Open Sesame (32 page)

There were times when John Fingers was convinced that day would last for ever; but it’s a long road that has no turning (the M25 is a good example) and eventually —

‘Is that it?’ he asked his shadow.

‘That’s it.’

He might well have hazarded a guess without the help of his two-dimensional guide. The bleak and barren landscape, the forbidding rampart of wind and frost-eroded stone rearing up out of the flat desert, the great cleft riven into the cliff face, even the vultures wheeling insolently in the clear, cruel sky; with such unambiguous dollops of symbolism as these you didn’t need signs saying THIS WAY TO THE SECRET CAVERN and LAST PETROL BEFORE THE BANDITS’ LAIR to know what was coming next. It was as if Nature and Narrative had met up in the bar beforehand to discuss the design and decided that subtlety is for wimps.

‘Skip.’

Sigh. ‘Yes?’

‘Are we nearly there yet?’

‘Not quite,’ John Fingers heard himself saying. ‘I mean, that’s it over there. Isn’t it?’

Even as he spoke, a sickening feeling of deja vu began to spread through him, making his flesh crawl. This place —

‘You.’

‘Me, Skip?’

‘That big flat boulder over there. Can you see it?’

‘I can see lots of boulders, Skip. Any particular one?’

‘The black one,’ said John Fingers. ‘Nearest to us, with the thorn tree alongside. Isn’t that where we put out the empties for the milkman?’

Sure enough; when Aziz and Hanif managed to drag the boulder a few inches clear and drop into the large dome-shaped cavern underneath, what did they find but a huge cache of empty bottles and a note, scrawled on a piece of charred vellum and reading: ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX PINTS TODAY, PLEASE.

Fine, John Fingers muttered to himself, God only knows why I remember this horrible place so vividly, but I do. And, if my theory’s right, that crack in the rock there is the letterbox, and you open the secret sliding door by waiting till the guard’s back is turned and leaning on that small projecting rock there…

‘Aziz.’

‘Skip?’

‘Just see if there’s any post in the box, there’s a good lad.’

For a moment it looked quite promising, as Aziz clambered out with his arms full of envelopes. Once they’d sorted out the junk mail, however, there was nothing left except a receipt from the lawn mower people and a dead lizard.

And then they were standing in front of a breathtaking curtain of sheer grey rock, extending upwards into the sky like the biggest, nastiest office block you ever saw, and John Fingers knew they’d arrived at the front gate. Something less like a gate you’d be hard put to imagine; all the king’s horses, men and heavy artillery couldn’t smash a hole in that lot, not in a million years. The only discordant notes were the doorknocker, a hundred feet above the ground and made of solid brass, and the little plaque saying Beware Of The Dog.

‘What Dog?’

‘Ah,’ said Aziz, grinning. ‘We haven’t actually got a dog. We just put that there to frighten away burglars.’

‘We get a lot of them, do we?’

‘Burglars? Well, no; except us, of course, but we live here, so we don’t count.’ Aziz considered the point, obviously for the first time. ‘Hey, it only goes to show how well the notice works, eh, Skip?’

John Fingers stood for a moment, staring upwards until he began to feel dizzy, and wondering what in hell’s name he was doing there. Then he remembered; treasure. Ah yes, the treasure. According to these idiots, behind that massive slab of rock there was a very large jackpot indeed. When he’d tried to get specific details, the idiots had been a bit vague; call him prosaic if you like, but John Fingers didn’t consider inexhaustible and beyond the dreams of avarice to be satisfactory terms of measurement. Going by the rough internal dimensions of the cavern which he’d finally managed to prise out of them, and taking a fairly arbitrary standard for the amount of gold bullion you could pile up in a square metre, he reckoned there was enough there to buy three fairly standard passenger airliners, and almost enough to pay the interest on public sector borrowing for an hour. That much. The dreams of avarice, if avarice had eaten too much cheese the night before. John Fingers found his enthusiasm slowly seeping back.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Anybody got the key?’

Aziz looked at him. ‘There isn’t a key, Skip,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to say the magic words.’

John Fingers made a small growling noise, like a tiny dog trying to pick a fight with a Charolais bull. ‘And what are the magic words, then?’ he asked.

‘Stop kidding around, Skip,’ Aziz replied. ‘You’re a great kidder, you are.’

‘That’s me all over,’ John Fingers replied. ‘Look, you lot stay here and don’t move. I’m just going to, er, look at something.’

