Leszátor's Cave

Isabella Bonfontaine tapped her foot.  Somewhere in the gloom above her, clinging to a rope, was the aristocratic, whiny, and unathletic Lord David Brackendell.  Around her were the rock walls of the natural chimney, and slightly to her left was an opening that looked man-made.  She’d already turned her head-lamp off and seen that there was a glow of  yellowish light coming through the opening, but David had started yelling and complaining so she’d had to turn the light back on.  She was seriously contemplating telling him that the floor was soft and just to let go.

“Izzy?  Are you still there Izzy?”  David’s voice echoed in the chimney and the words at the bottom blurred quickly into a seascape of sound.

“Yes!”  Her voice was crisp and clear and the echoes died away almost as soon as they’d arisen because she was speaking straight up, giving the sound least chance to spill from the cave.

“I think I’m stuck, Izzy.”

“It’s a rope, David.  You’re not stuck, you’re just scared.”

“I can’t move!”

“Well I think you should try and fix that,” she said.  “There was a spider’s nest at the top of the chimney, you probably saw it as you came over the ledge.  My experience with spiders tells me that they’re probably climbing the rope as well by now, seeing it as a welcome addition to their ecosystem.  They can’t be too far above you.”

There was a few seconds silence, and the rope jerked a little as though someone had started climbing down again.

“Izzy?”  Izzy, how much experience have you had with spiders?  Like, just garden spiders, house spiders, that kind of thing?”

“Well, last year in Australia there were Black Widows,” said Isabella thinking back.  There were no spiders at the top of the rope but she knew David was scared of them, and she had encountered a lot over the years.  “Earlier this year there were the corpse spiders, I never did find out the proper name for them.  That was Roumania I think, but I was over in Hungary as well in March, and that was where we found the giant spiders the size of a horse’s hoof.  And I mean a carthorse here, not one of those piddling little ponies you ride around your estate.”

There was a sudden rushing noise and then a thump as David landed heavily on the rock.  Isabella was pleased to see that he was still wearing his leather driving gloves; listening to him complain about rope burns for the next three days would quite possibly have driven her to stuffing his socks in his mouth and taping them there.

“I got unstuck,” he said, a little unsteadily.  Even the in the head-lamp – a small LED torch attached to a velcroed strip of cotton wrapped around her head – she could see that he was sweating.  Here underground, surrounded by rock and dripping water, it was too cool for that to be anything other than fear.

“That’s great,” she said.  “This way.”

“How do you know where you’re going, Izzy?  I thought this was all new to you too?”  There it was in his voice again, a little whine, a hint of entitlement that she’d been hoping he’d grow out of before they got this far.

“There’s two ways out, David,” she said patiently.  “This way, and back up the rope.”

“The rope with spiders on?  Are we leaving it here?”

She turned back and stared at him in amazement.  In the light of his torch he could clearly see that only three-quarters of her face seemed to work; a stroke some years earlier had paralysed the muscles from the corner of her mouth to the corner of her eye, so some of her expressions had become quite sinister as a result.  “It’s tied at the top,” she said at last.  “If you want to climb up, untie it, and then jump back down with it….”  She turned away.

“Then what?”

“Then you’ll break at least both your legs and I’ll leave you here,” she said.

“Oh.”

He was silent as she led the way to the corner, and then turned her lamp off again.  Stepping carefully around the rock, she found herself standing at the top of a rough-cut stone stairway.  Large sloping terraces of stone gradually descended the side of a vast cave until they reached a rough scree that covered most of the floor of the cave.  However, from this height it was clear that a path had been cleared through the scree, and – no, actually it looked more like a road, she thought.  It was too wide for a man to need or be bothered with, and the turns were fairly gradual, more suited to something wheeled than things with feet.  She followed it with her eyes, and realised that the yellowish glow was strongest where the road disappeared from sight.  She looked up next, the ceiling was hung with stalactites, some in full growth and others flattened and truncated.  It looked like at least some of the scree came from them breaking off and falling down.  All around was the continual trickle of water, punctuated by the occasional splash of a drop falling into a shaded pool.

“Come on,” she said, her voice low but firm.  “We need to get a little lower I think.”

“Where are we, Izzy?”  David appeared round the corner and she had to push him back and make him turn his lamp off too.  “I won’t be able to see where I’m going!”

“Follow me, and walk slowly,” she said.  “I will be, there’s a lot of loose rock in here.  But there is light in here, too, David, and that means other people.  Who might be very interested to know what you’ve hired me to find.”

