Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul



     When a passenger check-in desk at Terminal  Two,  Heathrow
Airport,  shot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange
flame the usual peaple tried to claim responsibility. First the
IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels
rushed out a statement to the effect  that  the  situation  was
completely  under  control,  that  it  was  a  one in a million
chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage  at  all,
and  that  the site of the explosion would make a nice location
for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having
to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do  with  them  at
all.

     No  rational  cause  could be found for the explosion - it
was simply designated an act of god. But, thinks  Dirk  Gently,
which  God?  And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal
Two of Heathrow Airport trying to chatch the 15.37 to Oslo.

     Funnier than Psycho... more chilling than Jeeves
Takes Charge... shorter than War  and  Peace...  the
new  Dirk  Gently  novel,  The  Long  Dark Teatime of the Soul.
Douglas Adams  is  the  best-selling  author  of  the  Hitch
Hiker  books:  The  Hitch  Hiker's  Guide  to the
Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life,
the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All
the Fish, and Mostly Harmless.
     The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy has appeared in more
forms than one might reasonably expect, most  of  which  flatly
contradict  each  other.  It has appeared as a BBC radio series
(its original form), a BBC TV series, all  sorts  of  different
records,  cassettes,  and  CD's,  a  computer  game,  and also,
apotheotically, a bath towel. A series  of  graphic  novels  is
currently  in  preparation, and the motion-picture version is
confidently expected any decade now.
     He is also the author of the Dirk  Gently  books,  Dirk
Gently's  Holistic  Detective Agency and The Long
Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. He is  currently  working
on another book in this series.
     He has also written The Deeper Meaning of Liff with
John Lloyd  and,  most  recently,  the travel and wildlife book
Last Chance to See, with Mark Carwardine.  He  is
making  more  TV  programmes  these  days  and  also frequently
lectures on computers and semi-extinct parrots.
     He lives partly in Islington, London, partly in  Provence,
France, but mostly in airport bookstalls. Also by Douglas Adams
in Pan Books

     The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
     The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
     Life, the Universe and Everything
     So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
     Mostly Harmless

     Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
     The Deeper Meaning of Liff (With John Lloyd)
     Last Chance to See (With Mark Carwardine)

     Douglas Adams. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

     Pan  Books  in  association with William HeinemannFor Jane
This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh II  and
an  Apple  LaserWriter II NTX. The word processing software was
FullWrite Professional from Ashton Tate. The fnal proofing  and
photosetting was done by The Last Word, London SW6.


     I  would  like  to say an enormous thank you to my amazing
and wonderful editor, Sue Freestone.
     Her help, support,  criticism,  encouragement.  enthusiasm
and  sandwiches have been beyond measure. I also owe thanks and
apologies to Sophie, James and Vivian who saw so little of  her
during the final weeks of work.

Chapter 1

     It  can  hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth
has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
     Airports are ugly. Some  are  very  ugly.  Some  attain  a
degree  of  ugliness  that  can only be the result of a special
effort. This ugliness  arises  because  airports  ane  full  of
people  who  are  tired,  cross,  and have just discovered that
their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport  is  the
only  known  exception  to this otherwise infallible rule), and
architects have on the whole tried to  reflect  this  in  their
designs.
     They  have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness
motif with brutal shapes and nerve jangling  colours,  to  make
effortless  the  business  of separating the traveller for ever
from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveller
with arrows that appear to point at the  windows,  distant  tie
racks,  or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky,
and wherever possible to expose the  plumbing  on  the  grounds
that  it  is  functional,  and  conceal  the  location  of  the
departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

     Caught in the middle of a sea of hazy light and a  sea  of
hazy noise, Kate Schechter stood and doubted.
     All  the  way  out  of London to Heathrow she had suffered
from doubt. She was not  a  superstitious  person,  or  even  a
religious  person.  she  was  simply someone who was not at all
sure she should be flying to Norway. But  she  was  finding  it
increasingly  easy to believe that God, if there was a God, and
if it was remotely possible that any godlike  being  who  could
order  the  disposition  of  particles  at  the creation of the
Universe would also be interested in directing traffic  on  the
M4,  did  not want her to fly to Norway either. All the trouble
with the tickets, finding a next-door neighbour to  look  after
the  cat,  then  finding the cat so it could be looked after by
the next-door neighbour, the  sudden  leak  in  the  roof,  the
missing  wallet,  the  weather,  the  unexpected  death  of the
next-door neighbour, the pregnancy of the cat - it all had  the
semblance  of an orchestrated campaign of obstruction which had
begun to assume godlike proportions.
     Even the taxi-driver - when she  had  eventually  found  a
taxi-  had  said,  "Norway? What you want to go there for?" And
when she hadn't instantly  said,  "'The  aurora  borealis!"  or
"Fjords!"  but  had looked doubtful for a moment and bitten her
lip, he had said, "I know, I bet it's some bloke  dragging  you
out  there.  Tell  you  what,  tell  him  to  stuff  it.  Go to
Tenerife."
     There was an idea.
     Tenerife.
     Or even, she dared to think for a fleeting second, home.
     She had stared dumbly out of the taxi window at the  angry
tangles  of traffic and thought that however cold and miserable
the weather was here, that was nothing to what it would be like
in Norway.
     Or, indeed, at home. Home would bc about  as  icebound  as
Norway  right  now.  Icebound,  and  punctuated with geysers of
steam bursting out of the grnund, catching in  the  frigid  air
and  dissipating  bctween  the  glacial  cliff  faces  of Sixth
Avenue.
     A quick glance at the itinerary Kate had  pursued  in  the
course  of  her thirty years would reveal her without any doubt
to be a New Yorker. For though she had lived in the  city  very
little,  most of her life had been spent at a constant distance
from it. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Europe, and  a  period  of
distracted  wandering  around  South  America  five  years  ago
following the loss of her newly mamed husband, Luke, in  a  New
York taxihailing accident.
     She  enjoyed  the  notion that New York was home, and that
she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was
pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of  pizza  they
brought  to  your door if you phoned them up and asked them to.
That was the only real pizza. Pizza that you had to go out  and
sit  at  a  table  staring at red paper napkins for wasn't real
pizza however much extra pepperoni and anchovy they put on it.
     London was the place she liked living in most,  apart,  of
course,  from  the  pizza  problem,  which drove her crazy. Why
would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand  that  it
was  fundamental  to the whole nature of pizza that it amved at
your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you  slithered  it
out  of  greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front
of the TV?  What  was  the  fundamental  flaw  in  the  stupid,
stuck-up,  sluggardly  English  that  they  couldn't grasp this
simple  principle?  For  some  odd  reason  it  was   the   one
frustration  she  could  never  learn  simply  to live with and
accept, and about once  a  month  or  so  she  would  get  very
depressed,  phone  a  pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most
lavish pizza she could describe - pizza with an extra pizza  on
it, essentially - and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.
     "To what?"
     "Deliver. Let me give you the address - "
     "I  don't understand. Aren't you going to come and pick it
up?"
     "No. Aren't you going to deliver? My address - "
     "Er, we don't do that, miss."
     "Don't do what?"
     "Er, deliver. . ."
     "You   don't   deliver?   Am   I   hearing   you
correctly... ?"
     The   exchange  would  quickly  degenerate  into  an  ugly
slanging match which would leave her feeling drained and shaky,
but much, much better  the  following  morning.  In  all  other
respects she was one of the most sweet-natured people you could
hope to meet.
     But today was testing her to the limit.
     There  had been terrible traffic jams on the motorway, and
when the distant flash of blue lights made it  clear  that  the
cause  was  an accident somewhere ahead of them Kate had become
more tense and had stared fixedly out of the  other  window  as
eventually they had crawled past it.
     The  taxi-driver had been bad-tempered when at last he had
dropped her off because she didn't have the  right  money,  and
there  was  a  lot of disgruntled hunting through tight trouser
pockets before he was eventually able to find change  for  her.
The  atmosphere was heavy and thundery and now, standing in the
middle of the main check-in concourse at Terminal Two, Heathrow
Airport, she could not find the check-in desk for her flight to
Oslo.
     She stood very still for a moment,  breathing  calmly  and
deeply and trying not to think of Jean-Philippe.
     Jean-Philippe   was,  as  the  taxi-driver  had  correctly
guessed, the reason why she was going to Norway, but  was  also
the  reason  why she was convinced that Norway was not at all a
good place for her to go. Thinking of him  therefore  made  her
head oscillate and it seemed best not to think about him at all
but simply to go to Norway as if that was where she happened to
be  going  anyway. She would then be terribly surprised to bump
into him at whatever hotel it was he had written  on  the  card
that was tucked into the side pocket of her handbag.
     In  fact  she would be surprised to find him there anyway.
What she would be much more likely to find was a  message  from
him  saying  that  he  had  been  unexpectedly  called  away to
Guatemala, Seoul or Tenerife and that he would  call  her  from
there. Jean-Philippe was the most continually absent person she
had ever met. In this he was the culmination of a series. Since
she  had  lost  Luke to the great yellow Chevrolet she had been
oddly dependent on the rather vacant emotions that a succession
of self-absorbed men had inspired in her.
     She tried to shut all this out of her mind, and even  shut
her  eyes  for  a  second. She wished that when she opened them
again there would be a sign in front of her  saying  "This  way
for  Norway"  which  she could simply follow without needing to
think  about  it  or  anything  else  ever  again.  This,   she
reflected,  in  a continuation of her earlier train of thought,
was presumably how religions  got  started,  and  must  be  the
reason  why  so  many  sects  hang  around airports looking for
converts. They  know  that  people  there  are  at  their  most
vulnerable  and  perplexed,  and  ready  to  accept any kind of
guidance.
     Kate  opened  her  eyes  again   and   was,   of   course,
disappointed.  But  then  a  second  or  two  later there was a
momentary parting in a long surging wave of  cross  Germans  in
inexplicable  yellow polo shirts and through it she had a brief
glimpse of the check-in desk for Oslo. Lugging her garment  bag
on to her shoulder, she made her way towards it.
     There  was just one other person before her in the line at
the desk and he, it turned out, was having trouble  or  perhaps
making it.
     He  was  a  large man, impressively large and well-built -
even expertly built - but he was also definitely odd-looking in
a way that Kate couldn't quite deal with. She couldn't even say
what it  was  that  was  odd  about  him,  only  that  she  was
immediately  inclined  not to include him on her list of things
to think about at the moment. She remembered reading an article
which had explained that the central  processing  unit  of  the
human  brain  only had seven memory registers, which meant that
if you had seven things in your mind at the same time and  then
thought  of  something  else,  orte  of  the  other seven would
instantly drop out.
     In quick succession she thought about whether or  not  she
was  likely  to  catch the plane, about whether it was just her
imagination that the day was a particularly bloody  one,  about
airline staff who smile charmingly and are breathtakingly rude,
about  Duty  Free  shops  which  are  able to charge much lower
prices than ordinary shops but - mysteriously  -  don't,  about
whether  or  not  she  felt  a  magazine article about airports
coming on which might help pay for the trip, about whether  her
garment  bag would hurt less on her other shoulder and finally,
in  spite  of  all  her  intentions  to  the  contrary,   about
Jean-Philippe,  who  was another set of at lest seven subtopics
all to himself.
     The man standing arguing in front of her popped right  out
of her mind.
     It  was only the announcement on the airport Tannoy of the
last call for her flight to Oslo  which  forced  her  attention
back to the situation in front of her.
     The  large  man  was making trouble about the fact that he
hadn't been given a first class seat reservation. It  had  just
transpired  that the reason for this was that he didn't in fact
have a first class ticket.
     Kate's spirits sank to the very bottom of  her  being  and
began to prowl around there making a low growling noise.
     It  now  transpired  that  the  man in front of her didn't
actually have a ticket at all, and the argument then  began  to
range  freely  and  angrily  over  such  topics as the physical
appearance of the airline :heck-in girl,  her  qualities  as  a
person,  theories  about her ancestors, speculations as to what
surprises the future might  have  in  store  for  her  and  the
airline  for which she worked, and finally lit by chance on the
happy subject of the man's credit card.
     He didn't have one.
     Further discussions ensued, and had to  do  with  cheques,
and why the airline did not accept them.
     Kate took a long, slow, murderous look at her watch.
     "Excuse  me," she said, interrupting the transactions. "Is
this going to take long? I have to catch the Oslo flight."
     "I'm just dealing with this  gentleman,"  said  the  girl,
"I'll be with you in just one second."
     Kate  nodded,  and  politely allowed just one second to go
by.
     "It's just that the flight's about  to  leave,"  she  said
then.  "I have one bag, I have my ticket, I have a reservation.
It'll take about thirty seconds. I hate to interrupt,  but  I'd
hate  even  more  to  miss  my  flight  for  the sake of thirty
seconds. That's thirty actual seconds, not  thirty  `just  one'
seconds, which could keep us here all night."
     The check-in girl turned the full glare on her lipgloss on
to Kate,  but before she could speak the large blond man looked
round, and the effect of his face was a little disconcerting.
     "I, too," he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, "wish  to
fly to Oslo."
     Kate  stared  at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in
an airport, or rather, the airport  looked  thoroughly  out  of
place around him.
     "Well,"  she said, "the way we're stacked up at the moment
it looks like neither of us is going to make it.  Can  we  just
sort this one out? What's the hold-up?"
     The  check-in  girl  smiled  her  charming, dead smile and
said, "The airline does not accept  cheques,  as  a  matter  of
company policy."
     "Well I do," said Kate, slapping down her own credit card.
"Charge  the gentleman's ticket to this, and I'll take a cheque
from him.
     "OK?" she added to the big man, who  was  looking  at  her
with  slow  surprise. His eyes were large and blue and conveyed
the impression that they had looked at a  lot  of  glaciers  in
their   time.  They  were  extraordinarily  arrogant  and  also
muddled.
     "OK?" she repeated briskly. "My name  is  Kate  Schechter.
Two `c's, two `h's, two `e's and also a `t', an `r' and an `s'.
Provided  they're  all  there the bank won't be fussy about the
order they come in. They never seem to know themselves."
     The man very slowly inclined his head a little towards her
in a rough bow of  acknowledgement.  He  thanked  her  for  her
kindness,  courtesy  and  some  Norwegian word that was lost on
her, said that it was a long while  since  he  had  encountered
anything  of  the kind, that she was a woman of spirit and some
other Norwegian word, and that he was indebted to her. He  also
added, as an afterthought, that he had no cheque-book.
     "Right!"  said  Kate,  determined not to be deflected from
her course. She fished in her handbag for  a  piece  of  paper,
took  a  pen  from the check-in counter, scribbled on the paper
and thrust it at him.
     "That's my address," she said, "send me  the  money.  Hock
your fur coat if you have to. Just send it me. OK? I'm taking a
flyer on trusting you."
     The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on
it with  immense  slowness,  then folded it with elaborate care
and put it into the pocket of his coat. Again he bowed  to  her
very slightly.
     Kate suddenly realised that the check-in girl was silently
waiting  for  her pen back to fill in the credit card form. She
pushed it back at her in annoyance, handed over her own  ticket
and imposed on herself an icy calm.
     The  airport  Tannoy  announced  the  departure  of  their
flight.
     "May  I  see  your  passports,  please?"  said  the   girl
unhunriedly.
     Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn't have one.
     "You what?" exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply
stopped  moving  at all and stared quietly at a random point on
her desk waiting for someone else to make a move. It wasn't her
problem.
     The man repeated angrily that he didn't have  a  passport.
He  shouted  it and banged his fist on the counter so hard that
it was slightly dented by the force of the blow.
     Kate picked up her ticket, her  passport  and  her  credit
card and hoisted her garment bag back up on to her shoulder.
     "This  is  when  I  get  off," she said, and simply walked
away. She felt that she had made every  effort  a  human  being
could possibly be expected to make to catch her plane, but that
it  was  not  to  be. She would send a message to Jean-Philippe
saying that she could not be there, and it would  probably  sit
in a slot next to his message to her saying why he could not be
there either. For once they would be equally absent.
     For  the time being she would go and cool off. She set off
in search of first a newspaper and then  some  coffee,  and  by
dint  of  following  the appropriate signs was unable to locate
either. She was then unable to find a working phone from  which
to  send  a  message,  and  decided  to  give up on the airport
altogether. Just get out, she told herself, find a taxi, and go
back home.
     She threaded her way back across the  check-in  concourse,
and  had almost made it to the exit when she happened to glance
back at the check-in desk that had defeated her, and  was  just
in  time to see it shoot up through the roof engulfed in a ball
of orange flame.
     As she lay beneath a pile of rubble,  in  pain,  darkness,
and  choking  dust,  trying to find sensation in her limbs, she
was at least relieved to be  able  to  think  that  she  hadn't
merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she
passed out.

