Deep Secret

  He grinned, stretching his already oddly stretched face. He knew my opinions. “Well, if they bothered to get reborn, it has to mean they’re keen. But you’ll find the great advantage is that they’re born subconsciously knowing half the stuff – and usually with plenty of talent too. All my list are good strong talents though. The best untrained in the world.” He paused a moment. He kept getting breathless. “And take your time looking at them,” he said. “I know we’re supposed to be quick, but it’s not that urgent. Do what I did: I left you for nearly a year. I couldn’t mostly believe it, that three brothers in the same family should all be Magid material. Then I thought, Why not? There has to be something in heredity. But I never told you what really made up my mind about you, did I?”

  “My obvious superiority?” I suggested.

  He chuckled. “Nah. It was the fact that you’d been a Magid before in at least two lifetimes.”

  In the ordinary way, I would have been extremely annoyed. “I have never,” I said stiffly, “ever either remembered a former life or told you anything to suggest that I had.”

  “There are other ways of finding out,” Stan said smugly.

  I let it pass. This was not the time to argue. “All right,” I said. “I’ll weigh up everyone on the list very carefully.”

  “And don’t necessarily choose the most willing. Run tests,” he said. “And when you do choose, make sure you let them follow you around during a fairly big assignment before you begin instructing them. See how they take it – the way I did with you over the Ayeworld pornography and with Will over the oil crisis.”

  “What did Simon have?” I asked. No one had ever told me.

  “A mistake on my part,” Stan admitted. “Someone was doing a white slave and marriage trade, pushing girls through Earth down from Naywards and then on through the Koryfonic Empire. I let Simon see the police team the Empire sent here to see me about it. Half of them were centaurs. There was no way I could pass them off as Earth people. After that I had to get him ratified as a Magid – he’d seen too much. Lucky for me he’s made a good one. But don’t you worry that you’ll make a mistake like that.”

  “I should hope not!” I said.

  “You won’t,” said Stan. “Because if you start, I’ll stop you.”

  “Er…” I began, wondering how to point the hard truth out.

  “I’ll be around,” he said. “I’ve arranged to be here. A Magid can work quite well disincarnate, and I plan to do that until you’ve got things settled.”

  I said, half joking and wholly disbelieving, “Don’t you trust me not to balls it up then?”

  “I trust you,” Stan said. “But you’ve only been a Magid just over two years. And it used to be customary for all new Magids to have a disincarnate adviser – I found it in the records. So I asked the Upper Room if I could stay and keep an eye on you, and they seemed to think it was reasonable. So I’ll be around. Rely on it.” He sighed, and stared into the distance somewhere beyond his flaking off-white ceiling.

  I sighed too, and thought, Be honest, Stan. You just don’t want to go away for good. And I don’t want this to happen either.

  “Mostly, though,” Stan added, “it’s that I can’t bear to leave. I’m only eighty-nine. That’s young for a Magid.”

  I had not realised he was much above sixty, and said so.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I’ve kept my condition. Most of us do. Then one day you get told, ‘That’s it, boy. Deathday tomorrow,’ and you know it’s true. I’ve been given until sundown.”

  I looked out of the window involuntarily. It was November. The shadows were long already.

  “Call the doctor just before sunset,” Stan said, and did not say much for a while after that. I gave him some water, got myself some more coffee and waited. Some time later, he began to talk again, this time more generally and reminiscently.

  “I’ve seen this world through a lot of changes,” he remarked. “I’ve helped clear away a lot of the political garbage that built up through this century. We’ve got the decks cleared for the changes due to come in the next century now. But, you know, the thing I take most pleasure in is the way we’ve managed to coax this world Ayewards. Gradually. Surreptitiously. When I was a lad, no one even considered there might be other universes, let alone talking of going to them. But now people write books about that, and they talk about working magic and having former lives, and nobody thinks you’re a nutcase for mentioning it. And I think, I did that. Me. I slid us back down the spiral. Back to where we should be. Earth is one of the early worlds, you know – well of course you know – and we should be a long way further Ayewards than we are.”

