You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (22 page)

The little man clicked his tongue. ‘It’s like you said just now,’ he replied. ‘Why does nobody ever explain anything?’

‘That’s right.’ Colin looked the little man in his funny little eve. ‘Well?’

‘Your problem,’ the little man said, and he was ticking boxes on his clipboard, ‘is that you don’t ask yourself the right questions. If you don’t do that—’ He shrugged. ‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘technology and magic and stuff can only take you so far. Take Funkhausen’s Loop, for example. You can lead a horse to water. right? But you can’t make it -‘ He was fading; Colin could see the congealed butter on the surface of the teacake right through his sweet little tummy ‘- think. But you’ve got the answer, so all you need to do is work back from—’

He vanished, and the girl stood up. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll go, then.’

Colin looked up at her. ‘Did you just see a gnome?’ he asked.

‘A what?’

‘A gnome. Like in gardens. On the table, right there.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘Sorry.’ He frowned, wondering what on earth had possessed him to start babbling about gnomes. ‘Look, please sit down and we can talk about this.’

‘No, sorry.’ She started to walk away. She’d gone three yards, four, five; he knew, as though he’d looked it up in a book of tables and specifications, that if he let her get ten yards away before he stood up and went after her, it’d be too late and that’d be that. He had five yards left; she had a head start. He jumped up, and found that his left leg had gone to sleep.

Colin got a whole yard before keeling over, grabbing at the table for support, yanking off the tablecloth and subsiding in a minor landslide of crockery and table-linen. The noise was deafening, but she didn’t hear it; she’d gone out through the door into the street.

On the pavement outside the tea shop, she met a little man. He was about ten inches high, and he was wearing a tall red floppy hat and other eccentric garments. Behind him, a car stopped dead, as though someone had just pressed the pause button.

‘Well?’ he said.

Cassie shrugged. ‘Search me,’ she replied. ‘Was that him?’

The gnome nodded. ‘That was him. The first him.’

‘Really.’ She frowned. ‘You surprise me.’

‘Not your type.’

‘Frankly, no.’

The gnome grinned. ‘And he thinks he’s superficial. Never mind. Take it from me, that was him. Actually, you should see yourself. That’d sort of put it in perspective.’

A small mirror materialised in Cassie’s hand. She looked in it, taking particular note of the mousy hair and the thin mouth. ‘I take your point,’ she said. ‘But anyway, I think I see now. We were in love—’

‘You were.’ The gnome grinned; she scowled. ‘Absolutely besotted. Embarrassed the hell out of your friends.’

‘And then something went—’

“Wrong, but neither of you had a clue what it could possibly be. You’d never—’

‘Had any of those problems,’ Cassie remembered. ‘We didn’t do issues, we used to say.’

‘A really nauseating phrase, let me point out,’ the gnome said. So when everything started to come unstuck—’

‘You know,’ Cassie said, ‘it was just like Icarus, in Greek mythology, when he flew too close to the— Sorry,’ she added irritably, ‘am I boring you?’

The gnome muffled his yawn with his sleeve. ‘Sorry,’ he said, Go on.’

‘I just couldn’t understand,’ she said. ‘Suddenly there was this terrible problem; a fatal exception has taken place and this program will be closed down. And I simply—’

‘Couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Couldn’t see why he was being like that. There was no reason.’

‘It just happened.’ Cassie frowned. ‘Things don’t just happen, though, do they?’

‘The gnome winked at her. ‘I should cocoa,’ he said.

‘So there has to be—’

‘Quite.’ The gnome was growing transparent; she could read the frozen car’s number plate through his funny little head. ‘I’ll send you my bill.’

‘All right.’ Cassie nodded. ‘Thanks, Mr Funkhausen.’

‘My pleasure, Ms Clay,’ the gnome replied, and vanished.

CHAPTER TEN

Colin woke up and fumbled for the alarm clock. Another morning. The usual status check; he had a bit of a headache - reasonable enough, since he remembered having indulged in strong drink the previous evening - and one hell of a sore throat. A cold on its way. What fun.

Another day at the office, and then he remembered. She’d be on reception. She wasn’t Snotty Gillett’s girlfriend after all. She’d said ‘See you in the morning’ when they’d all left the pub last night. Joy unbounded.

