone yourself this time, Madame."
His money tinkled on the table. "I should have asked for the Dental Palmistry," he said. "That might have made more sense."
As the door closed behind him Madame Sosotris finally got air back into her tired, ancient lungs, and called out. But Phlebitis was already gone.

Saint-Sebastien in flames

2011-11-29T07:00:00.000Z

The one evening it didn't rain the church of Saint-Sebastien caught fire. The clouds were heavy and grey overhead, and the wind would rise and fall as though some ancient dragon were breathing across the Paulitsa Square, but though the sky refused to clear, it also refused to rain.
The women were out, squatting in the doorways and calling to one another, bags of clothes in front of them which they pulled items from, held them up and tsked, putting some back and mending and darning others. Now and then there would be a nearly new vest, or a skirt so patched that it was becoming something new, an original emerging from a cheap knockoff bought with stolen money. Then a voice would rise above the others, crowing over the find, announcing their luck and bounty, and other voices would chime in, dissonant and plaintive, crying words of praise and bleeding just jealousy.
There were men around the square, keeping their distance from the women, who were apt to mock and jeer, brave and confidant together like this. Later on that evening, alone behind closed doors there would be more caution, the offering of sex like an olive branch, an unspoken apology. It would be accepted as tentatively, men acknowledging that they had been identified, stood-out by their wives, that their virility had been somehow enhanced and supported by the apparent humiliation. In the uneasy sweat of coitus it would be forgotten, and as they rolled apart the balance would be restored once more.
There were discussions afterwards of how the fire could have started. There were those who were far away who claimed that they heard the dull roll of thunder and saw the flash of light, that lightning had struck the church tower but that the lightning conductor had been broken and only conducted the lightning down the wooden choir stalls. Those who were close by denied this, of course, and said that the verger had come out towards ten and had been smoking. They told a story where he turned to an itinerant parishioner to answer a question about the omniperception of God and then forgot that he was smoking still. As he returned into the church he discarded his cigarette into the bushes and thus the fire started outside the church and ventured in to bathe itself in the glory of God.
The verger, who was at home that night with food poisoning from eating the fish that his wife had attempted to casserole, denied that story but the Bishop, who was not really a good man, still disbelieved him and caused him to be passed over for promotion for the next two years.
Wherever the fire started, it was first noticed when the Saints' window shattered, coloured glass cascading out from the church walls and softened lead twisting and falling inwards. Flames peeked out through the new exit, their golden and orange heads flickering this way and that as they sought more air, more oxygen, and greater range. The clouds above reflected the light from the flames back down, and the whole church seemed lambent, standing somehow suffused in a glow all of its own. Men crossed themselves, and women gathered their clothes back up, hastily stuffing them in their tired cloth sacks to protect them from the inevitable descent of ash.

