The Better Mousetrap (44 page)

‘Nonsense.’ Amelia had gone from terrified to angry without even noticing. ‘There’s nothing unusual about the lunar atmosphere that could possibly— Or the reduced gravity,’ she added, dismissing the thought as quickly as it came. ‘I had Simon Aristides in Metaphysics run a thorough computer simulation, and there couldn’t possibly be any side effects. You’re bluffing again.’

Emily’s face was as featureless as East Anglia. ‘The Moon,’ she said. ‘Generally speaking, of course, you’re right. But maybe there were other factors you didn’t take into account. Oh, I don’t know; something to do with the time of day, or perhaps there were significant beryllium deposits just under the surface of that particular crater. Easily overlooked, of course, but—’

‘Balls.’ Amelia was almost beside herself with fury. ‘I checked Simon’s results myself, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone ahead. You can read his report for yourself if you like-it’s just there, on the desk.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Help yourself,’ Amelia added sardonically. ‘You won’t find—’

‘Thank you.’ Emily swung round and pounced on the desk like a cat, sweeping papers aside until she found what she was looking for. ‘That’s marvellous,’ she added, glancing at the front page before tucking it firmly down the front of her blouse. ‘Exactly what we needed to know, and congratulations on being so wonderfully thorough. Oh yes, before I forget.’

Two long strides took her back to where Amelia was kneeling; then she shook herself, like a wet cat, and turned back into a goblin.

‘Surprise,’ she said. Amelia stared at her for a moment, then shut her eyes tightly. ‘Shit,’ she said.

‘Quite,’ the goblin replied. ‘It’s like I keep telling our Dennis, never judge by appearances. You’d have thought he’d have got the message, what with being part goblin himself, though of course he can’t do the shape-shifting, because of his human side. Ah well,’ she added, and booted Amelia in the side of the head, sending her to sleep.

Once she’d made sure that Amelia was out cold, Mr Tanner’s mother tied her up securely with a length of computer flex. Then she picked her up and swung her over her shoulder like a sack of coal, checked to make sure the report was still safely wedged down her front, and headed back to the Portable Door in the far wall. On its threshold she paused and turned towards the desk.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘You can come out now.’

But the lions and the surviving spider didn’t budge; in fact, one of the lions twitched an inch of exposed tail back out of sight behind the leg of the desk. Mr Tanner’s mother grinned.

‘Talk about a hair of the dog,’ she said to herself, and closed the Door behind her.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

As one Door closes, another opens. Thanks to Mr Aristides’s superbly detailed report, the timing was flawless, as was the dead-reckoning navigation. Accordingly, Emily was still staring at Honshu under the misapprehension that it was New Zealand’s North Island when she felt a tap on her shoulder. ‘Hello,’ Frank said.

‘There you are,’ she replied, when her heart had stopped trying to hammer its way out of her chest. ‘I was wondering when you were going to show up.’

Frank’s eyebrows disappeared into his fringe, like explorers setting off into the rainforest. ‘Sorry if I kept you waiting,’ he replied.

‘Oh, that’s all right. I knew you’d come.’

‘Did you? I mean, that’s very—’

Emily smiled at him. Behind her head, a million stars twinkled inquisitively. ‘Pretty safe sort of belief, as such things go. I mean, if I’d been wrong, I wouldn’t have had to suffer agonies of disappointment for very long.’ She looked past him, at the mountain range that made up the far wall of the crater she stood in. The first girl on the Moon: well, fine. Strange new worlds are where you find them. ‘Let’s go home, please.’

Frank stood aside so that she could see the Door, set into a giant boulder. It was slightly ajar, and yellow light leaked through the opening. Emily took a step towards it, then stopped.

‘There’s just one thing,’ she said.

Frank stopped dead in his tracks. ‘What?’

‘That long sort of lacy bit there,’ she said, pointing at the Earth. ‘That’s New Zealand, right? Where you come from.’

He followed her pointing finger and shook his head. ‘That’s Sumatra, I think. Look, does it really matter? If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to get back to a breathable atmosphere.’

Emily shrugged. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I was just taking an interest.’