“Would you tell them, Izzy?”  David felt for her hand and took it, and though she was tempted to shake him loose she decided that this might be easier than listening to him panic the whole way down.  She started down the steps, each step nestling between the loose rocks until she was sure she was stable.

“Perhaps,” she said.  “Some of them enjoy a little torture, others just want you dead before you can see anything really interesting.  The clever ones do.”

“But you’re not dead, Izzy.”  David sounded like he was trying to reassure himself, and Isabella wondered for a moment if she should tell him about her time in Roumania hunting for a woman who definitely had been dead several times and kept coming back for another try.

“There’s a first time for everything, David,” she said.  Then she stopped; she’d come far enough forward now to see the source of the light.  Round the corner of the rock, far down on the cave floor, she could see the entrance to a tunnel leading downwards whose walls were lined with electric lights and whose floor was set with rails.  The tunnel turned shortly after it started so she couldn’t see any further in, but it was now clear that this wasn’t a casual operation.

“Let’s go back,” she said.  “Turn round, David.”

“But there might be spiders!”

“And there might be guns here if we go further without a plan.  Now turn round!”

Office hours

Leslie DaFox’s office was strictly on a rental basis.  While he was teaching at the Camberwick Community Centre (easily identifiable from miles away by its ziggurat-style construction and Stalinist design ethic) he was granted an office, but the instant his contract expired the elite security force that he was increasingly suspecting came from the same school as the Okrana would lock him out and refuse him entry.  For the moment though, it was the middle of the term and the office was safely his.

It was astonishingly large.  His desk was three times the size he was used to, and as an experiment once he’d tried laying all of his students’ homework out on it, side by side in a neat paper matrix.  It had covered less than half of the available surface area.  His chair had arms, little extrusions on the rear legs to let you tilt it back safely, cushions (not one, but three!), a cup-holder(!) and an adjustable rear-view mirror on a little angle-arm.  There were five full-size bookcases lining the wall opposite his desk, it was a ten second walk from the door to his desk, and it was another three or four second walk from his desk to the windows.  The windows were the only real disappointment, being essentially glassed-over arrow slits, but the glass was rose-tinted and made the world outside look warm and friendly.  There were four filing cabinets, in one drawer of one of which he kept his students’ homework.  In an effort to make more use of the facilities he put his packed lunch in another drawer, and his satchel in a third, but he still worried that it looked like he wasn’t trying.

“This is impressive, Sir,” said Policeman Number 1, looking around him.  “Who did you murder to get this then, eh?”  He laughed in a heavy way that suggested he was really hoping that the clumsy question would elicit a confession from Leslie.

“Oh stop,” said Policeman Number 2.  “Mr. Fox is far too clever to admit to murdering anyone, aren’t you, Sir?”

Leslie said nothing, knowing that Policeman Number 2 was the more subtle of the pair but would still leap up and down like an excited puppy if he thought Leslie was admitting to not admitting to a crime.

“Sit down,” he said instead.  “My office hour starts in five minutes, so we will be here until that finishes.  Students may wish to come and visit and ask questions.  They will be asking questions of me, not you.  Let me repeat that.  They will be asking questions of me and not you.  You should not answer those questions no matter how tempting it might be.  They are here to learn.  You are here to harass me, make crude and lewd suggestions at inappropriate junctures, and waste tax-payers’ money.”

“Speaking of wasting tax-payers’ money,” said Policeman Number 2, “why do you have such a large office when you’re only teaching at a community college?  You could fit three of our offices in here, and that’s forty-eight officers.”

“I wish I knew,” said Leslie, sighing just a touch.  “There is something very odd about this place that I just can’t put my finger on.”

“What exactly is it you wish to put your finger on?”  Policeman Number 1 looked keen and attentive.

“You mean like employing a man who keeps murdering students in his lecture halls?  You can see why we have to be here in your office now, can’t you Sir?”

“Frankly, no.”  Leslie sat down in his chair and then remembered he needed homework from the filing cabinet.  He considered, briefly, asking one of the officers to get it but then decided that he didn’t want to have to explain how to operate a filing cabinet.  He stood up again.  “I’ve murdered no-one, you’ve never proven that I’ve even attacked someone, let along murdered them, and you persist in dogging me instead of conducting a serious investigation!  Good God, Miss Marple was more effective that your police force!”

“And who is she, please?”  Policeman Number 1 had produced his notebook and was writing the name down.  Leslie opened his mouth, but someone knocked on the door.

“Come in!” he shouted, and hauled the filing cabinet drawer open.

