Douglas Adams :

The Long Dark
Tea-Time of the Soul

Scanned and corrected by the world-famous Dirk Gently.
You can find me on iRC.
Pls send me GREETS in your diskmag/demo :)
I'm interested (scanning!) in c00l books. Books, articles, dictionaries etc... in Finnish and Estonian are preferred.
This file is in (MS-LOSS) WORD format. Try NOT to convert it to plain TEXT file, and DO NOT REMOVE my ScanRight!

I recommend you using WinWord with 2 coloumns and condensed prop chars with size 8 or with noncondensed/prop/6. If you are rich enough, you can use noncondensed ones with char sizes 9-10, but with only ONE coloumn!

Version 1.01, second, corrected release (it was a real pain in the ass to scan/correct this book, as the printing was VERY lame)

Another Dirk Gently-scans, under correction, to be released s00n:
Maailmanlopun Ravintola (Finnish - Restaurant at the end...)
El�m�, Maailmankaikkeus ja Kaikki (Finnish - Life, the Universe...)
Lord of the Rings (English) (Full!)
Teach yourself Japanese (English)
Teach yourself Finnish (English)

*I'm looking for help to correct LOTR. I don't have time to do it (1500 pages and LOTS of scan-errors). If you feel brave enough to correct it, let me know! :-) Of course I send the book to you via snail-mail as well!*

Dirk Gently has nowadays released:
Neil Gaiman: Don't Panic
Douglas Adams: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal Two, Heathrow Airport, shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame the usual peaple tried to claim responsibility. First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.

No rational cause could be found for the explosion - it was simply designated an act of god. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to chatch the 15.37 to Oslo.

  Funnier than Psycho... more chilling than Jeeves Takes Charge... shorter than War and Peace... the new Dirk Gently novel, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

Douglas Adams is the best-selling author of the Hitch Hiker
books: The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at
the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So
Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless.
 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has appeared in more
forms than one might reasonably expect, most of which flatly
contradict each other. It has appeared as a BBC radio series (its
original form), a BBC TV series, all sorts of different records,
cassettes, and CD's, a computer game, and also, apotheotically,
a bath towel. A series of graphic novels is currently in prep-
aration, and the motion-picture version is confidently expected
any decade now.
 He is also the author of the Dirk Gently books, Dirk Gently's
Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the
Soul. He is currently working on another book in this series.
 He has also written The Deeper Meaning of Liff with John
Lloyd and, most recently, the travel and wildlife book Last
Chance to See, with Mark Carwardine. He is making more
TV programmes these days and also frequently lectures on
computers and semi-extinct parrots.
 He lives partly in Islington, London, partly in Provence,
France, but mostly in airport bookstalls.

Also by Douglas Adams in Pan Books

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life, the Universe and Everything
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Mostly Harmless

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency


With John Lloyd
The Deeper Meaning of Liff


With Mark Carwardine
Last Chance to See

Douglas Adams

The Long Dark
Tea-Time of the Soul


Pan Books
in association with William Heinemann
For Jane

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II
and an Apple LaserWriter II NTX. The word processing
software was FullWrite Professional from Ashton Tate. The
fnal proofing and photosetting was done by The Last Word,
London SW6.

I would like to say an enormous thank you to my amazing and
wonderful editor, Sue Freestone.
  Her help, support, criticism, encouragement. enthusiasm and
sandwiches have been beyond measure. I also owe thanks and
apologies to Sophie, James and Vivian who saw so little of her
during the final weeks of work.

Chapter 1






It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has
ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
  Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree
of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This
ugliness arises because airports ane full of people who are tired,
cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in
Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to
this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole
tried to reflect this in their designs.
  They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness
motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling colours, to make
effortless the business of separating the traveller for ever from
his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller with
arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or
the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and
wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it
is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates,
presumably on the grounds that they are not.

  Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a sea of hazy
noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.
  All the way out of London to Heathrow she had suffered from
doubt. She was not a superstitious person, or even a religious
person. she was simply someone who was not at all sure she
should be flying to Norway. But she was finding it increasingly
easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and if it was
remotely possible that any godlike being who could order the
disposition of particles at the creation of the Universe would
also be interested in directing traffic on the M4, did not want her
to fly to Norway either. All the trouble with the tickets, finding a
next-door neighbour to look after the cat, then finding the cat so
it could be looked after by the next-door neighbour, the sudden
leak in the roof, the missing wallet, the weather, the unexpected
death of the next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat - it
all had the semblance of an orchestrated campaign of
obstruction which had begun to assume godlike proportions.
  Even the taxi-driver - when she had eventually found a taxi-
had said, "Norway? What you want to go there for?" And when
she hadn't instantly said, "'The aurora borealis!" or "Fjords!" but
had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her lip, he had said,
"I know, I bet it's some bloke dragging you out there. Tell you
what, tell him to stuff it. Go to Tenerife."
  There was an idea.
  Tenerife.
  Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.
  She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the angry
tangles of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable
the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like
in Norway.
  Or, indeed, at home. Home would bc about as icebound as
Norway right now. Icebound, and punctuated with geysers of
steam bursting out of the grnund, catching in the frigid air and
dissipating bctween the glacial cliff faces of Sixth Avenue.
  A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had pursued in the course
of her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt to be a
New Yorker. For though she had lived in the city very little,
most of her life had been spent at a constant distance from it.
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and a period of distracted
wandering around South America five years ago following the
loss of her newly mamed husband, Luke, in a New York taxi-
hailing accident.
  She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that
she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was
pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they
brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to.
That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out and sit
at a table staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real pizza
however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.
  London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of
course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why
would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it
was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it amved at
your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out
of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the
TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up,
sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple
principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she
could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once
a month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza
restaurant, order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could
describe - pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially - and then,
sweetly, ask them to deliver it.
  "To what?"
  "Deliver. Let me give you the address - "
  "I don't understand. Aren't you going to come and pick it
up?"
  "No. Aren't you going to deliver? My address - "
  "Er, we don't do that, miss."
  "Don't do what?"
  "Er, deliver. . ."
  "You don't deliver? Am I hearing you correctly... ?"
  The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly slanging
match which would leave her feeling drained and shaky, but
much, much better the following morning. In all other respects
she was one of the most sweet-natured people you could hope to
meet.
  But today was testing her to the limit.
  There had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and
when the distant flash of blue lights made it clear that the cause
was an accident somewhere ahead of them Kate had become
more tense and had stared fixedly out of the other window as
eventually they had crawled past it.
  The taxi-driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had
dropped her off because she didn't have the right money, and
there was a lot of disgruntled hunting through tight trouser
pockets before he was eventually able to find change for her.
The atmosphere was heavy and thundery and now, standing in
the middle of the main check-in concourse at Terminal Two,
Heathrow Airport, she could not find the check-in desk for her
flight to Oslo.
  She stood very still for a moment, breathing calmly and
deeply and trying not to think of Jean-Philippe.
  Jean-Philippe was, as the taxi-driver had correctly guessed,
the reason why she was going to Norway, but was also the
reason why she was convinced that Norway was not at all a
good place for her to go. Thinking of him therefore made her
head oscillate and it seemed best not to think about him at all but
simply to go to Norway as if that was where she happened to be
going anyway. She would then be terribly surprised to bump
into him at whatever hotel it was he had written on the card that
was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag.
  In fact she would be surprised to find him there anyway.
What she would be much more likely to find was a message
from him saying that he had been unexpectedly called away to
Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and that he would call her from
there. Jean-Philippe was the most continually absent person she
had ever met. In this he was the culmination of a series. Since
she had lost Luke to the great yellow Chevrolet she had been
oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions that a succession
of self-absorbed men had inspired in her.
  She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even shut her
eyes for a second. She wished that when she opened them again
there would be a sign in front of her saying "This way for
Norway" which she could simply follow without needing to
think about it or anything else ever again. This, she reflected, in
a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably
how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many
sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that
people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and
ready to accept any kind of guidance.
  Kate opened her eyes again and was, of course, disappointed.
But then a second or two later there was a momentary parting in
a long surging wave of cross Germans in inexplicable yellow
polo shirts and through it she had a brief glimpse of the check-in
desk for Oslo. Lugging her garment bag on to her shoulder, she
made her way towards it.
  There was just one other person before her in the line at the
desk and he, it turned out, was having trouble or perhaps making
it.
  He was a large man, impressively large and well-built - even
expertly built - but he was also definitely odd-looking in a way
that Kate couldn't quite deal with. She couldn't even say what it
was that was odd about him, only that she was immediately
inclined not to include him on her list of things to think about at
the moment. She remembered reading an article which had
explained that the central processing unit of the human brain
only had seven memory registers, which meant that if you had
seven things in your mind at the same time and then thought of
something else, orte of the other seven would instantly drop out.
  In quick succession she thought about whether or not she was
likely to catch the plane, about whether it was just her
imagination that the day was a particularly bloody one, about
airline staff who smile charmingly and are breathtakingly rude,
about Duty Free shops which are able to charge much lower
prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously - don't, about
whether or not she felt a magazine article about airports coming
on which might help pay for the trip, about whether her garment
bag would hurt less on her other shoulder and finally, in spite of
all her intentions to the contrary, about Jean-Philippe, who was
another set of at lest seven subtopics all to himself.
  The man standing arguing in front of her popped right out of
her mind.
  It was only the announcement on the airport Tannoy of the
last call for her flight to Oslo which forced her attention back to
the situation in front of her.
  The large man was making trouble about the fact that he
hadn't been given a first class seat reservation. It had just
transpired that the reason for this was that he didn't in fact have
a first class ticket.
  Kate's spirits sank to the very bottom of her being and began
to prowl around there making a low growling noise.
  It now transpired that the man in front of her didn't actually
have a ticket at all, and the argument then began to range freely
and angrily over such topics as the physical appearance of the
airline :heck-in girl, her qualities as a person, theories about her
ancestors, speculations as to what surprises the future might
have in store for her and the airline for which she worked, and
finally lit by chance on the happy subject of the man's credit
card.
  He didn't have one.
  Further discussions ensued, and had to do with cheques, and
why the airline did not accept them.
  Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch.
  "Excuse me," she said, interrupting the transactions. "Is this
going to take long? I have to catch the Oslo flight."
  "I'm just dealing with this gentleman," said the girl, "I'll be
with you in just one second."
  Kate nodded, and politely allowed just one second to go by.
  "It's just that the flight's about to leave," she said then. "I
have one bag, I have my ticket, I have a reservation. It'll take
about thirty seconds. I hate to interrupt, but I'd hate even more
to miss my flight for the sake of thirty seconds. That's thirty
actual seconds, not thirty `just one' seconds, which could keep
us here all night."
  The check-in girl turned the full glare on her lipgloss on to
Kate, but before she could speak the large blond man looked
round, and the effect of his face was a little disconcerting.
  "I, too," he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, "wish to fly to
Oslo."
  Kate stared at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in an
airport, or rather, the airport looked thoroughly out of place
around him.
  "Well," she said, "the way we're stacked up at the moment it
looks like neither of us is going to make it. Can we just sort this
one out? What's the hold-up?"
  The check-in girl smiled her charming, dead smile and said,
"The airline does not accept cheques, as a matter of company
policy."
  "Well I do," said Kate, slapping down her own credit card.
"Charge the gentleman's ticket to this, and I'll take a cheque
from him.
  "OK?" she added to the big man, who was looking at her with
slow surprise. His eyes were large and blue and conveyed the
impression that they had looked at a lot of glaciers in their time.
They were extraordinarily arrogant and also muddled.
  "OK?" she repeated briskly. "My name is Kate Schechter.
Two `c's, two `h's, two `e's and also a `t', an `r' and an `s'.
Provided they're all there the bank won't be fussy about the
order they come in. They never seem to know themselves."
  The man very slowly inclined his head a little towards her in
a rough bow of acknowledgement. He thanked her for her
kindness, courtesy and some Norwegian word that was lost on
her, said that it was a long while since he had encountered
anything of the kind, that she was a woman of spirit and some
other Norwegian word, and that he was indebted to her. He also
added, as an afterthought, that he had no cheque-book.
  "Right!" said Kate, determined not to be deflected from her
course. She fished in her handbag for a piece of paper, took a
pen from the check-in counter, scribbled on the paper and thrust
it at him.
  "That's my address," she said, "send me the money. Hock
your fur coat if you have to. Just send it me. OK? I'm taking a
flyer on trusting you."
  The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on it
with immense slowness, then folded it with elaborate care and
put it into the pocket of his coat. Again he bowed to her very
slightly.
  Kate suddenly realised that the check-in girl was silently
waiting for her pen back to fill in the credit card form. She
pushed it back at her in annoyance, handed over her own ticket
and imposed on herself an icy calm.
  The airport Tannoy announced the departure of their flight.
  "May I see your passports, please?" said the girl unhunriedly.
  Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn't have one.
  "You what?" exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply stopped
moving at all and stared quietly at a random point on her desk
waiting for someone else to make a move. It wasn't her
problem.
  The man repeated angrily that he didn't have a passport. He
shouted it and banged his fist on the counter so hard that it was
slightly dented by the force of the blow.
  Kate picked up her ticket, her passport and her credit card and
hoisted her garment bag back up on to her shoulder.
  "This is when I get off," she said, and simply walked away.
She felt that she had made every effort a human being could
possibly be expected to make to catch her plane, but that it was
not to be. She would send a message to Jean-Philippe saying that
she could not be there, and it would probably sit in a slot next to
his message to her saying why he could not be there either. For
once they would be equally absent.
  For the time being she would go and cool off. She set off in
search of first a newspaper and then some coffee, and by dint of
following the appropriate signs was unable to locate either. She
was then unable to find a working phone from which to send a
message, and decided to give up on the airport altogether. Just
get out, she told herself, find a taxi, and go back home.
  She threaded her way back across the check-in concourse,
and had almost made it to the exit when she happened to glance
back at the check-in desk that had defeated her, and was just in
time to see it shoot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of
orange flame.
  As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and
choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at
least relieved to be able to think that she hadn't merely been
imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.

Chapter 2



The usual people tried to claim responsibility.
  First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British
Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the
situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a
million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at
all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location
for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to
admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.
  No cause could be found for the explosion.
  It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own free
will. Explanations were advanced, but most of these were
simply phrases which restated the problem in different words,
along the same principles which had given the world "metal
fatigue". In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account
for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete
into an explosive condition, which was "non-linear catastrophic
sWctural exasperation", or to put it another way - as a junior
cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase
which was to haunt the rest of his career - the check-in desk had
just got "fundamentally fed up with being where it was".
  As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the casualties
varied wildly. They started at forty-seven dead, eighty-nine
seriously injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a hundred and
thirty injured, and rose as high as one hundred and seventeen
dead before the figures started to be revised downwards once
more. The final figures revealed that once all the people who
could be accounted for had been accounted for, in fact no one
had been killed at all. A small number of people were in hospital
suffering from cuts and bruises and varying degrees of
traumatised shock, but that, unless anyone had any information
about anybody actually being missing, was that.
  This was yet another inexplicable aspect to the whole affair.
The force of the explosion had been enough to reduce a large
part of the front of Terminal Two to rubble, and yet everyone
inside the building had somehow either fallen very luckily, or
been shielded from one piece of falling masonry by another, or
had the shock of the explosion absorbed by their luggage. All in
all, very little luggage had survived at all. There were questions
asked in Parliament about this, but not very interesting ones.

  It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware
of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside
world.
  She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which
she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin
trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great
curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a
tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful or
uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine-tenths
were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she
recognised at all that she was dreaming, she realised that she
must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it
said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their
brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine-tenths
were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they
were used for storing penguins.
  Gradually the trunks, the memories and the penguins began to
grow indistinct, to become all white and swimmy, then to
become like walls that were all white and swimmy, and finally
to become walls that were merely white, or rather a yellowish,
greenish kind of off-white, and to enclose her in a small room.
  The room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but
turned down low, and the light from a street lamp found its way
between the grey curtains and threw sodium patterns on the
opposite wall. She became dimly aware of the shadowed shape
of her own body lying under the white, turned-down sheet and
the pale, neat blankets. She stared at it for a nervous while,
checking that it looked right before she tried, tentatively, to
move any part of it. She tried her right hand, and that seemed to
be fine. A little stiff and aching, but the fingers all responded,
and all seemed to be of the right length and thickness, and to
bend in the right places and in the right directions.
  She panicked briefly when she couldn't immediately locate
her left hand, but then she found it lying across her stomach and
nagging at her in some odd way. It took her a second or two of
concentration to put together a number of rather disturbing
feelings and realise that there was a needle bandaged into her
arm. This shook her quite badly. From the needle there snaked a
long thin transparent pipe that glistened yellowly in the light
from the street lamp and hung in a gentle curl from a thick
plastic bag suspended from a tall metal stand. An array of
horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus, but she
peered dimly at the bag and saw the words "Dextro-Saline". She
made herself calm down again and lay quietly for a few
moments before continuing her exploration.
  Her ribcage seemed undamaged. Bruised and tender, but
there was no shaiper pain anywhere to suggest that anything was
broken. Her hips and thighs ached and were stiff, but revealed
no serious hurt. She flexed
 the muscles down her right leg and
then her left. She rather fancied that her left ankle was sprained.
  In other words, she told herself, she was perfectly all right. So
what was she doing here in what she could tell from the septic
colour of the paint was clearly a hospital?
  She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the pen-
guins for an entertaining few minutes.
  The next time she came round she treated herself with a little
more care, and lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous.
  She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It
was dark and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like
the North Sea. Lumpy things jumbled themselves out of it and
slowly arranged themselves into a heaving airport. The airport
was sour and ached in her head, and in the middle of it, pulsing
like a migraine, was the memory of a moment's whirling splurge
of light.
  It became suddenly very clear to her that the check-in
concourse of Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport had been hit by
a meteorite. Silhouetted in the flare was the fur-coated figure of
a big man who must have caught the full force of it and been
reduced instantly to a cloud of atoms that were free to go as they
pleased. The thought caused a deep and horrid shudder to go
through her. He had been infuriating and arrogant, but she had
liked him in an odd way. There had been something oddly noble
in his perverse bloody-mindedness. Or maybe, she realised, she
liked to think that such perverse bloody-mindedness was noble
because it reminded her of herself trying to order pizza to be
delivered in an alien, hostile and non-pizza-delivering world.
Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial
inevitabilities of life, but there were others.
  She felt a sudden surge of fear and loneliness, but it quickly
ebbed away and left her feeling much more composed, relaxed,
and wanting to go to the lavatory.
  According to her watch it was shortly after three o'clock, and
according to everything else it was night-time. She should
probably call a nurse and let the world know she had come
round. There was a window in the side wall of the room through
which she could see a dim corridor in which stood a stretcher
trolley and a tall black oxygen bottle, but which was otherwise
empty. Things were very quiet out there.
  Peering around her in the small room she saw a white-painted
plywood cupboard, a couple of tubular steel and vinyl chairs
lurking quietly in the shadows, and a white-painted plywood
bedside cabinet which supported a small bowl with a single
banana in it. On the other side of the bed stood her drip stand.
Set into the wall on that side of the bed was a metal plate with a
couple of black knobs and a set of old bakelite headphones
hanging from it, and wound around the tubular side pillar of the
bedhead was a cable with a bell push attached to it, which she
fingered, and then decided not to push.
  She was fine. She could find her own way about.
  Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her
elbows, and slid her legs out from under the sheets and on to the
floor, which was cold to her feet. She could tell almost
immediately that she shouldn't be doing this because every part
of her feet was sending back streams of messages telling her
exactly what every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched felt
like, as if it was a strange and worrying thing the like of which
they had never encountered before. Nevertheless she sat on the
edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor as something
they were just going to have to get used to.
  Ttte hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped thing. It
wasn't merely baggy, she decided on examining it more closely,
it actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue and white striped
cotton. It opened up the back and let in chilly night draughts.
Perfunctory sleeves flopped half-way down her arms. She
moved her arms around in the light, examining the skin, rubbing
it and pinching it, especially around the bandage which held her
drip needle in place. Normally her arms were lithe and the skin
was firm and supple. Tonight, however, they looked like bits of
chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with her other
hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.
  She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it
wobbled slightly less than she did, she was able to use it to pull
herself slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall slim figure
trembling, and after a few seconds she held the drip stand away
at a bent arm's length, like a shepherd holding a crook.
  She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least standing
up.
  The drip stand rolled on four small and independently
perverse wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a
supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the
door ahead of her. Walking increased her sense of wooziness,
but also increased her resolve not to give in to it. She reached
the door, opened it, and pushing the drip stand out ahead of her,
looked out into the corridor.
  To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing-doors with
circular porthole windows, which seemed to lead into a larger
area, an open ward perhaps. To her right a number of smaller
doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a short
distance before turning a sharp corner. One of those doors would
probably be the lavatory. The others? Well, she would find out
as she looked for the lavatory.
  The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly bigger
and had a chair in it and therefor probably counted as a room
since most people don't like to sit in cupboards, even nurses,
who have to do a lot of things that most people wouldn't like to.
It also had a stack of styro beakers, a lot of semi-congealed
coffee creamer and an elderly coffee maker, all sitting on top of
a small table together and seeping grimly over a copy of the
Evening Standard.
  Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to reconstruct
some of her missing days from it. However, what with her own
wobbly condition making it difficult to read, and the droopily
stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was able to glean
little more than the fact that no one could really say for certain
what had happened. It seemed that no one had been seriously
hurt, but that an employee of one of the airlines was still
unaccounted for. The incident had now been officially classified
as an "Act of God".
  "Nice one, God," thought Kate. She put down the remains of
the paper and closed the door behind her.
  The next door she tried was another small side ward like her
own. There was a bedside table and a single banana in the fruit
bowl.
  The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door to quickly,
but she did not pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately something
odd had caught her attention, but although she had noticed it,
she coutd not immediately say what it was. She stood there with
the door half closed, staring at the door, knowing that she should
not look again, and knowing that she would.
  Carefully she eased the door back open again.
  The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness did
not give her a good feeling about the occupant of the bed. She
listened. The silence didn't sound too good either. It wasn't the
silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence of nothing but a
little distant traffic noise.
  She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the doorway,
looking and listening. She wondered about the sheer bulk of the
occupant of the bed and how cold he was with just a thin blanket
pulled over him. Next to the bed was a small tubular-legged
vinyl bucket chair which was rather overwhelmed by the huge
nnd heavy fur coat draped over it, and Kate thought that the coat
should more properly be draped over the bed and its cold
occupant.
  At last, walking as softly and cautiously as she could, she
moved into the room and over to the bed. She stood looking
down at the face of the big, Nordic man. Though cold, and
though his eyes were shut, his face was frowning slightly as if
he was still rather worried about something. This struck Kate as
being almost infinitely sad. In life the man had had the air of
someone who was beset by huge, if somewhat puzzling,
difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost immediately
found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as well
was miserable to contemplate.
  She was astonished that he appeared to be so unscathed. His
skin was totally unmarked. It was rugged and healthy - or rather
had been healthy until very recently. Closer inspection showed a
network of fine lines which suggested that he was older than the
mid-thirties she had originally assumed. He could even have
been a very fit and healthy man in his late forties.
  Standing against the wall, by the door, was something
unexpected. It was a large Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn't
look as if it had been installed there: it wasn't plugged in and it
had a small neat sticker on it explaining that it was temporarily
out of order. It looked as if it had simply been left there
inadvenently by someone who was probably even now walking
around wondering which room he had left it in. Its large red and
white wavy panel stared glassily into the room and did not
explain itself. The only thing the machine communicated to the
outside world was that there was a slot into which coins of a
variety of denominations might be inserted, and an aperture to
which a variety of different cans would be delivered if the
machine was working, which it was not. There was also an old
sledge-hammer leaning against it which was, in its own way,
odd.
  Faintness began to creep over Kate, the room began to
develop a slight spin, and there was some restless rustling in the
cabin trunks of her mind.
  Then she realised that the rustling wasn't simply her
imagination. There was a distinct noise in the room - a heavy,
beating, scratching noise, a muffled fluttering. The noise rose
and fell like the wind, but in her dazed and woozy state, Kate
could not at first tell where the noise was coming from. At last
her gaze fell on the curtains. She stared at them with the worried
frown of a drunk trying to work out why the door is dancing.
The sound was coming from the curtains. She walked
uncertainly towards them and pulled them apart. A huge eagle
with circles tattooed on its wings was clattering and beating
against the window, staring in with great yellow eyes and
pecking wildly at the glass.
  Kate staggered back, turned and tried to heave herself out of
the room. At the end of the corridor the porthole doors swung
open and two figures came through them. Hands rushed towards
her as she became hopelessly entangled in the drip stand and
began slowly to spin towards the floor.
  She was unconscious as they carefully laid her back in her
bed. She was unconscious half an hour later when a disturbingly
short figure in a worryingly long white doctor's coat arrived,
wheeled the big man away on a stretcher trolley and then
returned after a few minutes for the Coca-Cola machine.
  She woke a few hours later with a wintry sun seeping through
the window. The day looked very quiet and ordinary, but Kate
was still shaking.

Chapter 3





The same sun later broke in through the upper windows of a
house in North London and struck the peacefully sleeping figure
of a man.
  The room in which he slept was large and bedraggled and did
not much benefit from the sudden intrusion of light. The sun
crept slowly across the bedclothes, as if nervous of what it might
find amongst them, slunk down the side of the bed, moved in a
rather startled way across some objects it encountered on the
floor, toyed nervously with a couple of motes of dust, lit briefly
on a stuffed fruitbat hanging in the corner, and fled.
  This was about as big an appearance as the sun ever put in
here, and it lasted for about an hour or so, during which time the
sleeping figure scarcely stirred.
  At eleven o'clock the phone rang, and still the figure did not
respond, any more than it had responded when the phone had
rung at twenty-five to seven in the morning, again at twenty to
seven, again at ten to seven, and again for ten minutes
continuously starting at five to seven, after which it has settled
into a long and significant silence, disturbed only by the braying
of police sirens in a nearby street at around nine o'clock, the
delivery of a large eighteenth-century dual manual harpsichord
at around nine-fifteen, and the collection of same by bailiffs at a
little after ten. This was a not uncommon sort of occurrence-
the people concerned were accustomed to finding the key under
the doormat, and the man in the bed was accustomed to sleeping
through it. You would probably not say that he was sleeping the
sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was
certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when
he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light.
  The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to
pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have
found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He
would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the
records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo
would have been distressed by its proponions, which were
neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or
symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much
equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays,
most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The
walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which
Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the
wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would
probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable
river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as
long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or "Dirk",
Gently, n� Cjelli.
  At last Gently stirred.
  The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his
head, but from somewhere half way down the length of the bed
a hand slowly emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers
felt their way in little tapping movements along the floor.
Working from experience, they neatly circumvented a bowl of
sornething very nasty that had been sitting there since
Michaelmas, and eventually happened upon a half-empty pack
of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers shook a
crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of
matches, and then started to poke a way through the sheets
tangled together at the top of the bed, like a magician prodding
at a handkerchief from which he intends to release a flock of
doves.
  The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette
was lit. For a while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the
cigarette in great heaving drags. It coughed long, loud and
shudderingly and then began at last to breathe in a more
measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk Gently achieved
consciousness.
  He lay there for a while feeling a terrible sense of worry and
guilt about something weighing on his shoulders. He wished he
could forget about it, and promptly did. He levered himself out
of bed and a few minutes later padded downstairs.
  The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual things: a rude
letter threatening to take away his American Express card, an
invitation to apply for an American Express card, and a few bills
of the more hysterical and unrealistic type. He couldn't
understand why they kept sending them. The cost of the postage
seemed merely to be good money thrown after bad. He shook
his head in wonderment at the malevolent incompetence of the
world, threw the mail away, entered the kitchen and approached
the fridge with caution.
  It stood in the corner.
  The kitchen was large and shrouded in a deep gloom that was
not relieved, only turned yellow, by the action of switching on
the light. Dirk squatted down in front of the fridge and carefully
examined the edge of the door. He found what he was looking
for. In fact he found more than he was looking for.
  Near the bottom of the door, across the narrow gap which
separated the door from the main body of the fridge, which held
the strip of grey insulating rubber, lay a single human hair. It
was stuck there with dried saliva. That he had expected. He had
stuck it there himself three days earlier and had checked it on
several occasions since then. What he had not expected to fine
was a second hair.
  He frowned at it in alarm. A second hair?
  It was stuck across the gap in the same way as the first one,
only this hair was near the top of the fridge door, and he had not
put it there. He peered at it closely, and even went so far as to go
and open the old shutters on the kitchen windows to let some
extra light in upon the scene.
  The daylight shouldered its way in like a squad of poiicemen,
and did a lot of what's-all-thising around the room which, like
the bedroom, would have presented anyone of an aesthetic
disposition with difficulties. Like most of the rooms in Dirk's
house it was large, looming and utterly dishevelled. It simply
sneered at anyone's attempts to tidy it, sneered at them and
brushed them aside like one of the small pile of dead and
disheartened flies that lay beneath the window, on top of a pile
of old pizza boxes.
  The light revealed the second hair for what it was - a grey
hair at root, dyed a vivid metallic orange. Dirk pursed his lips
and thought very deeply. He didn't need to think hard in order to
realise who the hair belonged to - there was only one person
who regularly entered the kitchen looking as if her head had
been used for extracting metal oxides from industrial waste - but
he did have seriously to consider the implications of the
discovery that she had been plastering her hair across the door of
his fridge.
  It meant that the silently waged conflict between himself and
his cleaning lady had escalated to a new and more frightening
level. It was now, Dirk reckoned, fully three months since this
fridge door had been opened, and each of them was grimly
determined not to be the one to open it first. The fridge no longer
merely stood there in the comer of the kitchen, it actually
lurked. Dirk could quite clearly remember the day on which the
thing had started lurking. It was about a week ago, when Dirk
had tried a simple subterfuge to trick Elena - the old bat's name
was Elena, pronounced to rhyme with cleaner, which was an
irony that Dirk now no longer relished - into opening the fridge
door. The subterfuge had been deftly deflected and had nearly
rebounded horribly on Dirk.
  He had resorted to the strategy of going to the local
mini-market to buy a few simple groceries. Nothing contentious
- a little milk, some eggs, some bacon, a carton or two of
chocolate custard and a simple half-pound of butter. He had left
them, innocently, on top of the fridge as if to say, "Oh, when
you have a moment, perhaps you could pop these inside..."
  When he had returned that evening his heart bounded to see
that they were no longer on top of the fridge. They were gone!
They had not been merely moved aside or put on a shelf, they
were nowhere to be seen. She must finally have capitulated and
put them away. In the fridge. And she would surely have
cleaned it out once it was actually open. For the first and only
time his heart swelled with warmth and gratitude towards her,
and he was about to fling open the door of the thing in relief and
triumph when an eighth sense (at the last count, Dirk reckoned
he had eleven) warned him to be very, very careful, and to
consider first where Elena might have put the cleared out
contents of the fridge.
  A nameless doubt gnawed at his mind as he moved
noiselessly towards the garbage bin beneath the sink. Holding
his breath, he opened the lid and looked.
  There, nestling in the folds of the fresh black bin liner, were
his eggs, his bacon, his chocolate custard and his simple
half-pound of butter. Two milk bottles stood rinsed and neatly
lined up by the sink into which their contents had presumably
been poured.
  She had thrown it away.
  Rather than open the fridge door, she had thrown his food
away. He looked round slowly at the grimy, squat, white
monolith, and that was the exact moment at which he realised
without a shadow of a doubt that his fridge had now begun
seriously to lurk.
  He made himself a stiff black coffee and sat, slightly
trembling. He had not even looked directly at the sink, but he
knew that he must unconsciously have noticed the two clean
milk bottles there, and some busy part of his mind had been
alarmed by them.
  The next day he had explained all this away to himself. He
was becoming needlessly paranoiac. It had surely been an
innocent or careless mistake on Elena's part. She had probably
been brooding distractedly on her son's attack of bronchitis
peevishness or homosexuality or whatever it was that regularly
prevented her from either turning up, or from having noticeable
effect when she did. She was Italian and probably had
absent-mindedly mistaken his food for garbage.
  But the business with the hair changed all that. It established
beyond all possible doubt that she knew exactly what she was
doing. She was under no circumstamces going to open the fridge
door until he had opened it first, and he was under no
circumstances going to open the fridge until she had.
  Obviously she had not noticed his hair, otherwise it would
have been her most effective course simply to pull it off, thus
tricking him into thinking she had opened the fridge. He shuuld
presumably now remove her hair in the hope of pulling that
same trick on her, but even as he sat there he knew that
somehow that wouldn't work, and that they were locked into a
tightening spiral of non-fridge-opening that would lead them
both to madness or perdition.
  He wondered if he could hire someone to come and open the
fridge.
  No. He was not in a position to hire anybody to do anything.
He was not even in a position to pay Elena for the last three
weeks. The only reason he didn't ask her to leave was that
sacking somebody inevitably involved paying them off, and this
he was in no position to do. His secretary had finally left him on
her own initiative and gone off to do something reprehensible in
the travel business. Dirk had attempted to cast scon on her
preferring monotony of pay over-
  "Regularity of pay," she had calmly corrected him.
  - over job satisfaction.
  She had nearly said, "Over what?", but at that moment she
realised that if she said that she would have to listen to his reply,
which would be bound to infuriate her into arguing back. It
occurred to her for the first time that the only way of escaping
was just not to get drawn into these arguments. If she simply did
not respond this time, then she was free to leave. She tried it.
She felt a sudden freedom. She left. A week later, in much the
same mood, she married an airline cabin steward called Smith.
  Dirk had kicked her desk over, and then had to pick it up
himself later when she didn't come back.
  The detective business was currently as brisk as the tomb.
Nobody, it seemed, wished to have anything detected. He had
recently, to make ends meet, taken up doing palmistry in drag on
Thursday evenings, but he wasn't comfortable with it. He could
have withstood it - the hateful, abject humiliation of it all was
something to which he had, in different ways, now become
accustomed, and he was quite anonymous in his little tent in the
back garden of the pub - he could have withstood it all if he
hadn't been so horribly, excruciatingly good at it. It made him
break out in a sweat of self loathing. He tried by every means to
cheat, to fake, to be deliberately and cynically bad, but whatever
fakery he tried to introduce always failed and he invariably
ended up being right.
  His worst moment had come about as a result of the poor
woman from Oxfordshiie who had come in to see him one
evening. Being in something of a waggish mood, he had
suggested that she should keep an eye on her husband, who,
judging by her mamage line, looked to be a bit of a flighty type.
It transpired that her husband was in fact a fighter pilot, and that
his plane had been lost in an exerrise over the North Sea only a
fortnight earlier.
  Dirk had been flustered by this and had soothed
meaninglessly at her. He was certain, he said, that her husband
would be restored to her in the fullness of time, that all would be
well, and that all manner of things would be well and so on. The
woman said that she thought this was not very likely seeing as
the world record for staying alive in the North Sea was rather
less than an hour, and since no trace of her husband had been
found in two weeks it seemed fanciful to imagine that he was
anything other than stone dead, and she was trying to get used to
the idea, thank you very much. She said it rather tartly.
  Dirk had lost all control at this point and started to babble.
  He said that it was very clear from reading her hands that the
great sum of money she had coming to her would be no
consolation to her for the loss of her dear, dear husband, but that
at least it might comfort her to know that he had gone on to that
great something or other in the sky, that he was floating on the
fleeciest of white clouds, looking very handsome in his new set
of wings, and that he was terribly sorry to be talking such
appalling drivel but she had caught him rather by surprise.
Would she care for some tea, or some vodka, or some soup?
  The woman demurred. She said she had only wandered into
the tent by accident, she had been looking for the lavatories, and
what was that about the money?
  "Complete gibberish," Dirk had explained. He was in great
difficulties, what with having the falsetto to keep up. "I was
making it up as I went along," he said. "Please allow me to
tender my most profound apologies for intruding so clumsily on
your private grief, and to escort you to, er, or rather, direct you
to the, well, what I can only in the circumstances call the
lavatory, which is out of the tent and on the left."
  Dirk had been cast down by this encounter, but was then
utterly horrified a few days later when he discovered that the
very following morning the unfonunate woman had learnt that
she had won �250,000 on the Premium Bonds. He spent several
hours that night standing on the roof of his house, shaking his
fist at the dark sky and shouting, "Stop it!" until a neighbour
complained to the police that he couldn't sleep. The police had
come round in a screaming squad car and woken up the rest of
the neighbourhood as well.

  Today, this morning, Dirk sat in his kitchen and stared
dejectedly at his fridge. The bloody-minded ebullience which he
usually relied on to carry him through the day had been knocked
out of him in its very opening moments by the business with the
fridge. His will sat imprisoned in it, locked up by a single hair.
  What he needed, he thought, was a client. Please, God, he
thought, if there is a god, any god, bring me a client. Just a
simple client, the simpler the better. Credulous and rich.
Someone like that chap yesterday. He tapped his fingers on the
table.
  The problem was that the more credulous the client, the more
Dirk fell foul at the end of his own better nature, which was
constantly rearing up and embarrassing him at the most
inopportune moments. Dirk frequently threatened to hurl his
better nature to the ground and kneel on its windpipe, but it
usually managed to get the better of him by dressing itself up as
guilt and self loathing, in which guise it could throw him right
out of the ring.
  Credulous and rich. Just so that he could pay off some,
perhaps even just one, of the more prominent and sensational
bills. He lit a cigarette. The smoke curled upwards in the
moming light and attached itself to the ceiling.
  Like that chap yesterday. . .
  He paused.
  The chap yesterday. . .
  The world held its breath.
  Quietly and gently there settled on him the knowledge that
something, somewhere, was ghastly. Something was terribly
wrong.
 There was a disaster hanging silently in the air around him
waiting for him to notice it. His knees tingled.
 What he needed, he had been thinking, was a client. He had
been thinking that as a matter of habit. It was what he always
thought at this time of the morning. What he had forgotten was
that he had one.
 He stared wildly at his watch. Nearly eleven-thirty. He shook
his head to try and clear the silent ringing between his ears, then
made a hysterical lunge for his hat and his great leather coat that
hung behind the door.
 Fifteen seconds later he left the house, five hours late but
moving fast.

Chapter 4



A minute or two later Dirk paused to consider his best strategy.
Rather than arrive five hours late and flustered it would be better
all round if he were to arrive five hours and a few extra minutes
late, but triumphantly in command.
  "Pray God I am not too soon!" would be a good opening line
as he swept in, but it needed a good follow-through as well, and
he wasn't sure what it should be.
  Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but
then again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous
propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely
because of his method of "Zen" navigation, which was simply to
find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and
follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful,
but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when
it was both.
  Furthermore he was not at all certain that his car was working.
  It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special time in the
company's history when they were making cars which had to
stop for repairs more often than they needed to stop for petrol,
and frequently needed to rest for months between outings. He
was, however, certain, now that he came to think about it, that
the car didn't have any petrol and furthermore he did not have
any cash or valid plastic to enable him to fill it up.
  He abandoned that line of thought as wholly fruitless.
  He stopped to buy a newspaper while he thought things over.
The clock in the newsagent's said eleven thirty-five. Damn
damn, damn. He toyed with the idea of simply dropping the
case. Just walking away and forgetting about it. Having some
lunch. The whole thing was fraught with difficulties in any
event. Or rather it was fraught with one particular difficulty
which was that of keeping a straight face. The whole thing was
complete and utter nonsense. The client was clearly loopy and
Dirk would not have considered taking the case except for one
very important thing.
  Three hundred pounds a day plus expenses.
  The client had agreed to it just like that. And when Dirk had
started his usual speech to the effect that his methods, involving
as they did the fundamental interconnectedness of all things,
often led to expenses that might appear to the untutored eye to
be somewhat tangential to the matter in hand, the client had
simply waved the matter aside as trifling. Dirk liked that in a
client.
  The only thing the client had insisted upon in the midst of this
almost superhuman fit of reasonableness was that Dirk had to be
there, absolutely had, had, had to be there ready, functioning and
alert, without fail, without even the merest smidgen of an inkling
of failure, at six-thirty in the morning. Absolute.
  Well, he was just going to have to see reason about that as
well. Six-thirty was clearly a preposterous time and he, the
client, obviously hadn't meant it seriously. A civilised six-thirty
for twelve noon was almost certainly what he had in mind, and
if he wanted to cut up rough about it, Dirk would have no option
but to start handing out some serious statistics. Nobody got
murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it.
You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-
lust levels up. Dirk had the figures to prove it.
  Did he, Anstey (the client's name was Anstey, an odd, intense
man in his mid-thirties with staring eyes, a narrow yellow tie
and one of the big houses in Lupton Road; Dirk hadn't actually
liked him very much and thought he looked as if he was trying
to swallow a fish), did he know that 67 per cent of all known
murderers, who expressed a preference, had had liver and bacon
for lunch? And that another 22 per cent had been torn between
either a prawn biryani or an omelette? That dispensed with 89
per cent of the threat at a stroke, and by the time you had further
discounted the salad eaters and the turkey and ham sandwich
munchers and started to look at the number of people who
would contemplate such a course of action without any lunch at
all, then you were well into the realms of negligibility and
bordering on fantasy.
  After two-thirty, but nearer to three o'clock, was when you
had to start being on your guard. Seriously. Even on good days.
Even when you weren't receiving death threats from strange
gigantic men with green eyes, you had to watch people like a
hawk after the lunching hour. The really dangerous time was
after four o'clockish, when the streets began to fill up with
marauding packs of publishers and agents, maddened with
fettucine and kir and baying for cabs. Those were the times that
tested men's souls. Six-thirty in the morning? Forget it. Dirk
had.
  With his resolve well stiffened Dirk stepped back out of the
newsagent's into the nippy air of the street and strode off.
  "Ah, I expect you'll be wanting to pay for that paper, then,
won't you, Mr Dirk, sir?" said the newsagent, trotting gently
after him.
  "Ah, Bates," said Dirk loftily, "you and your expectations.
Always expecting this and expecting that. May I recommend
serenity to you? A life that is burdened with expectations is a
heavy life. Its fruit is sorrow and disappointment. Learn to be
one with the joy of the moment."
  "I thirtk it's twenty pence that one, sir," said Bates, tranquilly.
  "Tell you what I'll do, Bates, seeing as it's you. Do you have
a pen on you at all? A simple ball-point will suffice."
  Bates produced one from an inner pocket and handed it to
Dirk, who then tore off the corner of the paper on which the
price was printed and scribbled "IOU" above it. He handed the
scrap of paper to the newsagent.
  "Shall I put this with the others, then, sir?"
  "Put it wherever it will give you the greatest joy, dear Bates, I
would want you to put it nowhere less. For now, dear man,
farewell."
  "I expect you'll be wanting to give me back my pen as well
Mr Dirk."
  "When the times are propitious for such a transaction, my
dear Bates," said Dirk, "you may depend upon it. For the
moment, higher purposes call it. Joy, Bates, great joy. Bates,
please let go of it."
  After one last listless tug, the little man shrugged and padded
back towards his shop.
  "I expect I'll be seeing you later, then, Mr Dirk," he called
out over his shoulder, without enthusiasm.
  Dirk gave a gracious bow of his head to the man's retreating
back, and then hurried on, opening the newspaper at the
horoscope page as he did so.
  "Virtually evervthing you decide today will be wrong," it said
bluntly.
  Dirk slapped the paper shut with a grunt. He did not for a
second hold with the notion that great whirling lumps of rock
light years away knew something about your day that you
didn't. It just so happened that "The Great Zaganza" was an old
friend of his who knew when Dirk's birthday was, and always
wrote his column deliberately to wind him up. The paper's
circulation had dropped by nearly a twelfth since he had taken
over doing the horoscope, and only Dirk and The Great Zaganza
knew why.
  He hurried on, flapping his way quickly through the rest of
the paper. As usual, there was nothing interesting. A lot of stuff
about the search for Janice Smith, the missing airline girl from
Heathrow, and how she could possibly have disappeared just
like that. They printed the latest picture of her, which was on a
swing with pigtails, aged six. Her father, a Mr Jim Pearce, was
quoted as saying it was quite a good likeness, but she had grown
up a lot now and was usually in better focus. Impatiently, Dirk
tucked the paper under his arm and strode onwards, his thoughts
on a much more interesting topic.
  Three hundred pounds a day. Plus expenses.
  He wondered how long he could reasonably expect to sustain
in Mr Anstey his strange delusions that he was about to be
murdered by a seven foot tall, shaggy-haired creature with huge
green eyes and horns, who habitually waved things at him: a
contract written in some incomprehensible language and signed
with a splash of blood, and also a kind of scythe. The other
notable feature of this creature was that no one other than his cli-
ent had been able to see it, which Mr Anstey dismissed as a trick
of the light.
  Three days? Four? Dirk didn't think he'd be able to manage a
whole week with a straight face, but he was already looking at
something like a grand for his trouble. And he would stick a new
fridge down on the list of tangential but non-negotiable
expenses. That would be a good one. Getting the old fridge
thrown out was definitely part of the interconnectedness of all
things.
  He began to whistle at the thought of simply getting someone
to come round and cart the thing away, turned into Lupton Road
and was surprised at all the police cars there. And the
ambulance. He didn't like them being there. It didn't feel right.
It didn't sit comfortably in his mind alongside his visions of a
new fridge.