Chapter 2

     The usual people tried to claim responsibility.
     First  the  IRA,  then  the  PLO  and  the Gas Board. Even
British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that
the situation was completely under control, that it was  a  one
in  a  million  chance,  that  there was hardly any radioactive
leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a
nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic,  before
finally  having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do
with them at all.
     No cause could be found for the explosion.
     It seemed to have happened spontaneously and  of  its  own
free  will.  Explanations were advanced, but most of these were
simply phrases which restated the problem in  different  words,
along  the  same  principles  which  had given the world "metal
fatigue". In fact,  a  very  similar  phrase  was  invented  to
account  for  the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and
concrete into an explosive  condition,  which  was  "non-linear
catastrophic sWctural exasperation", or to put it another way -
as  a  junior  cabinet minister did on television the following
night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his  career  -
the check-in desk had just got "fundamentally fed up with being
where it was".
     As  in  all  such  disastrous  events,  estimates  of  the
casualties varied wildly. They  started  at  forty-seven  dead,
eighty-nine  seriously  injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a
hundred and thirty injured, and rose as high as one hundred and
seventeen  dead  before  the  figures  started  to  be  revised
downwards  once  more. The final figures revealed that once all
the people who could be accounted for had been  accounted  for,
in fact no one had been killed at all. A small number of people
were  in  hospital  suffering from cuts and bruises and varying
degrees of traumatised shock, but that, unless anyone  had  any
information about anybody actually being missing, was that.
     This  was  yet  another  inexplicable  aspect to the whole
affair. The force of the explosion had been enough to reduce  a
large  part  of  the  front  of Terminal Two to rubble, and yet
everyone inside the building had  somehow  either  fallen  very
luckily,  or been shielded from one piece of falling masonry by
another, or had the shock of the explosion  absorbed  by  their
luggage.  All  in all, very little luggage had survived at all.
There were questions asked in Parliament about  this,  but  not
very interesting ones.

     It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware
of any  of  these  things,  or indeed of anything at all in the
outside world.
     She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which
she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with  old  cabin
trunks  full  of past memories in which she rummaged with great
curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at  least,  about  a
tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid, and often painful
or   uncomfortable   memories  of  her  past  life;  the  other
nine-tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar
as she recognised at all that she was  dreaming,  she  realised
that  she  must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had
heard it said that humans are supposed  only  to  use  about  a
tenth  of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the
other nine-tenths were for, but she had certainly  never  heard
it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.
     Gradually  the trunks, the memories and the penguins began
to grow indistinct, to become all white  and  swimmy,  then  to
become  like  walls that were all white and swimmy, and finally
to become walls that were merely white, or rather a  yellowish,
greenish kind of off-white, and to enclose her in a small room.
     The  room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but
turned down low, and the light from a street lamp found its way
between the grey curtains and  threw  sodium  patterns  on  the
opposite  wall. She became dimly aware of the shadowed shape of
her own body lying under the white, turned-down sheet  and  the
pale,  neat  blankets.  She  stared  at it for a nervous while,
checking that it looked right before she tried, tentatively, to
move any part of it. She tried her right hand, and that  seemed
to  be  fine.  A  little  stiff and aching, but the fingers all
responded, and all  seemed  to  be  of  the  right  length  and
thickness,  and  to  bend  in the right places and in the right
directions.
     She panicked briefly when she couldn't immediately  locate
her  left  hand, but then she found it lying across her stomach
and nagging at her in some odd way. It took her a second or two
of concentration to put together a number of rather  disturbing
feelings  and realise that there was a needle bandaged into her
arm. This shook her quite badly. From the needle there snaked a
long thin transparent pipe that glistened yellowly in the light
from the street lamp and hung in a gentle  curl  from  a  thick
plastic  bag  suspended  from  a  tall metal stand. An array of
horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus,  but
she  peered dimly at the bag and saw the words "Dextro-Saline".
She made herself calm down again and  lay  quietly  for  a  few
moments before continuing her exploration.
     Her  ribcage  seemed  undamaged.  Bruised  and tender, but
there was no shaiper pain anywhere to suggest that anything was
broken. Her hips and thighs ached and were stiff, but  revealed
no serious hurt. She flexed
     the  muscles  down  her  right  leg and then her left. She
rather fancied that her left ankle was sprained.
     In other words, she told herself, she  was  perfectly  all
right.  So  what was she doing here in what she could tell from
the septic colour of the paint was clearly a hospital?
     She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the
penguins for an entertaining few minutes.
     The  next  time  she came round she treated herself with a
little more care, and lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous.
     She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened.  It
was dark and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like
the  North  Sea.  Lumpy things jumbled themselves out of it and
slowly arranged themselves into a heaving airport. The  airport
was  sour  and  ached  in  her  head,  and in the middle of it,
pulsing like a migraine, was the memory of a moment's  whirling
splurge of light.
     It  became  suddenly  very  clear to her that the check-in
concourse of Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport had been hit by a
meteorite. Silhouetted in the flare was the  fur-coated  figure
of a big man who must have caught the full force of it and been
reduced  instantly  to a cloud of atoms that were free to go as
they pleased. The thought caused a deep and horrid  shudder  to
go  through  her. He had been infuriating and arrogant, but she
had liked him in an odd way. There  had  been  something  oddly
noble   in   his  perverse  bloody-mindedness.  Or  maybe,  she
realised,   she   liked   to   think   that    such    perverse
bloody-mindedness  was noble because it reminded her of herself
trying to order pizza to be delivered in an alien, hostile  and
non-pizza-delivering world. Nobleness was one word for making a
fuss  about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were
others.
     She felt a sudden surge of fear  and  loneliness,  but  it
quickly  ebbed  away  and  left her feeling much more composed,
relaxed, and wanting to go to the lavatory.
     According to her watch it was shortly after three o'clock,
and according to everything else it was night-time. She  should
probably  call  a  nurse  and  let  the world know she had come
round. There was a window in the side wall of the room  through
which  she  could see a dim corridor in which stood a stretcher
trolley and a tall black oxygen bottle, but which was otherwise
empty. Things were very quiet out there.
     Peering  around  her  in  the  small  room   she   saw   a
white-painted  plywood  cupboard, a couple of tubular steel and
vinyl  chairs  lurking  quietly   in   the   shadows,   and   a
white-painted  plywood  bedside cabinet which supported a small
bowl with a single banana in it. On the other side of  the  bed
stood her drip stand. Set into the wall on that side of the bed
was a metal plate with a couple of black knobs and a set of old
bakelite  headphones  hanging  from  it,  and  wound around the
tubular side pillar of the bedhead was a cable with a bell push
attached to it, which she fingered, and  then  decided  not  to
push.
     She was fine. She could find her own way about.
     Slowly,  a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her
elbows, and slid her legs out from under the sheets and  on  to
the  floor,  which  was cold to her feet. She could tell almost
immediately that she shouldn't be doing this because every part
of her feet was sending back streams of  messages  telling  her
exactly  what  every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched
felt like, as if it was a strange and worrying thing  the  like
of  which  they  had never encountered before. Nevertheless she
sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept  the  floor
as something they were just going to have to get used to.
     Ttte  hospital  had  put  her into a large, baggy, striped
thing. It wasn't merely baggy, she decided on examining it more
closely, it actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue  and  white
striped  cotton.  It opened up the back and let in chilly night
draughts. Perfunctory sleeves flopped half-way down  her  arms.
She  moved  her  arms  around in the light, examining the skin,
rubbing it and pinching it, especially around the bandage which
held her drip needle in place. Normally her arms were lithe and
the skin was firm and supple.  Tonight,  however,  they  looked
like  bits  of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with
her other hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.
     She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it
wobbled slightly less than she did, she was able to use  it  to
pull herself slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall slim
figure  trembling,  and  after  a few seconds she held the drip
stand away at a bent arm's length, like a  shepherd  holding  a
crook.
     She  had  not  made  it  to  Norway,  but she was at least
standing up.
     The drip stand rolled  on  four  small  and  independently
perverse wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a
supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the
door  ahead  of  her. Walking increased her sense of wooziness,
but also increased her resolve  not  to  give  in  to  it.  She
reached  the  door,  opened  it, and pushing the drip stand out
ahead of her, looked out into the corridor.
     To her left the corridor ended in a couple of  swing-doors
with  circular  porthole  windows,  which seemed to lead into a
larger area, an open ward perhaps. To her  right  a  number  of
smaller  doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a
short distance before turning a  sharp  corner.  One  of  those
doors  would  probably  be  the lavatory. The others? Well, she
would find out as she looked for the lavatory.
     The first two  were  cupboards.  The  third  was  slightly
bigger and had a chair in it and therefor probably counted as a
room  since  most  people  don't like to sit in cupboards, even
nurses, who have to  do  a  lot  of  things  that  most  people
wouldn't  like  to. It also had a stack of styro beakers, a lot
of semi-congealed coffee creamer and an elderly  coffee  maker,
all sitting on top of a small table together and seeping grimly
over a copy of the Evening Standard.
     Kate   picked  up  the  dark,  damp  paper  and  tried  to
reconstruct some of her missing days  from  it.  However,  what
with  her own wobbly condition making it difficult to read, and
the droopily stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was
able to glean little more than  the  fact  that  no  one  could
really say for certain what had happened. It seemed that no one
had  been  seriously  hurt,  but that an employee of one of the
airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had  now  been
officially classified as an "Act of God".
     "Nice one, God," thought Kate. She put down the remains of
the paper and closed the door behind her.
     The  next  door she tried was another small side ward like
her own. There was a bedside table and a single banana  in  the
fruit bowl.
     The  bed  was  clearly  occupied.  She  pulled the door to
quickly, but she did not pull it quickly enough.  Unfortunately
something  odd  had  caught her attention, but although she had
noticed it, she coutd not immediately  say  what  it  was.  She
stood  there  with  the  door half closed, staring at the door,
knowing that she should not look again, and  knowing  that  she
would.
     Carefully she eased the door back open again.
     The  room  was  darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness
did not give her a good feeling about the occupant of the  bed.
She  listened.  The  silence  didn't  sound too good either. It
wasn't the silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence of
nothing but a little distant traffic noise.
     She  hesitated  for  a  long  while,  silhouetted  in  the
doorway,  looking  and  listening. She wondered about the sheer
bulk of the occupant of the bed and how cold he was with just a
thin blanket pulled over him. Next  to  the  bed  was  a  small
tubular-legged  vinyl bucket chair which was rather overwhelmed
by the huge nnd heavy fur coat draped over it, and Kate thought
that the coat should more properly be draped over the  bed  and
its cold occupant.
     At  last,  walking  as softly and cautiously as she could,
she moved into the room and over to the bed. She stood  looking
down  at  the  face  of  the  big, Nordic man. Though cold, and
though his eyes were shut, his face was frowning slightly as if
he was still rather worried about something. This  struck  Kate
as being almost infinitely sad. In life the man had had the air
of  someone  who  was  beset  by  huge,  if  somewhat puzzling,
difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost immediately
found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as well
was miserable to contemplate.
     She was astonished that he appeared to  be  so  unscathed.
His  skin  was totally unmarked. It was rugged and healthy - or
rather had been healthy until very recently. Closer  inspection
showed  a  network  of  fine  lines which suggested that he was
older than the mid-thirties  she  had  originally  assumed.  He
could  even  have  been  a very fit and healthy man in his late
forties.
     Standing against the wall,  by  the  door,  was  something
unexpected. It was a large Coca-Cola vending machine. It didn't
look  as  if  it had been installed there: it wasn't plugged in
and it had a small neat sticker on it explaining  that  it  was
temporarily  out  of  order. It looked as if it had simply been
left there inadvenently by someone who was  probably  even  now
walking  around  wondering  which  room  he had left it in. Its
large red and white wavy panel stared glassily  into  the  room
and  did  not  explain  itself.  The  only  thing  the  machine
communicated to the outside world was that  there  was  a  slot
into  which  coins  of  a  variety  of  denominations  might be
inserted, and an aperture to which a variety of different  cans
would  be  delivered  if  the machine was working, which it was
not. There was also an old  sledge-hammer  leaning  against  it
which was, in its own way, odd.
     Faintness  began  to  creep  over  Kate, the room began to
develop a slight spin, and there was some restless rustling  in
the cabin trunks of her mind.
     Then  she  realised  that  the  rustling wasn't simply her
imagination. There was a distinct noise in the room - a  heavy,
beating, scratching noise, a muffled fluttering. The noise rose
and  fell like the wind, but in her dazed and woozy state, Kate
could not at first tell where the noise  was  coming  from.  At
last her gaze fell on the curtains. She stared at them with the
worried  frown  of  a  drunk trying to work out why the door is
dancing. The sound was coming from  the  curtains.  She  walked
uncertainly  towards  them  and pulled them apart. A huge eagle
with circles tattooed on its wings was clattering  and  beating
against  the  window,  staring  in  with  great yellow eyes and
pecking wildly at the glass.
     Kate staggered back, turned and tried to heave herself out
of the room. At the end of  the  corridor  the  porthole  doors
swung  open  and  two  figures  came through them. Hands rushed
towards her as she became  hopelessly  entangled  in  the  drip
stand and began slowly to spin towards the floor.
     She was unconscious as they carefully laid her back in her
bed. She was unconscious half an hour later when a disturbingly
short  figure in a worryingly long white doctor's coat arrived,
wheeled the big man  away  on  a  stretcher  trolley  and  then
returned after a few minutes for the Coca-Cola machine.
     She  woke  a  few  hours  later  with a wintry sun seeping
through the window. The day looked very quiet and ordinary, but
Kate was still shaking.

