Jack Horner

“Why’d you want to know about yourself?”  As I’d hoped, the kid wasn’t thinking fast enough to spot that I’d been asking for own name a minute ago.

“I’m that paranoid,” I said.  It was the truth as well.  In my line of work it doesn’t take you very long to start feeling like there isn’t anywhere that isn’t under surveillance.  It doesn’t help that Mad Frankie and his Anger Management has paid-for access to all of the police CCTV cameras either; between that and his network of informers a man can’t piss up against a doorway without Mad Frankie knowing and sending you the bill for having it cleaned again.  I know; I have six from him.  One of which complains that I managed to give the door dutch elm disease, which I’d contest if there was a court that would hear the case.

“Hah, that’s just healthy in this town,” said the kid sounding twenty years older again.  “Well mister, I can tell you that you come in here every Thursday looking right different to how you look now, and you order a plum pie from us, with six plums.  Fancy one now?”

I shook my head, and waited for him to continue.  He didn’t, so I had to speak again.  “What else?  What’s my name?  How do I pay?  When was the last time I stiffed you?  How often do I sleep with your aunt?”

He looked a little taken-aback by the staccato questions rattled at him like machine-gun fire, and indeed he even took a step backwards.  Over in the corner the aunt knocked over a tub of ketchup which started to very slowly ooze from captivity.  She righted it before it got within an inch of the lip and wiped the table anyway.

“You’re Jack Horner,” he said.  “You sit in the corner eating your pie, and you mostly do it by sticking your thumb in, pulling out a plum, and making a song and dance about being a good boy.  Frankly mister, you’re weird, but you always pay up front so it kind of makes it hard to throw you out.  And if you’ve slept with my aunt mister, then it’s a bit weirder still that you keep trying it on with me.”  He was a little red-faced by the end, but a long way away from anything I’d call attractive.

“How many thumbs have I got?” I said.  It was a strange question but the vague description of Jack Horner was ringing bells in my head; tiny little silver bells like a carillon in a morose major key.

“Count ‘em for yourself, mister,” said the boy.  “Do you reckon you’ll come up surprised?”

“I think you might,” I said.  “I’ve got three, haven’t I?”

He looked at the counter, and his gaze didn’t move for a moment.  I wondered what he was thinking, and then, too late, realised that my hands were both resting on the counter.

“Not at the moment,” he said.  “Which is another weird thing mister.  I don’t think you’re who you’re claiming to be, so either you buy a pie and eat it, or you get out.”

“I’ll take the plum pie,” I said.  “Six plums.”

I sat down at an empty table, though they were all empty so it gave me an unaccustomed choice.  I sat as far away from the aunt as I could get and twiddled my thumbs.  The only man I know who’s got three thumbs and is so proud of it that he won’t shut up about it is Jack Crown.  He had a girlfriend for a while, a girl called Jill Hill, and then he lost his job after an accident he won’t talk about and needed alternative work.  He found it, but he’s secretive about it, and he’s a hard man to track down if he owes you anything.  He owes me a bucket and some brown paper, so maybe that’s why I’d not seen him in an age and a half.  But then there were the rumours that he’d found work for Natasha Monkeybutt, so maybe I wasn’t seeing him because he didn’t want me to.  Monkeybutt wouldn’t be above setting a tail on me and thinking she could get away with it.

“There you go mister not-Jack,” said the boy slamming a small pie down on the table.  The crust jumped slightly from the force, and when it settled back I could see the first plum glistening between the crust and the side of the dish.  I slipped my thumb in and pulled it out.

“What type of plum?” I asked.  “Victoria?”

The kid gave me an old stare and, turning away, said, “I think you mean Whose plum, mister.”

I was starving.  I ate it anyway.  I even paid him afterwards.

The housekeeper

The drawing room was pristine.  There was no dust on the picture rails (Georganna had donned a pair of white gloves and run her finger along all of them to check, and was now massaging her shoulder and complaining that it ached), the chairs were all set out in exactly the right positions (Diane had pulled a battered copy of Feng Shui for the simple-minded from her capacious handbag and gone through Chapter 5, checking everything carefully), and the carpet was as bright as the day it had been purchased.  Sally ground her heels into it, a moue of spite on her face, and said,

“How does she do it?”

