You Don't Have To Be Evil To Work Here, But It Helps (31 page)

The man was staring at her. It was as though a monk or a hermit had spent his entire life praying to be granted a beatific vision; and finally, eventually, one evening in the solitude of his lonely cell the vision had appeared before him in glory and blown a raspberry. ‘Are you saying,’ he said slowly, ‘that you’re refusing to help us?’

Classie gritted her teeth. It was like drowning kittens and decapitating Barbie dolls and whisking up fluffy hamsters in a blender, but it had to be done. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Sorry,’ she added.

‘But you can’t—’ the girl managed to blurt out, before the sobs overtook her again. The man shot Cassie a furious now-look-what-you’ve-done glare, and put his arms around the girl, muttering, ‘It’s all right, sweetness, don’t cry, she doesn’t really mean it.’

‘Yes, I do,’ Cassie said crisply. ‘Listen to me,’ she added, raising her voice above the snuffling and the comforting. ‘I really am terribly sorry, but you’ve got to understand, there’s nothing I can do. I can’t just make up my mind to be in love with someone, it doesn’t work like that. You know that as well as I do. Either you’re in love with someone or you aren’t. And I’m sorry to say, I’ve met this Colin Hollingshead, and I have to tell you, I don’t love him one bit, and I’m pretty damn sure he doesn’t love me. End of story, I’m afraid.’

The couple didn’t say anything. She snuffled and he glared, but not a word was spoken. It was one of those silences into which light falls and is destroyed, and no matter what the cost you know you’ve got to fill it with something before it consumes the entire universe. ‘Look,’ Cassie said desperately, ‘if there was any way on earth I could deliberately make myself fall in love with the bloody man, I’d do it, just so she’d stop making that horrible noise, but—’

It was like treading on a mine; because even as she said the words, Cassie realised that yes, there was something she could do. Not just something, but something easy-peasy; something J. W. Wells and Co had been making possible for over two hundred years.

When it was first invented, round about the time they were laying the foundations of the Brighton Pavilion, they called it J. W. Wells & Co’s Patent Oxy-Hydrogen Love-At-First-Sight Philtre and that was all right, because there weren’t any trade-description laws in those days, and nobody bothered too much about the ropy science because nobody really knew what oxygen or hydrogen actually were. Two centuries later, the label just said JWW Love Philtre. It was still the same recipe and it worked just as well as it had always done, and there was always at least one fifty-five-gallon plastic drum of the stuff on hand in the closed-file store. All you had to do was drink it, and make him or her drink it too at the same time, then you’d both fall asleep for twenty minutes or so, and when you both woke up (assuming that each of you was the first person the other one saw), bingo.

Easy as falling off a log into a bottomless pit. These days, there were even orange, mango and tropical-fruit flavours. Couldn’t be more straightforward.

‘No,’ Cassie said, to herself as much as to the two translucent lovers. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. Has it - I mean, have you ever considered the possibility that you two just weren’t meant to Be together? Like Romeo and Juliet, or Clark and Lois—’ She Fell silent. Just looking at them, she knew she was drivelling, maybe it was a trick of the light, a side effect of their revolting translucence, but where their hands clasped it was as though they’d merged together, like a welded seam.

‘Oh no,’ the girl said firmly. ‘You see, the manager told us, in the other place. He looked it up in the register and everything. We were supposed to live happily ever after, seventy years and never a cross word.’ They exchanged a look so gooey that Cassie instinctively wiped her hands on her knees. ‘So we know for a definite fact it was meant to be. Also,’ she went on, ‘Mr Dao - that’s the manager’s name — he said that if things didn’t work out and we never did get married and so on, it’d cause a big problem. Hyperphasic anomaly in the spatio-temporal interface, I think he called it; anyway, it sounded pretty bad. All sorts of things’d start coming unravelled, he reckoned. For a start, you see, we were going to have six children—’

‘Three of each,’ the man put in dreamily.

‘And they were all going to go on and do wonderful things with their lives and make the world a better place; and if we don’t, well, that’s the future gone wrong for a start. Like, suppose one of our kids was going to be a great doctor who cured a dreadful disease and saved millions of lives—’

‘But instead,’ the man carried on, smooth as a well-trained relay team, ‘he’s never born, so all those people who should’ve lived actually die. Mr Dao was really upset about that; he said it’d cause havoc with schedules and staff duty rosters and accommodation arrangements and sittings for meals and things like that. So you see,’ he went on, ‘it’s not just us who’s affected, it’s millions and millions of other people too.’