  “I know,” I said, stressfully watching the shadow of my car spread over his bushy lawn.

  “Help it along some more,” he said.

  “It’s one of the things we’re here for,” I said.

  Later, when the room was getting dim, Stan said suddenly, “It was the homesickness that brought me back here, you know.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked him.

  “I started out my work as a Magid a long way Ayewards,” he murmured. His voice was getting weaker. “I chose it. A bit like Simon chose it. But I chose it for the centaurs. I’d always loved centaurs, always wanted to work with them. And as soon as I learnt that more than half the places Ayewards of here have centaurs, off I went. I thought I’d never come back here, you know.” Centaurs need a magical ambience to maintain them – well, you know they do – and they all died out here when we drifted off Naywards. And for three years I was blissfully happy, working with centaurs, studying them. I don’t think there’s a thing I don’t know about centaurs and their ways. Then I got homesick. Just like that. I can’t tell you what for. It was too general. It was just that the world I was on wasn’t this one. It didn’t smell right. The wind didn’t blow like it does here. Grass the wrong green. Small things, like the water tasting too pure. So back I had to come.”

  “To work as a jockey,” I said.

  “It was next best to being a centaur,” he said. After a long pause, he added, “I want to get reborn as a centaur. Hope I can arrange that.” Then, after a longer pause still, “Better phone that doctor then.”

  The phone was in the kitchen. I went through there and found the number carefully written on a pad laid by the phone. I remember thinking, as I punched it in, that this seemed hard on young Timotheo. I must have been one of the few people to be sorry he was dead, and yet all my sorrow was concentrated on Stan. I forgot Timotheo again the next moment. Stan had made his arrangements with care. The doctor, to my astonishment, answered the phone himself and promised to be there in ten minutes. I rang off and went to the front bedroom.

  “Stan?” I said.

  There was no answer. He had fallen half off the bed as he died and he had wanted to do that in private. I put him gently back.

  “Stan?” I said again, into the dead, dim air.

  There was nothing. I could feel nothing.

  “So much for the idea of staying around,” I said loudly. But there was still nothing.

  A little before Christmas, when most of the other small and large things connected with Stan’s death were done, I had a serious look at the list he had given me. There were five names on it, two of which were female. The addresses indicated that one of these women was British and the other American. The males were from Britain, Holland and – I had to get out my atlas – Croatia. I sighed and tried to look forward to travelling to meet all of them on various invented excuses. At least three of them spoke my language. I could call that lucky, I supposed. Stan had also supplied the dates of birth for all of them except the Croatian. The British girl and the man from Holland were both young. She was twenty, he was twenty-four. That was a point in their favour. The other two were in their forties. I found that a bit daunting. I had just been twenty-six, and the idea of having someone so much older for a pupil filled me with apprehension.

  But I set to work to find them all.


  I do not wish to describe the frustrations of that search. With interruptions from my neighbour – of whom more hereafter – and my mother’s natural desire to have at least one of her sons home for Christmas, I was divining, travelling or querying my various sources non-stop for six weeks. I flew to Amsterdam to find the Dutchman, Kornelius Punt, only to discover that he had won some kind of scholarship enabling him to travel. He had taken serious advantage of it too. I went down to Avignon, where he was last heard of, and found that he had gone to Rome, Athens and then Jerusalem. After a maddening four days, dealing with the Greek and Italian telephone systems, I came home to find a fax from a Magid visiting Israel informing me that Punt had gone to Australia. I gave up and decided to wait for him to come back. My American contacts traced the older woman, Tansy-Ann Fisk, soon after that. I was just preparing to fly out to Ohio when all sources sent urgent messages not to bother. Fisk had gone into retreat in some kind of all-female clinic where men were not allowed. Looking up this clinic in Magid records, I was a little perturbed to find it carried the remark ‘Query dubious esoterica’. Still, she could have entered the place in good faith for a simple rest-cure. All I could do was wait until she came out. The British man, Mervin Thurless, was equally hard to trace. Eventually it emerged that he was on a lecture tour in Japan. As for the Croatian, Gabrelisovic, I don’t have to remind you that there had been a war there. My NATO sources rather feared he was among the many who had vanished in it without trace.

