Barking (46 page)

For maybe as long as three seconds Duncan stood rooted to the spot, looking from the bunch of long, fine white hairs in his right hand to the comprehensively stuck unicorn vainly trying to wrench itself free. Then the fog lifted and he knew exactly what he had to do, and how little time he had to do it in before Bowden Allshapes realised that her best bet was to transform herself into some other life form that didn't have a great big spike sticking out of its nose. He grabbed blindly at the nearest bookshelf and felt his fingers tighten on something suitably wide and thick. As he swung it up to shoulder height he noticed in passing that it was Whitehouse and Stuart-Buttle on Revenue Law; not as chunky as Kemp and Kemp or Megarry and Wade, but formidable nonetheless and (thanks to its shiny cover) marginally more aerodynamic. He took a quick instinctive aim and let fly.

Tax statutes have put many people to sleep over the years, but never more efficiently or opportunely. The unicorn staggered, sort of came apart at the knees and folded up like a pasting table. Before she'd hit the ground, Duncan pounced. She was hanging by her horn, her head and neck off the floor, the rest of her messily flumped like used laundry on a teenager's floor. He landed on her ribcage with a soul-satisfying thump and reached out to grip her bottom lip with his left hand, while his right scrabbled to unbuckle and pull free his trouser belt. A simple loop through the buckle; a bit of a job getting it round her neck, but he got there in the end. When he was reasonably satisfied with the security arrangements, he dug his nails into the unicorn's lip and twisted—

‘Ouch,' she squealed, and opened her eyes.

Cue to let go of the lip and hold on tight to the belt with both hands. Sure enough, the unicorn vanished, to be replaced a nanosecond later by a huge and very hairy humanoid, presumably some variety of troll. But it had a neck, and Duncan jerked on the belt as hard as he dared without solid data on the breaking strain of leather-look plastic. The troll made a peculiar noise, choked and turned into—

Duncan rarely forgot a face, especially one capable of launching the regulation thousand ships. The face of the woman he was lying on was rather familiar, though of course he couldn't remember having seen it before . . .

‘All right,' she rasped. ‘Stop it, you're hurting.'

Not that lying on top of women had featured all that much in his life to date; but if this was typical, it was an overrated pastime. For one thing, their elbows dig into your solar plexus. He opened his mouth to say,
No, I'm not, you're dead, dead people don't feel pain
. But he didn't, for some reason. Instead, he slackened off the weight on the belt just a little.

‘We meet again, Bowden Allshapes,' he said.

He'd expected it to sound rather better than it did. She didn't seem particularly impressed. She just gurgled, ‘Get
off
me, you clumsy idiot, you're squashing my arm.' Curiously, it was one of the things Sally had said to him more than once during their married life, but all in all he was prepared to accept it as a coincidence.

‘No,' he said. ‘And don't go changing into a hedgehog or anything. It takes you just over two-thirds of a second to do a transformation. Think how tight I could get this belt in two-thirds of a second.'

A good argument clearly presented: the secret of successful advocacy. She called Duncan a very vulgar name and became perfectly still. Good old brute force, he thought. Trial by combat: an unjustly neglected branch of litigation, in his view, since it's invariably cheaper, quicker and fairer than the usual forms of dispute resolution used in the UK, not to mention a damn sight less traumatic for the participants.

‘All right,' she grunted. ‘Just think, though. If that Veronica happened to wander past right now, what do you think she'd make of us?'

‘Good point,' Duncan said, and stood up, dragging her to her feet with a brutal jerk of the wrist. ‘Attention to detail. I approve of that.' She yelped, and for a split second he grinned the relieved smile of the man whose theory has just been proved right. ‘Let's find an empty office or something and discuss this like civilised monsters,' he said.

As if on cue, he noticed a half-open door. It led into a sort of boardroom, with a long, shiny table and lots of chairs. He wrestled her into one of them with a couple of yanks of the belt, and sat down next to her.

‘Cosy, this,' he said. She gave him a look, but it bounced off. ‘Just to clarify before we get started. You do anything that makes me think you're about to change shape or something like that, and I'll pull hard on the belt and throttle you.' He paused and looked at her. ‘You don't like pain, do you?'