Chapter 3

     The same sun later broke in through the upper windows of a
house in North London and struck the peacefully sleeping figure
of a man.
     The room in which he slept was large  and  bedraggled  and
did  not  much  benefit from the sudden intrusion of light. The
sun crept slowly across the bedclothes, as if nervous  of  what
it  might  find  amongst  them, slunk down the side of the bed,
moved  in  a  rather  startled  way  across  some  objects   it
encountered  on  the  floor,  toyed  nervously with a couple of
motes of dust, lit briefly on a stuffed fruitbat hanging in the
corner, and fled.
     This was about as big an appearance as the sun ever put in
here, and it lasted for about an hour or so, during which  time
the sleeping figure scarcely stirred.
     At eleven o'clock the phone rang, and still the figure did
not respond,  any more than it had responded when the phone had
rung at twenty-five to seven in the morning, again at twenty to
seven, again at  ten  to  seven,  and  again  for  ten  minutes
continuously  starting  at  five  to  seven, after which it has
settled into a long and significant silence, disturbed only  by
the  braying of police sirens in a nearby street at around nine
o'clock, the delivery of a large eighteenth-century dual manual
harpsichord at around nine-fifteen, and the collection of  same
by bailiffs at a little after ten. This was a not uncommon sort
of  occurrence- the people concerned were accustomed to finding
the key  under  the  doormat,  and  the  man  in  the  bed  was
accustomed  to  sleeping through it. You would probably not say
that he was sleeping the sleep of the just,  unless  you  meant
the  just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who
was not fooling about when he climbed into bed of a  night  and
turned off the light.
     The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to
pick a  name  at  random,  would  not have liked it, would have
found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of  mirrors.
He  would  have  desired  someone to pick up the socks, put the
records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would
have been distressed by  its  proponions,  which  were  neither
lofty  nor  shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry,
other than that all parts of the room were pretty much  equally
full  of  old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of
which were now sharing their tasks with each other.  The  walls
were  painted  in  almost  precisely  that shade of green which
Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own  right  hand  at
the  wrist  rather  than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room,
would probably have returned half an hour later  armed  with  a
navigable  river.  It  was, in short, a dump, and was likely to
remain so for as long as it  remained  in  the  custody  of  Mr
Svlad, or "Dirk", Gently, n&#1080; Cjelli.
     At last Gently stirred.
     The  sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his
head, but from somewhere half way down the length of the bed  a
hand  slowly  emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers
felt their way in little tapping  movements  along  the  floor.
Working  from  experience,  they  neatly circumvented a bowl of
sornething  very  nasty  that  had  been  sitting  there  since
Michaelmas,  and  eventually happened upon a half-empty pack of
untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The  fingers  shook  a
crumpled  white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of
matches, and then started to poke  a  way  through  the  sheets
tangled  together  at  the  top  of  the  bed,  like a magician
prodding at a handkerchief from which he intends to  release  a
flock of doves.
     The  cigarette  was  at  last  inserted into the hole. The
cigarette was lit. For a while the bed itself  appeared  to  be
smoking  the cigarette in great heaving drags. It coughed long,
loud and shudderingly and then began at last to  breathe  in  a
more  measured  rhythm.  In  this  way,  Dirk  Gently  achieved
consciousness.
     He lay there for a while feeling a terrible sense of worry
and guilt about something weighing on his shoulders. He  wished
he  could forget about it, and promptly did. He levered himself
out of bed and a few minutes later padded downstairs.
     The mail on the doormat consisted of the usual  things:  a
rude letter threatening to take away his American Express card,
an  invitation to apply for an American Express card, and a few
bills of the more hysterical and unrealistic type. He  couldn't
understand  why they kept sending them. The cost of the postage
seemed merely to be good money thrown after bad. He  shook  his
head in wonderment at the malevolent incompetence of the world,
threw  the  mail  away,  entered the kitchen and approached the
fridge with caution.
     It stood in the corner.
     The kitchen was large and shrouded in a  deep  gloom  that
was  not  relieved,  only  turned  yellow,  by  the  action  of
switching on the light. Dirk squatted  down  in  front  of  the
fridge  and  carefully  examined the edge of the door. He found
what he was looking for. In fact he  found  more  than  he  was
looking for.
     Near  the  bottom of the door, across the narrow gap which
separated the door from the main body of the fridge, which held
the strip of grey insulating rubber, lay a single  human  hair.
It  was stuck there with dried saliva. That he had expected. He
had stuck it there himself three days earlier and  had  checked
it on several occasions since then. What he had not expected to
fine was a second hair.
     He frowned at it in alarm. A second hair?
     It  was  stuck across the gap in the same way as the first
one, only this hair was near the top of the fridge door, and he
had not put it there. He peered at it closely, and even went so
far as to go and open the old shutters on the  kitchen  windows
to let some extra light in upon the scene.
     The  daylight  shouldered  its  way  in  like  a  squad of
poiicemen, and did a lot  of  what's-all-thising  around
the  room  which, like the bedroom, would have presented anyone
of an aesthetic disposition with difficulties. Like most of the
rooms in  Dirk's  house  it  was  large,  looming  and  utterly
dishevelled. It simply sneered at anyone's attempts to tidy it,
sneered  at  them  and brushed them aside like one of the small
pile of dead  and  disheartened  flies  that  lay  beneath  the
window, on top of a pile of old pizza boxes.
     The  light  revealed  the  second hair for what it was - a
grey hair at root, dyed a vivid metallic  orange.  Dirk  pursed
his  lips and thought very deeply. He didn't need to think hard
in order to realise who the hair belonged to - there  was  only
one  person who regularly entered the kitchen looking as if her
head had been used for extracting metal oxides from  industrial
waste  - but he did have seriously to consider the implications
of the discovery that she had been plastering her  hair  across
the door of his fridge.
     It  meant that the silently waged conflict between himself
and  his  cleaning  lady  had  escalated  to  a  new  and  more
frightening  level.  It  was  now,  Dirk  reckoned, fully three
months since this fridge door had been opened, and each of them
was grimly determined not to be the one to open it  first.  The
fridge  no  longer  merely  stood  there  in  the  comer of the
kitchen, it actually lurked. Dirk could quite clearly  remember
the  day on which the thing had started lurking. It was about a
week ago, when Dirk had tried  a  simple  subterfuge  to  trick
Elena  - the old bat's name was Elena, pronounced to rhyme with
cleaner, which was an irony that Dirk now no longer relished  -
into  opening  the  fridge door. The subterfuge had been deftly
deflected and had nearly rebounded horribly on Dirk.
     He had resorted to the strategy  of  going  to  the  local
mini-market to buy a few simple groceries. Nothing contentious
- a  little  milk,  some  eggs,  some bacon, a carton or two of
chocolate custard and a simple half-pound  of  butter.  He  had
left  them, innocently, on top of the fridge as if to say, "Oh,
when you have a moment, perhaps you could pop these inside..."
     When he had returned that evening his heart bounded to see
that they were no longer on top of the fridge. They were  gone!
They  had  not  been merely moved aside or put on a shelf, they
were nowhere to be seen. She must finally have capitulated  and
put them away. In the fridge. And she would surely have cleaned
it  out  once it was actually open. For the first and only time
his heart swelled with warmth and gratitude towards her, and he
was about to fling open the door of the  thing  in  relief  and
triumph  when an eighth sense (at the last count, Dirk reckoned
he had eleven) warned him to be  very,  very  careful,  and  to
consider  first  where  Elena  might  have  put the cleared out
contents of the fridge.
     A  nameless  doubt  gnawed  at  his  mind  as   he   moved
noiselessly  towards  the garbage bin beneath the sink. Holding
his breath, he opened the lid and looked.
     There, nestling in the folds of the fresh black bin liner,
were his eggs, his bacon, his chocolate custard and his  simple
half-pound  of butter. Two milk bottles stood rinsed and neatly
lined up by the sink into which their contents  had  presumably
been poured.
     She had thrown it away.
     Rather  than open the fridge door, she had thrown his food
away. He  looked  round  slowly  at  the  grimy,  squat,  white
monolith,  and  that  was the exact moment at which he realised
without a shadow of a doubt  that  his  fridge  had  now  begun
seriously to lurk.
     He  made  himself  a  stiff black coffee and sat, slightly
trembling. He had not even looked directly at the sink, but  he
knew that he must unconsciously have noticed the two clean milk
bottles  there, and some busy part of his mind had been alarmed
by them.
     The next day he had explained all this away to himself. He
was becoming  needlessly  paranoiac.  It  had  surely  been  an
innocent  or careless mistake on Elena's part. She had probably
been brooding distractedly on her son's  attack  of  bronchitis
peevishness  or homosexuality or whatever it was that regularly
prevented her from either turning up, or from having noticeable
effect  when  she  did.  She  was  Italian  and  probably   had
absent-mindedly mistaken his food for garbage.
     But  the  business  with  the  hair  changed  all that. It
established beyond all possible doubt  that  she  knew  exactly
what  she  was  doing.  She was under no circumstamces going to
open the fridge door until he had opened it first, and  he  was
under no circumstances going to open the fridge until she had.
     Obviously she had not noticed his hair, otherwise it would
have been her most effective course simply to pull it off, thus
tricking him into thinking she had opened the fridge. He shuuld
presumably now remove her hair in the hope of pulling that same
trick  on  her,  but  even as he sat there he knew that somehow
that wouldn't work, and that they were locked into a tightening
spiral of non-fridge-opening  that  would  lead  them  both  to
madness or perdition.
     He  wondered if he could hire someone to come and open the
fridge.
     No. He was not  in  a  position  to  hire  anybody  to  do
anything.  He  was  not even in a position to pay Elena for the
last three weeks. The only reason he didn't ask  her  to  leave
was  that sacking somebody inevitably involved paying them off,
and this he was in no position to do. His secretary had finally
left him on her own initiative and gone  off  to  do  something
reprehensible  in  the  travel  business. Dirk had attempted to
cast scon on her preferring monotony of pay over-
     "Regularity of pay," she had calmly corrected him.
     - over job satisfaction.
     She had nearly said,  "Over  what?",  but  at  that
moment  she  realised  that  if she said that she would have to
listen to his reply, which would be bound to infuriate her into
arguing back. It occurred to her for the first  time  that  the
only  way  of  escaping  was  just  not to get drawn into these
arguments. If she simply did not respond this  time,  then  she
was free to leave. She tried it. She felt a sudden freedom. She
left.  A  week  later,  in  much  the same mood, she married an
airline cabin steward called Smith.
     Dirk had kicked her desk over, and then had to pick it  up
himself later when she didn't come back.
     The detective business was currently as brisk as the tomb.
Nobody,  it  seemed,  wished  to have anything detected. He had
recently, to make ends meet, taken up doing palmistry  in  drag
on  Thursday  evenings,  but  he wasn't comfortable with it. He
could have withstood it - the hateful, abject humiliation of it
all was something to which  he  had,  in  different  ways,  now
become  accustomed,  and  he  was quite anonymous in his little
tent in the back garden of the pub - he could have withstood it
all if he hadn't been so horribly, excruciatingly good  at  it.
It  made him break out in a sweat of self loathing. He tried by
every means to cheat, to fake, to be deliberately and cynically
bad, but whatever fakery he tried to  introduce  always  failed
and he invariably ended up being right.
     His  worst  moment  had come about as a result of the poor
woman from Oxfordshiie who had come in to see him one  evening.
Being in something of a waggish mood, he had suggested that she
should  keep  an eye on her husband, who, judging by her mamage
line, looked to be a bit of a flighty type. It transpired  that
her husband was in fact a fighter pilot, and that his plane had
been  lost  in  an exerrise over the North Sea only a fortnight
earlier.
     Dirk  had  been  flustered  by  this   and   had   soothed
meaninglessly at her. He was certain, he said, that her husband
would  be  restored  to  her  in the fullness of time, that all
would be well, and that all manner of things would be well  and
so on. The woman said that she thought this was not very likely
seeing  as  the world record for staying alive in the North Sea
was rather less than an hour, and since no trace of her husband
had been found in two weeks it seemed fanciful to imagine  that
he  was  anything  other than stone dead, and she was trying to
get used to the idea, thank you very much. She said  it  rather
tartly.
     Dirk  had  lost  all  control at this point and started to
babble.
     He said that it was very clear from reading her hands that
the great sum of money she  had  coming  to  her  would  be  no
consolation  to her for the loss of her dear, dear husband, but
that at least it might comfort her to know that he had gone  on
to  that  great  something  or  other  in  the sky, that he was
floating  on  the  fleeciest  of  white  clouds,  looking  very
handsome  in  his  new  set  of wings, and that he was terribly
sorry to be talking such appalling drivel but  she  had  caught
him  rather  by  surprise. Would she care for some tea, or some
vodka, or some soup?
     The woman demurred. She said she had  only  wandered  into
the  tent by accident, she had been looking for the lavatories,
and what was that about the money?
     "Complete gibberish," Dirk had explained. He was in  great
difficulties,  what with having the falsetto to keep up. "I was
making it up as I went along," he said.  "Please  allow  me  to
tender  my most profound apologies for intruding so clumsily on
your private grief, and to escort you to, er, or rather, direct
you to the, well, what I can only in the circumstances call the
lavatory, which is out of the tent and on the left."
     Dirk had been cast down by this encounter,  but  was  then
utterly  horrified a few days later when he discovered that the
very following morning the unfonunate woman had learnt that she
had won &#1105;250,000 on the Premium Bonds. He spent  several  hours
that  night standing on the roof of his house, shaking his fist
at the dark sky and shouting,  "Stop  it!"  until  a  neighbour
complained to the police that he couldn't sleep. The police had
come  round  in  a screaming squad car and woken up the rest of
the neighbourhood as well.

     Today, this morning, Dirk sat in his  kitchen  and  stared
dejectedly at his fridge. The bloody-minded ebullience which he
usually relied on to carry him through the day had been knocked
out of him in its very opening moments by the business with the
fridge.  His  will  sat imprisoned in it, locked up by a single
hair.
     What he needed, he thought, was a client. Please, God,  he
thought,  if there is a god, any god, bring me a client. Just a
simple client, the simpler  the  better.  Credulous  and  rich.
Someone  like that chap yesterday. He tapped his fingers on the
table.
     The problem was that the more credulous  the  client,  the
more  Dirk fell foul at the end of his own better nature, which
was constantly rearing up and  embarrassing  him  at  the  most
inopportune  moments.  Dirk  frequently  threatened to hurl his
better nature to the ground and kneel on its windpipe,  but  it
usually  managed to get the better of him by dressing itself up
as guilt and self loathing, in which guise it could  throw  him
right out of the ring.
     Credulous  and  rich.  Just so that he could pay off some,
perhaps even just one, of the more  prominent  and  sensational
bills.  He  lit  a  cigarette.  The smoke curled upwards in the
moming light and attached itself to the ceiling.
     Like that chap yesterday. . .
     He paused.
     The chap yesterday. . .
     The world held its breath.
     Quietly and gently there settled on him the knowledge that
something,  somewhere,  was  ghastly.  Something  was  terribly
wrong.
     There  was  a  disaster hanging silently in the air around
him waiting for him to notice it. His knees tingled.
     What he needed, he had been thinking, was a client. He had
been thinking that as a matter of habit. It was what he  always
thought  at this time of the morning. What he had forgotten was
that he had one.
     He stared wildly at his watch.  Nearly  eleven-thirty.  He
shook  his head to try and clear the silent ringing between his
ears, then made a hysterical lunge for his hat  and  his  great
leather coat that hung behind the door.
     Fifteen  seconds  later he left the house, five hours late
but moving fast.