These words are not my own

2011-11-28T07:00:00.000Z

Penelope stood in the doorway of Dr. Fraud's consulting room and screamed. She screamed continuously for three minutes and eighteen seconds, and then she closed her mouth, blinked twice, and walked into the room as though nothing had happened. Only when she sat down, her knees pressed carefully together despite that she was wearing jodhpurs, did Dr. Fraud look up and half-smile at her, in what she thought was a very European way, and ask her how she was today. At the other end of the room Dr. Fraud's secretary carefully closed the door and wondered why it was that neither the patient nor the psychiatrist ever seemed to notice the screaming.
"Penny," said Dr. Fraud.
"Penelope," said Penelope immediately. "I hate being called Penny, Doctor. You've written that down at least eight times now."
"My dear Frau," said Dr. Fraud, "you've only been to see me three times!"
"And yet," said Penelope firmly, though her face was going pale, "you've written down at least eight times that I hate being called Penny because you write it down every time I tell you."
"I'm sure that's an exaggeration," said Dr. Fraud, forcing himself to stop writing before he completed the sentence woman does not like being called Penny. "How have you been for the last week?"
"Better," said Penelope, though there was an obvious reluctance to her speech. "I managed to visit the library, the grocer's and the swimming pool without saying anything obscene or untoward."
"Really?" Dr. Fraud thought he sounded too surprised, and toned it down a little. "Reeeeeealllly? That is good news, it would appear that you are starting to get better. You will soon have repossessed your own sense of words, and with it your own sense of identity."
In the corner of the room all the leaves fell off a rubber plant. Penelope stared at it.
"So, our next step must be to discuss why you feel that you have to speak other people's words when you meet them. Tell me about your mother."
"All the leaves just fell off your plant," said Penelope, pointing. "Look!"
"Ah yes," said Dr. Fraud, not looking. "Rubber plants are well known to have depressive tendencies."
"Are you saying that your plant is committing suicide?"
"No. I regularly talk to it about its issues. I think my secretary is weeing in its plant-pot. It's probably a kind of inter-species-jealousy."
"Oh," said Penelope.
"Tell me about your mother. What did she make you do when you were a little boy?"
"I've never been a little boy," said Penelope.
"Come now," said Dr. Fraud. "You were a child once, there is no shame in that."
"Yes, but I was a little girl," said Penelope. "Isn't that obvious?"
Dr. Fraud's eyes went wide as he realised that yet again he had the wrong patient's notes in front of him. With a snarl he tapped several keys on his keyboard, trying to find the right file. "There is a conspiracy!" he shouted, his Austrian accent suddenly coming out thickly. "Yes, of course you were a little goat. Who isn't at that age?"
"Girl," said Penelope, trying to be patient. "Girl, Dr. Fraud."
"Yes, yes, that's what I said," he said. "Now, Penny, tell me about your mother."
"PENELOPE, Doctor," said Penelope. "How many files have you now written 'Does not like to be called Penny' in? And why are none of them mine?"
The rubber plant in the corner spontaneously combusted, tiny orange flames licking at the central trunk of the plant and causing the edges of the nearby fallen leaves to curl up and go brown.
"It is part of your therapy, you see. We continually push the edges of what you'll accept so that you can regress inside your own psyche and we can find out why you feel that your words are so often not your own."
"They're not my own. I read minds and then I say what I've just read. Your rubber plant just caught fire."
"Aha!" shouted Dr. Fraud, his eyes gleaming. "I was NOT thinking that!"
"No," said Penelope, "but it's happened anyway."
As Dr. Fraud turned round to see the flames the tiny white wisps of smoke finally set the smoke detector off, and the sprinkler system engaged, spraying the office with something orange and sweet-tasting.
"Orange juice?" said Penelope, tasting it.
"I hope so," said Dr. Fraud, sounding slightly hopeless. "I shall see you next week."