Shit, Cassie thought. Millions and millions of people. She really ought to care about that. And besides: what in the world could possibly be more important than true love? It’s the message that everybody’s bombarded with, from primary school to crematorium. Love is all you need, they tell you. It’s so fundamental that it’s practically a duty, like recycling or voting in elections. If she drank the philtre, and spiked Colin’s tea with the stuff, there was absolutely no question, they’d be in love, for ever; they’d be just as blissfully, repulsively happy as the two specimens nestling up close in front of her. That had to be a good thing, surely. It was accepted throughout the trade: love philtre was a good thing, because it made people happy. No bitter, traumatic break-ups, broken hearts, ruined lives with love philtre, no ghastly mistaken choices. It was like an arranged marriage made in heaven, stone-cold guaranteed or your money back. So really, there was no earthly reason—

Except that she didn’t love young Mr Hollingshead, not one little bit.

Cassie took a deep breath.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Up and down the back stairs, along the corridors in every direction, in and out of the conference rooms and the stationery cupboards and the laser-printer bay and everywhere; not a trace of them anywhere. It was as though they’d just walked straight out through a wall or something.

Which, Benny reminded himself, they were probably quite capable of doing. He could feel himself running out of steam, as the hopelessness of his task gradually became apparent. Unless he was lucky enough to run into them by sheer accident, he was wasting his time.

He traipsed back to his office, sat down on a stack of green timesheet pads (just arrived from the printers, still in their shrink-wrap; he spared a moment from his despair to hate the new management) and let his head loll forwards onto his chest.

He’d done his best but he’d failed. The question was, what now? The obvious, logical, sensible thing would be to keep quiet, pretend it had never happened, and get on with the work he was supposed to be doing. The alternative was going and finding one of the bosses and telling him what’d happened, so that he could immediately notify the firm’s insurers. If he did that he might get yelled at for a bit, but nothing terribly bad would happen; after all, he was the cashier, the one who had to make the soul-corroding, brain-melting trip to the Bank of the Dead every day. They couldn’t fire him, because the job had to be done and who else would be crazy enough to do it? If he went and confessed, like he was supposed to, it’d stop being his responsibility, he could pass it onto someone else and they’d be the one facing sleepless nights and nightmare days haunted with stark terror.

Benny sat up. That’d be a very bad reason for doing the right thing. Benny Shumway had his faults, as his ex-wives knew to their cost, but he wasn’t a coward, and he faced up to his responsibilities, one of which was the door in his office. If someone - something - had broken through it and was infesting the land of he living, it was his job to deal with it. The other name for pest control was heroism; in the same way, admittedly, as estate agents describe Swindon as ‘edge of the Cotswolds’, but never mind. Besides, if he went to one of the ex-partners or (even worse) the new management, who did he think they’d assign to the case? The pest-control specialist. Fine.

He stood up, climbed onto his chair, fetched a book down from the top shelf of his bookcase and blew dust off it. Necromancy for Dummies; how long since he’d read it? No matter.

He turned to the index. Dead, unquiet, exorcising. Good a place to start as any.

There’s one thing every practitioner should know about exorcising. Can’t be done. There’s a whole heap of books (see Further Reading, pp. 427-558) that’ll tell you how to go about it, but guess what. They’re all making it up. You can’t banish the dead, and for why? Because they don’t exist.

Benny sighed, and put the book down on his desk. He remembered now. Oh, he thought.

Next, he tried the office procedures manual, twice as thick and half again as heavy as Necromancy for Dummies, and it said more or less the same thing but without the comic patter. There’s no point in trying to impose your will on something that isn’t there, like the non-existent man on the stair in the nursery rhyme. Dead and gone means what it says. Deal with it.

Yes, Benny thought, but.

Logic; access your inner Spock. The books, who ought to know, said that the dead weren’t there any more. On the other hand, something had opened the door, and it hadn’t been from his side. Furthermore, he had the evidence of the thin-faced girl, what’s-her-name, who’d seen them in the corridor. So either the books were wrong (impossible) or he was wrong (also impossible); or else (entirely possible) he was missing the point—

He growled under his breath. Something had opened the door, but obviously it couldn’t have been dead. But it had come from the other side, and nothing could possibly live out there, by definition.

