The Better Mousetrap (41 page)

‘Thank you,’ Emily said.

The grin on the goblin woman’s face had a long and eventful pedigree. Embedded in it were little fragments of ancient memories-lost travellers seeking shelter from a storm in a mountain cave, in whose shadows lurked a hidden terror; dark, dripping mine shafts where the footfall you hear behind you might not be an echo; a glint of red eyes and soft, vicious laughter on the edge of hearing. Just as well, Emily thought, she’s on our side—

‘You’re welcome,’ the goblin woman said. ‘Now then, what the hell were you playing at down there? You’re supposed to have killed the bloody thing.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Emily said. ‘But I didn’t have my stuff with me.’

Derisive snort. ‘Oh for crying out loud. If you were really any good, you’d have found a way. I remember Kurt Lundqvist—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Emily lied. ‘But it’s not that easy. Besides, I—’ She stopped herself just in time. Besides, I didn’t want to kill it: not really what her audience wanted to hear, not when they’d just risked their lives rescuing her. There’s a time and a place for non-violent conflict-resolution, mutual respect and understanding and David Cameronesque dragon-hugging; this, she felt, wasn’t it.

‘I was scared,’ she said. And that was true, too.

The goblin woman raised an eyebrow. Frank said, ‘Well, of course you were. Anybody would’ve been,’ which was sweet but very unhelpful. The little shrivelled man sitting on the edge of the desk was looking at commodity prices on his computer screen.

‘Anyway,’ Frank said, ‘you’re safe now, that’s all that matters. And I think we should—’

It should have been a tender moment, but Emily wasn’t listening. She was too busy staring at the thin black lines appearing on the wall behind her, as if drawn in by an invisible Tony Hatch. Two uprights and a lintel, and a black dot where a doorknob would be.

‘Frank,’ she said, in a hoarse little voice.

Too late. A Door had opened in the wall, and Amelia Carrington stepped through it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Let’s get this over with quickly, shall we?’ Amelia said. ‘Boys.’

It says a lot about Amelia Carrington’s presence and force of personality that, until she drew attention to them, Frank hadn’t noticed her two companions. They were, he guessed, trolls or ogres or something like that: anthropoid, like the better class of ape, but so drastically out of proportion that you’d never be tempted to think of them as human. Not even Walt Disney could have made them cuddly. The overall impression was that they’d been designed by someone who was very good at muscles but had never quite got the hang of heads. The spears and axes gripped in their enormous paws were easily the friendliest things about them. As far as menace went, however, they might as well have been little gambolling puppies, because they added nothing. Compared to Amelia they weren’t scary, just quaint.

‘Uncle Dennis,’ she said. ‘Sweet little office you’ve got here. Auntie Rosie.’ She looked straight past Frank as though he wasn’t there. ‘Emily, dear. I hope you haven’t been upsetting my dragon-it cost ever such a lot of money. I’m very disappointed, though, it really should have burned you to a crisp instead of just lying there sleeping like a teenager. I’m going to have to have a serious talk with the supplier about that.’ She finally noticed Frank, advanced a step towards him and held out her hand. ‘The Door, please,’ she said, and Frank gave it to her, because trying to resist would’ve been like arguing the toss with gravity.

‘I shall deal with Erskine later,’ Amelia said, more to herself than to them. ‘It’s a bad day when you can’t even rely on your own dog. Fortunately, Lynford and Gervase here aren’t dogs, they’re nose-hairs, so I know I can rely on them implicitly.’ She nodded her head, and the trolls picked up Dennis, his mother and Frank by their collars and held them a foot off the ground, presumably just to show that they could, since none of them struggled a bit. ‘Emily, you’re with me,’ she said. ‘Come along, now.’

So Emily followed her through the Door, and found herself once again in the cellar where she’d encountered the dragon’s teeth. Someone had been round with a dustpan and brush and tidied them all away, though there were still a few patches of sawdust with a sort of brown mud seeping through. The trolls came after her, carrying their luggage, which they put down neatly against the wall. ‘You’re staying here,’ Amelia said to them. ‘Emily.’ She opened the Door again, and Emily followed her through it into a place she didn’t recognise. Not somewhere she’d be likely to have forgotten if she’d ever been there before.

It was daylight, but the sky was black and freckled with stars. She stood up to her ankles in fine grey dust, staring at a landscape of rocks and boulders, without the faintest suggestion of green. Directly overhead, huge and yet tiny at the same time, was the round shining blue-green Earth.