The Waltons

2011-11-27T07:00:00.000Z

Janet O'Steen was not having a good day. First a pipe had burst shortly after she'd gotten up and she'd had to make small talk with her neighbour while he fixed it. She knew that this was much cheaper than getting a plumber to do the work, and that she'd have had to make small talk with the plumber as well, but it still felt like an intrusion in her day. No sooner was the pipe bandaged up ("leave it like for six weeks," said her neighbour, "and then see if it's healed alright, so you do") than there'd been a kerfuffle outside and she looked out of the window to see two women in the street outside her front door throwing apples at each other. Apples that they were seizing from Janet's apple tree. So, of course, she'd picked up a convenient broom and run out to chase them off, but the excitement of that, and from nearly twisting her ankle stepping on a crushed apple, meant that she couldn't do any writing at all until that evening.
Now, she had four pages in front of her in which her main character's father gave his shoes away to the orphans, forced his housekeeper to take a cold shower until her skin was blue, told two of his daughters that they were adopted and the other two that they were born biologically male, and hired a bagpiper to pipe at all meals. She sighed heavily and dropped them in the bin. It was her own fault, she knew she shouldn't have watched the X-Factor before starting to write, but the alternative was Songs of Praise, and that was no more helpful to the writing process.
She picked up her pen again, deciding that she'd get four pages written before she went to bed, pages that she wouldn't have to immediately drop into the bin. Her pen hovered over a fresh page of her notebook as she wondered what her main character and her family would really do at this point of the novel.
Another problem, she thought to herself, not really aware that she was procrastinating again, was that this wasn't the novel she wanted to be writing. Her agent, a normally very pliable woman called Arthuria, had completely rejected the concept of a novel called On death and dying: rebellion in a Chinese room. "It just won't sell, dearie," she'd said over and over again. "You have to look at your target audience; they want pastoral scenes of family life. Something with so little tension that they can sleep easily at night, but not so interesting that they wish they were there, or that their lives were different."
"You mean people read my books to feel like their miserable little lives are better than nothing?" Janet had been incredulous, but Arthuria had nodded solemnly and made her feel slightly bad about getting upset.
Back to the writing, she thought. Her main character was trying to resolve her father's decision to move to another town in the context of her own life. He was proposing to move to a grand house that she worried they wouldn't have enough money for if there were to be any accidents, and her mother and her three sisters were all thrilled about it and constantly talking about how their prospects would be improved. Her main character, called Jane, conceded that there would be fewer cows and other obviously rural things about, but was not at all convinced that her prospects would improve just because she was walking muddy streets instead of muddy cart-tracks. Finally inspiration struck.
"Daddy," said Jane, trying hard to sound like a strong, modern woman and forgetting completely that Daddy loathed people who had opinions other than his, "Daddy, may I speak with you a moment?"
Her father laid his Bible aside, smiling at her like he smiled at his Sunday congregation: all teeth and no good humour. "Of course, sweetie," he said, struggling to remember her name. Why had he been cursed with only daughters? "What bothers you?"
"If we should move to Bath–" she began, and he cut her off, placing his palm firmly across her mouth.
"When," he said. "When we move to Bath. It is God's will."
She waited for him to let go of her face, and continued bravely on. "When we move to Bath," she said, "what will become of us if something becomes of you?"
"Do you mean, if I die?"
"Well yes, Daddy. Or if you run off with a common street-slattern, or take up with a Chineseman and spend your evenings and your money in an Opium den, or if you are run down by a carriage and the doctors announce that you must spend your days in legless solitude, or–"
He stopped her again by placing his hand over her mouth. "Do you spend all of your time thinking up ways for me to be injured or killed?"
Janet stopped writing and re-read it. No, those last few lines would have to change; perhaps tomorrow would be a better day for writing after all. Bedtime. Ah, thinking of which, there was a little more she could write, though she'd have to find a proper home for it in the novel.
"Bedtime!" shouted Theresa-May excitedly, and everyone scampered off to bed. "Goodnight Mother," called Antoinette, and her mother good-naturedly shouted "Goodnight!" back from her room. "Goodnight Annie," called Florence, "goodnight Theresa, goodnight father!"
More cries of goodnight echoed throughout the house, and though Jane buried her head under the cold, lumpy, mildew-smelling pillow she could still hear them, until finally she sat up in bed and shouted, "Oh shut up all of you! I'm trying to sleep!"

Wishlist

2011-11-26T07:00:00.001Z

It was an obvious product enhancement. Anyone could have seen it, anyone would have done it. I just got there first, that's all.
There were a number of shopping sites that were popular enough to allow you to create wish-lists that other people could see. It let your friends and family know what you might like for your birthday, it let your friends and family see your wedding registry all from one site, it even let your enemies and exes know what you were getting and be annoyed about it. But it made things a little bit easier, for some people at least, and that was a product enhancement. It was just the right way to merchandise the site a little better.
My first suggestion was just that we separate wedding registry and wish-lists. "Make them separate," I said, "and people can put the expensive stuff they want from people they never see on one list, and they can put the cheap stuff they'd really love on the list to share with the people who mean the most to them."
"Like who?" asked Brent across the table. His roseacea was particularly bad that day.
"Like no-one," I said, going for honesty. "That'll be where they keep the things they really want and don't want anyone to know about."
"But we'll know," he said, his face wrinkling in puzzlement, like a shah-pei's.
"Yes," I said, "and we can market to them based on their secret desires. We can recommend leather clothes, soft Japanese ropes and unusual intimate jewellery alongside the usual cookie-cutters and books."
We went ahead and split the lists, and it was successful. Brent wasn't happy, as I got a bonus that quarter and he didn't, but then I checked his own recommendations and realised that he must have a very strange wish-list indeed.
If I'd stopped there, it might have been ok. Just maybe.
"Well," I said at the next meeting. "I was thinking, why have just two lists? Why not let people create their own lists? Let them create a Secret Santa list to be shared by the office, let them create a Nerf-arsenal list to be shared by the whole civil-war reenactment club, und so weiter?"
"What was that last bit?" asked Brent. His fingernails were black from where he'd shut his hand in his garage door that morning.
"It was German," I said smugly. I'd read it in a magazine the previous evening.
"I think they pronounce their w's as v's," he said, sounding disinterested. I blushed, knowing he'd won a point over me, and realised I had to try and claw the advantage back.
"We use the existing list technology," I said quickly, "and just give it editable names and a sharing list. Then we'll keep an eye on common names for lists and we'll automatically create lists of those types to inspire people."
By itself, it wasn't a bad idea. It really wasn't.
"The new lists are working well," said Brent, reading from a forty-eight page report. He'd lost two fingers to frostbite over Christmas and I didn't like looking at his hands any more. "But there are a few worrying trends, and I don't think we should be allowing autogeneration of popular list types any more."
"Why's that?" Kevin, Head Honcho for Marketing, was growing a moustache and it was turning out patchy. He was compensating by trying to seem dynamic.
"We had to remove a 'People I'd like to F-word" list already, said Brent. I sniggered, but quietly and behind my hand. "We also had to remove an 'Outed sex offenders list' too. There's a little too much flexibility in the lists, they can seriously infringe on our policies."
"I agree with Brent," said Geraldine, who represented Legal. "We could get into some serious trouble with some of these lists. We should probably put an age-restriction on creating a list too, so there's no more 'We hate Brent Conmurty' lists either."
Brent looked stricken, apparently he'd not known about the list. I was relieved that I'd got my sister to create it using her daughter's boyfriend's account.
If I only left it there. If only I'd not risen to the bait.
I went home that evening determined to get a little more revenge on Brent done. I wasn't sure what I wanted any more, or why revenge was important, but it was fun and I got a little bored in the evenings before I opened the wine. I put his name on my 'To Hit' list and then went off and got drunk.
I was woken at three am by the pinging of my cell-phone. I'd fallen asleep on the toilet after throwing up my knees, as far as I could tell. My head hurt, so I peered at my phone, hoping it would be telling me how to feel better.
Saw the addition to your hit list, read the text. Ran Brent Conmurty down on the Haversham road two hours ago. He's so much roadkill now!
I threw up again. How the hell had I mixed up my 'to-hit' list and my 'hit' list? And where had a 'hit list' come from anyway?
The cold memory of Brent in the meeting, when he was still alive, saying that autogeneration was dangerous reared its ugly head.
My phone pinged again.
Bonus: I got his parents too; house has been petrol bombed into a ruin!