‘Just to update you,’ Frank said, as they passed through the Door together and came out in Emily’s office in the Carringtons building. ‘Rosie Tanner’s got Amelia Carrington locked up in that doorless cellar place. Dennis Tanner’s nipped out to find a chemist’s; Rosie got a couple of nasty burns while she was sorting out Amelia, but apparently, since she’s a goblin, a dab of Germoline and she’ll be right as rain. Colin Gomez,’ he went on, closing the Door and rolling it up, ‘is staging a rather genteel palace coup, with the aim of getting himself crowned senior partner. Oh, and Erskine’s all right. I made up a bed for him in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, with a couple of Amelia’s cashmere sweaters to lie on. He’s going to sniff out George Sprague for me once he’s recovered from turning back into a dog again, so that’s all right. I think that covers everything.’

‘Rosie Tanner,’ Emily said, frowning as she sat down in her old, familiar chair. ‘Oh, right, the goblin woman.’ Slight double take. ‘She managed to get the better of Amelia Carrington? How the hell did she manage that?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Frank said. ‘But it worked. Amelia’s safely locked up, and we got the coordinates so I could come and fetch you. Oh, and you owe her a favour.’

Her old familiar chair. When you live in an office (she had a flat, a tiny little thing huddled in the shadow of an enormous mortgage, like a cottage at the foot of Vesuvius, but it was just somewhere she went to sleep), your chair gradually becomes the centre of the universe. It’s your triangulation point, where you measure all your distances from. It’s where you’re to be found, unless you have legitimate business that calls you away. Needless to say, it reflects your status as accurately as the shoulders of a soldier’s uniform. Emily’s chair swivelled and sort of reclined, though you dared not push your luck unless you really wanted to visit the floor, but it was old and tired, having been handed (so to speak) down in a career of inverse promotions: full equity partner to associate partner to senior assistant to junior assistant, and when Emily, if Emily ever got promoted, it’d descend another rung of the ladder and support the weight of a junior junior assistant, until it finally wore out completely and went in the skip. The thing about office chairs is, though, that the more beat-up and rickety they become, the more comfortable they grow and the harder they are to leave. The seat moulds itself to the bum, but the brain and the heart mould themselves to the chair, until it’s not quite clear where one ends and the others begin—

‘Yes,’ Emily said gravely, ‘I guess I do. What did she have in mind?’

‘Well,’ said Frank.

The dragon stirred.

Fluctuations in the dream carried it, like a leaf in a storm. Gusts of memory swept it back into the shared past of all dragonkind, eddies sent it spiralling sideways into the minds of other dragons as they brooded, sulked, hoped, loved and regretted eating cheese. A swirl of vicarious pleasure lifted it up, but then it stalled and felt itself hang in empty air as it registered an unfamiliar presence.

You again, it said.

Me again, replied the human female.

The dragon registered her properly. Emily Spitzer, dragon-slayer; exponent of a necessary function, since dragons hardly ever die of old age or disease, but unless dragons die the dream would be a straight line rather than a circle. Hello, Emily Spitzer. Have you come to kill me now?

Sort of, she replied.

The dream filled with strange shapes and rare colours. Sort of, the dragon repeated.

Look, said Emily Spitzer, about this prophecy.

Oh yes.

You know more about it than I do, obviously, and Amelia Carrington clearly believed in it, or she wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to get rid of me—

Have you been got rid of, then?

Yes, but I came back. Just listen for a moment, will you? The prophecy says that when we fight, I’ll win, okay?

Yes. I can show you the place in the dream, if it’d help.

No, really, that’s fine. Only, I was thinking. I don’t really want to kill you, you see.

Oh. That would be-inconvenient.

The dream flared orange with Emily’s irritation. Well, tough. Look, this dream of yours. It’s not, well, carved in stone, is it?

Of course not. It exists within the neural pathways of all dragons, comprised of regulated electrical discharges travelling along synaptic—

Oh, be quiet. What I mean is, if we wanted to, we could change it. Right?

Deep, rather revolting green. Well, in theory—

Excellent. So, let’s fight.

Now you’re talking. Just give me a second to wake up, and I’ll be ready for you.

No (said Emily Spitzer, the dragon-slayer), don’t do that. Just tell me if I’m on the right lines, okay? The prophecy says when we fight-fight meaning ‘engage in conflict’, yes?

I suppose so, dreamt the dragon grudgingly. Engage in conflict, right. And in this context, presumably, the ownership of great wealth has to be at stake, yes? It’s what we’re all about, yes. Otherwise, how do you keep score?

Exactly (thought Emily Spitzer). Keeping score. Now, I’d like you to concentrate, please.