Chapter 5







Dirk knew Lupton Road. It was a wide tree-lined affair, with
large late-Victorian terraces which stood tall and sturdily and
resented police cars. Resented them if they tumed up in
numbers, that is, and if their lights were flashing. The
inhabitants of Lupton Road liked to see a nice, well-turned-out
single police car patrolling up and down the street in a cheerful
and robust manner - it kept property values cheerful and robust
too. But the moment the lights started flashing in that
knuckle-whitening blue, they cast their pallor not only on the
neatly pointed bricks that they flashed across, but also on the
very values those bricks represented.
  Anxious faces peered from behind the glass of neighbouring
windows, and were irradiated by the blue strobes.
  There were three of them, three police cars left askew across
the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent out a
massive signal to the world saying that the law was here now
taking charge of things, and that anyone who just had normal,
good and cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road could just
fuck off.
  Dirk hurried up the road, sweat pricking at him beneath his
heavy leather coat. A police constable loomed up ahead of him
with his arms spread out, playing at being a stop barrier, but
Dirk swept him aside in a torrent of words to which the
constable was unable to come up with a good response off the
top of his head. Dirk sped on to the house.
  At the door another policeman stopped him, and Dirk was
about to wave an expired Marks and Spencer charge card at him
with a deft little flick of the wrist that he had practised for hours
in front of a mirror on those long evenings when nothing much
else was on, when the officer suddenly said, "Hey, is your name
Gently?"
  Dirk blinked at him warily. He made a slight grunting noise
that could be either "yes" or "no" depending on the
circumstances.
  "Because the Chief has been looking for you."
  "Has he?" said Dirk.
  "I recognised you from his description," said the officer
looking him up and down with a slight smirk.
  "In fact," continued the officer, "he's been using your name
in a manner that some might find highly offensive. He even sent
Big Bob the Finder off in a car to find you. I can tell that he
didn't find you from the fact that you're looking reasonably
well. Lot of people get found by Big Bob the Finder, they come
in a bit wobbly. Just about able to help us with our enquiries but
that's about all. You'd better go in. Rather you than me," he
added quietly.
  Dirk glanced at the house. The stripped-pine shutters were
closed across all the windows. Though in all other respects the
house seemed well cared for, groomed into a state of clean,
well-pointed aftluence, the closed shutters seemed to convey an
air of sudden devastation.
  Oddly, there seemed to be music coming from the basement,
or rather, just a single disjointed phrase of thumping music
being repeated over and over again. It sounded as if the stylus
had got stuck in the groove of a record, and Dirk wondered why
no one had turned it off, or at least nudged the stylus along so
that the record could continue. The song seemed very vaguely
familiar and Dirk guessed that he had probably heard it on the
radio recently, though he couldn't place it. The fragment of lyric
seemed to be something like:
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i - " and so on.
  "You'll be wanting to go down to the basement," said the
officer impassively, as if that was the last thing that anyone in
their right mind would be wanting to do.
  Dirk nodded to him curtly and hurried up the steps to the
front door, which was standing slightly ajar. He shook his head
and clenched his shoulders to try and stop his brain fluttering.
  He went in.
  The hallway spoke of prosperity imposed on a taste that had
originally been formed by student living. The floors were
stripped boards heavily polyurethaned, the walls white with
Greek rugs hung on them, but expensive Greek rugs. Dirk would
be prepared to bet (though probably not to pay up) that a
thorough search of the house would reveal, amongst who knew
what other dark secrets, five hundred British Telecom shares and
a set of Dylan albums that was complete up to Blood on the
Tracks.
  Another policeman was standing in the hall. He looked
terribly young, and he was leaning very slightly back against the
wall, staring at the floor and holding his helmet against his
stomach. His face was pale and shiny. He looked at Dirk
blankly, and nodded faintly in the direction of the stairs leading
down.
  Up the stairs came the repeated sound:
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
  Dirk was trembling with a rage that was barging around
inside him loooking for something to hit or throttle. He wished
that he could hotly deny that any of this was his fault, but until
anybody tried to assert that it was, he couldn't.
  "How long have you been here?" he said curtly.
  The young policeman had to gather himself together to
answer.
  "We arrived about half-hour ago," he replied in a thick voice.
"Hell of a morning. Rushing around."
  "Don't tell me about rushing around," said Dirk, completely
meaninglessly. He launched himself down the stars.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
  At the bottom there was a narrow corridor. The main door off
it was heavily cracked and hanging off its hinges. It opened into
a large double room. Dirk was about to enter when a figure
emerged from it and stood barring his way.
  "I hate the fact that this case has got you mixed up in it," said
the figure, "I hate it very much. Tell me what you've got to do
with it so I know exactly what it is I'm hating."
  Dirk stared at the neat, thin face in astonishment.
  "Gilks?" he said.
  "Don't stand there looking like a startled whatsisname, what
are those things what aren't seals? Much worse than seals. Big
blubbery things. Dugongs. Don't stand there looking like a
startled dugong. Why has that..." Gilks pointed into the room
behind him, "why has that. . .man in there got your name and
teIephone number on an envelope full uf money?"
  "How m..." started Dirk. "How, may I ask, do you come to
be here, Gilks? What are you doing so far from the Fens?
Surprised you find it dank enough for you here."
  "Three hundred pounds," said Gilks. "Why?"
  "Perhaps you would allow me to speak to my client," said
Dirk.
  "Your client, eh?" said Gilks grimly. "Yes. All right. Why
don't you speak to him? I'd be interested to hear what you have
to say." He stood back stiffly, and waved Dirk into the room.
  Dirk gathered his thoughts and entered the room in a state of
controlled composure which lasted for just over a second.
  Most of his client was sitting quietly in a comfortable chair in
front of the hi-fi. The chair was placed in the optimal listening
position - about twice as far back from the speakers as the
distance between them, which is generally considered to be ideal
for stereo imaging.
  He seemed generally to be casual and relaxed with his legs
crossed and a half-finished cup of coffee on the small table
beside him. Distressingly, though, his head was sitting neatly on
the middle of the record which was revolving on the hi-fi
turntable, with the tone arm snuggling up against the neck and
constantly being deflected back into the same groove. As the
head revolved it seemed once every 1.8 seconds or so to shoot
Dirk a reproachful glance, as if to say, "See what happens when
you don't turn up on time like I asked you to," then it would
sweep on round to the wall, round, round, and back to the front
again with more reproach.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
  The room swayed a little around Dirk, and he put his hand out
against the wall to steady it.
  "Was there any particular service you were engaged to
provide for your client?" said Gilks behind him, very quietly.
  "Oh, er, just a small matter," said Dirk weakly. "Nothing
connected with all this. No, he, er, didn't mention any of this
kind of thing at all. Well, look, I can see you're busy, I think I'd
better just collect my fee and leave. You say he left it out for
me?"
  Having said this, Dirk sat heavily on a small bentwood chair
standing behind him, and broke it.
  Gilks hauled him back to his feet again, and propped him
against the wall. Briefly he left the room, then came back with a
small jug of water and a glass on a tray. He poured some water
into the glass, took it to Dirk and threw it at him.
  "Better?"
  "No," spluttered Dirk, "can't you at least turn the record off?"
  "That"s forensic's job. Can't touch anything till the clever
dicks have been. Maybe that's them now. Go out on to the patio
and get some air. Chain yourself to the railing and beat yourself
up a little, I'm pushed for time myself. And try to look less
green, will you? It's not your colour."
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
  Gilks turned round, looking tired and cross, and was about to
go out and up the stairs to meet the newcomers whose voices
could be heard up on the ground floor, when he paused and
watched the head revolving patiently on its heavy platter for a
few seconds.
  "You know," he said at last, "these smart-alec show-off
suicides really make me tired. They only do it to annoy."
  "Suicide?" said Dirk.
  Gilks glanced round at him.
  "Windows secured with iron bars half an inch thick," he said.
"Door locked from the inside with the key still in the lock.
Furniture piled against the inside of the door. French windows to
the patio locked with mortice door bolts. No signs of a tunnel. If
it was murder then the murderer must have stopped to do a damn
fine job of glazing on the way out. Except that all the putty's old
nnd painted over.
  "No. Nobody's left this room, and nobody's broken into it
except for us, and I'm pretty sure we didn't do it.
  "I haven't time to fiddle around on this one. Obviously
suicide; and just done to be difficult. I've half a mind to do the
deceased for wasting police time. Tell you what," he said,
glancing at his watch, "you've got ten minutes. If you come up
with a plausible explanation of how he did it that I can put in my
report, I'll let you keep the evidence in the envelope minus 20
per cent compensation to me for the emotional wear and tear
involved in not punching you in the mouth."
  Dirk wondered for a moment whether or not to mention the
visits his client claimed to have received from a strange and
violent green-eyed, fur-clad giant who regularly emerged out of
nowhere bellowing about contracts and obligations and waving a
three foot glittering-edged scythe, but decided, on balance, no.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
  He was seething at himself at last. He had not been able to
seethe at himself properly over the death of his client because it
was too huge and horrific a burden to bear. But now he had been
humiliated by Gilks, and found himself in too wobbly and
disturbed a state to fight back, so he was able to seethe at
himself about that.
  He turned sharply away from his tormentor and let himself
out into the patio garden to be alone with his seethings.
  The patio was a small, paved, west-facing area at the rear
which was largely deprived of light, cut off as it was by the high
back wall of the house and by the high wall of some industrial
building that backed on to the rear. In the middle of it stood, for
who knew what possible reason, a stone sundial. If any light at
aIl fell on the sundial you would know that it was pretty close to
noon, GMT. Other than that, birds perched on it. A few plants
sulked in pots.
  Dirk jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and burnt a lot of the end
of it fiercely.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-" still nagged from
inside the house.
  Neat garden walls separated the patio on either side trom the
gardens of neighbouring houses. The one to the left was the
same size as this one, the one to the right extended a little
further, benefiting from the fact that the industrial building
finished flush with the intervening garden wall. There was an air
of well-kemptness. Nothing grand, nothing flashy, just a sense
that all was well and that upkeep on the houses was no problem.
The house to the right, in particular, looked as if it had had its
brickwork repointed quite recently, and its windows reglossed.
  Dirk took a large gulp of air and stood for a second staring up
into what could be seen of the sky, which was grey and hazy. A
single dark speck was wheeling against the underside of the
clouds. Dirk watched this for a while, glad of any focus for his
thoughts other than the horrors of the room he had just left. He
was vaguely aware of comings and goings within the room, of a
certain amount of tape-measuring happening, of a feeling that
photographs were being taken, and that severed-head-removal
activities were taking place.
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
  "Don't pi - "
  Somebody at last picked it up, the nagging repetition was at
last hushed, and now the gentle sound of a distant television
floated peacefully on the noontime air.
  Dirk, however, was having a great deal of difficulty in taking
it all in. He was much more aware of taking a succession of
huge swimmy whacks to the head, which were the assaults of
guilt. It was not the normal background-noise type of guilt that
comes from just being alive this far into the twentieth century,
and which Dirk was usually fairly adept at dealing with. It was
an actual stunning sense of, "this specific terrible thing is
specifically and terribly my fault". All the normal mental moves
wouldn't let him get out of the path of the huge pendulum.
Wham it came again, whizz, wham, again and again, wham
wham, wham.
  He tried to remember any of the details of what his late client
(wham, wham) had said (wham) to him (wham), but it was
(wham) virtually impossible (wham) with all this whamming
taking place (wham). The man had said (wham) that (Dirk took a
deep breath) (wham) he was being pursued (wham) by (wham) a
large, hairy, green-eyed monster armed with a scythe.
  Wham!
  Dirk had secretly smiled to himself about this.
  Whim, wham, whim, wham, whim, wham!
  And had thought, "What a silly man."
  Whim, whim, whim, whim, wham!
  A scythe (whom), and a contract (wham).
  He hadn't known, or even had the faintest idea as to what the
contract was for.
  "Of course," Dirk had thought (wham).
  But he had a vague feeling that it might have something to do
with a potato. There was a bit of a complicated story attached to
that (whim, whim, whim).
  Dirk had nodded seriously at this point (wham), and made a
reassuring tick (wham) on a pad which he kept on his desk
(wham) for the express purpose of making reassuring ticks on
(wham, wham, wham). He had prided himself at that moment on
having managed to convey the impression that he had made a
tick in a small box marked "Potatoes".
  Wham, wham, wham, wham
  Mr Anstey had said he would explain further about the
potatoes when Dirk arrived to carry out his task.
  And Dirk had promised (whom), easily (wham), casually
(wham), with an airy wave of his hand (wham, wham, wham), to
be there at six-thirty in the morning (wham), because the
contract (wham) fell due at seven o'clock.
  Dirk remembered having made another tick in a notional
"Potato contract falls due at 7.00 a.m." box. (Wh...)
  He couldn't handle all this whamming any more. He couldn't
blame himself for what had happened. Well, he could. Of course
he could. He did. It was, in fact, his fault (wham). The point was
that he couldn't continue to blame himself for what had
happened and think clearly about it, which he was going to have
to do. He would have to dig this horrible thing (wham) up by the
roots, and if he was going to be fit to do that he had somehow to
divest himself (wham) of this whamming.
  A huge wave of anger surged over him as he contemplated
his predicament and the tangled distress of his life. He hated this
neat patio. He hated all this sundial stuff, and all these neatly
painted windows, all these hideously trim roofs. He wanted to
blame it all on the paintwork rather than on himself, on the
revoltingly tidy patio paving-stones, on the sheer disgusting
abomination of the neatly repointed brickwork.
  "Excuse me..."
  "What?" He whirled round, caught unawares by this intrusion
into his private raging of a quiet polite voice.
  "Are you connected with...?" The woman indicated all the
unpleasantness and the lower-ground-floorness and the horrible
sort of policeness of things next door to her with a little floating
movement of her wrist. Her wrist wore a red bracelet which
matched the frames of her glasses. She was looking over the
garden wall from the house on the right, with an air of stightly
anxious distaste.
  Dirk glared at her speechlessly. She looked about forty-
somethingish and neat, with an instant and unmistakable quality
of advertising about her.
  She gave a troubled sigh.
  "I know it's probably all very terrible and everything," she
said, "but do you think it will take long? We only called in the
police because the noise of that ghastly record was driving us up
the wall. It's all a bit..."
  She gave him a look of silent appeal, and Dirk decided that it
could all be her fault. She could, as far as he was concerned,
take the blame for everything while he sorted it out. She
deserved it; if only for wearing a bracelet like that.
  Without a word, he turned his back on her, and took his fury
back inside the house where it began rapidly to freeze into
something hard and efficient.
  "Gilks!" he said. "Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like it. It
works for me. And I think I see how the clever bastard pulled it
off. Bring me pen. Bring me paper."
  He sat down with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse
table which occupied the centre of the rear portion of the room
and deftly sketched out a scheme of events which involved a
number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging,
weighted light fitting, some very precise timing, and hinged on
the vital fact that the record turntable was Japanese.
  "That should keep your forensic chaps happy," said Dirk
briskly to Gilks. The forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its
salient points and liked them. They were simple, implausible,
and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked the same
sort of holidays in Marbella which they did would be sure to
relish.
  "Unless," said Dirk casually, "you are interested in the notion
that the deceased had entered into some kind of diabolical
contract with a supernatural agency for which payment was now
being exacted?"
  The forensic chaps glanced at each other and shook their
heads. There was a strong sense from them that the morning was
wearing on and that this kind of talk was only introducing
unnecessary complications into a case which otherwise could be
well behind them before lunch.
  Dirk made a satisfied shrug, peeled off his share of the evi-
dence and, with a final nod to the constabulary, made his way
back upstairs.
  As he reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to
him that the gentle sounds of day-time television which he had
heard from out in the garden had previously been masked from
inside by the insistent sound of the record stuck in its groove.
  He was surprised now to realise that they were in fact coming
from somewhere upstairs in this house. With a quick look round
to see that he was not observed he stood on the bottom step of
the staircase leading to the upstairs floors of the house and
glanced up them in surprise.

Chapter 6




The stairs were carpeted with a tastefully austere matting type of
substance. Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some taste-
fully dried large things in a pot that stood on the first landing,
and looked into the rooms on the first floor. They, too, were
tasteful and dried.
  The larger of the two bedrooms was the only one that showed
any signs of current use. It had clearly been designed to allow
the morning light to play on delicately arranged flowers and
duvets stuffed with something like hay, but there was a feeling
that socks and used shaving heads were instead beginning to
gather the room into their grip. There was a distinct absence of
anything female in the room - the same sort of absence that a
missing picture leaves behind it on a wall. There was an air of
tension and of sadness and of things needing to be cleaned out
from under the bed.
  The bathroom, which opened out from it, had a gold disc
hung on the wall in front of the lavatory, for sales of five
hundred thousand copies of a record called Hot Potato by a band
called Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. Dirk had a vague
recollection of having read part of an interview with the leader
of the band (there were only two of them, and one of them was
the leader) in a Sunday paper. He had been asked about their
name, and he had said that there was an interesting story about
it, though it turned out not to be. "It can mean whatever people
want-it to mean," he had added with a shrug from the sofa of his
manager's office somewhere off Oxford Street.
  Dirk remembered visualising the journalist nodding politely
and writing this down. A vile knot had formed in Dirk's stomach
which he had eventually softened with gin.
  "Hot Potato... " thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred to him
looking at the gold disc hanging in its red frame, that the record
on which the late Mr Anstey's head had been perched was
obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don't pick it up.
  What could that mean?
  Whatever people wanted it to mean, Dirk thought with bed
grace.
  The other thing that he remembered now about the interview
was that Pain (the leader of Pugilism and the Third Autistic
Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to have written the lyrics down
more or less verbatim from a conversation which he or
somebody had overheard in a cafe or a sauna or an aeroplane or
something like that. Dirk wondered how the originators of the
conversation would feel to hear their words being repeated in the
circumstances in which he had just heard them.
  He peered more closely at the label in the centre of the gold
record. At the top of the label it said simply, "ARRGH!", while
underneath the actual title were the writers' credits - "Paignton,
Mulville, Anstey".
  Mulville was presumably the member of Pugilism and the
Third Autistic Cuckoo who wasn't the leader. And Geoff
Anstey's inclusion on the writing credits of a major-selling
single was probably what had paid for this house. When Anstey
had talked about the contract having something to do with
Potato he had assumed that Dirk knew what he meant. And he,
Dirk, had as easily assumed that Anstey was blithering. lt was
very easy to assume that someone who was talking about green-
eyed monsters with scythes was also blithering when he talked
about potatoes.
  Dirk sighed to himself with deep uneasiness. He took a
dislike to the neat way the trophy was hanging on the wall and
adjusted it a little so that it hung at a more humane and untidy
angle. Doing this caused an envelope to fall out from behind the
frame and flutter towards the floor. Dirk tried unsuccessfully to
catch it. With an unfit grunt he bent over and picked the thing
up.
  It was a largish, cream envelope of rich, heavy paper, roughly
slit open at one end, and resealed with Sellotape. In fact it
looked as if it had been opened and resealed with fresh layers of
tape many times, an impression which was borne out by the
number of names to which the envelope had in its time been
addressed - each successively crossed out and replaced by
another.
  The last name on it was that of Geoff Anstey. At least Dirk
assumed it was the last name because it was the only one that
had not been crossed out, and crossed out heavily. Dirk peered
at some of the other names, trying to make them out.
  Some memory was stirred by a couple of the names which he
could just about discern, but he needed to examine the envelope
much more closely. He had been meaning to buy himself a
magnifying glass ever since he had become a detective, but had
never got around to it. He also did not possess a penknife, so
reluctantly he decided that the most prudent course was to tuck
the envelope away for the moment in one of the deeper recesses
of his coat and examine it later in privacy.
  He glanced quickly behind the frame of the gold disc to see if
any other goodies might emerge but was disappointed, and so he
quit the bathroom and resumed his exploration of the house.
  The other bedroom was neat and soulless. Unused. A pine
bed, a duvet and an old battered chest of drawers that had been
revived by being plunged into a vat of acid were its main
features. Dirk pulled the door of it closed behind him, and
started to ascend the small, wobbly, white-painted stairway that
led up to an attic from which the sounds of Bugs Bunny could
be heard.
  At the top of the stairs was a minute landing which opened on
one side into a bathroom so small that it would best be used by
standing outside and sticking into it whichever limb you wanted
to wash. The door to it was kept ajar by a length of green
hosepipe which trailed from the cold tap of the wash-basin, out
of the bathroom, across the landing and into the only other room
here at the top of the house.
  It was an attic room with a severely pitched roof which
offered only a few spots where a person of anything approaching
average height could stand up.
  Dirk stood hunched in the doorway and surveyed its contents,
nervous of what he might find amongst them. There was a
general grunginess about the place. The curtains were closed and
little light made it past them into the room, which was otherwise
illuminated only by the flickering glow of an animated rabbit.
An unmade bed with dank, screwed-up sheets was pushed under
a particularly low angle of the ceiling. Part of the walls and the
more nearly vertical surfaces of the ceiling were covered with
pictures crudely cut out of magazines.
  There didn't seem to be any common theme or purpose
behind the cuttings. As well as a couple of pictures of flashy
German cars and the odd bra advertisement, there were also a
badly torn picture of a fruit flan, part of an advertisement for life
insurance and other random fragments which suggested they had
been selected and arranged with a dull, bovine indifference to
any meaning that any of them might have or effect they might
achieve.
  The hosepipe curled across the floor and led around the side
of an elderly armchair pulled up in front of the television set.
  The rabbit rampaged. The glow of his rampagings played on
the frayed edges of the armchair. Bugs was wrestling with the
controls of an aeroplane which was plunging to the ground.
Suddenly he saw a button marked "Autopilot" and pressed it. A
cupboard opened and a robot pilot clambered out, took one look
at the situation and baled out. The plane hurtled on towards the
ground but, luckily, ran out of fuel just before reaching it and so
the rabbit was saved.
  Dirk could also see the top of a head.
  The hair of this head was dark, matted and greasy. Dirk
watched it for a long, uneasy moment before advancing slowly
into the room to see what, if anything, it was attached to. His
relief at discovering, as he rounded the armchair, that the head
was, after all, attached to a living body was a little marred by the
sight of the living body to which it was attached.
  Slumped in the armchair was a boy.
  He was probably about thirteen or fourteen, and although he
didn't look ill in any specific physical way, he was definitely not
a well person. His hair sagged on his head, his head sagged on
his shoulders, and he lay in the armchair in a sort of limp,
crumpled way, as if he'd been hurled there from a passing train.
He was dressed merely in a cheap leather jacket and sleeping-
bag.
  Dirk stared at him.
  Who was he? What was a boy doing here watching television
in a house where someone had just been decapitated? Did he
know what had happened? Did Gilks know about him? Had
Gilks even bothered to come up here? It was, after all, several
flights of stairs for a busy policeman with a tricky suicide on his
hands.
  After Dirk had been standing there for twenty seconds or so,
the boy's eyes climbed up towards him, failed utterly to
acknowledge him in any way at all, and then dropped again and
locked back on to the rabbit.
  Dirk was unused to making quite such a minuscule impact on
anybody. He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather
coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and
dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway.
  He felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er... " by way of
self introduction, but it didn't get the boy's attention. He didn't
like this. The kid was deliberately and maliciously watching
television at him. He frowned. There was a kind of steamy
tension building in the room it seemed to Dirk, a kind of
difficult, hissing quality to the whole air of the place which he
did not know how to respond to. It rose in intensity and then
suddenly ended with an abrupt click which made Dirk start.
  The boy unwound himself like a slow, fat snake, leaned
sideways over the far side of the armchair and made some
elaborate unseen preparations which clearly involved, as Dirk
now realised, an electric kettle. When he resumed his earlier
splayed posture it was with the addition of a plastic pot clutched
in his right hand, from which he forked rubbery strands of
steaming gunk into his mouth.
  The rabbit brought his affairs to a conclusion and gave way to
a jeering comedian who wished the viewers to buy a certain
brand of lager on the basis of nothing better than his own hardly
disinterested say-so.
  Dirk felt that it was time to make a slightly greater impression
on the proceedings than he had so far managed to do. He
stepped forward dinectly into the boy's line of sight.
  "Kid," Dirk said in a tone that he hoped would sound firm but
gentle and not in any way at all patronising or affected or
gauche, "I need to know who - "
  He was distracted at that moment by the sight which met him
from the new position in which he was standing. On the other
side of the armchair there was a large, half full catering-size box
of Pot Noodles, a large, half full catering-size box of Mars Bars,
a half demolished pyramid of cans of soft drink, and the end of
the hosepipe. The hosepipe ended in a plastic tap nozzle, and
was obviously used for refilling the kettle.
  Dirk had simply been going to ask the boy who he was, but
seen from this angle the family resemblance was unmistakable.
He was clearly the son of the lately decapitated Geoffrey
Anstey. Perhaps this behaviour was just his way of dealing with
shock. Or perhaps he really didn't know what had happened. Or
perhaps he...
  Dirk hardly liked to think.
  In fact he was finding it hard to think clearly while the
television beside him was, on behalf of a toothpaste manu-
facturing company, trying to worry him deeply about some of
the things which might be going on in his mouth.
  "OK," he said, "I don't like to disturb you at what I know
must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to
know first of all if you actually realise that this is a difficult and
distressing time for you."
  Nothing.
  All right, thought Dirk, time for a little judicious toughness.
He leant back against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets in
an OK-if-that's-the-way-you-want-to-play-it manner, stared
moodily at the floor for a few seconds, then swung his head up
and let the boy have a hard look right between the eyes.
  "I have to tell you, kid," he said tersely, "your father's dead."
  This might have worked if it hadn't been for a very popular
and long-running commercial which started at that moment. It
seemed to Dirk to be a particularly astounding example of the
genre.
  The opening sequence showed the angel Lucifer being hurled
from heaven into the pit of hell where he then lay on a buming
lake until a passing demon amved and gave him a can of a fizzy
soft drink called sHades. Lucifer took it and tried it. He greedily
guzzled the whole contents of the can and then tumed to camera,
slipped on some Porsche design sunglasses, said, "Now we're
really cookin'!" and lay back basking in the glow of the burning
coals being heaped around him.
  At that point an impossibly deep and growly American voice,
which sounded as if it had itself crawled from the pit of hel1, or
at least from a Soho basement drinking club to which it was
keen to return as soon as possible to marinade itself into shape
for the next voice-over, said, "sHades. The Drink from Hell... "
and the can revolved a little to obscure the initial "s", and thus
spell "Hades".
  The theology of this seemed a little confused, reflected Dirk,
but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation in such a
raging torrent?
  Lucifer then mugged at the camera again and said, "I could
really fall for this stuff... " and just in case the viewer had been
rendered completely insensate by all these goings-on, the
opening shot of Lucifer being hurled from heaven was briefly
replayed in order to emphasise the word "fall".
  The boy's attention was entirely captivated by this.
  Dirk squatted down in between the boy and the screen.
  "Listen to me," he began.
  The boy craned his neck round to look past Dirk at the screen.
He had to redistribute his limbs in the chair in order to be able to
do this and continue to fork Pot Noodle into himself.
  "Listen," insisted Dirk again.
  Dirk felt he was beginning to be in serious danger of losing
the upper hand in the situation. It wasn't merely that the boy's
attention was on the television, it was that nothing else seemed
to have any meaning or independent existence for him at all.
Dirk was merely a featureless object in the way of the television.
The boy seemed to bear him no malice, he merely wished to see
past him.
  "Look, can we turn this off for a moment?" Dirk said, and he
tried not to make it sound testy.
  The boy did not respond. Maybe there was a slight stiffening
of the shoulders, maybe it was a shrug. Dirk turned around and
was at a loss to find which button to push to turn the television
off. The whoIe control pane seemed to be dedicated to the
single purpose of keeping itself turned on - there was no single
button marked "on" or "off". Eventually Dirk simply
disconnected the set from the power socket on the wall and
turned back to the boy, who broke his nose.
  Dirk felt his septum crunching from the terrific impact of the
boy's forehead as they both toppled heavily backwards against
the set, but the noise of the bone breaking, and the noise of his
own cry of pain as it broke was completely obliterated by the
howling screams of rage that erupted from the boy's throat. Dirk
flailed helplessly to try and protect himself from the fury of the
onslaught, but the boy was on top with his elbow in Dirk's eye,
his knees pounding first on Dirk's ribcage, then his jaw and then
on Dirk's already traumatised nose, as he scrambled over him to
reconnect the power to the television. He then settled back
comfortably into the armchair and watched with a moody and
unsettled eye as the picture reassembled itself.
  "You could at least have waited for the news," he said in a
dull voice.
  Dirk gaped at him. He sat huddled on the floor, coddling his
bleeding nose in his hands, and gaped at the monstrously
disinterested creature.
  "Whhfff. . . fffmmm. . . nnggh ! " he protested, and then gave up
for the time being, while he probed his nose for the damage.
  There was definitely a wobbly bit that clicked nastily between
his fingers, and the whole thing seemed suddenly to be a
horribly unfamiliar shape. He fished a handkerchief out of his
pocket and held it up to his face. Blood spread easily through it.
He staggered to his feet, brushed aside non-existent offers of
help, stomped out of the room and into the tiny bathroom. There,
he yanked the hosepipe angrily off the tap, found a towel,
soaked it in cold water and held it to his face for a minute or two
until the flow of blood gradually slowed to a trickle and
stopped. He stared at himself in the mirror. His nose was quite
definitely leaning at a slightly rakish angle. He tried bravely to
shift it, but not bravely enough. It hurt abominably, so he
contented himself with dabbing at it a little more with the wet
towel and swearing quietly.
  Then he stood there for a second or two longer, leaning
against the basin, breathing heavily, and practising saying "All
right!" fiercely into the mirror. It came out as "Aww-bwigh!"
and lacked any real authority. When he felt sufficiently braced,
or at least as braced as he was likely to feel in the immediate
future, he turned and stalked grimly back into the den of the
beast.
  The beast was sitting quietly absorbing news of some of the
exciting and stimulating game shows that the evening held in
store for the determined viewer, and did not look up as Dirk
re-entered.
  Dirk walked briskly over to the window and drew the curtains
sharply back, half hoping that the beast might shrivel up
shrieking if exposed to daylight, but other than wrinkling up its
nose, it did not react. A dark shadow flapped briefly across the
window, but the angle was such that Dirk could not see what
caused it.
  He turned and faced the boy-beast. The midday news bulletin
was starting on television, and the boy seemed somehow a little
more open, a little more receptive to the world outside the
flickering coloured rectangle. He glanced up at Dirk with a sour,
tired look.
  "Whaddayawananyway?" he said.
  "I ted you whad I wad," said Dirk, fiercely but hopelessly, "I
wad...hag od a bobed...I gnow thad faith!"
  Dirk's attention had switched suddenly to the television
screen, where a rather more up-to-date photograph of the
missing airline check-in girl was being shown.
  "Whadayadoingere?" said the boy.
  "Jjchhhhh!" said Dirk, and perched himself down on the arm
of the chair, peering intently at the face on the screen. It had
been taken about a year ago, before the girl had learnt about
corporate lipgloss. She had frizzy hair and a frumpy, put-upon
look.
  "Whoareyou? Wassgoinon?" insisted the boy.
  "Loog, chuddub," snapped Dirk, "I'b tryid to wodge dthith!"
  The newscaster said that the police professed themselves to
be mystified by the fact that there was no trace of Janice Smith
at the scene of the incident. They explained that there was a
limit to the number of times they could search the same
buildings, and appealed for anyone who might have a clue as to
her whereabouts to come forward.
  "Thadth by segradry! Thadth Mith Pearth!" exclaimed Dirk
in astonishment.
  The boy was not interested in Dirk's ex-secnetary, and gave
up trying to atttact Dirk's attention. He wriggled out of the
sleeping-bag and sloped off to the bathroom.
  Dirk sat staring at the television, bewildered that he hadn't
realised before who the missing girl was. Still, there was no
reason why he should have done, he realiced. Marriage had
changed her name, and this was the first time they had shown a
photograph that actually identified her. So far he had taken no
real interest in the strange incident at the airport, but now it
demanded his attention.
  The explosion was now officially designated an "Act of
God".
  But, thought Dirk, what god? And why?
  What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of
fieathrow Aitport trying to catch the 15.37 flight to Oslo?
  After the miserable lassitude of the last few weeks, he
suddenly had a great deal that required his immediate attention.
He frowned in deep thought for a few moments, and hardly
noticed when the beast-boy snuck back in and snuggled back
into his sleeping-bag just in time for the advertisements to start.
The first one showed how a perfectly ordinary stock cube could
form the natural focus of a normal, happy family life.
  Dirk leapt to his feet, but even as he was about to start
questioning the boy again his heart sank as he looked at him.
The beast was far away, sunk back in his dark, flickering lair,
and Dirk did not feel inclined to disturb him again at the
moment.
  He contented himself with barking at the unresponding child
that he would be back, and bustled heavily down the stairs, his
big leather coat flapping madly behind him.
  In the hallway he encountered the loathed Gilks once more.
  "What happened to you?" said the policeman sharply,
catching sight of Dirk's bruised and bulging nose.
  "Ondly whad you dold me," said Dirk, innocently. "I bead
bythelf ub."
  Gilks demanded to know what he had been doing, and Dirk
generously explained that there was a witness upstairs with
some interesting information to impart. He suggested that Gilks
go and have a word with him, but that it would be best if he
turned off the television first.
  Gilks nodded curtly. He started to go up the stairs, but Dirk
stopped him.
  "Doedth eddydthig dthrike you adth dthraydge aboud dthidth
houdth?" he said.
  "What did you say?" said Gilks in irritation.
  "Subbthig dthraydge," said Dirk.
  "Something what?"
  "Dthraydge!" insisted Dirk.
  "Strange?"
  "Dthadth right, dthraydge."
  Gilks shrugged. "Like what?" he said.
  "Id dtheemdth to be cobbleedly dthouledth."
  "Completely what?"
  "Dthouledth!" he tried again. "Thoul-leth! I dthigg dthadth
dverry idderedthigg!"
  With that he doffed his hat politely, and swept on out of the
house and up the street, where an eagle swooped out of the sky
at him and came within a whisker of causing him to fall under a
73 bus on its way south.
For the next twenty minutes, hideous yells and screams
emanated from the top floor of the house in Lupton Road, and
caused much tension among the neighbours. The ambulance
took away the upper and lower remains of Mr Anstey and also a
policeman with a bleeding face. For a short while after this,
there was quietness.
  Then another police car drew up outside the house. A lot o
"Bob's here" type of remarks floated from the house, as an
extremely large and burly policeman heaved himself out of the
car and bustled up the steps. A few minutes and a great deal of
screaming and yelling later he re-emerged also clutching his
face, and drove off in deep dudgeon, squealing his tyres in a
violent and unnecessary manner.
  Twenty minutes later a van arrived from which emerged
another policeman carrying a tiny pocket television set. He
entered the house, and re-emerged a short while later leading a
docile thirteen-year-old boy, who was content with his new toy.
  Once all policemen had departed, save for the single squad
car which remained parked outside to keep watch on the house,
a large, hairy, green-eyed figure emerged from its hiding place
behind one of the molecules in the large basement room.
  It propped its scythe against one of the hi-fi speakers, dipped
a long, gnarled finger in the almost congealed pool of blood that
had collected on the deck of the turntable, smeared the finger
across the bottom of a sheet of thick, yellowing paper, and then
disappeared off into a dark and hidden otherworld whistling a
strange and vicious tune and returning only briefly to collect its
scythe.