“She’s got to have help,” said Diane.  She was the eldest of the three sisters and felt a constant pressure to know both more than her siblings, and to look no older than them.  “It’s simply not possible to keep a house as large as this as clean as this without help.  There have been scientific studies, you know.”

“Really?”  Georganna flexed her arm, a slim brown hand rubbing her shoulder a little theatrically.  “Oh, my arm.  Why couldn’t one of you have checked one of those rails?  Who does scientific studies on housework, sister dear?”

“Because you’d only do it again because you didn’t believe us,” said Diane.  “And you haven’t checked the dado rails yet, I bet she’s only expecting us to check the high rails because that’s the hardest to reach.”

“Well I’m not doing it!”

“Oh Sally, can you check then please?”

Sally huffed, but produced her pair of white gloves and walked slowly around the room, her finger running along the dado rails.  She paused every ten steps to check for dust or other dirt on the glove, but with no success.

“As for who does studies, little Georganna, that would be the Institute of Women’s Studies at Northanger University.  They have their own journal: Domestic Analysis.  I subscribe.”  She gave Georganna a look that dared her to challenge that.

“Northanger University?” said Sally, frowning at her gloved finger that was staying resolutely white and clean.  “That sounds oddly familiar.  Did you go there, Georganna?”

Georganna was the only one of the sisters to have gone to university, though she’d struggled to graduate, changing her course three times and eventually resorting to sleeping with first her tutors, then other members of the faculty, and finally the President of the university.  “No,” she said with a little acerbity.  “No, I went to the Lesser University of Much Bothering.  It has unique courses, not offered anywhere else in the country.  That was a significant consideration to me when selecting my course.”

“So why does it sound familiar then?”

“I know,” said Diane.  When the other two had looked at her for long enough, with sufficient hatred in their eyes she allowed herself a small smile and continued.  “Northanger University was the inspiration for Janet O’Steen’s novel Coathanger Abbey.  There was a documentary about it a couple of weeks ago that you both insisted I watch with you.”  There was a momentary silence, and then Sally said, with just a touch of frost in her tone, “No dust.  The dados are clean as well.”

“She has to be cheating!” said Georganna.

“Who has to be cheating?” said Moira.  She had opened the door that led to the conservatory and was standing in the doorway.  Behind her the three sisters could see sprays of flowers and hear piano music.

“Diane,” said Georganna immediately.  Her eyes sparkled with malice.  “She’s been winning rather more at Canasta than can be explained by her skill at cards alone.”

“I had no idea you three played Canasta,” said Sally.  She smiled as pleasantly as her plastic surgery would allow.  “I have a small group of players who come over on Thursdays, if you might be interested?”

“Yes,” said Diane, while the other two shook their heads.

“We sew on Thursdays,” said Sally, while Georganna said at the same time, “We dress poor people.”  The two sisters looked at each other, and shrugged.  “We do both,” they said together.

“I can come,” said Diane.  Moira smiled again, her lips almost turning upwards.  “But I would love to know how you keep your house so clean when you’re all by yourself.  The forfeit for losing at Canasta isn’t cleaning is it?”

Georganna looked furious that she’d not seen this opportunity to ask such a question herself, while Sally perked up and looked interested.

“Oh, the housekeeper does it,” said Moira.  “Eight o’clock on Thursdays.  We play penny-ante.”

“What housekeeper?” said all three sisters in unison.  Moira looked as shocked as her plastic surgery would allow.

“My housekeeper,” she said.  “Abigail.  She’s been in my family for ninety years.”

Diane nodded.  “Yes,” she said slowly.  “We know.  We also know that she died fifteen years ago.”

“We attended her funeral,” said Sally.

“I was a pallbearer,” said Georganna, who’d lost a bet to end up having to do that.  “She was heavy.”

“Oh yes,” said Moira.  “Well, she was employed by mother, poor thing.”

All three sisters looked at her, waiting for her to continue.  “Oh.  Well, mother was very forward thinking in these things, and so her contract stated that if she died on the job, so to speak, she was still obliged to continue working for us after her death as well.  She either died on her own time, or not at all.”