‘Welcome,’ Amelia said, ‘to the Moon.’

Oh, Emily thought.

‘Now, then,’ Amelia went on. ‘While I’m here with you, you’re quite safe. I brought enough air and gravity with us for five minutes. After that, well—’

Emily listened hard, but there was no simultaneous translation. Amelia, it seemed, was one of those people who says exactly what they’re thinking.

‘One small step, dear,’ she said. ‘Which is about all you’ll have time for. Oh, before I leave you.’

‘Yes?’

‘The Macpherson case. Did you ever get around to sending them a bill? Only I can’t tell from the file. You always were rather sloppy about credit control, you know.’

‘What? Oh, no, sorry. I was meaning to, but—’

A faint tongue-click. ‘You never got round to it, quite. Never mind. Apart from that, I have to say, your files are in pretty good order-it won’t take your replacement long to get the hang of them. All in all, I’m sorry to lose you, but there you go. Plenty more fish. I was hoping that Erskine could take over from you, but I think I’ll have to get an ordinary human after all. Goodbye.’

‘Wait,’ Emily gasped, but Amelia had already stepped back through the Door and closed it. The thin black lines faded from the boulder in front of her, until it was hard to believe they’d ever been there.

Emily Spitzer, she said to herself, the first girl on the Moon.

Three minutes.

She spent one of them just standing perfectly still and shaking all over, partly because of the cold. The remaining two she wasted seeing if you really could make out the Great Wall of China like you’re supposed to be able to. As luck would have it, it was night in Asia just then, and she eventually found what she thought was Japan, though at first she thought it was New Zealand. But if that was Japan, then the sort of semicircular cut-out must be the Yellow Sea, in which case, the Great Wall must be—

But then time ran out.

The trolls left, closing the Door behind them. It vanished, taking the light with it. For a long time, nobody said anything. Then Mr Tanner’s mother swore.

‘Where are we?’ Frank asked.

Dennis laughed. ‘Here,’ he said.

‘Urn. That’s not terribly helpful.’

‘No.’

‘Is there a light-switch anywhere?’

Dennis sighed and muttered something, whereupon the room filled with pale green light. ‘Look around,’ he said, ‘see the sights. Only you’d better be quick about it, because I can’t keep this up for more than ninety seconds.’

Frank saw a table, on which stood a plate of sandwiches and a plastic Coke bottle. That was it. No windows, no other furniture or contents of any kind. No light-switch. No door.

‘All done?’ The green light faded and died. ‘Well,’ Dennis went on, ‘here we are. Bloody fucking Carpenters,’ he added, managing to pack an extraordinary amount of feeling into seven syllables.

‘Yes, but where—?’

‘It’s called a sealed room,’ Frank heard Mr Tanner’s mother say, and it worried him to hear how subdued she sounded. ‘Which describes it pretty well. The plate and the bottle fill up by magic twice a day, so we won’t starve to death. We’re a long way underground, so the temperature stays more or less the same. I expect if you ask him nicely our Dennis can do the pretty green light from time to time, though since there’s nothing to see I don’t think there’d be much point. That’s it, basically, until we grow old and die. Though,’ she added, with a faint wobble in her voice, ‘rumour has it that when you’re in one of these places, real time doesn’t actually pass, so you don’t even grow old. Dennis’s dad was stuck in one of these for a hundred and fifty years, till your dad let him out, bless him, and when he escaped he didn’t look a day older—’

‘Oh,’ said Frank.

‘But it’s not all doom and gloom,’ Dennis said, with a featheredge of hysteria in his voice. I mean, we can play games to pass the time. How about I Spy? Something beginning with D.’

‘Be quiet, Dennis, you’re not helping.’

‘Be quiet yourself.’

Stunned silence; then, eerie as a banshee’s wail, the sound of muffled sobbing. Frank listened to it in fascinated horror, until he heard Dennis say, ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I didn’t mean—’

Sob, sob, sniffle; and Frank couldn’t help wondering if this was the first time that Mr Tanner had ever heard his mother crying. There had been panic in his voice, the sort you’d expect from a man standing on a collapsing bridge. He tried to imagine what it must have been like, growing up with her for a mother. Of course, it would be different for goblins. But not all that different.

‘Please don’t cry,’ he heard Dennis say. ‘I didn’t mean it, really. I shouldn’t have answered you back, it’s just that I’m all stressed out with this being-trapped-for-all eternity thing. I’d really like it if you could stop crying now. Please?’