Chapter 7




A little earlier in the morning, at a comfortable distance from all
these events, set at a comfortable distance from a well-
proponioned window through which cool mid-morning light
was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A
newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it
had been hurled two minutes before, at shortly aher ten o'clock
by the clock on the bedside table.
  The room was not large, but was furnished in excessively
bland good taste, as if it were a room in an expensive private
hospital or clinic, which is exactly what it was - the Woodshead
Hospital, set in its own small but well-kempt grounds on the
outskirts of a small but well-kempt village in the Cotswolds.
  The man was awake but not glad to be.
  His skin was very delicately old, like finely stretched,
translucent parchment, delicately freckled. His exquisitely frail
hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and
quivered very faintly.
  His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or
Odin. He was - is - a god, and furthermore he was that least
good of all gods to be alongside, a cross god. His one eye
glinted.
  He was cross because of what he had been reading in the
newspapers, which was that another god had been cutting loose
and making a nuisance of himself. It didn't say that in the
papers, of course. It didn't say, "God cuts loose, makes nuisance
of himself in airport," it merely described the resulting
devastation and was at a loss to draw any meaningful
conclusions from it.
  The story had been deeply unsatisfactory in all sorts of ways,
on account of its perplexing inconclusiveness, its going-
nowhereness and the irritating (from the newspapers' point of
view) lack of any good solid carriage. There was of course a
mystery attached to the lack of carnage, but a newspaper
preferred a good whack of carnage to a mere mystery any day of
the week.
  Odin, however, had no such difficulty in knowing what was
going on. The accounts had "Thor" written all over them in
letters much too big for anyone other than another god to see.
He had thrown this morning's paper aside in irritation, and was
now trying to concentrate on his relaxation exercises in order to
avoid getting too disturbed about all this. These involved
breathing in in a certain way and breathing out in a certain other
way and were good for his blood pressure and so on. It was not
as if he was about to die or anything - ha! - but there was no
doubt that at his time of life - ha! - he preferred to take things
easy and look after himself.
  Best of all he liked to sleep.
  Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to
sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping
overnight was not taking the business seriously. He enjoyed a
good night's sleep and wouldn't miss one for the world, but he
didn't regard it as anything even half approaching enough. He
liked to be asleep by half past eleven in the morning if possible,
and if that could come directly after a nice leisurely lie-in then
so much the better. A little light breakfast and a quick trip to the
bathroom while fresh linen was applied to his bed is really all
the astivity he liked to undertake, and he took care that it didn't
jangle the sleepiness out of him and thus disturb his afternoon of
napping. Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep,
and this he regarded as a good snooze. He had also slept through
the whole of 1986 and hadn't missed it.
  But he knew to his deep disgruntlement that he would shortly
have to arise and undertake a sacred and irritating trust. Sacred,
because it was godlike, or at least involved gods, and irritating
because of the particular god that it involved.
  Sneakily, he twitched the curtains at a distance, using nothing
but his divine will. He sighed heavily. He needed to think and,
what was more, it was time for his morning visit to the
bathroom.
  He rang for the orderly.
  The orderly arrived promptly in his well-pressed loose green
tunic, good-morninged cheerfully, and bustled around locating
bedroom slippers and dressing-gown. He helped Odin out of
bed, which was a little like rolling a stuffed crow out of a box,
and escorted him slowly to the bathroom. Odin walked stiffly,
like a head hung between two heavy stilts draped in striped
Viyella and white towelling. The orderly knew Odin as Mr
Odwin, and didn't realise that he was a god, which was
something that Odin tended to keep quiet about, and wished that
Thor would too.
  Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted like it. It
was inappropriate. He seemed unwilling, or unable, or maybe
just too stupid to understand or accept...Odin stopped himself.
He sensed that he was beginning mentally to rant. He would
have to consider calmly what next to do about Thor, and he was
on his way to the right place for a good think.
  As soon as Odin had completed his stately hobble to the
bathroom door, two nurses hurried in and stripped and remade
the bed with immense precision, patting down the fresh linen,
pulling it taut, turning it and tucking it. One of the nurses,
clearly the senior, was plump and matronly, the other younger,
darker and more generally bird-like. The newspaper was
whisked off the tloor and neatly refolded, the floor was briskly
Hoovered, the curtains hooked back, the flowers and the
untouched fruit replaced with fresh flowers and fresh fruit that
would, like every piece of fruit before them, remain untouched.
  When after a little while the old god's morning ablutions had
been completed and the bathroom door reopened, the room had
been transformed. The actual differences were tiny, of course,
but the effect was of a subtle but magical transformation into
something cool and fresh. Odin nodded in quiet satisfaction to
see it. He made a little show of inspecting the bed, like a
monarch inspecting a line of soldiers.
  "Is it well tucked?" he asked in his old and whispery voice.
  "It is very well tucked, Mr Odwin," said the senior nurse with
an obsequious beam.
  "Is it neatly turned?" It clearly was. This was merely a ritual.
  "Turned very neatly indeed, Mr Odwin," said the nurse, "I
supervised the turning down of the sheets myself."
  "I'm glad of that, Sister Bailey, very glad," said Odin. "You
have a fine eye for a trimly turned fold. It alarms me to know
what I shall do without you."
  "Well, I'm not about to go anywhere, Mr Odwin," said Sister
Bailey, oozing happy reassurance.
  "But you won't last for ever, Sister Bailey," said Odin. It was
a remark that puzzled Sister Bailey on the times she had heard it,
because of its apparent extreme callousness.
  "Sure, and none of us lasts for over, Mr Odwin," she said
gently as she and the other nurse between them managed the
difficult task of lifting Odin back into hed while keeping his
dignity intact.
  "You're Irish aren't you, Sister Bailey?" he asked, once he
was properly settled.
  "I am indeed so, Mr Odwin."
  "Knew an Irishman once. Finn something. Told me a lot of
stuff I didn't need to know. Never told me about the linen. Still
know now."
  He nodded curtly at this memory and lowered his head stiffly
back on to the firmly plumped up pillows and ran the back of his
finely freckled hand over the folded-back linen sheet. Quite
simply he was in love with linen. Clean, lightly starched, white
Irish linen, pressed, folded, tucked - the words themselves were
almost a litany of desire for him. In centuries nothing had
obsessed him or moved him so much as linen now did. He could
not for the life of him understand how he could ever have cared
for anything else.
  Linen.
  And sleep. Sleep and linen. Sleep in linen. Sleep.
  Sister Bailey regarded him with a sort of proprietary
fondness. She did not know that he was a god as such, in fact
she thought he was probably an old film producer or Nazi war
criminal. Certainly he had an accent she couldn't quite place
and his careless civility, his natural selfishness and his obsession
with personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich with horrors.
  If she could have been transported to where she might see her
secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the wamor Gods of
Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite
true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits.
But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent
with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered
from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the
human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it
continued to be true long after the human race particularly
needed it to be true any more.
  Odin dismissed his medical attendants with a gesture, having
first asked for his personal assistant to be found and sent to him
once more.
  This caused Sister Bailey to tighten her lips just a very little.
She did not like Mr Odwin's personal assistant, general
factotum, manservant, call him what you will. His eyes were
malevolent, he made her jump, and she strongly suspected him
of making unspeakabie suggestions to her nurses during their tea
breaks.
  He had what Sister Bailey supposed was what people meant
by an olive complexion, in that it was extraordinarily close to
being green. Sister Bailey was convinced that it was not right at
all.
  She was of course the last person to judge somebody by the
colour of their skin - or if not absolutely the last, she had at least
done it as recently as yesterday afternoon when an African
diplomat had been brought in to have some gallstones removed
and she had conceived an instant resentment of him. She didn't
like him. She couldn't say exactly what it was she didn't like
about him, because she was a nurse, not a taxi-driver, and she
wouldn't let her personal feelings show for an instant. She was
much too professional, much too good at her job, and treated
everyone with a more or less equal efficient and cheerful
courtesy, even, she thought - and a profound iciness settled on
her at this point - even Mr Rag.
  "Mr Rag" was the name of Mr Odwin's personal assistant.
There was nothing she could do about it. It was not her place to
criticise Mr Odwin's personal arrangements. But if it had been
her business, which it wasn't, then she would greatly have
preferred it, and not just for herself, but for Mr Odwin's own
well-being as well, which was the important thing, if he could
have employed someone who didn't give her the absolute
heebie-jeebies, that was all.
  She thought no more about it, merely went to look for him.
She had been relieved to discover when she came on duty this
morning that Mr Rag had left the premises the previous night,
but had then, with a keen sense of disappointment, spotted him
returning about an hour or so ago.
  She found him exactly where he was not supposed to be. He
was squatting on one of the seats in the visitors' waiting-room
wearing what looked horribly like a soiled and discarded
doctor's gown that was much too big for him. Not only that, but
he was playing a thinly unmusical tune on a sort of pipe that he
had obviously carved out of a large disposable hypodermic
syringe which he absolutely should not have had.
  He glanced up at her with his quick, dancing eyes, grinned
and continued to tootle and squeak, only significantly louder.
  Sister Bailey ran through in her mind all the things that it was
completely pointless to say about either the roat or the syringe,
or about him being in the visitors' room frightening, or
preparing to frighten, the visitors. She knew she wouldn't be
able to stand the air of injured innocence with which he would
reply, or the preposterous absurdity of his answers. Her only
course was simply to let it pass and just get him away from the
room and out of the way as quickly as possible.
  "Mr Odwin would like to see you," she said. She tried to jam
some of her normal lilting quality into her voice, but it just
wouldn't go. She wished his eyes would stop dancing like that.
Apart from finding it highly disturbing from both a medical and
aesthetic point of view she also could not help but be piqued by
the impression it conveyed that there were at least thirty-seven
things in the room more interesting than her.
  He gazed at her in this disconcerting manner for a few
seconds then, muttering that there was no peace for the wicked,
not even the extremely wicked, he pushed past Sister Bailey and
skedaddled up the corridor to receive instructions from his lord
and master, quickly, before his lord and master fell asleep.

Chapter 8


By the end of the morning Kate had discharged herself from
hospital. There were some initial difficulties involved in this
because first the ward sister and then the doctor in charge of
Kate's case were adamant that she was in no fit state to leave.
She had only just emerged from a minor coma and she needed
care, she needed -
  "Pizza - " insisted Kate.
  - rest, she needed -
  "- my own home, and fresh air. The air in here is horrible. It
smells like a vacuum cleaner's armpit."
  - further medication, and should definitely remain under
observation for another day or so until they were satisfied that
she had made a full recovery.
  At least, they were fairly adamant. During the course of the
morning Kate demanded and got a telephone and started trying
to order pizza to be delivered to her ward. She phoned around all
of the least co-operative pizza restaurants she knew in London,
harangued them, then made some noisily unsuccessful attempts
to muster a motorbike to roam around the West End and try and
pick up for her an American Hot with a list of additional peppers
and mushrooms and cheeses which the controller of the courier
service refused even to attempt to remember, and after an hour
or so of this sort of behaviour the objections to Kate discharging
herself from the hospital gradually fell away like petals from an
autumn rose.
  And so, a little after lunchtime, she was standing on a bleak
West London street feeling weak and shaky but in charge of
herself. She had with her the empty, tattered remains of the
garment bag which she had refused to relinquish, and also a
small scrap of paper in her purse, which had a single name
scribbled on it.
  She hailed a taxi and sat in the back with her eyes closed
most of the way back to her home in Primrose Hill. She climbed
up the stairs and let herself into her top-tloor flat. There were ten
messages on her answering machine, which she simply erased
without listening to.
  She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a moment
or two leaned out of it at the rather dangerous and awkward
angle which allowed her to see a patch of the park. It was a
small comer patch, with just a couple of plane trees standing in
it. The backs of some of the intervening houses framed it, or
rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very personal
and private to Kate in a way which a vast, sweeping vista would
not have been.
  On one occasion she had gone to this corner of the park and
walked around the invisible perimeter that marked out the limits
of what she could see, and had come very close to feeling that
this was her own domain. She had even patted the plane trees in
a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat beneath them
watching the sun going down over London - over its badly
spoiled skyline and its non-delivering pizza restaurants - and
had come away with a profound sense of something or other,
though she wasn't quite certain what. Still, she had told herself,
these days she should feel grateful for a profound sense of
anything at all, however unspecific.
  She hauled herself in from the window, left it wide open in
spite of the chill of the outside air, padded through into the small
bathroom and ran the bath. It was a bath of the sprawling
Edwardian type which took up a wonderfully disproportionate
amount of the space available, and encompassed most of the rest
of the room with cream-painted pipes. The taps seethed. As soon
as the room was sufficiently full of steam to be warm, Kate
undressed and then went and opened the large bathroom
cupboard.
  She felt faintly embarrassed by the sheer profusion of things
she had for putting in baths, but she was for some reason
incapable of passing any chemist or herb shop without going in
to be seduced by some glass-stoppered bottle of something blue
or green or orange and oily that was supposed to restore the
natural balance of some vague substance she didn't even know
she was supposed to have in her pores.
  She paused, trying to choose.
  Something pink? Something with extra Vitamin B? Vitamin
B12? B13? Just the number of things with different types of
Vitamin B in them was an embarrassment of choice in itself.
There were powders as well as oils, tubes of gel, even packets of
some kind of pungent smelling seed that was meant to be good
for some obscure part of you in some arcane way.
  How about some of the green crystals? One day, she had told
herself in the past, she would not even bother trying to choose,
but would simply put a bit of everything in. When she really felt
in need of it. She rather thought that today was the day, and with
a sudden reviving rush of pleasure she set about puaing a drop
or two of everything in the cupboard into the seething bath until
it was confused with mingling, muddying colours and verging
on the glutinous to touch.
  She turned off the taps, went to her handbag for a moment,
then returned and lowered herself into the bath, where she lay
with her eyes closed, breathing slowly for fully three minutes
before at last turning her attention to the scrap of paper she had
brought with her from the hospital.
  It had one word on it, and it was a word she had dragged out
of an oddly reluctant young nurse who had taken her
temperature that morning.
  Kate had questioned her about the big man. The big man
whom she had encountered at the airport, whose body she had
seen in a nearby side ward in the early hours of the night.
  "Oh no," the nurse had said, "he wasn't dead. He was just in
some sort of coma."
  Could she see him? Kate had asked. What was his name?
  She had tried to ask idly, in passing as it were, which was a
difficult trick to pull off with a thermometer in her mouth, and
she wasn't at all certain she had succeeded. The nurse had said
that she couldn't really say, she wasn't really meant to talk about
other patients. And anyway, the man wasn't there any more, he
had been taken somewhere else. They had sent an ambulance to
collect him and take him somewhere else.
  This had taken Kate considerably by surprise.
  Where had they taken him? What was this special place? But
the nurse had been unwilling to say anything much more, and a
second or two later had been summoned away by the Sister. The
only word the nurse had said was the one that Kate had then
scribbled down on the piece of paper she was now looking at.
  The word was "Woodshead".
  Now that she was more relaxed she had a feeling that the
name was familiar to her in some way, though she could not
remember where she had heard it.
  The instant she remembered, she could not stay in the bath
any longer, but got out and made straight for the telephone,
pausing only briefly to shower all the gunk off her.

Chapter 9






The big man awoke and tried to look up, but could hardly raise
his head. He tried to sit up but couldn't do that either. He felt as
if he'd been stuck to the floor with superglue and after a few
seconds he discovered the most astounding reason for this.
  He jerked his head up violently, yanking out great tufts of
yellow hair which stayed painfully stuck to the floor, and looked
around him. He was in what appeared to be a derelict
warehouse, probably an upper floor judging by the wintry sky he
could see creeping past the grimy, shattered windows.
  The ceilings were high and hung with cobwebs built by
spiders who did not seem to mind that most of what they caught
was crumbling plaster and dust. They were supported by pillars
made from upright steel joists on which the dirty old cream paint
was bubbled and flaking, and these in turn stood on a floor of
battered old oak on to which he had clearly been glued.
Extending out for a foot or two in a rough oval all around his
naked body the floor glistened darkly and dully. Thin,
nostril-cleaning fumes rose from it. He could not believe it. He
roared with rage, tried to wriggle and shake himself but
succeeded only in tugging painfully at his skin where it was
stuck fast to the oak planks.
  This had to be the old man's doing.
  He threw his head back hard against the floor in a blow that
cracked the boards and made his ears sing. He roared again and
took some furious satisfaction in making as much hopeless,
stupid noise as he could. He roared until the steel pillars rang
and the cracked remains of the windows shattered into finer
shards. Then, as he threw his head angrily from one side to the
other he caught sight of his sledge-hammer leaning against the
wall a few feet from him, heaved it up into the air with a word,
and sent it hurtling round the great space, beating and clanging
on every pillar until the whole building reverberated like a mad
gong.
  Another word and the hammer flew back at him, missed his
head by a hand's-width and punched straight down through the
floor, shattering the wood and the plaster below.
  In the darker space beneath him the hammer spun, and swung
round in a slow heavy parabola as bits of plaster fell about it and
rattled on the concrete floor below. Then it gathered a violent
momentum and hurtled back up through the ceiling, smacking
up a stack of startled splinters as it punched through another oak
floorboard a hand's-width from the soles of the big man's feet.
  It soared up into the air, hung there for a moment as if its
weight had suddenly vanished, then, deftly flicking its short
handle up above its head, it drove hard back down through the
tloor again - then up again, then down again, punching holes in
a splintered ring around its master until, with a long heavy
groan, the whole oval section of punctured floor gave way and
plunged, twisting, through the air. It shattered itself against the
floor below amidst a rain of plaster debris, from which the figure
of the big man then emerged, staggering, flapping at the dusty
air and coughing. His back, his arms and his legs were still
covered with great splintered hunks of oak flooring, but at least
he was able to move. He leant the flat of his hands against the
wall and violently coughed some of the dast from his lungs.
  As he turned back, his hammer danced out of the air towards
him, then suddenly evaded his grasp and skidded joyfully off
across the floor striking sparks from the concrete with its great
head, flipped up and parked itself against a nearby pillar at a
jaunty angle.
  In front of him the shape of a large Coca-Cola vending
machine loomed through the settling cloud of dust. He regarded
it with the gravest suspicion and worry. It stood there with a sort
of glazed, blank look to it, and had a note from his father stuck
on the front panel saying whatever he was doing, stop it. It was
signed "You-know-who", but this had been crossed out and first
the word "Odin" and then in larger letters "Your Father" had
been substituted. Odin never ceased to make absolutely clear his
view of his son's intellectual accomplishments. The big man
tore the note off and stared at it in anger. A postscript added
darkly "Remember Wales. You don't want to go through all that
again." He screwed the note up and hurled it out of the nearest
window, where the wind whipped it up and away. For a moment
he thought he heard an odd squeaking noise, but it was probably
just the blustering of the wind as it whistled between the nearby
derelict buildings.
  He turned and walked to the window and stared out of it in a
belligerent sulk. Glued to the floor. At his age. What the devil
was that supposed to mean? "Keep your head down," was what
he guessed. "If you don't keep it down, I'll have to keep it down
for you." That was what it meant. "Stick to the ground."
  He remembered now the old man saying exactly that to him
at the time of all the unpleasantness with the Phantom fighter jet.
"Why can't you just stick to the ground?" he had said. He could
imagine the old man in his soft-headed benign malice thinking it
very funny to make the lesson so literal.
  Rage began to rumble menacingly inside him but he pushed it
down hard. Very worrying things had recently begun happening
when he got angry and he had a bad feeling, looking back at the
Coca-Cola vending machine, that another of those very
worrying things must have just happened. He stared at it and
fretted.
  He felt ill.
  He had felt ill a lot of late, and he found it impossible to
discharge what were left of his godly duties when he felt he was
suffering from a sort of continual low-grade flu. He experienced
headaches, dizzy spells, guilt and all the sorts of ailments that
were featured so often in television advertisements. He even
suffered terrifying blackouts whenever the great rage gripped
him.
  He always used to have such a wonderful time getting angry.
Great gusts of marvellous anger would hurl him through life. He
felt huge. He felt flooded with power and light and energy. He
had always been provided with such wonderful things to get
angry about - immense acts of provocation or betrayal, people
hiding the AtIantic ocean in his helmet, dropping continents on
him or getting drunk and pretending to be trees. Stuff you could
really work up a rage about and hit things. In short he had felt
good about being a Thunder God. Now suddeniy it was
headaches, nervous tension, nameless anxieties and guilt. These
were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant ones.
  "You look ridiculous!"
  The voice screeched out and affected Thor like fingernails
scratched across a blackboard lodged in the back of his brain. It
was a mean voice, a spiteful, jeering voice, a cheap white nylon
shirt of a voice, a shiny-trousered pencil moustache of a voice, a
voice, in short, which Thor did not like. He reacted very badly to
it at the best of times, and was particularly provoked to have to
hear it while standing naked in the middle of a decrepit
warehouse with large sections of an oak floor still stuck to his
back.
  He spun round angrily. He wanted to be able to turn round
calmly and with crushing dignity, but no such strategy ever
worked with this creature, and since he, Thor, would only end
up feeling humiliated and ridiculous whatever postune he
adopted, he might as well go with one he felt comfortable with.
  "Toe Rag!" he roared, yanked his hammer spinning into the
air and hurled it with immense, stunning force at the small
creature who was squatting complacently in the shadows on top
of a small heap of rubble, leaning forward a little.
  Toe Rag caught the hammer and placed it neatly on top of the
pile of Thor's clothes that lay next to him. He grinned, and
allowed a stray shaft of sunlight to glitter on one of his teeth.
These things don't happen by accident. Toe Rag had spent some
time while Thor was unconscious working out how long it
would take him to recover, then industriously moving the pile of
rubble to exactly this spot, checking the height and then
calculating the exact angle at which to lean. As a provocateur he
regarded himself as a professional.
  "Did you do this to me?" roared Thor. "Did you - "
  Thor searched for any way of saying "glue me to the floor"
that didn't sound like "glue me to floor", but eventually the
pause got too long and he had to give up.
  "- glue me to the floor?" he demanded at last. He wished he
hadn't asked such a stupid question.
  "Don't even answer that!" he added angrily and wished he
hadn't said that either. He stamped his foot and shook the
foundations of the building a little just to make the point. He
wasn't certain what the point was, but he felt that it had to be
made. Some dust settled gently around him.
  Toe Rag watched him with his dancing, glittering eyes.
  "I merely carry out the instructions given to me by your
father," he said in a grotesque parody of obsequiousness.
  "It seems to me," said Thor, "that the instructions my father
has been giving since you entered his service have been very
odd. I think you have some kind of evil grip on him. I don't
know what kind of evil grip it is, but it's definitely a grip, and
it's definitely..." synonyms failed him "...evil," he concluded.
  Toe Rag reacted like an iguana to whom someone had just
complained about the wine.
  "Me?" he protested. "How can I possibly have a grip on your
father? Odin is the greatest of the Gods of Asgard, and I am his
devoted servant in all things. Odin says, `Do this,' and I do it.
Odin says, `Go there,' and I go there. Odin says, `Go and get my
big stupid son out of hospital before he causes any more trouble,
and then, I don't know, glue him to the floor or something,' and
I do exactly as he asks. I am merely the most humble of
functionaries. However small or menial the task, Odin's bidding
is what I am there to perform."
  Thor was not sufficiently subtle a student of human nature or,
for that matter, divine or goblin nature, to be able to argue that
this was in fact a very powerful grip to hold over anybody,
particularly a fallible and pampered old god. He just knew that it
was all wrong.
  "Well then," he shouted, "take this message back to my
father, Odin. Tell him that I, Thor, the God of Thunder, demand
to meet him. And not in his damned hospital either! I'm not
going to hang about reading magazines and looking at fruit
while he has his bed changed! Tell him that Thor, the God of
Thunder, will meet Odin, the Father of the Gods of Asgard, to-
night, at the Challenging Hour in the Halls of Asgard!"
  "Again?" said Toe Rag, with a sly glance sideways at the
Coca-Cola vending machine.
  "Er, yes," said Thor. "Yes!" he repeated in a rage. "Again!"
  Toe Rag made a tiny sigh, such as one who felt resigned to
carrying out the bidding of a temperamental simpleton might
make, and said, "Well, I'll tell him. I don't suppose he will be
best pleased."
  "It is no matter of yours whether he is pleased or not!"
shouted Thor, disturbing the foundations of the building once
more. "This is between my father and myself! You may think
yourself very clever, Toe Rag, and you may think that I am
not - "
  Toe Rag arched an eyebrow. He had prepared for this
moment. He stayed silent and merely let the stray beatn of
sunlight glint on his dancing eyes. It was a silence of the most
profound eloquence.
  "I may not know what you'to up to, Toe Rag, I may not know
a lot of things, but I do know one thing. I know that I am Thor,
the God of Thunder, and that I will not be made a fool of by a
goblin!"
  "Well," said Toe Rag with a light grin, "when you know two
things I expect you'll be twice as clever. Remember to put your
clothes on before you go out." He gestured casually at the pile
beside him and departed.

Chapter 10




The trouble with the sort of shop that sells things like
magnifying glasses and penknives is that they tend also to sell
all kinds of other fascinating things, like the quite extraordinary
device with which Dirk eventually emerged after having been
hopelessly unable to decide between the knife with the built-in
Philips screwdriver, toothpick and ball-point pen and the one
with the 13-tooth gristle saw and the tig-welded rivets.
  The magnifying glasses had held him in thrall for a short
while, particularly the 25-diopter, high-index, vacuum-
deposited, gold-coated glass model with the integral handle and
mount and the notchless seal glazing, but then Dirk had
happened to catch sight of a small electronic I Ching calculator
and he was lost.
  He had never before even guessed at the existence of such a
thing. And to be able to move from total ignorance of something
to total desire for it, and then actually to own the thing all within
the space of about forty seconds was, for Dirk, something of an
epiphany.
  The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made. It had
probably been manufactured in whichever of the South-East
Asian countries was busy tooling up to do to South Korea what
South Korea was busy doing to Japan. GIue technology had
obviously not progressed in that country to the point where
things could be successfully held together with it. Already the
back had half fallen off and needed to be stuck back on with
Sellotape.
  It was much like an ordinary pocket calculator, except that
the LCD screen was a little larger than usual, in order to
accommodate the abridged judgements of King Wen on each of
the sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son,
the Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of each hexagram. These
were unusual texts to see marching across the display of a
pocket calculator, particularly as they had been translated from
the Chinese via the Japanese and seemed to have enjoyed many
adventures on the way.
  The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator, but only
to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which
returned an answer of anything up to "4".
  "1+1" it could manage ("2"), and "1+2" ("3") and "2+2"
("4") or "tan 74" ("3.4874145"), but anything above "4" it
represented merely as "A Suffusion of Yellow". Dirk was not
certain if this was a programming error or an insight beyond his
ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough to
hand over �20 of ready cash for the thing.
  "Thank you, sir," said the proprietor. "It's a nice piece that. I
think you'll be happy with it."
  "I ab," said Dirk.
  "Glad to hear it, sir," replied the proprietor. "Do you know
you've broken your nose?"
  Dirk looked up from fawning on his new possession.
  "Yedth," he said testily, "obf courth I dknow."
  The man nodded, satisfied.
  "Just that a lot of my customers wouldn't always know about
a thing like that," he explained.
  Dirk thanked him tersely and humed out with his purchase.
A few minutes later he took up residence at the small comer
table of an Islington caf�, ordered a small but incredibly strong
cup of coffee; and attempted to take stock of his day. A
moment's reflection told him that he was almost certainly going
to need a small but incredibly strong beer as well, and he
attempted to add this to his order.
  "A wha?" said the waiter. His hair was very black and filled
with brilliantine. He was tall, incredibly fit and too cool to listen
to customers or say consonants.
  Dirk repeated his order, but what with having the caf�'s
music system, a broken nose, and the waiter's insuperable cool
to contend with, he eventually found it simpler to write out the
order on a napkin with a stub of pencil. The waiter peered at it in
an offended manner, and left.
  Dirk exchanged a friendly nod with the girl sitting half
reading a book at the next table, who had watched this exchange
with sympathy. Then he set about laying out his morning's
acquisitions on the table in front of him - the newspaper, the
electronic I Ching calculator and the envelope which he had
retrieved from behind the gold disc on Geoffrey Anstey's
bathroom wall. He then spent a minute or two dabbing at his
nose with a handkerchief, and prodding it tenderly to see how
much it hurt, which turned out to be quite a lot. He sighed and
stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.
  A few seconds later the waiter returned bearing a herb
omelette and a single breadstick. Dirk explained that this wasn't
what he had ordered. The waiter shrugged and said that it wasn't
his fault.
  Dirk had no idea what to say to this, and said so. He was still
having a great deal of difficulty speaking. The waiter asked Dirk
if he knew that he had broken his nose and Dirk said that yedth,
dthagg you berry budge, he did. The waiter said that his friend
Neil had once broken his nose and Dirk said that he hobed it
hurd like hell, which seemed to draw the conversation to a close.
The waiter took the omelette and left, vowing never to return.
  When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a
moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he
was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be
able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the
lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.
  He knew that before consulting the I Ching, even an
electronic one, he should try and compose his thoughts and
allow them to settle calmly.
  This was a tough one.
  However much he tried to clear his mind and think in a calm
and collected way, he was unable to stop Geoffrey Anstey's
head revolving incessantly in his mind. It revolved
disapprovingly, as if pointing an accusing finger at Dirk. The
fact that it did not have an accusing finger with which to point
only served to drive the point it was trying to make home all the
harder.
  Dirk screwed up his eyes and attempted to concentrate
instead on the problem of the mysteriously vanished Miss
Pearce, but was unable to get much of a grip on it. When she had
used to work for him she would often disappear mysteriously for
two or three days at a time, but the papers didn't make any kind
of fuss about it then. Admittedly, there weren't things exploding
around her at the time, at least, not that he was aware of. She
had never mentioned anything exploding particularly.
  Furthermore, whenever he thought of her face, which he had
last seen on the television set in Geoffrey Anstey's house, his
thoughts tended instantly to sink towards the head which was
busy revolving thirty-three and a third times a minute three
floors beneath it. This was not conducive to the calm and
contemplative mood he was seeking. Nor was the very loud
music on the caf�'s music system.
  He sighed, and stai-ed at the electronic I Ching calculator.
  If he wanted to get his thoughts into some kind of order then
maybe chronological order would be as good a one as any. He
decided to cast his mind back to the beginning of the day, before
any of these appalling things had happened, or at least, before
they'd happened to him.
  First there had been the fridge.
  It seemed to him that by comparison with everything else, the
problem of what to do about his fridge had now shrunk to fairly
manageable proportions. It still provoked a discemible twinge of
fear and guilt, but here, he thought, was a problem which he
could face up to with relative calm.
  The little book of instructions suggested that he should
simply concentrate "soulfully" on the question which was
"besieging" him, write it down, ponder on it, enjoy the silence,
and then once he had achieved inner harmony and tranquillity he
should push the red button.
  There wasn't a red button, but there was a blue button
marked "Red", and this Dirk took to be the one.
  He concentrated for a while on the question, then looked
through his pockets for a piece of paper, but was unable to find
one. In the end he wrote his question, "Should I buy a new
fridge?" on a corner of his napkin. Then he took the view that if
he was going to wait until he had achieved inner harmony and
tranquillity he could be there all night, so he went ahead and
pushed the blue button marked "Red" anyway. A symbol flashed
up in a corner of the screen, a hexagram which looked like this:

************  ***********
*************************
************  ***********
************  ***********
************  ***********
*************************
        3 : CHUN

the I Ching calculator then scrolled this text Across its tiny
LCD display:
  "THE JUDGEMENT OF KING WEN:
  "Chun Signifies Difficulties At Outset, As Of Blade Of
  Grass Pushing Up Against Stone. The Time Is Full Of
  Irregularities And Obscurities: Superior Man Will Adjust
  His Measures As In Sorting The Threads Of The Warp
  And Woof. Firm Correctness Will Bring At Last Success.
  Early Advances Should Only Be Made With Caution.
  There Will Be Advantage In Appointing Feudal Princes.
  "LINE 6 CHANGES:
  "THE COMMENTARY OF THE DUKE OF CHOU:
  "The Horses And The Chariot Obliged To Retreat.
  Streams Of Bloody Tears Will Flow."
  Dirk considered this for a few moments, and then decided
that on balance it appeared to be a vote in favour of getting the
new fridge, which, by a staggering coincidence, was the course
of action which he himself favoured.
  There was a pay phone in one of the dark corners where
waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his way
through them, wondering whom it was they reminded him of,
and eventually deciding that it was the small crowd of naked
men standing around behind the Holy Family in Michelangelo's
picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than that
Michelangelo rather liked them.
  He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby Paxton,
or so he claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic
appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.
  "Dobby, I deed a fridge."
  "Dirk, I been saving one against the day you'd ask me."
  Dirk found this highly unlikely.
  "Only I wand a good fridge you thee, Dobby."
  "This is the best, Dirk. Japanese. Microprocessor controlled."
  "What would a microprothethor be doing id a fridge,
Dobby?"
  "Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I'll get the lads to bring it round
right away. I need to get it off the premises pretty sharpish for
reasons which I won't trouble you with."
  "I apprethiade thid, Dobby," said Dirk. "Froblem id, I'm not
at home at preddent."
  "Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owner is
only one of the panoply of skills with which my lads are blessed.
Let me know if you find anything missing afterwards, by the
way."
  "I'd be happy to, Dobby. Id fact if your ladth are in a mood
for carting thtuff off I'd be glad if they would thtart with my old
fridge. It badly needth throwing away."
  "I shall see that it's done, Dirk. There's usually a skip or two
on your street these days. Now, do you expect to be paying for
this or shall I just get you kneecapped straight off, save
everybody time and aggravation all round?"
  It was never one hundred per cent clear to Dirk exactly when
Nobby was joking and he was not keen to put it to the test. He
assured him that he would pay him, as soon as next they met.
  "See you very soon then, Dirk," said Nobby. "By the way, do
you know you sound exactly as if someone's broken your
nose?"
  There was a pause.
  "You there, Dirk?" said Nobby.
  "Yed," said Dirk. "I wad judd liddening to a reggord."
  "Hot Potato!" roared the hi-fi in the caf�.
  "Don't pick it up. pick it up, pick it up.
  "Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on."
  "I said, do you know you sound exactly as if someone's
broken your nose?" repeated Nobby.
  Dirk said that he did know this, thanked Nobby for pointing
it out, said goodbye, stood thoughtfully for a moment, made
another quick couple of phone calls, and then threaded his way
back through the huddle of posing waiters to find the girl whose
coffee he had appropriated sitting at his table.
  "Hello," she said, meaningfully.
  Dirk was as gracious as he knew how.
  He bowed to her very politely, doffed his hat, since all this
gave him a second or so to recover himself, and requested her
permission to sit down.
  "Go ahead," she said, "it's your table." She gestured
magnanimously.
  She was small, her hair was neat and dark, she was in her
mid-twenties, and was looking quizzically at the half-empty cup
of coffee in the middle of the table.
  Dirk sat down opposite her and leant forward
conspiratorially. "I expeg," he said in a low voice, "you are
enquirigg after your coffee."
  "You betcha," said the girl.
  "Id very bad for you, you dow."
  "Is it?"
  "Id id. Caffeide. Cholethderog in the milgg."
  "I see, so it was just my health you were thinking of."
  "I was thiggigg of meddy thiggs," said Dirk airily.
  "You saw me sitting at the next table and you thought
`There's a nice-looking girl with her health in ruins. Let me save
her from herself.'"
  "In a nudthell."
  "Do you know you've broken your nose?"
  "Yeth, of courth I do," said Dirk crossly. "Everybody
keepth - "
  "How long ago did you break it?" the girl asked.
  "Id wad broked for me," said Dirk, "aboud tweddy middidd
ago."
  "I thought so," said the girl. "Close your eyes for a moment."
  Dirk looked at her suspiciously.
  "Why?"
  "It's all right," she said with a smile, "I'm not going to hurt
you. Now close them."
  With a puzzled frown, Dirk closed his eyes just for a
moment. In that moment the girl reached over and gripped him
firmly by the nose, giving it a sharp twist. Dirk nearly exploded
with pain and howled so loudly that he almost attracted the
attention of a waiter.
  "You widge!" he yelled, staggering wildly back from the
table clutching his face. "You double-dabbed widge!"
  "Oh, be quiet and sit down," she said. "All right, I lied about
it not going to hurt you, but at least it should be straight now,
which will save you a lot worse later on. You should get straight
round to a hospital to have some splints and padding put on. I'm
a nurse, I know what I'm doing. Or at least, I think I do. Let's
have a look at you."
  Panting and spluttering, Dirk sat down once more, his hands
cupped round his nose. After a few long seconds he began to
prod it tenderly again and then let the girl examine it.
  She said, "My name's Sally Mills, by the way. I usually try to
introduce myself properly before physical intimacy takes place,
but sometimes," she sighed, "there just isn't time."
  Dirk ran his fingers up either side of his nose again.
  "I thigg id id trader," Dirk said at last.
  "Straighter," Sally said. "Say `straighter' properly. It'll help
you feel better. "
  "Straighter," said Dirk. "Yed. I thee wad you mead."
  "What?"
  "I see what you mead."
  "Good," she said with a sigh of relief, "I'm glad that worked.
My horoscope this morning said that virtually everything I
decided today would be wrong."
  "Yes, well you don't want to believe all that rubbish," said
Dirk sharply.
  "I don't," said Satly. �
  "Particularly not The Great Zaganza."
  "Oh, you read it too, did you?"
  "No. That is, well, not for the same reason."
  "My reason was that a patient asked me to read his horoscope
to him this morning just before he died. What was yours?"
  "Er, a very complicated one."
  "I see," said Sally, sceptically. "What's this?"
  "It's a calculator," said Dirk. "Well, look, I mustn't keep you.
I am indebted to you, my dear lady, for the tenderness of your
ministrations and the loan of your coffee, but lo! the day wears
on, and I am sure you have a heavy schedule of grievous bodily
harm to attend to."
  "Not at all. I came off night duty at nine o'clock this
morning, and all I have to do all day is keep awake so that I can
sleep normally tonight. I have nothing better to do than to sit
arnund talking to strangers in caf�s. You, on the other hand,
should get yourself to a casualty department as soon as possible.
As soon as you've paid my bill, in fact."
  She leant over to the table she had originally been sitting at
and picked up the running-total lying by her plate. She looked at
it, shaking her head disapprovingly.
  "Five cups of coffee, I'm afraid. It was a long night on the
wards. All sorts of comings and goings in the middle of it. One
patient in a coma who had to be moved to a private hospital in
the early hours. God knows why it had to be done at that time of
night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. I wouldn't pay for the
second croissant if I were you. I ordered it but it never came."
  She pushed the bill across to Dirk who picked it up with a
reluctant sigh.
  "Inordinate," he said, "larcenously inordinate. And, in the
circumstances, adding a 15 per cent service charge is tantamount
to jeering at you. I bet they won't even bring me a knife."
  He turned and tried, without any real hope of success, to
summon any of the gaggle of waiters lounging among the sugar
bowls at the back.
  Sally Mills took her bill and Dirk's and attempted to add
them up on Dirk's calculator.
  "The total seems to come to `A Suffusion of YelIow'," she
said.
  "Thank you, I'll take that," said Dirk turning bask crossly
and relieving her of the electronic I Ching set which he put into
his pocket. He resumed his hapless waving at the tableau of
waiters.
  "What do you want a knife for, anyway?" asked Sally.
  "To open this," said Dirk, waggling the large, heavily
Sellotaped envelope at her.
  "I'll get you one," she said. A young man sitting on his own
at another nearby table was looking away at that moment, so
Sally quickly leaned across and nabbed his knife.
  "I am indebted to you," said Dirk and put out his hand to take
the knife from her.
  She held it away from him.
  "What's in the envelope?" she said.
  "You are an extremely inquisitive and presumptuous young
lady," exclaimed Dirk.
  "And you," said Sally Mills, "are very strange."
  "Only," said Dirk, "as strange as I need to be."
  "Humph," said Sally. "What's in the envelope?" She still
wouldn't give him the knife.
  "The envelope is not yours," proclaimed Dirk, "and its
contents are not your concern."
  "It looks very interesting though. What's in it?"
  "Well, I won't know till I've opened it!"
  She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope
from him.
  "I insist that you - " expostulated Dirk, incompletely.
  "What's your name?" demanded Sally.
  "My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently."
  "And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that
have been crossed out?" She frowned, briefly, looking at them.
  "No," said Dirk. "Certainly not."
  "So you mean the envelope is not yours either?"
  "I - that is - "
  "Aha! So you are also being extremely... what was it?"
  "Inquisitive and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am a
private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous.
Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I am nevertheless
inquisitive and presumptuous on a professional basis."
  "How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and
presumptuous as a hobby. So you are a professional while I am
merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don't look like a
private detective."
  "No private detective looks like a private detective. That's
one of the first rules of private detection."
  "But if no private detective looks like a private detective,
how does a private detective know what it is he's supposed not
to look like? Seems to me there's a problem there."
  "Yes, but it's not one that keeps me awake at nights," said
Dirk in exasperation. "Anyway, I am not as other private
detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense
of the word, chaotic. I operate by investigating the fundamental
interconnectedness of all things."
  Sally Mills merely blinked at him.
  "Every particle in the universe," continued Dirk, warming to
his subject and beginning to stare a bit, "affects every other
particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects
with everything. The beating of a butterfly's wings in China can
affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate
this table-leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table-leg,
then it could provide me with the answer to any question about
the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by
chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their
answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem
to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of
knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met
entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my
investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don't, and
if only I could be bothered to, which I can't."
  He paused, and said, "Please will you let me have the
envelope and the knife?"
  "You make it sound as if someone's life depends on it."
  Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.
  "I rather think somebody's life did depend on it," he said. He
said it in such a way that a cloud seemed to pass briefly over
them.
  Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife
over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.
  The knife was too blunt and the Sellotape too thickly applied.
Dirk struggled with it for a few seconds but was unable to slice
through it. He sat back in his seat feeling tired and irritable.
  He said, "I'll go and ask them if they've got anything
sharper," and stood up, clutching the envelope.
  "You should go and get your nose fixed," said Sally Mills
quietly.
  `"Thank you," said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.
  He picked up the bills and set out to visit the exhibition of
waiters mounted at the rear of the cafe. He encountered a certain
coolness when he was disinclined to augment the mandatory 15
per cent service charge with any voluntary additional token of
his personal appreciation, and was told that no, that was the only
type of knife they had and that's all there was to it.
  Dirk thanked them and walked back through the caf�.
  Sitting in his seat talking to Sally Mills was the young man
whose knife she had purloined. He nodded to her, but she was
deeply engrossed in conversation with her new friend and did
not notice.
  "...in a coma," she was saying, "who had to be moved to a
private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be
done at that time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble.
Excuse me rabbiting on, but the patient had his own personal
Coca-Cola machine and sledge-hammer with him, and that sort
of thing is.all very well in a private hospital, but on a short-
staffed NHS ward it just makes me tired, and I talk too much
when I'm tired. If I suddenly fall insensible to the floor, would
you let me know?"
  Dirk walked on, and then noticed that Sally Mills had left the
book she had been reading on her original table, and something
about it caught his attention.
  It was a large book, called Run Like the Devil. In fact it was
extremely large and a little dog-eared, looking more like a puff
pastry cliff than a book. The bottom half of the cover featured
the normal woman-in-cocktail-dress-framed-in-the-sights-of-a-
gun, while the top half was entirely taken up with the author's
name, Howard Bell, embossed in silver.
  Dirk couldn't immediately work out what it was about the
book that had caught his eye, but he knew that some detail of the
cover had struck a chord with him somewhere. He gave a
circumspect glance at the girl whose coffee he had purloined,
and whose five coffees and two croissants, one undelivered and
uneaten, he had subsequently paid for. She wasn't looking, so he
purloined her book as well and slipped it into the pocket of his
leather coat.
  He stepped out on to the street, where a passing eagle
swooped out of the sky at him, nearly forcing him into the path
of a cyclist, who cursed and swore at him from a moral high
ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