  I turned to hunting for the British girl with some relief. At least we were both in the same country. Moreover she was younger than me and possessed, according to Stan’s list, the greatest amount of untrained talent of the lot. She was the one I secretly hoped to select. I even allowed myself very agreeable visions of her as a pretty and intelligent young woman whom it would be a pleasure to instruct. I visualised myself laying down the laws of the Magids to her. I saw her hanging on my every word. I looked forward to meeting her.

  I couldn’t find her either.

  She had a slightly complex family history. The address I had for her proved to be that of an aunt, her father’s sister, in Bristol where Maree Mallory seemed to be a student. I stood on the aunt’s doorstep in Bristol, in the pouring rain, while damp children pushed in and out of the house around me. Before long, the children formed a yelling, fighting heap behind the aunt. She shouted at me above the din that poor Maree had gone back to her mother in London, didn’t I know? Parents divorced. Sad case. I bellowed to be told whereabouts in London. She screamed that she couldn’t remember, but if I didn’t mind waiting she’d ask her sister-in-law. So I stood for a further five minutes in the rain watching the aunt across the fighting heap of children while she telephoned further down the hall. Eventually she came back and screamed an inaccurate address at me. I wrote it down, with further inaccuracies caused by damp paper and blotches of rain, and went to London the next day. It rained that day too.

  The address was in South London. That part I got right. But when at last I found it, it proved not to be called Rain Kitten as I had written down, but Grain Kitchen. It was a healthfood shop. The lady standing behind a glassed-in display of more kinds of beans than I knew existed was tall and slender in her white overall. The white cloth round her head revealed youthful fair hair. She was so young-looking and comely that, for a moment, I had hopes that she was Maree Mallory herself. But when I came nearer, she looked older, possibly even over forty. She could have been Maree’s mother. My blotched notes said that in this case she would be a Mrs Buttle; but the sign over the door had read PROPRIETORS L. & M. NUTTALL. I decided not to risk names. I told her politely that I was looking for Maree Mallory.

  She stared at me with her head on one side, in a summing-up way I found slightly ominous. “I’m not helping you,” she announced at length.

  “Can you tell me why not?” I asked.

  “You think too well of yourself,” she said. “Posh accent, shiny shoes, expensive raincoat, not a hair out of place – oh, I can see well enough why you let her down like that. You thought she wasn’t good enough for the likes of you, didn’t you? Or didn’t she iron your shirts to your liking?”

  I know I was speechless for a moment. I could feel my face flooding red. I do, certainly, like to be well dressed, but I found myself wanting to protest that I always iron my own shirts. It was too ridiculous. I pulled myself together enough to say, “Mrs – er Buttle – Nuttall? – I assure you I have not let your daughter down in any way.”

  “Then why is she so upset and saying you have?” the lady demanded. “Maree’s not one to lie. And why have you come crawling to me? Realised you let a good girl slip between your nicely clipped fingernails, have you?”

  “Mrs Buttle—” I said.

  “Nuttall,” said she. “I never did like men who wear cravats. What’s wrong with an honest tie? Let me tell you, if I’d seen you when she first took up with you, I’d have warned her. Never trust a cravat, I’d have told her. Nor a mac with lots of little straps and buttons. Clothes always tell.”

  “Mrs Nuttall!” I more or less howled. “I have never met your daughter in my life!”

  She looked at me disbelievingly. “Then what are you here for, dripping all over my shop floor?”

  “I came,” I said, “because I am trying to trace your daughter, Maree Mallory, in connection with – with a legacy which may come her way.” The idea of a legacy was perhaps a poor one, but I was too flustered to remember all the cleverer pretexts I had invented on my way to Bristol the day before.