Aftermath of the Nativity

2011-11-26T07:00:00.000Z

Miss Snippet felt she'd done very well not to laugh until she was back in the privacy of the staffroom. Then she'd thrown back her head and howled with laughter until tears ran down her face and her stomach ached like she was on her period. She'd staggered over to a lounge-chair, her shoulders shaking with the effort of holding the laughter in, sat down in it and laughed again, bringing yet more tears to her eyes. Finally she ran out of laughter, and wiped her eyes with a tissue she found in her pocket that only had eye-liner on; naturally her waterproof mascara had run.
"It wasn't that funny," said Miss Devonport, without any of her usual reproof.
"Oh come on!" said Miss Snippet, finding her colleague standing in front of the coffee cups holding what looked like a half-bottle of Scotch. "Santa just died out there in our nativity play! It's just like that story you told me about, everyone dies at Christmas."
"It wasn't a story, it was an essay," said Miss Devonport, "and the last line of it was, it's not Christmas until everyone's dead."
"Well, I was close enough," said Miss Snippet. Her sides hurt as well as her stomach. "And it was funny."
She'd been sat near the back, on a chair that wobbled, trying not to yawn through any of the speeches or obviously be checking her iPhone while the third year students put on a Nativity play. Despite her objections Mary, Joseph and Jesus were all played by white kids, and the donkey, Shepherds and one wise man were played by kids with other ethnic backgrounds. Despite Miss Devonport's objections, Santa was also one of the wise men, and despite both of them objecting, Santa was played by some gluttonous nephew of the Headmaster, demonstrating once again his easy grasp of nepotism. That his nephew was in his thirties was apparently unimportant, with the Headmaster saying that the man looked the part far better than any of the students. Miss Snippet had been tempted to point out Mark Andretti in the fifth form who had five o'clock shadow by ten o'clock most days and an impressive physique that bodybuilders would admire, but had resisted. She was certain the only way he could be doing it was to be stealing insulin from the diabetic kids and growth hormone from Freddy Glazer who was medically a midget. She was so certain that one of them would sooner or later either have to tell on him or die that she'd got a hundred pounds riding on there being a death-due-to-bullying story in the papers by the end of the year.
Santa had turned up to the play drunk, and Miss Devonport had immediately called security to have him thrown out. Instead, the Headmaster had turned up and given her a stern talking to about respecting other members of staff, leaving her bemused and near tears. Santa had gone on stage anyway, two scenes early, and urinated in one of the pots for the potted palms, starting angry whispers among the parents. Once again, Miss Snippet suspected that the whispers would have been far less angry if it had been Mark Andretti getting undressed on stage.
And then. And then in Santa's actual scene they'd reached the Hilton Stable where Mary and Joseph had elected to spend the night in the King-size Deluxe stall with house-trained oxen, self-heating manger and 24-hour room service and Santa had collapsed, pushing the non-white wise man off the stage and into the orchestra pit and falling on top of the manger. While people were scampering about trying to pick the unfortunate wise man up and make sure that he was alright the manger overheated underneath Santa and set fire to his beard. That was made of polyester, as was his hair and his jacket, so in a handful of seconds Santa was a butter-ball of flame, barely conscious yet trying to stand up. The terrified children had retreated, and many of them were screaming at the sight of Santa burning up. The Headmaster had left for the evening, so it was up to his illegally imported janitor, Lupo, to run on stage and throw a mop-bucket over him. There was a spectacular hiss, most of the flames went out, steam billowed across the audience and everyone started coughing and choking from the quantity of black-market bleach that Lupo had had in the bucket. Realising that he'd effectively tear-gassed the audience, Lupo had attempted to save the situation by pointing dramatically at Santa and shouting, "He lives!" at the top of his voice. As he did so, and people struggled to clear their eyes to see this heroism, Santa vomited a large quantity of red-wine all over the stage, which predictably enough everyone took to be blood.
The ambulances took away most of the parents first, largely because Miss Devonport had shut Santa in the men's toilets and was getting the parents seen to. When she 'remembered' that Santa had gone to the toilets, the ambulance staff found him with his head in the sink in four inches of water, so close to dead as to make no difference.
Miss Snippet thought it was the best Nativity play she'd seen in years.
"We'll never have our Yule celebration now," said Miss Devonport unhappily. She added half-a-cup of Scotch to her coffee. "Why did Santa have to die?"
"Oh yes we will," said Miss Snippet. "I have plans!"