Chapter 11


Into the well-kempt grounds that lay just on the owtskins of a
well-kempt village on the fringes of the well-kempt Cotswolds
turned a less than well-kempt car.
  It was a battered yellow Citro�n 2CV which had had one
careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones. It made its
way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked for
from life was to be tipped into a restful ditch in one of the
adjoining meadows and there allowed to settle in graceful
abandonment, instead of which here it was being asked to drag
itself all the way up this long gravelled drive which it would no
doubt soon be called upon to drag itself all the way back down
again, to what possible purpose it was beyond its wit to imagine.
  It drew to a halt in front of the elegant stone entrance to the
main building, and then began to trundle slowly backwards
again until its occupant yanked on the handbrake, which evoked
from the car a sort of strangled "eek".
  A door flopped open, wobbling perilously on its one
remaining hinge, and there emerged from the car a pair of the
sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without
needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons
which no one besides soundtrack editors has ever been able to
understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone
would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which
the same soundtrack editor would almost certainly have slapped
all over the progress of the vehicle.
  The owner of the legs followed them in the usual manner,
closed the car door tenderly, and then made her way into the
building.
  The car remained parked in front of it.
  After a few minutes a porter came out and examined it,
adopted a disapproving manner and then, for lack of anything
more positive to do, went back in.
  A short time later, Kate was shown into the office of Mr
Ralph Standish, the Chief Consultant Psychologist and one of
the directors of the Woodshead Hospital, who was just
completing a telephone conversation.
  "Yes, it is true," he was saying, "that sometimes unusually
intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But,
Mrs Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid
as well. I think that's something you might have to consider. I
know it's very painful, yes. Good day, Mrs Benson."
  He put the phone away into a desk drawer and spent a couple
of seconds collecting his thoughts before looking up.
  "This is very short notice, Miss, er, Schechter," he said to her
at last.
  In fact what he had said was, This is ve short notice, Miss,
er-" and then he had paused and peered into another of his desk
drawers before saying "Schechter".
  It seemed to Kate that it was very odd to keep your visitors'
names in a drawer, but then he clearly disliked having things
cluttering up his fine, but severely designed, black ash desk
because there was nothing on it at all. It was completely blank,
as was every other surface in his office. There was nothing on
the small neat steel and glass coffee table which sat squarely
between two Barcelona chairs. There was nothing on top of the
two expensive-looking filing cabinets which stood at the back of
the room.
  There were no bookshelves - if there were any books they
were presumably hidden away behind the white doors of the
large blank built-in cupboards - and although there was one
plain black picture frame hanging on the wall, this was
presumably a temporary aberration because there was no picture
in it.
  Kate looked around her with a bemused air.
  "Do you have no ornaments in here at all, Mr Standish?" she
asked.
  He was, for a moment, somewhat taken aback by her trans-
atlantic directness, but then answered her.
  "Indeed I have ornaments," he said; and pulled open another
drawer. He pulled out from this a small china model of a kitten
playing with a ball of wool and put it firmly on the desk in front
of him.
  "As a psychologist I am aware of the important role that
ornamentation plays in nourishing the human spirit," he
pronounced.
  He put the china kitten back in the drawer and slid it closed
with a smooth click.
  "Now."
  He clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him, and
looked at her enquiringly.
  "It's very good of you to see me at short notice, Mr
Standish - "
  "Yes, yes, we've established that."
  "- but I'm sure you know what newspaper deadlines are
like."
  "I know at least as much as I would ever care to know about
newspapers, Miss, er - "
  He opened his drawer again.
  "Miss Schechter, but - "
  "Well that's partly what made me approach you," lied Kate
charmingly. "I know that you have suffered from some, well,
unfortunate publicity here, and thought you might welcome the
opportunity to talk about some of the more enlightening aspects
of the work at the Woodshead Hospital." She smiled very
sweetly.
  "It's only because you come to me with the highest recom-
mendation from my very good friend and colleague Mr, er - "
  "Franklin, Alan Franklin," prompted Kate, to save the
psychologist from having to open his drawer again. Alan
Franklin was a therapist whom Kate had seen for a few sessions
after the loss of her husband Luke. He had warned her that
Standish, though brilliant, was also peculiar, even by the high
standards set by his profession.
  "Franklin," resumed Standish, "that I agreed to see you. Let
me warn you instantly that if I see any resumption of this
'Something nasty in the Woodshead' mendacity appearing in the
papers as a result of this interview I will, I will - "
  "`- do such things-
  `What they are yet I know not - but they shall be
  ` The terror of the Earth '," said Kate, brightly.
  Standish narrowed his eyes.
  "Lear, Act 2, Scene 4," he said. "And I think you'll find it's
`terrors' and not `terror'."
  "Do you know, I think you're right?" replied Kate.
  Thank you, Alan, she thought. She smiled at Standish, who
relaxed into pleased superiority. It was odd, Kate reflected, that
people who needed to bully you were the easiest to push around.
  "So you would like to know precisely what, Miss Schechter?"
  "Assume," said Kate, "that I know nothing."
  Standish smiled, as if to signify that no assumption could
possibly give him greater pleasure.
  "Very well," he said. "The Woodshead is a research hospital.
We specialise in the care and study of patients with unusual or
previously unknown conditions, largely in the psychological or
psychiatric fields. Funds are raised in various ways. One of our
chief methods is quite simply to take in private patients at
exorbitantly high fees, which they are happy to pay, or at least
happy to complain about. There is in fact nothing to complain
about because patients who come to us privately are made fully
aware of why our fees are so high. For the money they are
paying, they are, of course, perfectly entitled to complain - the
right to complain is one of the privileges they are paying for. In
some cases we come to a special arrangement under which, in
return for being made the sole beneficiaries of a patient's estate,
we will guarantee to look after that patient for the rest of his or
her life."
  "So in effect you are in the business of giving scholarships to
people with particularly gifted diseases?"
  "Exactly. A very good way of expressing it. We are in the
business of giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted
diseases. I must make a note of that. Miss Mayhew!"
  He had opened a drawer, which clearly contained his office
intercom. In response to his summons one of the cupboards
opened, and tumed out to be a door into a side office - a feature
which must have appealed to some architect who had conceived
an ideological dislike of doors. From this office there emerged
obediently a thin and rather blank-faced woman in her mid-
forties.
  "Miss Mayhew," said Mr Standish, "we are in the business of
giving scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases."
  "Very good, Mr Standish," said Miss Mayhew, and retreated
backwards into her office, pulling the door closed after her. Kate
wondered if it was perhaps a cupboard after all.
  "And we do have some patients with some really quite
outstanding diseases at the moment," enthused the psychologist.
"Perhaps you would care to come and see one or two of our
current stars?"
  "Indeed I would. That would be most interesting, Mr
Standish, you're very kind," said Kate.
  "You have to be kind in this job," Standish replied, and
flicked a smile on and off at her.
  Kate was trying to keep some of the impatience she was
feeling out of her manner. She did not take to Mr Standish, and
was beginning to feel that there was a kind of Martian quality to
him. Furthermore, the only thing she was actually interested in
was discovering whether or not the hospital had accepted a new
admission in the early hours of the morning, and if so, where he
was and whether she could see him.
  She had originally tried the direct approach but had been
rebuffed by a mere telephone receptionist on the grounds that
she didn't have a name to ask for. Simply asking if they had any
tall, well-built, blond men in residence had seemed to create
entirely the wrong impression. At least, she insisted to herself
that it was entirely the wrong impression. A quick phone call to
Alan Franklin had set her up for this altogether more subtle
approach.
  "Good!" A look of doubt passed momentarily over Mr
Standish's face, and he summoned Miss Mayhew from out of
her cupboard again.
  "Miss Mayhew, that last thing I just said to you - "
  "Yes, Mr Standish?"
  "I assume you realised that I wished you to make a note of it
for me?"
  "No, Mr Standish, but I will be happy to do so."
  "Thank you," said Mr Standish with a slightly tense look.
"And tidy up in here please. The place looks a - "
  He wanted to say that the place looked a mess, but was
frustrated by its air of clinical sterility.
  "Just tidy up generally," he concluded.
  "Yes, Mr Standish."
  The psychologist nodded tersely, brushed a non-existent
speck of dust off the top of his desk, flicked another brief smile
on and off at Kate and then escorted her out of his office into the
corridor which was immaculately laid with the sort of beige
carpet which gave everyone who walked on it electric shocks.
  "Here, you see," said Standish, indicating part of the wall
they were walking past with an idle wave of his hand, but not
making it in any way clear what it was he wished her to see or
what she was supposed to understand from it.
  "And this," he said, apparently pointing at a door hinge.
  "Ah," he added, as the door swung open towards them. Kate
was alarmed to find herself giving a little expectant start every
time a door opened anywhere in this place. This was not the sort
of behaviour she expected of a worldly-wise New Yorker
journalist, even if she didn't actually live in New York and only
wrote travel articles for magazines. It still was not right for her
to be looking for large blond men every time a door opened.
  There was no large blond man. There was instead a small,
sandy-haired girl of about ten years old, being pushed along in a
wheelchair. She seemed very pale, sick and withdrawn, and was
murmuring something soundlessly to herself. Whatever it was
she was murmuring seemed to cause her worry and agitation,
and she would flop this way then that in her chair as if trying to
escape from the words coming out of her mouth. Kate was
instantly moved by the sight of her, and on an impulse asked the
nurse who was pushing her along to stop.
  She squatted down to look kindly into the girl's face, which
seemed to please the nurse a little, but Mr Standish less so.
  Kate did not try to demand the girl's attention, merely gave
her an open and friendly smile to see if she wanted to respond,
but the girl seemed unwilling or unable to. Her mouth worked
away endlessly, appearing almost to lead an existence that was
independent of the rest of her face.
  Now that Kate looked at her more closely it seemed that she
looked not so much sick and withdrawn as weary, harassed and
unutterably fed up. She needed a little rest, she needed peace,
but her mouth kept motoring on.
  For a fleeting instant her eyes caught Kate's, and the message
Kate received was along the lines of "I'm sorry but you'll just
have to excuse me while all this is going on". The girl took a
deep breath, half-closed her eyes in resignation and continued
her relentless silent murmuring.
  Kate leant forward a little in an attempt to catch any actual
words, but she couldn't make anything out. She shot an enquir-
ing look up at Standish.
  He said, simply, "Stock market prices."
  A look of amazement crept over Kate's face.
  Standish added with a wry shrug, "Yesterday's, I'm afraid."
  Kate flinched at having her reaction so wildly misinterpreted,
and hurriedly looked back at the girl in order to cover her
confusion.
  "You mean," she said, rather redundantly, "she's just sitting
here reciting yesterday's stock market prices?" The girl rolled
her eyes past Kate's.
  "Yes," said Standish. "It took a lip reader to work out what
was going on. We all got rather excited, of course, but then
closer examination revealed that they were only yesterday's
which was a bit of a disappointment. Not that significant a case
really. Aberrant behaviour. Interesting to know why she does it,
but - "
  "Hold on a moment," said Kate, trying to sound very
interested rather than absolutely horrified, "are you saying that
she is reciting - what? - the closing prices over and over, or - "
  "No. That's an interesting feature of course. She pretty much
keeps pace with movements in the market over the course of a
whole day. Just twenty-four hours out of step."
  "But that's extraordinary, isn't it?"
  "Oh yes. Quite a feat."
  "A feat?"
  "Well, as a scientist, I have to take the view that since the
information is freely available, she is acquiring it through
normal channels. There's no necessity in this case to invent
any supernatural or paranonnal dimension. Occam's razor.
Shouldn't needlessly multiply entities."
  "But has anyone seen her studying the newspapers, or
copying stuff down over the phone?"
  She looked up at the nurse, who shook her head, dumbly.
  "No, never actually caught her at it," said Standish. "As I
said, it's quite a feat. I'm sure a stage magician or memory man
could tell you how it was done."
  "Have you asked one?"
  "No. Don't hold with such people."
  "But do you really think that she could possibly be doing this
deliberately?" insisted Kate.
  "Believe me, if you understood as much about people as I do,
Miss, er - you would believe anything," said Standish, in his
most professionally reassuring tone of voice.
  Kate stared into the tired, wretched face of the young girl and
said nothing.
  "You have to understand," said Standish, "that we have to be
rational about this. If it was tomorrow's stock market prices, it
would be a different story. That would be a phenomenon of an
entirely different character which would merit and demand the
most rigorous study. And I'm sure we'd have no difficulty in
funding the research. There would be absolutely no problem
about that."
  "I see," said Kate, and meant it.
  She stood up, a little stiftly, and brushed down her skirt.
  "So," she said, and felt ashamed of herself, "who is your
newest patient? Who has arrived most recently, then?" She
shuddered at the crassness of the non sequitur, but reminded
herself that she was there as a journalist, so it would not seem
odd.
  Standish waved the nurse and the wheelchair with its sad
charge on their way. Kate glanced back at the girl once, and then
followed Standish through the swing-doors and into the next
section of corridor, which was identical to the previous one.
  "Here, you see," said Standish again, this time apparently in
relation to a window frame.
  "And this," he said, pointing at a light.
  He had obviously either not heard her question or was
deliberately ignoring it. Perhaps, thought Kate, he was simply
treating it with the contempt it deserved.
  It suddenly dawned on her what all this Here you see, and
And thising was about. He was asking her to admire the quality
of the decor. The windows were sashes, with finely made and
beautifully painted beads; the light fittings were of a heavy dull
metal, probably nickel-plated - and so on.
  "Very fine," she said accommodatingly, and then noticed that
this had sounded an odd thing to say in her American accent.
  "Nice place you've got here," she added, thinking that that
would please him.
  It did. He allowed himself a subdued beam of pleasure.
  "We like to think of it as a quality caring environment," he
said.
  "You must get a lot of people wanting to come here," Kate
continued, plugging away at her theme. "How often do you
admit new patients? When was the last -?"
  With her left hand she carefully restrained her right hand
which wanted to strangle her at this moment.
  A door they were passing was slightly ajar, and she tried,
unobtrusively, to look in.
  "Very well, we'll take a look in here," said Standish imme-
diately, pushing the door fully open, on what transpired to be
quite a small room.
  "Ah yes," Standish said, recognising the occupant. He
ushered Kate in.
  The occupant of the room was another non-large, non-blond
person. Kate was beginning to find the whole visit to be
something of an emotionally wearing experience, and she had a
feeling that things were not about to ease up in that respect.
  The man sitting in the bedside chair while his bed was being
made up by a hospital orderly was one of the most deeply and
disturbingly tousled people that Kate had ever seen. In fact it
was only his hair that was tousled, but it was tousled to such an
extreme degree that it seemed to draw all of his long face up into
its distressed chaos.
  He seemed quite content to sit where he was, but there was
something tremendously vacant about his contentedness - he
seemed literally to be content about nothing. There was a
completely empty space hanging in the air about eighteen inches
in front of his face, and his contentedness, if it sprang from
anything, sprang from staring at that.
  There was also a sense that he was waiting for something.
Whether it was something that was about to happen at any
moment, or something that was going to happen later in the
week, or even something that was going to happen some little
while after hell iced over and British Telecom got the phones
fixed was by no means apparent because it seemed to be all the
same to him. If it happened he was ready for it and if it didn't-
he was content.
  Kate found such contentedness almost unbearably distressing.
  "What's the matter with him?" she said quietly, and then
instantly realised that she was talking as if he wasn't there when
he could probably speak perfectly well for himself. Indeed, at
that moment, he suddenly did speak.
  "Oh, er, hi," he said. "OK, yeah, thank you."
  "Er, hello," she said, in response, though it didn't seem quite
to fit. Or rather, what he had said didn't seem quite to fit.
Standish made a gesture to her to discourage her from speaking.
  "Er, yeah, a bagel would be fine," said the contented man. He
said it in a flat kind of tone, as if merely repeating something he
had been given to say.
  "Yeah, and maybe some juice," he added. "OK, thanks." He
then relaxed into his state of empty watchfulness.
  "A very unusual condition," said Standish, "that is to say, we
can only believe that it is entirely unique. I've certainly never
heard of anything remotely like it. It has also proved virtually
impossible to verify beyond question that it is what it appears to
be, so I'm glad to say that we have been spared the
embarrassment of attempting to give the condition a name."
  "Would you like me to help Mr Elwes back to bed?" asked
the orderly of Standish. Standish nodded. He didn't bother to
waste words on minions.
  The orderly bent down to talk to the patient.
  "Mr Elwes?" he said quietly.
  Mr Elwes seemed to swim up out of a reverie.
  "Mmmm?" he said, and suddenly looked around. He seemed
confused.
  "Oh! Oh? What?" he said faintly.
  "Would you like me to help you back to bed?"
  "Oh. Oh, thank you, yes. Yes, that would be kind."
  Though clearly dazed and bewildered, Mr Elwes was quite
able to get himself back into bed, and all the orderly needed to
supply was reassurance and encouragement. Once Mr Elwes
was well settled, the orderly nodded politely to Standish and
Kate and made his exit.
  Mr Elwes quickly lapsed back into his trancelike state, lying
propped up against an escarpment of pillows. His head dropped
forward slightly and he stared at one of his knees, poking up
bonily from under the covers.
  "Get me New York," he said.
  Kate shot a puzzled glance at Standish, hoping for some kind
of explanation, but got none.
  "Oh, OK," said Mr Elwes, "it's 541 something. Hold on." He
spoke another four digits of a number in his dead, flat voice.
  "What is happening here?" asked Kate at last.
  "It took us rather a long time to work it out. It was only quite
by the remotest chance that someone discovered it. That
television was on in the room... "
  He pointed to the small portable set off to one side of the bed.
  ". . .tuned to one of those chat programme things, which
happened to be going out live. Most extraordinary thing. Mr
Elwes was sitting here muttering about how much he hated the
BBC - don't know if it was the BBC, perhaps it was one of
those other channels they have now - and was expressing an
opinion about the host of the programme, to the effect that he
considered him to be a rectum of some kind, and saying
furthermore that he wished the whole thing was over and that,
yes, all right he was coming, and then suddenly what he was
saying and what was on the television began in some
extraordinary way almost to synchronise."
  "I don't understand what you mean," said Kate.
  "I'd be surprised if you did," said Standish. "Everything that
Elwes said was then said just a moment later on the television by
a gentleman by the name of Mr Dustin Hoffman. It seems that
Mr Elwes here knows everything that this Mr Hoffman is going
to say just a second or so before he says it. It is not, I have to
say, something that Mr Hoffman would be very pleased about if
he knew. Attempts have been made to alert the gentleman to the
problem, but he has proved to be somewhat difficult to reach."
  "Just what the shit is going on here?" asked Mr Elwes
placidly.
  "Mr Hoffman is, we believe, currently making a film on
location somewhere on the west coast of America."
  He looked at his watch.
  "I think he has probably just woken up in his hotel and is
making his early morning phone calls," he added.
  Kate was gazing with astonishment between Standish and the
extraordinary Mr Elwes.
  "How long has the poor man been like this?"
  "Oh, about five years I think. Started absolutely out of the
blue. He was sitting having dinner with his family one day as
usual when suddenly he started complaining about his caravan.
And then shortly afterwards about how he was being shot. He
then spent the entire night talking in his sleep, repeating the
same apparently meaningless phrases over and over again and
also saying that he didn't think much of the way they were
written. It was a very trying time for his family, as you can
imagine, living with such a perfectionist actor and not even
realising it. It now seems very surprising how long it took them
to identify what was occurring. Particularly when he once woke
them all up in the early hours of the morning to thank them and
the producer and the director for his Oscar."
  Kate, who didn't realise that the day was still only softening
her up for what was to come, made the mistake of thinking that
it had just reached a climax of shock.
  "The poor man," she said in a hushed voice. "What a pathetic
state to be in. He's just living as someone else's shadow."
  "I don't think he's in any pain."
  Mr Elwes appeared to be quietly locked in a bitter argument
which seemed to touch on the definitions of the words "points"
"gross", "profits" and "limo".
  "But the implications of this are extraordinary aren't they?"
said Kate. "He's actually saying these things moments before
Dustin Hoffman?"
  "Well, it's all conjecture of course. We've only got a few
clear instances of absolute correlation and we just haven't got
the opportunity to do more thorough research. One has to
recognise that those few instances of direct correlation were not
rigorously documented and could more simply be explained as
coincidence. The rest could be merely the product of an
elaborate fantasy."
  "But if you put this case next to that of the girl we just
saw... "
  "Ah, well we can't do that you see. We have to judge each
case on its own merits."
  "But they're both in the same world..."
  "Yes, but there are separate issues. Obviously, if Mr Elwes
here could demonstrate significant precognition of, for instance,
the head of the Soviet Union or, better still, the President of the
United States, then clearly there would be important defence
issues involved and one might be prepared to stretch a point on
the question of what is and what is not coincidence and fantasy,
but for a mere screen actor - that is, a screen actor with no
apparent designs on political office - I think that, no, we have to
stick to the principles of rigorous science.
  "So," he added, turning to leave, and drawing Kate with him,
"I think that in the cases of both Mr Elwes and, er, what-was-
her-name, the charming girl in the wheelchair, it may be that we
are not able to be of much more help to them, and we may need
the space and facilities for more deserving cases."
  Kate could think of nothing to say to this and followed,
seething dumbly.
  "Ah, now here we have an altogether much more interesting
and promising case," said Standish, forging on ahead through
the next set of double doors.
  Kate was trying to keep her reactions under control, but
nevertheless even someone as glassy and Martian as Mr
Standish could not help but detect that his audience was not
absolutely with him. A little extra brusqueness and impatience
crept into his demeanour, to join forces with the large quantities
of brusqueness and impatience which were already there.
  They paced down the corridor for a few seconds in silence.
Kate was looking for other ways of casually introducing the
subject of recent admissions, but was forced to concede to
herself that you cannot attempt to introduce the same subject
three times in a row without beginning to lose that vital quality
of casualness. She glanced as surreptitiously as she could at each
door they passed, but most were firmly closed, and the ones that
were not revealed nothing of interest.
  She glanced out of a window as they walked past it and
noticed a van turning into a roar courtyard. It caught her
attention in the brief instant that it was within her view because
it very clearly wasn't a baker's van or a laundry van. Baker's
vans and laundry vans advertise their business and have words
like "Bakery" and "Laundry" painted on them, whereas this van
was completely blank. It had absolutely nothing to say to anyone
nnd it said it loudly and distinctly.
  It was a large, heavy, serious-looking van that was almost on
the verge of being an actual lorry, and it was painted in a
uniform dark metallic grey. It reminded Kate of the huge gun-
metal-grey freight lorries which thunder through Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia on their way from Albania with nothing but the
word "Albania" stencilled on their sides. She remembered
wondering what it was that the Albanians exported in such an
anonymous way, but when on one occasion she had looked it up,
she found that their only export was electricity - which, if she
remembered her high school physics correctly, was unlikely to
be moved around in lorries.
  The large, serious-looking van turned and started to reverse
towards a rear entrance to the hospital. Whatever it was that the
van usually carried, Kate thought, it was about either to pick it
up or deliver it. She moved on.
  A few moments later Standish arrived at a door, knocked at it
gently and looked enquiringly into the room within. He then
beckoned to Kate to follow him in.
  This was a room of an altogether different sort. Immediately
within the door was an ante-room with a very large window
through which the main room could be seen. The two rooms
were clearly sound-proofed from each other, because the ante-
room was decked out with monitoring equipment and
computers, not one of which but didn't hum loudly to itself, and
the main room contained a woman lying in bed, asleep.
  "Mrs Elspeth May," said Standish, and clearly felt that he
was introducing the top of the bill. Her room was obviously a
very good one - spacious and furnished comfortably and expen-
sively. Fresh flowers stood on every surface, and the bedside
table on which Mrs May's knitting lay was of mahogany.
  She herself was a comfortably shaped, silver-haired lady of
late middle age, and she was lying asleep half propped up in bed
on a pile of pillows, wearing a pink woolly cardigan. Aher a
moment it became clear to Kate that though she was asleep she
was by no means inactive. Her head lay back peacefully with her
eyes closed, but her right hand was clutching a pen which was
scribbling away furiously on a large pad of paper which lay
beside her. The hand, like the wheelchair girl's mouth, seemed
to lead an independent and feverishly busy existence. Some
small pinkish electrodes were taped to Mrs May's forehead just
below her hairline, and Kate assumed that these were providing
some of the readings which danced across the computer screens
in the ante-room in which she and Standish stood. Two white-
coated men and a woman sat monitoring the equipment, and a
nurse stood watching through the window. Standish exchanged a
couple of brief words with them on the current state of the
patient, which was universally agreed to be excellent.
  Kate could not escape the impression that she ought to know
who Mrs May was, but she didn't and was forced to ask.
  "She is a medium," said Standish a little crossly, "as I
assumed you would know. A medium of prodigious powers. She
is currently in a trance and engaged in automatic writing. She is
taking dictation. Virtually every piece of dictation she receives
is of inestimable value. You have not heard of her?"
  Kate admitted that she had not.
  "Well, you are no doubt familiar with the lady who claimed
that Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert were dictating music to
her?"
  "Yes, I did hear about that. There was a lot of stuff in colour
supplements about her a few years ago."
  "Her claims were, well, interesting, if that's the sort of thing
you're interested in. The music was certainly more consistent
with what might be produced by each of those gentlemen
quickly and before breakfast, than it was with what you would
expect from a musically unskilled middle-aged housewife."
  Kate could not let this pomposity pass.
  "That's a rather sexist viewpoint," she said, "George Eliot
was a middle-aged housewife."
  "Yes, yes," said Standish testily, "but she wasn't taking
musical dictation from the deceased Wolfgang Amadeus. That's
the point I'm making. Please try and follow the logic of this
argument and do not introduce irrelevancies. If I felt for a
moment that the example of George Eliot could shed any light
on our present problem, you could rely on me to introduce it
myself.
  "Where was I?"
  "I don't know."
  "Mabel. Doris? Was that her name? Let us call her Mabel.
The point is that the easiest way of dealing with the Doris
problem was simply to ignore it. Nothing very important hinged
on it at alI. A few concerts. Second rate material. But here, here
we have something of an altogether diffenent nature."
  He said this last in hushed tones and turned to study a TV
monitor which stood among the bank of computer screens. It
showed a close-up of Mrs May's hand scuttling across her pad
of paper. Her hand largely obscured what she had written, but it
appeared to be mathematics of some kind.
  "Mrs May is, or so she claims, taking dictation from some of
the greatest physicists. From Einstein and from Heisenberg and
Planck. And it is very hard to dispute her claims, because the
information being produced here, by automatic writing, by
this...untutored lady, is in fact physics of a very profound order.
  "From the late Einstein we are getting more and more
refinements to our picture of how time and space work at a
macroscopic level, and from the late Heisenberg and Planck we
are increasing our understanding of the fundamental structures
of matter at a quantum level. And there is absolutely no doubt
that this information is edging us closer and closer towards the
elusive goal of a Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything.
  "Now this produces a very interesting, not to say somewhat
embarrassing situation for scientists because the means by which
the information is reaching us seems to be completely contrary
to the meaning of the information."
  "It's like Uncle Henry," said Kate, suddenly.
  Standish looked at her blankly.
  "Uncle Henry thinks he's a chicken," Kate explained.
  Standish looked at her blankly again.
  "You must have heard it," said Kate. "`We're terribly worried
about Uncle Henry. He thinks he's a chicken.' `Well, why don't
you send him to the doctor?' `Well, we would only we need the
eggs.'".
  Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly formed
elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of
her nose.
  "Say that again," he said in a small, shocked voice.
  "What, all of it?"
  "All of it."
  Kate stuck her fist on her hip and said it again, doing the
voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time.
  "'That's brilliant," Standish breathed when she had done.
  "You must have heard it before," she said, a little surprised
by this response. "It's an old joke."
  "No," he said, "I have not. We need the eggs. We need the
 eggs. We need the eggs. `We can't send him to the doctor
because we need the eggs.' An astounding insight into the
central paradoxes of the human condition and of our
indefatigable facility for constructing adaptive rationales to
account for it. Good God."
  Kate shrugged.
  "And you say this is a joke?" demanded Standish
incredulously.
  "Yes. It's very old, really."
  "And are they all like that? I never realised."
  "Well - "
  "I'm astounded," said Standish, "utterly astounded. I thought
that jokes were things that fat people said on television and I
never listened to them. I feel that people have been keeping
something from me. Nurse!"
  The nurse who had been keeping watch on Mts May through
the window jumped at being barked at unexpectedly like this.
  "Er, yes, Mr Standish?" she said. He clearly made her
nervous.
  "Why have you never told me any jokes?"
  The nurse stared at him, and quivered at the impossibility of
even knowing how to think about answering such a question.
  "Er, well... "
  "Make a note of it will you? In future I will require you and
all the other staff in this hospital to tell me all the jokes you have
at your disposal, is that understood?"
  "Er, yes, Mr Standish - "
  Standish looked at her with doubt and suspicion.
  "You do know some jokes do you, nurse?" he challenged
her.
  "Er, yes, Mr Standish, I think, yes I do."
  "Tell me one."
  "What, er, now, Mr Standish?"
  "This instant."
  "Er, well, um - there's one which is that a patient wakes up
after having, well, that is, he's been to, er, to surgery, and he
wakes up and, it's not very good, but anyway, he's been to
surgery and he says to the doctor when he wakes up, 'Doctor,
doctor, what's wrong with me, I can't feel my legs.' And the
doctor says, `Yes, I'm afraid we've had to amputate both your
arms.' And that's it really. Er, that's why he couldn't feel his
legs, you see."
  Mr Standish looked at her levelly for a moment or two.
  "You're on report, nurse," he said.
  "Yes, Mr Standish."
  He turned to Kate.
  "Isn't there one about a chicken crossing a road or some such
thing?"
  "Er, yes," said Kate, doubtfully. She felt she was caught in a
bit of a situation here.
  "And how does that go?"
  "Well," said Kate, "it goes `Why did the chicken cross the
road?'"
  "Yes? And?"
  "And the answer is `To get to the other side'."
  "I see." Standish considered things for a moment. "And what
does this chicken do when it arrives at the other side of the
road?."
  "History does not relate," replied Kate promptly. "I think that
falls outside the scope of the joke, which really only concerns
itself with the journey of the chicken across the road and the
chicken's reasons for making it. It's a little like a Japanese haiku
in that respect."
  Kate suddenly found she was enjoying herself. She managed
a surreptitious wink at the nurse, who had no idea what to make
of anything at all.
  "I see," said Standish once again, and frowned. "And do
these, er, jokes require the preparatory use of any form of
artificial stimulant?"
  "Depends on the joke, depends on who it's being told to."
  "Hmm, well I must say, you've certainly opened up a rich
furrow for me, Miss, er. It seems to me that the whole field of
humour could benefit from close and immediate scrutiny.
Clearly we need to sort out the jokes which have any kind of
genuine psychological value from those which merely
encourage drug abuse and should be stopped. Good."
  He turned to address the white-coated nesearcher who was
studying the TV monitor on which Mrs May's scribblings were
being tracked.
  "Anything fresh of value from Mr Einstein?" he asked.
  The researrher did not move his eyes from the screen. He
replied, "It says `How would you like your eggs? Poached or
boiled?'"
  Again, Standish paused.
  "Interesting," he said, "very interesting. Continue to make at
careful note of everything she writes. Come." This last he said to
Kate, and made his way out of the room.
  "Very strange people, physicists," he said as soon as they
were outside again. "In my experience the ones who aren't
actually dead are in some way very ill. Well, the afternoon
presses on and I'm sure that you are keen to get away and write
your article, Miss, er. I certainly have things urgently awaiting
my attention and patients awaiting my care. So, if you have no
more questions - "
  "There is just one thing, Mr Standish." Kate decided, to hell
with it. "We need to emphasise that it's up to the minute.
Perhaps if you could spare a couple more minutes we could go
and see whoever is your most recent admission."
  "I think that would be a little tricky. Our last admission was
about a month ago and she died of pneumonia two weeks after
admission."
  "Oh, ah. Well, perhaps that isn't so thrilling. So. No new
admissions in the last couple of days. No admissions of anyone
particularly large or blond or Nordic, with a fur coat or a sledge-
hammer perhaps. I mean, just for instance." An inspiration
struck her. "A re-admission perhaps?"
  Standish regarded her with deepening suspicion.
  "Miss, er - "
  "Schechter."
  "Miss Schechter, I begin to get the impression that your
interests in the hospital are not - "
  He was interrupted at that moment by the swing-doors just
behind them in the corridor being pushed open. He looked up to
see who it was, and as he did so his manner changed.
  He motioned Kate sharply to stand aside while a large trolley
bed was wheeled through the doors by an orderly. A sister and
another nurse followed in attendance, and gave the impression
that they were the entourage in a procession rather than merely
nurses about their normal business.
  The occupant of the trolley was a delicately frail old man
with skin like finely veined parchment.
  The rear section of the trolley was inclined upwards at a very
slight angle so that the old man could survey the world as it
passed him, and he surveyed it with a kind of quiet, benevolent
horror. His mouth hung gently open and his head lolled very
slightly, so that every slightest bump in the progress of the
trolley caused it to roll a little to one side or the other. Yet in
spite of his fragile listlessness, the air he emanated was that of
very quietly, very gently, owning everything.
  It was the one eye which conveyed this. Each thing it rested
on, whether it was the view through a window, or the nurse who
was holding back the door so that the trolley could move
through it without impediment, or whether it was on Mr
Standish, who suddenly was all obsequious charm and
obeisance, all seemed instantly gathered up into the domain
ruled by that eye.
  Kate wondered for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed
such an immense amount of information about their owners.
They were, after all, merely spheres of white gristle. They
hardly changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder
and a bit runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was
all. Where did all this flood of information come from?
Particularly in the case of a man with only one of them and only
a sealed up flap of skin in place of the other.
  She was interrupted in this line of thought by the fact that at
that instant the eye in question moved on from Standish and
settled on her. The grip it exerted was so startling that she
almost yelped.
  With the frailest of faint motions the old man signalled to the
orderly who was pushing the trolley to pause. The trolley drew
to a halt and when the noise of its rolling wheels was stilled
there was, for a moment, no other noise to be heard other than
the distant hum of an elevator.
  Then the elevator stopped.
  Kate returned his look with a little smiling frown as if to say,
"Sorry, do I know you?" and then wondered to herself if in fact
she did. There was some fleeting familiarity about his face, but
she couldn't quite catch it. She was impressed to notice that
though this was only a trolley bed he was in, the bed linen that
his hands lay on was real linen, freshly laundered and ironed.
  Mr Standish coughed slightly and said, "Miss, er, this is one
of our most valued and, er, cherished patients, Mr-"
  "Are you quite comfortable, Mr Odwin?" interrupted the
Sister helpfully. But there was no need. This was one patient
whose name Standish most certainly knew.
  Odin quieted her with the slightest of gestures.
  "Mr Odwin," said Standish, "this is Miss, er - "
  Kate was about to introduce herself once more when she was
suddenly taken completely by surprise.
  "I know exactly who she is," said Odin in a quiet but distinct
voice, and there was in his eye for a moment the sense of an
aerosol looking meaningfully at a wasp.
  She tried to be very formal and English.
  "I'm afraid," she said stiffly, "that you have the advantage of
me."
  "Yes," said Odin.
  He gestured to the orderly, and together they resumed their
leisurely passage down the corridor. Glances were exchanged
between Standish and the Sister, and then Kate was startled to
notice that there was someone else standing in the corridor there
with them.
  He had not, presumably, appeared there by magic. He had
merely stood still when the trolley moved on, and his height, or
rather his lack of it, was such that he had simply hitherto been
hidden behind it.
  Things had been much better when he had been hidden.
  There are some people you like immediately, some whom
you think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and
some that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp
stick. It was instantly apparent into which category, for Kate, the
person of Toe Rag fell. He grinned and stared at her, or rather,
appeared to stare at some invisible fly darting round her head.
  He ran up, and before she could prevent him, grabbed hold of
her right hand in his and shook it wildly up and down.
  "I, too, have the advantage of you, Miss Schechter," he said,
and gleefully skipped away up the corridor.

Chapter 12




The large, serious-looking grey van moved smoothly down the
driveway, emerged through the stone gates and dipped sedately
as it turned off the gravel and on to the asphalt of the public
road. The road was a windy country lane lined with the wintry
silhouettes of leafless oaks and dead elms. Grey clouds were
piled high as pillows in the sky. The van made its stately
progress away down the lane and soon was lost among its
further twists and turns.
  A few minutes later the yellow Citro�n made its less stately
appearance between the gates. It turned its splayed wheels up on
to the camber of the lane and set off at a slow but difficult rate in
the same direction.
  Kate was rattled.
  The last few minutes had been rather unpleasant. Standish
was clearly an oddly behaved man at the best of times, but after
their encounter with the patient named Odwin, he had turned
unequivocally hostile. It was the frightening hosulity of one who
was himself frightened - of what, Kate did not know.
  Who was she? he had demanded to know. How had she
wheedled a refenence out of Alan Franklin, a respected man in
the profession? What was she after? What - and this seemed to
be the big one - had she done to arouse the disapprobation of Mr
Odwin?
  She held the car grimly to the road as it negotiated the bends
with considerable difficulty and the straight sections with only
slightly less. The car had landed her in court on one occasion
when one of its front wheels had sailed off on a little expedition
of its own and nearly caused an accident. The police witness in
court had referred to her beloved Citro�n as "the alleged car"
and the name had subsequently stuck. She was particularly fond
of the alleged car for many reasons. If one of its doors, for
instance, fell off she could put it back on herself, which is more
than you could say for a BMW.
  She wondered if she looked as pale and wan as she felt, but
the rear-view mirror was rattling around under the seat so she
was spared the knowledge.
  Standish himself had become quite white and shaky at the
very idea of anybody crossing Mr Odwin and had dismissed out
of hand Kate's attempts to deny that she knew anything of him
at all. If that were the case, he had demanded of her, why then
had Mr Odwin made it perfectly clear that he knew her? Was
she accusing Mr Odwin of being a liar? If she was then she
should have a care for herself.
  Kate did not know. The encounter with Mr Odwin was
completely inexplicable to her. But she could not deny to herself
that the man packed some kind of punch. When he looked at you
you stayed looked at. But beneath the disturbing quality of his
steady gaze had lain some even more disturbing undercurrents.
They were more disturbing because they were undercurrents of
weakness and fear.
  And as for the other creature. . .
  Clearly he was the cause of the stories that had arisen recently
in the more extremely abhorrent sectors of the tabloid press
about there being "Something Nasty in the Woodshead". The
stories had, of course, been offensive and callously insensitive
and had largely been ignored by everybody in the country except
for those very few millions who were keen on offensive and
callously insensitive things.
  The stories had claimed that people in the nrea had been
"terrorised" by some repulsively deformed "goblin-like"
creature who regularly broke out of the Woodshead and
committed an impressively wide range of unspeakable acts.
  Like most people, Kate had assumed, insofar as she had
thought about it at all, that what had actually happened was that
some poor bewildered mental patient had wandered out of the
grounds and given a couple of passing old ladies a bit of a turn,
and that the slavering hacks of Wapping had done the rest. Now
she was a little more shaky and a little less sure.
  He - it - had known her name.
  What could she make of that?
  What she made of it was a wrong turning. In her
preoccupation she missed the turning that would take her on to
the main road back to London, and then had to work out what to
do about it. She could simply do a three-point turn and go back,
but it was a long time since she had last put the car into reverse
gear, and she was frankly a bit nervous about how it would take
to it.
  She tried taking the next two right turns to see if that would
set her straight, but she had no great hopes of this actually
working, and was right not to have. She drove on for two or
three miles, knowing that she was on the wrong rmad but at least,
judging from the position of the lighter grey smear in the grey
clouds, going in the right direction.
  After a while she settled down to this new route. A couple of
signposts she passed made it clear to her that she was merely
taking the B route back to London now, which she was perfectly
happy to do. If she had thought about it in advance, she would
probably have chosen to do so anyway in preference to the busy
trunk road.
  The trip had been a total failure, and she would have done far
better simply to have stayed soaking in the bath all afternoon.
The whole experience had been thoroughly disturbing, verging
on the frightening, and she had drawn a complete blank as far as
her actual objective was concemed. It was bad enough having an
objective that she could hardly bring herself to admit to, without
having it completely fall apart on her as well. A sense of stale
futility gradually closed in on her along with the general
greyness of the sky.
  She wondered if she was going very slightly mad. Her life
seemed to have drifted completely out of her control in the last
few days, and it was distressing to realise just how fragile her
grip was when it could so easily be shattered by a relatively
minor thunderbolt or meteorite or whatever it was.
  The word "thunderbolt" seemed to have arrived in the middle
of that thought without warning and she didn't know what to
make of it, so she just let it lie there at the bottom of her mind,
like the towel lying on her bathroom floor that she hadn't been
bothered to pick up.
  She longed for some sun to break through. The miles ground
along under her wheels, the clouds ground her down, and she
found herself increasingly thinking of penguins. At last she felt
she could stand it no more and decided that a few minutes' walk
was what she needed to shake her out of her mood.
  She stopped the car at the side of the road, and the elderly
Jaguar which had been following her for the last seventeen miles
ran straight into the back of her, which worked just as well.

