As soon as we were under the lights and among the ubiquitous mirrors, I saw what a weird trio we made. Nick was covered with golden dust, hair and all, with streaks of it on his face, and he had a ragged, slightly bloody hole in both knees of his jeans. I was not much better, and I was charred into the bargain. My good suede jacket was black and crisp in front. Holes had been burnt randomly in my trouser-legs. The front locks of my hair had frizzled off short and my face was red and blistered, except for the white rings where my glasses had kept the heat off. As for Maree, she was like a mad little dowager over whom someone had emptied a bag of flour.
Then Nick pushed open the doors into the Grand Lobby and we were not out of place at all. I had forgotten the Masquerade. There were people wandering about there in every conceivable kind of dress, including a large shiny caterpillar with at least five sets of human legs. There were Vikings, aliens of all sorts, Grim Reapers, people in cloaks, several blood-soaked corpses, and scores of stunning girls in robes with strategic holes in them. Some were in next to nothing. One, whose costume consisted of two leather straps and thigh-high red boots, caused Nick’s head and mine to whip round after her. We nearly lost Maree over that.
The sudden laughing, vivid crowd seemed to make Maree very restless. She stirred from side to side of her chair and made several attempts to get out of it. While Nick and I were distracted by the straps and red boots, she succeeded. Nick ran after her frantically, diving among aliens and tripping on the train of a queen. He caught her beside the caterpillar.
We had just got her back, coaxed her into the chair and set off again when we found ourselves face-to-face-to-face with Rick Corrie, as himself, and two young gentlemen tightly laced into bright silk crinolines, each carrying a fringed parasol.
“Those are interesting costumes,” one of them fluted at us. And the other asked, in a strong counter-tenor, “What section are you three entered in?”
Nick, who appeared to know them well, answered airily. “Extra-terrestrial, of course. We’re victims of a mining disaster out in Tau Centauri.”
“Oh,” said Rick Corrie. “Maybe that accounts for the rumour. I heard you were coming as a centaur, Nick.”
“Er,” said Nick. “I was – but the legs wouldn’t work. We did this instead at the last minute.”
Nick was sweating as we finally pushed Maree out into the corridor beyond. He wiped golden dust around his face with his sleeve and said he hoped we didn’t meet anyone else. Naturally the next turn in the corridor brought us slap up against Ted Mallory and Tina Gianetti, who both stared.
“Nice idea, shame about the execution,” Ted Mallory said. “You all look terrible. What have you done to yourself, Maree?”
Maree recognised him. She mumbled and shifted. I said hurriedly, “She’s the Moon Dowager from that short story by H. C. Blands.”
Mallory of course had never heard of the story but, as I had hoped, he did not like to admit it. He took Gianetti’s arm and moved on, saying, “Well, on with the motley, Tina.” But he was faintly suspicious, enough to turn and look at us over his shoulder and to add in a slightly puzzled way, “I like that costume even less than the centaur get-up, Nick. Don’t expect me to award you any prizes.”
We rounded the corner to the lifts, feeling limp, both of us. Neither lift was there. Nick pounded his thumb on the call buttons. “This is almost worse than everything else!” he was saying, when both lifts arrived together. “I can’t bear to meet anyone else I know,” he said, watching a crowd of people surrounding an angel with a harp surge out of the lift on the right.
The lift on the left contained Janine.
Rupert Venables continued
If Janine was disconcerted, you could have fooled me. She stood in the doorway of the lift and stared pleasantly down at Maree. “Dear, dear,” she said. “What can have happened to my niece?”
She was still wearing that bloodstained jumper. I noticed it the way you do notice things, vividly, when something this shocking happens. The apparent blood, from this close, resolved itself into a cluster of moistly shiny red strawberries. I tore my eyes from them and met Janine’s. “I don’t know what happened to Maree exactly,” I said. “You tell me.”