Diane looked impressed, Sally looked puzzled and Georganna looked shocked.

“How did you get her to keep working?” asked Diane.

“Is she a zombie?” asked Georganna, her eyes wide.

“A séance,” said Moira.  “Dr. Phillips helped us with it, but we bound her spirit back to this earth.  It was a great advantage that mother made all the servants sign in blood.”

“Is she a zombie?” asked Georganna a little more insistently.

“No,” said Moira.  “Bits would only drop off and double her workload.  That would be inefficient.  Oh.  And a little unfair.”

The three sisters sat there, a little awed, and Moira basked.

“Please come through,” she said.  “I believe the housekeeper has baked a lasagne.”

Experimenting with veganism

“My daughter is home for Christmas,” said Milady Natalie.  She waved a powdered white hand languorously in the direction of a chubby girl with red cheeks and straggly blonde hair that looked both dyed and dead.  “She will be determining the menus for lunch for the two weeks that she is here.  You may assume that she has my authority in all culinary decisions.”

“My name’s Jenna,” said the chubby girl and smiled.  I blanched a little, because I’d been likening her head to a beetroot and beetroot don’t (normally) have teeth, then rallied and smiled back.  “And mummy, you said I’d be in charge!”

“One thing at a time, dear,” said Milady Natalie, her eyes rolling slowly upwards in her head, a sure sign that she’d started on the laudanum early today.  “Let us see how you fare with the lunch menu before you take over duties as head of the household.  Don’t forget, you have one more year at university to complete in… what is your course is again?”  Her voice grew gradually more stretched out and quieter as the length of the sentence wore her out, but Jenna seemed neither to notice nor to care.

“I’m studying Business Politics,” she snapped, her jowls quivering a little and reminding me that I had a pork cheek in brine waiting for use.  I licked my lips involuntarily.  “I’ll be specialising in Mergers and Take-aways next year.”

“How delightful,” droned Milady Natalie, her eyelids now drooping as well.  “Indian or Chinese?”

“What?”  Jenna looked stonily at her mother, her lips pressed together and going almost cross-eyed in her attempts to look down her nose.

“You said Takeaways, dear.  Indian or Chinese?  I remember you can’t eat Thai because you get that rash all over your pubis–“

“Pas devant les enfants!” said Jenna, staring at me intently.  I half-smiled, and tried to look puzzled, as though a master chef would have no idea at all about French.  “I meant take-overs, obviously mummy.  Why must you be so silly about these things?”

“Silly?” breathed Milady Natalie, and fell asleep.

*

“I’m experimenting with veganism,” said Jenna.  The kitchen was in full swing: the butler was in the corner mixing up fresh laudanum for Milady Natalie and the boot-boy was helping him, learning how to extract the opium from the poppies using alcohol.  I grew the poppies amongst the edible garden flowers on the grounds that Milady Natalie would never notice if they got a little mixed up.  My sous-chef was removing the pork-cheek from the tub of brine, and his sous-chef (the line-chef, but we gave him the better title because he was only 19, spotty and nervous around everything but insects) was making egg pasta.

“Isn’t that illegal?” I said, setting down the pen I was using to calligraph today’s menu.  Luckily I’d only planned out tea and supper so far.

“What?”

“Experimenting on Vegans?  My understanding was that they’re actually human too, just a little bit different to the rest of us.  Like… oh I don’t know, Republicans or Human Resource Managers.”

“What’s a republican?  And how are Human Resource Managers not human?”  There was a note of frustration in her voice that I found irresistible.

“I thought you were doing Business Politics at an American college?  I assumed that both of those roles would be frequent topics of conversation.”

“I’m at Brown,” she said, aggression flaring up like an oil field struck by lightning.  “And that means I’m cleverer than you, Mister cooking-man.”  She punctuated her words by jabbing her finger into my chest.  I looked down at the finger, and she whipped it up to flick my nose.  “No man cooks unless he’s gay,” she sneered.  “So you’re not even a real man, are you?”  Behind her, my sous-chef (who's had more boyfriends than he’s prepared hot meals if I believe his stories) picked up a filleting knife and the line-cook (who’s easily led) gripped the large pot of boiling pasta water.  I shook my head, and she thought I was I talking to her.