Chapter 13





With a delicious shock of rage Kate leapt, invigorated, out of her
car and ran to harangue the driver of the other car who was, in
turn, leaping out of his in order to harangue her.
  "Why don't you look where you're going?" she yelled at him.
He was a rather overweight man who had been driving wearing
a long leather coat and a rather ugly red hat, despite the discom-
fort this obviously involved. Kate warmed to him for it.
  "Why don't I look where I'rn going?" he replied heatedly.
"Don't you look in your near-view mirror?"
  "No," said Kate, putting her fists on her hips.
  "Oh," said her adversary. "Why not?"
  "Because it's under the seat."
  "I see," he replied grimly. "Thank you for being so frank with
me. Do you have a lawyer?"
  "Yes I do, as a matter of fact," said Kate. She said it with vim
and hauteur.
  "Is he any good?" said the man in the hat. "I'm going to need
one. Mine's popped into prison for a while."
  "Well, you certainly can't have mine."
  "Why not?"
  "Don't be absurd. It would be a clear conflict of interest."
  Her adversary folded his arms and leant back against the bon-
net of his car. He took his time to survey the surroundings. The
lane was growing dim as the early winter evening began to settle
on the land. He then leant into his car to turn on his hazard
warning indicators. The rear amber lights winked prettily on the
scrubby grass of the roadside. The front lights were buried in the
rear of Kate's Citro�n and were in no fit state to wink.
  He resumed his leaning posture and looked Kate up and down
appraisingly.
  "You are a driver," he said, "and I use the word in the loosest
possible sense, i.e. meaning merely somebody who occupies the
driving seat of what I will for the moment call - but I use the
term strictly without prejudice - a car while it is proceeding
along the road, of stupendous, I would even say verging on the
superhuman, lack of skill. Do you catch my drift?"
  "No."
  "I mean you do not drive well. Do you know you've been all
over the road for the last seventeen miles?"
  "Seventeen miles!" exclaimed Kate. "Have you been follow-
ing me?"
  "Only up to a point," said Dirk. "I've tried to stay on this side
of the road."
  "I see. Well, thank you in turn for being so frank with me.
This, I need hardly tell you, is an outrage. You'd better get your-
self a damn good lawyer, because mine's going to stick red-hot
skewers in him."
  "Perhaps I should get myself a kebab instead."
  "You look as if you've had quite enough kebabs. May I ask
you why you were following me?"
  "You looked as if you knew where you were going. To begin
with at least. For the first hundred yards or so.".
  "What the hell's it got to do with you where I was going?"
  "Navigational technique of mine."
  Kate narrowed her eyes.
  She was about to demand a full and instant explanation of this
preposterous remark when a passing white Ford Sierra slowed
down beside them.
  The driver wound down the window and leant out. "Had a
crash then?" he shouted at them.
  "Yes."
  "Ha!" he said and drove on.
  A second or two later a Peugeot stopped by them.
  "Who was that just now?" the driver asked them, in reference
to the previous driver who had just stopped.
  "I don't know," said Dirk.
  "Oh," said the driver. "You look as if you've bad a crash of
some sort."
  "Yes," said Dirk.
  "Thought so," said the driver and drove on.
  "You don't get the same quality of passers-by these days, do
you?" said Dirk to Kate.
  "You get hit by some real dogs, too," said Kate. "I still want
to know why you were following me. You realise that it's hard
for me not to see you in the role of an extremely sinister sort of a
person."
  "That's easily explained," said Dirk. "Usually I am. On this
occasion, however, I simply got lost. I was forced to take
evasive action by a large grey oncoming van which took a pro-
prietorial view of the road. I only avoided it by nipping down a
side lane in which I was then unable to reverse. A few turnings
later nnd I was thoroughly lost. There is a school of thought
which says that you should consult a map on these occasions,
but to such people I merely say, `Ha! What if you have no map
to consult? What if you have a map but it's of the Dordogne?'
My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which
looks as if it knows where it's going and follow it. I rarely end
up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere
that I needed to be. So what do you say to that?"
  "Piffle."
  "A robust response. I salute you."
  "l was going to say that I do the same thing myself some-
times, but I've decided not to admit that yet."
  "Very wise," said Dirk. "You don't want to give away too
much at this point. Play it enigmatic is my advice."
  "I don't want your advice. Where were you trying to get
before suddenly deciding that driving seventeen miles in the
opposite direction would help you get there?"
  "A place called the Woodshead."
  "Ah, the mental hospital."
  "You know it?"
  "I've been driving away from it for the last seventeen miles
and I wish it was further. Which ward will you be in? I need to
know where to send the repair bill."
  "They don't have wards," said Dirk. "And I think they would
be distressed to hear you call it a mental hospital."
  "Anything that distresses 'em is fine by me."
  Dirk looked about him.
  "A fine evening," he said.
  "No it isn't."
  "I see," said Dirk. "You have, if I may say so, the air of one
to whom her day has not been a source of joy or spiritual enrich-
ment."
  "Too damn right, it hasn't," said Kate. "I've had the sort of
day that would make St Francis of Assisi kick babies.
Particularly if you include Tuesday in with today, which is the
last time I was actually conscious. And now look. My beautiful
car. The only thing I can say in favour of the whole shebang is
that at least I'm not in Oslo."
  "I can see how that might cheer you."
  "I didn't say it cheered me. It just about stops me killing my-
self. I might as well save myself the bother anyway, with people
like you so keen to do it for me."
  "You were my able assistant, Miss Schechter."
  "Stop doing that!"
  "Stop doing what?"
  "My name! Suddenly every stranger I meet knows my name.
Would you guys please just quit knowing my name for one
second? How can a girl be enigmatic under these conditions?
The only person I met who didn't seem to know my name was
the only one I actually introduced myself to. All right," she said,
pointing an accusing finger at Dirk, "you're not supernatural, so
just tell me how you knew my name. I'm not letting go of your
tie till you tell me."
  "You haven't got hold of - "
  "I have now, buster."
  "Unhand me!"
  "Why were you following me?" insisted Kate. "How do you
know my name?"
  "I was following you for exactly the reasons stated. As for
your name, my dear lady, you practically told me yourself."
  "I did not."
  "I assure you, you did."
  "I'm still holding your tie."
  "If you are meant to be in Oslo but have been unconscious
since Tuesday, then presumably you were at the incredible ex-
ploding check-in counter at Heathrow Terminal Two. It was
widely reported in the press. I expect you missed it through
being unconscious. I myself missed it through rampant apathy,
but the events of today have rather forced it on my attention."
  Kate grudgingly let go of his tie, but continued to eye him
with suspicion.
  "Oh yeah?" she said. "What events?"
  "Disturbing ones," said Dirk, brushing himself down. "Even
if what you had told me yourself had not been eoough to identify
you, then the fact of your having also been today to visit the
Woodshead clinched it for me. I gather from your mood of
belligerent despondency that the man you were seeking was not
thene."
  "What?"
  "Please, have it," said Dirk, rapidly pulling off his tie and
handing it to her. "By chance I ran into a nurse from your hospi-
tal earlier today. My first encounter with her was one which, for
various reasons, I was anxious to terminate abruptly. It was only
while I was standing on the pavement a minute or two later,
fending off the local wildlife, that one of the words I had heard
her say struck me, I may say, somewhat like a thunderbolt. The
idea was fantastically, wildly improbable. But like most fantas-
tically, wildly improbable ideas it was at least as worthy of
consideration as a more mundane one to which the facts had
been strenuously bent to fit.
  "I returned to question her further, and she confirmed that a
somewhat unusual patient had, in the early hours of the morning,
been transferred from the hospital, apparently to the Woodshead.
  "She also confided to me that another patient had been almost
indecently curious to find out what had become of him. That
patient was a Miss Kate Schechter, and I think you will agree,
Miss Schechter, that my methods of navigation have their ad-
vantages. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I
think I have ended up where I needed to be."

Chapter 14








After about half an hour a hefty man from the local garage
arrived with a pick-up truck, a tow-rope and a son. Having
looked at the situation he sent his son and the pick-up truck
away to deal with another job, attached the tow-rope to Kate's
now defunct car and pulled it away to the garage himself.
  Kate was a little quiet about this for a minute or two, and then
said, "He wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been an
American."
  He had recommended to them a small local pub where he
would come and look for them when he had made his diagnosis
on the Citro�n. Since Dirk's Jaguar had only lost its front right
indicator light, and Dirk insisted that he hardly ever turned right
anyway, they drove the short distance there. As Kate, with some
reluctance, climbed into Dirk's car she found the Howard Bell
book which Dirk had purloined from Sally Mills in the caf�, and
pounced on it. A few minutes later, walking into the pub, she
was still trying to work out if it was one she had nead or not.
  The pub combined all the traditional English quatities of
horse brasses, Formica and surliness. The sound of Michael
Jackson in the other bar mingled with the mournful
intermittence of the glass-cleaning machine in this one to create
an aural ambience which perfectly matched the elderly
paintwork in its dinginess.
  Dirk bought himself and Kate a drink each, and then joined
her at the small comer table she had found away from the fat, T-
shirted hostility of the bar.
  "I have read it," she announced, having thumbed her way by
now through most of Run Like the Devil. "At least, I started it
and read the first couple of chapters. A couple of months ago, in
fact. I don't know why I still read his books. It's pcrfectly clear
that his editor doesn't." She looked up at Dirk. "I wouldn't have
thought it was your sort of thing. From what little I know of
you."
  "It isn't," said Dirk. "I, er, picked it up by mistake."
  "'That's what everyone says," replied Kate. "He used to be
quite good," she added "if you liked that sort of thin. My
brother's in publishing in New York, and he says Howard Bell's
gone very strange nowadays. I get the feeling that they're all a
little afraid of him and he quite likes that. Certainly no one
seems to have the guts to tell him he should cut chapters ten to
twenty-seven inclusive. And all the stuff about the goat. The
theory is that the reason he sells so many millions of copies is
that nobody ever does read them. If everyone who bought them
actually read them they'd never bother to buy the next one and
his career would be over."
  She pushed it away from her.
  "Anyway," she said, "you've very cleverly told me why I
went to the Woodshead; you haven't told me why you were
going there yourself."
  Dirk shrugged. "To see what it was like," he said, non-
commitally.
  "Oh yes? Well, I'll save you the bother. The place is quite
horrible."
  "Describe it. In fact start with the airport."
  Kate took a hefty swig at her Bloody Mary and brooded
silently for a moment while the vodka marched around inside
her.
  "You want to hear about the airport as well?" she said at last.
  "Yes."
  Kate drained the rest of her drink.
  "I'll need another one, then," she said and pushed the empty
glass across at him.
  Dirk braved the bug-eyedness of the batman and returned a
minute or two later with a refill for Kate.
  "OK," said Kate. "I'll start with the cat."
  "What cat?"
  "The cat I needed to ask the next-door neighbour to look after
for me."
  "Which next-door neighbour?"
  "The one that died."
  "I see," said Dirk. "Tell you what, why don't I just shut up
and let you tell me?"
  "Yes," said Kate, "that would be good."
  Kate recounted the events of the last few days, or at least,
those she was conscious for, and then moved on to her
impressions of the Woodshead.
  Despite the distaste with which she described it, it sounded to
Dirt like exactly the sort of place he would love to retire to, if
possible tomorrow. It combined a dedication to the inexplicable,
which was his own persistent vice (he could only think of it as
such, and sometimes would rail against it with the fury of an
addict), with a pampered self-indulgence which was a vice to
which he would love to be able to aspire if he could ever but
afford it.
  At last Kate related her disturbing encounter with Mr Odwin
and his repellent minion, and it was as a result of this that Dirk
remained sunk in a frowning silence for a minute afterwards. A
large part of this minute was in fact taken up with an internal
struggle about whether or not he was going to cave in and have a
cigarette. He had recendy foresworn them and the struggle was a
regular one and he lost it regularly, often without noticing.
  He decided, with triumph, that he would not have one, and
then took one out anyway. Fishing out his lighter from the
capacious pocket of his coat involved first taking out the
envelope he had removed from Geoffrey Aristey's bathroom. He
put it on the table next to the book and lit his cigarette.
  "The check-in girl at the airport..." he said at last.
  "She drove me mad," said Kate, instantly. "She just went
through the motions of doing her job like some kind of blank
machine. Wouldn't listen, wouldn't think. I don't know where
they find people like that."
  "She used to be my secretary, in fact," said Dirk. "They don't
seem to know where to find her now, either."
  "Oh. I'm sorry," said Kate immediately, and then reflected
for a moment.
  "I expect you're going to say that she wasn't like that really "
she continued. "Well, that's possible. I expect she was just
shielding herself from the frustrations of her job. It must drive
you insensible working at an airport. I think I would have
sympathised if I hadn't been so goddamn frustated myself. I'm
sorry, I didn't know. So that's what you're trying to find out
about."
  Dirk gave a non-committal type of nod. "Amongst other
things," he said. Then he added, "I'm a private detective."
  "Oh?" said Kate in surprise, and then looked puzzled.
  "Does that bother you?"
  "It's just that I have a friend who plays the double bass."
  "I see," said Dirk.
  "Whenever people meet him and he's struggling arnund with
it, they all say the same thing, and it drives him crazy. They all
say, `I bet you wished you played the piccolo.' Nobody ever
works out that that's what everybody else says. I was just trying
to work out if there was something that everybody would always
say to a private detective, so that I could avoid saying it."
  "No. What happens is that everybody looks very shifty for a
moment, and you got that very well."
  "I see." Kate looked disappointed. "Well, do you have any
clues - that is to say, any idea about what's happened to your
secretary?"
  "No," said Dirk, "no idea. Just a vague image that I don't
know what to make of." He toyed thoughtfully with his
cigarette, and then let his gaze wander over the table again and
on to the book.
  He picked it up and looked it over, wondering what impulse
had made him pick it up in the first place.
  "I don't really know anything about Howard Bell," he said.
  Kate was surprised at the way he suddenly changed the
subject, but also a little relieved.
  "I only know," said Dirk, "that he sells a lot of books and that
they all look pretty much like this. What should I know?"
  "Well, there are some very strange stories about him."
  "Like what?"
  "Like what he gets up to in hotel suites all across America.
No one knows the details, of course, they just get the bills and
pay them because they don't like to ask. They feel they're on
safer ground if they don't know. Particularly about the
chickens."
  "Chickens?" said Dirk. "What chickens?"
  "Well apparently," said Kate, lowering her voice and leaning
forward a little, "he's always having live chickens delivered to
his hotel room."
  Dirk frowned.
  "What on earth for?" he said.
  "Nobody knows. Nobody ever knows what happens to them.
Nobody ever sees them again. Not," she said, leaning even
further forward, and dropping her voice still further, "a single
feather."
  Dirk wondered if he was being hopelessly innocent and na�ve.
  "So what do people think he's doing with them?" he asked.
  "Nobody," Kate said, "has the faintest idea. They don't even
want to have the faintest idea. They just don't know."
  She shrugged and picked the book up again herself.
  "The other thing David - that's my brother - says about him
is that he has the absolute perfect bestseller's name."
  "Really?" said Dirk. "In what way?"
  "David says it's the first thing any publisher looks for in a
new author. Not, `Is his stuff any good?' or, `Is his stuff any
good once you get rid of all the adjectives?' but, `Is his last
name nice and short and his first name just a bit longer?' You
see? The `Bell' is done in huge silver letters, and the `Howard'
fits neatly across the top in slightly narrower ones. Instant trade
mark. It's publishing magic. Once you've got a name like that
then whether you can actually write or not is a minor matter.
Which in Howard Bell's case is now a significant bonus. But it's
a very ordinary name if you write it down in the normal way,
like it is here you see."
  "What?" said Dirk.
  "Here on this envelope of yours."
  "Where? Let me see."
  "That's his name there, isn't it? Crossed out."
  "Good heavens, you're right," said Dirk, peering at the
envelope. "I suppose I didn't recognise it without its trade mark
shape."
  "Is this something to do with him, then?" asked Kate, picking
it up and looking it over.
  "I don't know what it is, exactly," said Dirk. "It's something
to do with a contract, and it may be something to do with a
record."
  "I can see it might be to do with a record."
  "How can you see that?" asked Dirk, sharply.
  "Well, this name here is Dennis Hutch, isn't it? See?"
  "Oh yes. Yes, I do," said Dirk, examining it for himself. "Er,
should I know that name?"
  "Well," said Kate slowly, "it depends if you're alive or not, I
suppose. He's the head of the Aries Rising Record Group. Less
famous than the Pope, I grant you, but - you know of the Pope I
take it?"
  "Yes, yes," said Dirk impatiently, "white-haired chap."
  "That's him. He seems to be about the only person of note
this envelope hasn't been addressed to at some time. Here's Stan
Dubcek, the head of Dubcek, Danton, Heidegger, Draycott. I
know they handle the ARRGH! account."
  "The...?"
  "ARRGH! Aries Rising Record Group Holdings. Getting that
account made the agency's fortunes."
  She looked at Dirk.
  "You have the air," she stated, "of one who knows little of
the record business or the advertising business."
  "I have that honour," said Dirk, graciously inclining his head.
  "So what are you doing with this?"
  "When I manage to get it open, I'll know," said Dirk. "Do
you have a knife on you?"
  Kate shook her head.
  "Who's Geoffrey Anstey, then?" she asked. "He's the only
name not crossed out. Friend of yours?"
  Dirk paled a little and didn't immediately answer. Then he
said, "This strange person you mentioned, this `Something
Nasty in the Woodshead' creature. Tell me again what he said to
you."
  "He said, `I, too, have the advantage of you, Miss
Schechter.'" Kate tried to shrug.
  Dirk weighed his thoughts uncertainly for a moment.
  "I think it is just possible," he said at last, "that you may be in
some kind of danger."
  "You mean it's possible that passing lunatics may crash into
me in the road? That kind of danger?"
  "Maybe even worse."
  "Oh yeah?"
  "Yes."
  "And what makes you think that?"
  "It's not entirely clear to me yet," replied Dirk with a frown.
"Most of the ideas I have at the moment have to do with things
that are completely impossible, so I am wary about sharing
them. They are, however, the only thoughts I have."
  "I'd get some different ones, then," said Kate. "What was the
Sherlock Holmes principle? `Once you have discounted the
impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must
be the truth."'
  "I reject that entirely," said Dirk, sharply. "The impossible
often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable
lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently
rational explanation of something which works in all respects
other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable?
Your instinct is to say, `Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do
that.'"
  "Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
  "Ah yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the
glasses jump, "your girl in the wheelchair - a perfect example.
The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market
prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and
therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is
maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no
benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely
supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God
knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs
contrary to something fundamental and human which we do
know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all
its specious rationality."
  "But you won't tell me what you think."
  "No."
  "Why not?"
  "Because it sounds ridiculous. But I think you are in danger. I
think you might be in horrible danger."
  "Great. So what do you suggest I do about it?" said Kate
taking a sip of her second drink, which otherwise had stayed
almost untouched.
  "I suggest," said Dirk seriously, "that you come back to
London and spend the night in my house."
  Kate hooted with laughter and then had to fish out a Kleenex
to wipe tomato juice off herself.
  "I'm sorry, what is so extraordinary about that?" demanded
Dirk, rather taken aback.
  "It's just the most wonderfully perfunctory pick-up line I've
ever heard." She smiled at him. "I'm afraid the answer is a
resounding `no'."
  He was, she thought, interesting, entertaining in an eccentric
kind of way, but also hideously unattractive to her.
  Dirk felt very awkward. "I think there has been some
appalling misunderstanding," he said. "Allow me to explain
that - "
  He was interrupted by the sudden arrival in their midst of the
mechanic from the garage with news of Kate's car.
  "Fixed it," he said. "In fact there were nothing to fix other
than the bumper. Nothing new that is. The funny noise you
mentioned were just the engine. But it'll go all right. You just
have to rev her up, let in the ctutch, and then wait for a little bit
longer than you might normally expect."
  Kate thanked him a little stiffly for this advice and then
insisted on atlowing Dirk to pay the �25 he was charging for it.
  Outside, in the car park, Dirk repeated his urgent request that
Kate should go with him, but she was adamant that all she
needed was a good night's sleep and that everything would look
bright and clear and easily capable of being coped with in the
morning.
  Dirk insisted that they should at least exchange phone
numbers. Kate agreed to this on condition that Dirk found
another route back to London and didn't sit on her tail.
  "Be very careful," Dirk called to her as her car grumbled out
on to the road.
  "I will," shouted Kate, "and if anything impossible happens, I
promise you'll be the first to know."
  For a brief moment, the yellow undulations of the car
gleamed dully in the light leaking from the pub windows and
stood out against the heavily hunched greyness of the night sky
which soon swallowed it up.
  Dirk tried to follow her, but his car wouldn't start.

Chapter 15




The clouds sank more heavily over the land, clenching into huge
sullen towers, as Dirk, in a sudden excess of alarm, had to call
out the man from the garage once again. He was slower to arrive
with his truck this time and bad-tempered with drink when at
last he did.
  He emitted a few intemperate barks of laughter at Dirk's
predicament, then fumbled the bonnet of his car open and
subjected him to all kinds of muttered talk about manifolds,
pumps, alternators and starlings and resolutely would not be
drawn on whether or not he was going to be able to get the thing
to go again that night.
  Dirk was unable to get a meaningful answer, or at least an
answer that meant anything to him, as to what was causing the
rumpus in the alternator, what ailed the fuel pump, in what way
the operation of the starter motor was being disrupted and why
the timing was off.
  He did at last understand that the mechanic was also claiming
that a family of starlings had at some time in the past made their
nest in a sensitive part of the engine's workings and had
subsequently perished horribly, taking sensitive parts of the
engine with them, and at this point Dirk began to cast about
himself desperatety for what to do.
  He noticed that the mechanic's pick-up truck was standing
nearby with its engine still running, and elected to make off with
this instead. Being a slightly less slow and cumbersome runner
than the mechanic he was able to put this plan into operation
with a minimum of difficulty.
  He swung out into the lane, drove off into the night and
parked three miles down the road. He left the van's lights on, let
down its tyres and hid himself behind a tree. After about ten
minutes his Jaguar came hurtling round the corner, passed the
van, hauled itself to an abrupt halt and reversed wildly back
towards it. The mechanic threw open the door, leapt out and
hurried over to reclaim his property, leaving Dirk with the
opportunity he needed to leap from behind the tree and reclaim
his own.
  He spun his wheels pointedly and drove off in a kind of grim
triumph, still haunted, nevertheless, by anxieties to which he
was unable:to give a name or shape.
  Kate, in the meantime, had joined the dimly glowing yellow
stream that led on eventually through the westem suburbs of
Acton and Ealing and into the heart of London. She crawled up
over the Westway flyover and soon afterwards turned north up
towards Primrose Hill and home.
  She always enjoyed driving up alongside the park, and the
dark night shapes of the trees soothed her and made her long for
the quietness of her bed.
  She found the nearest parking space she could to her front
door, which was about thirty yards distant. She climbed out of
the car and carefully omitted to lock it. She never left anything
of value in it, and she found that it was to her advantage if
people didn't have to break anything in order to find that out.
The car had been stolen twice, but on each occasion it had been
found abandoned twenty yards away.
  She didn't go straight home but set off instead in the opposite
direction to get some milk and bin liners frmm the small corner
shop in the next street. She agreed with the gentle-faced
Pakistani who ran it that she did indeed look tired, and should
have an early night, but on the way back she made another small
diversion to go and lean against the railings of the park, gaze
into its darkness for a few minutes, and breathe in some of its
cold, heavy night air. At last she started to head back towards
her flat. She turned into her own road and as she passed the first
street lamp it flickered and went out, leaving her in a small pool
of darkness.
  That sort of thing always gives one a nasty turn.
  It is said that there is nothing surprising about the notion of,
for instance, a person suddenly thinking about someone they
haven't thought about for years, and then discovering the next
day that the person has in fact just died. There are always lots of
people suddenly remembering people they haven't thought
about for ages, and always lots of people dying. In a population
the size of, say, America the law of averages means that this
particular coincidence must happen at least ten times a day, but
it is none the less spooky to anyone who experiences it.
  By the same token, there are light bulbs burning out in street
lamps all the time, and a fair few of them must go pop just as
someone is passing beneath them. Even so, it still gives the
person concerned a nasty tum, especially when the very next
street lamp they pass under does exactly the same thing.
  Kate stood rooted to the spot.
  If one coincidence can occur, she told herself, then another
coincidence can occur. And if one coincidence happens to occur
just after another coincidence, then that is just a coincidence.
There was absolutely nothing to feel alarmed about in having a
couple of street lamps go pop. She was in a perfectly normal
friendly street with houses all around her with their lights on.
She looked up at the house next to her, unfortunately just as the
lights in its front window chanced to go out. This was
presumably because the occupants happened to choose that
moment to leave the room, but though it just went to show what
a truly extraordinary thing coincidence can be it did tittle to
improve her state of mind.
  The rest of the street was still bathed in a dim yellow glow. It
was only the few feet immediatety around her that were
suddenly dark. The next pool of light was just a few footsteps
away in front of her. She took a deep breath, pulled herself
together, and walked towards it, reaching its very centre at the
exact instant that it, too, extinguished itself.
  The occupants of the two houses she had passed on the way
also happened to choose that moment to leave their front rooms,
as did their neighbours on the opposite side of the street.
  Perhaps a poputar television show had just finished. That's
what it was. Evervone was getting up and turning off their TV
sets and lights simultaneously, and the resulting power surge
was blowing some of the street lamps. Something like that. The
resulting power surge was also making her blood pound a little.
She moved on, trying to be calm. As soon as she got home she'd
have a look in the paper to see what the programme had been
that had caused three street lamps to blow.
  Four.
  She stopped and stood absolutely stitl under the dark lamp.
More houses were darkening. What she found particularty
alarming was that they darkened at the very moment that she
looked at them.
  Glance - pop.
  She tried it again.
  Glance - pop.
  Each one she looked at darkened instantly.
  Glance - pop.
  She realised with a sudden start of fear that she must stop
herself looking at the ones that were still lit. The rationalisations
she had been trying to construct were now running around inside
her head screaming to be let out and she let them go. She tried to
lock her eyes to the ground for fear of extinguishing the whole
street, but couldn't help tiny glances to see if it was working.
  Glance - pop.
  She froze her gaze, down on to the narrow path forward. Most
of the road was dark now.
  There were three remaining street lamps between her and the
front door which led to her own flat. Though she kept her eyes
averted, she thought she could detect on the periphery of her
vision that the lights of the flat downstairs from hers were lit.
  Neil lived there. She couldn't remember his last name, but he
was a part-time bass-player and antiques dealer who used to give
her decorating advice she didn't want and also stole her milk -
so her relationship with him had always remained at a slightly
frosty level. Just at the moment, though, she was praying that he
was there to tell her what was wrong with her sofa, and that his
light would not go out as her eyes wavered from the pavement in
front of her, with its three remaining pools of light spaced
evenly along the way she had to tread.
  For a moment she tried turning, and looked back the way she
had come. All was darkness, shading off into the blackness of
the park which no longer calmed but menaced her, with
hideously imagined thick, knotted roots and treacherous, dark,
rotting litter.
  Again she turned, sweeping her eyes low.
  Three pools of light.
  The street lights did not extinguish as she looked at them,
only as she passed.
  She squeezed her eyes closed and visualised exactly where
the lamp of the next street light was, above and in front of her.
She raised her head, and carefully opened her eyes again, staring
directly into the orange glow radiating through the thick glass.
  It shone steadily.
  With her eyes locked fast on it so that it burnt squiggles on
her retina, she moved cautiously forward, step by step, exerting
her will on it to stay burning as she approached. It continued to
glow.
  She stepped forward again. It continued to glow. Again she
stepped, still it glowed. Now she was almost beneath it, craning
her neck to keep it in focus.
  She moved forward once more, and saw the filament within
the glass flicker and quickly die away, leaving an after-image
prancing madly in her eyes.
  She dropped her eyes now and tried looking steadily forward,
but wild shapes were leaping everywhere and she felt she was
losing control. The next lamp she took a lunging run towards,
and again, sudden darkness enveloped her arrival. She stopped
there panting, and blinking, trying to calm herself again and get
her vision sorted out. Looking towards the last street lamp, she
thought she saw a figure standing beneath it. It was a large form,
silhouetted with jumping orange shadows. Huge horns stood
upon the figure's head.
  She stated with mad intensity into the billowing darkness,
and suddenly screamed at it, "Who are you?"
  There was a pause, and then a deep answering voice said,
"Do you have anything that can get these bits of floorboard off
my back?"

Chapter 16





There was another pause, of a different and slightly disordered
quality.
  It was a long one. lt hung there nervously, wondering which
direction it was going to get broken from. The darkened street
took on a withdrawn, defensive aspect.
  "What?" Kate screamed back at the figure, at last. "I said...
what?"
  The great figure stirred. Kate still could not see him properly
because her eyes were still dancing with blue shadows, seared
there by the orange light.
  "1 was," said the figure, "glued to the floor. My father - "
  "Did you...are you..." Kate quivered with incoherent rage
"are you responsible. . .for all this?" She turned and swept an
angry hand around the street to indicate the nightmare she had
just traversed.
  "It is important that you know who I am."
  "Oh yeah?" said Kate. "Well let's get the name down right
now so I can take it straight to the police and get you done for
breach of something wilful or other. Intimidation. Interfering
with - "
  "I am Thor. I am the God of Thunder. The God of Rain. The
God of the High Towering Clouds. The God of Lightning. The
God of the Flowing Currents. The God of the Particles. The God
of the Shaping and the Binding Forces. The God of the Wind.
The God of the Growing Crops. The God of the Hammer
Mjollnir."
  "Are you?" simmered Kate. "Well, I've no doubt that if
you'd picked a slack moment to mention all that, I might have
taken an interest, but right now it just makes me very angry.
Turn the damn lights on!"
  "I am - "
  "I said turn the lights on!"
  With something of a sheepish glow, the streetlights all came
back on, and the windows of the houses all quietly illuminated
themselves once more. The lamp above Kate popped again
almost immediately. She shot him a warning look.
  "It was an old light, and infirm," he said.
  She simply continued to glare at him.
  "See," he said, "I have your address." He held out the piece
of paper she had given him at the airport, as if that somehow
explained everything and put the world to rights.
  "I - "
  "Back!" he shouted, throwing up his arms in front of his face.
  "What?"
  With a huge rush of wind a swooping eagle dropped from out
of the night sky, with its talons outspread to catch at him. Thor
beat and thrashed at it until the great bird flailed backwards,
turned, nearly crashed to the ground, recovered itself, and with
great slow beats of its wings, heaved itself back up through the
air and perched on top of the street lamp. It grasped the lamp
hard with its talons and steadied itself, making the whole
lamppost quiver very slightly in its grip.
  "Go!" shouted Thor at it.
  The eagle sat there and peered down at him. A monstrous
creature made more monstrous by the effect of the orange light
on which it perched, casting huge, flapping shadows on the
nearby houses, it had strange circular markings on its wings.
These were markings that Kate wondered if she had seen before,
only in a nightmare, but then again, she was by no means certain
that she was not in a nightmare now.
  There was no doubt that she had found the man she was
looking for. The same huge form, the same glacial eyes, the
same look of arrogant exasperation and slight muddle, only this
time his feet were plunged into huge hide boots, great furs,
straps and thongs hung from his shoulders, a huge steel horned
helmet stood on his head, and his exasperation was directed this
time not at an airline check-in girl but at a huge eagle perched
on a lamppost in the middle of Primrose Hill.
  "Go," he shouted at it again. "The matter is beyond my
power! All that I can do I have done! Your family is provided
for. You I can do nothing more for! I myself am powerless and
sick."
  Kate was suddenly shocked to see that there were great
gouges on the big man's left forearm where the eagle had got its
talons into him and ripped them through his skin. Blood was
welling up out of them like bread out of a baking tin.
  "Go!" he shouted again. With the edge of one hand he
scraped the blood off his other arm and flung the heavy drops at
the eagle, which reared back, flapping, but retained its hold.
Suddenly the man leapt high into the air and grappled himself to
the top of the lamppost, which now began to shake dangerously
under their combined weight. With loud cries the eagle pecked
viciously at him while he tried with great swings of his free arm
to sweep it from its perch.
  A door opened. It was the front door of Kate's house and a
man with grey-rimmed spectacles and a neat moustache looked
out. It was Neil, Kate's downstairs neighbour, in a mood.
  "Look, I really think - " he started. However, it quickly
became clear that he simply didn't know what to think and
retreated back indoors, taking his mood, unsatisfied, with him.
  The big man braced himself, and with a huge leap hurled
himself through the air and landed with a slight, controlled
wobble on top of the next lamppost, which bent slightly under
his weight. He crouched, glaring at the eagle, which glared back.
  "Go!" he shouted again, brandishing his arm at it.
  "Gaarh!" it screeched back at him.
  With another swing of his arm he pulled from under his furs a
great short-handled sledge-hammer and hefted its great weight
meaningfully from one hand to another. The head of the hammer
was a roughly cast piece of iron about the size and shape of a
pint of beer in a big glass mug, and its shaft was a stocky, wrist-
thick piece of ancient oak with leather strapping bound about its
handle.
  "Gaaaarrrh!" screeched the eagle again, but regarded the
sledgehammer with keen-eyed suspicion. As Thor began slowly
to swing the hammer, the eagle shifted its weight tensely from
one leg to the other, in time to the rhythm of the swings.
  "Go!" said Thor again, more, quietly, but with greater
menace. He rose to his full height on top of the lamppost, and
swung the hammer faster and faster in a great circle. Suddenly
he hurled it directly towards the eagle. In the same instant a bolt
of high voltage electricity erupted from the lamp on which the
eagle was sitting, causing it to leap with loud cries wildly into
the air. The hammer sailed harmlessly under the lamp, swung up
into the air and out over the darkness of the park, while Thor,
released of its weight, wobbled and tottered on top of his
lamppost, spun round and regained his balance. Flailing madly
at the air with its huge wings, the eagle, too, regained control of
itself, flew upwards, made one last diving attack on Thor, which
the god leapt backwards off the lamppost to avoid, and then
climbed up and away into the night sky in which it quickly
became a small, dark speck, and then at last was gone.
  The hammer came bounding back from out of the sky,
scraped flying sparks from the paving-stones with its head,
turned over twice in the air and then dropped its head back to the
ground next to Kate and nested its shaft gently against her leg.
  An elderly lady who had been waiting patiently with her dog
in the shadows beneath the street lamp, which was now defunct,
sensed, correctly, that all of the excitement was now over and
proceeded quietly past them. Thor waited politely till they had
passed and then approached Kate, who stood with her arms
folded watching him. After all the business of the last two or
three minutes he seemed suddenly not to have the faintest idea
what to say and for the moment merely gazed thoughtfully into
the middle distance.
  Kate formed the distinct impression that thinking was, for
him, a separate activity from everything else, a task that needed
its own space. It could not easily be combined with other
activities such as walking or talking or buying airline tickets.
  "We'd better take a look at your arm," she said, and led the
way up the steps to her house. He followed, docile.
  As she opened the front door she found Neil in the hall
leaning his back against the wall and looking with grim
pointedness at a Coca-Cola vending machine standing against
the opposite wall and taking up an inordinate amount of space in
the hallway.
  "I don't know what we're going to do about this, I really
don't," he said.
  "What's it doing there?" asked Kate.
  "Well, that's what I'm asking you, I'm afraid," said Neil. "I
don't know how you're going to get it up the stairs. Don't see
how it can be done to be perfectly frank with you. And let's face
it, I don't think you're going to like it once you've got it up
there. I know it's very modern and American, but think about it,
you've got that nice French cherrywood table, that sofa which
will be very nice once you've taken off that dreadful Collier
Campbell covering like I keep on saying you should, only you
won't listen, and I just don't see that it's going to fit in, not in
either sense. And I'm not even sure that I should allow it, I mean
it's a very heavy object and you know what I've said to you
about the floors in this house. I'd think again, I really would,
you know."
  "Yes, Neil, how did it get here?"
  "Well, your friend here delivered it just an hour or so ago. I
don't know where he's been working out, but I must say I
wouldn't mind paying his gym a visit. I said I thought the whole
thing was very doubtful but he would insist and in the end I even
had to give him a hand. But I must say that I think we need to
have a very serious think about the whole topic. I asked your
friend if he liked Wagner but he didn't respond very well. So, I
don't know, what do you want to do about it?"
  Kate took a deep breath. She suggested to her huge guest that
he carry on upstairs and she would see him in just a moment.
Thor lumbered past, and was an absurd figure mounting the
stairs.
  Neil watched Kate's eyes very closely for a clue as to what,
exactly, was going on, but Kate was as blank as she knew how.
  "I'm sorry, Neil," she said, matter-of-factly. "The Coke
machine will go. It's all a misunderstanding. I'll get this sorted
out by tomorrow."
  "Yes, that's all very well," said Neil, "but where does all this
leave me? I mean, you see my problem."
  "No, Neil, I don't."
  "Well, I've got this...thing out here, you've got that...person
upstairs, and the whole thing is just a total disruption."
  "Is there anything I can do to make anything any better?"
  "Well it's not as easy as that, is it? I mean, I think you should
just think about it a bit, that's all. I mean, all this. You told me
you were going away. I heard the bath running this afternoon.
What was I to think? And after you had gone on about the cat,
and you know I won't work with cats."
  "I know; Neil. That's why I asked Mrs Grey next door to look
after her."
  "Yes, and look what happened to her. Died of a heart attack.
Mr Grey's very upset, you know."
  "I don't think it had anything to do with me asking her if she
would look after my cat."
  "Well, all I can say is that he's very upset."
  "Yes, Neil. His wife's died."
  "Well, I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying I think you
should think about it. And what on earth are we going to do
about all this?" he added, re-addressing his attention to the
Coca-Cola machine.
  "I've said that I will make sure it's gone in the morning
Neil," said Kate. "I'm quite happy to stand here and scream very
loudly if you think it will help in any way, but - "
  "Listen, love, I'm only making the point. And I hope you're
not going to be making a lot of noise up there because I've got
to practise my music tonight, and you know that I need quiet to
concentrate." He gave Kate a meaningful look over the top of
his glasses and disappeared into his flat.
  Kate stood and silently counted as much of one to ten as she
could currently remember and then headed staunchly up the
stairs in the wake of the God of Thunder, feeling that she was
not in a mood for either weather or theology. The house began
to throb and shake to the sound of the main theme of The Ride of
the Valkyries being played on a Fender Precision bass.

Chapter 17




As Dirk edged his way along the Euston Road, caught in the
middle of a rush hour traffic jam that had started in the late
nineteen seventies and which, at a quarter to ten on this
Thursday evening, still showed no signs of abating, he thought
he caught sight of something he recognised.
  It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating
part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation
merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming
quietly to itself, saying nothing.
  "Well of course I've just seen something I recognise," Dirk
muttered mentally to his subconscious. "I drive along this
benighted thoroughfare twenty times a month. I expect I
recognise every single matchstick lying in the gutter. Can't you
be a little more specific?" His subconscious would not be
hectored though, and was dumb. It had nothing further to add.
The city was probably full of grey vans anyway. Very
unremarkable.
  "Where?" muttered Dirk to himself fiercely, twisting round in
his seat this way and that. "Where did I see a grey van?"
  Nothing.
  He was thoroughly hemmed in by the traffic and could not
manoeuvre in any direction, least of all forward. He erupted
from his car and started to jostle his way back through the
jammed cars bobbing up and down to try and see where, if
anywhere, he might have caught a glimpse of a grey van. If he
had seen one, it eluded him now. His subconscious sat and said
nothing.
  The traffic was still not moving, so he tried to thread his way
further back, but was obstructed by a large motorcycle courier
edging his way forward on a huge grimy Kawasaki. Dirk
engaged in a brief altercation with the courier, but lost it because
the courier was unable to hear Dirk's side of the altercation;
eventually Dirk retreated through the tide of traffic which now
was beginning slowly to move in all lanes other than the one in
which his car sat, driverless, immobile and hooted at.
  He felt suddenly elated by the braying of the motor horns,
and as he swayed and bobbed his way back through the snarled
up columns of cars, he suddenly found that he reminded himself
of the crazies he had seen on the streets of New York, who
would career out into the road to explain to the oncoming traffic
about the Day of Judgement, imminent alien invasions and in-
competence and corruption in the Pentagon. He put his hands
above his head and started to shout out, "The Gods are walking
the Earth! The Gods are walking the Earth!"
  This further inflamed the feelings of those who were beeping
their horns at his stationary car, and quickly the whole rose
through a crescendo of majestic cacophony, with Dirk's voice
ringing out above it.
  "'The Gods are walking the Earth! The Gods are walking the
Earth!" he hollered. "The Gods are walking the Earth ! Thank
you!" he added, and ducked down into his car, put it into Drive
and pulled away, allowing the whole jammed mass at last to
seethe easily forward.
  He wondered why he was so sure. An "Act of God". Merety a
chance, careless phrase by which people were able to dispose
conveniently of awkward phenomena that would admit of no
more rational explanation. But it was the chance carelessness of
it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used care-
lessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed
otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
  Ao inexplicable disappearance. Oslo and a hammer: a tiny,
tiny coincidence which struck a tiny, tiny note. However, it was
a note which sang in the midst of the daily hubbub of white
noise, and other tiny notes were singing at the same pitch. An
Act of God, Oslo, and a hammer. A man with a hammer, trying
to go to Norway, is prevented, loses his temper, and as a result
there is an "Act of God".
  If, thought Dirk, if a being were immortal he would still be
alive today. That, quite simply, was what "immortal" meant.
  How would an immortal being have a passport?
  Quite simpty, how? Dirk tried to imagine what might happen
if - to pick a name quite at random - the God Thor, he of the
Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at the
passport office and try to explain who he was and how come he
had no birth certificate. There would be no shock, no horror, no
loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic
impossibility. It wouldn't be a matter of whether anybody
believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing
a valid birth certificate. He coutd stand there wreaking miracles
all day if he liked but at close of business, if he didn't have a
valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked to leave.
  And credit cards.
  If, to sustain for a moment the same arbitrary hypothesis, the
God Thor were alive and for some reason at large in England,
then he would probably be the only person in the country who
did not receive the constant barrage of invitations to apply for an
American Express card, crude threats by the same post to take
their American Express cards away, and gift catalogues full of
sumptuously unpleasant things, lavishly tooled in naff brown
plastic.
  Dirk found the idea quite breathtaking.
  That is, if he were the only god at large - which, once you
were to accept the first extravagant hypothesis, was hardly likely
to be the case.
  But imagine for a moment such a person attempting to leave
the country, armed with no passport, no credit cards, merely the
power to throw thunderbolts and who knew what else. You
would probably have to imagine a scene very similar to the one
that did in fact occur at Terminal Two, Heathrow.
  But why, if you were a Norse god, would you be needing to
leave the country by means of a scheduled airline? Surely there
were other means? Dirk rather thought that one of the perks of
being an immortal divine might be the ability to fly under your
own power. From what he remembered of his reading of the
Norse legends many years ago, the gods were continually flying
all over the place and there was never any mention of them
hanging around in departure lounges eating crummy buns.
Admittedly, the world was not, in those days, bristling with air-
traffic controllers, radar, missile warning systems and such like.
Still, a quick hop across the North Sea shouldn't be that much of
a problem for a god, particularly if the weather was in your
favour, which, if you were the God of Thunder, you would
pretty much expect it to be, or want to know the reason why.
Should it?
  Another tiny note sang in the back of Dirk's mind and then
was lost in the hubbub.
  He wondered for a moment what it was like to be a whale.
Physically, he thought, he was probably well placed to get some
good insights, though whales were better adapted for their lives
of gliding about in the vast pelagic blueness than he was for his
of struggling up through the Pentonville Road traffic in a weary
old Jaguar - but what he was thinking of, in fact, was the
whales' songs. In the past the whales had been able to sing to
each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another
because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now,
again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part
of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of
ships' motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for
the whales to hear each other's songs or messages.
  So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to
view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After
all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals,
burping at each other?
  But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and
sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise
that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have
heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
  As he turned north into Islington and began the long haul up
past the pizza restaurants and estate agents, he felt almost frantic
at the idea of what their lives must now be like.