A perfectly horrible little smile flitted on Janine’s face, gleeful and secretly gloating. It took in my blistered face as well as Maree’s blanched little figure. “I’ve no idea,” she said. “But I think she ought to go to her room and lie down.”
Janine clearly thought she was quite safe. She had no notion, of course, that I knew she had been on Thalangia. But surely, I thought, seeing Nick was with me would show her – Here I began to wonder what mixture of feelings Nick must be having. If it was bad for me, meeting Janine like this, it was surely ten times worse for Nick. I looked round for him and there was no sign of him. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. But Will was standing a few feet away, staring at Maree in evident horror. And Maree knew Janine. Her bleached hands were flailing limply and she was trying to say something.
Janine, still smiling, cocked her face sweetly down towards Maree. “What’s the poor little thing trying to say, do you think?”
Seeing Will standing there made me feel better. I wanted to hurl accusations at Janine. I wanted to show her I knew what she had done. But it would have done no good. She knew as well as I did that there was no kind of Earthly evidence to connect her with Maree’s condition. Instead, I leant forward over the handle of the chair, across Maree’s head. “She’s trying to tell you,” I said, “that someone has sewn six rabbit’s testicles to your right breast.”
Janine’s head jerked upright. She stared at me for a second, obviously wondering if I had said what she thought she heard. Then she settled for looking puzzled and distant, turned and stalked gracefully away.
Will pounced forward. “My God, Rupe! What the hell—?”
“Get in the lift with us,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.” I looked round again for Nick, but he was still nowhere to be seen. It was the deftest vanishing trick I had ever come across. I just hoped he would turn up again. Will and I crowded into the lift beside the wheelchair and its drooping white occupant, and I gave Will a summary of events as we hummed slowly upwards.
“Lord!” he said. “No wonder you look such a mess! And I’ve never heard even you be that rude to a strange woman before! I couldn’t think what – and what about the centaur, Rob?”
“We’ll get it out of him somehow,” I said. “But I think you saved his life by running into him. He was obviously supposed to take them back to Thalangia with him.”
“But what are you going to do about Janine and this man White?” Will wanted to know. “There’s no evidence against them except Nick’s and she’s his mother!”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m going to have to send Nick to Babylon with Maree – if he turns up – so we could lose that evidence anyway.” I looked up at the indicator and found we were passing the fourth floor. Nearly there. “Will, tell me your Babylon verse. I need it.”
“You certainly will,” he said. “It’s the central one.” And he recited rapidly:
“How hard is the road to Babylon?
As hard as grief or greed.
What do I ask for when I get there?
Only for what you need.
If you travel in need and travel light
You can get there by candle-light.”
The lift stopped and the door opened as he finished. I pushed Maree out, saying, “Thanks. Yes. That sounds central.” As I said it, the other lift opened and Nick stepped out. He was looking so shut-away and non-committal that all I liked to say to him was “Oh, there you are. Come to my room and I’ll get us something to eat from Room Service.”
“I’m not very hungry,” he said.
“Maybe you aren’t,” Will told him cheerfully, “but I am. I can eat anything you can’t manage.”
That was the right approach with Nick, seemingly. Nick came along beside us as I trundled Maree round the first mirr
ored corner and along the corridor beyond. The node had been tampered with again. We turned another corner and still had not reached my room. It occurred to me to wonder if this happened whenever Gram White made transit to or from Thalangia. I asked Will.
“Not only that,” he said, “someone else has been at it too. Your room’s been further off every time I’ve been up here.”
This time it was so far off that we reached Nick’s room first. Nick said he wanted to get a sweater and would catch us up.
“We’ll wait for you,” Will and I said, almost in chorus. We didn’t want to lose him again. “And where’s Maree’s room?” I asked while Nick unlocked the door.
Nick pointed to the next door along. “There. Why?”
I didn’t like to say that Janine had suggested I take Maree there. “Just want to check something,” I said. “Where would Maree keep her key?”