Chapter 4

     A minute or two later Dirk paused  to  consider  his  best
strategy.  Rather  than arrive five hours late and flustered it
would be better all round if he were to arrive five hours and a
few extra minutes late, but triumphantly in command.
     "Pray God I am not too soon!" would be a good opening line
as he swept in, but it needed a good  follow-through  as  well,
and he wasn't sure what it should be.
     Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car,
but then  again  it  was  only  a  short distance, and he had a
tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving.  This  was
largely  because  of  his method of "Zen" navigation, which was
simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where  it  was
going  and  follow  it.  The results were more often surprising
than successful, but he felt it was worth it for  the  sake  of
the few occasions when it was both.
     Furthermore  he  was  not  at all certain that his car was
working.
     It was an elderly Jaguar, built at that very special  time
in  the  company's history when they were making cars which had
to stop for repairs more often than they  needed  to  stop  for
petrol,  and  frequently  needed  to  rest  for  months between
outings. He was, however, certain, now that he  came  to  think
about  it,  that the car didn't have any petrol and furthermore
he did not have any cash or valid plastic to enable him to fill
it up.
     He abandoned that line of thought as wholly fruitless.
     He stopped to buy a  newspaper  while  he  thought  things
over.  The  clock  in  the newsagent's said eleven thirty-five.
Damn damn, damn. He toyed with the idea of simply dropping  the
case.  Just  walking  away and forgetting about it. Having some
lunch. The whole thing was fraught  with  difficulties  in  any
event.  Or rather it was fraught with one particular difficulty
which was that of keeping a straight face. The whole thing  was
complete  and  utter nonsense. The client was clearly loopy and
Dirk would not have considered taking the case except  for  one
very important thing.
     Three hundred pounds a day plus expenses.
     The  client had agreed to it just like that. And when Dirk
had started his usual speech to the effect  that  his  methods,
involving as they did the fundamental interconnectedness of all
things,  often  led  to  expenses  that  might  appear  to  the
untutored eye to be somewhat tangential to the matter in  hand,
the  client had simply waved the matter aside as trifling. Dirk
liked that in a client.
     The only thing the client had insisted upon in  the  midst
of  this  almost superhuman fit of reasonableness was that Dirk
had to be there, absolutely had, had, had to  be  there  ready,
functioning  and  alert,  without fail, without even the merest
smidgen of an inkling of failure, at six-thirty in the morning.
Absolute.
     Well, he was just going to have to see reason  about  that
as well. Six-thirty was clearly a preposterous time and he, the
client,  obviously  hadn't  meant  it  seriously.  A  civilised
six-thirty for twelve noon was almost certainly what he had  in
mind,  and  if  he  wanted to cut up rough about it, Dirk would
have  no  option  but  to  start  handing  out   some   serious
statistics.  Nobody  got  murdered  before  lunch.  But nobody.
People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch  to  get  both
the blood-sugar and bloodlust levels up. Dirk had the figures
to prove it.
     Did  he,  Anstey  (the  client's  name was Anstey, an odd,
intense man in his mid-thirties with  staring  eyes,  a  narrow
yellow  tie  and  one  of  the  big houses in Lupton Road; Dirk
hadn't actually liked him very much and thought he looked as if
he was trying to swallow a fish), did he know that 67 per  cent
of  all  known  murderers,  who expressed a preference, had had
liver and bacon for lunch? And that another  22  per  cent  had
been  torn  between either a prawn biryani or an omelette? That
dispensed with 89 per cent of the threat at a  stroke,  and  by
the  time  you  had further discounted the salad eaters and the
turkey and ham sandwich munchers and started  to  look  at  the
number  of people who would contemplate such a course of action
without any lunch at all, then you were well into the realms of
negligibility and bordering on fantasy.
     After two-thirty, but nearer to three  o'clock,  was  when
you  had  to start being on your guard. Seriously. Even on good
days. Even  when  you  weren't  receiving  death  threats  from
strange  gigantic  men with green eyes, you had to watch people
like a hawk after the lunching hour. The really dangerous  time
was  after  four  o'clockish, when the streets began to fill up
with marauding packs of publishers and  agents,  maddened  with
fettucine  and  kir  and  baying for cabs. Those were the times
that tested men's souls. Six-thirty in the morning? Forget  it.
Dirk had.
     With  his  resolve well stiffened Dirk stepped back out of
the newsagent's into the nippy air of  the  street  and  strode
off.
     "Ah,  I  expect  you'll  be wanting to pay for that paper,
then, won't you, Mr Dirk, sir?" said  the  newsagent,  trotting
gently after him.
     "Ah,   Bates,"   said   Dirk   loftily,   "you   and  your
expectations. Always expecting this and expecting that.  May  I
recommend  serenity  to  you?  A  life  that  is  burdened with
expectations  is  a  heavy  life.  Its  fruit  is  sorrow   and
disappointment. Learn to be one with the joy of the moment."
     "I  thirtk  it's  twenty pence that one, sir," said Bates,
tranquilly.
     "Tell you what I'll do, Bates, seeing as it's you. Do  you
have a pen on you at all? A simple ball-point will suffice."
     Bates  produced  one from an inner pocket and handed it to
Dirk, who then tore off the corner of the paper  on  which  the
price  was  printed and scribbled "IOU" above it. He handed the
scrap of paper to the newsagent.
     "Shall I put this with the others, then, sir?"
     "Put it wherever it will give you the greatest  joy,  dear
Bates,  I  would want you to put it nowhere less. For now, dear
man, farewell."
     "I expect you'll be wanting to give me back my pen as well
Mr Dirk."
     "When the times are propitious for such a transaction,  my
dear  Bates,"  said  Dirk,  "you  may  depend  upon it. For the
moment, higher purposes call it. Joy, Bates, great joy.  Bates,
please let go of it."
     After  one  last listless tug, the little man shrugged and
padded back towards his shop.
     "I expect I'll be seeing you later,  then,  Mr  Dirk,"  he
called out over his shoulder, without enthusiasm.
     Dirk  gave  a  gracious  bow  of  his  head  to  the man's
retreating back, and then hurried on, opening the newspaper  at
the horoscope page as he did so.
     "Virtually  evervthing you decide today will be wrong," it
said bluntly.
     Dirk slapped the paper shut with a grunt. He did not for a
second hold with the notion that great whirling lumps  of  rock
light years away knew something about your day that you didn't.
It  just so happened that "The Great Zaganza" was an old friend
of his who knew when Dirk's birthday was, and always wrote  his
column deliberately to wind him up. The paper's circulation had
dropped  by  nearly a twelfth since he had taken over doing the
horoscope, and only Dirk and The Great Zaganza knew why.
     He hurried on, flapping his way quickly through  the  rest
of the paper. As usual, there was nothing interesting. A lot of
stuff  about  the  search for Janice Smith, the missing airline
girl from Heathrow, and how she could possibly have disappeared
just like that. They printed the latest picture of  her,  which
was  on  a  swing with pigtails, aged six. Her father, a Mr Jim
Pearce, was quoted as saying it was quite a good likeness,  but
she  had  grown  up  a lot now and was usually in better focus.
Impatiently, Dirk tucked the paper under  his  arm  and  strode
onwards, his thoughts on a much more interesting topic.
     Three hundred pounds a day. Plus expenses.
     He wondered how long he could reasonably expect to sustain
in Mr  Anstey  his  strange  delusions  that he was about to be
murdered by a seven foot tall, shaggy-haired creature with huge
green eyes and horns, who habitually waved  things  at  him:  a
contract  written  in some incomprehensible language and signed
with a splash of blood, and also a kind of  scythe.  The  other
notable feature of this creature was that no one other than his
client had been able to see it, which Mr Anstey dismissed as
a trick of the light.
     Three days? Four? Dirk didn't think he'd be able to manage
a whole week with a straight face, but he was  already  looking
at something like a grand for his trouble. And he would stick a
new  fridge  down  on the list of tangential but non-negotiable
expenses. That would be a good  one.  Getting  the  old  fridge
thrown out was definitely part of the interconnectedness of all
things.
     He  began  to  whistle  at  the  thought of simply getting
someone to come round and cart  the  thing  away,  turned  into
Lupton Road and was surprised at all the police cars there. And
the  ambulance. He didn't like them being there. It didn't feel
right. It didn't sit comfortably  in  his  mind  alongside  his
visions of a new fridge.

Chapter 5

     Dirk  knew  Lupton  Road. It was a wide tree-lined affair,
with  large  late-Victorian  terraces  which  stood  tall   and
sturdily  and resented police cars. Resented them if they tumed
up in numbers, that is, and if their lights were flashing.  The
inhabitants of Lupton Road liked to see a nice, well-turned-out
single  police  car  patrolling  up  and  down  the street in a
cheerful and robust manner - it kept property  values  cheerful
and  robust  too. But the moment the lights started flashing in
that knuckle-whitening blue, they cast their pallor not only on
the neatly pointed bricks that they flashed across, but also on
the very values those bricks represented.
     Anxious faces peered from behind the glass of neighbouring
windows, and were irradiated by the blue strobes.
     There were three of them, three  police  cars  left  askew
across the road in a way that transcended mere parking. It sent
out  a massive signal to the world saying that the law was here
now taking charge of things,  and  that  anyone  who  just  had
normal,  good  and  cheerful business to conduct in Lupton Road
could just fuck off.
     Dirk hurried up the road, sweat pricking  at  him  beneath
his  heavy  leather coat. A police constable loomed up ahead of
him with his arms spread out, playing at being a stop  barrier,
but  Dirk  swept  him  aside in a torrent of words to which the
constable was unable to come up with a good  response  off  the
top of his head. Dirk sped on to the house.
     At  the  door  another policeman stopped him, and Dirk was
about to wave an expired Marks and Spencer charge card  at  him
with a deft little flick of the wrist that he had practised for
hours  in front of a mirror on those long evenings when nothing
much else was on, when the officer suddenly said, "Hey, is your
name Gently?"
     Dirk blinked at him warily.  He  made  a  slight  grunting
noise  that  could  be  either  "yes"  or "no" depending on the
circumstances.
     "Because the Chief has been looking for you."
     "Has he?" said Dirk.
     "I recognised you from his description," said the  officer
looking him up and down with a slight smirk.
     "In  fact,"  continued  the officer, "he's been using your
name in a manner that some might find highly offensive. He even
sent Big Bob the Finder off in a car to find you.  I  can  tell
that  he  didn't  find  you  from  the fact that you're looking
reasonably well. Lot of people get found by Big Bob the Finder,
they come in a bit wobbly. Just about able to help us with  our
enquiries  but that's about all. You'd better go in. Rather you
than me," he added quietly.
     Dirk glanced at the house. The stripped-pine shutters were
closed across all the windows. Though in all other respects the
house seemed well cared for, groomed into  a  state  of  clean,
well-pointed aftluence, the closed shutters seemed to convey an
air of sudden devastation.
     Oddly,  there seemed to be music coming from the basement,
or rather, just a single disjointed phrase  of  thumping  music
being repeated over and over again. It sounded as if the stylus
had  got stuck in the groove of a record, and Dirk wondered why
no one had turned it off, or at least nudged the  stylus  along
so that the record could continue. The song seemed very vaguely
familiar  and Dirk guessed that he had probably heard it on the
radio recently, though he couldn't place it.  The  fragment  of
lyric seemed to be something like:

      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
       "Don't  pick it up, pick it up, pick i - " and so
on.

     "You'll be wanting to go down to the basement,"  said  the
officer  impassively, as if that was the last thing that anyone
in their right mind would be wanting to do.
     Dirk nodded to him curtly and hurried up the steps to  the
front door, which was standing slightly ajar. He shook his head
and   clenched   his  shoulders  to  try  and  stop  his  brain
fluttering.
     He went in.
     The hallway spoke of prosperity imposed on  a  taste  that
had  originally  been formed by student living. The floors were
stripped boards heavily polyurethaned,  the  walls  white  with
Greek  rugs  hung on them, but expensive Greek rugs. Dirk would
be prepared to bet (though probably  not  to  pay  up)  that  a
thorough  search  of  the  house would reveal, amongst who knew
what other dark secrets, five hundred  British  Telecom  shares
and  a  set of Dylan albums that was complete up to Blood on
the Tracks.
     Another policeman was standing  in  the  hall.  He  looked
terribly  young,  and he was leaning very slightly back against
the wall, staring at the floor and holding his  helmet  against
his  stomach.  His  face  was pale and shiny. He looked at Dirk
blankly, and nodded faintly in  the  direction  of  the  stairs
leading down.
     Up the stairs came the repeated sound:
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
     Dirk  was  trembling  with  a rage that was barging around
inside him loooking for something to hit or throttle. He wished
that he could hotly deny that any of this was  his  fault,  but
until anybody tried to assert that it was, he couldn't.
     "How long have you been here?" he said curtly.
     The  young  policeman  had  to  gather himself together to
answer.
     "We arrived about half-hour ago," he replied  in  a  thick
voice. "Hell of a morning. Rushing around."
     "Don't   tell   me   about  rushing  around,"  said  Dirk,
completely meaninglessly. He launched himself down the stars.
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
     At the bottom there was a narrow corridor. The  main  door
off  it  was  heavily  cracked  and  hanging off its hinges. It
opened into a large double room. Dirk was about to enter when a
figure emerged from it and stood barring his way.
     "I hate the fact that this case has got you  mixed  up  in
it," said the figure, "I hate it very much. Tell me what you've
got to do with it so I know exactly what it is I'm hating."
     Dirk stared at the neat, thin face in astonishment.
     "Gilks?" he said.
     "Don't  stand  there  looking like a startled whatsisname,
what are those things what aren't seals? Much worse than seals.
Big blubbery things. Dugongs. Don't stand there looking like  a
startled  dugong.  Why has that..." Gilks pointed into the room
behind him, "why has that. . .man in there got  your  name  and
teIephone number on an envelope full uf money?"
     "How  m..."  started Dirk. "How, may I ask, do you come to
be here, Gilks? What are  you  doing  so  far  from  the  Fens?
Surprised you find it dank enough for you here."
     "Three hundred pounds," said Gilks. "Why?"
     "Perhaps  you  would allow me to speak to my client," said
Dirk.
     "Your client, eh?" said Gilks grimly. "Yes. All right. Why
don't you speak to him? I'd be interested to hear what you have
to say." He stood back stiffly, and waved Dirk into the room.
     Dirk gathered his thoughts and entered the room in a state
of controlled composure which lasted for just over a second.
     Most of his client was sitting quietly  in  a  comfortable
chair  in  front  of  the  hi-fi.  The  chair was placed in the
optimal listening position - about twice as far back  from  the
speakers  as  the  distance  between  them,  which is generally
considered to be ideal for stereo imaging.
     He seemed generally to be casual and relaxed with his legs
crossed and a half-finished cup of coffee on  the  small  table
beside  him. Distressingly, though, his head was sitting neatly
on the middle of the record which was revolving  on  the  hi-fi
turntable,  with the tone arm snuggling up against the neck and
constantly being deflected back into the same  groove.  As  the
head  revolved  it seemed once every 1.8 seconds or so to shoot
Dirk a reproachful glance, as if to say, "See what happens when
you don't turn up on time like I asked you to," then  it  would
sweep on round to the wall, round, round, and back to the front
again with more reproach.
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
     The  room swayed a little around Dirk, and he put his hand
out against the wall to steady it.
     "Was there any particular  service  you  were  engaged  to
provide for your client?" said Gilks behind him, very quietly.
     "Oh,  er, just a small matter," said Dirk weakly. "Nothing
connected with all this. No, he, er, didn't mention any of this
kind of thing at all. Well, look, I  can  see  you're  busy,  I
think I'd better just collect my fee and leave. You say he left
it out for me?"
     Having  said  this,  Dirk  sat heavily on a small bentwood
chair standing behind him, and broke it.
     Gilks hauled him back to his feet again, and  propped  him
against the wall. Briefly he left the room, then came back with
a  small  jug  of  water  and a glass on a tray. He poured some
water into the glass, took it to Dirk and threw it at him.
     "Better?"
     "No," spluttered Dirk, "can't you at least turn the record
off?"
     "That"s forensic's job.  Can't  touch  anything  till  the
clever dicks have been. Maybe that's them now. Go out on to the
patio  and get some air. Chain yourself to the railing and beat
yourself up a little, I'm pushed for time myself.  And  try  to
look less green, will you? It's not your colour."
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
     Gilks turned round, looking tired and cross, and was about
to go  out and up the stairs to meet the newcomers whose voices
could be heard up on the  ground  floor,  when  he  paused  and
watched the head revolving patiently on its heavy platter for a
few seconds.
     "You  know,"  he  said at last, "these smart-alec show-off
suicides really make me tired. They only do it to annoy."
     "Suicide?" said Dirk.
     Gilks glanced round at him.
     "Windows secured with iron bars half an  inch  thick,"  he
said.  "Door  locked  from the inside with the key still in the
lock. Furniture piled against the inside of  the  door.  French
windows  to  the patio locked with mortice door bolts. No signs
of a tunnel. If it was  murder  then  the  murderer  must  have
stopped to do a damn fine job of glazing on the way out. Except
that all the putty's old nnd painted over.
     "No.  Nobody's left this room, and nobody's broken into it
except for us, and I'm pretty sure we didn't do it.
     "I haven't time to fiddle around on  this  one.  Obviously
suicide;  and just done to be difficult. I've half a mind to do
the deceased for wasting police time. Tell you what," he  said,
glancing  at his watch, "you've got ten minutes. If you come up
with a plausible explanation of how he did it that I can put in
my report, I'll let you keep the evidence in the envelope minus
20 per cent compensation to me for the emotional wear and  tear
involved in not punching you in the mouth."
     Dirk  wondered  for a moment whether or not to mention the
visits his client claimed to have received from a  strange  and
violent green-eyed, fur-clad giant who regularly emerged out of
nowhere  bellowing about contracts and obligations and waving a
three foot glittering-edged scythe, but  decided,  on  balance,
no.
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-"
     He  was  seething at himself at last. He had not been able
to seethe at himself properly over  the  death  of  his  client
because  it was too huge and horrific a burden to bear. But now
he had been humiliated by  Gilks,  and  found  himself  in  too
wobbly  and  disturbed a state to fight back, so he was able to
seethe at himself about that.
     He turned sharply away from his tormentor and let  himself
out into the patio garden to be alone with his seethings.
     The patio was a small, paved, west-facing area at the rear
which  was  largely deprived of light, cut off as it was by the
high back wall of the house  and  by  the  high  wall  of  some
industrial  building  that backed on to the rear. In the middle
of it stood,  for  who  knew  what  possible  reason,  a  stone
sundial. If any light at aIl fell on the sundial you would know
that  it  was pretty close to noon, GMT. Other than that, birds
perched on it. A few plants sulked in pots.
     Dirk jabbed a cigarette in his mouth and burnt  a  lot  of
the end of it fiercely.
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
       "Don't  pick  it  up,  pick it up, pick i-" still
nagged from inside the house.
     Neat garden walls separated the patio on either side  trom
the gardens of neighbouring houses. The one to the left was the
same  size  as this one, the one to the right extended a little
further, benefiting from the fact that the industrial  building
finished  flush  with the intervening garden wall. There was an
air of well-kemptness. Nothing grand, nothing  flashy,  just  a
sense  that  all  was well and that upkeep on the houses was no
problem. The house to the right, in particular, looked as if it
had had its brickwork repointed quite recently, and its windows
reglossed.
     Dirk took a large gulp of  air  and  stood  for  a  second
staring  up  into what could be seen of the sky, which was grey
and  hazy.  A  single  dark  speck  was  wheeling  against  the
underside of the clouds. Dirk watched this for a while, glad of
any  focus  for his thoughts other than the horrors of the room
he had just left. He was vaguely aware of  comings  and  goings
within   the  room,  of  a  certain  amount  of  tape-measuring
happening, of a feeling that photographs were being taken,  and
that severed-head-removal activities were taking place.
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick i-
      "Don't pi - "
  Somebody  at last picked it up, the nagging repetition was at
last hushed, and now the gentle sound of a  distant  television
floated peacefully on the noontime air.
     Dirk,  however,  was  having a great deal of difficulty in
taking it all in. He was much more aware of taking a succession
of huge swimmy whacks to the head, which were the  assaults  of
guilt.  It  was  not  the normal background-noise type of guilt
that comes from just being alive this far  into  the  twentieth
century,  and  which  Dirk  was usually fairly adept at dealing
with. It was  an  actual  stunning  sense  of,  "this  specific
terrible  thing is specifically and terribly my fault". All the
normal mental moves wouldn't let him get out of the path of the
huge pendulum.
     Wham it came again, whizz, wham,  again  and
again,
     wham
     wham, wham.
     He  tried  to remember any of the details of what his late
client  (wham,  wham)  had  said  (wham)  to  him
(wham),  but  it  was (wham) virtually impossible
(wham)   with   all   this   whamming    taking    place
(wham). The man had said (wham) that (Dirk took a
deep  breath)  (wham) he was being pursued (wham)
by (wham) a large, hairy, green-eyed monster armed  with
a scythe.

