Tom Holt (15 page)

A trio of voices said Woof in such a way as to indicate that if Jason knew, he wouldn't like it terribly much, but if he insisted on a clue there was a pretty nifty one in his own last remark. Jason grinned nervously.

'I don't suppose you know how to get the hell... to get out of here, do you?'

'Woof.'

'Thought not.'

'Woof.'

'Sorry.'

Jason wiped his hand carefully on his trousers; then, for the first time in his life, he listened hard in the back of his head for the sound of three dots. Nothing. Marvellous.

'.' said a canine voice beside him.

'.' said another.

'.' remarked a third.

'Oh come
on,'
said Jason despairingly. 'Let's all stop pissing about here, or I'm going to give the whole thing up on the grounds of complete incomprehensibility.'

There was a long silence. Then the dog spoke; all three voices, but speaking as one.

'We,' it (or they) said, 'are the dog.'

Well yes; Jason replied cautiously. 'I had gathered.'

'We,' the voice(s) went on, 'would like you to consider what you get if you spell our name backwards.'

'What, now?'

'Yes, now.'

'All right; said Jason, after a short pause, 'you get god. So bloody what? If you spell moon backwards you get noom, but right now I'm more interested in getting back to Piccadilly Circus, if it's all the same to you.'

'Think,' said the dog.

'Oh no; Jason replied. 'I tried that, and look where it got me. Look, thanks ever so much for dropping by, but perhaps we'd all get on much better if we went our separate...'

'We,' said the dog, 'are merely Speakers.'

'Barkers.'

'Speakers,' said the dog coldly, 'for the Thought in your head. You called for us. We are here.'

Jason opened his mouth and then closed it again, waiting for some words to drip through from the filterpaper of his brain. Some time later he said, 'You're what?'

'We are saying out loud what the Thought in your head would be saying if it could speak out loud,' said the dog.

'Really?'

'Yes.'

'You mean to say,' Jason said, 'that I'm actually thinking all this garbage?'

'No; said the dog.

Jason whimpered ever so slightly. 'Oh be fair, please,' he said. 'I can cope with gibberish just as long as it's
consistent.
I thought you just told me...'

'The Thought is not you; said the dog. 'The Thought is the god-turned-backwards. Previously I have spoken to you in the quiet of your mind. Here I am speaking to you through the dog.'

'Why?'

'Why not?'

There was another very long silence.

'Had you going there for a minute, didn't we?' said the dog.

Stuff it, Jason said to himself, enough is enough. He made a careful estimate of the position of the dog's rear end and kicked hard. There was a triune yelp and a sharp stabbing pain in the back of his head, but he really didn't mind about that. He felt better now.

'Ouch,' said the dog.

'Serves you right,' Jason replied. 'You had it coming.'

'Can't you take a joke or something?' growled the dog.

'No.'

The dog growled ominously; and was that a very faint breath of moving air Jason could feel on his cheek? 'Would you care to rephrase that?' ventured one of the dog's heads.

'Why should I?'

'Because,' said a different head, 'in the circumstances that wasn't the cleverest thing you've ever said, that's all.'

'So what?' Jason snarled. 'You can have too much of being clever if you ask me. Right now I fancy being mindlessly violent.'

'Keep your voice down, for dog's sake,' whispered all three voices (but not simultaneously). 'This is not the right time for aggressive posturing.'

Jason shook his head. 'I don't care,' he said. 'I've had enough and I want to go home. Failing that, I want an explanation. My final, fall-back option is a heavily-mangled dog, but perhaps we can sort something out if we work at it.

'You want an explanation?' said the dog.

'Yes.'

'Then you shall have it.

Jason suddenly became extremely still, as if someone had just unplugged him. 'Did you say something?' he asked.

'No; whispered three very nervous dog-heads.

'Somebody said something.'

'We know.'

'Who?'

Woof.'

'Woof?'

Then Jason felt something in the back of his head; not felt as in an emotional response; more like felt as in there being a large, heavy weight behind his ears which was swinging in a semicircle, taking the head with it.

'Come here,' commanded the darkness. But a tiny spark of courage flashed across the contacts of what remained of Jason's personality, and he stayed where he was. Fear of death, the unknown, darkness and the Devil were one thing, he decided; bad manners were something else.

'Only if you put the lights on,' he replied.

The darkness laughed. 'Sure?'

'Sure.'

And there was light.

CHAPTER EIGHT

On his way back up Virgil was stopped by a hairy old man long fingernails whom he recognised at once. He shuddered and tried very hard to look like somebody else.

'Excuse me,' said Pluto, 'but have you seen a dog?'

'Frequently,' Virgil replied. 'So thank you all the same, but...'

'No,' Pluto said, 'what I mean is, have you seen a dog
recently?'

Virgil considered for a moment. 'Can't say I have,' he said. 'Not for ages. But I'm trying to give them up, actually, so it's no skin off my nose. Good Lord, is that the...'

Pluto looked at him carefully. 'Here,' he said, 'I know you, don't I?'

'Me?' Virgil shook his head vigorously. 'That's highly unlikely, isn't it?'

Pluto frowned. 'I do know you,' he said accusingly. 'You're dead.'

'Well yes; Virgil said, 'If you want to be biologically exact I suppose I am, but I try not to dwell on it too much. Clearly where you come from, tact is held in roughly the same esteem as personal appearance. And now I must be...'

'Then what are you doing here?'

'Where?'

'Here,' Pluto said, 'in the land of the
living.
You should be in...'

