Deep Secret (18 page)

“About ten reflections of him. I know,” I said, thinking of the fabulous Nordic type.

“No,” Nick said. “No, that was one of the odd things. There was only him. No reflections at all. But then the walls and the mirrors started turning round him. Like a wheel. I mean, I saw the edges of the mirrors as they went round past him. Honestly.”

We stared at one another queasily. Nick doesn’t say things like that unless they’re true. And I could see he was not having me on. “Remind me never to do the Witchy Dance again,” I said.

“I think it’s this hotel,” Nick said. “It’s the weirdest place.”

“And full of weird folk,” I agreed.

That was over an hour ago at least. I kept plugging away at the keyboard because there is a disco going on downstairs. Another weird thing about this hotel is that you can’t hear a
thing
from any of the people chasing about in it, but you can hear the disco loud and clear through four floors. But I think it’s stopped now. I might get some sleep, with luck.

[1]

From the account of Rupert

Venables

S
carlatti played in my car all the way to Wantchester. I bore it. I even changed the tapes myself so that Andrew, sitting solidly beside me, should not notice there were three of us. Andrew was remarkably cheerful. He looked out at the wintry landscape and smiled as if it were high summer and blue sky, instead of bare fields under sulky grey rolls of snowcloud. He had just designed the perfect vacuum cleaner, he said. New principles. Should last through the twenty-first century. He asked me to drop him outside the Cathedral in Wantchester. This I did. He ducked out of the car briskly. And then ducked back in to look at me gravely.

“There’s a presence in this car,” he said. “Does it worry you?”

“No,” I said, somewhat thunderstruck. “It’s quite benign.”

“How about
that
!” Stan said as I drove on up the empty market street. “The man’s a psychic empathy!”

“I suppose he had to be, or he wouldn’t have got into the barn that evening,” I said, slowing down to swing into the hotel car park. “But it’s unlikely that I –
What
the—?”

A horribly battered car blocked the archway. At the moment when I swung in behind it, its driver hurled open his door and rushed, waving and gesticulating, upon a car stopped just beyond the entry. Against that car, two heads were bobbing, one high and dark, the other low and like a lion’s mane – that lion having been dragged backwards through a hedge recently, of course. I did not even need the sight of two hands, spiked like stilettos, coming into view with a memorable flick, flick, flick, to know what I was seeing here.

“I don’t believe this!” I said, and backed away in a howling half-circle.

“What’s going on? What’s up?” Stan wanted to know.

“Mallory,” I said through clenched teeth, as I went forward on the other lock. “At her tribal dances again in the car park. What’s she
doing
here? I put an exclusion round my working after Andrew walked in, I
know
I did! I put an exclusion on Mallory particularly!” On the other side of the road there was a much smaller archway, which I remembered from my first visit. This proves how useful it is to inspect a site before doing a working in it. The notice on the smaller archway said H
OTEL STAFF ONLY
. I drove through it like a bullet. Beyond, as I had hoped, was a smaller car park, only half full. “Let’s pretend I’m the chef,” I said, and roared over to the far corner.

“Steady, steady!” Stan said. He was treating me like a horse again. He said soothingly. “That writer fellow on your programme – he’s called Mallory. Must be some relation. Must have been fixed up months ago. It can’t be anything to do with the working.”

I put my chin on the steering wheel, the better to feel my teeth grind. “There’s no such thing as coincidence, Stan. And the fact remains that she ought not to
be
here!”

“Yes, but she is and you have to live with it,” he said. “Just keep out of her way. Better put up a Don’t Notice round this car if you’re going to leave it here. I don’t need the manager sniffling around me.”

I put a blanket of modesty round the car as I unloaded my bags. When I walked away from it, even I could have taken it for a dismal, ordinary, slightly battered car like Mallory’s, like all the other cars around it. I hurried in through the Staff door. I wanted to get hidden in my hotel room before Mallory finished her fandango. I could still hardly believe she was here. Perhaps, I thought, I had made a mistake, and it was somebody else dancing beyond that archway.