Slowly, sniffs came to outnumber sobs, while Dennis rambled pitifully on through a repeating loop of explanation and apology; and Frank thought, Trapped in here for ever, with them. Oh boy.

“Salright,’ Mr Tanner’s mother snuffled eventually. ‘Only you hurt me, our Dennis, you really did. And you were always such a good boy, when you were small. And what about poor little Paul Azog, who’s going to look after him while I’m stuck in here? I’ll never see my baby boy again, and it’s all his fault—’

Pitch dark, but Frank just knew that two pairs of very sharp red eyes were fixed on his last known location. Trapped in here for ever with two goblins who hate me.

‘Don’t blame me,’ he snapped, his patience fraying. ‘You wanted to come, you volunteered. Bauxite, remember? All that money. I just wanted to rescue the girl I love, but you—’

‘Oh be quiet,’ said Mr Tanner’s mother, and just because her voice was back to its usual peremptory bark Frank was filled with joy. ‘Of course it’s your fault, for playing around with the bloody Door in the first place. If it’d stayed in New Zealand, nice and safe, none of this would’ve happened.’ Long sigh. ‘Actually,’ Mr Tanner’s mother went on after a moment, ‘it’s as much my fault as anyone’s. Should never have given the stupid thing to your dad in the first place. Of course, he wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in the trade without it, and he most definitely wouldn’t have got together with your mum. So I guess it serves me right. That’s what you’re both thinking, isn’t it?’

Well, yes, Frank thought. ‘No, of course not,’ he said briskly. ‘It’s all that bloody Carrington woman’s fault. She started it all, she was the one who tried to kill Emily and kidnapped my friend George and stole the Door and concocted this stupid bauxite thing. So why don’t we all stop having a go at each other, get a grip and figure out how we’re going to escape. Well? Come on, you two, you’re supposed to know about this magic stuff, what’s the drill? I mean, do we all say a spell or an incantation or something, or what?’

The long silence that followed was eventually broken by a sigh from Mr Tanner’s mother. ‘You tell him,’ she said.

‘Tell me what?’

He heard Dennis clear his throat. ‘Yes, there is a way out of here,’ Dennis said. ‘Tried and tested, it’s in all the books, comes up in the final exams most years.’

‘Great. What is it?’

‘The Portable Door,’ Dennis replied. ‘And if you haven’t got it, then tough. And since there’s only two of the bloody things in the world, and that woman’s got both of them—’

‘Three, actually.’

‘—It really isn’t a whole lot of… what did you just say?’

‘Three,’ Mr Tanner’s mother repeated. ‘The original, the new one she’s got hold of somehow-Pereira’s Last Theorem, presumably, that’s how I made my back-up, just before I gave the original to Paul Carpenter.’

Frank opened his mouth but nothing came out; it was Dennis who rasped, ‘Back-up?’ ‘Yes, that’s right. Hence three. She’s got two, plus my one.’

‘Mother—’

‘Oh, don’t go getting all excited, it’s no bloody good to us in here, is it?’ Mr Tanner’s mother made a strange noise, somewhere between a sigh and a snort. ‘What am I going to do with this rare and dangerous magical object, I thought; can’t just leave it lying around, someone might pinch it and fuck up the fabric of space/time. No, I thought, I’d better put it somewhere nice and safe until I need it again. So what’s what I did. More fool me, really.’

No need of troll’s blood to know what Dennis was thinking. ‘Somewhere nice and safe,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘That’s right. Well, I could just imagine the fuss you’d have made if you happened to come across it in a drawer somewhere. So I put it in a safe deposit box, in a bank.’

‘A bank.’ Dennis made the words sound like the death warrant of the universe.

‘That’s right. The National Lombard in Fenchurch Street. Best security in London, they reckon. If only I’d gone with my instincts and shoved it down my front we’d be out of here by now and ripping bloody Carrington’s lungs out with a bent spoon. All in all, it makes me wish I’d never set eyes on the stupid thing in the first place.’

It’s not despair that does the real damage, it’s hope. Dennis mumbled, ‘Well, that’s that, then.’ His mother found a bit of wall and kicked it for a while, but only because it was there. Then she groped round for the plate of sandwiches and started to munch. ‘Well, why not?’ she said, with her mouth full. ‘I always eat when I’m miserable. Salmon paste,’ she added resentfully, after a brief bout of noisy spitting. ‘Now that’s just plain spiteful.’