The dragon concentrated; and into the dream came a pair of wooden blocks with holes drilled in them, two matchsticks and a pile of cardboard rectangles with pictures printed on them.

Ready to fight?

Always.

Fine. Now then, the name of the game is cribbage—

‘Just to clarify,’ Dennis Tanner said, after a long silence. ‘You won the new Wayatunga bauxite strike off Amelia Carrington’s super-dragon in a game of cards?’

Emily was too tired to speak, so she nodded.

‘Oh well,’ Dennis said. ‘It’s an approach, I guess. Very ecofriendly and non-violent of you, and you’ll probably be getting Christmas cards from Bob Geldof and David Cameron. So,’ he added wistfully, ‘what’re you planning on doing with it, now?’

‘Already done.’ Emily yawned. ‘Gave it to your mum. Small token of appreciation.’

‘Oh.’ Dennis’s face registered no visible emotion whatsoever. ‘How about the dragon?’ he went on (and, tired as she was, Emily recognised a changed subject when she heard one). ‘Only it’s not really such a good idea to leave something like that just wandering about. You know better than anybody what they’re capable of—’

Emily’s next yawn registered on seismic instruments all over the world. ‘Gone to Vegas,’ she mumbled. ‘It reckons gambling’s the most fun it’s had in years and what’s the point of having money if you don’t spend it? Said something about putting together a dream syndicate of all dragons everywhere. Poor buggers,’ she added, ‘they’ll end up losing the scales off their backs. Still, better than—’ Her eyelids drooped, and she fell asleep.

‘She’ll be all right,’ Dennis said, as Frank half-rose from his chair. ‘Just tired out, that’s all. I mean, what with all the dying she’s been doing lately, it’s hardly surprising.’ He fell silent and sat quietly for a while, staring down at his hands.

Frank waited for a bit, then said, ‘The Carrington woman.’

‘Locked up in the cellars. Won’t be going anywhere in a hurry.’

‘Yes, but we can’t just leave her there.’

Dennis looked up. ‘Yes, we bloody well can. Your girlfriend there may suddenly have turned into a dragon-hugger, but I prefer my pest control traditional, thanks all the same.’

Frank frowned. ‘Isn’t Amelia Carrington your god-daughter or something?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘I just thought—’ Frank shrugged. ‘Forget it, then. But you can’t leave her down there. I’ve been there, remember. So have you.’

‘Fine.’ Dennis grinned. ‘We’ll kill her, then.’

‘You can’t do—’

‘Why not? We don’t need her for anything any more. If you don’t want anything to do with it, I expect Colin Gomez’ll help us out. Jump at the chance, probably.’

Frank shook his head; then a smile crept over his face. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a better idea.’

Amelia Carrington woke up.

Her first reaction was to grab for a handful of fire, just in case the goblin woman was— No, belay that. She wasn’t in her office any more. In fact, she wasn’t in a building of any sort. She was lying on grass-wet grass, yetch - under a cloudless blue sky.

Does not compute. She sat up, and in doing so she caught sight of her feet. They were bare, and stuck out from under the hem of a flowing, tie-dyed cheesecloth skirt.

A horrible thought struck her. They couldn’t have, she thought. The bastards!

It was at that point that she became aware that she was not alone. Lying grouped around her on the grass were a number of young men and women. The girls wore kaftans, headbands and big clunky beads, the boys had long hair, beards, and, in the most extreme cases, round rimless spectacles. One of them was strumming a guitar.

The funny smell, Amelia realised later, was patchouli oil. They couldn’t have, she thought. But they could, and they had. Bastards!

Rage flooded into her, and she clenched both hands in the air. True, her real enemies were presumably decades away by now, leaving her Crusoe-stranded in the most unforgivingly alien environment known to mankind, so she couldn’t very well firebomb them. But the rage was so strong that it had to be vented somehow. She needed to firebomb somebody, or she’d burst.

She looked round and selected two of the hippies at random. After all, she told herself as she squeezed the inert elements out between her fingers, who the hell would miss them?

A male exhibit lifted his head and stared blearily at her. He’d do for one target. Him and that bloody guitarist. She gave the fireballs in her hands a final squeeze for luck, took careful aim and let fly—

(Later, Amelia figured out that someone-Uncle Dennis, most likely, or possibly Colin Gomez-must’ve put a strong dampening field on her, almost entirely neutralising her magical abilities.)