The death of Luke Baphomet

2011-11-25T07:00:00.000Z

The wind is ahowl and the waves are breaking on the shore with deafening noise. A man out here on a night like this is soaked through in under a minute and freezing cold, so no wonder the three men are pressed as close to the wall under the overhang as they can get. It's barely shelter, but it's better than none.
Except for Luke Baphomet, who is stood on the rock, Mother's Tongue, clutching a hat to his head and peering out into the impenetrable darkness. He's like to call it Stygian, but he doesn't know what that means. Somewhere out there is a ship with a cargo, and Baphomet is desperate to see the cargo brought ashore.
"Why do you call it Mother's Tongue?" Jathanial is new to the group and tonight is partly a test. If he brings the ship in and the cargo ashore he'll have earned a measure of trust, and if he's dumb enough to working for anyone else, accidents happen on nights like these. He came up from the South around the same time as Baphomet came over from the East, and though there's those that don't like coincidence, it seems as though that's what it was.
"It's a comfort when you see it, 'cos you knows you're coming home," says Batrachian, a man who doesn't know what his surname means. He says you're like it's ewer. "But it's got sharp edges, and if you run afoul of it you know about it." His eyes bulge out of his face a little and his cheeks puff up in the cold.
"When you hear it you're coming home," says Griffen. "The wind turns around that rock something twisted. If you can hear it at night when the sheep are birthing, that means you'll be barren for a year."
"Sounds like a mean rock," says Jathanial at last, realising he has to finish the talk he's started. He falls silent, and no-one adds anything more. The crash of the waves and the idiot ferocity of the wind make ti too hard to talk anyway.
A light appears, then disappears again, but Luke Baphomet sees it. He uncovers a lantern he's holding and hoists it above his head on a long pole. The lantern sways violent, caught by the wind, but the light is pure and doesn't go out. The light out at sea reappears, disappears again, and then reappears once more. This time it stays. Luke is quietly ecstatic, hiding his glee that his ruse is working.
It takes thirty minutes for the boat to come in and Baphomet stays on the rock the whole time, keeping the lantern up and lit. The three men hide in the shadows, wishing they were dead, because the dead don't feel the wet and cold. Then, at last, there's a crunching, grinding noise and Luke Baphomet is leaping and dancing on the rock, delighted at the wrecking of another ship. The three men move out towards him, ready to bring the cargo in.
A shot rings out, an impossible shot because there's no way to keep powder dry on a night like this, no way to fire a pistol. Only Luke doesn't flinch; only Luke is hit. He falls, trying to catch himself as he goes, his leg supporting him, his arms going out. Somehow he bounces when he falls, and then he's off the rocks and into the water, and though Jathanial shouts once, neither Griffen nor Batrachian even slow their pace. A man in the maelstrom is dead, and they know it.
There's no living man at the ship, and no gun to be seen anywhere. The three men exchange looks, and Jathanial is sent back to look for a man behind them while Batrachian and Griffen start unloading the cargo. Baphomet has warned them that it's a strange one, but when they find that every box is a coffin they stop again, and wonder if what they're doing is right.
"Coast's clear," reports Jathanial, though he's stopped by the sight of all those little corpse-holders too. "What's Baphomet want them for?"
"Baphomet's dead," says Griffen. "Who cares? We deliver to the warehouse, we get paid, then we tell them not to expect the boss any more."
There's agreement over that, even though the boxes are too heavy by far.