      Wham!
     Dirk had secretly smiled to himself about this.
      Whim, wham, whim, wham, whim, wham!
     And had thought, "What a silly man."
      Whim, whim, whim, whim, wham!
     A scythe (whom), and a contract (wham).

     He  hadn't known, or even had the faintest idea as to what
the contract was for.
     "Of course," Dirk had thought (wham).
     But he had a vague feeling that it might have something to
do with a potato. There  was  a  bit  of  a  complicated  story
attached to that (whim, whim, whim).
     Dirk had nodded seriously at this point (wham), and
made a  reassuring tick (wham) on a pad which he kept on
his desk  (wham)  for  the  express  purpose  of  making
reassuring  ticks  on  (wham, wham, wham). He had prided
himself  at  that  moment  on  having  managed  to  convey  the
impression  that  he  had  made  a  tick  in a small box marked
"Potatoes".
      Wham, wham, wham, wham
     Mr Anstey had said he  would  explain  further  about  the
potatoes when Dirk arrived to carry out his task.
     And Dirk had promised (whom), easily (wham),
casually (wham), with an airy wave of his hand (wham,
wham,  wham),  to  be  there  at  six-thirty in the morning
(wham), because the contract (wham) fell  due  at
seven o'clock.
     Dirk  remembered  having  made  another tick in a notional
"Potato contract falls due at 7.00 a.m." box. (Wh...)
     He couldn't handle all this whamming any more. He couldn't
blame himself for what had happened. Well, he could. Of  course
he could. He did. It was, in fact, his fault (wham). The
point  was  that he couldn't continue to blame himself for what
had happened and think clearly about it, which he was going  to
have   to  do.  He  would  have  to  dig  this  horrible  thing
(wham) up by the roots, and if he was going to be fit to
do that he had somehow to divest himself (wham) of  this
whamming.
     A  huge  wave  of anger surged over him as he contemplated
his predicament and the tangled distress of his life. He  hated
this neat patio. He hated all this sundial stuff, and all these
neatly  painted  windows,  all  these  hideously trim roofs. He
wanted to blame it all on the paintwork rather than on himself,
on the revoltingly  tidy  patio  paving-stones,  on  the  sheer
disgusting abomination of the neatly repointed brickwork.
     "Excuse me..."
     "What?"   He   whirled  round,  caught  unawares  by  this
intrusion into his private raging of a quiet polite voice.
     "Are you connected with...?" The woman indicated  all  the
unpleasantness  and the lower-ground-floorness and the horrible
sort of policeness of things next door to  her  with  a  little
floating  movement  of her wrist. Her wrist wore a red bracelet
which matched the frames of her glasses. She was  looking  over
the  garden  wall  from  the house on the right, with an air of
stightly anxious distaste.
     Dirk glared at her speechlessly. She looked  about  forty-
somethingish and neat, with an instant and unmistakable quality
of advertising about her.
     She gave a troubled sigh.
     "I  know  it's probably all very terrible and everything,"
she said, "but do you think it will take long? We  only  called
in  the  police  because  the  noise of that ghastly record was
driving us up the wall. It's all a bit..."
     She gave him a look of silent  appeal,  and  Dirk  decided
that  it  could  all  be her fault. She could, as far as he was
concerned, take the blame for everything  while  he  sorted  it
out. She deserved it; if only for wearing a bracelet like that.
     Without  a  word,  he turned his back on her, and took his
fury back inside the house where it  began  rapidly  to  freeze
into something hard and efficient.
     "Gilks!"  he said. "Your smart-alec suicide theory. I like
it. It works for me. And I think I see how the  clever  bastard
pulled it off. Bring me pen. Bring me paper."
     He  sat  down  with a flourish at the cherrywood farmhouse
table which occupied the centre of the rear portion of the room
and deftly sketched out a scheme of  events  which  involved  a
number of household or kitchen implements, a swinging, weighted
light  fitting,  some  very  precise  timing, and hinged on the
vital fact that the record turntable was Japanese.
     "That should keep your forensic chaps  happy,"  said  Dirk
briskly to Gilks. The forensic chaps glanced at it, took in its
salient  points  and liked them. They were simple, implausible,
and of exactly that nature which a coroner who liked  the  same
sort  of  holidays  in Marbella which they did would be sure to
relish.
     "Unless," said Dirk casually, "you are interested  in  the
notion  that  the  deceased  had  entered  into  some  kind  of
diabolical  contract  with  a  supernatural  agency  for  which
payment was now being exacted?"
     The  forensic  chaps glanced at each other and shook their
heads. There was a strong sense from them that the morning  was
wearing  on  and  that  this  kind of talk was only introducing
unnecessary complications into a case which otherwise could  be
well behind them before lunch.
     Dirk  made  a satisfied shrug, peeled off his share of the
evidence and, with a final nod to the constabulary, made  his
way back upstairs.
     As  he reached the hallway, it suddenly became apparent to
him that the gentle sounds of day-time television which he  had
heard  from  out  in the garden had previously been masked from
inside by the insistent  sound  of  the  record  stuck  in  its
groove.
     He  was  surprised  now  to realise that they were in fact
coming from somewhere upstairs in this house. With a quick look
round to see that he was not observed he stood  on  the  bottom
step  of  the  staircase  leading to the upstairs floors of the
house and glanced up them in surprise.