Chapter 18






Thin fingers of lightning spread out across the heavy underside
of the great clouds which hung from the sky like a sagging
stomach. A small crack of fretful thunder nagged at it and
dragged from it a few mean drops of greasy drizzle.
  Beneath the sky ranged a vast assortment of wild turrets,
gnarled spires and pinnacles which prodded at it, goaded and
inflamed it till it seemed it would burst and drown them in a
flood of festering horrors.
  High in the flickering darkness, silent figures stood guard
behind long shields, dragons crouched gaping at the foul sky as
Odin, father of the Gods of Asgard, approached the great iron
portals through which led to his domain and on into the vaulted
halls of Valhalla: The air was full of the noiseless howls of great
winged dogs, welcoming their master to the seat of his rule.
Lightning searched among the towers and turrets.
  The great, ancient and immortal God of Asgard was returning
to the current site of his domain in a manner that would have
surprised even him centuries ago in the years of the prime of his
life - for even the immortal gods have their primes, when their
powers are rampant and they both nourish and hold sway over
the world of men, the world whose needs give them birth - he
was returning in a large, unmarked grey Mercedes van.
  The van drew to a halt in a secluded area.
  The cab door opened and there climbed down from it a dull,
slow-faced man in an unmarked grey uniform. He was a man
who was charged with the work he did in life because he was
not one to ask questions - not so much on account of any natural
quality of discretion as because he simply could never think of
any questions to ask. Moving with a slow, rolling gait, like a
paddle being pulled through porridge, he made his way to the
rear of the van and opened the rear doors - an elaborate
procedune involving the co-ordinated manipulation of many
sliders and levers.
  At length the doors swung open, and if Kate had been present
she might for a moment have been jolted by the thought that
perhaps the van was carrying Albanian electricity after all. A
haze of light greeted Hillow - the man's. name was Hillow - but
nothing about this struck him as odd. A haze of light was simply
what he expected to see whenever he opened this door. The first
time ever he had opened it he had simply thought to himself,
"Oh. A haze of light. Oh well," and more or less Ieft it at that, on
the strength of which he had guaranteed himself regular
employment for as long as he cared to live.
  The haze of light subsided and coalesced into the shape of an
old, old man in a trolley bed attended by a short little figure
whom HiIlow would probably have thought was the most evil-
looking person he had ever seen if he had had a mind to recall
the other people he had seen in his life and run through them all
one by one, making the comparison. That, however, was harder
than Hillow wished to work. His only concern at present was to
assist the small figure with the decanting of the old man's bed on
to ground leveI.
  This was fluently achieved. The legs and wheels of the bed
were a miracle of smoothly operating stainless steel technology.
They unlocked, rolled, swivelled, in elaborately interlocked
movements which made the negotiating of steps or bumps all
part of the same fluid, gliding motion.
  To the right of this area lay a large ante-chamber panelled in
finely carved wood with great marble torch holders standing
proudly from the walls. This in turn led into the great vaulted
hall itself. To the left, however, lay the entrance to the majestic
inner chambers where Odin would go to prepare himself for the
encounters of the night.
  He hated all this. Hounded from his bed, he muttered to
himself, though in truth he was bringing his bed with him. Made
to listen once again to all kinds of self indulgent clap-trap from
his bone-headed thunderous son who would not accept, could
not accept, simply did not have the intelligence to accept the
new realities of life. If he would not accept them then he must be
extinguished, and tonight Asgard would see the extinction of an
immortal god. It was all, thought Odin fractiously, too much for
someone at his time of life, which was extremely advanced, but
not in any particular direction.
  He wanted merely to stay in his hospital, which he loved. The
arrangement which had brought him to that place was of the
sweetest kind and though it was not without its cost, it was a
cost that simply had to be borne and that was all there was to it.
There were new realities, and he had learned to embrace them.
Those who did not would simply have to suffer the
consequences. Nothing came of nothing, even for a god.
  Aher tonight he could return to his life in the Woodshead
indefinitely, and that would be good. He said as much to Hillow.
  "Clean white sheets," he said to Hillow, who merely nodded,
blankly. "Linen sheets. Every day, clean sheets."
  Hillow manoeuvred the bed arnund and up a step.
  "Being a god, Hillow," continued Odin, "being a god, well, it
was unclean, you hear what I'm saying? There was no one who
took care of the sheets. I mean really took care of them. Would
you think that? In a situation like mine? Father of the Gods?
There was no one, absolutely no one, who came in and said, `Mr
Odwin,'" - he chuckled to himself - "they call me Mr Odwin
there, you know. They don't quite know who they're dealing
with. I don't think they could handle it, do you, Hillow? But
there was no one in all that time who came in and said, `Mr
Odwin, I have changed your bed and you have clean sheets.' No
one. There was constant talk about hewing things and ravaging
things and splitting things asunder. Lots of big talk of things
being mighty, and of things being riven, and of things being in
thrall to other things, but very little attention given, as I now
realise, to the laundry. Let me give you an example..."
  His reminiscences were for a moment interrupted, however,
by the arrival of his vehicle at a great doorway which was
guarded by a great sweaty splodge of a being who stood
swaying, arms akimbo, in their path. Toe Rag, who had been
preserving an intense silence as he stalked along just ahead of
the bed, hurried forward and had a quick word with the sweating
creature, who had to bend, red-faced, to hear him. Then instantly
the sweaty creature shrank back with glistening obsequiousness
into its yellow lair, and the sacred trolley rolled forward into the
great halls, chambers and corridors from which great gusty
echoes roared and fetid odours blew.
  "Let me give you an example, Hillow," continued Odin.
"Take this place for example. Take Valhalla. . ."

Chapter 19



Turning north was a manoeuvre which normally had the effect
of restoring a sense of reason and sanity to things, but Dirk
could not escape a sense of foreboding.
  Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have
helped, but it was such mean and wretched rain to come from
such a heavy sky that it only increased the sense of
claustrophobia and frustration which gripped the night. Dirk
turned on the car wipers which grumbled because they didn't
have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off
again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen.
  He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel
that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in
protest. The streets turned treacherously slippery.
  Dirk shook his head. He was being quite absurd, he told
himself, in the worst possible way. He had allowed himself to
become fanciful in a manner that he quite despised. He
astounded himself at the wild fantasies he had built on the
flimsiest amount of, well he would hardly call it evidence, mere
conjecture.
  An accident at an airport. Probably a simple explanation.
  A man with a hammer. So what?
  A grey van which Kate Schechter had seen at the hospital.
Nothing unusual about that. Dirk had nearly collided with it, but
again, that was a perfectly commonplace occurrence.
  A Coca-Cola machine: he hadn't taken that into account.
  Where did a Coca-Cola machine fit into these wild notions
about ancient gods? The only idea he had about that was simply
too ridiculous for words and he refused even to acknowledge it
to himself.
  At that point Dirk found himself driving past the house
where, that very moming, he had encountered a client of his
who had had his severed head placed on a revolving record
turntable by a green-eyed devil-figure waving a scythe and a
blood-signed contract who had then vanished into thin air.
  He peered at it as he passed, and when a large dark-blue
BMW pulled out from the kerb just ahead of him he ran straight
into the back of it, and for the second time that day he had to
leap out of his car, already shouting.
  "For God's sake can't you look where you're going?" he
exclaimed, in the hope of bagging his adversary's best lines
from the outset. "Stupid people!" he continued, without pausing
for breath. "Careering all over the place. Driving without due
care and attention! Reckless assault!" Confuse your enemy, he
thought. lt was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying
"Yes? Hello?" in a testy voice when they answered, which was
one of Dirk's favourite methods of whiling away long, hot
summer afternoons. He bent down and examined the palpable
dent in the rear of the BMW, which was quite obviously, damn
it, a brand new one. Blast and bugger it, thought Dirk.
  "Look what you've done to my bumper!" he cried. "I hope
you have a good lawyer!"
  "I am a good lawyer," said a quiet voice which was followed
by a quiet click. Dirk looked up in momentary apprehension.
The quiet click was only the sound of the car door closing.
  The man was wearing an Italian suit, which was also quiet.
He had quiet glasses, quietly cut hair, and though a bow-tie is
not, by its very nature, a quiet object, the particular bow-tie he
wore was, nevertheless, a very quietly spotted example of the
genre. He drew a slim wallet from his pocket and also a slim
silver pencil. He walked without fuss to the rear of Dirk's Jaguar
and made a note of the registration number.
  "Do you have a card?" he enquired as he did so, without
looking up. "Here's mine," he added, taking one from his wallet.
He made a note on the back of it. "My registration number," he
said, "and the name of my insurance company. Perhaps you
would be good enough to let me have the name of yours. If you
don't have it with you, I'll got my girl to call you."
  Dirk sighed, and decided there was no point in putting up a
fight on this one. He fished out his wallet and leafed through the
various business cards that seemed to accumulate in it as if from
nowhere. He toyed for a second with the idea of being Wesley
Arlott, an ocean-going yacht navigation consultant from,
apparently, Arkansas, but then thought better of it. The man had,
after all, taken his registration number, and although Dirk had no
particular recollection of paying an insurance premium of late,
he also had no particular recollection of not paying one either,
which was a reasonably promising sign. He handed over a bona-
fide card with a wince. The man looked at it.
  "Mr Gently," he said. "Private investigator. I'm sony, private
holistic investigator. OK."
  He put the card away, taking no further interest.
  Dirk had never felt so patronised in his life. At that moment
there was another quiet click from the other side of the car. Dirk
looked across to see a woman with red spectacles standing there
giving him a frozen half smile. She was the woman he had
spoken with over Geoffrey Anstey's garden wall this morning,
and the man, Dirk therefore supposed, was probably her
husband. He wondered for a second whether he should wrestle
them to the ground and question them rigorously and violently,
but he was suddenly feeling immensely tired and run down.
  He acknowledged the woman in red spectacles with a minute
inclination of his head.
  "All done, Cynthia," said the man and flicked a smile on and
off at her. "It's all taken care of."
  She nodded faintly, and the two of them climbed back into
their BMW and after a moment or two pulled away without fuss
and disappeared away down the road. Dirk looked at the card in
his hand. Clive Draycott. He was with a good firm of City
solicitors. Dirk stuck the card away in his wallet, climbed
despondently back into his car, and drove on back to his house,
where he found a large golden eagle sitting patiently on his
doorstep.

Chapter 20





Kate rounded on her guest as soon as they were both inside her
flat with the door closed and Kate could be reasonably certain
that Neil wasn't going to sneak back out of his flat and lurk dis-
approvingly half way up the stairs. The continuing thumping of
his bass was at least her guarantee of privacy.
  "All right," she said fiercely, "so what is the deal with the
eagle then? What is the deal with all the street lights? Huh?"
  The Norse God of Thunder looked at her awkwardly. He had
to remove his great horned helmet because it was banging
against the ceiling and leaving scratch marks in the plaster. He
tucked it under his arm.
  "What is the deal," continued Kate, "with the Coca-Cola
machine? What is the deal with the hammer? What, in short, is
the big deal? Huh?"
  Thor said nothing. He frowned for a second in arrogant
irritation, then frowned in something that looked somewhat like
embarrassment, and then simply stood there and bled at her.
  For a few seconds she resisted the impending internal
collapse of her attitude, and then realised it was just going to go
to hell anyway so she might as well go with it.
  "OK," she muttered, "let's get all that cleaned up. I'll find
some antiseptic."
  She went to rummage in the kitchen cupboard and returned
with a bottle to find Thor saying "No" at her.
  "No what?" she said crossly, putting the bottle down on the
table with a bit of a bang.
  "That," said Thor, and pushed the bottle back at her. "No."
  "What's the matter with it?"
  Thor just shrugged and stared moodily at a corner of the
room. There was nothing that could be considered remotely
interesting in that comer of the room, so he was clearly looking
at it out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
  "Look, buster," said Kate, "if I can call you buster, what - "
  "Thor," said Thor, "God of - "
  "Yes," said Kate, "you've told me all the things you're God
of. I'm trying to clean up your arm."
  "Sedra," said Thor, holding his bleeding arm out, but away
from her. He peered at it anxiously.
  "What?"
  "Crushed leaves of sedra. Oil of the kernel of the apricot.
Infusion of bitter orange blossom. Oil of almonds. Sage and
comfrey. Not this."
  He pushed the bottle of antiseptic off the table and sank into a
mood.
  "Right!" said Kate, picked up the bottle and hurled it at him.
It rebounded off his cheekbone leaving an instant red mark.
Thor lunged forward in a rage, but Kate simply stood her ground
with a finger pointed at him.
  "You stay right there, buster!" she said, and he stopped.
"Anything special you need for that?"
  Thor looked puzzled for a moment.
  "That!" said Kate, pointing at the blossoming bruise on his
cheek.
  "Vengeance," said Thor.
  "I'll have to see what I can do," said Kate. She turned on her
heel and stalked out of the room.
  Aher about two minutes of unseen activity Kate returned to
the room, trailed by wisps of steam.
  "All right," she said, "come with me."
  She led him into her bathroom. He followed her with a great
show of reluctance, but he followed her. Kate had been trailed
by wisps of steam because the bathroom was full of it. The bath
itself was overflowing with bubbles and gunk.
  There were some bottles and pots, mostly empty, lined up
along a small shelf above the bath. Kate picked them up one by
one and displayed them at him.
  "Apricot kernel oil," she said, and turned it upside down to
emphasise its emptiness. "All in there," she added, pointing at
the foaming bath.
  "Neroli oil," she said, picking up the next one, "distilled from
the blossom of bitter oranges. All in there."
  She picked up the next one. "Orange cream bath oil. Contains
almond oil. All in there."
  She picked up the pots.
  "Sage and comfrey," she said of one, "and sedra oil. One of
them's a hand cream and the other's hair conditioner, but they're
all in there, along with a tube of Aloe Lip Preserver, some
Cucumber Cleansing Milk, Honeyed Beeswax and Jojoba Oil
Cleanser, Rhassoul Mud, Seaweed and Birch Shampoo, Rich
Night Cream with Vitamin E, and a very great deal of cod liver
oil. I'm afraid I haven't got anything called `Vengeance', but
here's some Calvin Klein `Obsession'."
  She took the stopper from a bottle of perfume and threw the
bottle in the bath:
  "I'll be in the next room when you're done."�
  With that she marched out, and slammed the door on him.
She waited in the other room, firmly reading a book.

Chapter 21






For about a minute Dirk remained sitting motionless in his car a
few yards away from his front door. He wondered what his next
move should be. A small, cautious one, he rather thought. The
last thing he wanted to have to contend with at the moment was
a startled eagle.
  He watched it intently. It stood there with a pert magnificence
about its bearing, its talons gripped tightly round the edge of the
stone step. From time to time it preened itself, and then peered
sharply up the street and down the street, dragging one of its
great talons across the stone in a deeply worrying manner. Dirk
admired the creature greatly for its size and its plumage and its
general sense of extreme air-worthiness, but, asking himself if
he liked the way that the light from the street lamp glinted in its
great glassy eye or on the huge hook of its beak, he had to admit
that he did not.
  The beak was a major piece of armoury.
  It was a beak that would frighten any animal on earth, even
one that was already dead and in a tin. Its talons looked as if
they could rip up a small Volvo. And it was sitting waiting on
Dirk's doorstep, looking up and down the street with a gaze that
was at once meaningful and mean.
  Dirk wondered if he should simply drive off and leave the
country. Did he have his passport? No. It was at home. It was
behind the door which was behind the eagle, in a drawer
somewhere or, more likely, lost.
  He could sell up. The ratio of estate agents to actual houses in
the area was rapidly approaching parity. One of their lot could
come and deal with the house. He'd had enough of it, with its
fridges and its wildlife and its ineradicable position on the
mailing lists of the American Express company.
  Or he could, he supposed with a slight shiver, just go and see
what it was the eagle wanted. There was a thought. Rats,
probably, or a small whippet. All Dirk had, to his knowledge,
was some Rice Krispies and an old muffin, and he didn't see
those appealing to this magisterial creature of the air. He rather
fancied that he could make out fresh blood congealing on the
bird's talons, but he told himself firmly not to be so ridiculous.
  He was just going to have to go and face up to the thing,
explain that he was fresh out of rats and take the consequences.
  Quietly, infinitely quietly, he pushed open the door of his car,
and stole out of it, keeping his head down. He peered at it from
over the bonnet of the car. It hadn't moved. That is to say, it
hadn't left the district. It was still looking this way and that
around itself with, possibly, a heightened sense of alertness.
Dirk didn't know in what remote mountain eyrie the creature
had learnt to listen out for the sound of Jaguar car door hinges
revolving in their sockets, but the sound had clearly not escaped
its attention.
  Cautiously, Dirk bobbed along behind the line of cars that
had prevented him from being able to park directly outside his
own house. In a couple of seconds all that separated him from
the extraordinary creature was a small, blue Renault.
  What next?
  He could simply stand up and, as it were, declare himself. He
would be saying, in effect, "Here I am, do what you will." What-
ever then transpired, the Renault could probably bear the brunt.
  There was always the possibility, of course, that the eagle
would be pleased to see him, that all this swooping it had been
directing at him had been just its way of being matey.
Assuming, of course, that it was the same eagle. That was not
such an enormous assumption. The number of golden eagles at
large in North London at any one time was, Dirk guessed, fairly
small.
  Or maybe it was just nesting on his doorstep completely by
chance, enjoying a quick breather prior to having another hurtle
through the sky in pursuit of whatever it is that eagles hurtle
through the sky after.
  Whatever the explanation, now, Dirk realised, was the time
that he had simply to take his chances. He steeled himself, took
a deep breath and arose from behind the Renault, like a spirit
rising from the deep.
  The eagle was looking in another direction at the time, and it
was a second or so before it looked back to the front and saw
him, at which point it reacted with a loud screech and stepped
back an inch or two, a reaction which Dirk felt a little put out by.
It then blinked rapidly a few times and adopted a sort of perky
expression of which Dirk did not have the faintest idea what to
make.
  He waited for a second or two, until he felt the situation had
settled down again after all the foregoing excitement, and then
stopped forward tentatively, round the front of the Renault. A
number of quiet, interrogative cawing noises seemed to float
uncertainly through the air, and then after a moment Dirk
realised that he was making them himself and made himself
stop. This was an eagle he was dealing with, not a budgie.
  It was at this point that he made his mistake.
  With his mind entirely taken up with eagles, the possible
intentions of eagles, and the many ways in which eagles might
be considercd to differ from small kittens, he did not concentrate
enough on what he was doing as he stepped up out of the road
and on to a pavement that was slick with the recent drizzle. As
he brought his rear foot forward it caught on the bumper of the
car he wobbled, slipped, and then did that thing which one
should never do to a large eagle of uncertain temper, which was
to fling himself headlong at it with his arms outstretched.
  The eagle reacted instantly.
  Without a second's hesitation it hopped neatly aside and
allowed Dirk the space he needed to collapse heavily on to his
own doorstep. It then peered down at him with a scorn that
would have withered a lesser man, or at least a man that had
been looking up at that moment.
  Dirk groaned.
  He had sustained a blow to the temple from the edge of the
step, and it was a blow, he felt, that he could just as easily have
done without this evening. He lay there gasping for a second or
two, then at last rolled over heavily, clasping one hand to his
forehead, the other to his nose, and looked up at the great bird in
apprehension, reflecting bitterly on the conditions under which
he was expected to work.
  When it became clear to him that he appeared for the moment
to have nothing to fear from the eagle, who was merely
regarding him with a kind of quizzical, blinking doubt, he sat up,
and then slowly dragged himself back to his feet and wiped and
smaacked some of the dirt off his coat. Then he hunted through
his pockets for his keys and unlocked the front door, which
seemed a little loose. He waited to see what the eagle would do
next.
  With a slight rustle of its wings it hopped over the lintel and
into his hall. It looked around itself, and seemed to regard what
it saw with a little distaste. Dirk didn't know what it was that
eagles expected of people's hallways, but had to admit to
himself that it wasn't only the eagle which reacted like that. The
disorder was not that great, but there was a grimness to it which
tended to cast a pall over visitors, and the eagle was clearly not
immune to this effect.
  Dirk picked up a large flat envelope lying on his doormat,
looked inside it to check that it was what he had been expecting,
then noticed that a picture was missing from the wall. It wasn't a
particularly wonderful picture, merely a small Japanese print
that he had found in Camden Passage and quite liked, but the
point was that it was missing. The hook on the wall was empty.
There was a chair missing as well, he realised.
  The possible significance of this suddenly struck him, and he
hurried through to the kitchen. Many of his assorted kitchen
implements had clearly gone. The rack of largely unused
Sabatier knives, the food processor and his radio cassette player
had all vanished, but he did, however, have a new fridge. It had
obviously been delivered by Nobby Paxton's felonious thugs
and he would just have to make the usual little list.
  Still, he had a new fridge and that was a considerable load off
his mind. Already the whole atmosphere in the kitchen seemed
easier. The tension had lifted. There was a new sense of
lightness and springiness in the air which had even
communicated itself to the pile of old pizza boxes which seemed
now to recline at a jaunty rather than an oppressive angle.
  Dirk cheerfully threw open the door to the new fridge and
was delighted to find it completely and utterly empty. Its inner
light shone on perfectly clean blue and white walls and on
gleaming chrome shelves. He liked it so much that he instantly
determined to keep it like that. He would put nothing in it at all.
His food would just have to go off in plain view.
  Good. He closed it again.
  A screech and a flap behind him reminded him that he was
entertaining a visiting eagle. He turned to find it glaring at him
from on top of the kitchen table.
  Now that he was getting a little more accustomed to it, and
had not actually been viciously attacked as he had suspected he
might be, it seemed a little less fearsome than it had at first. It
was still a serious amount of eagle, but perhaps an eagle was a
slightly more manageable proposition than he had originally
supposed. He relaxed a little and took off his hat, pulled off his
coat, and threw them on to a chair.
  The eagle seemed at this juncture to sense that Dirk might be
getting the wrong idea about it and flexed one of its claws at
him. With sudden alarm Dirk saw that it did indeed have
something that closely resembled congealed blood on the talons.
He backed away from it hurriedly. The eagle then rose up to its
full height on its talons and began to spread its great wings out,
wider and wider, beating them very slowly and leaning forward
so as to keep its balance. Dirk did the only thing he could think
to do under the cincumstances and bolted from the room,
slamming the door behind him and jamming the hall table up
against it.
  A terrible cacophony of screeching and scratching and
buffeting arose instantly from behind it. Dirk sat leaning back
against the table, panting and trying to catch his breath, and then
after a while began to get a worrying feeling about what the bird
was up to now.
  It seemed to him that the eagle was actually dive-bombing
itself against the door. Every few seconds the pattern would
repeat itself - first a great beating of wings, then a rush, then a
terrible cracking thud. Dirk didn't think it would get through the
door, but was alarmed that it might beat itself to death trying.
The creature seemed to be quite frantic about something, but
what, Dirk could not even begin to imagine. He tried to calm
himself down and think clearly, to work out what he should do
next.
  He should phone Kate and make certain she was all right.
  Whoosh, thud!
  He should finally open up the envelope he had been carrying
with him all day and examine its contents.
  Whoosh, thud!
  For that he would need a sharp knife.
  Whoosh, thud!
  Three rather awkward thoughts then struck him in fairly
quick succession.
  Whoosh, thud!
  First, the only sharp knives in the place, assuming Nobby's
removal people had left him with any at all, were in the kitchen.
  Whoosh, thud!
  That didn't matter so much in itself, because he could
probably find something in the house that would do.
  Whoosh, thud!
  The second thought was that the actual envelope itself was in
the pocket of his coat which he had left lying over the back of a
chair in the kitchen.
  Whoosh, thud!
  The third thought was very similar to the second and had to
do with the location of the piece of paper with Kate's telephone
number on it.
  Whoosh, thud!
  Oh God.
  Whoosh, thud!
  Dirk began to feel very, very tired at the way the day was
working out. He was deeply worried by the sense of impending
calamity, but was still by no means able to divine what lay at the
root of it.
  Whoosh, thud!
  Well, he knew what he had to do now...
  Whoosh, thud!
  ... so there was no point in not getting on with it. He quietly
pulled the table away from the door.
  Whoosh -
  He ducked and yanked the door open, passing smoothly
under the eagle as it hurtled out into the hallway and hit the
opposite wall. He slammed the door closed behind him from
inside the kitchen, pulled his coat off the chair and jammed the
chair back up under the handle.
  Whoosh, thud!
  The damage done to the door on this side was both
considerable and impressive, and Dirk began seriously to worry
about what this behaviour said about the bird's state of mind, or
what the bird's state of mind might become if it maintained this
behaviour for very much longer.
  Whoosh... scratch...
  The same thought seemed to have occurred to the bird at that
moment, and after a brief flurry of screeching and of scratching
at the door with its talons it lapsed into a grumpy and defeated
silence, which after it had been going on for about a minute
became almost as disturbing as the previous batterings.
  Dirk wondered what it was up to.
  He approached the door cautiously and very, very quietly
moved the chair back a little so that he could see through the
keyhole. He squatted down and peered through it. At first it
seemed to him that he could see nothing through it, that it must
be blocked by something. Then, a slight flicker and glint close
up on the other side suddenly revealed the startling truth, which
was that the eagle also had an eye up at the keyhole and was
busy looking back at him. Dirk almost toppled backwards with
the shock of the realisation, and backed away from the door with
a sense of slight horror and revulsion.
  This was extremely intelligent behaviour for an eagle wasn't
it? Was it? How could he find out? He couldn't think of any or-
nithological experts to phone. All his reference books were piled
up in other rooms of the house, and he didn't think he'd be able
to keep on pulling off the same stunt with impunity, certainly
not when he was dealing with an eagle which had managed to
figure out what keyholes were for.
  He retrealed to the kitchen sink and found some kitchen
towel. He folded it into a wad, soaked it, and dabbed it first on
his bleeding temple, which was swelling up nicely, and then on
his nose which was still very tender, and had been a
considerable size for most of the day now. Maybe the eagle was
an eagle of delicate sensibilities and had reacted badly to the
sight of Dirk's face in its current, much abused, state and had
simply lost its mind. Dirk sighed and sat down.
  Kate's telephone, which was the next thing he turned his
attention to, was answered by a machine when he tried to ring it.
Her voice told him, very sweetly, that he was welcome to leave
a message after the beep, but warned that she hardly ever
listened to them and that it was much better to talk to her
directly, only he couldn't because she wasn't in, so he'd best try
again.
  Thank you very much, he thought, and put the phone down.
  He realised that the truth of the matter was this: he had spent
the day putting off opening the envelope because of what he was
worried about finding in it. It wasn't that the idea was
frightening, though indeed it was frightening that a man should
sell his soul to a green-eyed man with a scythe, which is what
circumstances were trying very hard to suggest had happened. It
was just that it was extremely depressing that he should sell it to
a green-eyed man with a scythe in exchange for a share in the
royalties of a hit record.
  That was what it looked like on the face of it. Wasn't it?
  Dirk picked up the other envelope, the one which had been
waiting for him on his doormat, delivered there by courier from
a large London bookshop where Dirk had an account. He pulled
out the contents, which were a copy of the sheet music of Hot
Pototo, written by Colin Paignton, Phil Mulville and Geoff
Anstey.
  The lyrics were, well, straightforward. They provided a basic
repetitive bit of funk rhythm and a simple sense of menace and
cheerful callousness which had caught the mood of last summer.
They went:
  Hot Potato,
  Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
  Quick, pass it on, poss it on, poss it on.
  You don't want to get caught, get caught, get caught.
  Drop it on someone. Who ? Who ? Anybody.
  You better not have it when the big one comes.
  I said you better not have it when the big one comes.
  It's a Hot Potato.
  And so on. The repeated phrases got tossed back and forward
between the two members of the band, the drum machine got
heavier and heavier, and there had been a dance video.
  Was that all it was going to be? Big deal. A nice house in
Lupton Street with polyurethaned floors and a broken marriage?
  Things had certainly come down a long way since the great
days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all
the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his
mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul.
Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy
furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall and, whap,
your head comes off.
  So what exactly was the deal? What was the Potato contract?
Who was getting what and why?
  Dirk rummaged through a drawer for the breadknife, sat
down once more, took the envelope from his coat pocket and
ripped through the congealed strata of Sellotape which held the
end of it together.
  Out fell a thick bundle of papers.

Chapter 22





At exactly the moment that the telephone rang, the door to
Kate's sitting-room opened. The Thunder God attempted to
stomp in through it, but in fact he wafted. He had clearly soaked
himself very thoroughly in the stuff Kate had thrown into the
bath, then redressed, and torn op a nightgown of Kate's to bind
his forearm with. He casually tossed a handful of softened oak
shards away into the comer of the room. Kate decided for the
moment to ignore both the deliberate provocations and the
telephone. The former she could deal with and the latter she had
a machine for dealing with.
  "I've been reading about you," she challenged the Thunder
God. "Where's your beard?"
  He took the book, a one volume encyclopaedia, from her
hands and glanced at it before tossing it aside contemptuously.
  "Ha," he said, "I shaved it off. When I was in Wales." He
scowled at the memory.
  "What were you doing in Wales for heaven's sake?"
  "Counting the stones," he said with a shrug, and went to stare
out of the window.
  There was a huge, moping anxiety in his bearing. It suddenly
occurred to Kate with a spasm of something not entinely unlike
fear, that sometimes when people got like that, it was because
they had picked up their mood from the weather. With a
Thunder God it presumably worked the other way round. The
sky ootside certainly had a restless and disgruntled look.
  Her reactions suddenly started to become very confused.
  "Excuse me if this sounds like a stupid question," said Kate,
"but I'm a little at sea here. I'm not used to spending the evening
with someone who's got a whole day named after them. What
stones were you counting in Wales?"
  "All of them," said Thor in a low growl. "All of them
between this size... " he held the tip of his forefinger and thumb
about a quarter of an inch apart, "...and this size." He held his
two hands about a yard apart, and then put them down again.
  Kate stared at him blankly.
  "Well... how many were thene?" she asked. It seemed only
polite to ask.
  He rounded on her angrily.
  "Count them yourself if you want to know!" he shouted.
"What's the point in my spending years and years and years
counting them, so that I'm the only person who knows, and who
will ever know, if I just go and tell somebody else? Well?"
  He turned back to the window.
  "Anyway," he said, "I've been worried about it. I think I may
have lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. But I'm not," he
shouted, "going to do it again!"
  "Well, why on earth would you do such an extraordinary
thing in the first place?"
  "It was a burden placed on me by my father. A punishment.
A penance." He glowered.
  "Your father?" said Kate. "Do you mean Odin?"
  "The All-Father," said Thor. "Father of the Gods of Asgard."
  "And you're saying he's alive?"
  Thor turned to look at her as if she was stupid.
  "We are immortals," he said, simply.
  Downstairs, Neil chose that moment to conclude his
thunderous performance on the bass, and the house seemed to
sing in its aftermath with an eerie silence.
  "Immortals are what you wanted," said Thor in a low, quiet
voice. "Immortals are what you got. It is a little hard on us. You
wanted us to be for ever, so we are for ever. Then you forget
about us. But still we are for ever. Now at last, many are dead,
many dying," he then added in a quiet voice, "but it takes a
special effort."
  "I can't even begin to understand what you're talking about,"
said Kate, "you say that I, we - "
  "You can begin to understand," said Thor, angrily, "which is
why I have come to you. Do you know that most people hardly
see me? Hardly notice me at all? It is not that we are hidden. We
are here. We move among you. My people. Your gods. You
gave birth to us. You made us be what'you would not dare to be
yourselves. Yet you will not acknowledge us. If I walk along
one of your streets in this... world you have made for yourselves
without us, then barely an eye will once flicker in my direction."
  "Is this when you're wearing the helmet?"
  "Especially when I'm wearing the helmet!"
  "Well- "
  "You make fun of me!" roared Thor.
  "You make it very easy for a girl," said Kate. "I don't know
what - "
  Suddenly the room seemed to quake and then to catch its
breath. All of Kate's insides wobbled violently and then held
very still. In the sudden horrible silence, a blue china table lamp
slowly toppled off the table, hit the floor, and crawled off to a
dark corner of the room where it sat in a worried little defensive
huddle.
  Kate stared at it and tried to be calm about it. She felt as if
cold, soft jelly was trickling down her skin.
  "Did you do that?" she said shakily.
  Thor was looking livid and confused. He muttered, "Do not
make me angry with you. You were very lucky." He looked
away.
  "What are you saying?"
  "I'm saying that I wish you to come with me."
  "What? What about that?" She pointed at the small
befuddled kitten under the table which had so recently and so
confusingly been a blue china table lamp.
  "There's nothing I can do for it."
  Kate was suddenly so tired and confused and frightened that
she found she was nearly in tears. She stood biting her lip and
trying to be as angry as she could.
  "Oh yeah?" she said. "I thought you were meant to be a god. I
hope you haven't got into my home under false pretences, I..."
She stumbled to a halt, and then resumed in a different tone of
voice.
  "Do you mean," she said, in a small voice, "that you have
been here, in the world, all this time?"
  "Here, and in Asgard," said Thor.
  "Asgard," said Kate. "The home of the gods?"
  Thor was silent. It was a grim silence that seemed to be full
of something that bothered him deeply.
  "Where is Asgard?" demanded Kate.
  Again Thor did not speak. He was a man of very few words
and enormously long pauses. When at last he did answer, it
wasn't at all clear whether he had been thinking all that time or
just standing there.
  "Asgard is also here," he said. "All worlds are here."
  He drew out from under his furs his great hammer and
studied its head deeply and with an odd curiosity, as if
something about it was very puzzling. Kate wondered where she
found such a gesture familiar from. She found that it
instinctively made her want to duck. She stepped back very
slightly and was watchful.
  When he looked up again, there was an altogether new focus
and energy in his eyes, as if he was gathering himself up to hurl
himself at something. "
  "Tonight I must be in Asgard," he said. "I must confront my
father Odin in the great hall of Valhalla and bring him to
account for what he has done."
  "You mean, for making you count Welsh pebbles?"
  "No!" said Thor. "For making the Welsh pebbles not worth
counting!"
  Kate shook her head in exasperation. "I simply don't know
what to make of you at all," she said. "I think I'm just too tired.
Come back tomorrow. Explain it all in the morning."
  "No," said Thor. "You must see Asgard yourself, and then
you will understand. You must see it tonight." He gripped her by
the arm.
  "I don't want to go to Asgard," she insisted. "I don't go to
mythical places with strange men. You go. Call me up and tell
me how it went in the morning. Give him hell about the
pebbles."
  She wrested her arm from his grip. It was very, very clear to
her that she only did this with his permission.
  "Now please, go, and let me sleep!" She glared at him.
  At that moment the house seemed to erupt as Neil launched
into a thumping bass rendition of Siegfried's Rheinfahrt from
Act 1 of G�tterd�mmerung, just to prove it could be done. The
walls shook, the windows rattled. From under the table the
sound of the table lamp mewing pathetically could just be heard.
  Kate tried to maintain her furious glare, but it simply couldn't
be kept up for very long in the circumstances.
  "OK," she said at last, "how do we get to this place?"
  "There are as many ways as there are tiny pieces."
  "I beg your pardon?"
  "Tiny things." He held up his thumb and forefinger again to
indicate something very small. "Molecules," he added, seeming
to be uncomfortable with the word. "But first let us leave here."
  "Will I need a coat in Asgard?"
  "As you wish."
  "Well, I'll take one anyway. Wait a minute."
  She decided that the best way to deal with the astonishing
rigmarole which currently constituted her life was to be
businesslike about it. She found her coat, brushed her hair, left a
new message on her telephone answering machine and put a
saucer of milk firmly under the table.
  "Right," she said, and led the way out of the flat, locking it
carefully after them, and making shushing noises as they passed
Neil's door. For all the uproar he was currently making he was
almost certainly listening out for the slightest sound, and would
be out in a moment if he heard them going by to complain about
the Coca-Cola machine, the lateness of the hour, man's
inhumanity to man, the weather, the noise, and the colour of
Kate's coat, which was a shade of blue that Neil for some reason
disapproved of most particularly. They stole past successfully
and closed the front door behind them with the merest click.