And then he remembered. He’d gone to the pub to meet the strange woman from JWW. When he left it, he’d bumped into that - that whatever, the thing that had barged into his room that night, and hadn’t there been something about the two of them having a lads’ night out, just him and it, getting to know each other better? And then he’d had that extraordinary dream, where the strange woman had stabbed him and he’d—

Yes, he remembered, but just before she said ‘See you in the morning,’ she’d given him her phone number. Joy still unbounded, and screw all the weird stuff.

Her phone number, which he’d forgotten. Horror.

‘Morning,’ she practically sang at him as he stumbled through the door. ‘Oh, and your Dad’s been looking for you.’

‘Ah,’ Colin said.

‘Meeting, in the boardroom,’ she said. ‘He seemed a bit put out that he couldn’t find you earlier.’

A bit put out. Right. ‘Anyone in there with him?’

A slight frown on that delightful face. ‘There was a blonde woman called to see him, nine sharp.’ She said the word blonde with a certain inflection, like the clerk of the court reading out charges - blonde with intent to cause grievous emotional harm and he was wondering about that when she added: ‘She asked if you were in so she could have a word with you first, but I told her you weren’t in yet.’

‘Oh, right.’ Just a trace of hesitation, as though scouring his mind for a long-buried memory. ‘Was she from J. W. Wells? Clay, I think her name is.’

‘Mphm.’

‘Oh, her,’ Colin said, and maybe he went a bit overboard on the heavy sigh ‘Dreadful woman,’ he added. ‘Boring. Still—’ He shrugged. ‘Better get on and get it over with, I suppose.’ Pause. Full eye contact. Deep breath. ‘Are you doing anything for lunch?’

‘No.’

‘Only, I was going to head into town, there’s a new sort of Italian place I noticed a couple of days ago—’

‘Yes, love to,’ she said, cutting him off in mid-dither. And she smiled. ‘Go on,’ she added, ‘you’ll be late.’

Up the stairs two at a time; offbeat combination of the spring in the step that comes from a date duly secured and terror at the thought of being late for the meeting. Colin stopped outside the boardroom door and listened, but he could only hear Dad’s booming drone. He knocked and went in.

‘At bloody last,’ his father said. But Colin was too preoccupied to notice or care what sort of mood the old sod was in. Nor was he particularly interested in Cassie, sitting next to the old man, writing something on a big pad of A4 paper. Instead, his attention was monopolised by—

‘I gather you’ve met Oscar,’ Dad said, nodding in its direction. ‘And Miss Clay, from J. W. Wells.’

Only then did he notice that Cassie was trying to establish non-verbal communication with him; she was opening her eyes wide, twitching her head sideways, mouthing something at him, but he couldn’t begin to take any of it in. He sat down, as far away from Oscar as he could get.

‘Anyway.’ Dad turned away from him and looked down at the papers in front of him. Colin recognised the contract. ‘I think we can say that’s all pretty well sorted; so, if Miss Clay wouldn’t mind being the witness, we can all crack on and get this thing signed.’

Colin opened his mouth, but nothing came out. What with one thing and another, he’d let the whole ghastly soul-selling business slip his mind. After all, hadn’t Cassie said she thought she’d be able to derail the procedure before it got to this point? He’d taken that as permission to let it slither down his list of priorities and things to lie awake at night shuddering about; and now here it was, happening, in spite of everything. It wasn’t fair; it was an ambush, a sneak attack when his back was turned, and it had caught him completely unprepared. Even so, he opened his mouth to start yelling. Then he saw the pen in his father’s hand.

Oh, he thought.

There’s always a sort of kids-party-game feel to the signing of a legal document, as it gets passed round like the parcel, and everybody has to have a go. When it was his turn, Colin couldn’t resist sneaking a look to see what Oscar’s signature looked like, but there wasn’t one. Instead there was a circular emblem embossed into the paper, slightly discoloured by scorch marks. He slid the paper back across the table, and Cassie signed both copies for the third time. Dad took one of them and slid it into the folder open in front of him. Oscar took the other copy, and Colin looked away to avoid seeing what it did with it. Then there was a scraping of chairs on the polished wood floor. Oscar nodded to him as it passed, which made him feel sick. Dad said ‘Thanks for coming’ to Cassie in a mildly distracted tone of voice; he was going to show Oscar something in the factory, apparently. Cassie, on the other hand, was taking an inordinate length time packing her papers and pens and whatever into her briefcase.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she hissed, as soon as Dad and the thing were safely out of the room.

‘What?’

‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘About last night.’

