The beautifully dressed boy bowed gravely to me when we reached the top floor. I bowed back. He set off striding on spike heels one way and I in the other. The marvel of it was that we did not meet round the other side. I turned corner after mirrored right-angle corner on my way to my room. Seven of them. The room was near the lift on the other side. At the time, I was too bemused by what I had done to the fatelines to recognise the peculiarity of this. I simply slung my bags on the stand, noted that it was a fine, large room with a cocktail fridge and a big bed, and tastefully decorated for a hotel room, and changed into the most casual garments I had with me. I feared I was not going to be happy in the forthright weirdness of this convention. Now Mallory was here, I wished I could go home.
But I had work to do. I pinned on my badge to prove I was not a gate-crasher, studied the Alice in Wonderland sort of pamphlet that said “Read Me” under a portrait of a coy-eyed dragon, and discovered I was already late for the Opening Ceremony in Home Universe. I sped back downwards.
I missed some kind of interruption that happened at the beginning of this. The chairman, a guy called Maxim Hough, who wore his curly blond hair cut in the manner of an ancient Egyptian wig, was apologising for whatever it was when I slipped into a seat in the vast room. The event was otherwise prodigiously boring. I studied the folk on the platform, and those in the audience, with equal misgivings. Ted Mallory was the only one who looked halfway normal. He was a larger, healthier edition of the poor cancer-ridden man I had met in Kent, and this made it certain there was a family connection with Maree Mallory, as Stan had suggested. To confirm this, I spotted the Mrs Mallory who had opened the door to me in Bristol sitting in the front row, looking attentive. Her jumper, this time, had a bundle of pink satin roses sprawled down its left side. I played with the notion of tapping her on the shoulder and whispering that she was being attacked by man-eating sugar mice.
I would never have said such a thing, of course, not even to a third party. But people say this kind of thing at conventions. I was surprised and highly delighted when one of the very agreeable Americans I met over supper opined that Mrs Mallory seemed to have had an accident with some strawberry ice cream.
“No, no,” said her husband. “You didn’t examine them closely enough. Those are parasitic sea anemones.”
We talked of all sorts of other things as well. By the time we all got to the bar, where I met Rick Corrie and, through him, Maxim Hough, I was actively enjoying myself. I think it was on slightly false pretences. Maxim seemed sure I was some sort of hidden celebrity, and my friends from supper had obviously decided the same, but I am not sure that was important. My main feeling by then was annoyance with myself – exasperation that I had chosen to live so much out of the world. I hadn’t, until that evening, remembered the value of congenial company. True, I need privacy for my Magid work, but one can have that without isolating oneself.
Rick Corrie, who had rushed away, now rushed back, very much out of breath and aggrieved. “That was Thurless again,” he said.
“Oh what is it this time?” said Maxim.
“I think he’s settled now,” Corrie said, “but it cost the convention forty pounds—”
“Already? How?” Maxim wanted to know. “The bloody man’s only been here four hours! That’s ten pounds an hour, Rick!”
“Well, you know I let Maree Mallory have Thurless’s room,” Corrie explained. “Her fool aunt forgot to book for her. She looked as if she was going to cry when I got to her. And Thurless was late, so I had to find him a room at the Station Hotel, because all the other empties are needed for publishers – none of them have turned up yet, by the way – and I took Thurless down there myself in a taxi along with that unexpected Croatian and a Russian or so. And I went and looked at all the damn rooms and they’re OK. Just as good as the ones here. But next thing I know, Thurless arrives back here in another taxi, insisting his shower won’t work and demanding that we pay for his taxi. So I sort that one out, and back he goes in the taxi again—”
“Hang on,” I said. “It’s only about a hundred yards from here to the Station Hotel.”
“It’s longer with the one-way system,” Maxim pointed out. “Still – but forty pounds, Rick! How often did he come back and forth in that taxi?”