Chapter 23






The sheets which tumbled out on to Dirk's kitchen table were
made of thick heavy paper, folded together, and had obviously
been much handled.
  He sorted them out, one by one, separating them from each
other, smoothing them out with the flat of his hand and laying
them out neatly in rows on the kitchen table, clearing a space, as
it became necessary, among the old newspapers, ashtrays and
dirty cereal bowls which Elena the cleaner always left exactly
where they were, claiming, when challenged on this, that she
thought he had put them there specially.
  He pored over the papers for several minutes, moving from
one to another, comparing them with each other, studying them
carefully, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, line by line.
  He couldn't understand a word of them.
  It should have occurred to him, he realised, that the green-
eyed, hairy, scythe-waving giant might differ from him not only
in general appearance and personal habits, but also in such
matters as the alphabet he favoured.
  He sat back in his seat, disgruntled and thwarted, and reached
for a cigarette, but the packet in his coat was now empty. He
picked up a pencil and tapped it in a cigarette-like way, but it
wasn't able to produce the same effect.
  After a minute or two he became acutely conscious of the fact
that he was probably still being watched through the keyhole by
the eagle and he found that this made it impossibly hard to
concentrate on the problem before him, particularly without a
cigarette. He scowled to himself. He knew there was still a
packet upstairs by his bed, but he didn't think he could handle
the sheer ornithology involved in going to get it.
  He tried to stare at the papers for a little longer. The writing,
apart from being written in some kind of small, crabby and
indecipherable runic script, was mostly hunched up towards the
left-hand side of the paper as if swept there by a tide. The right-
hand side was largely clear except for an occasionai group of
characters which were lined up underneath each other. All of it,
except for a slight sense of undefinable familiarity about the
layout, was completely meaningless to Dirk.
  He turned his attention back to the envelope instead and tried
once more to examine some of the names which had been so
heavily crossed out.
  Howard Bell, the incredibly wealthy bestselling novelist who
wrote bad books which sold by the warehouse-load despite - or
perhaps because of - the fact that nobody read them.
  Dennis Hutch, record company magnate. Now that he had a
context for the name, Dirk knew it perfeetly well. The Aries
Rising Record Group which had been founded on Sixties ideals,
or at least on what passed for ideals in the Sixties, grown in the
Seventies and then embraced the materialism of the Eighties
without missing a beat, was now a massive entertainment
conglomerate on both sides of the Atlantic. Dennis Hutch had
stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal
overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a
Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. ARRGH! was also the record
label on which Hot Potato had been released.
  Stan Dubcek, senior partner in the advertising company with
the silly name which now owned most of the British and
American advertising companies which had not had names
which were quite as silly, and had therefore been swallowed
whole.
  And here, suddenly, was another name that was instantly
recognisable, now that Dirk was attuned to the sort of names he
should be looking for. Roderick Mercer, the world's greatest
publisher of the world's sleaziest newspapers. Dirk hadn't at
first spotted the name with the unfamiliar "...erick" in place
after the "Rod". Well, well, well. . .
  Now here were people, thought Dirk suddenly, who had
really got something. Certainly they had got rather more than a
nice little house in Lupton Road with some dried flowers lying
around the place. They also had the great advantage of having
heads on their shoulders as well, unless Dirk had missed
something new and dramatic on the news. What did that all
mean? What was this contract? How come everybody whose
hands it had been through had been so astoundingly successful
except for one, Geoffrey Anstey? Everybody whose hands it had
passed through had benefited from it except for the one who had
it last. Who had still got it.
  It was a hot potato. .
  You better not have it when the big one comes.
  The notion suddenly formed in Dirk's mind that it might have
been Geoffrey Anstey himself who had overheard a
conversation about a hot potato, about getting rid of it, passing it
on. If he remembered correctly the interview he had read with
Pain, he didn't say that he himself had overheard the
conversation.
  You better not have it when the big one comes.
  The notion was a horrible one and ran on like this: Geoffrey
Anstey had been pathetically na�ve. He had overheard this
conversation, between - who? Dirk picked up the envelope and
ran over the list of names - and had thought that it had a good
dance rhythm. He had not for a moment realised that what he
was listening to was a conversation that would result in his own
hideous death. He had got a hit record out of it, and when the
real hot potato was actually handed to him he had picked it up.
  Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
  And instead of taking the advice he had recorded in thc words
of the song...
  Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.
  ... he had stuck it behind the gold record award on his
bathroom wall.
  You better not have it when the big one comes.
  Dirk frowned and took a long, slow thoughtful drag on his
pencil.
  This was ridiculous.
  He had to got some cigarettes if he was going to think this
through with any intellectual rigour. He pulled on his coat,
stuffed his hat on his head and made for the window.
  The window hadn't been opened for - well, certainly not
during his ownership of the house, and it struggled and
screamed at the sudden unaccustomed invasion of its space and
independence. Once he had forced it wide enough, Dirk
struggled out on to the windowsill, pulling swathes of leather
coat out with him. From here it was a bit of a jump to the
pavement since there was a lower ground floor to the house with
a narrow flight of steps leading down to it in the front. A line of
iron railings separated these from the pavement, and Dirk had to
get clear over these.
  Without hesitating for a moment he made the jump, and it
was in mid-bound that he realised he had not pickcd up his car
keys from the kitchen table where he'd left them.
  He considered as he sailed gracelessly through the air
whether or not to execute a wild mid-air twist, make a desperate
grab backwards for the window and hope that he might just
manage to hold on to the sill, but decided on mature reflection
that an error at this point might just conceivably kill him
whereas the walk would probably do him good.
  He landed heavily on the far side of the railings, but the tails
of his coat became entangled with them and he had to pull them
off, tearing part of the lining in the process. Once the ringing
shock in his knees had subsided and he had recovered what little
composure the events of the day had left him with, he realised
that it was now well after eleven o'clock and the pubs would be
shut, and he might have a longer walk than he had bargained for
to find some cigarettes.
  He considered what to do.
  The current outlook and state of mind of tbe eagle was a
major factor to be taken into account here. The only way to get
his car keys now was back through the front door into his eagle-
infested hallway.
  Moving with great caution he tip-toed back up the steps to his
front door, squatted down and, hoping that the damn thing
wasn't going to squeak, gently pushed up the flap of the letter-
box and peered through.
  In an instant a talon was hooked into the back of his hand and
a great screeching beak slashed at his eye, narrowly missing it
but scratching a great gouge across his much abused nose.
  Dirk howled with pain and lurched backwards, not getting
very far because he still had a talon hooked in his hand. He
lashed out desperately and hit at the talon, which hurt him
considerably, dug the sharp point even further into his flesh and
caused a great, barging flurry on the far side of the door, each
tiniest movement of which tugged heavily in his hand.
  He grabbed at the great claw with his free hand and and tried to
tug it back out of himself. It was immensely strong, and was
shaking with the fury of the eagle, which was as trapped as he
was. At last, quivering with pain, he managed to release himself,
and pulled his injured hand back, nursing and cuddling it with
the other.
  The eagle pulled its claw back sharply, and Dirk heard it
flapping away back down his hallway, emitting terrible
screeches and cries, its great wings colliding with and scraping
thc walls.
  Dirk toyed with the idea of burning the house down, but once
the throbbing in his hand had begun to subside a little he calmed
down and tried, if he could, to see things from the eagle's point
of view.
  He couldn't.
  He had not the faintest idea how things appeared to eagles in
general, much less to this particular eagle, which seemed to be a
seriously deranged example of the species.
  After a minute or so more of nursing his hand, curiosity-
allied to a strong sense that the eagle had definitely retreated to
the far end of the hall and stayed there - overcame him, and he
bent down once more to the letter-box. This time he used his
pencil to push the flap back upwards and scanned the hallway
from a safe position a good few inches back.
  The eagle was clearly in view, perched on the end of the
bannister rail, regarding him with resentment and opprobrium,
which Dirk felt was a little rich coming from a creature which
had only a moment or two ago been busily engaged in trying to
rip his hand off.
  Then, once the eagle was certain that it had got Dirk's
attention, it slowly raised itself up on its feet and slowly shook
its great wings out, beating them gently for balance. It was this
gesture that had previously caused Dirk to bolt prudently from
the room. This time, however, he was safely behind a couple of
good solid inches of wood and he stood, or rather, squatted his
ground. The eagle stretched its neck upwards as well, jabbing its
tongue out at the air and cawing plaintively, which surprised
Dirk.
  Then he noticed something else rather surprising about the
eagle, which was that its wings had strange, un-eaglelike
markings on them. They were large concentric circles.
  The differences of coloration which delineated thc circles
were very slight, and it was only the absolute geometric
regularity of them which made them stand out as clearly as they
did. Dirk had the very clear sense that the eagle was showing
him these circles, and that that was what it had wanted to attract
his attention to all along. Each time the bird had dived at him, he
realised as he thought back, it had then started on a strange kind
of flapping routine which had involved opening its wings right
out. However, each time it had happened Dirk had been too
busily engaged with the business of turning round and running
away to pay this exhibition the appropriate attention.
  "Have you got the money for a cup of tea, mate?"
  "Er, yes thank you," said Dirk, "I'm fine." His attention was
fully occupied with the eagle, and he didn't immediately look
round.
  "No, I meant can you spare me a bob or two, just for a cup of
tea?"
  "What?" This time Dirk looked round, irritably.
  "Or just a fag, mate. Got a fag you can spare?"
  "No, I was just going to go and get some myself," said Dirk.
  The man on the pavement behind him was a tramp of
indeterminate age. He was standing there, slightly wobbly, with
a look of wild and continuous disappointment bobbing in his
eyes.
  Not getting an immediate response from Dirk, the man
dropped his eyes to the ground about a yard in front of him, and
swayed back and forth a little. He was holding his arms out,
slightly open, slightly away from his body, and just swaying.
Then he frowned suddenly at the ground. Then he frowned at
another part of the ground. Then, holding himself steady while
he made quite a major realignment of his head, he frowned away
down the street.
  "Have you lost something?" said Dirk.
  The man's head swayed back towards him.
  "Have I lost something?" he said in querulous astonishment.
"Have I lost something?"
  It seemed to be the most astounding question he had ever
heard. He looked away again for a while, and seemed to be
trying to balance the question in the general scale of things. This
involved a fair bit more swaying and a fair few more frowns. At
last he seemed to come up with something that might do service
as some kind of answer.
  "The sky?" he said, challenging Dirk to find this a good
enough answer. He looked up towards it, carefully, so as not to
lose his balance. He seemed not to like what he saw in the dim,
orange, street-lit pallor of the clouds, and slowly looked back
down again till he was staring at a point just in front of his feet.
  "The ground?" he said, with evident great dissatisfaction, and
then was struck with a sudden thought.
  "Frogs?" he said, wobbling his gaze up to meet Dirk's rather
bewildered one. "I used to like...frogs," he said, and left his
gaze sitting on Dirk as if that was all he had to say, and the rest
was entirely up to Dirk now.
  Dirk was completely flummoxed. He longed for the times
when life had been easy, life had been carefree, the great times
he'd had with a mere homicidal eagle, which seemed now to be
such an easygoing and amiable companion. Aerial attack he
could cope with, but not this nameless roaring guilt that came
howling at him out of nowhere.
  "What do you want?" he said in a strangled voice.
  "Just a fag, mate," said the tramp, "or something for a cup of
tea."
  Dirk pressed a pound coin into the man's hand and lunged off
down the street in a panic, passing, twenty yards further on, a
builder's skip from which the shape of his old fridge loomed at
him menacingly.

Chapter 24





As Kate came down the steps from her house she noticed that
the temperature had dropped considerably. The clouds sat
heavily on the land and loured at it. Thor set off briskly in the
direction of the park, and Kate trotted along in his wake.
  As he strode along, an extraordinary figure on the streets of
Primrose Hill, Kate could not help but notice that he had been
right. They passed three different people on the way, and she
saw distinctly how their eyes avoided looking at him, even as
they had to make allowance for his great bulk as he passed them.
He was not invisible, far from it. He simply didn't fit.
  The park was closed for the night, but Thor leapt quickly over
the spiked railings and then lifted her over in turn as lightly as if
she had been a bunch of flowers.
  The grass was damp and mushy, but still worked its magic on
city feet. Kate did what she always did when entering the park,
which was to bob down and put the flats of her hands down on
the ground for a moment. She had never quite worked out why
she did this, and often she would adjust a shoe or pick up a piece
of litter as a pretext for the movement, but all she really wanted
was to feel the grass and the wet earth on her palms.
  The park from this viewpoint was simply a dark shoulder that
rose up before them, obscuring itself. They mounted the hill and
stood on the top of it, looking over the darkness of the rest of the
park to where it shaded off into the hazy light of the heart of
London which lay to the south. Ugly towers and blocks stuck
yobbishly up out of the skyline, dominating the park, the sky,
and the city.
  A cold, damp wind moved across the park, flicking at it from
time to time like the tail of a dark and broody horse. There was
an unsettled, edgy quality to it. In fact the night sky seemed to
Kate to be like a train of restless, irritable horses, their traces
flapping and slapping in the wind. It also seemed to her as if the
traces all radiated loosely from a single centre, and that the
centre was very close by her. She reprimanded herself for absurd
suggestibility, but nevertheless, it still seemed that all the
weather was gathered and circling around them, waiting on
them.
  Thor once more drew out his hammer, and held it before him
in the thoughtful and abstracted manner she had seen a few
minutes before in her flat. He frowned, and seemed to be
picking tiny invisible pieces of dust off it. It was a little like a
chimpanzee grooming its mate, or - that was it! - the
comparison was extraordinary, but it explained why she had
tensed herself so watchfully when last he had done it. It was like
Jimmy Connors minutely adjusting the strings of his racquet
before preparing to serve.
  He looked up sharply once again, drew his arm back, turned
fully once, twice, three times, twisting his heels heavily in the
mud, and then hurled his hammer with astonishing force up to
the heavens.
  It vanished almost instantly into the murky haze of the sky.
Damp flashes sparked deep within the clouds, tracking its path
in a long parabola through the night. At the furthest extent of the
parabola it swung down out of the clouds, a distant tiny pinpoint
moving slowly now, gathering and redirecting its momentum for
the return flight. Kate watched, breathless, as the speck crept
behind the dome of St Paul's. It then seemed almost as if it had
halted altogether, hanging silently and improbably in the air,
before gradually beginning to increase microscopically in size as
it accelerated back towards them.
  Then, as it returned, it swung aside in its path, no longer
describing a simple parabola, but following instead a new path
which seemed to lie along the perimeter of a gigantic Mobius
strip which took it round the other side of the Telecom Tower.
Then suddenly it was swinging back in a path directly towards
them, hurtling out of the night with impossible weight and speed
like a piston in a shaft of light. Kate swayed and nearly dropped
in a dead faint out of its path, when Thor stepped forward and
caught it with a grunt.
  The jolt of it sent a single heavy shudder down into the earth,
and then the thing was resting quietly in Thor's grip. His arm
quivered slightly and was still.
  Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that it
was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
  "Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?" she
said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
  "We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
  At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple, but
instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything shifted,
was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then snapped back
again as a suddenly different world.
  This world was a much darker one and colder still.
  A bitter, putrid wind blew sharply, and made every breath
gag in the throat. The ground beneath their feet was no longer
the soft muddy grass of the hill, but a foul-smelling, oozing
slush. Darkness lay over all the horizon with a few small
exceptional fires dotted here and there in the distance, and one
great blaze of light about a mile and a half away to the south-
east.
  Here, great fantastical towers stabbed at the night; huge
pinnacles and turrets flickered in the firelight that surged from a
thousand windows. It was an edifice that mocked reason,
ridiculed reality and jeered wildly at the night.
  "My father's palace," said Thor, "the Great Hall of Valhalla
where we must go."
  It was just on the tip of Kate's tongue to say that something
about the place was oddly familiar when the sound of horses'
hooves pounding through the mud came to them on the wind. At
a distance, between where they stood and the Great Hall of
Valhalla, a small number of flickering torches could be seen
jolting towards them.
  Thor once more studied the head of his hammer with interest,
brushed it with his forefinger and rubbed it with his thumb. Then
slowly he looked up, again he twisted round once, then twice
and a third time and then hurled the missile into the sky. This
time, however, he continued to hold on to its shaft with his right
hand, while with his left he held Kate's waist in his grasp.

Chapter 25





Cigarettes clearly intended to make themselves a major problem
for Dirk tonight.
  For most of the day, except for when he'd woken up, and
except for again shortly after he'd woken up, and except for
when he had just encountered the revolving head of Geoffrey
Anstey, which was understandable, and also except for when
he'd been in the pub with Kate, he had had absolutely no
cigarettes at all.
  Not one. They were out of his life, foresworn utterly. He
didn't need them. He could do without them. They merely
nagged at him like mad and made his life a living hell, but he
decided he could handle that.
  Now, however, just when he had suddenly decided, coolly,
rationally, as a clear, straightforward decision rather than merely
a feeble surrender to craving, that he would, after all, have a
cigarette, could he find one? He could not.
  The pubs by this stage of the night were well closed. The late
night corner shop obviously meant something different by "late
night" than Dirk did, and though Dirk was certain that he could
convince the proprietor of the rightness of his case through sheer
linguistic and syllogistic bravado, the wretched man wasn't
there to undergo it.
  A mile away there was a 24-hour filling station, but it turned
out just to have sustained an armed robbery. The plate glass was
shattered and crazed round a tiny hole, police were swarming
over the place. The attendant was apparently not badly injured,
but he was still losing blood from a wound in his arm, having
hysterics and being treated for shock, and no one would sell
Dirk any cigarettes. They simply weren't in the mood.
  "You could buy cigarettes in the blitz," protested Dirk.
"People took a pride in it. Even with the bombs falling and the
whole city ablaze you could still get served. Some poor fellow,
just lost two daughters and a leg, would still say `Plain or filter
tipped?' if you asked him."
  "I expect you would, too," muttered a white-faced young
policeman.
  "It was the spirit of the age," said Dirk.
  "Bug off," said the policeman.
  And that, thought Dirk to himself, was the spirit of this. He
retreated, miffed, and decided to prowl the streets with his hands
in his pockets for a while.
  Camden Passage. Antique clocks. Antique clothes. No
cigarettes.
  Upper Street. Antique buildings being ripped apart. No sign
of cigarette shops being put up in their place.
  Chapel Market, desolate at night. Wet litter wildly flapping.
Cardboard boxes, egg boxes, paper bags and cigarette packets-
empty ones.
  Pentonville Road. Grim concrete monoliths, eyeing the new
spaces in Upper Street where they hoped to spawn their horrid
progeny.
  King's Cross station. They must have cigarettes, for heaven's
sake. Dirk hurried on down towards it.
  The old frontage to the station reared up above the area, a
great yellow brick wall with a clock tower and two huge arches
fronting the two great train sheds behind. In front of this lay the
one-storey modern concourse which was already far shabbier
than the building, a hundred years its senior, which it obscured
and generally messed up. Dirk imagined that when the designs
for the modern concourse had been drawn up the architects had
explained that it entered into an exciting and challenging
dialogue with the older building.
  King's Cross is an area where terrible things happen to
people, to buildings, to cars, to trains, usually while you wait,
and if you weren't careful you could easily end up involved in a
piece of exciting and challenging dialogue yourself. You could
have a cheap car radio fitted while you waited, and if you turned
your back for a couple of minutes, it would be removed while
you waited as well. Other things you could have removed while
you waited were your wallet, your stomach lining, your mind
and your will to live. The muggers and pushers and pimps and
hamburger salesmen, in no particular order, could arrange all
these things for you.
  But could they arrange a packet of cigarettes, thought Dirk,
with a mounting sense of tension. He crossed York Way,
declined a couple of surprising offers on the grounds that they
did not involve cigarettes in any immediately obvious way,
hurried past the closed bookshop and in through the main
concourse doors, away from the life of the street and into the
safer domain of British Rail.
  He looked around him.
  Here things seemed rather strange and he wondered why, but
he only wondered this very briefly because he was also
wondering if there was anywhere open selling cigarettes and
there wasn't.
  He sagged forlornly. It seemed to him that he had been
playing catch-up with the world all day. The morning had
started in about as disastrous a way as it was possible for a
morning to start, and he had never managed to get a proper grip
on it since. He felt like somebody trying to ride a bolting horse,
with one foot in a stirrup and the other one still bounding along
hopefully on the ground behind. And now even as simple a thing
as a cigarette was proving to be beyond his ability to get hold of.
  He sighed and found himself a seat, or at least, room on a
bench.
  This was not an immediately easy thing to do. The station
was more crowded than he had expected to find it at - what was
it? he looked up at the clock - one o'clock in the morning. What
in the name of God was he doing on King's Cross station at one
o'clock in the morning, with no cigarette and no home that he
could reasonably expect to get into without being hacked to
death by a homicidal bird?
  He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass the
time. He looked around himself, and after a while the impulse to
feel sorry for himself gradually subsided as he began to take in
his surroundings.
  What was strange about it was seeing such an immediately
familiar place looking so unfamiliar. There was the ticket office,
still open for ticket sales, but looking sombre and beleaguered
and wishing it was closed.
  There was the W.H.Smith, closed for the night. No one would
be needing any further newspapers or magazines tonight, except
for purposes of accommodation, and old ones would do just as
well for sleeping under.
  The pimps and hookers, drug-pushers and hamburger
salesmen were all outside in the streets and in the hamburger
bars. If you wanted quick sex or a dirty fix or, God help you, a
hamburger, that was where you went to get it.
  Here were the people that nobody wanted anything from at
all. This was where they gathered for shelter until they were
periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted
from them, in fact - their absence. That was in hot demand, but
not easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere.
  Dirk looked from one to another of the men and women
shuffling round or sitting hunched in seats or struggling to try
and sleep across benches that were specifically designed to
prevent them from doing exactly that.
  "Got a fag, mate?"
  "What? No, I'm sorry. No, I haven't got one," replied Dirk,
awkwardly patting his coat pockets in embarrassment, as if to
suggest the making of a search which he knew would be
fruitless. He was startled to be summoned out of his reverie like
this.
  "Here you are, then." The old man offered him a beat-up one
from a beat-up packet.
  "What? Oh. Oh - thanks. Thank you " Momentarily taken
aback by the offer, Dirk nevertheless accepted the cigarette
gratefully, and took a light from the tip of the cigarette the old
man was smoking himself.
  "What you come hene for then?" asked the old man - not
challenging, just curious.
  Dirk tried to look at him without making it seem as if he was
looking him up and down. The man was wildly bereft of teeth,
had startled and matted hair, and his old clothes were well
mulched down around him, but the eyes which sagged out of his
face were fairly calm. He wasn't expecting anything worse than
he could deal with to happen to him.
  "Well, just this in fact," said Dirt, twiddling the cigarette.
"Thanks. Couldn't find one anywhere."
  "Oh ah," said the old man.
  "Got this mad bird at home," said Dirk. "Kept attacking me."
  "Oh ah," said the man, nodding resignedly.
  "I mean an actual bird," said Dirk, "an eagle."
  "Oh ah."
  "With great wings."
  "Oh ah."
  "Got hold of me with one of its talons through the letter-box."
  "Oh ah."
  Dirk wondered if it was worth pursuing the conversation
much further. He lapsed into silence and looked around.
  "You're lucky it didn't slash at you with its beak as well,"
said the old man after a while. "An eagle will do that when
roused."
  "It did!" said Dirk. "It did! Look, right here on my nose. That
was through the letter-box as well. You'd scarcely believe it!
Talk about grip! Talk about reach! Look at what it did to my
hand!"
  He held it out for sympathy. The old man gave it an
appraising look.
  "Oh ah," he said at last, and retreated into his own thoughts.
  Dirk drew his injured hand back.
  "Know a lot about eagles, then, do you?"
  The man didn't answer, but seemed instead to retreat still
further.
  "Lot of people here tonight," Dirk ventured again, after a
while.
  The man shrugged. He took a long drag on his cigarette, half
closing his eyes against the smoke.
  "Is it always like this? I mean, are there always so many
people here at night?"
  The man merely looked down, slowly releasing the smoke
from his mouth and nostrils.
  Yet again, Dirk looked around. A man a few feet away, not so
old-looking as Dirk's companion but wildly deranged in his
demeanour, had sat nodding hectically over a bottle of cooking
brandy all this time. He slowly stopped his nodding, screwed
with difficulty a cap on to the bottle, and slipped it into the
pocket of his ragged old coat. An old fat woman who had been
fitfully browsing through the bulging black bin liner of her
possessions began to twist the top of it together and fold it.
  "You'd almost think that something was about to happen,"
said Dirk.
  "Oh ah," said his companion. He put his hands on his knees,
bent forward and raised himself painfully to his feet. Though he
was bent and slow, and though his clothes were dirt-ridden and
tattered, there was some little power and authority there in his
bearing.
  The air which he unsettted as he stood, which flowed out
from the folds of his skin and ctothes, was richly pungent even
to Dirk's numbed nostrils. It was a smell that never stopped
coming at you - just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it
struck on upwards with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that his
very brain would vaporise.
  He tried not to choke, indeed he tried to smile courteously
without allowing his eyes to run as the man turned to him and
said, "Infuse some blossom of the bitter orange. Add some
sprinklings of sage while it is still warm. This is very good for
eagle wounds. There are those who will add apricot and almond
oil and even, the heavens defend us, sedra. But then there are
always those that will overdo things. And sometimes we have
need of them. Oh ah."
  With that he turned away once more and joined the growing
stream of pathetic, hunched and abused bodies that were heading
for the front exit from the station. In all about two, maybe three
dozen were leaving. Each seemed to be leaving separatety, each
for his or her entirely independent reasons, and not following
too fast the one upon the other, and yet it was not hard to tell, for
anyone who cared to watch these people that no one cared to
watch or see, that they were leaving together and in a stream.
  Dirk carefulty nursed his cigarette for a minute or so and
watched them intently as one by one they left. Once he was
certain that there were no more to go, and that the last two or
three of them were at the door, he dropped the cigarette and
ground it out with his heel. Then he noticed that the old man had
left behind his crumpled cigarette packet. Dirk looked inside and
saw that there were still two bedraggled cigarettes left. He poc-
keted it, stood up, and quietly followed at a distance that he
thought was properly respectful.
  Outside on the Euston Road the night air was grumbling and
unsettled. He loitered idly by the doorway, watching which way
they went - to the west. He took one of the cigarettes out and lit
it and then idled off westwards himself, around the taxi rank and
towards St Pancras Street.
  On the west side of St Pancras Street, just a few yards north
of the Euston Road, a flight of steps leads up to the forecourt of
the old Midland Grand Hotel, the huge, dark gothic fantasy of a
building which stands, empty and desolate, across the front of St
Pancras railway station.
  Over the top of the steps, picked out in gold letters on
wrought-iron-work, stands the name of the station. Taking his
time, Dirk followed the last of the band of old tramps and
derelicts up these steps, which emerged just to the side of a
small, squat, brick building which was used as a car-park. To the
right, the great dark hulk of the old hotel spread off into the
night, its roofline a vast assortment of wild turrets, gnarled
spires and pinnacles which seemed to prod at and goad the night
sky.
  High in the dim darkness, silent stone figures stood guard
behind long shields, grouped around pilasters behind wrought-
iron railings. Carved dragons crouched gaping at the sky as Dirk
Gently, in his flapping leather coat, approached the great iron
portals which led to the hotel, and to the great vaulted train shed
of St Pancras station. Stone figures of winged dogs crouched
down from the top of pillars.
  Here, in the bridged area between the hotel entrance and the
station booking hall, was parked a large unmarked grey
Mercedes van. A quick glance at the front of it was enough to
tell Dirk that it was the same one which had nearly forced him
off the road several hours earlier in the Cotswolds.
  Dirk walked into the booking hall, a large space with great
panelled walls along which were spaced fat marble columns in
the form of tonch holders.
  At this time of night the ticket office was closed - trains do
not run all night from St Pancras - and beyond it the vast
chamber of the station itself, the great Victorian train shed, was
shrouded in darkness and shadow.
  Dirk stood quietly secluded in the entrance to the booking
hall and watched as the old tramps and bag tadies, who had
entered the station by the main entrance from the forecourt,
mingled together in the dimness. There were now many more
than two dozen of them, perhaps as many as a hundred, and
there seemed to be about them an air of repressed excitement
and tension.
  As they moved about it seemed to Dirk after a while that,
though he had been surprised at how many of them there had
been when he first arrived, there seemed now to be fewer and
fewer of them. He peered into the gloom trying to make out
what was happening. He detached himself from his seclusion in
the entrance to the booking hall and entered the main vault, but
kept himself nevertheless as close to the side wall as possible as
he ventured in towards them.
  There were definitely fewer still of them now, a mere handful
left. He had a distinct sense of people slipping away into the
shadows and not re-emerging from them.
  He frowned at them.
  The shadows were deep but they weren't that deep. He began
to hurry forward, and quickly threw all caution aside to reach the
small remaining group. But by the time he reached the centre of
the concourse where they had been gathered there were none
remaining at all and he was left whirling round in confusion in
the middle of the great, dark, empty railway station.

Chapter 26





The only thing which prevented Kate screaming was the sheer
pressure of air rushing into her lungs as she hurtled into the sky.
  When, a few seconds later, the blinding acceleration eased a
little, she found she was gulping and choking, her eyes were
stinging and streaming to the extent that she could hardly see,
and there was hardly a muscle in her body which wasn't
gibbering with shock as waves of air pummelled past her, tear-
ing at her hair and clothes and making her knees, knuckles and
teeth batter at each other.
  She had to struggle with herself to suppress her urge to
struggle. On the one hand she absolutely certainly did not want
to be let go of. Insofar as she had any understanding at all of
what was happening to her she knew that she did not want to be
let go of. On the other hand the physical shock of it was facing
some stiff competition from her sheer affronted rage at being
suddenly hauled into the sky without warning. The result of this
was that she struggled rather feebly and was angry at herself for
doing so. She ended up clinging to Thor's arm in the most abject
and undignified way.
  The night was dark, and the blessing of this, she supposed,
was that she could not see the ground. The lights she had seen
dotted here and there in the distance now swung sickeningly
away beneath her, but her instincts would not identify them as
representing ground. Already the flickering beacons which
shone from the insanely turreted building she had glimpsed
seconds before this outrage occurred were swaying away behind
her now at an increasing distance.
  They were still ascending.
  She could not struggle, she could not speak. She could
probably, if she tried, bite the stupid brute's arm, but she
contented herself with the idea of this rather than the actual
deed.
  The air was bad and rasped in her lungs. Her nose and eyes
were streaming, and this made it impossible for her to look
forward. When she did try it, just once, she caught a momentary
blurred glimpse of the head of the hammer streaking out through
the dark air of them, of Thor's arm grasping its stunted
handle and being pulled forward by it. His other arm was
gripped around her waist. The strength of him defied her
imagination but did not make her any the less angry.
  She got the feeling that they were now skimming along just
beneath the clouds. Every now and then they would be buffeted
by damp clamminess, and breathing would become yet harder
and more noxious. The wet air tasted bitter, and deadly cold, and
her streaming wet hair lashed and slammed about her face.
  She decided that the cold was definitely going to kill her, and
after a while was convinced that she was beginning to lose
consciousness. In fact she realised she was actually trying to
lose consciousness but she couldn't. Time slipped into a
greyness though, and she was less aware of how much of it was
passing.
  At last she began to sense that they were slowing and that
they were beginning to curve back downwards. This precipitated
fresh waves of nausea and disorientation in her, and she felt that
her stomach was being slowly turned through a mangle.
  The air was, if anything, getting worse. It smelled worse,
tasted more acrid and seemed to be getting a great deal more
turbulent. They were definitely slowing now, and the going was
becoming more and more difficult. The hammer was clearly
pointing downwards now, and finding its way along rather than
surging ahead.
  Down still further they went, battling through the thickening
clouds that swirled round them till it seemed that they must now
reach all the way down to the ground.
  Their speed had dropped to the point where Kate felt able to
look ahead now, though the acridity of the air was such that she
was only able to manage a very brief glance. In the moment that
she glanced, Thor released the hammer. She couldn't believe it.
He released it only for a fraction of a second, just to change his
grip on the thing, so that they were now hanging from the shaft
as it flew slowly forward, rather than being pulled along by it.
As he redistributed his weight into this new posture he hoisted
Kate firmly upwards as if pulling up a sock. Down they went,
and down further and further.
  There was now a roaring crashing sound borne in on them by
the wind from up ahead, and suddenly Thor was running,
leaping over rocky, sandy scrubland, dancing through the
knotted tussocks, and finally pounding and drumming his feet to
a halt.
  They stood still at last, swaying, but the ground on which
they stood was solid.
  Kate breathed for a few seconds, bending over to catch her
breath. She then pulled herself up to her full height and was
about to deliver a full account of her feelings concerning these
events at the top of her voice, when she suddenly got an
alarming sense of where she was standing.
  Though the night was dark, the wind whipping at her and the
pungent smell of it told her that some kind of sea was very close
by. The sound of wild crashing breakers told her that in fact it
was more or less beneath her, that they were standing very near
to the edge of a cliff. She gripped the arm of the insufferable god
who had brought her here and hoped, vainly, that it hurt him.
  As her reeling senses began gradually to calm down she
noticed that there was a dim light spreading away before her,
and after a while she realised that this was coming off the sea.
  The whole sea was glowing like an infection. It was rearing
itself up in the night, lunging and thrashing in a turmoil of itself
and then smashing itself to pieces in a frenzy of pain against the
rocks of the coast. Sea and sky seethed at each other in a
poisonous fury.
  Kate watched it speechlessly, and then became aware of Thor
standing at her shoulder.
  "I met you at an airport," he said, his voice breaking up in the
wind. "I was trying to get home to Norway by plane." He
pointed out to sea. "I wanted you to see why I couldn't come
this way."
  "Where are we? What is this?" asked Kate fearfully.
  "In your world, this is the North Sea," said Thor and turned
away inland again, walking heavily and dragging his hammer
behind him.
  Kate pulled her wet coat close around her and hurried after
him.
  "Well, why didn't you just fly home the way we just did but
in, well, in our world?"
  The rage in her had subsided into vague worries about
vocabulary.
  "I tried," responded Thor, still walking away.
  "Well, what happened?"
  "I don't want to talk about it."
  "What on earth's the point of that?"
  "I'm not going to discuss it."
  Kate shuddered in exasperation. "Is this godlike behaviour?"
she shouted. "It bothers you so you won't talk about it?"
  "Thor! Thor! Is it you?"
  This last was a thin voice trailing over the wind. Kate peered
into the wind. Through the darkness a lantern was bobbing
towards them from behind a low rise.
  "Is that you, Thor?" A little old lady came into view, holding
a lantern above her head, hobbling enthusiastically. "I thought
that must be your hammer I saw. Welcome!" she chirruped.
"Oh, but you come in dismal times. I was just putting the pot on
and thinking of having a cup of something and then perhaps
killing myself, but then I said to myself, just wait a couple of
days longer, Tsuliwa..., Tsuwila..., Swuli..., Tsuliwa�nsis - I
can never pronounce my own name properly when I'm talking
to myself, and it drives me hopping mad, as I'm sure you can
imagine, such a bright boy as I've always maintained, never
mind what those others say, so I said to myself, Tsuliwa�nsis,
see if anyone comes along, and if they don't, well, then might be
a good time to think about killing myself. And look! Now here
you are! Oh, but you are welcome, welcome! And I see you've
brought a little friend. Are you going to introduce me? Hello,
my dear, hello! My name's Tsuliwa�nsis and I won't be at all
offended if you stutter."
  "I... I'm, er, Kate," said Kate, totally flummoxed.
  "Yes, well I'm sure that will be all right," said the old woman
sharply. "Anyway, come along if you're coming. If you're going
to hang around out here all night I may as well just get straight
on with killing myself now and let you get your own tea when
you're quite ready. Come along!"
  She hurried on ahead, and in a very few yards they reached a
terrible kind of ramshackle structure of wood and mud which
looked as if it had become unaccountably stuck while half way
through collapsing. Kate glanced at Thor, hoping to read some
kind of reaction from him to give her a bearing on the situation,
but he was occupied with his own thoughts and was clearly not
about to share them. Thene seemed to her to be a difference in
the way he moved, though. In the brief experience she had of
him he seemed constantly to be struggling with some internal
and constrained anger, and this, she felt, had lifted. Not gone
away, just lifted. He stood aside to allow her to enter
Tsuliwa�nsis's shack, and brusquely gestured her to go in. He
followed, ducking absurdly, a few seconds later, having paused
for a moment outside to survey what little could be seen of the
surrounding landscape.
  Inside was tiny. A few boards with straw for a bed, a
simmering pot hung over a fire, and a box tucked away in the
corner for sitting on.
  "And this is the knife I was thinking of using, you see," said
Tsuliwa�nsis, fussing around. "Just been sharpening it up nicely,
you see. It comes up very nice if you get a nice sweeping action
with the stone, and I was thinking here would be a good place,
you see? Here on the wall, I can stick the handle in this crack so
it's held nice and firm, and then just go fling! And fling myself
at it. Fling! You see? I wonder, should it be a little lower, what
do you think, my dear? Know about these things, do you?"
  Kate explained that she did not, and managed to sound
reasonably calm about it.
  "Tsuliwa�nsis," said Thor, "we have come not to stay but
to...Tsuli - please put the knife down."
  Tsuliwa�nsis was standing looking up at them quite chirpily,
but she was also holding the knife, with its great heavy sweeping
blade, poised over her own left wrist.
  "Don't mind me, dears," she said, "I'm quite comfortable. I
can just pop off any time I'm ready. Happy to. These times are
not to live in. Oh, no. You go off and be happy. I won't disturb
your happiness with the sound of me screaming. I'll hardly
make a sound with the knife as you go." She stood quivering
and challenging.
  Carefully, almost gently, Thor reached out and drew the knife
away and out of her shaking hand. The old woman seemed to
crumple as it went, and all the performance faded out of her. She
sat back in a heap on her box. Thor squatted down in front of
her, slowly drew her to him and hugged her. She gradually
seemed to come back to life, and eventually pushed him away
telling him not to be so stupid, and then made a bit of a fuss of
smoothing out her hopelessly ragged and dirty black dress.
  When once she had composed herself properly she turned her
attention to Kate and looked her up and down.
  "You're a mortal, dear, aren't you?" she said at last.
  "Well... yes," said Kate.
  "I can tell it from your fancy dress. Oh, yes. Well, now you
see what the world looks like from the other side, don't you,
dear? What do you think then?"
  Kate explained that she did not yet know what to think. Thor
sat himself down on the floor and leant his big head back against
the wall, half-closing his eyes. Kate had the sense that he was
preparing himself for something.
  "It used to be things were not so different," continued the old
woman. "Used to be lovely here, you know, all lovely. Bit of
give and take between us. Terrible rows, of course, terrible
fights, but really it was all lovely. Now?" She let out a long and
tired sigh, and brushed a bit of nothing much off the wall.
  "Oh, things are bad," she said, "things are very bad. You see
things get affected by things. Our world affects your world, your
world affects our world. Sometimes it is hard to know exactly
what that effect is. Very often it is hard to like it, either. Most of
them, these days, are difficult and bad. But our worlds are so
nearly the same in so many ways. Where in your world you have
a building there will be a structure here as well. Maybe it will be
a small muddy hillock, or a beehive, or an abode like this one.
Maybe it will be something a little grander, but it will be
something. You all right, Thor, dear?"
  The Thunder God closed his eyes and nodded. His elbows lay
easily across his knees. The ragged strips of Kate's nightgown
bound about his left forearm were limp and wet. He idly pushed
them off.
  "And where there is something which is not dealt with
properly in your world," the old lady pranled on, "as like as not
it will emerge in ours. Nothing disappears. No guilty secret. No
unspoken thought. It may be a new and mighty god in our world,
or it may be just a gnat, but it will be here. I might add that these
days it is more often a gnat than a new and mighty god. Oh,
there are so many more gnats and fewer immortal gods than
once there were."
  "How can there be fewer immortals?" asked Kate. "I don't
want to be pedantic about it, but - "
  "Well, there's being immortal, dear, and then again there's
being immortal. I mean, if I could just get this knife properly
secured and then work up a really good fling, we'd soon see
who was immortal and who wasn't."
  "Tsuli..." admonished Thor, but didn't open his eyes to do it.
  "One by one we're going, though. We are, Thor. You're one
of the few that care. There's few enough now that haven't
succumbed to alcoholism or the onx."
  "What is that? Some kind of disease?" asked Kate. She was
beginning to feel cross again. Having been dragged unwillingly
from her flat and hurled across the whole of East Anglia on the
end of a hammer, she was irritated at being then just abandoned
to a conversation with an insanely suicidal old woman while
Thor just sat and looked content with himself, leaving her to
make an effort she was not in a mood to make.
  "It's an affliction, dear, which only gods get. It really means
that you can't take being a god any more, which is why only
gods get it you see."
  "I see."
  "In the final stages of it you simply lie on the ground and
after a while a tree grows out of your head and then it's all over.
You rejoin the earth, seep into its bowels, flow through its vital
arteries, and eventually emerge as a great pure torrent of water,
and as like as not get a load of chemical waste dumped into you.
It's a grim business being a god nowadays, even a dead god.
  "Well," she said, patting her knees. Her eyes hovered on
Thor, who had opened his eyes but was only using them to stare
at his own knuckles and fingertips. "Well, I hear you have an
appointment tonight, Thor."
  "Hmm," grunted Thor, without moving.
  "I hear you've called together the Great Hall for the
Challenging Hour, is that right?"
  "Hmm," said Thor.
  "The Challenging Hour, hmm? Well, I know that things have
not been too good between you and your father for a long time.
Hmm?"
  Thor wasn't going to be drawn. He said nothing.
  "I thought it was quite dreadful about Wales," continued
Tsuliwa�nsis. "Don't know why you stood for it. Of course I
realise that he's your father and the All-Father which makes it
difficult. But, Odin, Odin - I've known him for so long. You
know that he made a deal once to sacrifice one of his own eyes
in exchange for wisdom? Of course you do, dear, you're his son,
aren't you? Well, what I've always said is he should stand up
and make a fuss about that particular deal, demand his eye back.
Do you know what I mean by that, Thor? And that horrible Toe
Rag. There's someone to be careful of, Thor, very careful
indeed. Well, I expect I shall hear all about it in the morning,
won't I?"
  Thor slid his back up the wall and stood up. He clasped the
old woman warmly by the hands and smiled a tight smile, but
said nothing. With a slight nod he gestured to Kate that they
were leaving. Since leaving was what she most wanted in all the
world to do she resisted the temptation to say "Oh yeah?" and
kick up a fuss about being treated like this. Meekly she bade a
polite farewell to the old woman and made her way out into the
murky night. Thor followed her.
  She folded her arms and said, "Well? Where now? What
other great social events have you got in store for me this
evening?"
  Thor prowled around a linle, examining the ground. He
pulled out his hammer, and weighed it appreciatively in his
hands. He peered out into the night, and swung the hammer a
couple of times, idly. He swung himself round a couple of times,
again not hard. He loosed the hammer, which bounded off into
the night and split open a casually situated rock a couple of
dozen yards away and then bounded back. He caught it easily,
tossed it up into the air and caught it easily again.
  Then he turned to her and looked her in the eye for the first
time.
  "Would you like to see something?" he asked.

Chapter 27





A gust of wind blew through the huge vaults of the empty
station and nearly provoked in Dirk a great howl of frustration at
the trail that had so suddenly gone cold on him. The cold
moonlight draped itself through the long ranges of glass panels
that extended the length of the St Pancras station roof.
  It fell on empty rails, and illuminated them. It fell on the train
departures board, it fell on the sign which explained that today
was a Blue Saver Day and illuminated them both.
  Framed in the archway formed by the far end of the vaulted
roof were the fantastical forms of five great gasometers, the
supporting superstructures of which seemed in their
adumbrations to be tangled impossibly with each other, like the
hoops of an illusionist's conjuring trick. The moonlight
illuminated these as well, but Dirk it did not illuminate.
  He had watched upwards of a hundred people or so simply
vanish into thin air in a way that was completely impossible.
That in itself did not give him a problem. The impossible did not
bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be done, then
obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?
  He paced the area of the station which they had all vanished
from, and scanned everything that could be seen from every
vantage point within it, looking for any clue, any anomaly,
anything that might let him pass into whatever it was he had just
seen a hundred people pass into as if it was nothing. He had the
sense of a major party taking place in the near vicinity, to which
he had not been invited. In desperation he started to spin around
with his arms outstretched, then decided this was completely
futile and lit a cigarette instead.
  He noticed that as he had pulled out the packet, a piece of
paper had fluttered from his pocket, which, once the cigarette
was burning well, he stooped to retrieve.
  It was nothing exciting, just the bill he had picked up from
the stroppy nurse in the caf�. "Outrageous," he thought about
each of the items in turn as he scanned down them, and was
about to screw it up and throw it away when a thought struck
him about the general layout of the document.
  The items charged were listed down the left hand side, and
the actual charges down the right.
  On his own bills when he issued them, when he had a client,
which was rare at the moment, and the ones he did have seemed
unable to stay alive long enough to receive his bills and be
outraged by them, he usually went to a little trouble about the
items charged. He constructed essays, little paragraphs to
describe them. He liked the client to feel that he or she was
getting his or her money's worth in this respect at least.
  In short, the bills he issued corresponded in layout almost
exactly to the wad of papers with indecipherable runic scripts
which he had been unable to make head or tail of a couple of
hours previously. Was that helpful? He didn't know. If the wad
was not a contract but a bill, what might it be the bill for? What
services had been performed? They must certainly have been
intricate services. Or at least, intricately described services.
Which professions might that apply to? It was at least something
to think about. He screwed up the caf� bill and moved off to
throw it into a bin.
  As it happened, this was a fortuitous move.
  It meant that he was away from the central open space of the
station, and near a wall against which he could press himself
inconspicuously when he suddenly heard the sound of two pairs
of feet crossing the forecourt outside.
  In a few seconds, they entered the main part of the station, by
which time Dirk was well out of sight round the angle of a wall.
  Being well out of sight worked less well for him in another
respect, which was that for a while he was unable to see the
owners of the feet. By the time he caught a glimpse of them,
they had reached exactly the same area where a few minutes
previously a small horde of people had, quietly and without fuss,
vanished.
  He was surprised by the red spectacles of the woman and the
quietly tailred Italian suit of the man, and also the speed with
which they themselves then immediately vanished.
  Dirk stood speechless. The same two damn people who had
been the bane of his life for the entire day (he allowed himself
this slight exaggeration on the grounds of extreme provocation)
had now flagrantly and deliberately disappeared in front of his
eyes.
  Once he was quite certain that they had absolutely definitely
vanished and were not merely hiding behind each other, he
ventured out once more into the mysterious space.
  It was bafflingly ordinary. Ordinary tarmacadam, ordinary
air, ordinary everything. And yet a quantity of people that would
have kept the Bermuda triangle industry happy for an entire
decade had just vanished in it within the space of five minutes.
  He was deeply aggravated.
  He was so deeply aggravated that he thought he would share
the sense of aggravation by phoning someone up and
aggravating them - as it would be almost certain to do at twenty
past one in the morning.
  This wasn't an entirely arbitrary thought - he was still
anxious concerning the safety of the American girl, Kate
Schechter, and had not been at all reassuned to have been
answered by her machine when last he had called. By now she
should surely be at home and in bed asleep, and would be
reassuringly livid to be woken by a meddling phone call at this
time.
  He found a couple of coins and a working telephone and
dialled her number. He got her answering machine again.
  It said that she had just out for the night to Asgard.
She wasn't certain which parts of Asgard they were going to but
they would probably swing by Valhalla later, if the evening was
up to it. If he cared to leave a message she would deal with it in
the morning if she was still alive and in the mood. There were
some beeps, which rang on in Dirk's ear for seconds after he
heard them.
  "Oh," he said, realising that the machine was currently busy
taping him, "good heavens. Well, I thought the arrangement was
that you were going to call me befone doing anything
impossible."
  He put the phone down, his head spinning angrily. Valhalla,
eh? Was that where everybody was going to tonight except him?
He had a good mind to go home, go to bed and wake up in the
grocery business.
  Valhalla.
  He looked about him once again, with the name Valhalla
ringing in his ears. There was no doubt, he felt, that a space this
size would make a good feasting hall for gods and dead heroes,
and that the empty Midland Grand Hotel would be almost worth
moving the shebang from Norway for.
  He wondered if it made any difference knowing what it was
you were walking into.
  Nervously, tentatively, he walked across and through the
space in question. Nothing. Oh well. He turned, and
stood surveying it for a moment or two while he took a couple
of slow drags on the cigarette he had got from the tramp. The
space didn't look any different.
  He walked back through it again, this time a little less
tentatively, but with slow positive steps. Once again, nothing
happened, but then just as he was moving out of it at the end he
half fancied that he half heard a half moment of some kind of
raucous sound, like a burst of white noise on a twisted radio dial.
He turned once more, and headed back into the space, moving
his head carefully round trying to pick up the slightest sound.
For a while he didn't catch it, then suddenly there was a snatch
of it that burst around him and was gone. A movement and
another snatch. He moved very, very slowly and carefully. With
the most slight and gentle movements, trying to catch at the
sound he moved his head round what seemed like a billionth
part of a billionth part of a degree, slipped behind a molecule
and was gone.
  He had instantly to duck to avoid a great eagle swooping out
of the vast space at him.