“Mr. daFox?”  He recognised the face of the student stood in the doorway looking scared, but he couldn’t remember his name.  The young man had the beginnings of a moustache, little cuts from shaving on his chin, watery grey eyes and a self-inflicted Justin Bieber haircut.

“Come in,” said Leslie.  “And tell these gentlemen your name so they don’t worry that you’re an accomplice.  Then ignore them as best as you can and sit down.  At my desk.”

“Uh, I’m Nigel,” said the young man.  “Nigel Parks.  Which chair, Sir?”  There were four chairs on the side of the desk opposite Leslie’s, and the policemen were picking from another twelve arrayed around the office.

“Any,” said Leslie, dextrous fingers finding Nigel’s last two submitted homeworks.  Neither had scored higher than a C.  “Now, I’ve got some homework to return to you, but first, do you have any other questions about the material we’re covering in class, the lectures in general, or… well, anything I suppose?”

“Why are there policemen following you around?”

Leslie smiled thinly and sat down.  He desperately wanted to say Because I’m an international playboy and suspected jewel thief but he was certain that both the student and the policemen would take him seriously.  It was like being in a badly-written sitcom – which by definition was not one of the ones he’d successfully written and sold in the seventies.  Three of his were still being re-run in Asia today.  “Apparently tax-payers have been over-paying and there’s a budget surplus,” he said.  “They come with the office.  Just ignore them, I do.”

“Oh,” said Nigel.  “Oh.  Well, in that case… er… I was wondering… when do we get to sleep with girls?”

Leslie took a closer look at Nigel, and in the process realised that the young man smelled of stale sweat and, if he wasn’t mistaken, camel.  Wet camel.

“This is a creative writing course,” he said.  “Sleeping with girls is part of the post-graduate syllabus, when you’ve actually written and sold something.  That class starts with an introduction to hygiene and aftershaves.”

“Oh.  Oh.  Well, is it still ok to sleep with boys in this class?”  Leslie’s jaw dropped before he could catch himself, so he desperately improvised it into a yawn.  “Only, Dave keeps telling me that we have to be sleeping with people if we’re real writers, and I think he’s kind of interested –“

Leslie leaned back in his chair, the extensions catching him and supporting him safely, and listened to a ten minute description of a love-life that would leave rabbits confused and frustrated.  At the end of it he reflected that he now had no idea what Nigel would or wouldn’t sleep with, and if he’d enjoy any of it anyway, and that this in no way made his, Leslie’s, life any better.

“Why don’t you write about this?” he said.  “Look, here’s your last homework.  Dreadful.  If I didn’t know you were paying for this course I’d think you were doing this deliberately to punish me.  Do you see on page two, that–“

“Excuse me?”  Policeman Number 2 held up a hand.

“What?” Leslie glared at him, using the same stare that had reduced his housekeeper to tears and impelled her to hide in the piles of wet laundry.

“Can he repeat everything after the bit about the tortoise, please?  We didn’t get it all down.”

“What?”

“Sure,” said Nigel looking animated.  “Did you get the ketchup bottle–“

“Yes!” said the Policemen in unison.

“That’s kind of why we missed bits after that,” said Policeman Number 2.  “But we have to take notes on everything that’s said around you, Mr. daFox.”

Leslie’s palm slapped audibly against his face.

“Go on,” he said, his voice dull and lifeless.  “Tell them again.” 

Six minutes (Skateway II)

The towering metal construction of the Skateway loomed over him as he walked towards the edges and the exit.  He could already see the very top of the grandstand ahead, where the crowds sat to watch the skaters on racedays.  The walls captured every small sound and bounced it around, so that echoes were continually born and died, even from his soft-soled Adibastards.  He considered re-engaging them as skates but his legs were achingly tired and he didn’t fancy trying to skate to the exit, where Damien would be waiting.  At least he’d know that Bryan had managed to skate 7’48; that was a small consolation.

Water splashed nearby and Bryan turned his head, puzzled.  The rain had slackened off a little while back, so the Skateway should have been nearly dry by now; the sheer metal surfaces didn’t hold the water, and contributed to the increased danger: the Skateway had sections that could flood in less than five minutes, and an unaware skater could easily get caught and drowned.  The fatality record for the Skateway was updated pretty much every month.  A stream of water jetted out from the top of a Skateway tower.  These were pylons that stretched up to three hundred feet above the track bed and were used for vertical races.  They had spiral slopes that intertwined around a central core, and the skaters would race head-to-head, one on each track attempting to reach the top first.  The tracks came close together at several points, and there were three symmetrically place points where they intersected and crossed-over.  These proximity points allowed pushing, shoving, and general gamesmanship and the Skateway tower challenge wasn’t supposed to happen unless the crash-mats were out to protect racers coming off worse in a squabble.