Unless—

Benny jumped up. His feet were running before they hit the carpet, like the cat in the cartoons.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Colin drifted back into reception. He wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was the same instinct that motivates cats on wet days to go and see if there’s a door where it isn’t raining. If so, it hadn’t worked. Fam wasn’t behind the desk; it was just that Rosie person.

She looked at him and grinned. ‘Hello,’ she said.

If he’d been wise, he’d have paid more attention to the grin. Humans, with their lamentable tendency to anthropomorphise, are an easy mark for any species that opens its mouth and displays its teeth: they’re either unaware of or wilfully blind to the fact that, in most of the animal kingdom, the gesture doesn’t mean what they think it does. ‘Anything I can do for you?’ she asked.

Colin shook his head. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I just, um, I’m waiting for an important fax and I was wondering if it’d come in yet, that’s all.’

‘Ah.’ Rosie’s grin widened to Little-Red-Riding-Hood’s-surrogate-granny proportions. ‘If you’re not too busy,’ she said, ‘could you spare a couple of ticks to answer a question for me?’

‘Sure.’

‘All right. What the hell is it about young human males and receptionists?’

For a second or so, Colin felt as though someone had accidentally set off a boxful of fireworks inside his head. While he was still thus indisposed, she went on, ‘Not that I’m complaining, don’t get me wrong. After all, it’s why I do this job. It was my cousin Veronica who put me on to it. Be a receptionist, Rosie, she said to me, you can pick ‘em off like a sniper up a church tower. I thought she was kidding me until I tried it, and I’ve never looked back.’

‘Um,’ Colin said.

‘There was this lad at the place I used to work,’ she went on, ‘a bit like you, he was, only taller and wetter. He had this thing for receptionists; leastways, one of ‘em. Not me,’ she added with a sigh, ‘though not for want of trying. But his receptionist turned out to be an illusion created by the Queen of the Fey to lure him to his doom, and I think he went off us a bit after that. Married a bony little cow and moved to New Zealand. Last I heard he was blissfully happy and richer than Bill Gates, but there you go. Anyhow, you didn’t come out here to talk to me. You were thinking about that chubby bird of yours.’

‘She’s not— How did you know?’

Rosie twitched her nose at him. ‘Smell, actually. It’s a special talent of my lot - we can smell true love. Like smelling beer on someone’s breath. It’s a hold-over from the old days. My lot used to track their prey by scent, you see. It’s pretty dark, where we evolved.’

A burning eagerness to ask who her lot were fought it out with the sure and certain knowledge that he wouldn’t like the answer one bit, and the sure and certain knowledge won. ‘Right,’ he said; then, ‘True love?’

‘Mphm. If you’re interested, it’s sort of a cross between garlic and iodine. The smell, I mean. But you wouldn’t be able to smell it, like humans can’t hear dog whistles.’

‘Then you’re saying—’ He hesitated. ‘Are you sure about that?’

‘I’d know it a mile off.’ She sighed. ‘If it was just a passing infatuation it’d be more like sump oil and violets; and good old plain and simple lust - well, it’s hard to describe, a bit like creosote mixed with—’

‘Fine,’ Colin said quickly. He realised that, in spite of Rosie’s breathtaking exterior, he found her about as alluring as a dead badger.

She sniffed, clicked her tongue and said, ‘Thank you so much. You know, there’s times when I think I’m losing my touch. Here, what about this?’

Rosie didn’t vanish or anything; there was no single instant when she wasn’t there. It was just that there was one moment when she was a screamingly gorgeous redhead, and another when she was a heart-stoppingly lovely brunette; neither of whom would Colin willingly have touched with a ten-foot pole.

“Oh well,’ she said. ‘Worth a try, no hard feelings. Though in your shoes, I don’t think I’d be quite so damn picky.’

Fair comment, but so what? ‘Anyhow,’ Colin said, a bit awkwardly, ‘nice to have chatted with you again and everything. I’d better be—’

She grinned again. ‘I know. Used to it by now. You run along, and when your terribly important fax comes in, I’ll let you know. I’II bring it down to your office if you like.’