“Top right-hand pocket of her jacket,” Nick said. I could tell by his deadpan face that he guessed it had something to do with his mother.
Wincing rather, I got the key from Maree’s pallid pocket and let myself into a hotel room much smaller than mine, filled with a surprising number of possessions. At a rough guess, I would have said it contained all Maree’s worldly goods. There was a grey and skinny teddy bear on the bed that looked as if it had been carried around by its neck for years, the vet-case on top of a heap of things on the floor, a computer set up on the dressing-table and several boxes of much-read-looking books. And, as I had suspected, something felt wrong. Something felt very wrong, but I couldn’t tell where it was. But it felt so wrong that when Will started innocently pushing Maree in after me, I told him to stay out and, at all costs, to keep Maree outside. Will sensed the wrongness too. He nodded and backed out. I climbed about among the heaps, unavailingly searching.
“Try the computer,” Nick said from the doorway. He was engulfed in a big furry blue sweater and shivering as if he had only just now noticed how cold and shocked he had been. “She uses her computer a lot.”
I climbed over a book box and turned on the computer. As the screen lit, I did almost without thinking what I always do with any computer of my own, and put out a scan for viruses, Magid-style. The result was startling. VIRUS OPERATES, the screen told me. The space behind filled with dry clustering twigs, more and more of them, until the screen looked like dense undergrowth, and there was a sense of something looking out at me from among them. The twigs grew thorns, vicious ones, and with their burgeoning came every feeling of frustration, despair and humiliation I had ever known – and some I had not, particularly the humiliations. And it caught me.
I stood and stared at the clustering twigs, writhing with several kinds of shame, thinking I might as well give up and go home and die. I was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing was even worth fighting for because everything I touched was going to go wrong. Nothing—
An exclamation from Nick snapped me out of it. He was pointing to the bed. A shadowy thornbush seemed to be growing upon it. It was sending spiteful sprays up through the pillow, thrusting clumps of spines up through the duvet, and several spiky shoots were even pushing through the grey teddy bear. My shame and despair were wiped away by anger. So this was why Janine wanted Maree to lie down! No doubt the original intention was to have left Maree stripped in the lane for Dakros to find along with the other murdered heirs – and she must have been quite annoyed, Janine, to find I had retrieved Maree. So she had suggested this instead, knowing that in Maree’s present condition these spectral thorns would finish her off. Somehow it angered me particularly to see them attacking that evidently loved teddy bear.
“It’s the Thornlady,” Nick said. “Maree had dreams about it. That’s why we did the Witchy Dance in Bristol. To get rid of it.”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” I said. “It’s a damned goddess. Her computer’s rigged so that every time Maree used it the manifestations get stronger.” My respect for Maree increased, now I knew she must have been fighting this all the time.
“Can you get rid of it?” Nick asked me.
“Yes, but it’ll be a long job,” I said. Any kind of theurgy and workings connected with deities always take long strenuous hours to undo. Sometimes you have to request the help of another god. I sighed. This was another item in the stack of things accumulating for me to do tomorrow. “We’ll just lock it up for now and keep well away.”
We did that. I felt drained. Those thorns were powerful. We went on down the corridor and round another corner, with me only wanting to get to my room, clean up and rest before starting on the next part. And there was my room at last. There was something stuck to the middle of the door, just below the number.
“Yuk!” said Will. “That wasn’t there when I last came up.”
It was one of the foulest of the foul sigils. It made me frankly retch. Its foulness was such that it was perceptible to Nick and even to Maree too. Nick’s shivering increased to shudders. Maree gave a mumbling cry and tried to cover her face. I had no doubt that Janine had just been putting the thing here before she came down in the lift. I clenched my teeth and went to get rid of it.