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well,' she said, ‘it hurts, you see.'

‘Quite. But you
really
don't like it. Which is odd, isn't it?'

‘No, actually. I think you'll find it's pretty unpopular generally. Like rice pudding, or the government.'

Duncan shook his head. ‘When Wesley Loop and I were beating the shit out of each other - actually, it was a bit more one-sided than that, but on the few occasions when I managed to land one on him, he hardly seemed to notice. And that bloke you were with earlier, your driver. George. I don't think they really felt anything, either of them. I mean, Wesley got annoyed when I threw him against walls, but it was just the inconvenience rather than agony or anything. I think they didn't feel it because they're dead. Or undead, or whatever the technical term is. I think pain's the body's way of warning you that you're about to come to harm. If you're dead already, why bother? It's just discomfort which serves no purpose. Well?'

She frowned, then nodded. ‘One of the perks of belonging to our organisation,' she said. ‘Like a health plan, only better, I think.'

‘But you—' He smiled. ‘You still feel pain, don't you? Because you're not like them. You're still alive.'

Her so-what shrug was nearly perfect, but not quite. ‘You make it sound like it's unusual,' she said. ‘But loads of people are alive every day.'

‘Not people like you.'

A slight glow of irrepressible pride as she answered, ‘There are no people like me. I'm unique.'

Duncan nodded. ‘Let's hear it for small mercies,' he said. ‘And don't even think about trying to change the subject. You're alive. You're this sort of incredibly rich and powerful zombie gangmaster, but you're not one of them. You never died. Did you?'

‘Oh, all right, then, if it means so much to you.' She pulled a face. ‘No, I never died. Call me an old stick-in-the-mud if you like, but—'

‘Sh.' She stared at him, but she shushed. ‘Now then,' he went on, ‘Luke Ferris told me that it's directly because of you that there's no natural wolves in Britain. Is that true?'

‘You say it like it's a bad thing.'

‘So it's true. Interesting. I don't know the exact date offhand, but according to the History Channel or David Attenborough or whoever I got it from wolves have been extinct here for over four hundred years. So if it was you who wiped them all out—' He hesitated, in case she denied it or something, but she just sat there trying to look bored. ‘I was going to say, four hundred years old, you've worn well, almost as well as Joan Collins. But then it occurred to me that I haven't got a clue what you look like. And I'm sitting here next to you.'

The bored look got a little colder and harder. ‘You do say the sweetest things,' she said. ‘Would you like to see me as I really am, Mr Hughes? Just say the word.'

‘Not really, no,' Duncan said very quickly, but too late. It was well over a second before he managed to snap out of it, jerk hard on the belt and look away. Strange, how something natural, like a human head, could be so much more repulsive than vampires or werewolves.'Would you mind terribly—?'

‘Sissy,' she said viciously. ‘I hate people who judge by appearances. It's all right,' she added. ‘The scary monster's gone now - you can look.'

He relaxed the strain on the belt, but didn't look back just in case. ‘As I was saying,' he croaked, ‘you're still alive. Unlike,' he added, ‘most four-hundred-and-somethings. The question really is, how?'

She sighed. ‘Oh, the usual,' she said. ‘Healthy diet, plenty of fresh air and exercise, five fresh fruit and veg a day. That sort of thing.'

‘That sort of thing,' Duncan repeated. ‘And a little bit of creative bookkeeping as well.'

He heard a hiss, as of breath sucked in sharply. ‘What's that supposed to mean?' she said.

Duncan turned to look at her. Mercifully, she'd gone back to being lovely and instantly forgettable. ‘It's where I come in, isn't it?' he said. ‘Because you're not the only one who's unique around here. Me too, in my own highly specialised way.'