‘What?’ Colin shook his head, as though trying to get rid of the turmoil inside his head by sheer centrifugal force. ‘You promised me,’ he burst out. ‘You promised you’d find a way of stopping it.’

That wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. ‘I did no such thing,’ she snapped defensively. ‘I said I’d see if there was anything I could do. But then I found out they’d been talking direct to each other, cutting me out, so—’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You’re sorry,’ Colin repeated savagely. ‘My Dad has just sold his soul to - to that thing, and you’re sorry.’

‘Yes.’ Cassie’s forehead tightened into a warning frown. ‘I’m sorry, all right? Now, can we talk about—?’

‘No.’ He stopped. ‘What do you mean, last night? What’s any of that that got to do with you?’

Her eyes widened, as though he’d just deliberately poured a cup of tea down the front of her blouse. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I mean—’ Stop; think. ‘Well, some stuff happened to me last night, sure, but I don’t remember you coming into it. All right, I did have a drink with a really strange woman from your office, Connie something; and then I ran into, um, a couple of old friends in the pub. And then I went home. And yes, I had a bloody funny dream, about being stabbed and dying and being reborn as a—’

‘Yes?’

‘You were in it,’ he said slowly. ‘You were in my dreams.’

‘Halle-bloody-lujah,’ Cassie said sharply. ‘Yes, that’s right. Only it wasn’t a dream. I know, because I was there too. I was the racing car, and you were the little dog.’

‘My God.’ For a moment, a sound outside the door snagged Colin’s attention; he was afraid it might be his Dad coming back, with or without Oscar. But the door didn’t open, so he went on:

‘What d’you mean, real? It couldn’t have actually happened, for crying out loud. I was a dog. I saw my own funeral. That’s not—’

‘It’s called Funkhausen’s Loop,’ she interrupted briskly. ‘It’s a magical technique for investigating conditions like avatar slip and Ustinov’s Syndrome.’

Colin groaned aloud. ‘Could you maybe make a special effort and speak English for a change? Ustinov’s Syndrome?’

‘Sorry.’ Cassie frowned slightly. I forgot. Basically, it’s about things to do with time; but not like a time machine or anything. It’s breakdowns and anomalies in your own temporal network. In this case,’ she added, with just a trace of an apologetic simper, ‘reincarnation. Funkhausen’s Loop means that you can sneak a look at your previous existences, to see if there’s feedback or bleed-through or anything like that.’

‘You’re doing it again,’ Colin protested angrily. ‘Bleed-through?’

She closed her eyes and opened them again. He guessed it was her version of counting to ten. ‘Where stuff from a previous life seeps through into this one and messes things up. Which is what’s happening to us, apparently.’

It was, Colin decided, one hell of a bad time to have a thick head, not to mention savage indigestion and pins and needles in his left leg. ‘Is it?’ he said.

‘Yes. Look, don’t you remember? We were people in the Middle Ages, on horseback; you were holding a hawk. And then we were sort of in Jane Austen’s time, and—’

Now he came to think of it, yes. ‘And peasants,’ he interrupted. ‘There was a cow inside the house,’ he added, ‘which is simply gross.’

‘That’s right.’ Cassie sounded relieved. ‘Those were flashbacks from previous incarnations. We knew each other in past lives. In fact, we were—’ She hesitated. ‘But it never worked out,’ she went on. ‘Something always screwed us up, but we never knew what it was. Things would be going along just fine, and then suddenly we’d find we couldn’t carry on any more and we split up,’ She was looking at him. ‘You know what that makes us?’ She had to brace herself to say the next bit. ‘Time-crossed lovers.’

Oink, Colin thought. ‘You what?’

‘Think about it, for pity’s sake,’ she snapped. ‘You do know basic reincarnation theory, don’t you?’

‘No.’

Cassie made a small noise; a cross between the roar of a Spanish bull and tearing linen. ‘Sorry,’ she added, ‘but this is so frustrating. Look, there’s no time for the whole deal now, so I ‘m oversimplifying like crazy. You die, okay?’

Colin frowned. ‘What, now?’

‘No.’ Eyes shut and opened again. ‘You die, and your spirit or soul or whatever you want to call it leaves your body and gets put into a new one.’

‘Is that what happens, then?’ Colin said, in a tiny voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

‘And then,’ Cassie went on, ‘that body dies and you move to the next one, and so on. That’s unless you’ve been really horribly bad, in which case the new host rejects you, and—’