May Contain Traces of Magic (7 page)

- Which was how Chris had come to learn about the reality of magic, the existence of sorcerers and demons, and what Grandpa had really done for a living, and how these things ran in families, and for all they knew he might have it too. Which had turned out to be the case; though, according to the government people who did the tests, he was little better than borderline, no real chance of him ever being able to practise professionally, even if he went to university and did the degree course; certainly no scholarship, which he'd have to have, since you couldn't get a student loan for thaumaturgical studies. And that was that, which was why he now carried the bag for JWW Retail, as close as he'd ever get to the real thing—

 

Maybe because Chris was still in shock and therefore not really trying, he managed to shift a phenomenal amount of stuff off on Sedgely's, including four dozen BB27Ks with display materials and a dumpbin. He thanked them automatically, wrote the order up in the book and drifted back to the car.

‘Might as well stop for lunch now,' he heard himself say. ‘There's a pub on our way to Milford & Shale's, miserable place but it means we won't have to go out of our way. All right by you?'

‘OK.'

Miserable, as it turned out, was putting it mildly. The land-lord made them feel about as welcome as a notifiable disease, the food took half an hour to arrive and even the pub cat wouldn't touch the sausages. That, as far as Chris was concerned, was just fine. It wasn't really a happy day, and anything nice or fun would've seemed faintly grotesque.

‘I don't know the exact figures,' he was saying, replying to the girl's question. ‘There's more of them about than you'd think, but not enough to be a real problem. We keep the lid on it pretty well, which is why you don't see anything about them on the telly. Actually, an attack's generally quite good for business. We sell quite a few demon-related products: early warning alarms, liquid demon-repellant, pepper sprays—'

‘Pepper sprays?'

Chris nodded. ‘Didn't you know, they're an endangered species? Though not nearly endangered enough, if you ask me. Still, there it is. You and I can't go around knocking them off, it's got to be done by trained authorised personnel. So, yes, pepper sprays. They tell me nothing pisses a demon off quite as thoroughly as a face full of pepper, but that's the law.'

‘Oh,' Angela said. ‘That's stupid.'

He shrugged. ‘Not up to me,' he said. ‘Also, to be fair, they're bloody hard to kill. Friend of mine works for the department - you know, those comedians we met back there - and apparently you need very specialised kit, not the sort of thing that fits neatly in your handbag or jacket pocket. Anyhow,' he added, as she started to ask another question, ‘let's not talk about it any more, if you don't mind. All right?'

She shrugged too but he could see that she wasn't happy. ‘If you like,' she said.

‘Thanks. So,' Chris went on, taking a deep breath, ‘apart from that, how are you finding it?'

‘What?'

‘The business. The thrill of the open road, the challenge of hand-to-hand marketing. About what you'd expected?'

Another shrug. ‘More or less,' Angela said. ‘Though really it's not about, well, magic, is it? You might as well be selling envelopes or toilet rolls.'

‘Yes,' Chris said. ‘Except I wouldn't be, because all that stuff's done by technology now, electronic point of sale reordering and centralised buying. But this is an old-fashioned business, so they still need reps. Which is just as well for me, really.'

‘I suppose.' Angela looked away, then down at her fingernails, which were bitten short. ‘Anyway, I get the general idea. You go round the shops and try and get them to buy stuff. That's about it, isn't it?'

‘Broadly speaking.' Chris offered a corner of his fried-bread crust to the cat; it stared at him, yowled and ran away. ‘Still, it's as close to the interesting stuff as I'll ever get. Not like you, with your high-powered research.'

‘Actually, it's mostly pretty boring,' Angela replied. ‘I mean, when I was a kid I thought it'd be all invisibility cloaks and turning people into frogs, but it's not like that. Really, the only difference between what I'm doing and ordinary physics and chemistry is that there's a little chip of Knowing Stone inside my calculator instead of silicon, so it doesn't need batteries.'

Chris nodded. ‘We sell those,' he said. ‘They're not very reliable, though. Drop them or leave them out in the sun and they're knackered.'