Having retreated to a respectable distance, John Fingers positioned himself carefully between the sun and the ground, and said, ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Well,’ he said impatiently, ‘what’s the bloody password?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ replied his shadow. ‘Come off it. Everybody knows the password.’

‘Then it must be a singularly useless password if everybody knows it. Except, it would seem, me.’

‘Everybody,’ the shadow explained, ‘on your side of the Line. You probably learned it at your mother’s knee; you know, when you were little and she told you stories.’

John Fingers’ face hardened, indicating an extreme level of tact deficiency. ‘Not me,’ he replied, ‘on account of my mother not telling me stories. Lies, yes. Like, I’d ask her, Mummy, why’s my carrycot full of pretty beads and why mustn’t I tell the lady at the till about them. Then, when I was three and a bit, we started Elementary Shoplifting and Mugging for the Under-Fives. Never any time for stories in our family. So what’s the password?’

The shadow seemed taken aback. ‘But you must know the story,’ it said, bewilderment clogging its voice. ‘Everybody knows the … Except you, apparently. Bugger me, just my luck, we’re going to have to do this the hard way. All right, watch the rock to your left.’

‘Why?’

‘Just shut up and do as you’re told.’

John Fingers shrugged and looked.

‘It’s a rabbit,’ he said.

‘That’s just to give you the idea,’ the shadow said, as a silhouette rabbit waggled its ears at him from the cliff-face opposite. ‘Now then, concentrate.’

‘What? Oh I see, right. Two words. First word, door. Gate. Something like a gate. Something swinging, something opening, no, shorter, open. Open. Right, next word. Three, oh right, three syllables. Nasty smell, stink, lavatory, drains, like drains, sewers, cesspit, shorter, oh, right, cess. Open cess. Next syllable, sandwich, eating, sandwich filling, God I hate this game, I was always lousy at it when I was a kid, sandwich filling let’s see, chicken tikka, no, prawn, tuna fish salad, cheese, ham, oh right. Open cess ham. Last syllable, finger pointing, finger pointing at me, me. Open cess ham me.’

‘Again.’

‘Open cess ham me. Hey, what a peculiar password.’

‘Again.’

‘Open Sesame’

Whereupon sesame opened.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

‘Hello , this is Michelle Partridge’s answering machine, I’m sorry there’s nobody here to take your call right now, so if you’ll leave your name and where the hell have you been, we’ve been worried sick about you.’

What constitutes a telephone depends on which side of the Line you happen to be. Storyside, of course, they don’t have the banana-shaped pieces of plastic we have here; instead, they use seer-stones, crystal balls, magic mirrors and similar gadgets, which work on pretty much the same principle but don’t go wrong quite so often, and you don’t have to pay the standing charges. Until recently, it was virtually impossible to patch into the Storyside network from Realside, and vice versa. With privatisation and the abolition of the BT monopoly, the advent of Mercury and the like, the situation has changed and, in theory at least, you can now gabble away across the Line to your heart’s content. In practice, of course, it’s not quite so simple; even so, it’s still easier to ring Tom Thumb or the Seven Dwarves than, say, Los Angeles.

‘Sorry,’ Michelle replied. ‘Look…’

‘And speak up, will you? I can hardly hear you.’

‘Sorry,’ Michelle hissed, closing her hand around the small silver ring she’d just borrowed from her father. ‘Look, I’ve got to whisper, I don’t want anybody to hear me.’

‘Then you’re going the right way about it. I can’t, for starters.’

‘Anybody here. I’m a prisoner in a cave. I’m talking to you on a mirror.’

‘A what? Hey, have we got a crossed line?’

‘… Kate Moss, Drew Barrymore, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Demi Moore…’

‘It’s this blasted mirror,’ Michelle explained. ‘Used to belong to a wicked stepmother; you know - mirror, mirror, on the wall, all that sort of thing? Anyway, why I’m calling is —’

‘.. .Julia Roberts, Yasmin Le Bon, Elizabeth Hurley…’

‘— Because I need you to do something up for me, quick as you can, and call me back. Okay? Probably won’t take you five minutes; you can get the vacuum cleaner and the kitchen steps to do the heavy lifting.’

‘I can try,’ the answering machine replied. ‘But listen, what do you mean, captured? And where exactly are you? I’ve been trying to get your number from the exchange but it doesn’t seem to want to tell me.’