I got to the foyer. The placid, stately area I remembered from my last visit was bedlam. Beards. Embraces. Heaps of luggage. Everyone in T-shirts. A roar of greetings. The only other person wearing a suit besides me was also wearing a floor-length cloak. While I waited for the maddeningly slow Finnish receptionist to find my key, I saw, upside down in the ceiling mirrors, a row of robed and cowled figures processing through the crowd. People drew back from them and pulled luggage out of their way, but otherwise failed to look at them. I could see why. Even upside down and in reflection, they gave off a strong smell of – well – power that was unright.

Still, they were nothing to do with me. I took a look in the mirrors again as I finally got my key. Mallory and her young relative were just coming in through the glass doors of the main entrance. It was definitely them. Damn, I thought, and sped up the stairs. Here I was again delayed, this time by a row of people dispensing membership badges. The girl on the V-section clutched a teddy bear to herself and wanted to know what I wished to be called on my badge. A perspiring pair of lusty youths behind her were wrestling with the machine that made the things. They looked up expectantly.

“My name’s Rupert—” I began.

“Rupert Bear,” said the girl with the teddy. “
Love
it!”

“He looks more like Rupert of the Rhine,” said one of the lusty operators. A female, I realised.

“But he’s too cuddly!” said the teddy carrier.

“Venturesome as well,” said the operator firmly.

“Rupert Bear has lots of adventures,” the teddy carrier argued, injured.

The argument went on for some time. I was so unused to being discussed like this that I stood for a while, dumbly turning my eyes from speaker to speaker, until a loud, low voice with a sob in it, that could only be Mallory’s, sounded behind me on the stairs. I pulled myself together.

“Wrong, both of you,” I said. “Have you never heard of Rupert the Mage?”

They had not – which was not surprising, since I had only just made him up. “Who
is
Rupert the Mage?” asked the teddy one as she wrote it on the unmade badge.

“The
preux chevalier
of magicians,” I invented. “The books were all written in the twenties, so you may not have come across them.”

“Oh. A sort of magical Bertie Wooster!” the operator panted. She and her companion leant mightily on the machine to force it to make my badge.

I thought of Stan. “With an invisible butler,” I said. “Thanks.”

As I received my badge, Mallory advanced on the table for hers. I fled to the lift, where I rode to the top floor with a beautifully dressed transvestite boy, trying to think just where in my working I had let Mallory in instead of excluding her. I remembered those bursts of rage I had kept having about her. Those, I suspected, were the crux. They had caused me to be too preoccupied with her. Now, it seemed, I had to face the fact that I had entangled Mallory’s fateline with my own, and Andrew’s, and those of my four candidates. What a mess!

The beautifully dressed boy bowed gravely to me when we reached the top floor. I bowed back. He set off striding on spike heels one way and I in the other. The marvel of it was that we did not meet round the other side. I turned corner after mirrored right-angle corner on my way to my room. Seven of them. The room was near the lift on the other side. At the time, I was too bemused by what I had done to the fatelines to recognise the peculiarity of this. I simply slung my bags on the stand, noted that it was a fine, large room with a cocktail fridge and a big bed, and tastefully decorated for a hotel room, and changed into the most casual garments I had with me. I feared I was not going to be happy in the forthright weirdness of this convention. Now Mallory was here, I wished I could go home.

But I had work to do. I pinned on my badge to prove I was not a gate-crasher, studied the Alice in Wonderland sort of pamphlet that said “Read Me” under a portrait of a coy-eyed dragon, and discovered I was already late for the Opening Ceremony in Home Universe. I sped back downwards.