Bryan slowed, puzzled now.  There was no reason for water to be coming off the tower; there was only him and Damien at the Skateway now.  He watched as the water jet slowed to a trickle and then stopped altogether.  No-one appeared at the top of the tower though, and finally he started walking again.  A shout from the exit made him look up and force himself into a jog.

Thirty seconds later he could see the exit and Damien, who was grappling with two men, both taller and bulkier than him.  Damien swung at one of them, just missing his face, and then the other grabbed him from behind, his arms snaking over Damien’s and pinning them back.  Damien’s face contorted and he tried to kick backwards, but the other man now punched him in his stomach, and Bryan almost doubled up in sympathy.  Damien seemed to go limp, his face suddenly white, and Bryan tried to run faster to catch up to them.

“Skateway locked,” boomed the mechanical voice from the PA system.  All around Bryan the air seemed to gel suddenly and he was pushed – almost squeezed – backwards several feet until the air loosened its grip again and he was stood just inside the Skateway’s forcefield wall.  He punched at the air, which caught and slowed his fist.  Beyond the transparent wall Damien was being dragged towards a flight-car.

“Unlock!’ shouted Bryan.  “Unlock!”

“Denied,” said the mechanical voice.  “Conditional unlock instigated.”

“What?”

“Unlock is only permitted to those who race the Skateway in six minutes or less,” said the mechanical voice.  “Conditional unlock instigated.”

Six minutes?  Bryan’s heart sank and his knees felt weak.  His calves, which had been longing for him to sit down and rest felt like they were burning again, just thinking of trying to complete the course.  That was nearly two minutes faster than his best-ever time.  How could he race the Skateway that fast?  He looked over at Damien and saw that he had been bundled in the flight-car now, and the door shut behind him.  The two men were going round opposite sides of the car to get in and drive away.  What choice did he have?

“I’ll race!” he said, his voice quivering slightly.

“Challenge accepted,” said the mechanical voice.  Moments later a lifter sank down; a small but heavy platform that flew on predefined paths and carried racers from one part of the Skateway to another for competitions, mostly so that they were fresh at the start of the race.  Bryan stepped on, and it lifted up.

“Skateway shutdown initiated,” said the mechanical voice.  “Forty seconds to close.”

Bryan was looking at the flight-car, watching as the front-doors slid shut and the car lifted off into the air straight away.  Where the hell were they taking Damien?

“Thirty seconds to close.”

He blinked, and looked down.  The Skateway is shutting down?  Shutdown meant that everything would switch off.  Including the forcefield walls!

“Twenty seconds to close.”

And the lifter.  He didn’t look, he just jumped.  The higher the lifter got, the further there was to fall.  He fell for long enough to wonder what was taking him so long to hit the ground, then something solid smashed into him, jarring his whole body and knocking the wind out of his lungs.

“Ten seconds to close.”

He felt himself start to slide, but nothing worked, nothing wanted to move.  He could taste iron in his mouth, probably blood.  His arms felt weird, as though they weren’t quite there any more.  His back was a molten column of fire, and his legs just felt heavy.  There was a screech, flesh against wet metal and something tugged at his face.

“Shutdown.”

Two seconds later the bang of the lifter slamming into the steel structure of the Skateway was enough to knock him unconscious.

Skateway

It was raining and the Skateway had issued its third fatality warning of the hour.  The mechanical voice boomed around the track, bouncing off the hard steel surfaces, all corners and reflections, echoing oddly in the covered sections and barely audible at all in the underpass.  Bryan ignored it, concentrating instead on the hot feeling in his legs as fatigue caught up with him.  On his feet, his Adibastard skates hummed slightly, and the water they were slicing through swished each time he switched his weight and thrust his leg forward.  The last of the covered sections was approaching, a fifteen metre stretch of tunnel that contracted and narrowed until it was barely wide enough to fit through and the ceiling was a hand’s reach above his head.  He felt his stomach contract a little at the thought of going into it.  Some of the other skaters made jokes about it, calling it the Womb and talking about rebirth at the end, but he could never shake the dread of losing his balance in there where there was no room to wipe-out.  The thought of bouncing haphazardly off the walls, tumbling through propelled by his skates until being spat out at the other end, a broken, bloody wreck, had given him nightmares when he was younger.  He’d woken screaming so many times in the night that his mother had taken his skates away.  Two days later after non-stop screaming she’d given them back and sound-proofed his room with egg-boxes.