Book of Miracles XI

2011-11-24T07:00:00.000Z

Irene's driving was fast and competent, and though I think James was hoping for her to be either slower or less able, he was looking slightly impressed as we zoomed down the road. I tried to pay attention to where we were going, looking out for roadsigns and landmarks, and Isabella did a pretty good job of trying to distract me. After a while, when I realised that I was seeing the same tall building going past us for the third time, I gave up trying to work out where we were and accepted that Irene was taking us the long way round to wherever we were going, and listened to Isabella instead. Some of her stories were thoroughly hair-raising, and my respect for her abilities rose. As did my worry about what exactly I was getting myself into, and my confidence that this book of Miracles that she was taking me to was the real thing. It seemed like a fair trade-off.
When the car finally stopped we were at a small café of some kind, just along a muddy side-track from the main road. Irene had indicated and turned off so smoothly that at first I thought we were just striking out across a field. The car stopped in a car park that was equal parts mud and gravel, sending up a spray of muddy water, and Isabella opened her door.
"We'll have breakfast here," she said. "They speak English and don't have much small talk. The food's not wonderful, but it's cooked from scratch and most of the ingredients are locally sourced, which makes it better than any convenience store that's ever inconvenienced me. We're not far from where we're going, but I doubt there'll be much food there."
"I'm happy if they do bacon," said James. "Nothing beats a proper bacon sandwich."
I noticed Irene smiling too, and figured that made two bacon-lovers. I looked over at Isabella.
"Not for me," she said, but she was smiling as well. "I prefer less preserved foods. Eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes."
"Sounds vaguely Spanish, especially for breakfast," I said. "I think I'm probably in the bacon camp, though the eggs and potatoes sound pretty good too."
Isabella led the way into a single-storey building that appeared to have been made in the log-cabin fashion of piling wood up and filling in the gaps with whatever was handy. It was warm and dry inside, with the light coming from hurricane lanterns hanging from the ceiling every ten feet or so. There were tables; two were already occupied, and another eight were waiting for hungry breakfasters. We picked one and sat down, and a menu written in five languages was put in front of me by a tall, lethargic looking waiter.
We ordered, and while we waited Isabella told us what to expect next.
"We're going to a safe-house," she said. "It's safe because it's well protected, but it's not infallible. If you draw enough attention to yourselves, then even the safe-house will only buy us a small amount of time. They're difficult and expensive to put up, so please don't compromise it. I'm not letting you know where it is so that you can't tell anyone if they do capture you."
"Capture me?" I said. This was the first time Isabella had mentioned anything like this.
"Any of you," said Isabella. "We're going to look at a very precious and rare book, without its owners' knowledge. There is a trade-off for this."
I nodded my understanding but I could see that James still wasn't happy. "What happens if they capture us? And... who are they for that matter?"
"Eventual death," said Isabella, her voice curiously flat. As for who they are, they're the people who own the Book. They will feel that they have certain rights because of this.
"They don't sound all that pleasant," I said. "Why did you pick them for our little visit?"
"Because their Book is the best fit with what you told me you're looking for," said Isabella. "Did you think that these things are put into little community libraries in a back-room somewhere with a couple of cheap aluminium bars on the window and an elderly Doberman as a guard dog?"
"Would definitely be easier," said James. Irene smiled, though I think only I spotted it.
"And after the safe-house?" I said.
"That's when the adventure really begins," said Isabella.