“No, not you,” Will said, shoving me aside. “It’s aimed personally at you, you fool!” He scooped at the sigil with both hands – hands that were used to scooping farmyard muck every day – and almost instantly threw the double handful down on the carpet with a yelp, where he stamped on it and ground it in with his substantial shoe. For a second or so there was a truly filthy smell. “As I said – yuk!” Will said, wiping his hands hard on his coat.
There was now a smooth rounded hollow in my door, but at least it was a clean hollow. I unlocked the door and we all trooped in. Will had left lights on. I could see Rob as a large mound under my duvet and a spread of fine black hair on my pillow, apparently asleep. Once I had made sure that he was breathing and unharmed by the foulness that had been on my door, I quite deliberately left him alone. I simply pushed Maree in her wheelchair to where Rob could see her if he deigned to open the one beautiful black-fringed eye that was visible, and went to the phone.
“Hamburgers and chips all round?” I asked Will.
“Two cheeseburgers for me,” said my brother. Years of the two of us winding up Simon paid off. I didn’t even have to wink at him. He went on innocently, “What do centaurs eat? They’re all vegetarians, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know,” I said, which was true. “Perhaps I’d better order a vegeburger and a bit of lettuce for him.”
“Vegeburgers are full of additives – could do damage to his stomach – you’d better not,” Will said callously. “But on the other hand the meat in most hamburgers could be horse.”
Here Nick tumbled to what was going on and nearly gave the game away by laughing. Will and I both glared at him. I said anxiously, “So he’s faced with a choice of two things he can’t eat. I don’t think I’d better order any food for him at all. He seems to be asleep anyway.”
Will capped this with. “There’s probably nothing on Earth he can eat, you know. He’d better not have coffee, and I’m sure milk’s bad for him. Even water’s full of harmful chemicals.”
Here Rob could take no more. He rose up on one elbow, looking surprisingly healthy considering what he had been through. “Oh please!” he said. “I’m very hungry. Isn’t there really anything I can eat or drink?”
“That depends,” I said. “Do you eat meat?”
“I love it,” Rob said frankly. “And cheese and bread, and I’d even eat lettuce. And I do drink milk.”
“All right,” I said. “Cheeseburgers, chips and coffee all round then.”
I picked up the phone, leaving Rob confronting Maree and, beyond her, Nick staring gravely and wonderingly at Rob. I took my time over the order, which was not difficult to do, since the Room Service waiter I spoke to showed signs of stress and kept asking me to repeat things. “And can you assure me, sir,” he asked, “that the members of staff who deliver this meal will be spared the sight of –
er – eccentric costumes?” I looked at Rob, who was very clearly trying not to look at Maree and as a result kept meeting Nick’s eye, and assured the man that everyone in my room was perfectly normal. “And can you give me exact directions, sir, as to the whereabouts of room 555?” the harassed man continued. “Staff have unaccountably got lost tonight and we are trying to avoid – er, further complaints.”
Here Rob tried to solve his problems by lying down again and pulling the duvet over his face. As I wanted him to remain off balance, I was forced to turn from the phone and ask, “Rob, do you eat hay?”
“Hay?” Rob said, rising up aghast.
“One bale or two?” I asked.
“What?” cried Rob and Room Service almost simultaneously.
“Sorry,” I said into the phone. “We convention people have a strange sense of humour. Tell the staff member it was round three corners from the lift to room 555 when we came here just now.”
I turned from the phone and pulled up a chair so that I could sit facing Rob, beside Maree. “Right,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for the food, so you can answer me a few questions while we wait.”
“I’ll be happy to do that,” Rob answered warily.
“I doubt it,” I said. “I’m going to want you to answer each question in one word only. Who sent you here?”
“Knarros,” Rob said, wide-eyed, sincere and rather hurt.
“And who told Knarros to send you?”
“I don’t really see Knarros taking orders from any—”
“Rob,” I said. “One word. Who?”
“I – I can’t tell you,” Rob said. His face paled and he began looking so unwell that, despite what Stan had said, I felt a brute.