Chapter 6

     The stairs were carpeted with a tastefully austere matting
type of substance. Dirk quietly made his way up them, past some
tastefully dried large things in a  pot  that  stood  on  the
first  landing,  and  looked into the rooms on the first floor.
They, too, were tasteful and dried.
     The larger of the two  bedrooms  was  the  only  one  that
showed  any  signs of current use. It had clearly been designed
to allow the morning  light  to  play  on  delicately  arranged
flowers  and  duvets stuffed with something like hay, but there
was a feeling that socks and used shaving  heads  were  instead
beginning  to  gather  the  room  into  their grip. There was a
distinct absence of anything female in the room - the same sort
of absence that a missing picture leaves behind it on  a  wall.
There  was  an  air  of  tension  and  of sadness and of things
needing to be cleaned out from under the bed.
     The bathroom, which opened out from it, had  a  gold  disc
hung  on  the  wall in front of the lavatory, for sales of five
hundred thousand copies of a record called Hot Potato by a band
called Pugilism and the Third Autistic Cuckoo. Dirk had a vague
recollection of having read  part  of  an  interview  with  the
leader  of  the  band  (there were only two of them, and one of
them was the leader) in a Sunday paper. He had been asked about
their name, and he had said that there was an interesting story
about it, though it turned out not to be. "It can mean whatever
people want-it to mean," he had added with  a  shrug  from  the
sofa of his manager's office somewhere off Oxford Street.
     Dirk   remembered   visualising   the  journalist  nodding
politely and writing this down.  A  vile  knot  had  formed  in
Dirk's stomach which he had eventually softened with gin.
     "Hot Potato... " thought Dirk. It suddenly occurred
to him  looking at the gold disc hanging in its red frame, that
the record on which the late Mr Anstey's head had been  perched
was obviously this one. Hot Potato. Don't pick it up.
     What could that mean?
     Whatever  people  wanted it to mean, Dirk thought with bed
grace.
     The other thing that he remembered now about the interview
was that Pain (the leader of Pugilism and  the  Third  Autistic
Cuckoo was called Pain) claimed to have written the lyrics down
more  or less verbatim from a conversation which he or somebody
had overheard in a cafe or a sauna or an aeroplane or something
like  that.  Dirk  wondered  how   the   originators   of   the
conversation  would  feel to hear their words being repeated in
the circumstances in which he had just heard them.
     He peered more closely at the label in the centre  of  the
gold  record. At the top of the label it said simply, "ARRGH!",
while underneath the actual title were the writers'  credits  -
"Paignton, Mulville, Anstey".
     Mulville  was  presumably  the  member of Pugilism and the
Third Autistic Cuckoo who wasn't the leader. And Geoff Anstey's
inclusion on the writing credits of a major-selling single  was
probably  what  had paid for this house. When Anstey had talked
about the contract having something to do with Potato he
had assumed that Dirk knew what he meant. And he, Dirk, had  as
easily  assumed that Anstey was blithering. lt was very easy to
assume that someone who was talking about green-eyed  monsters
with scythes was also blithering when he talked about potatoes.
     Dirk  sighed  to  himself  with deep uneasiness. He took a
dislike to the neat way the trophy was hanging on the wall  and
adjusted  it  a  little  so  that  it hung at a more humane and
untidy angle. Doing this caused an envelope to  fall  out  from
behind  the  frame  and  flutter  towards the floor. Dirk tried
unsuccessfully to catch it. With an unfit grunt  he  bent  over
and picked the thing up.
     It  was  a  largish,  cream envelope of rich, heavy paper,
roughly slit open at one end, and resealed with  Sellotape.  In
fact it looked as if it had been opened and resealed with fresh
layers of tape many times, an impression which was borne out by
the  number of names to which the envelope had in its time been
addressed - each  successively  crossed  out  and  replaced  by
another.
     The  last  name  on  it was that of Geoff Anstey. At least
Dirk assumed it was the last name because it was the  only  one
that  had  not  been crossed out, and crossed out heavily. Dirk
peered at some of the other names, trying to make them out.
     Some memory was stirred by a couple of the names which  he
could just about discern, but he needed to examine the envelope
much  more  closely.  He  had  been  meaning  to  buy himself a
magnifying glass ever since he had become a detective, but  had
never  got around to it. He also did not possess a penknife, so
reluctantly he decided that the most prudent course was to tuck
the envelope away for the moment in one of the deeper  recesses
of his coat and examine it later in privacy.
     He  glanced  quickly  behind the frame of the gold disc to
see if any other goodies might emerge but was disappointed, and
so he quit the bathroom and  resumed  his  exploration  of  the
house.
     The  other  bedroom  was neat and soulless. Unused. A pine
bed, a duvet and an old battered chest of drawers that had been
revived by being plunged into a  vat  of  acid  were  its  main
features.  Dirk  pulled  the  door of it closed behind him, and
started to ascend the  small,  wobbly,  white-painted  stairway
that  led  up  to  an attic from which the sounds of Bugs Bunny
could be heard.
     At the top of the stairs was a minute landing which opened
on one side into a bathroom so small that it would best be used
by standing outside and sticking into  it  whichever  limb  you
wanted  to  wash.  The  door to it was kept ajar by a length of
green  hosepipe  which  trailed  from  the  cold  tap  of   the
wash-basin,  out  of  the bathroom, across the landing and into
the only other room here at the top of the house.
     It was an attic room with a severely  pitched  roof  which
offered only a few spots where a person of anything approaching
average height could stand up.
     Dirk  stood  hunched  in  the  doorway  and  surveyed  its
contents, nervous of what he might find amongst them. There was
a general grunginess about the place. The curtains were  closed
and  little  light  made  it past them into the room, which was
otherwise  illuminated  only  by  the  flickering  glow  of  an
animated rabbit. An unmade bed with dank, screwed-up sheets was
pushed  under  a particularly low angle of the ceiling. Part of
the walls and the more nearly vertical surfaces of the  ceiling
were covered with pictures crudely cut out of magazines.
     There didn't seem to be any common theme or purpose behind
the cuttings.  As well as a couple of pictures of flashy German
cars and the odd bra advertisement, there  were  also  a  badly
torn picture of a fruit flan, part of an advertisement for life
insurance  and  other random fragments which suggested they had
been selected and arranged with a dull, bovine indifference  to
any  meaning  that  any of them might have or effect they might
achieve.
     The hosepipe curled across the floor and  led  around  the
side  of  an  elderly  armchair  pulled  up  in  front  of  the
television set.
     The rabbit rampaged. The glow of his rampagings played  on
the  frayed  edges of the armchair. Bugs was wrestling with the
controls of an aeroplane which  was  plunging  to  the  ground.
Suddenly  he  saw a button marked "Autopilot" and pressed it. A
cupboard opened and a robot pilot clambered out, took one  look
at  the  situation  and baled out. The plane hurtled on towards
the ground but, luckily, ran out of fuel just  before  reaching
it and so the rabbit was saved.
     Dirk could also see the top of a head.
     The  hair  of  this head was dark, matted and greasy. Dirk
watched it for a long, uneasy moment  before  advancing  slowly
into the room to see what, if anything, it was attached to. His
relief  at  discovering,  as  he rounded the armchair, that the
head was, after all, attached to a living  body  was  a  little
marred  by  the  sight  of  the  living  body  to  which it was
attached.
     Slumped in the armchair was a boy.
     He was probably about thirteen or fourteen,  and  although
he  didn't  look  ill  in  any  specific  physical  way, he was
definitely not a well person. His hair sagged on his head,  his
head  sagged  on his shoulders, and he lay in the armchair in a
sort of limp, crumpled way, as if he'd been hurled there from a
passing train. He was dressed merely in a cheap leather  jacket
and sleeping-bag.
     Dirk stared at him.
     Who  was he? What was a boy doing here watching television
in a house where someone had just been decapitated? Did he know
what had happened? Did Gilks know about  him?  Had  Gilks  even
bothered to come up here? It was, after all, several flights of
stairs for a busy policeman with a tricky suicide on his hands.
     After  Dirk  had been standing there for twenty seconds or
so, the boy's eyes climbed up towards him,  failed  utterly  to
acknowledge  him  in any way at all, and then dropped again and
locked back on to the rabbit.
     Dirk was unused to making quite such a minuscule impact on
anybody. He checked to be  sure  that  he  did  have  his  huge
leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly
and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway.
     He  felt momentarily deflated and said, "Er... " by way of
self introduction, but it didn't get the  boy's  attention.  He
didn't  like  this.  The  kid  was deliberately and maliciously
watching television at him. He frowned. There  was  a  kind  of
steamy  tension  building in the room it seemed to Dirk, a kind
of difficult, hissing quality to the whole  air  of  the  place
which  he  did not know how to respond to. It rose in intensity
and then suddenly ended with an abrupt click  which  made  Dirk
start.
     The  boy  unwound  himself  like a slow, fat snake, leaned
sideways over the far  side  of  the  armchair  and  made  some
elaborate  unseen  preparations which clearly involved, as Dirk
now realised, an electric kettle. When he resumed  his  earlier
splayed  posture  it  was  with  the  addition of a plastic pot
clutched in his  right  hand,  from  which  he  forked  rubbery
strands of steaming gunk into his mouth.
     The  rabbit  brought  his affairs to a conclusion and gave
way to a jeering comedian who  wished  the  viewers  to  buy  a
certain  brand of lager on the basis of nothing better than his
own hardly disinterested say-so.
     Dirk felt that it was time  to  make  a  slightly  greater
impression on the proceedings than he had so far managed to do.
He stepped forward dinectly into the boy's line of sight.
     "Kid,"  Dirk said in a tone that he hoped would sound firm
but gentle and not in any way at all patronising or affected or
gauche, "I need to know who - "
     He was distracted at that moment by the  sight  which  met
him  from  the  new  position  in which he was standing. On the
other side of  the  armchair  there  was  a  large,  half  full
catering-size   box   of   Pot  Noodles,  a  large,  half  full
catering-size box of Mars Bars, a half  demolished  pyramid  of
cans  of  soft drink, and the end of the hosepipe. The hosepipe
ended in a plastic tap  nozzle,  and  was  obviously  used  for
refilling the kettle.
     Dirk  had simply been going to ask the boy who he was, but
seen from this angle the family resemblance  was  unmistakable.
He  was  clearly  the  son  of  the lately decapitated Geoffrey
Anstey. Perhaps this behaviour was just his way of dealing with
shock. Or perhaps he really didn't know what had  happened.  Or
perhaps he...
     Dirk hardly liked to think.
     In  fact he was finding it hard to think clearly while the
television beside him was, on  behalf  of  a  toothpaste
manufacturing company, trying to worry him deeply about some of
the things which might be going on in his mouth.
     "OK," he said, "I don't like to disturb you at what I know
must be a difficult and distressing time for you, but I need to
know first  of  all  if  you  actually  realise  that this is a
difficult and distressing time for you."
     Nothing.
     All right, thought  Dirk,  time  for  a  little  judicious
toughness.  He  leant back against the wall, stuck his hands in
his  pockets  in  an   OK-if-that's-the-way-you-want-to-play-it
manner,  stared  moodily  at  the floor for a few seconds, then
swung his head up and let  the  boy  have  a  hard  look  right
between the eyes.
     "I have to tell you, kid," he said tersely, "your father's
dead."
     This  might  have  worked  if  it  hadn't  been for a very
popular and  long-running  commercial  which  started  at  that
moment.  It  seemed  to  Dirk  to  be a particularly astounding
example of the genre.
     The opening sequence showed the angel Lucifer being hurled
from heaven into the pit of hell where he then lay on a  buming
lake  until a passing demon amved and gave him a can of a fizzy
soft drink called sHades.  Lucifer  took  it  and
tried it. He greedily guzzled the whole contents of the can and
then   tumed   to   camera,  slipped  on  some  Porsche  design
sunglasses, said, "Now we're really  cookin'!"  and  lay
back  basking  in  the  glow  of the burning coals being heaped
around him.
     At that point  an  impossibly  deep  and  growly  American
voice,  which  sounded as if it had itself crawled from the pit
of hel1, or at least from a  Soho  basement  drinking  club  to
which  it  was  keen  to return as soon as possible to marinade
itself   into   shape   for   the   next   voice-over,    said,
"sHades.  The  Drink  from  Hell... " and the can
revolved a little to obscure the initial "s",  and  thus
spell "Hades".
     The  theology  of this seemed a little confused, reflected
Dirk, but what was one tiny extra droplet of misinformation  in
such a raging torrent?
     Lucifer then mugged at the camera again and said, "I could
really  fall  for  this  stuff... " and just in case the
viewer had been rendered  completely  insensate  by  all  these
goings-on, the opening shot of Lucifer being hurled from heaven
was briefly replayed in order to emphasise the word "fall".
     The boy's attention was entirely captivated by this.
     Dirk squatted down in between the boy and the screen.
     "Listen to me," he began.
     The  boy  craned  his  neck round to look past Dirk at the
screen. He had to redistribute his limbs in the chair in  order
to  be  able  to  do  this and continue to fork Pot Noodle into
himself.
     "Listen," insisted Dirk again.
     Dirk felt he was beginning to  be  in  serious  danger  of
losing  the  upper hand in the situation. It wasn't merely that
the boy's attention was on the television, it was that  nothing
else  seemed  to  have any meaning or independent existence for
him at all. Dirk was merely a featureless object in the way  of
the television. The boy seemed to bear him no malice, he merely
wished to see past him.
     "Look,  can we turn this off for a moment?" Dirk said, and
he tried not to make it sound testy.
     The  boy  did  not  respond.  Maybe  there  was  a  slight
stiffening  of the shoulders, maybe it was a shrug. Dirk turned
around and was at a loss to find which button to push  to  turn
the  television  off.  The  whoIe  control  pane  seemed  to be
dedicated to the single purpose of keeping itself turned  on  -
there  was  no  single  button marked "on" or "off". Eventually
Dirk simply disconnected the set from the power socket  on  the
wall and turned back to the boy, who broke his nose.
     Dirk felt his septum crunching from the terrific impact of
the boy's  forehead  as  they  both  toppled  heavily backwards
against the set, but the noise of the bone  breaking,  and  the
noise  of  his  own  cry  of  pain  as  it broke was completely
obliterated by the howling screams of rage  that  erupted  from
the  boy's  throat.  Dirk flailed helplessly to try and protect
himself from the fury of the onslaught, but the boy was on  top
with  his  elbow  in  Dirk's  eye,  his knees pounding first on
Dirk's ribcage,  then  his  jaw  and  then  on  Dirk's  already
traumatised  nose,  as  he  scrambled over him to reconnect the
power to the television. He then settled back comfortably  into
the  armchair and watched with a moody and unsettled eye as the
picture reassembled itself.
     "You could at least have waited for the news," he said  in
a dull voice.
     Dirk  gaped  at him. He sat huddled on the floor, coddling
his bleeding nose in his hands, and gaped  at  the  monstrously
disinterested creature.
     "Whhfff.  . . fffmmm. . . nnggh ! " he protested, and then
gave up for the time being, while he probed his  nose  for  the
damage.
     There  was  definitely  a  wobbly bit that clicked nastily
between his fingers, and the whole thing seemed suddenly to  be
a  horribly  unfamiliar  shape. He fished a handkerchief out of
his pocket and held it up to  his  face.  Blood  spread  easily
through   it.   He   staggered   to  his  feet,  brushed  aside
non-existent offers of help, stomped out of the room  and  into
the  tiny  bathroom.  There, he yanked the hosepipe angrily off
the tap, found a towel, soaked it in cold water and held it  to
his  face for a minute or two until the flow of blood gradually
slowed to a trickle and stopped. He stared at  himself  in  the
mirror.  His  nose  was  quite definitely leaning at a slightly
rakish angle. He tried bravely to shift  it,  but  not  bravely
enough.  It  hurt  abominably,  so  he  contented  himself with
dabbing at it a little more with the  wet  towel  and  swearing
quietly.
     Then  he  stood  there for a second or two longer, leaning
against the basin, breathing  heavily,  and  practising  saying
"All   right!"  fiercely  into  the  mirror.  It  came  out  as
"Aww-bwigh!" and  lacked  any  real  authority.  When  he  felt
sufficiently  braced, or at least as braced as he was likely to
feel in the immediate future, he turned and stalked grimly back
into the den of the beast.
     The beast was sitting quietly absorbing news  of  some  of
the  exciting  and stimulating game shows that the evening held
in store for the determined viewer, and did not look up as Dirk
re-entered.
     Dirk walked briskly  over  to  the  window  and  drew  the
curtains sharply back, half hoping that the beast might shrivel
up  shrieking  if exposed to daylight, but other than wrinkling
up its nose, it did not react. A dark  shadow  flapped  briefly
across  the  window, but the angle was such that Dirk could not
see what caused it.
     He  turned  and  faced  the  boy-beast.  The  midday  news
bulletin was starting on television, and the boy seemed somehow
a  little  more  open,  a  little  more  receptive to the world
outside the flickering coloured rectangle.  He  glanced  up  at
Dirk with a sour, tired look.
     "Whaddayawananyway?" he said.
     "I   ted   you  whad  I  wad,"  said  Dirk,  fiercely  but
hopelessly, "I wad...hag od a bobed...I gnow thad faith!"
     Dirk's attention had switched suddenly to  the  television
screen,  where  a  rather  more  up-to-date  photograph  of the
missing airline check-in girl was being shown.
     "Whadayadoingere?" said the boy.
     "Jjchhhhh!" said Dirk, and perched himself down on the arm
of the chair, peering intently at the face on  the  screen.  It
had  been  taken  about  a year ago, before the girl had learnt
about corporate lipgloss. She had frizzy  hair  and  a  frumpy,
put-upon look.
     "Whoareyou? Wassgoinon?" insisted the boy.
     "Loog,   chuddub,"  snapped  Dirk,  "I'b  tryid  to  wodge
dthith!"
     The newscaster said that the police  professed  themselves
to  be  mystified by the fact that there was no trace of Janice
Smith at the scene of the incident. They explained  that  there
was  a  limit to the number of times they could search the same
buildings, and appealed for anyone who might have a clue as  to
her whereabouts to come forward.
     "Thadth  by  segradry! Thadth Mith Pearth!" exclaimed Dirk
in astonishment.
     The boy was not interested  in  Dirk's  ex-secnetary,  and
gave  up trying to atttact Dirk's attention. He wriggled out of
the sleeping-bag and sloped off to the bathroom.
     Dirk sat staring at the  television,  bewildered  that  he
hadn't  realised  before who the missing girl was. Still, there
was no reason why he should have done,  he  realiced.  Marriage
had  changed  her  name,  and  this was the first time they had
shown a photograph that actually identified her. So far he  had
taken  no real interest in the strange incident at the airport,
but now it demanded his attention.
     The explosion was now officially  designated  an  "Act  of
God".
     But, thought Dirk, what god? And why?
     What god would be hanging around Terminal Two of fieathrow
Aitport trying to catch the 15.37 flight to Oslo?
     After  the  miserable  lassitude of the last few weeks, he
suddenly  had  a  great  deal  that  required   his   immediate
attention.  He  frowned  in deep thought for a few moments, and
hardly noticed when the beast-boy snuck back  in  and  snuggled
back  into his sleeping-bag just in time for the advertisements
to start. The first one showed how a perfectly  ordinary  stock
cube  could  form  the  natural focus of a normal, happy family
life.
     Dirk leapt to his feet, but even as he was about to  start
questioning  the  boy again his heart sank as he looked at him.
The beast was far away, sunk back in his dark, flickering lair,
and Dirk did not feel inclined to  disturb  him  again  at  the
moment.
     He  contented  himself  with  barking  at the unresponding
child that he would be  back,  and  bustled  heavily  down  the
stairs, his big leather coat flapping madly behind him.
     In the hallway he encountered the loathed Gilks once more.
     "What  happened  to  you?"  said  the  policeman  sharply,
catching sight of Dirk's bruised and bulging nose.
     "Ondly whad you dold me," said Dirk, innocently.  "I  bead
bythelf ub."
     Gilks  demanded  to  know what he had been doing, and Dirk
generously explained that there was  a  witness  upstairs  with
some interesting information to impart. He suggested that Gilks
go  and  have  a word with him, but that it would be best if he
turned off the television first.
     Gilks nodded curtly. He started to go up the  stairs,  but
Dirk stopped him.
     "Doedth eddydthig dthrike you adth dthraydge aboud dthidth
houdth?" he said.
     "What did you say?" said Gilks in irritation.
     "Subbthig dthraydge," said Dirk.
     "Something what?"
     "Dthraydge!" insisted Dirk.
     "Strange?"
     "Dthadth right, dthraydge."
     Gilks shrugged. "Like what?" he said.
     "Id dtheemdth to be cobbleedly dthouledth."
     "Completely what?"
     "Dthouledth!"   he  tried  again.  "Thoul-leth!  I  dthigg
dthadth dverry idderedthigg!"
     With that he doffed his hat politely, and swept on out  of
the  house and up the street, where an eagle swooped out of the
sky at him and came within a whisker of  causing  him  to  fall
under  a  73 bus on its way south. For the next twenty minutes,
hideous yells and screams emanated from the top  floor  of  the
house  in  Lupton  Road,  and  caused  much  tension  among the
neighbours. The ambulance took away the upper and lower remains
of Mr Anstey and also a policeman with a bleeding face.  For  a
short while after this, there was quietness.
     Then another police car drew up outside the house. A lot o
"Bob's  here"  type  of  remarks  floated from the house, as an
extremely large and burly policeman heaved himself out  of  the
car and bustled up the steps. A few minutes and a great deal of
screaming  and  yelling  later he re-emerged also clutching his
face, and drove off in deep dudgeon, squealing his tyres  in  a
violent and unnecessary manner.
     Twenty  minutes  later  a  van  arrived from which emerged
another policeman carrying a tiny  pocket  television  set.  He
entered the house, and re-emerged a short while later leading a
docile thirteen-year-old boy, who was content with his new toy.
     Once all policemen had departed, save for the single squad
car which remained parked outside to keep watch on the house, a
large,  hairy,  green-eyed figure emerged from its hiding place
behind one of the molecules in the large basement room.
     It propped its scythe against one of the  hi-fi  speakers,
dipped  a  long, gnarled finger in the almost congealed pool of
blood that had collected on the deck of the turntable,  smeared
the  finger  across  the  bottom of a sheet of thick, yellowing
paper,  and  then  disappeared  off  into  a  dark  and  hidden
otherworld  whistling  a strange and vicious tune and returning
only briefly to collect its scythe.