He sped through the covered section going slightly faster, his legs protesting but obeying, and shot out of the other end.  The Skateway banked here, of course, and he rode up the bank slightly, getting dangerously close to the top where he could see out and down to the train station six hundred feet below, and then lowered his body and tucked his arms in to his sides.  More aerodynamic now he zoomed down the Skateway, reaching the floor of the track and throwing up a sheet of silvery water behind him.  The hiss of the water and the thump of blood in his ears took over his senses completely and his legs moved almost robotically until there was a sudden flash of light and he was across the finish line.

“Seven minutes and forty-eight seconds,” said the mechanical voice of the Skateway.  This time it came from a local speakerbox rather than the PA system, and was easier to understand.  “Time locked.”

Bryan came to a halt, describing several graceful, tightening curves to come back to the speakerbox slowly.  His Adibastards purred as they powered down to minimum.

“Time locked?” he asked.

“Time locked.  The Skateway is too dangerous for skating.”

Bryan shook his head; the time was his best yet for the course, though still a long way off the five-and-a-half minutes that some of the skaters could achieve.  Time locked meant that the Skateway would keep the record but he’d have to petition to have it made public, and of course he’d been there when the Skateway had been declared too dangerous to skate.  Which was the only time it was ever empty enough to get a good time unless you could afford to pay for a private session.

“Right,” he said, feeling slightly embarrassed at talking to a computer.  “Doesn’t seem that dangerous to me.”

“Your opinion wasn’t solicited,” said the Skateway.  Bryan started to walk away, though he cast a curious glance at the speakerbox.  Lots of people must have said something similar for that to be a programmed response, he thought.

Salt and smoke

When I schlepped out of the Corner Pie House my stomach was full with… well, let’s leave it at something meaty, and my mind was overflowing with thoughts.  The evening had started off with a simple visit to Little Boy Blue and had gone wildly off the rails since then.  Natasha Monkeybutt showing up had been bad enough, but another sighting of the deliciously prestidigitational Miss Sapphire and the mention of Mad Frankie had done nothing but boost my dyspepsia.  Then Jackie, Belle Peep, the Corner Pie House, and now a suggestion that Jack Crown might be watching me.  I needed somewhere where I could lie down, listen to my bones creak and my tendons snap, and think about what was going on.  The trouble was, it was the wrong time of day, or rather, it was night-time.  I share a room with a hard-working young man with the deal being that I have the room during the day and he has it at night.  It maximises the utility of the room, which should make any amateur economist happy, and by happy coincidence we maximise the use of the bed too.  In my case by sleeping in it, and in his case by the sheer volume of clients he… takes care of.  We’re a boon to the economy also as the sheets have to be replaced roughly weekly, though we argue over who puts the most wear and tear to them.  So going home wasn’t an option for at least another five hours.

I trudged up the street, avoiding the piles of rubbish and walking through the puddles of liquid.  They might have been water when they fell from the sky, but they’d have been added to since, and now only needed a lightning strike to start the evolution of life all over again.  My shoes have seen worse though, and my trouser cuffs are permanently soggy; the doctors occasionally marvel that I haven’t got trench-foot, trench-ankle, and trench-shin.  That is, until they discover the athlete’s foot and exactly how pernicious it is, and then a look of understanding comes over their faces as they recoil, holding tongue depressors before them in whatever religious symbol they prefer, and attempt to exorcise me from their offices.  I’ve heard it said that there are no atheists in foxholes, and while I’ve been in a few foxholes, taking my shoes off and showing the ends of my legs to people seems a more sure-fire way of finding what God there is in a person.

Left at the top of the street, turning a corner housing a greengrocer on one side and some residential houses on the other.  They were tenement buildings, once town houses but now taken over by several families and divided up amongst them.  The windows housed cracked glass, darkened by smoke and years without cleaning and tattered curtains fluttered at only a couple of them.  A pale face like an anaemic ghost peered out of one briefly, not seeing anyone in particular on the streets below, and then was cuffed away by a fist like a shovel.  I stepped heavily on a soft turnip that squished, and remembered that I should look where I’m going.