Michelle scowled. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll call you back. What I need you to do —’

‘… Jerry Hall, Helena Christensen, Kelly Klein, Isabella Rosellini…’

‘Is, get the big bottle of olive oil from the cupboard under the sink and a really large flowerpot, block up the drain hole in the bottom, get a saucer or a small plate or something—’

‘… Esther Rantzen, Judi Dench, Margaret Thatcher…’

Michelle swore under her breath. ‘It’s no good,’ she muttered, ‘this stupid thing’s on the blink again, I think somebody must have dropped it or banged it or something. Look, I’ll have to call you back.’

‘Yes, but…’

The mirror went dead, leaving Michelle with a momentary feeling of great and frightening distance, such as one might expect at the end of a tantalisingly brief contact with the normal and everyday. Then she reflected that she’d just been asking her answering machine to get her hoover to go through the kitchen cupboard, which put things back in perspective somewhat.

‘Well?’ Akram demanded.

‘I got through,’ she replied. ‘I gave it half the message and then the mirror started playing up. I’ll try again later if I get the chance; otherwise we’ll just have to hope…’ She was going to say, hope the answering machine uses its initiative, but that would be silly; rather like urging an invertebrate to put its back into it. ‘We’ll just have to hope,’ she repeated, and as she did so, it occurred to her that that was sillier still, in context.

‘It’ll be all right,’ said Ali Baba unexpectedly, holding out his hand for the ring. Michelle had given it to him before she stopped to ask herself why; after all, it was her ring, her aunt had left it to her. Or someone, an old woman she used to go and visit, had given it to her and she’d assumed it was the old woman’s to give. So; did it belong to Ali Baba? Only because he’d stolen it from Akram, who’d himself stolen it from someone else, presumably now long since deceased in circumstances of extreme prejudice. She might have said something about this if she’d actually wanted the wretched thing; as it was, she didn’t. You don’t, after all, kick and scream and drum your heels on the floor and demand to have your ingrowing toenail put back when the chiropodist’s just dug it out.

‘Now then,’ Ali Baba went on, slipping the ring on and closing his fist around it. ‘Before we move on to phase two, how’d it be if we just think it through for a moment and make sure we know what it is we’re supposed to be doing. For once in the history of the Universe, let’s try and do something properly.’

Michelle and Akram nodded. Fang, who was sulking, went on facing the other way and pretending not to be able to hear them. That, as far as Ali Baba was concerned, was no bad thing. As befitted someone in his line of business he had particularly fine teeth, and he couldn’t help feeling that smiling in the presence of a tooth fairy’s a bit like sunbathing in full view of the vultures, lying on a big plate with a cruet beside you.

‘As I see it,’ Ali Baba said, ‘it won’t be long before our host comes back, unlocks the door and shoos us out to be executed or tortured or whatever. Probably tortured,’ he added. ‘I don’t suppose he’s brought us here and locked us up in the coal cellar just because he’s starting a collection of trans-dimensional freaks. Now, when he shows up, we’ve got to get him to look in that peculiar mirror Michelle was talking to just now’ He stopped and turned to her. ‘You think that thing’s up to it? I mean, ordinary phone messages are one thing, but…’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Michelle replied. ‘On the other hand, it’s all we’ve got; I mean, if we want to be pessimistic and look on the dark side of it all, we really aren’t spoilt for choice. Like, what if the machine at the other end isn’t switched on, or it’s engaged, or the men have just turned up to cut it off?’

‘Maybe it’ll scramble the bastard,’ Akram growled. ‘No bad thing if it does.’

Michelle looked at him. That last remark had sounded a little bit more in character; except that she’d never had much evidence of the bloodcurdling villain side of him. Even as a kidnapper he’d been no more terrifying than, say, the average car park attendant or pizza delivery man; and since they’d been here, on what she’d come to believe was indeed the other side of this mysterious Line everybody was so fussed about, he’d been milder than a vegetarian biryani. Which was, of course, no bad thing in general terms, she supposed.

On the other hand, right now when a savage and ruthless killing machine might just come in quite handy, he’d apparently turned into the sort of bloke who’d have no hangups at all about staying home with the kids while his wife went out to work, and would probably be all sensitive and interested in colour schemes and wallpaper patterns. The expression ‘shadow of his former self crossed her mind fleetingly, until it was rounded up by the Taste Police and thrown out on its ear.