Chapter 7

     A little earlier in the morning, at a comfortable distance
from all these events, set at a  comfortable  distance  from  a
wellproponioned  window through which cool mid-morning light
was streaming, lay an elderly one-eyed man in a  white  bed.  A
newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it
had been hurled two minutes before, at shortly aher ten o'clock
by the clock on the bedside table.
     The  room  was not large, but was furnished in excessively
bland good taste, as if it were a room in an expensive  private
hospital  or  clinic,  which  is  exactly  what  it  was  - the
Woodshead Hospital, set in its own small but well-kempt grounds
on the outskirts of a  small  but  well-kempt  village  in  the
Cotswolds.
     The man was awake but not glad to be.
     His  skin  was very delicately old, like finely stretched,
translucent parchment,  delicately  freckled.  His  exquisitely
frail  hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets
and quivered very faintly.
     His name was variously given as Mr  Odwin,  or  Wodin,  or
Odin.  He  was  - is - a god, and furthermore he was that least
good of all gods to be alongside, a  cross  god.  His  one  eye
glinted.
     He  was  cross  because of what he had been reading in the
newspapers, which was that another god had been  cutting  loose
and  making  a  nuisance  of himself. It didn't say that in the
papers, of course.  It  didn't  say,  "God  cuts  loose,  makes
nuisance  of  himself  in  airport,"  it  merely  described the
resulting devastation and was at a loss to draw any  meaningful
conclusions from it.
     The  story  had been deeply unsatisfactory in all sorts of
ways, on account of its perplexing inconclusiveness, its
goingnowhereness and the irritating (from the newspapers' point
of view) lack of any good solid carriage. There was of course a
mystery attached to  the  lack  of  carnage,  but  a  newspaper
preferred  a good whack of carnage to a mere mystery any day of
the week.
     Odin, however, had no such difficulty in knowing what  was
going  on.  The  accounts  had  "Thor" written all over them in
letters much too big for anyone other than another god to  see.
He had thrown this morning's paper aside in irritation, and was
now  trying to concentrate on his relaxation exercises in order
to avoid getting too disturbed about all this.  These  involved
breathing  in  in  a certain way and breathing out in a certain
other way and were good for his blood pressure and  so  on.  It
was not as if he was about to die or anything - ha! - but there
was  no  doubt that at his time of life - ha! - he preferred to
take things easy and look after himself.
     Best of all he liked to sleep.
     Sleeping was a very important activity for him.  He  liked
to  sleep  for  longish  periods, great swathes of time. Merely
sleeping overnight was not taking the  business  seriously.  He
enjoyed  a  good  night's  sleep  and wouldn't miss one for the
world,  but  he  didn't  regard  it  as  anything   even   half
approaching  enough.  He liked to be asleep by half past eleven
in the morning if possible, and if  that  could  come  directly
after a nice leisurely lie-in then so much the better. A little
light  breakfast  and  a quick trip to the bathroom while fresh
linen was applied to his bed is  really  all  the  astivity  he
liked  to undertake, and he took care that it didn't jangle the
sleepiness out  of  him  and  thus  disturb  his  afternoon  of
napping.  Sometimes he was able to spend an entire week asleep,
and this he regarded as  a  good  snooze.  He  had  also  slept
through the whole of 1986 and hadn't missed it.
     But  he  knew  to  his  deep  disgruntlement that he would
shortly have to arise and undertake  a  sacred  and  irritating
trust.  Sacred,  because  it  was godlike, or at least involved
gods, and irritating because of  the  particular  god  that  it
involved.
     Sneakily,  he  twitched  the curtains at a distance, using
nothing but his divine will. He sighed heavily.  He  needed  to
think  and, what was more, it was time for his morning visit to
the bathroom.
     He rang for the orderly.
     The orderly arrived promptly  in  his  well-pressed  loose
green  tunic,  good-morninged  cheerfully,  and  bustled around
locating bedroom slippers and dressing-gown. He helped Odin out
of bed, which was a little like rolling a stuffed crow out of a
box, and escorted him  slowly  to  the  bathroom.  Odin  walked
stiffly,  like  a  head hung between two heavy stilts draped in
striped Viyella and white towelling. The orderly knew  Odin  as
Mr  Odwin,  and  didn't  realise  that  he was a god, which was
something that Odin tended to keep quiet about, and wished that
Thor would too.
     Thor was the God of Thunder and, frankly, acted  like  it.
It  was inappropriate. He seemed unwilling, or unable, or maybe
just too stupid to understand or accept...Odin stopped himself.
He sensed that he was beginning mentally to rant. He would have
to consider calmly what next to do about Thor, and  he  was  on
his way to the right place for a good think.
     As  soon  as  Odin had completed his stately hobble to the
bathroom door, two nurses hurried in and  stripped  and  remade
the  bed  with immense precision, patting down the fresh linen,
pulling it taut, turning it and tucking it. One of the  nurses,
clearly  the senior, was plump and matronly, the other younger,
darker and more generally bird-like. The newspaper was  whisked
off  the  tloor  and  neatly  refolded,  the  floor was briskly
Hoovered,  the  curtains  hooked  back,  the  flowers  and  the
untouched  fruit  replaced  with  fresh flowers and fresh fruit
that would, like every  piece  of  fruit  before  them,  remain
untouched.
     When  after a little while the old god's morning ablutions
had been completed and the bathroom door reopened, the room had
been transformed. The actual differences were tiny, of  course,
but  the effect was of a subtle but magical transformation into
something cool and fresh. Odin nodded in quiet satisfaction  to
see  it.  He  made  a little show of inspecting the bed, like a
monarch inspecting a line of soldiers.
     "Is it well tucked?" he asked  in  his  old  and  whispery
voice.
     "It  is very well tucked, Mr Odwin," said the senior nurse
with an obsequious beam.
     "Is it neatly turned?" It clearly was. This was  merely  a
ritual.
     "Turned  very neatly indeed, Mr Odwin," said the nurse, "I
supervised the turning down of the sheets myself."
     "I'm glad of that, Sister Bailey, very glad,"  said  Odin.
"You  have a fine eye for a trimly turned fold. It alarms me to
know what I shall do without you."
     "Well, I'm not about  to  go  anywhere,  Mr  Odwin,"  said
Sister Bailey, oozing happy reassurance.
     "But  you  won't last for ever, Sister Bailey," said Odin.
It was a remark that puzzled Sister Bailey on the times she had
heard it, because of its apparent extreme callousness.
     "Sure, and none of us lasts for over, Mr Odwin," she  said
gently  as  she  and  the  other nurse between them managed the
difficult task of lifting Odin back into hed while keeping  his
dignity intact.
     "You're  Irish  aren't you, Sister Bailey?" he asked, once
he was properly settled.
     "I am indeed so, Mr Odwin."
     "Knew an Irishman once. Finn something. Told me a  lot  of
stuff  I  didn't  need  to know. Never told me about the linen.
Still know now."
     He nodded curtly at  this  memory  and  lowered  his  head
stiffly  back  on  to the firmly plumped up pillows and ran the
back of his finely freckled hand  over  the  folded-back  linen
sheet.  Quite  simply he was in love with linen. Clean, lightly
starched, white Irish linen,  pressed,  folded,  tucked  -  the
words  themselves  were  almost  a litany of desire for him. In
centuries nothing had obsessed him or  moved  him  so  much  as
linen  now did. He could not for the life of him understand how
he could ever have cared for anything else.
     Linen.
     And sleep. Sleep and linen. Sleep in linen. Sleep.
     Sister Bailey regarded him  with  a  sort  of  proprietary
fondness.  She  did not know that he was a god as such, in fact
she thought he was probably an old film producer  or  Nazi  war
criminal.  Certainly  he had an accent she couldn't quite place
and his careless civility,  his  natural  selfishness  and  his
obsession  with  personal hygiene spoke of a past that was rich
with horrors.
     If she could have been transported to where she might  see
her  secretive  patient  enthroned, warrior father of the wamor
Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is  not
quite  true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of
her wits. But she would at least have recognised  that  it  was
consistent  with  the  qualities she perceived in him, once she
had recovered from the  shock  of  discovering  that  virtually
everything  the  human  race  had ever chosen to believe in was
true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race
particularly needed it to be true any more.
     Odin dismissed his  medical  attendants  with  a  gesture,
having  first  asked for his personal assistant to be found and
sent to him once more.
     This caused Sister Bailey to tighten her lips just a  very
little. She did not like Mr Odwin's personal assistant, general
factotum,  manservant,  call  him  what you will. His eyes were
malevolent, he made her jump, and she strongly suspected him of
making unspeakabie suggestions to her nurses during  their  tea
breaks.
     He  had  what Sister Bailey supposed was what people meant
by an olive complexion, in that it was extraordinarily close to
being green. Sister Bailey was convinced that it was not  right
at all.
     She was of course the last person to judge somebody by the
colour  of  their skin - or if not absolutely the last, she had
at least done it as recently as  yesterday  afternoon  when  an
African  diplomat  had  been brought in to have some gallstones
removed and she had conceived an instant resentment of him. She
didn't like him. She couldn't  say  exactly  what  it  was  she
didn't  like  about  him,  because  she  was  a  nurse,  not  a
taxi-driver, and she wouldn't let her  personal  feelings  show
for an instant. She was much too professional, much too good at
her  job,  and  treated  everyone  with  a  more  or less equal
efficient and cheerful courtesy, even,  she  thought  -  and  a
profound iciness settled on her at this point - even Mr Rag.
     "Mr  Rag"  was  the name of Mr Odwin's personal assistant.
There was nothing she could do about it. It was not  her  place
to  criticise  Mr  Odwin's personal arrangements. But if it had
been her business, which it wasn't, then she would greatly have
preferred it, and not just for herself, but for Mr Odwin's  own
well-being  as well, which was the important thing, if he could
have  employed  someone  who  didn't  give  her  the   absolute
heebie-jeebies, that was all.
     She thought no more about it, merely went to look for him.
She had  been  relieved  to discover when she came on duty this
morning that Mr Rag had left the premises the  previous  night,
but  had then, with a keen sense of disappointment, spotted him
returning about an hour or so ago.
     She found him exactly where he was not supposed to be.  He
was squatting on one of the seats in the visitors' waiting-room
wearing  what  looked  horribly  like  a  soiled  and discarded
doctor's gown that was much too big for him. Not only that, but
he was playing a thinly unmusical tune on a sort of  pipe  that
he  had  obviously  carved out of a large disposable hypodermic
syringe which he absolutely should not have had.
     He glanced up at her with his quick, dancing eyes, grinned
and continued to tootle and squeak, only significantly louder.
     Sister Bailey ran through in her mind all the things  that
it was completely pointless to say about either the roat or the
syringe,  or about him being in the visitors' room frightening,
or preparing to frighten, the visitors. She knew  she  wouldn't
be  able  to  stand  the air of injured innocence with which he
would reply, or the preposterous absurdity of his answers.  Her
only  course  was  simply  to let it pass and just get him away
from the room and out of the way as quickly as possible.
     "Mr Odwin would like to see you," she said. She  tried  to
jam  some  of her normal lilting quality into her voice, but it
just wouldn't go. She wished his eyes would stop  dancing  like
that.  Apart  from  finding  it  highly  disturbing from both a
medical and aesthetic point of view she also could not help but
be piqued by the impression it  conveyed  that  there  were  at
least  thirty-seven  things  in  the room more interesting than
her.
     He gazed at her in this disconcerting  manner  for  a  few
seconds then, muttering that there was no peace for the wicked,
not even the extremely wicked, he pushed past Sister Bailey and
skedaddled  up  the  corridor  to receive instructions from his
lord and master, quickly,  before  his  lord  and  master  fell
asleep.

Chapter 8

     By the end of the morning Kate had discharged herself from
hospital. There were some initial difficulties involved in this
because  first the ward sister and then the doctor in charge of
Kate's case were adamant that she was in no fit state to leave.
She had only just emerged from a  minor  coma  and  she  needed
care, she needed -
     "Pizza - " insisted Kate.
     - rest, she needed -
     "-  my  own  home,  and  fresh  air.  The  air  in here is
horrible. It smells like a vacuum cleaner's armpit."
     - further medication, and should definitely  remain  under
observation  for  another  day  or so until they were satisfied
that she had made a full recovery.
     At least, they were fairly adamant. During the  course  of
the  morning  Kate  demanded  and  got  a telephone and started
trying to order pizza to be delivered to her ward.  She  phoned
around all of the least co-operative pizza restaurants she knew
in  London, harangued them, then made some noisily unsuccessful
attempts to muster a motorbike to roam around the West End  and
try  and  pick  up  for  her  an  American  Hot  with a list of
additional  peppers  and  mushrooms  and  cheeses   which   the
controller  of  the  courier service refused even to attempt to
remember, and after an hour or so of this sort of behaviour the
objections  to  Kate  discharging  herself  from  the  hospital
gradually fell away like petals from an autumn rose.
     And  so,  a  little after lunchtime, she was standing on a
bleak West London street feeling weak and shaky but  in  charge
of herself. She had with her the empty, tattered remains of the
garment  bag  which  she  had refused to relinquish, and also a
small scrap of paper in her purse,  which  had  a  single  name
scribbled on it.
     She hailed a taxi and sat in the back with her eyes closed
most of  the way back to her home in Primrose Hill. She climbed
up the stairs and let herself into her  top-tloor  flat.  There
were  ten  messages  on her answering machine, which she simply
erased without listening to.
     She threw open the window in her bedroom and for a  moment
or  two  leaned  out  of it at the rather dangerous and awkward
angle which allowed her to see a patch of the park.  It  was  a
small  comer  patch, with just a couple of plane trees standing
in it. The backs of some of the intervening houses  framed  it,
or  rather, just failed totally to obscure it, and made it very
personal and private to Kate in a way which  a  vast,  sweeping
vista would not have been.
     On  one  occasion  she had gone to this corner of the park
and walked around the invisible perimeter that marked  out  the
limits  of  what  she  could  see,  and  had come very close to
feeling that this was her own domain. She had even  patted  the
plane  trees  in  a proprietorial sort of way, and had then sat
beneath them watching the sun going down over London - over its
badly spoiled skyline and its non-delivering pizza  restaurants
- and  had  come  away  with  a  profound sense of something or
other, though she wasn't quite certain  what.  Still,  she  had
told  herself,  these  days  she  should  feel  grateful  for a
profound sense of anything at all, however unspecific.
     She hauled herself in from the window, left it  wide  open
in  spite  of the chill of the outside air, padded through into
the small bathroom and ran the bath.  It  was  a  bath  of  the
sprawling   Edwardian   type   which   took  up  a  wonderfully
disproportionate amount of the space available, and encompassed
most of the rest of the room with cream-painted pipes. The taps
seethed. As soon as the room was sufficiently full of steam  to
be  warm,  Kate  undressed  and  then went and opened the large
bathroom cupboard.
     She felt faintly embarrassed by  the  sheer  profusion  of
things  she  had  for  putting  in  baths, but she was for some
reason incapable of passing any chemist or  herb  shop  without
going  in  to  be  seduced  by  some  glass-stoppered bottle of
something blue or green or orange and oily that was supposed to
restore the natural balance of some vague substance she  didn't
even know she was supposed to have in her pores.
     She paused, trying to choose.
     Something  pink?  Something  with extra Vitamin B? Vitamin
B12? B13? Just the number of things  with  different  types  of
Vitamin  B  in  them  was an embarrassment of choice in itself.
There were powders as well as oils, tubes of gel, even  packets
of some kind of pungent smelling seed that was meant to be good
for some obscure part of you in some arcane way.
     How  about  some  of  the green crystals? One day, she had
told herself in the past, she would not even bother  trying  to
choose,  but  would simply put a bit of everything in. When she
really felt in need of it. She rather thought  that  today  was
the  day,  and  with a sudden reviving rush of pleasure she set
about puaing a drop or two of everything in the  cupboard  into
the seething bath until it was confused with mingling, muddying
colours and verging on the glutinous to touch.
     She turned off the taps, went to her handbag for a moment,
then returned  and lowered herself into the bath, where she lay
with her eyes closed, breathing slowly for fully three  minutes
before  at last turning her attention to the scrap of paper she
had brought with her from the hospital.
     It had one word on it, and it was a word she  had  dragged
out  of  an  oddly  reluctant  young  nurse  who  had taken her
temperature that morning.
     Kate had questioned her about the big  man.  The  big  man
whom  she  had  encountered  at the airport, whose body she had
seen in a nearby side ward in the early hours of the night.
     "Oh no," the nurse had said, "he wasn't dead. He was  just
in some sort of coma."
     Could she see him? Kate had asked. What was his name?
     She  had  tried  to ask idly, in passing as it were, which
was a difficult trick to pull off with  a  thermometer  in  her
mouth,  and  she  wasn't  at all certain she had succeeded. The
nurse had said that she couldn't really say, she wasn't  really
meant  to talk about other patients. And anyway, the man wasn't
there any more, he had been taken somewhere else. They had sent
an ambulance to collect him and take him somewhere else.
     This had taken Kate considerably by surprise.
     Where had they taken him? What was this special place? But
the nurse had been unwilling to say anything much more,  and  a
second  or  two later had been summoned away by the Sister. The
only word the nurse had said was the one  that  Kate  had  then
scribbled down on the piece of paper she was now looking at.
     The word was "Woodshead".
     Now  that  she was more relaxed she had a feeling that the
name was familiar to her in some  way,  though  she  could  not
remember where she had heard it.
     The instant she remembered, she could not stay in the bath
any longer,  but  got  out and made straight for the telephone,
pausing only briefly to shower all the gunk off her.