The street at the top, Cuttermonger street where the knife-sellers used to sell out at three and then hide behind their shutters until the fighting died down and the participants had died off still had knife-sellers on it, joined now by the wok-istas who cooked street food in huge, hot, cast-iron bowls over charcoal fires.  Smells of smoky spices filled the air, some from the food and others from the sticks of lemon-grass and cinnamon that the vendors threw on the coals deliberately.  Meats, neat little cubes coated in marinades that made it impossible to guess what they were, sizzled in pans as people stated their orders and proffered their money; ginger, garlic, chili peppers, water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, and river-shrimp were added, and sauces, usually sticky and sweet, redolent of memories of other people’s childhoods, were poured over.  Then a handful of salt, large flat crystals that seemed inclined to rest on the surface like dandruff, was thrown on at the last minute before it was all scooped out with a little wire net and dumped unceremoniously into a cardboard box whose bottom would give out in five minutes, so you had to eat fast.

Normally I avoided Cuttermonger street because it made me hungry and smell like a three-day-old barbecue pit, but having just eaten a decent meal for the week I was feeling like I could handle it, and I breathed deep as I walked along.  Salt and smoke, two of my favourite smells in all the world.

At the end of the street I turned left again, and started down Nobs Hill.  The houses here were smaller but better kept; the people here still had pride, and one or two, during daylight hours at least, would run out and chase the likes of me away with brooms, tea-towels, and occasionally secateurs.  There was no real money here, just a determination not to be seen to not have any.  Now, with evening behind me and the night beckoning invitingly, the householders were all inside, tucked up in their beds with threadbare blankets, kept warm more by their dogs than their pride, and the street was mine to walk down.

And of course, the real indicator of wealth for a neighbourhood is what else is there other than the houses.  At the bottom of Nobs Hill was the overflow morgue, outside whose doors I stopped.

Distillation

Distillation, not accumulation.  The words were scrawled on the white tiles of the kitchen wall, about three inches from the floor, in blood.  Perhaps an inch and a half away from the words was a hand which appeared to have been physically torn from an arm; the stump was ragged and tendons and other bits of dark red tissue stretched out behind it in the general direction of the living room.  The fingers were blood-stained too, and it would appear that the author had used the hand as a pen of some kind, though where the blood they’d used as ink was now was anyone’s guess.  Detective Lindsay checked the sink, looking for signs that it had been poured away, while Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett stood and shuddered at the horror of the scene.

“It looks like it might be murder, ma’am,” said Detective Lindsay.  She’d found only old crockery and a bristleless brush in the sink, and it was reminding her of a modern art installation.

“I do hope not,” said Mr.s. Bennett.  She sounded oddly determined.  “That’s my mother’s hand!”

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian, pushed her chair back from her typewriter, got up and went to the kitchen, got out a rough cloth and wetted it, and started rubbing the tiles walls down.  This was the fourth time today that her writing had gotten to her enough to trigger her slightly obsessive desire for cleanliness, and she knew she’d know no peace until she was sure that her kitchen walls were spotlessly clean, and she checked all the corners for discarded hands.  She sighed as she scrubbed, aware that what she was doing wasn’t quite normal, but equally aware that fighting it just made it worse.  She’d tried hiring a maid to do these things for her a couple of months ago, but the girl had first quit and then tried to take her to a tribunal claiming that her demands were unnatural and inappropriate.  The court-room had been brown and drab, and the lawyers had been young, well-scrubbed, and somehow depressingly eager to see a fair resolution for everybody.  The clerk of the court had been an alcoholic she was sure, she had smelled the fumes of Uisghe on him when he came into the room, and his typewriter didn’t have enough keys to hold the whole alphabet.  The judge however… well, her first thought had been to dismiss him because he was clearly a pervert, but then as it became clear to everyone that he had been hoping the case was about predatory lesbians and the kinds of things that only happened in smutty movies she had warmed to him.  With every new revelation his face would brighten and he’d ask questions like, “Did you expect her to clean in the nude?” or “And did you insist that she rub herself with the brush first?” and, at the end, “Couldn’t you have even asked her to take her socks off in front of you?”.  He’d shuddered quite a lot with that question, and then he’d seemed to relax somehow.

“Case thrown out,” he’d yelled.  “There is clearly no case to answer for.  How dare you all waste my time by bringing this before me!”

“Expenses, milud?” Janet’s lawyer had said quickly.

“For the defendant,” snapped the judge.  “Doubled if the prosecution wants to complain.”

And that was that, except that she still had no-one to keep the kitchen appropriately clean, and she was trying to write a detective novel.  She could see it might be a long process.