Chapter 28






It was another eagle, a different eagle. The next one was a
different eagle too, and the next. The air seemed to be thick with
eagles, and it was obviously impossible to enter Valhalla
without getting swooped on by at least half a dozen of them.
Even eagles were being swooped on by eagles.
  Dirk threw up his arms over his head to fend off the wild,
beating flurries, turned, tripped and fell down behind a huge
table on to a floor of heavy, damp, earthy straw. His hat rolled
under the table. He scrambled after it, stuffed it back firmly on
his head, and slowly peered up over the table.
  The hall was dark, but alive with great bonfires.
  Noise and woodsmoke filled the air, and the smells of
roasting pigs, roasting sheep, roasting boar, and sweat and
reeking wine and singed eagle wings.
  The table he was crouched behind was one of countless slabs
of oak on trestles that stretched in every direction, laden with
steaming hunks of dead animals, huge breads, great iron beakers
slopping with wine and candles like wax anthills. Massive
sweaty figures seethed around them, on them, eating, drinking,
fighting over the food, fighting in the food, fighting with the
food.
  A yard or so from Dirk, a warrior was standing on top of a
table fighting a pig which had been roasting for six hours, and he
was clearly losing, but losing with vim and spirit and being
cheered on by other warriors who were dousing him down with
wine from a trough.
  The roof - as much of it as could be made out at this distance,
and by the dark and flickering light of the bonfires - was made
of lashed-together shields.
  Dirk clutched his hat, kept his head down and ran, trying to
make his way towards the side of the hall. As he ran, feeling
himself to be virtually invisible by reason of being completely
sober and, by his own lights, normally dressed, he seemed to
pass examples of every form of bodily function imaginable,
other than actual teeth-cleaning.
  The smell, like that of the tramp in King's Cross station, who
must surely be here participating, was one that never stopped
coming at you. It grew and grew until it seemed that your head
had to become bigger and bigger to accommodate it. The din of
sword on sword, sword on shield, sword on flesh, flesh on flesh
was one that made the eardrums reel and quiver and want to cry.
He was pummelled, tripped, elbowed, shoved and drenched with
wine as he scumed and pushed through the wild throng, but
arrived at last at a side wall - massive slabs of wood and stone
faced with sheets of stinking cow hide.
  Panting, he stopped for a moment, looked back and surveyed
the scene with amazement.
  It was Valhalla.
  Of that there would be absolutely no question. This was not
something that could be mocked up by a catering company. And
the whole seething, wild mass of carousing gods and warriors
and their caroused-at ladies, with their shields and fires and
boars did seem to fill a space that must be something
approaching the size of St Pancras station. The sheer heat that
rose off it all seemed as if it should suffocate the flocks of
deranged eagles which thrashed through the air above them.
  And maybe it was. He was by no means certain that a flock of
enraged eagles which thought that they might be suffocating
would behave significantly differently from many of the eagles
he was currently watching.
  There was something he had been putting off wondering
while he had fought his way through the mass, but the time had
come to wonder it now.
  What, he wondered, about the Draycotts?
  What could the Draycotts possibly be doing here? And
whene, in such a m�l�e, could the Draycotts possibly be?
  He narrowed his eyes and peered into the heaving throng, try-
ing to see if he could locate anywhere a pair of red designer
spectacles or a quiet Italian suit mingling out there with the
clanging breastplates and the sweaty leathers, knowing that the
attempt was futile but feeling that it should be made.
  No, he decided, he couldn't see them. Not, he felt, their kind
of party. Further reflections along these lines were cut short by a
heavy short-handled axe which hurtled through the air and
buried itself with an astounding thud in the wall about three
inches from his left ear and for a moment blotted out all thought.
  When he recovered from the shock of it, and let his breath
out, he thought that it was probably not somethiog that had been
thrown at him with malicious intent, but was merely warriorly
high spirits. Nevertheless, he was not in a partying mood and
decided to move on. He edged his way along the wall in the
direction which, had this actually been St Pancras station rather
than the hall of Valhalla, would have led to the ticket office. He
didn't know what he would find there, but he reckoned that it
must be different to this, which would be good.
  It seemed to him that things were generally quieter here, out
on the periphery.
  The biggest and best of the good tunes soemed to be
concentrated more strongly towanls the middle of the hall,
whereas the tables he was passing now seemed to be peopled
with those who looked as if they had teached that season in their
immortal lives when they preferred to contemplate the times
when they used to wrestle dead pigs, and to pass appreciative
comments to each other about the finer points of dead pig
wrestling technique, than actually to wrestle with one again
themselves just at the moment.
  He overheard one remark to his companion that it was the
left-handed three-fingered flat grip on the opponent's sternum
that was all-important at the crucial moment of finally not quite
falling over in a complete stupor, to which his companion
responded with a benign "Oh ah."
  Dirk stopped, looked and backtracked.
  Sitting hunched in a thoughtful posture over his iron plate,
and clad in heavily stained and matted furs and buckles which
were, if anything, more rank and stinking than the ensemble
Dirk had last encountered him in, was Dirk's companion from
the concourse at King's Cross station.
  Dirk wondered how to approach him. A quick backslap and a
"Hey! Good party. Lot of energy," was one strategy, but Dirk
didn't think it was the right one.
  While he was wondering, an eagle suddenly swooped down
from out of the air and, with a lot of beating and thrashing,
landed on the table in front of the old man, folded its wings and
advanced on him, demanding to be fed. Easily, the old man
pulled a bit of meat off a bone and held it up to the great bird,
which pecked it sharply but accurately out of his fingers.
  Dirk thought that this was the key to a friendly approach. He
leant over the table and picked up a small hunk of meat and
offered it in turn to the bird. The bird attacked him and went for
his neck, forcing him to try and beat the savage creature off with
his hat, but the introduction was made.
  "Oh ah," said the man, shooed the eagle away and shifted a
couple of inches along the bench. Though it was not a fulsome
invitation, it was at least an invitation. Dirk clambered over the
bench and sat down.
  `"Thank you," said Dirk, puffing.
  "Oh ah."
  "If you remember, we - "
  At that moment the most tremendous reverberating thump
sounded out across Velhalla. It was the sound of a drum being
beaten, but it sounded like a drum of immense proportions, as it
had to be to make itself heard over the tumult of noise with
which the hall was filled. The drum sounded three times, in slow
and massive beats, like the heartbeat of the hall itself.
  Dirk looked up to see where the sound might have come
from. He noticed for the first time that at the south end of the
hall, to which he had been heading, a great balcony or bridge
extended across most of its width. There were some figures up
there, dimly visible through the heat haze and the eagles, but
Dirk had a sense that whoever was up there presided over
whoever was down here.
  Odin, thought Dirk. Odin the All-Father must be up on the
balcony.
  The sound of the revels died down quickly, though it was
several seconds before the reverberations of the noise finally fell
away.
  When all was quiet, but expectant, a great voice rang out
from the balcony and through the hall.
  The voice said, '"The time of the Challenging Hour is nearly
at an end. The Challenging Hour has been called by the
God Thor. For the third time of asking, where is Thor?"
  A murmuring throughout the hall suggested that nobody
knew where Thor was and why he had not come to make his
challenge.
  The voice said, "This is a very grave affront to the dignity of
the All-Father. If there is no challenge before the expiration of
the hour, the penalty for Thor shall be correspondingly grave."
  The drum beat again three times, and the consternation in the
hall increased. Where was Thor?
  "He's with some girl," said a voice above the rest, and there
were loud shouts of laughter, and a return to the hubbub of
before.
  "Yes." said Dirk, quietly, "I expect he probably is."
  "Oh ah."
  Dirk had supposed that he was talking to himself and was
surprised to have elicited a response from the man, though not
particularly surprised at the response that had been elicited.
  "Thor called this meeting tonight?" Dirk asked him.
  "Oh ah."
  "Bit rude not to turn up."
  "Oh ah."
  "I expect everyone's n bit upset."
  "Not as long as there's enough pigs to go round."
  "Pigs?"
  "Oh ah."
  Dirk didn't immediately know how to go on from here.
  "Oh ah," he said, resignedly.
  "It's only Thor as really cares, you see," said the old man.
"Keeps on issuing his challenge, then not being able to prove it.
Can't argue. Gets all confused and angry, does something
stupid, can't sort it out and gets made to do a penance.
Everybody else just turns up for the pigs."
  "Oh ah." Dirk was learning a whole new conversational
technique and was astonished at how successful it was. He
regarded the man with a new-found respect.
  "Do you know how many stones there are in Wales?" asked
the man suddenly.
  "Oh ah," said Dirk warily. He didn't know this joke.
  "Nor do I. He won't tell anybody. Says count 'em yourself
and goes off in a sulk."
  "Oh ah." He didn't think it was a very good one.
  "So this time he hasn't even turned up. Can't say I blame
him. But I'm sorry, because I think he might be right."
  "Oh ah."
  The man lapsed into silence.
  Dirk waited.
  "Oh ah," he said again, hopefully.
  Nothing.
  "So, er," said Dirk, going for a cautious prompt, "you think
he might be right, eh?"
  "Oh ah."
  "So.Old Thor might be right, eh? That's the story," said
Dirk.
  "Oh ah."
  "In what way," said Dirk, running out of patience at last, "do
you think he might be right?"
  "Oh, every way."
  "Oh ah," said Dirk, defeated.
  "It's no secret that the gods have fallen on hard times," said
the old man, grimly. "That's clear for all to see, even for the
ones who only care about the pigs,which is most of 'em. And
when you feel you're not needed any more it can be hard to
think beyond the next pig,even if you used to have the whole
world there with you. Everyone just accepts it as inevitable.
Everyone except Thor, that is. And now he's given up. Hasn't
even bothered to turn up and break a pig with us.Given up his
challenge. Oh ah."
  "Oh ah," said Dirk.
  "Oh ah."
  "So, er, Thor's challenge then," said Dirk tentatively.
  "Oh ah."
  "What was it?"
  "Oh ah."
  Dirk lost his patience entirely and rounded on the man.
  "What was Thor's challenge to Odin?" he insisted angrily.
  The man looked round at him in slow surprise,lookcd him up
and down with his big sagging eyes.
  "You're a mortal, aren't you?"
  "Yes," said Dirk testily, "I'm a mortal. Of course I'm a
mortal. What has being a mortal got to do with it?"
  "How did you get here?"
  "I followed you." He pulled the screwed up, empty cigarette
packet out of his pocket and put it on the table. "Thanks," he
said, "I owe you."
  It was a pretty feeble type of apology, he thought, but it was
the best he could manage.
  "Oh ah." The man looked away.
  "What was Thor's challenge to Odin?" said Dirk, trying hard
to keep the impatience out of his voice this time.
  "What does it matter to you?" the old immortal said bitterly.
"You're a mortal. Why should you care? You've got what you
want out of it, you and your kind, for what little it's now worth."
  "Got what we want out of what?"
  "The deal," said the old immortal. "The contract that Thor
claims Odin has entered into."
  "Contract?" said Dirk. "What contract?"
  The man's face filled with an expression of slow anger. The
bonfires of Valhalla danced deeply in his eyes as he looked at
Dirk.
  "The sale," he said darkly, "of an immortal soul."
  "What?" said Dirk. He had already considered this idea and
discounted it. "You mean a man has sold his soul to him? What
man? It doesn't make sense."
  "No," said the man, "that wouldn't make sense at all. I said
an immortal soul. Thor says that Odin has sold his soul to Man."
  Dirk stared at him with horror and then slowly raised his eyes
to the balcony. Something was happening there. The great drum
beat out again, and the hall of Valhalla began to hush itself once
more. But a second or third drumbeat failed to come. Something
unexpected seemed to have occurred, and the figures on the
balcony were moving in some confusion. The Challenging Hour
was just expiring, but a challenge of some kind seemed to have
arrived.
  Dirk beat his palms to his forehead and swayed where he sat
as all kinds of realisations finally dawned on him.
  "Not to Man," he said, "but to a man, and a woman. A lawyer
and an advertiser. I said it was all her fault the moment I saw
her. I didn't realise I might actually be right." He rounded on his
companion urgently. "I have to get up there," he said, "for Gods'
sake, help me."

Chapter 29





"O...dddddiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!"
  Thor let out a bellow of rage which made the sky shake. The
heavy clouds let out a surprised grunt of thunder at the sheer
volume of air that moved beneath them. Kate started back, white
with fear and shock, with her ears ringing.
  "Toe Rag!!!!"
  He hurled his hammer to the ground right at his very feet with
both hands. He hurled it this short distance with such astounding
force that it hit and rebounded into the air up to about a hundred
feet.
  "Ggggrrrrrraaaaaaaah!!!!!!" With an immense explosion of air
from his lungs he hurled himself up into the air after it, caught it
just as it was beginning to drop, and hurled it straight back down
at the ground again, catching it again as it bounded back up,
twisting violently round in mid-air and hurling it with all the
force he could muster out to sea before falling to the ground
himself on his back, and pounding the earth with his ankles,
elbows and fists in an incredible tattoo of rage.
  The hammer shot out over the sea on a very low trajectory.
The head went down into the water and planed through it at a
constant depth of about six inches. A sharp ripple opened slowly
but easily across its surface, extending eventually to about a
mile as the hammer sliced its way through it like a surgeon's
knife. The inner walls of the ripple deepened smoothly in its
wake, falling away from the sheer force of the hammer, till a
vast valley had opened in the face of the sea. The walls of the
valley wobbled and swayed uncertainly, then folded up and
crashed together in crazed and foaming tumult. The hammer
lifted its head and swung up high into the air. Thor leapt to his
feet and watched it, still pounding his feet on the ground like a
boxer, but like a boxer who was perhaps about to precipitate a
major earthquake. When the hammer reached the top of its
trajectory, Thor hurled his fist downwards like a conductor, and
the hammer hurtled down into the crashing mass of sea.
  That seemed to calm the sea for a moment in the same way
that a smack in the face will calm a hysteric. The moment
passed. An immense column of watcr crupted out of the smack,
and seconds later the hammer exploded upwards out of its
centre, pulling another huge column of water up from the middle
of the first one.
  The hammer somersaulted at the top of its rise, turned, spun,
and rushed back to its owner like a wildly over-excited puppy.
Thor caught at it, but instead of stopping it he allowed it to carry
him backwards, and together they tumbled back through the
rocks for about a hundred yards and scuffled to a halt in some
soft earth.
  Instantly, Thor was back on his feet again. He turned round
and round, bounding from one leg to the other with strides of
nearly ten feet, swinging the hammer round him at arm's length.
When he released it again it raced out to sea once more, but this
time it tore round the surface in a giant semicircle, causing the
sea to rear up around its circumference to form for a moment a
gigantic amphitheatre of water. When it fell forward it crashed
like a tidal wave, ran forward and threw itself, enraged, against
the short wall of the cliff.
  The hammer returned to Thor, who threw it off again
instantly in a great overarm. It flew into a rock, hitting off a fat
angry spark. It bounded off further and hit a spark off another
rock, and another. Thor threw himself forward on to his knees,
and with each rock the hammer hit he pounded the ground with
his fist to make the rock rise to meet the hammer. Spark after
spark erupted from the rocks. The hammer hit each successive
one harder and harder, until one spark provoked a warning lick
of lightning from the clouds.
  And then the sky began to move, slowly, like a great angry
animal uncoiling in its lair. The pounding sparks flew faster and
heavier from the hammer, more lightning licks arced down to
meet them from the sky, and the whole earth was beginning to
tremble in something very like fearful excitement.
  Thor hauled his elbows up above his head and then thrust
them hard down with another ringing bellow at the sky.
  "O...ddddiiiiiiinnnnnn!!!!"
  The sky seemed about to crack open.
  "Toe Raaaaagggggggggg!!!!!!!!!"
  Thor throw himself into the ground, heaving aside about two
skipsful of rocky carth. He shook with expanding rage. With a
deep groan the whole of the side of the cliff began slowly to lean
forward into the sea as he pushed and shook. In a few seconds
more it tumbled heavily into the seething torment beneath it as
Thor clambered back, seized a rock the size of a grand piano and
held it above his head.
  Everything seemed still for a fleeting moment.
  Thor hurled the rock into the sea.
  He regained his hammer.
  "O...!" he bellowed.
  "...Ddddddddinnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!"
  His hammer cracked down.
  A torrent of water erupted from the ground, and the sky
exploded. Lightning flickered down like a white wall of light for
miles along the coast in either direction. Thunder roared like
colliding worlds and the clouds vomited rain that shattered the
ground. Thor stood exulting in the torrent.
  A few minutes later and the violence abated. A strong and
steady rain continued to fall. The clouds were cleansing
themselves and the weak rays of the early morning light began
to find their way through the thinning cover.
  Thor trudged back up from where he had been standing,
slapping and washing the mud from his hands. He caught at his
hammer when it flew to him.
  He found Kate standing watching him, shivering with
astonishment, fear and fury.
  "What was that all about?" she yelled at him.
  "I just needed to be able to lose my temper properly," he said.
When this didn't seem to satisfy her he added, "A god can show
off once in a while can't he?"
  The huddled figure of Tsuliwa�nsis came hurrying out
through the rain towards them.
  "You're a noisy boy, Thor," she scolded, "a noisy boy."
  But Thor was gone. When they looked, they guessed that he
must be the tiny speck hurtling northwards through the clearing
sky.

Chapter 30




Cynthia Draycott peered over the balcony at the sceene below
them with distaste. Valhalla was back in full swing.
  "I hate this," she said, "I don't want this going on in my life."
  "You don't have to, my darling," said Clive Draycott quietly
from behind her, with his hands on her shoulders. "It's all going
to be taken care of right now, and it's going to work out just
fine. Couldn't be better in fact. It's just what we wanted. You
know, you look fantastic in those glasses? They really suit you. I
mean really. They're very chic."
  "Clive, it was meant to have been taken care of originally.
The whole point was that we weren't to be troubled, we could
just do it, deal with it, and forget about it. That was the whole
point. I've put up with enough shit in my life. I just wanted it to
be good, 100 per cent. I don't want all this."
  "Exactly. And that's why this is so perfect for us. So perfect.
Clear breach of contract. We get everything we wanted now, and
we're released from all obligations. Perfecto. We come out of it
smelling of roses, and we have a life that is just 100 per cent
good. 100 per cent. And clean. Just exactly as you wanted it.
Really, it couldn't be better for us. Trust me."
  Cynthia Draycott hugged herself irritably.
  "So what about this new...person? Something else we have to
deal with."
  "It'll be so easy. So easy. Listen, this is nothing. We either
cut him in to it, or we cut him right out. It'll be taken care of
before we leave here. We'll buy him something. A new coat.
Maybe we'll have to buy him a new house. Know what that'll
cost us?" He gave a charming laugh. "It's nothing. You won't
ever even need to think about it. You won't ever even need to
think about not thinking about it. It's... that... easy. OK?"
  "Hm."
  "OK. I'll be right back."
  He turned and headed back into the ante-chamber of the hall
of the All-Fattier, smiling all the way.
  "So, Mr... " he made a show of looking at the card again
"... Gently. You want to act for these people do you?"
  "These immortal gods," said Dirk.
  "OK, gods," said Draycott. "'That's fine. Perhaps you'll do a
better job than the manic little hustler I had to deal with first
time out. You know, he's really quite a little character, our Mr
Rag, Mr Rag. You know, that guy was really quite amazing. He
did everything he could, tried every oldest trick in the book to
freak me out, and give me the run-around. You know how I deal
with people like that? Simple. I ignore it. I just...ignone it. If he
wants to play around and threaten and screech, and shovel in
five hundred and seventeen subclauses that he thinks he's going
to catch me out on, that's OK. He's just taking up time, but so
what? I've got time. I've got plenty of time for people like Mr
Rag. Because you know what the really crazy thing is? You
know what's really crazy? The guy cannot draw up an actual
contract to save his life. Really. To save...his...life. And I tell
you something, that's fine by me. He can thrash around and spit
all he likes - when he gets tired I just reel him in. Listen. I draw
up contracts in the recond business. These guys are just minnows
by comparison. They're primitive savages. You've met them.
You've dealt with them. They're primitive savages. Well, aren't
they? Like the Red Indians. They don't even know what they've
got. You know, these people are lucky they didn't meet some
real shark. I mean it. You know what America cost? You know
what the whole United States of America actually cost? You
don't, and neither do I. And shall I tell you why? The sum is so
negligible that someone could tell us what it was and two
minutes later we would have forgotten. It would have gone clean
out of our minds.
  "Now, compared with that, let me tell you, I am providing. I
am really providing. A private suite in the Woodshead Hospital?
Lavish attention, food, sensational quantities of linen.
Sensational. You could practically buy the United States of
America at today's prices for what that's all costing. But you
know what? I said, if he wants the linen, let him have the linen.
Just let him have it. It's fine. The guy's earned it. He can have
all the linen...he...wants. Just don't fuck with me is all.
  "Now let me tell you, this guy has a nice life. A nice life. And
I think that's what we all want, isn't it. A nice life. This guy
certainly did. And he didn't know how to have it. None of these
guys did. They're just kind of helpless in the modern world. It's
kind of tough for them and I'm just trying to help out. Let me
tell you how na�ve they are, and I mean na�ve.
  "My wife, Cynthia, you've met her, and let me tell you, she is
the best. I tell you, my relationship with Cynthia is so good- "
  "I don't want to hear about your relationship with your wife."
  "OK. That's fine. That's absolutely fine. I just think maybe
it's worth you getting to know a few things. But whatever you
want is fine. OK. Cynthia's in advertising. You know that. She
is a senior partner in a major agency. Major. They did some big
campaign, really big, a few years back in which some actor is
playing a god in this commercial. And he's endorsing some-
thing, I don't know, a soft drink, you know, tooth rot for kids.
  And Odin at this time is just a down and out. He's living on
the streets. He simply can't get anything together, because he's
just not for this world. All that power, but he doesn't
know how to make it work for him here, today. Now here's the
crazy part.
  "Odin sees this commercial on the television and he thinks to
himself, `Hey, I could do that, I'm a god.' He thinks maybe he
could get paid for being in a commercial. And you know what
that would be. Pays even less than the United States of America
cost, you follow me? Think about it. Odin, the chief and fount of
all the power of all of the Norse gods, thinks he might be able to
get paid for being in a television commercial to sell soft drinks.
  "And this guy, this god, literally goes out and tries to find
someone who'll let him in a TV commercial. Pathetically na�ve.
But also greedy - let's not forget greedy.
  "Anyway, he happens to come to Cynthia's attention. She's
just a lowly account executive at the time, doesn't pay any
attention, thinks he's just a whacko, but then she gets kind of
fascinated by how odd he is, and I get to see him. And you know
what? It dawns on us he's for real. The guy is for real. A real
actual god with the whole panoply of divine powers. And not
only a god, but like, the main one. The one all the others depend
on for their power. And he wants to be in a commercial. Let's
just say the word again shall we? A commercial.
  "The idea was dumbfounding. Didn't the guy know what he
had? Didn't he realise what his power could get him?
  "Apparently not. I have to tell you, this was the most
astounding moment in our lives. A...stoun...ding. Let me tell
you, Cynthia and I have always known that we were, well,
special people, and that something special would happen to us,
and here it was. Something special.
  "But look. We're not greedy. We don't want all that power,
all that wealth. And I mean, we're looking at the world here.
The whole...fucking...world. We could own the world if we
wanted to. But who wants to own the world? Think of the
trouble. We don't even want huge wealth, all those lawyers
accountants to deal with, and let me tell you I'm a layer. OK,
so you can hire people to look after your lawyers and
accountants for you, but who are those people going to be? Just
more lawyers and accountants. And you know, we don't even
want the responsibility for it all. It's too much.
  "So then I have this idea. It's like you buy a big property, and
then you sell on what you don't want. That way you get what
you want, and a lot of other people get what they want, only
they get it through you, and they feel a little obligated to you,
and they remember who they got it through because they sign a
piece of paper which says how obligated they feel to you. And
money flows back to pay for our Mr Odin's very, very, very
expensive private medical care.
  "So we don't have much, Mr Gently. One or two modestly
nice houses. One or two modestly nice cars. We have a very nice
life. Very, very nice indeed. We don't need much because
anything we need is always made available to us, it's taken care
of. All we demanded, and it was a very reasonable demand in
the circumstances, was that we didn't want to know any more
about it. We take our modest requirements and we bow out. We
want nothing more than absolute peace and absolute quiet, and a
nice life because Cynthia's sometimes a little nervous. OK.
  "And then what happens this morning? Right on our own
doorstep. Pow. It's disgusting. I mean it is really a disgusting
little number. And you know how it happened?
  "Here's how it happened. It's our friend Mr Rag again, and
he's tried to be a clever tricky little voodoo lawyer. It's so
pathetic. He has fun trying to waste my time with all his little
tricks and games and run-arounds, and then he tries to faze me
by presenting me with a bill for his time. That's nothing. It's
work creation. All lawyers do it. OK. So I say, I'll take your bill.
I'll take it, I don't care what it is. You give me your bill and I'll
see it's taken care of. It's OK. So he gives it to me.
  "It's only later I see it's got this tricky kind of subtotal thing
in it. So what? He's trying to be clever. He's given me a hot
potato. Listen, the record business is full of hot potatoes. You
just get them taken care of. There are always people happy to
take care of things for you when they want to make their way up
the ladder. If they're worthy of their place on the ladder, well,
they'll get it taken care of in return. You get a hot potato, you
pass it on. I passed it on. Listen, there were a lot of people who
are very happy to get things taken care of for me. Hey, you
know? It was really funny seeing how far and how fast that
particular potato got passed on. That told me a lot about who
was bright and who was not. But then it lands up in my back
garden, and that's a penalty clause job I'm afraid. The
Woodshead stuff is a very expensive little number, and I think
your clients may have blown it on that particular score. We have
the whip hand here. We can just cancel this whole thing. Believe
me, I have everything I could possibly want now.
  "But listen, Mr Gently. I think you understand my position.
We've been pretty frank with each other and I've felt good
about that. There are certain sensitivities involved, of course,
and I'm also in a position to be able to make a lot of things
happen. So perhaps we can come to any one of a number of
possible accommodations. Anything you want, Mr Gently, it can
be made to happen."
  "Just to see you dead, Mr Draycott," said Dirk Gently, "just
to see you dead."
  "Well fuck you, too."
  Dirk Gently turned and left the room and went to tell his new
client that he thought they might have a problem.

Chapter 31



A tittle while later a dark-blue BMVV pulled quietly nway fran
the otherwise deserted forecourt of St Pancras stadon and moved
off up the quiet streets.
  Somewhat dejected, Dirk Gently put on his hat and left his
newly acquired and newly relinquished client who said that he
wished to be alone now and maybe turn into a rat or something
like some other people he could mention.
  He closed the great doors behind him and walked slowly out
on to the balcony overlooking the great vaulted hall of gods and
heroes, Valhalla. He arrived just as the last few stragglers of the
revels were fading away, presumably to emerge at the same
moment in the great vaulted train shed of St Pancras station. He
stayed staring for a while at the empty hall, in which the bonfires
now were just fading embers.
  It then took the very slightest flicker of his head for him to
perform the same transition himself, and he found himself
standing in a gusty and dishevelled corridor of the empty
Midland Grand Hotel. Out in the great dark concourse of St
Pancras station he saw again the last stragglers from Valhalla
shuffling away and out into the cold streets of London to find
benches that were designed not to be slept on, and to try to sleep
on them.
  He sighed and tried to find his way out of the derelict hotel, a
task that proved more difficult than he anticipated, as immense
and as dark and as labyrinthine as it was. He found at last the
great winding gothic staircase which led all the way down to the
huge arches of the entrance lobby, decorated with carvings of
dragons and griffins and heavy ornamental ironwork. The main
front entrance was locked as it had been for years, and
eventually Dirk found his way down a side corridor to an exit
manned by a great sweaty splodge of a man who guarded it at
night. He demanded to know how Dirk had gained entrance to
the hotel and refused to be satisfied by any of his explanations.
In the end he had simply to allow Dirk to leave, since there was
little else he could do.
  Dirk crossed from this entrance to the entrance into the
station booking hall, and then into the station itself. For a while
he simply stood there looking around, and then he left via the
main station entrance, and descended the steps which led down
on to the St Pancras Road. As he emerged on to the street he was
so surprised not to be instantly swooped upon by a passing eagle
that he tripped and stumbled and was run over by the first of the
early morning's motorcycle couriers.

Chapter 32



With a huge crash, Thor surged through the wall at the far end of
the great hall of Valhalla and stood ready to proclaim to the
assembled gods and heroes that he had finally managed to break
through to Norway and had found a copy of the contract Odin
had signed buried deep in the side of a mountain, but he couldn't
because they'd all gone and there was no one there.
  "There's no one here," he said to Kate, releasing her from his
huge grip, "they've all gone."
  He slumped in disappointment.
  "Wh - " said Kate.
  "We'll try the old man's chambers," said Thor and hurled his
hammer up to the balcony, with themselves in tow.
  He stalked through the great chambers, ignoring Kate's pleas,
protests and general abuse.
  He wasn't there.
  "He's here somewhere," said Thor angrily, trailing his
hammer behind him.
  "We'll go through the world divide," he said, and took hold
of Kate again. They flicked themselves through.
  They were in a large bedroom suite in the hotel.
  Litter and scraps of rotting carpet covered the floors, the
windows were grimy with years of neglect. Pigeon droppings
were everywhere, and the peeling paintwork made it look as if
several small families of starfish had exploded on the walls.
  Thene was an abandoned trolleybed in the middle of the floor
in which an old man lay in beautifully laundered linen, weeping
from his one remaining eye.
  "I found the contract, you bastard," raged Thor, waving it at
him. "I found the deal you did. You sold all our power to...to a
lawyer and a...an advertiser and, and all sorts of other people.
You stole our power! You couldn't steal all of mine because I'm
too strong, but you kept me bewildered and confused, and made
bad things happen every time I got angry. You prevented me
getting back home to Norway by every method you could,
because you knew I'd find this! You and that poison dwarf Toe
Rag. You've been abusing and humiliating me for years, and - "
  "Yes, yes, we know all that," said Odin.
  "Well...Good!"
  "Thor - " said Kate.
  "Well I've shaken all that off now!" shouted Thor.
  "Yes, I see - "
  "I went somewhere I could get good and angry in pence,
when I knew you'd be otherwise occupied and expecting me to
be here, and I had a hell of a good shout and blew things up a
bit, and I'm all right now! And I'm going to tear this up for a
start!"
  He ripped right through the contract, threw the pieces in the
air and incinerated them with a look.
  "Thor - " said Kate.
  "And I'm going to put right all the things you made happen
so I'd be afraid of getting angry. The poor girl at the airline
check-in desk that got turned into a drink machine. Woof!
Wham! She's back! The jet fighter that tried to shoot me down
when I was flying to Norway! Woof! Wham! It's back! See, I'm
back in control of myself!"
  "What jet fighter?" asked Kate. "You haven't told me
about a jet fighter."
  "It tried to shoot me down over the North Sea. We had a
scrap and in the heat of the moment I, well, I turned it into
an eagle, and it's been bothering me ever since. So now
that's dealt with. Don't look at me like that. I did what I
could. I took care of his wife by fixing one of those lottery
things. Look," he added angrily, "all this has been very dif-
ficult for me, you know. All right. What else?"
  "My table lamp," said Kate quietly.
  "And Kate's table lamp! It shall be a small kitten no more!
Woof! Wham! Thor speaks and it is so! What was that noise?"
  A ruddy glow was spreading across the London skyline.
  Thor, I think there's something wrong with your father."
  "I should bloody well hope so. Oh. What's wrong? Father?
Are you all right?"
  "I have been so very, very foolish and unwise," wept Odin, "I
have been so wicked and evil, and - "
  "Yes, well that's what I think, too," said Thor and sat on the
cnd of his bed. "So what are we going to do?"
  "I don't think I could live without my linen, and my Sister
Bailey, and... It's been so, so, so long, and I'm so, so old. Toe
Rag said I should kill you, but I...I would rather have killed
myself. Oh, Thor..."
  "Oh," said Thor. "I see. Well. I don't know what to do now.
Blast. Blast everything."
  "Thor -"
  "Yes, yes, what is it?"
  "Thor, it's very simple what you do about your father and the
Woodshead," said Kate.
  "Oh yes? What then?"
  "I'll tell you on one condition."
  "Oh really? And what's that?"
  "That you tell me how many stones there are in Wales."
  "What!" exclaimed Thor in outrage. "Away from me! That's
years of my life you're talking about!"
  Kate shrugged.
  "No!" said Thor. "Anything but that! Anyway, he added
sullenly, "I told you."
  "No you didn't."
  "Yes I did. I said I lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan.
Well, I was hardly going to start again, was I? Think, girl,
think!

Chapter 33




Beating a path through the difficult territory to the north-east of
Valhalla - a network of paths that seemed to lead only to other
paths and then back to the first paths again for another try - went
two figures, one a big, stupid, violent creature with green eyes
and a scythe which hung from its belt and often seriously imped-
ed its progress, the other a small crazed creature who clung on to
the back of the bigger one, manically urging him on white actu-
aily impeding his progress still further.
  They attained at last a long, low, smelly building into which
they hurried shouting for horses. The old stable master came
forward, recognised them and, having heard already of their
disgrace, was at first disinclined to help them on their way. 'The
scythe flashed through the air and the stable master's head
started upwards in surprise while his body took an affronted step
backwards, swayed uncertainly, and then for lack of any further
instructions to the contrary keeled over backwards in its own
time. His head bounded into the hay.
  His assailants hurriedly lashed up two horses to a cart and
clattered away out of the stable yard and along the broader
thoroughfare which led upwards to the north.
  They made rapid progress up the road for a mile, Toe Rag
urging the horses on frantically with a long and cruel whip.
After a few minutes, however, the horses began to slow down
and to look about them uneasily. Toe Rag lashed them all the
harder, but they became more anxious still then suddenly lost all
control and reared in terror, turning over the cart and tipping its
occupants out on the ground, from which they instantly sprang
up in a rage.
  Toe Rag screamed at the terrified horses and then, out of the
corner of his eye, caught sight of what had so disturbed them.
  It wasn't so terrifying. It was just a large, white, metal box,
upturned on a pile of rubbish by the roadside and rattling itself.
  The horses were rearing and trying to bolt away from the big
white rattling thing but they were impossibly entangled in their
traces. They were only working themselves up into a thrashing
lather of panic. Toe Rag quickly realised that there would be no
calming them until the box was dealt with.
  "Whatever it is," he screeched at the green-eyed creature,
"kill it!"
  Green-eye unhooked his scythe from his belt once more and
clambered up the pile of rubbish to where the box was rattling.
He kicked it and it only rattled the more. He got his foot behind
it and with a heavy thrust shoved it away down the heap. The
big white box slithered a foot or so then turned over and toppled
to the ground. It rested there for a moment and then a door,
finally freed, flew open. The horses screamed in fear.
  Toe Rag and his green-eyed thug approached the thing with
worried curiosity, then staggered back in horror as a great and
powerful new god erupted from its innards.

Chapter 34





The following afternoon, at a comfortable distance from alI
these events, set at a comfortable distance from a well-
proportioned window through which the afternoon light was
streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a white bed. A
newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it
had been hurled two minutes before.
  The man was awake but not glad to be. His exquisitely frail
hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets and
quivered very faintly.
  His name was variously given as Mr Odwin, or Wodin, or
Odin. He was - is - a god, and furthermore he was a confused
and startled god.
  He was confused and startled because of the report he had
just been reading on the front page of the newspaper, which was
that another god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance
of himself. It didn't say so in so many words of course, it merely
described what had happened last night when a missing jet
fighter aircraft had mysteriously erupted under full power from
out of a house in North London into which it could not
conceivably have been thought to have fitted. It had instantly
lost its wings and gone into a screaming dive and crashed and
exploded in a main road. The pilot had managed to eject during
the few seconds he had had in the air, and had landed, shaken,
bruised, but otherwise unharmed, and babbling about strange
men with hammers flying over the North Sea.
  Luckily, because of the time at which the inexplicable
disaster had occurred, the roads were almost deserted, and apart
from massive damage to property, the only fatalities to have
occurred were the as yet unidentified occupants of a car which
was thought to have been possibly a BMW and possibly blue,
though because of the rather extreme nature of the accidcnt it
was rather hard to tell.
  He was very, very tired and did not want to think about it,
did not want to think about last night, did not want to think of
anything other than linen sheets and how wonderful it was when
Sister Bailey patted them down around him as she had just now,
just five minutes ago, and again just ten minutes before that.
  The American girl, Kate something, came into his room. He
wished she would just let him sleep. She was going on about
something being all fixed up. She congratulated him on having
extremely high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and a
very dicky heart, as a consequence of which the hospital would
be very glad to accept him as a lifelong patient in return for his
entire estate. They didn't even care to know what his estate was
worth, because it would clearly be sufficient to cover a stay as
brief as his was likely to be.
  She seemed to expect him to be pleased, so he nodded
amiably, thanked her vaguely and drifted, drifted happily off to
sleep.

Chapter 35




  The same afternoon Dirk Gently awake, also in hospital,
suffering from mild concussion, scrapes and bruises and a
broken leg. He had had the greatest difficulty in explaining, on
admittance, that most of his injuries had been caused by a small
boy and an eagle, and that really, being run over by a motorcycle
courier was a relatively restful experience since it mostly
involved lying down a lot and not being swooped on every two
minutes.
  He was kept under sedation - in other words, he slept - for
most of the morning, suffering terrible dreams in which Toe Rag
and a green-eyed, scythe-bearing giant made their escape to the
north-east from Valhalla, where they were unexpectedly
accosted and consumed by a newly created, immense Guilt God
which had finally escaped from what looked suspiciously like an
upturned refrigerator on a skip.
  He was relieved to be woken at last from this by a cheery,
"Oh it's you, is it? You nicked my book."
  He opened his eyes and was greeted by the sight of Sally
Mills, the girl he had been violently accosted by the previous
day in the caf�, for no better reason than that he had, prior to
nicking her book, nicked her coffee.
  "Well, I'm glad to see you took my advice and came in to
have your nose properly attended to," she said as she fussed
around him. "Pretty roundabout way you seem to have taken
but you're here and that's the main thing. You caught up with
the girl you were interested in did you? Oddly enough, you're in
the very bed that she was in. If you see her again, perhaps you
could give her this pizza which she arranged to have delivered
before checking herself out. It's all cold now, but the courier did
insist that she was very adamant it should be delivered.
  "I don't mind you nicking the book, really, though. I don't
know why I buy them really, they're not very good, only
everyone always does, don't they? Somebody told me there's a
rumour he had entered into a pact with the devil or something. I
think that's nonsense, though I did hear another story about him
which I much preferred. Apparently he's always having these
mysterious deliveries of chickens to his hotel rooms, and no one
dares to ask why or even guess what it is he wants them for,
because nobody ever sees a single scrap of them again. Well, I
met somebody who knows exactly what he wants them for. The
somebody I met once had the job of secretly smuggling the
chickens straight back out of his rooms again. What Howard
Belt gets out of it is a reputation for being a very strange and
demonic man and everybody buys his books. Nice work if you
can get it is what I say. Anyway, I expect you don't want to have
me nattering to you alt afternoon, and even if you do I've got
better things to do. Sister says you'll probably be discharged this
evening so you can go to your own home and sleep in your own
bed, which I'm sure you'll much prefer. Anyway, hope you feel
better, here's a couple of newspapers."
  Dirk took the papers, glad to be left alone at last.
  He first turned to see what The Great Zaganza had to say
about his day. The Great Zaganza said, "You are very fat and
stupid and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should
be ashamed of."
  He grunted slightly to himself about this, and turned to the
  horoscope in the other paper.
  It said, "Today is a day to enjoy home comforts."
  Yes, he thought, he would be glad to get back home. He was
still strangely relieved about getting rid of his old fridge
looked forwand to enjoying a new phase of fridge ownership
with the spanking new model currently sitting in his kitchen at
home.
  Then was the eagle to think about, but he would worry about
that later, when he got home.
  He turned to the front page to see if there was any interesting
news.
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