“I thought not,” she said.  “Now, for lunch we will be eating vegan food.  So no meat.  Got that?”

“No meat,” I repeated, shaking my head again as neither my sous-chef nor the line-cook looked any less murderous.  “Perhaps then just tête de veau avec saucissons?”

“Perfect!” she said, a sudden smile appearing on her face.  I smiled, very faintly, and wondered if she ever washed her face properly: it was a playground for blackheads and other blemishes.  She made the line-cook look handsome, and although he tried, he clearly had a face he needed to grow into.  “Write that down, and I shall give it to mummy, so you’d better serve exactly what you’ve just said.”

“It’ll be a pleasure,” I said, knowing full well that Milady Natalie hated waste and would insist on her daughter eating the food she’d requested.  “I’ll get the largest tête de veau I can find.”

Eight trains

“I’ve been waiting for eight trains!  Eight trains!  Eight trains!”

The repetitive woman squawked indignantly at the sheepish herd of people who were crammed into the tube-train carriage, each of them squeezed into their neighbours with a look of discomfort, hands stretched out for any handhold, praying that they would be able to keep their balance when the train moved off.  She glared at them with unhidden hostility, jabbing her stroller’s wheel into ankles as she tried to force her way into the carriage.

“I need to get home!  Eight trains!” she squawked again.

“There’s no room,” a man in the doorway started to say, his long frame already bent awkwardly to fit in on the edge of the carriage where the ceiling curved down.

“Eight trains,” shrieked the woman, cutting him off.  “Of course there’s room, you could all move down the carriage and make some space.”

The standing passengers looked at one another, puzzlement on their faces.  They were already standing down the full length of the carriage, carefully ignoring the seated passengers, who in turn were hiding their fear that the train would start moving and one of the standers would fall over and land on one of the sitters.  Or worse, several of the sitters, rolling around like a beached walrus, until finally prised off and forced up, backing to a standing position.

“I don’t think we could,” said the man in the doorway, his face flushing with embarrassment at having to point out the obvious truth to the woman.  She pushed on the stroller again, bruising his ankles.

“You don’t think!” she said, her voice smug and a smirk on her face revealing that she thought she was the first person ever to find this comeback.  ‘If you thought, you would have made room for me by now.”

“Why don’t you fold the stroller up?” said another voice from somewhere inside the carriage.  “You’ve said there’s been eight trains, you’ve had plenty of time to fold the stroller up.  Then you wouldn’t need anywhere as much space and you’d be able to get on, wouldn’t you?”

“How dare you!” The little woman was so angry that flecks of white spittle flew from her lips and landed on the stroller.  “How dare you!  I’m entitled, I am!  I should be allowed on the train because I have a stroller with me!  I have a baby!”  She seized the carrier bag hanging ostentatiously from the handle of the stroller and shook it.  “This is a Harrods bag!  That is how much better than all you I am.  I shop at Harrods, and I have a baby and a stroller, and I deserve to be on this train so much more than all of you combined.”

“Fold the stroller up,” came the voice from within the carriage.  “Then you can stand it next to you and you’ll take up the space of two people instead of six.”

“And where would my baby go?  Should I leave him here on this platform, by himself?  Abandon him?  Is that what you want?”

“Carry the baby?  You have arms, I can see them waving that carrier bag around, so they must work.”

“Carry?  Carry the baby?  Do you understand how much work that would be?  Babies are heavy, and then there’s the stroller!  And I have a Harrods bag here with me.  Do you think I should spend my money on things only to leave them behind?”

“Sounds better than leaving the baby behind, but you should make your own mind up,” said the voice within the carriage.  “Get your stroller off this train, stop trying to get on at the very end of the train, fold it up and carry it and the baby and you’ll get on the next one without any trouble.  Make an effort, woman, instead of screaming at the rest of the world to make the effort for you.”

“Eight trains!”

“Nine,” said the voice within the carriage.  “Make someone’s else life a misery, we’ve done nothing to deserve it.”  The carriage doors started to close with an ominous beeping sound, and the recorded voice came over the speaker system.  “Do not obstruct the closing doors.”  The man, bent awkwardly and still red-faced, placed a foot against the stroller and extended his leg, pushing it out of the carriage.  The doors closed, and he pulled his foot back inside just in time.