The novel was intended to be a prequel to Bride of Prejudice to explain to people why the protagonist’s mother had deserved such unpleasant things to happen to her.  Janet was tired of turning on comedy shows to find them still satirising her works, and of turning on the radio and finding reviewers still discussing her alleged mother-hatred, and even of going to the university as a guest speaker and being asked leading questions about the untimely and slightly mysterious death of the major reviewer of her works.  To set the record straight at last she intended to present the story of Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett and why the wretched woman, after giving birth to an unwanted child, had deserved to end up a sex-slave at the bottom of Ireland’s last coalmine and then drown to death when the miners inexplicably struck oil.

“Though,” she muttered to herself as she scrubbed the gleaming white tiles, “I would have thought it obvious that she just deserved it!”

So Mrs. Elizabeth Bennett was, in her very early twenties, a detective working on a small-town police force in rural Ireland, expecting the kinds of crimes you get in places where there are only forty people, one school, eight hundred head of cattle and no cars.  She worked with Detective Lindsay, who had all the imagination of last winter’s potato, and she found herself embroiled in an Ireland-wide conspiracy to resurrect the infection agent responsible for the Potato Famine and transport it to the food states of North America.  Janet intended that Elizabeth’s actions would cause the deaths of innocents, which would in turn justify the horrible end that she came to in Bride of Prejudice.  

“They won’t be able to criticise me after this!” she muttered, her teeth gritted as she tried to shift entirely imaginary bloodstains.

Finally satisfied that the walls were clean enough and the dark corners were free of severed appendages, she sat back down at the typewriter.

“Your mother’s hand?” said Detective Lindsay opening the oven and peering inside.  “Why would she leave it here?  Do you think she knew Mrs. O’Green?”

“We all knew Mrs. O’Green!”  Mrs. Bennett contemplated hitting Detective Lindsay with the greasy frying-pan sitting on the counter and claiming that it had fallen off.  “Mrs. O’Green ran the General Store for nearly fifty years before her son made her retire last year!  There’s no-one living in this town who hasn’t bought soap or condoms from her!”

Detective Lindsay straightened reflexively and caught her head on the oven.  She cursed like a nine-year old, and backed more cautiously out of the oven.  She rubbed her head, glaring at Mr.s. Bennett.

“The Pope has banned condoms!”

“Mrs. O’Green was Protestant.”

“Did you buy condoms from her?”

Mrs. Bennett looked at Detective Lindsay and wondered what the poor woman thought she would do with condoms and no boyfriend in a town this small.  The fourteen-year-old boy who’d had sex with his second cousin last week in a hayrick was currently the hot gossip topic, and he’d done that at midnight two miles away.

“No,” she said patiently.  “And neither did my mother.”

“Oh!  Your mother’s hand!”  Detective Lindsay pointed at the hand on the floor, and Mrs. Bennett sighed heavily.

“Yes,” she said.  “Oh dear.  I think I’ve just seen her other hand behind the door.”

Janet sighed as well, and got up to check behind all the doors in the house.

The Hook

The Hook was a restaurant on the edge of the forest. Little Red Riding Hood liked going there for dinner with her grandmother, partly because the old lady always paid, and partly because of the paintings on the walls. They were done by local artists and were usually portraits, either of dinner guests or local dignitaries. Mayor Wolf had the biggest portrait, paid for by himself.
"What do you fancy then, dear?" asked Grandmother, peering myopically at the menu. "I think I might have the sushi."
Red, who was well aware that they were over three hundred miles from the sea and wouldn't have eaten the sushi if Mayor Wolf himself was demanding it, smiled politely. "I think I'll have three little pigs in blankets," she said. "With a port wine reduction. Grandmother, why is this place called the Hook?"
Grandmother's face grew solemn and she laid the menu down.
"Now there's a tale," she said, frowning. "And it starts with the death of your parents."
"My parents aren't dead," said Red, startled.
"About that, dear...."

Red sighed and let her chin rest on her hands.  Her face was striking, her hazel eyes were slightly too-wide-set but her nose turned up just a little at the end and her lips were a perfect cherubic bow, as bee-stung as the boy who tried to steal the bees’ honey.  “OK,” she said.  “I know that my parents can’t be my real parents.  That’s been obvious for a while, Grandmother.”

Grandmother waved at a waiter, her hand shaking just a little and a querulous smile on her face.  The waiter nodded stiffly and continued to take the orders of the table he was serving.

“Well, I confess I did hope that you might have noticed,” she said, her voice firm and gentle.  “What was the tip-off then?”

“Dad took me the longest,” said Red, wrinkling her forehead as she thought back.  “I suppose I just actually wanted him to be my Dad, but when I started studying biology I had to accept facts. The Gingerbread man couldn’t have had a human daughter.  In fact, he couldn’t have a daughter in any real sense of the word.”