'And the same to you too,' Virgil said quickly. 'Must rush. Bye.'

It was fortunate for the poet that Pluto had other things on his mind, for the ex-God of the Dead has never, despite his best efforts, completely retired, and he has extremely strong views on dead people who wander about topside, fiddling about with the Great Chain of Being and startling old ladies. Instead of taking the matter further, however, Pluto simply shrugged and carried on following the dog.

It wasn't difficult, actually; in many places, the tiles on the walls of the corridors were already starting to bubble, and the smell was unmistakable. He might be three-headed, immortal and capable of human speech, but Cerberus was very much a dog.

Down past the normal, everyday levels now, and Pluto began to feel that familiar feeling of uneasiness, together with a certain very faint nostalgia. It had been years since he last visited Hell (or, as he had always tried to think of it, the Autumn Leaves Rest Home); and -- well, you can never completely let go, can you?

My God, Pluto said to himself as he wandered through the endless passageways, what
have
they done to the old place? All right, it had never exactly been what you'd call cosy -- too many souls-in-torment for that -- but at least he'd tried his best. You can do a lot with the odd pot plant here and framed print there, the occasional lick of paint and roil of woodchip when the budget could run to it; even just little things, like a table, a couple of chairs and a few old colour supplements, made a great deal of difference to the guests (Pluto always thought of them as guests). After all, a lot of people have to spend a lot of time here, and the least you can do is try to encourage them to think of it as their
home
... He shook his head sadly and tried to remember where the laundry cupboard used to be.

He arrived on the platform just as the train was pulling in and jumped nimbly through the doors, stepping over the crushed bodies with the ease of long practice. The train was always pretty full at this time of day, he remembered, but he found one of those corner seats which have a little blue notice above it saying
Please give up this seat if an irrevocably damned person needs it,
put a damned expression on his face, and sat down. He was just starting to wonder where the dog could have got to when he became aware of someone standing over him.

'I said, Tickets please.'

Pluto looked up into what he took at first to be a pair of blue industrial lasers, and nearly jumped Out of his skin.

'Look,' said the spectre, 'have you got a ticket or not?' Pluto twitched slightly and the spectre glowered at him, if yellow-fanged, goat-headed monsters can glower; the point has never been properly researched, understandably.

Pluto pulled himself together. 'Well, no,' he admitted. 'You're new here, aren't you?'

'If you haven't got a ticket,' said the spectre -- how, Pluto asked himself, does he manage to avoid skewering his own upper lip every time he speaks? -- 'you'll have to buy one now. That or I put you off at the next stop.'

Pluto, who knew what the next stop was, rummaged vigorously in his pocket for change. Being a god is all very well, but one doesn't like to push one's luck. Mercifully, he found some money.

'How much?' he asked, and the spectre told him. While it was writing out a ticket, Pluto laid the two coins across his own closed eyelids and waited.

'Here,' said the spectre, 'haven't you got anything smaller?' Pluto apologised, took his ticket and his change, and started breathing again. Spectres were definitely new since last dine, although he remembered that there had been demons. State-registered demons, naturally. They had been pretty horrible, true; but at least they were polite and had their watches pinned to their frontal scales.

The panic over, he leaned back in his seat and watched the stations go by -- Lechery, Gluttony, Wrath (change here for Murder, Parricide and Regicide), Sloth, Sloth Circus, High Street Sloth, Sloth Central, Sloth Broadway, Greed (escalator link to Simony), Pride and Being Found Out...

Being Found Out?
Yes, thought Pluto, I guess I really am out of touch. He shrugged and started reading the advertisements.

'Ah,' Jason said, 'hello there.'

Me and my big mouth, he said to himself. Who was it insisted on having the lights on, then? Old Mister Dickhead, that's who.

'Hello yourself.'

There was a long pause, and Jason took a cautious look at his new companion.

Say what you like about Jason, he is not one of those idiots who takes against people just because of the colour of their skin. But he does like them to have skin, and this chap palpably didn't. Instead, he seemed to have masonry.

Description is the lifeblood of narrative, so let us start with the furniture. The throne he sat in was made from some sort of very shiny black metal, and its four feet, carved in the shape of disconcertingly realistic dragons' heads, rested on nothing at all. The little light that there was seemed to be coming from the throne, but it wasn't as if there were little bulbs hidden discreetly behind the reliefs of writhing serpents and contorted bull-headed shapes. The light just seemed to ooze out of the metal, like acid from a very old battery. There were other things oozing out of the throne apart from the light, of course, but since they seemed to be turning into snakes and spiders and other nasty things as soon as they got clear of the throne Jason decided to do the sensible thing and pretend he hadn't seen them.

So much for the furniture. Now for the clothes. He wore a flowing black robe, heavy with glittering black gemstones; jet and obsidian, that sort of thing, although ordinary gemstones don't hurt your eyes so much when you look at them. The cloth -- Jason assumed for the sake of a quiet life that it was cloth -- was simply the colour and texture of the absence of light. On his feet he wore shoes in the shape of huge hooked talons, except that they weren't shoes.

We are pussyfooting, we know; but that is because since the Great Adjective Shortage of 1976, we simply can't get the materials. We will therefore leave it at Very Horrible and hope that you will bear with us and use your imaginations. Carefully.

'Have a sausage roll,' he said.

Jason grinned weakly. 'No thanks,' he said. 'I had something before I came out, really. Er...'

'Yes?'

'Well, it's... I mean... Like, don't let me keep you or anything, I...'