“Eight trains!” howled the miserable little woman on the platform, raising a fist and shaking it as the train started to move.  “Eight trains!”

Corisette and Margoyle

“My name’s Corisette,” said the pretty little woman.  She looked, to Margoyle’s eyes, as though she had Oriental ancestry: her skin was flawless, her nose was delicate and slightly pointed, her chin was elfin and her eyes would have put a Manga character to shame.  Her hair was neatly coiled into a bun that sat just above the nape of her neck, and was skunk-striped.

“Corisette?”  Margoyle’s tone was flat and cold like the wind in a Canadian winter.  Corisette actually shivered slightly when Margoyle had finished saying her name.

“Yes,” she said.  “Like Anisette, only more bitter and toxic to cattle.”  She smiled, and little dimples appeared in her cheeks and chin.

“You look like a bowling ball when you do that,” said Margoyle.  “I’m finding it hard to resist the temptation to come over there and hurl you along the corridor and see how many interns I can knock over.  Try not to tempt me again.”

“You can’t do that!” said Corisette, the pitch of her voice rising in indignation.  “I’ve dated an HR manager, and I know that that’s harassment, and possibly intimidation.”

“You should probably meet our HR director then,” said Margoyle.  “Or at least read the company handbook.  We have slightly different policies than those you may be used to.”

“I couldn’t read the handbook,” said Corisette.  She looked longing at the chair opposite Margoyle’s desk, but didn’t dare sit down.  Not until she was invited to.  “It was inside the shredder in my office, and I couldn’t find any way to turn the shredder off to get the book out.  The shredder appears to have its own internal power supply, and… well I pushed an intern’s hand into it and now… now they’re in hospital.”  Margoyle raised an eyebrow that had been plucked almost to extinction and then had a miniature weave sewn in place.  It waved gently as though it were alive.

“And you’re about to start complaining about harassment?” she asked.

“We don’t pay interns, do we?” asked Corisette, looking meaningfully at the chair.  Margoyle ignored her.  “So they’re not really like us, right?”

“Many people dehumanise them,” said Margoyle.  “Why do you poison cattle?”

“I’m sorry?” Corisette didn’t look sorry, she looked annoyed that Margoyle had changed the subject.  Her dimples had disappeared, and her face was notably angular now.  Tiny little red blood vessels crowded the corners of her eyes.

“You said you were bitter and poisoned cattle.”

“Oh.  No, I don’t poison cattle, but the plant I’m named after does.  Corisette.”  Margoyle said nothing and toyed with a pencil.  “My mother was a naturist and she liked to name her children after the things she studied.  My sister’s called Wedlock and my brother is called Ramp.”

Margoyle smiled thinly, her lips pressed so firmly together to prevent any laughter escaping that they were a white version of her eyebrows.  When she felt she had herself back under control again, she looked Corisette in the eye.  “I hope you mean that your mother was a naturalist,” she said.  “I suspect your sister is actually called Hemlock too.  And your brother… –“

“I don’t like him.”  Corisette sniffed.  “He smells like garlic all the time.”

“… might just be accurately named,” said Margoyle.  “Why are you in my office, Corisette?  I don’t care about your family, or you for that matter.  I don’t care that you can’t get through the shredder – which is a test, by the way, that you can still fail if you try – and I’m not seeing the report I asked you for, either in my Inbox or in my inbox.  So why are you here?”

“I’ve been promoted,” said Corisette.  “I was told to tell you.”

Margoyle shrieked like a banshee at karaoke.  “This is a stalling action!”  You’re a diversion, aren’t you?”  Corisette’s face was as blank as her mind for a moment.  “You stupid little cow-poisoner!  You’re not promoted at all, only I can promote you!  You’re keeping me occupied why Jeronica takes the corner office on the third floor!”

“But… but she said –“

“She’d say anything to get you to keep me occupied!  You stupid little plant, you idiotic child of sludge, you simple-minded slime mould!  How could I be so stupid as to let you in here!  Get out!  Get out now!”