 

All in all, a long, fraught day. Karen was out when Chris got home, so he defrosted a pizza and sat down in front of the telly. Nothing on the news about the grisly murder of a shopkeeper in the West Midlands, so maybe he'd imagined it after all.

He was halfway through his pizza when the phone rang. ‘Chris?'

There was an edge to her voice, but he could understand that. ‘Hi, Jill. How did you get on with the—?'

‘Did you open my carrier bag before you gave it back?'

He jumped, as though the phone had bitten his ear. ‘What? No, of course—'

‘There was a sealed packet of biscuits in there and now there's just a wrapper.'

So the day hadn't finished with him quite yet. ‘Was there?'

‘Yes.'

Chris hesitated. ‘I guess Karen must've eaten them. I left the bag on the kitchen table. She must've wandered down in the night and—'

‘They were plain digestives. She hates plain digestives.'

‘Does she?'

‘Yes.' Less than friendly
tsk
noise. ‘I know that for a fact, Chris, she was my best friend at school, remember?'

And he, Karen's long-term significant other, hadn't got a clue what sort of biscuits she did and didn't like (but Jill, he happened to know, adored chocolate hobnobs). ‘Is that right?' he said. ‘I never—'

‘Which means,' Jill continued grimly, ‘she wouldn't have eaten them. But somebody did.'

He really wasn't in the mood for anything like this. ‘Look, for crying out loud, Jill, I'll buy you another damn packet of biscuits, all right? But for the record, I didn't eat—'

‘I don't care about the biscuits, I want to know if you looked in the bag. Well, I know you did,' she went on (had he ever heard her this angry before? Not as far as he could remember), ‘what I need to know is exactly what you did.'

This is silly, Chris thought. Jill and her stupid bloody carrier bags. ‘All right,' he said, ‘I may have just glanced inside it quickly, as I was putting it down on the—'

‘You just looked. You didn't take anything out.'

‘No.'

‘You mean, no apart from the biscuits.'

From silly to annoying; evolution in action. ‘I didn't touch the fucking biscuits. I don't like plain digestives either. Just as soon eat plywood. And no, I didn't touch anything in the stupid bag, all right?'

Silence at the other end. Anybody else and he'd have construed it as sulking, only Jill never sulked. Mind you, Jill never freaked out about anything as trivial as biscuit theft, either. But when she spoke again, her voice was different. Not less agitated, but clearer in her mind, maybe. ‘All right,' she said, ‘if you're absolutely sure.'

‘Yes.'

‘Fine. That's all I needed to know.' Pause. ‘You haven't got a cat or a dog or anything like that, have you?'

‘You know we haven't, Jill, because of Karen's asthma.'

‘Yes, of course. Mice? Rats?'

‘No.'

And this time - well, not relief, but the lowering of tension that comes with a mystery solved, even if the solution is unpalatable. ‘So, you really have no idea what could've eaten the biscuits?'

‘No.' As Chris said it, he frowned, and the question formed in his mind; so, if it wasn't Karen, who the hell
did
eat the—?

‘OK. Thanks for clearing that up.' But I didn't, he thought; there's been something weird going on, and I can't account for it. ‘Sorry if I came across a bit nasty - I didn't mean to bite your head off.'

Pause. Freudian slip, if that was the term he was looking for. At any rate, it could be taken as a perfectly valid explanation for Jill stressing out like that. ‘Talking of which,' he said, his voice a little higher and falsely cheerful, ‘did you find the - well, the thingummy that did in poor Mr Newsome?'

‘No.' Definitely not happy about that. ‘By the time we got there, the trail had gone cold. We even tried scrying in water, but it knew what it was doing, covered its tracks very well.' Long pause, then: ‘Is Karen there?'

‘No, she's out.'

‘When you see her, maybe it'd be better not to talk about it,' Jill said, sounding much more like herself. ‘Because of - well, you know, what happened. I happen to know it's a very sore subject with her, she can get a bit extreme about it, and if she gets the idea there's one on the loose out there, it could mess her up a bit. So, keep quiet about it, will you?'