“And Thurless has got a car,” Corrie said. “It was because I’d given his room away, you see. I didn’t feel I should argue too much, and to tell the truth I’ve lost count of how many times Thurless turned up in that taxi. Ten times? Something like that. I just gave the driver a cheque in the end. Thurless turned up this time saying he was late for Esoterica and wanting the taxi to wait for an hour and I thought I’d better scotch that.”
“If he wants a taxi to go back in, tell him to come to me,” Maxim said. “Tell him I’ll find him a bicycle.”
Corrie nodded and flitted away again. I looked idly after him in the mirror at the end of the bar. And there was Maree Mallory again. She had seen me too. To do her justice, she looked horrified. The feeling is mutual. I looked pointedly away. She was looking rather glum – which I suspect is her natural expression: it goes with that irritating sob in her voice – but otherwise she had neatened up considerably from the witchy bag-lady I had encountered in Bristol. She was wearing a nice leather jacket and jeans and had obviously made efforts with her hair. It was now in quite a stylish bush, though still a bush, and I think she had new glasses. Evidently my hundred quid had wrought quite a change. She looked almost human. I watched Rick Corrie dart up to her, converse, dart away, and dart back with drinks. I got the impression he fancied the woman in his shy way. There is no accounting for taste.
“Is Thurless generally such a pain?” I asked Maxim, with some anxiety.
“Nearly always,” he told me. “The trouble is, he’s not that good a writer and he thinks he is. I’ve never known him quite this dreadful, though. There must be something else biting him. I’ll get someone to— Oh, Zinka! You’re the very person! Have you heard about Mervin Thurless?”
Zinka is not that common a name. I turned stiffly on my stool, unbelievingly. And there, coming up to about my waist, stood the well-known crimson-robed lovely ample shape of Zinka Fearon. Fellow Magid. One-time lover. Last heard from messaging me about Koryfos several worlds Ayewards from the Empire. I couldn’t think what she was doing here. While Maxim was ordering her the pint of cider she always drinks, I bent down and asked her.
“And I love you too, Rupert,” she said. “I’m here on holiday. I always have my holiday here at PhantasmaCon. I close down. I put everything on hold, and I have a rest. Your brother Si’s handling any emergencies out there for me. Are you here working? Yes, I can see you are. It’s not exactly quite your usual scene, is it?”
“I’m beginning to enjoy it rather,” I admitted.
“Oh good,” she said. “If I ever knew anyone who needed to unbend…! But don’t ask me to lift a hand to help you in any way. I’m off duty. I mean it.”
Maxim turned back with her cider then, and we had the tale of Thurless all over again, including the way he had made an ass of himself at the Opening Ceremony.
“Male menopause,” Zinka said decidedly. “I’ll sort him out.”
I sincerely hoped she could, or I was one candidate short. Thinking this, I raised my eyes to the mirror, and saw Maree Mallory bent back in her chair, trying to avoid the great beaky gabbling face of an appalling female dressed apparently in an orange tent.
“Who is that dreadful creature in orange?” I asked.
Zinka looked in the mirror too. She slammed her tankard down on the bar. “Damn! Tansy-Ann’s caught a neo again. Back in a moment.”
She was. The woman in orange fled yelling, Mallory vanished too and Zinka was back, unruffled.
“Tansy-Ann?” I asked her apprehensively.
“Fisk. American,” she told me. “Not exactly nasty – just a well-known pain. Can you lend me ten pounds?”
“Probably,” I said. Damn. There, by the looks of it, wa
s another candidate down the drain. “Why?”
She looked, to be sure Maxim was safely talking to someone else (and he was: bellowing into a hearing-aid) and muttered hurriedly, “I’ve almost no Earth currency until I sell some stuff in the Dealers Room.”
So I gave her a tenner. It is a problem a Magid can face quite often. All in all, it was a very pleasant evening, except that before it ended I seemed to be two candidates short. I went up in the lift knowing that my spirit rebelled at the thought of having Fisk for a pupil – unless she turned out to be one hundred per cent more reasonable than she looked, of course. Of the two women, I almost preferred Mallory. Which was saying something. Mervin Thurless, I hoped, might be still possible, if one supposed that he had been unbalanced by having the sort of gifts that make a person a potential Magid. It is bad, having those gifts and not knowing how to use them. I know I was pretty difficult myself as a student because of this. My brother Will has described me then succinctly as “a little shit” and I suspect I was. But then, I thought glumly, the same could apply equally well to the dreaded Fisk.