Corisette fled the office, turning left instead of right, and Margoyle smiled tightly, her bad mood gone as quickly as it had appeared.  Corisette should have gone left, back to her own office, but right would take her to the stairwell and the third floor, presumably to meet up with Jeronica and receive her reward for her treachery.

There was a surprisingly loud click, which Margoyle knew was a solenoid engaging and preventing the doors to and from the stairwell from opening.  Corisette would have used her standard access pass-card, not realising that Margoyle would have tracking programmes in all of Data Analytic Marketetic Normalisations systems, and little contingency scripts for… eventualities.  Something whumphed inside the building, and the floor rocked.  Margoyle waited.  Two minutes later exactly, by her watch, an intern tapped on her open door, and peered cautiously in.

“Security warning,” she said, her voice trembling.  “Apparently there’s been some kind of air lock in the stairwell and everyone is to use the lifts for the rest of the day.  Until the pressures can be equalised.”

Margoyle smiled, and her eyebrows waved at the intern like a sea-creature in a warm-water current.

Turning tables II

“Do you think he’s just here to have an orgasm with us?” asked another voice from around the table, this one female.

“No,” said the first woman.  “No, he wouldn’t be able to org….”  Her voice trailed away as she realised that was revealing too much.  All the faces around the table had turned to her, and though a couple looked shocked, several looked interested and one looked revolted.  “Arthur?”  she said, abruptly.  “Is that you Arthur?”

The table rocked enthusiastically from side to side, which Madame Sosotris knew for certain she couldn’t make it do with her pedals.  She treadled them a little anyway, and found them squishy, the hydraulics clearly failing to engage anything.  She treadled a little harder, just in case, but the table just ignored her.

“Itchy legs?” whispered a voice, a woman next to her leaning in to her.  Madame Sosotris’s skin crawled at the proximity of the woman, and she pushed back in her chair.  The legs groaned as they stuttered against the uneven floorboards.  She nodded, and to her relief the woman leaned away again.  The table started to rotate, rocking on the floor about half-way round the circle, and definitely gaining a little height.

“Arthur?” A man’s voice now, one Madame Sosotris recognised.  More voices around the table joined in, all asking if the spirit rocking the table was Arthur.  She cleared her voice, about to tell the room that the spirit’s never spoke directly, only through the medium, when the table suddenly stopped dead and dropped onto the floor.  Someone screamed, a tiny little scream that was heartfelt, and the people on either side of her tightened their grip on her hands.  All of the lights went out, and the curtains fell across the windows with a sound like a sail flapping in the wind.

“Arthur?” asked Madame Sosotris, her voice quavering.  She was instantly annoyed with herself, but as she was clearing her throat, which sounded a little like a tubercular cow, light returned and she fell as silent as the rest of the room.  On the table in front of them tiny motes of purple light were swirling around, drifting, a hologrammic Brownian motion.  For a moment there were just enough to capture attention, and then suddenly they were a column of light, thick and coruscant, that reached to the ceiling of the room.  Madame Sosotris squinted, trying to see if there was something in the light, and then chips of light seemed to slough away, falling to the table where they splashed and vanished.  This unnatural sculpting persisted for five minutes, after which the light presented the image of the statue atop Nelson’s Column.

“Arthur!”

“That’s Arthur?  Wasn’t he… well, fatter?”

“He was fat!  Very fat!  That’s not Arthur.”

“Oh come on, he wasn’t that fat.”

“He had to have help standing up.  How fat do you have to be before you’ll call someone fat?”

“Well…,”

“Hey, he’s pretty fat too.  Maybe Arthur really didn’t look so fat by his standards.”

“Lady!”

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said Nelson, his voice rolling around the room as though Madame Sosotris had a sound-system.  Heads turned, looking into the darkness that surrounded them, but they were all drawn back when Nelson spoke again.  “Why have you summoned me?”

“We have questions, Arthur,” said the female voice who’d identified his orgasm noise.  “You fell rather suddenly.”

“I was pushed,” said Nelson, the table shaking as he spoke.  Madame Sosotris flexed her fingers, trying to see if she could break the circle, but the people holding her hands tightened their grip.  “I was pushed, by my lieutenant.  It could happen to you all.”

“Not me,” said a male voice.  “No lieutenants.”