Synthesised yawn. ‘There're all sorts of ways in which you're different from other people,' she said, ‘all of them either annoying or embarrassing or both. Simple tact—'

‘Also,' he went on, ‘it's how Luke got dragged into all this - him and the rest of the gang. I guess Luke must've said something about it to Wesley Loop, and he told you, and it all spiralled out of control from there. And there was me always assuming that Luke was the centre of the universe and I was just some sort of pathetic little moon or asteroid or something in orbit around him. And all the time, it was the other way round. It was all me, wasn't it? From the start.'

She didn't bother contradicting him. Instead, she looked at him with a lack of expression so complete that he could feel it dragging him in, like a black hole. ‘More than once I've asked myself,' she said, ‘why did it have to be you? Why couldn't it have been somebody
tolerable
? Possibly with some tiny vestige of a personality.'

That annoyed Duncan, and he scowled. ‘Wasn't, though, was it? It was me. Because I was the only kid in the school, the only human being on the whole fucking
planet
, who could've done that maths homework and got precisely that particular set of answers. Nobody else, not all the Nobel prize-winners and professors of pure maths and quantum-nuclear-astrophysicists. Only me.' For a moment, the unfairness of it all surged over him and left him speechless. Then he blurted out, ‘They were right, weren't they? My answers, to those questions. I got all the sums right.'

She made him wait a very long time before she said, ‘Yes.'

‘Not right for anybody else, of course,' he added bitterly. ‘Just for me.'

‘Well, of course. After all,' she added, ‘you're the only person in the world who does his sums in Base Ten Point One instead of boring conventional old Base Ten.'

Duncan looked up sharply. ‘Is that all it is?' he said, astonished in spite of himself. ‘One rotten decimal place out, and all this shit ends up happening to me?'

Her eyes were like the empty space between galaxies. ‘One decimal place is all it takes,' she said. ‘Just a very slight variation, so small you'd never notice under normal circumstances. Anything larger and it'd show, you see. It was essential that whoever I chose should look completely normal and ordinary, so nobody would ever notice. Ten-point-one instead of ten was pretty well perfect.'

Duncan sat very still and quiet for a second or two. Then he said, ‘And that's why I didn't die. That day in the classroom, when Luke bashed me and I hit my head on the pipe. Because of one decimal place.'

She sighed, as if he was being tiresome. ‘Be grateful,' she said. ‘The fact that you're point one out of phase with the rest of humanity saved your stupid life. I'd have thought only getting a B in maths instead of an A was a small price to pay for twenty years you wouldn't otherwise have had.' She slid a finger between the belt and her neck. ‘Look, is this really necessary?' she said. ‘I think we understand each other now. And if you understand, you'll see that your only possible future's with us. Certainly not with Luke Ferris or these—' She grinned. ‘These
people
. They may be colourful and mildly amusing for a while, but they can't help you. Only I can do that. You do see that, don't you?'

Duncan shook his head. ‘Other way round, though, isn't it?' He pressed his little finger against the belt, applying a very slight pressure. ‘You need me, I'm the only one who can save you.' Then he pulled a face. ‘Because of this - what did you call it? Variation? Out of phase? All sounds a bit
Star Trek
to me.'

Her voice became calm and businesslike. ‘It's perfectly simple and straightforward, actually. The thing about you is, you exist just a tiny bit out of step with everybody else. Basic, fundamental quantum theory; when the boffins get around to discovering it, in about twenty years from now, it'll all seem so blindingly obvious that we'll all wonder how we could've been so stupid as not to have figured it out before. Honestly,' she added with feeling, ‘scientists. Clueless, the lot of them. No imagination; they can't make the intuitive leaps. If you want them to think just a weensy bit out of the box, you've got to climb up a tree while they're snoozing and pelt them with apples.'

It took Duncan a third of a second to work out what she meant by that. Oh, he thought. ‘So that was you,' he said. ‘Sir Isaac New—'

‘Yes, that was me.' She sounded too bored to talk about it. ‘And a load of other stuff, too. A few nudges here and there, when the pace of research had slowed down to a pathetic snails-overtaking-on-the-inside crawl. Mostly, though, my part throughout history has been providing the funding. With what I give those useless nerds each year, I could buy South America. And after all that, they're still lagging way behind. Which is why—'