I had walked round at least one mirrored corner on the nearest way to my room before I realised that I had not yet reached it. It was literally not where I left it. It should have been just beyond the lifts. But, according to the numbers on the walls, rooms 555–587 were somewhere round the next corner. My room was 555.
I stopped. I thought. Then I turned round and retraced my steps to the corner just beyond the lifts. It was extraordinarily hard going, because I was now walking clockwise, and whoever had been using the power node had set about it anti-clockwise – widdershins, the direction of bad magic. I was not happy about that at all. I had to strive around yet another corner before I came in sight of the lifts too. Someone had set something going and not bothered to stop it. Sloppy practice. In this case you could even end up with a vortex. This node was powerful. I stood at the corner and considered it.
The node was centred on this hotel. It spread through quite a bit of the town too, but the strong centre was almost where I stood. That ought to have meant that things were relatively calm here – like the eye of a storm – but someone had come along not long ago and disturbed it, violently. Two someones, in fact. I could detect two different sets of recent activity from where I stood. And the node had responded violently to violence because it was so exceptionally strong. The Upper Room had been right to feel concerned.
I put everything back and stilled it as gently as I could. Then I went to bed.
[2]
From Maree Mallory’s
Thornlady Directory, file
twenty-four
Thornlady dream again. Biting moonlit comments about my antisocial nature. Why don’t I ever dream I bring matches and set fire to her damn bush?
Got up feeling disgruntled and went to see after Nick. I do this most mornings, particularly on schooldays. Janine is usually happy enough to leave him to me. Nick really is a total, genuine, sleep-walking zombie for at least an hour after he gets up. I have never met anyone quite as bad. Nick is capable of putting clothes on, more or less, but it stops there. I don’t ask if he washes or cleans his teeth.
When I went into his room, he was sleep-walking into walls with his sweater on backwards. He could only speak in a blurred sort of blaring mumble. I turned his sweater right way round, found his room key and led him to the lift. He had still not opened his eyes when we got to the ground floor. This had its advantages. I couldn’t find the place where they were serving breakfast, but Nick could. His nose flared to the smell of bacon and toast and he shambled along that way, dragging me.
A bright young waiter-man met us at the entrance. “Two, miss?” he says. “Not much room at the moment, I’m afraid. This way.” He gave us both menus and Nick promptly dropped his. This alerted the waiter-man to Nick’s condition. He peered at Nick’s face. Then he retrieved the menu and gave it to me, looking Nick in the face again in a sort of hushed, respectful way, as if he thought Nick might be dead. He led the way past tables where most of the fat people were already eating, and quite a few of the shy middle-aged ladies too – you could see these ladies had been trained all their lives to eat breakfast punctually at eight – and over to a table near the window. It was the only semi-empty table in the room.
I don’t believe this! I thought.
The Prat Venables was sitting at one end of it reading a newspaper and drinking coffee. He twitched the paper aside as I sat Nick down, saw it was us, and put it up again like a shield. Too bad. I got on with ordering us both breakfast.
“To start?” says the waiter-man, pad poised.
“Ner – yah!” said Nick.
“He means not yoghurt,” I said. “Cornflakes for both of us, please. And to follow—”
“Ner – bah – bah – ez – bay!” Nick stated.
“He doesn’t like beans, but he does like eggs and bacon,” I translated.
“How about sausages, tomatoes or mushrooms?” the waiter asked courteously. I swear he was experimenting to see what noise Nick would make for these. Nor was he disappointed.
“M’sha, m’sha, m’sha,” Nick went.
“Mushrooms, but he doesn’t want sausages,” I explained. “He wants tomatoes. Fried bread, Nick? Toast?”