“Hah,” boomed Nelson.  “He was inspired by La Reveille, who I see has not accompanied you today.  Beware La Reveille.”

“We know,” said the woman who’d identified the orgasm noise.  “We know how you fell, Arthur.  You were lazy, you were incompetent.  It is no surprise that the Throne passed to another.  But we don’t have enough data on your Throne, and your little… ah, surprises, are causing us issues.”

“You knew?  You knew that I was targeted?”  The indignation in Nelson’s voice made it louder, and a couple of people around the table cringed.  Madame Sosotris pulled at the hands holding hers, now trying her best to break the circle, but still her neighbours gripped her tightly, squeezing.  “What honour is there amongst Thrones?” screamed Nelson, his face distorting with rage.  “And now you come here to ask me for my help?”

Madame Sosotris let herself fall off her chair and landed heavily on the floor, banging her tailbone.  Her arms ended up above her, her hands still held firmly in place.  She cursed softly under her breath.

“Arthur, you’re dead,” said the female voice.  “The concerns of this world aren’t yours any more.  Why don’t you be a little reasonable?”

“Hah!” Nelson’s face twisted into something that might have been a sneer.  “Hah, I might be dead but I’m certainly not impotent.  Each possessor of a Throne becomes part of the Throne when they die!  You haven’t seen the last of me!”

The hologram of the statue disappeared with a sharp crack and a sudden sea-fresh smell of ozone, and everyone’s hands were suddenly thrown apart, breaking the circle.  Madame Sosotris, her hands above her head, ended up clapping them together involuntarily, which drew everyone’s eyes to her as light leaked back into the room around the edges of the curtains, and she clumsily pulled herself up from the floor and back on to her chair.

“Payment,” she said, “needs to be made before you leave.”

Chihuahua preparing for snow

She was lying on her hot-water bottle, watching the net curtains.  They were moving very gently because the window they guarded was very slightly ajar.  Thankfully the breeze didn't reach her, but even if had, her hot-water bottle was freshly refilled and keeping her toasty-warm.
There had been talk of snow again, and she was wondering if she was going to have an opinion on that.  The last time she'd seen the snow it had been fleeting, clearly scared away when she barked at it.  She'd let it know that it was too cold and became wet when she tried to deal with it.  That had been very satisfying, though perhaps not as satisfying as lying here on her hot-water bottle.  She considered stretching, and decided that that ran the risk of not being so comfortable after her stretch.
There were noises in the background somewhere, and she listened to them, checking if they were too close, or too loud, or the wrong kind of noise.  She had a mental checklist of what was acceptable and what wasn't, and despite the warmth and comfort she would leap up and deal ruthlessly and quickly with anyone who didn't tick the right boxes.  The noises at the moment sounded like typical human noises, and so she waited for them to get interesting, or be joined by smells of cooking.
"Chihuahua," said a voice like the filigree spreading of frost on a window-pane.  "I have been looking for you."
Jack Frost, she thought, and lifted her head very slightly, turning it to see where he was.  He was perched on a chair across from her, his alabaster skin shimmering slightly in the light, and his breath clouding in the air.
"I need to you find the snow for me again," said Jack Frost.  "It is here somewhere, but it is hidden, and you did an excellent job last time."
She laid her head back down again, secure in the knowledge that on her hot-water bottle she was too warm for Jack to get any closer.  Hunting for snow had not, in her opinion, been either fun or worth the price he'd paid.
"I can pay more,"  he said, his words like icicles, hanging briefly in the air and then evaporating away to nothing.  It was hard to remember what he'd said after he finished speaking.  "I can pay... in flesh."
She lifted her head again and looked back at him.  That sounded rather more interesting.
"Two weeks," he said, holding up both his hands for emphasis.  She noted with only mild curiosity that he had six fingers and a thumb on each hand; clearly he meant two calendar weeks and not two working weeks.  That was a shame, as she worked only three days a week, and for about an hour and a half a day.  Sleeping and eating were the big entries in her diary.  "Two weeks to find me the snow."
She barked, a gentle little bark that meant "OK, now go away," and Jack Frost grinned like a gleeful manaic and disappeared in a tiny snowstorm that glittered in the air for an entire minute.