I missed some kind of interruption that happened at the beginning of this. The chairman, a guy called Maxim Hough, who wore his curly blond hair cut in the manner of an ancient Egyptian wig, was apologising for whatever it was when I slipped into a seat in the vast room. The event was otherwise prodigiously boring. I studied the folk on the platform, and those in the audience, with equal misgivings. Ted Mallory was the only one who looked halfway normal. He was a larger, healthier edition of the poor cancer-ridden man I had met in Kent, and this made it certain there was a family connection with Maree Mallory, as Stan had suggested. To confirm this, I spotted the Mrs Mallory who had opened the door to me in Bristol sitting in the front row, looking attentive. Her jumper, this time, had a bundle of pink satin roses sprawled down its left side. I played with the notion of tapping her on the shoulder and whispering that she was being attacked by man-eating sugar mice.

I would never have said such a thing, of course, not even to a third party. But people say this kind of thing at conventions. I was surprised and highly delighted when one of the very agreeable Americans I met over supper opined that Mrs Mallory seemed to have had an accident with some strawberry ice cream.

“No, no,” said her husband. “You didn’t examine them closely enough. Those are parasitic sea anemones.”

We talked of all sorts of other things as well. By the time we all got to the bar, where I met Rick Corrie and, through him, Maxim Hough, I was actively enjoying myself. I think it was on slightly false pretences. Maxim seemed sure I was some sort of hidden celebrity, and my friends from supper had obviously decided the same, but I am not sure that was important. My main feeling by then was annoyance with myself – exasperation that I had chosen to live so much out of the world. I hadn’t, until that evening, remembered the value of congenial company. True, I need privacy for my Magid work, but one can have that without isolating oneself.

Rick Corrie, who had rushed away, now rushed back, very much out of breath and aggrieved. “That was Thurless again,” he said.

“Oh what is it
this
time?” said Maxim.

“I think he’s settled now,” Corrie said, “but it cost the convention forty pounds—”

“
Already? How?”
Maxim wanted to know. “The bloody man’s only
been
here four hours! That’s ten pounds an hour, Rick!”

“Well, you know I let Maree Mallory have Thurless’s room,” Corrie explained. “Her fool aunt forgot to book for her. She looked as if she was going to cry when I got to her. And Thurless was late, so I had to find him a room at the Station Hotel, because all the other empties are needed for publishers – none of them have turned up yet, by the way – and I took Thurless down there myself in a taxi along with that unexpected Croatian and a Russian or so. And I went and
looked
at all the damn rooms and they’re OK. Just as good as the ones here. But next thing I know, Thurless arrives back here in another taxi, insisting his shower won’t work and demanding that we pay for his taxi. So I sort that one out, and back he goes in the taxi again—”

“Hang on,” I said. “It’s only about a hundred yards from here to the Station Hotel.”

“It’s longer with the one-way system,” Maxim pointed out. “Still – but forty
pounds
, Rick! How often did he come back and forth in that taxi?”

“
And
Thurless has got a car,” Corrie said. “It was because I’d given his room away, you see. I didn’t feel I should argue too much, and to tell the truth I’ve lost count of how many times Thurless turned up in that taxi. Ten times? Something like that. I just gave the driver a cheque in the end. Thurless turned up this time saying he was late for Esoterica and wanting the taxi to wait for an hour and I thought I’d better scotch that.”

“If he wants a taxi to go back in, tell him to come to me,” Maxim said. “Tell him I’ll find him a bicycle.”

Corrie nodded and flitted away again. I looked idly after him in the mirror at the end of the bar. And there was Maree Mallory again. She had seen me too. To do her justice, she looked horrified. The feeling is mutual. I looked pointedly away. She was looking rather glum – which I suspect is her natural expression: it goes with that irritating sob in her voice – but otherwise she had neatened up considerably from the witchy bag-lady I had encountered in Bristol. She was wearing a nice leather jacket and jeans and had obviously made efforts with her hair. It was now in quite a stylish bush, though still a bush, and I think she had new glasses. Evidently my hundred quid had wrought quite a change. She looked almost human. I watched Rick Corrie dart up to her, converse, dart away, and dart back with drinks. I got the impression he fancied the woman in his shy way. There is no accounting for taste.