“N’fee,” said Nick.
“He says toast but not fried bread,” says I. “To drink—”
“WOOORF – EEF!” Nick proclaimed.
“Yes, we want the biggest pot of coffee you’ve got,” I explained hastily. “It’s urgent. His mind’s working perfectly, you see, but he can’t see or speak properly until he’s had at least four cups of coffee.”
The waiter peered respectfully at Nick’s face once more. Nick’s eyes were still shut and sort of bloated. “And for you, miss?”
“The same,” I said.
He wrote it all down and whizzed off, whereupon Nick blared, “M’feeyert.”
“Oh God,” I said and raised the table cloth to look at his feet.
“M’bertowswash!” Nick wailed.
“It’s all right, you fool,” I said. “You’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet again, that’s all.” I got down under the table and changed his shoes over. As I went to my knees, I thought I heard newspaper crackle. When I backed out from among the chairs and got the cloth off my head, I caught a glimpse of a gold-rimmed lens hastily retreating behind the Telegraph again. The Prat, like the waiter, was fascinated, but pretending not to be.
I’d just got sat down again when the waiter dashed back with a coffee-pot half the size of a gasometer and poured some of it out for both of us, with reverent curiosity. “Milk, miss?”
“Thanks,” I said. “No, he’ll have the first four cups black.”
The waiter stood and watched and poured and watched while Nick drained the necessary four cups, still without opening his eyes. The newspaper in front of the Prat noticeably shifted so that he could watch too.
The waiter had obviously spread the news of Nick to the rest of the staff. A waitress arrived with cornflakes for both of us. She and the waiter, and the Prat (with a corner of his newspaper bent back for the purpose), all watched fascinated while Nick ate a whole bowlful and absorbed two more cups of coffee without looking at any of it. His eyes were open in slits by then, but he was still at the state of staring ahead at nothing when another waitress rushed up with two plates of cooked breakfast. Another waiter arrived with a rack of toast, and the four of them stood there expectantly while I put a knife into one of Nick’s hands and a fork into the other and said to him, “Eat.”
Nick obeyed. They watched wonderingly while Nick somehow managed to spear a brisk slippery mushroom he couldn’t have known was there and get it into his mouth. Then they watched him cut bacon and eat that. Their eyes turned to the egg. I wondered if they had a bet on that Nick couldn’t eat an egg without spilling some of it. if so, they lost. Nick put the whole egg in his mouth at once, dangling perilously from the fork by one corner. Not a drop got away.
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Here the Prat stopped pretending he wasn’t watching. He folded his paper and asked me, “What happens if you put another plate of breakfast in front of him when he’s finished this one? Would he eat that as well without noticing?”
The waiters and waitresses looked at him gratefully. I could see they had been dying to know this too.
“Yes, he would, just like a zombie. I’ve tried,” I told them.
“Eyenose cuzzedin lyebins,” Nick added.
Everyone looked at me for a translation. “He’s saying he noticed what I’d done when he discovered he was eating beans for the second time,” I explained.
“Dinlye furstye,” Nick agreed.
Before I could translate this, I was swept aside by Janine and Uncle Ted. I mean literally swept aside. Janine cried out. “Oh, my poor Nick!” and pushed me off on to the chair opposite the Prat’s, while Uncle Ted said, “Morning, morning,” as he sat down by Nick, and both waitresses and one waiter fled. The first waiter fetched out his order pad, rather sadly.
“Order for me, Ted,” Janine said. “Poor Nick’s helpless in the morning.” She began tenderly buttering toast for Nick. She had a new sweater today. The shoulder of it that was turned to me had a golden splash on it, as if someone had broken an egg over her. I wish someone had.
The Prat looked as disappointed as the waiter. But he politely pushed the marmalade nearer Janine and said to me, “Can’t he butter his own toast by now?”
“I usually let him try,” I said. “Some mornings he butters the plate and tries to eat it.”
“He looks rather to have reached that stage,” the Prat said. Shrewd of him. Nick always makes his worst mistakes when he’s almost awake.