‘Sure,' Chris replied without thinking, mostly relieved because Jill was back to normal. ‘And there's no reason why the subject should come up, we're not exactly a had-a-nice-day-at-the-office-dear kind of household.' He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Look, about your biscuits, I'll get you another—'

‘Forget about it,' Jill replied, and she sounded quite normal. ‘Actually, your poltergeist or whatever it was probably did me a favour, I really can't afford to go stuffing my face with biscuits unless I want to end up looking like a small whale.'

End of conversation. Chris put the phone down, then looked at it for a few seconds, as though he suspected it of playing games with him. Yes, all right, post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever the medical term was, maybe Jill was a little bit off her head tonight because of what she'd seen at the shop. But that still left the problem of what had munched its way through an entire packet of digestive biscuits, and the more he thought about that, the stranger it became. Furthermore, now he came to think of it, the unidentified muncher had eaten all the biccies and then put the wrapper back in the bag. Karen wouldn't have done that, she'd have binned it, no doubt breathing a heavy sigh as she did so because it was non-recyclable, and it'd have had to have been a fairly sophisticated mouse—

Under other circumstances, if he'd had a problem like that, he'd have phoned Jill; who'd either have explained it away in ten seconds flat, or told him not to be so stupid as to worry about it. Option not available. Chris sat down with his half a cold pizza on his lap, and tried to rationalise it, but his mind kept slipping off it, as though it had been waxed.

Karen got home just after ten; in a foul mood, overtired and overwrought. There'd been a screw-up at work, she explained, and she'd had to stay on and sort it all out in time for the meeting tomorrow. Chris didn't ask for details and she didn't offer them. He heard her slamming cabinet doors in the bathroom as he closed his eyes and went to sleep.

He had the dream again. Not that he minded. It was a nice dream, his favourite.

He was in the car, somewhere in Staffordshire, although the view through the window was of mountains, their sides covered in an endless sea of pine trees, shimmering faintly grey in the summer heat. Sitting beside him, she'd just said, ‘At the end of the road, turn left,' though the road went on, straight as an arrow, as far as the eye could see.

‘The road is very long,' he said. He talked like that, in the dream.

‘You will know when the time comes to turn left,' she replied.

‘How will I know?'

‘I will be here to tell you.'

He didn't look round. ‘I am glad you will be here with me when the turning comes,' he said.

‘I am always with you,' she said, and he could feel the warmth of her radiance, and the edges of his vision blurred golden from the light that shone from her, and he passed a signpost that said
Stoke on Trent 455 miles
.

Oh good, he thought; because when he saw that sign it meant it was the point in the dream where he was allowed to ask one question and still be able to remember the answer when he woke up. It was amazing, the sort of stuff she knew about, and she'd never been wrong yet.

‘SatNav,' he said, ‘who ate the biscuits?'

Silence for a while, and then she said, ‘The one who is to come ate the biscuits, Chris.'

Oh, he thought. Never wrong yet; but there were some nights when she came over all cryptic, which was only to be expected when you considered that she was just his problem-solving subconscious mind, sublimated into the form of the only entity in the world he really trusted.

‘I do not know who that is,' he said. It was all right to admit stuff like that, in the dream. In real life, of course, women expect you to be bloody telepathic.

‘When the time comes, you will know,' she said. ‘After six hundred and fifty-four miles, prepare to turn left.'

Oh no you don't, he thought; so he asked, ‘Who is the one who is to come, SatNav?'

‘The one who is to come will unite the children who fell,' she replied. ‘The one who is to come will lead them along the road they have to travel, taking the third exit at the next roundabout. But you will not remember that when you wake up, because it is still hidden.'

Oh well, he thought, fair enough. ‘Why did the one who is to come steal Jill's biscuits, SatNav?' he persevered, and in front of him the road narrowed, hedges closing in around him like the fingers of a grasping hand.