“He did try, you know,” said Grandmother thoughtfully.  “There was this baker, a red-head as I recall… oh, you look like you’d rather not know, dear.”

Red smiled, her plump lips pressed thin.  “So he couldn’t be my real father,” she said.  “I cried myself to sleep the night I finally accepted that, but I woke up in the morning and realised that he’d been acting like my father all my life, so who was I to tell him he wasn’t, in some sense, my real father?  It’s not like mum didn’t shout that kind of thing at him all the time.”

“Oh yes,” said Grandmother.  The waiter, with a sour look on his face, appeared at her elbow.  “Oh, how kind!”  Her voice was suddenly quavery and she sounded a little uncertain of herself.  Red watched the transformation and tried not to smirk.  “Would you recommend the sushi, my dear boy?”

“Yes,” said the waiter with feeling.  “Absolutely.”

“Oh, well I’m allergic to fish,” said Grandmother.  “But you seem like a lovely young man, and with such an obvious love for the food you serve!  I shall order you the sushi and you shall sit here and eat it with us.  I’ll have Milanese Risotto, please.”

“I’ll have the three little pigs in blankets,” said Red, smoothly stopping the waiter from protesting.

“Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” asked Grandmother, laying one fragile, liver-spotted hand on the waiter’s crotch, which was conveniently at shoulder height for her.  The waiter nearly convulsed, but remained standing.

“I’m sure I’ll remember,” he said, his voice sounding trapped in his throat.  He started to walk backwards, but Grandmother’s hand tightened.

“I’d like you to write it down,” she said.  “I really would.  I’d hate to see you lose your job over a mis-taken order.”

The waiter produced his order pad and wrote down the order with ill-grace, his pencil scribbling over the pad like a spider on speed.  When Grandmother insisted on reading the pad and correcting his spelling he went puce but didn’t say anything, and Red had to quietly award him a bonus point in her head for coping with Grandmother so well.

“Thank-you, that’ll be all,” said Grandmother at last, letting go.  The waiter vanished so rapidly that there was a draught left behind him.

“So, your mother?” said Grandmother, all traces of little old lady disappearing again.

“Oh, I knew she wasn’t my mother early on,” said Red.  “I found her diary.”

“Her diary?”  Grandmother leaned forward, her pearls falling softly from the neck of her dress and clinking on the cutlery.

“Longing for Kansas,” said Red.  “It was full of stories of her life in some other place, a strange place where animals were somehow retarded and humans did inhuman things to one another.  It talked about Toto, which was her dog until he died, and had her real name in it.  Dorothy.”

“Oh yes,” said Grandmother.  “Strange name, it always puts me in mind of milking stools and churns for some reason.”

“You’ve never milked a cow in your life!”

“Well, not personally, no.”  Grandmother smiled.  “And did you decide that she had been acting like your mother long enough that she was your real mother too?”

“No.  She acted like a spoiled child my whole life so far,” said Red.  “I get through most of it simply because I can remind myself that I’m not her daughter.”

Grandmother laughed and sat back.  Her chair creaked slightly, possibly because she had two shortened katana strapped to her back and concealed beneath her heavy linen blouse.

“So my real parents are dead, are they?” asked Red.  She was thinking about that, wondering why she didn’t feel very sad.

“No,” said Grandmother.  “The gingerbread man and Dorothy are dead.  They died this afternoon when Dorothy found the red slippers we hid.  She put them on, tapped the heels together three times, and summoned a hurricane.  It tore down the kitchen and pantry, killed both of them, and then drifted off to terrify the grim brothers who live on the cliff-top.

“What?”  Red felt the shock hit her like a splash of icy water.  Her father was dead?

“Well, we hid the shoes because we knew they were booby-trapped,” said Grandmother.  “We’ve been trying to break the spells for ages.  It seems that Dorothy must have found out where we hid them and got them out.  She always was stubborn and stupid, a lethal combination if you ask me.”

Red stared across the table at the woman who’d trained her to be an assassin, had taken her from a complex family dynamic and given her a purpose that helped everything make sense, and wondered if she was truly as sociopathic as she seemed.

“Dad’s dead?” she said.  “Really dead?”

“Yes,” said Grandmother.  “Crumbs.  And at least half-eaten by the crows afterwards.”

Red started to cry, tiny silver trails of tears silently flowing over her pink cheeks.

“Oh, and both your real parents are dead too,” said Grandmother.  “We may as well get all this family stuff out of the way in one fell swoop, I suppose.”