  It seemed to impress Mrs Nuttall. It was her turn to blush. Her fair pink skin went a strong purple and she clapped both hands over her mouth. “Oh. You mean you’re not this Robbie of hers, then?”

  “My name is Rupert Venables, madam,” I said, hoping to rub the embarrassment home.

  “Oh,” she said again. I assumed she was about to relent and summon her daughter from a flat upstairs or somewhere. Not a bit of it. “Prove it,” she said, as her flush died down. And when I had shown her a business card, she said, “Anyone can have a card printed.” So I produced my driving licence, a credit card and my chequebook. She looked at them long and hard.

  “I didn’t bring my passport,” I said, not altogether pleasantly.

  To which she said, “Well, Rupert’s not much different from Robbie as a name.”

  “There’s all the difference in the world,” I said.

  She returned to my business card and looked at it broodingly. “It says here Computer Software Designer. That’s you?” I nodded. “And this Robbie is supposed to be training for a vet,” she mused. “That is different. But why aren’t you a lawyer if it’s about a legacy?”

  “Because,” I said, “I am the executor of the will. The deceased, Stanley Churning, named me executor in his will. Mrs Nuttall, much as I applaud your caution, I would be grateful if you would let me talk to Maree.”

  “I suppose I have to believe you,” she said grudgingly. “But Maree’s not here.”

  My heart sank. “Where is she?”

  “Oh, she went to her dad when they found he’d got cancer,” Mrs Nuttall told me. “She would go. It’s not my fault she’s not here.”

  “Do you mind giving me her address then?”

  She did mind. She was suspicious of the whole thing. I applauded her instinct even while I tried not to grind my teeth. Eventually she said, “I suppose if it’s over a legacy…” and at last gave me an address north of Ealing.

  I thanked her and went there. It took hours. And when I got there I found the house locked and the lower windows boarded up. A neighbour informed me that the owner was in hospital – a long way away, she couldn’t remember where – and the daughter had closed the house up and left.

  I drove home, seething the whole way. The M25 was at a standstill. I tried to go cross-country and there were roadworks every half-mile. Talk about a run round the gasworks! I slammed my car door viciously when I finally got out in my own yard. I kicked my back
door open and then slammed it shut. I tore off my damp mac. I slammed cupboards hunting for a glass. I slammed my way into my quiet, orderly living room, poured a stiff drink and threw myself into a chair. After the first swig, I had a thought. I swore, tore off my cravat and threw it at the fireplace.

  “If I’d only known what you were letting me in for, Stan!” I said. “If I’d known! As it is, I give up. Now.”

  “Why? What’s the matter, lad?” Stan’s voice said.

  I stopped dead, with my whisky tipped towards my mouth. “Stan?”

  “Here, Rupert,” his voice said, husky and apologetic, from the space by my big window. “Sorry about the delay. It’s – well, it’s not as easy to come back as I thought. It’s not like you think. There’s conditions to be met. I had to argue my case with the Lords of Karma as well as the Upper Room, and Lords of Karma aren’t easy. Not all of them are human. I don’t blame you for not looking happy. What’s the problem?”

  I think if Stan had arrived at any other time, I would have had trouble accepting him. Something about that unembodied presence brought me out in cold shudders, even annoyed as I was. But I was so fed up that I drank the rest of my whisky in one gulp and told him what was the problem. And finished by yelling, “And it’s all your damned fault!”

  “Steady! Steady on!” husked his disembodied voice. I had heard him talk to unquiet horses the same way. “It isn’t my fault. Another Magid has to be found. And you’re going about it all wrong anyway.”

  “Wrong?” I said. “In what way wrong?”

  “You always were prone to it,” he said. “Going about it like a normal person and forgetting you’re a Magid. You’ve got enormous powers, lad. Use them. Go after them the Magid way.”

  “Oh,” I said. “All right. But not until I’ve had a square meal, another stiff whisky and a pint of coffee. Does your present state remember the needs of the body? Can you wait that long?”