Chapter 9

     The big man awoke and tried to look up, but  could  hardly
raise his head. He tried to sit up but couldn't do that either.
He  felt  as if he'd been stuck to the floor with superglue and
after a few seconds he discovered the  most  astounding  reason
for this.
     He  jerked  his head up violently, yanking out great tufts
of yellow hair which stayed painfully stuck to the  floor,  and
looked  around  him.  He  was in what appeared to be a derelict
warehouse, probably an upper floor judging by the wintry sky he
could see creeping past the grimy, shattered windows.
     The ceilings were high and  hung  with  cobwebs  built  by
spiders  who did not seem to mind that most of what they caught
was crumbling plaster and dust. They were supported by  pillars
made  from  upright  steel  joists on which the dirty old cream
paint was bubbled and flaking, and these in  turn  stood  on  a
floor  of  battered  old  oak  on  to which he had clearly been
glued. Extending out for a foot or two  in  a  rough  oval  all
around  his  naked  body  the floor glistened darkly and dully.
Thin, nostril-cleaning fumes rose from it. He could not believe
it. He roared with rage, tried to wriggle and shake himself but
succeeded only in tugging painfully at his skin  where  it  was
stuck fast to the oak planks.
     This had to be the old man's doing.
     He  threw  his  head back hard against the floor in a blow
that cracked the boards and made his ears sing. He roared again
and took some furious satisfaction in making as much  hopeless,
stupid  noise  as  he  could. He roared until the steel pillars
rang and the cracked remains  of  the  windows  shattered  into
finer  shards. Then, as he threw his head angrily from one side
to the other he  caught  sight  of  his  sledge-hammer  leaning
against the wall a few feet from him, heaved it up into the air
with  a  word,  and  sent  it  hurtling  round the great space,
beating and clanging on every pillar until the  whole  building
reverberated like a mad gong.
     Another  word  and the hammer flew back at him, missed his
head by a hand's-width and punched straight  down  through  the
floor, shattering the wood and the plaster below.
     In the darker space beneath him the hammer spun, and swung
round in a slow heavy parabola as bits of plaster fell about it
and rattled  on  the  concrete  floor below. Then it gathered a
violent momentum and  hurtled  back  up  through  the  ceiling,
smacking up a stack of startled splinters as it punched through
another oak floorboard a hand's-width from the soles of the big
man's feet.
     It  soared  up into the air, hung there for a moment as if
its weight had suddenly vanished,  then,  deftly  flicking  its
short handle up above its head, it drove hard back down through
the  tloor  again  -  then  up again, then down again, punching
holes in a splintered ring around its master until, with a long
heavy groan, the whole oval section of punctured floor gave way
and plunged, twisting, through the  air.  It  shattered  itself
against  the  floor below amidst a rain of plaster debris, from
which the figure of  the  big  man  then  emerged,  staggering,
flapping  at the dusty air and coughing. His back, his arms and
his legs were still covered with great splintered hunks of  oak
flooring,  but  at least he was able to move. He leant the flat
of his hands against the wall and violently coughed some of the
dast from his lungs.
     As he turned back,  his  hammer  danced  out  of  the  air
towards  him,  then  suddenly  evaded  his  grasp  and  skidded
joyfully off across the floor striking sparks from the concrete
with its great head, flipped up and  parked  itself  against  a
nearby pillar at a jaunty angle.
     In  front  of  him  the shape of a large Coca-Cola vending
machine loomed through the settling cloud of dust. He  regarded
it  with the gravest suspicion and worry. It stood there with a
sort of glazed, blank look to it,  and  had  a  note  from  his
father  stuck  on the front panel saying whatever he was doing,
stop it. It  was  signed  "You-know-who",  but  this  had  been
crossed  out  and  first  the  word  "Odin"  and then in larger
letters "Your Father" had been substituted. Odin  never  ceased
to  make  absolutely  clear  his view of his son's intellectual
accomplishments. The big man tore the note off and stared at it
in anger. A postscript added darkly "Remember Wales. You  don't
want  to go through all that again." He screwed the note up and
hurled it out of the nearest window, where the wind whipped  it
up  and away. For a moment he thought he heard an odd squeaking
noise, but it was probably just the blustering of the  wind  as
it whistled between the nearby derelict buildings.
     He turned and walked to the window and stared out of it in
a belligerent  sulk.  Glued  to the floor. At his age. What the
devil was that supposed to mean? "Keep  your  head  down,"  was
what  he guessed. "If you don't keep it down, I'll have to keep
it down for you."  That  was  what  it  meant.  "Stick  to  the
ground."
     He  remembered  now the old man saying exactly that to him
at the time of all the unpleasantness with the Phantom  fighter
jet.  "Why can't you just stick to the ground?" he had said. He
could imagine the old man  in  his  soft-headed  benign  malice
thinking it very funny to make the lesson so literal.
     Rage  began  to rumble menacingly inside him but he pushed
it down hard. Very worrying things had recently begun happening
when he got angry and he had a bad feeling, looking back at the
Coca-Cola vending machine, that another of those very  worrying
things must have just happened. He stared at it and fretted.
     He felt ill.
     He  had felt ill a lot of late, and he found it impossible
to discharge what were left of his godly duties when he felt he
was suffering from  a  sort  of  continual  low-grade  flu.  He
experienced headaches, dizzy spells, guilt and all the sorts of
ailments   that   were   featured   so   often   in  television
advertisements. He even suffered terrifying blackouts  whenever
the great rage gripped him.
     He  always  used  to  have  such  a wonderful time getting
angry. Great gusts of marvellous anger would hurl  him  through
life.  He  felt  huge. He felt flooded with power and light and
energy. He had always been provided with such wonderful  things
to  get  angry about - immense acts of provocation or betrayal,
people hiding  the  AtIantic  ocean  in  his  helmet,  dropping
continents  on him or getting drunk and pretending to be trees.
Stuff you could really work up a rage about and hit things.  In
short  he had felt good about being a Thunder God. Now suddeniy
it was  headaches,  nervous  tension,  nameless  anxieties  and
guilt.  These  were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant
ones.
     "You look ridiculous!"
     The voice screeched out and affected Thor like fingernails
scratched across a blackboard lodged in the back of his  brain.
It  was  a mean voice, a spiteful, jeering voice, a cheap white
nylon shirt of a voice, a shiny-trousered pencil moustache of a
voice, a voice, in short, which Thor did not like.  He  reacted
very  badly  to  it  at the best of times, and was particularly
provoked to have to hear it while standing naked in the  middle
of  a  decrepit  warehouse  with large sections of an oak floor
still stuck to his back.
     He spun round angrily. He wanted to be able to turn  round
calmly  and  with  crushing  dignity, but no such strategy ever
worked with this creature, and since he, Thor, would  only  end
up  feeling  humiliated  and  ridiculous  whatever  postune  he
adopted, he might as well go with one he felt comfortable with.
     "Toe Rag!" he roared, yanked his hammer spinning into  the
air  and  hurled  it  with immense, stunning force at the small
creature who was squatting complacently in the shadows  on  top
of a small heap of rubble, leaning forward a little.
     Toe  Rag  caught the hammer and placed it neatly on top of
the pile of Thor's clothes that lay next to  him.  He  grinned,
and  allowed a stray shaft of sunlight to glitter on one of his
teeth. These things don't happen by accident. Toe Rag had spent
some time while Thor was unconscious working out  how  long  it
would  take  him to recover, then industriously moving the pile
of rubble to exactly this spot, checking the  height  and  then
calculating  the exact angle at which to lean. As a provocateur
he regarded himself as a professional.
     "Did you do this to me?" roared Thor. "Did you - "
     Thor searched for any way of saying "glue me to the floor"
that didn't sound like "glue me to floor", but  eventually  the
pause got too long and he had to give up.
     "-  glue  me to the floor?" he demanded at last. He wished
he hadn't asked such a stupid question.
     "Don't even answer that!" he added angrily and  wished  he
hadn't  said  that  either.  He  stamped his foot and shook the
foundations of the building a little just to make the point. He
wasn't certain what the point was, but he felt that it  had  to
be made. Some dust settled gently around him.
     Toe Rag watched him with his dancing, glittering eyes.
     "I  merely  carry out the instructions given to me by your
father," he said in a grotesque parody of obsequiousness.
     "It seems to me," said Thor,  "that  the  instructions  my
father  has been giving since you entered his service have been
very odd. I think you have some kind of evil  grip  on  him.  I
don't  know what kind of evil grip it is, but it's definitely a
grip, and it's definitely..." synonyms failed him "...evil," he
concluded.
     Toe Rag reacted like an iguana to whom  someone  had  just
complained about the wine.
     "Me?"  he  protested.  "How  can I possibly have a grip on
your father? Odin is the greatest of the Gods of Asgard, and  I
am his devoted servant in all things. Odin says, `Do this,' and
I  do it. Odin says, `Go there,' and I go there. Odin says, `Go
and get my big stupid son out of hospital before he causes  any
more  trouble, and then, I don't know, glue him to the floor or
something,' and I do exactly as he asks. I am merely  the  most
humble  of  functionaries.  However  small  or menial the task,
Odin's bidding is what I am there to perform."
     Thor was not sufficiently subtle a student of human nature
or, for that matter, divine or goblin nature,  to  be  able  to
argue  that  this was in fact a very powerful grip to hold over
anybody, particularly a fallible and pampered old god. He  just
knew that it was all wrong.
     "Well  then,"  he  shouted,  "take this message back to my
father, Odin. Tell him that I, Thor, the God of Thunder, demand
to meet him. And not in his damned  hospital  either!  I'm  not
going  to  hang  about  reading  magazines and looking at fruit
while he has his bed changed! Tell him that Thor,  the  God  of
Thunder,  will meet Odin, the Father of the Gods of Asgard,
tonight, at the Challenging Hour in the Halls of Asgard!"
     "Again?" said Toe Rag, with a sly glance sideways  at  the
Coca-Cola vending machine.
     "Er,  yes,"  said  Thor.  "Yes!"  he  repeated  in a rage.
"Again!"
     Toe Rag made a tiny sigh, such as one who felt resigned to
carrying out the bidding of  a  temperamental  simpleton  might
make,  and  said, "Well, I'll tell him. I don't suppose he will
be best pleased."
     "It is no matter of yours whether he is pleased  or  not!"
shouted  Thor,  disturbing the foundations of the building once
more. "This is between my father  and  myself!  You  may  think
yourself  very clever, Toe Rag, and you may think that I am not
- "
     Toe Rag arched  an  eyebrow.  He  had  prepared  for  this
moment.  He  stayed  silent  and  merely let the stray beatn of
sunlight glint on his dancing eyes. It was  a  silence  of  the
most profound eloquence.
     "I may not know what you'to up to, Toe Rag, I may not know
a lot  of  things,  but  I  do know one thing. I know that I am
Thor, the God of Thunder, and that I will not be made a fool of
by a goblin!"
     "Well," said Toe Rag with a light grin, "when you know two
things I expect you'll be twice as clever. Remember to put your
clothes on before you go out." He gestured casually at the pile
beside him and departed.

Chapter 10

     The trouble with the sort of shop that sells  things  like
magnifying glasses and penknives is that they tend also to sell
all   kinds   of  other  fascinating  things,  like  the  quite
extraordinary device with which Dirk eventually  emerged  after
having  been hopelessly unable to decide between the knife with
the built-in Philips screwdriver, toothpick and ball-point  pen
and  the  one  with the 13-tooth gristle saw and the tig-welded
rivets.
     The magnifying glasses had held him in thrall for a  short
while,   particularly   the   25-diopter,  high-index,
vacuumdeposited, gold-coated glass model with the integral handle
and mount and the  notchless seal glazing, but  then  Dirk  had
happened   to  catch  sight  of  a  small  electronic  I  Ching
calculator and he was lost.
     He had never before even guessed at the existence of  such
a  thing.  And  to  be  able  to  move  from total ignorance of
something to total desire for it, and then actually to own  the
thing  all  within  the  space  of about forty seconds was, for
Dirk, something of an epiphany.
     The electronic I Ching calculator was badly made.  It  had
probably been manufactured in whichever of the South-East Asian
countries  was  busy tooling up to do to South Korea what South
Korea was busy doing to Japan. GIue  technology  had  obviously
not  progressed in that country to the point where things could
be successfully held together with it.  Already  the  back  had
half fallen off and needed to be stuck back on with Sellotape.
     It  was  much  like  an ordinary pocket calculator, except
that the LCD screen was a little larger than usual, in order to
accommodate the abridged judgements of King Wen on each of  the
sixty-four hexagrams, and also the commentaries of his son, the
Duke of Chou, on each of the lines of each hexagram. These were
unusual  texts  to  see marching across the display of a pocket
calculator, particularly as they had been translated  from  the
Chinese  via  the  Japanese  and  seemed  to  have enjoyed many
adventures on the way.
     The device also functioned as an ordinary calculator,  but
only to a limited degree. It could handle any calculation which
returned an answer of anything up to "4".
     "1+1"  it  could  manage  ("2"), and "1+2" ("3") and "2+2"
("4") or "tan 74" ("3.4874145"),  but  anything  above  "4"  it
represented  merely  as  "A  Suffusion of Yellow". Dirk was not
certain if this was a programming error or  an  insight  beyond
his ability to fathom, but he was crazy about it anyway, enough
to hand over &#1105;20 of ready cash for the thing.
     "Thank  you, sir," said the proprietor. "It's a nice piece
that. I think you'll be happy with it."
     "I ab," said Dirk.
     "Glad to hear it, sir," replied the  proprietor.  "Do  you
know you've broken your nose?"
     Dirk looked up from fawning on his new possession.
     "Yedth," he said testily, "obf courth I dknow."
     The man nodded, satisfied.
     "Just  that  a  lot  of  my customers wouldn't always know
about a thing like that," he explained.
     Dirk thanked him tersely and humed out with his  purchase.
A  few  minutes  later  he took up residence at the small comer
table of an Islington caf&#1080;,  ordered  a  small  but  incredibly
strong cup of coffee; and attempted to take stock of his day. A
moment's reflection told him that he was almost certainly going
to  need  a  small  but  incredibly strong beer as well, and he
attempted to add this to his order.
     "A wha?" said the waiter. His  hair  was  very  black  and
filled  with  brilliantine. He was tall, incredibly fit and too
cool to listen to customers or say consonants.
     Dirk repeated his order, but what with having  the  caf&#1080;'s
music  system, a broken nose, and the waiter's insuperable cool
to contend with, he eventually found it simpler  to  write  out
the  order on a napkin with a stub of pencil. The waiter peered
at it in an offended manner, and left.
     Dirk exchanged a friendly nod with the girl  sitting  half
reading a book at the next table, who had watched this exchange
with  sympathy.  Then  he  set  about  laying out his morning's
acquisitions on the table in front of him - the newspaper,  the
electronic  I  Ching  calculator  and the envelope which he had
retrieved from  behind  the  gold  disc  on  Geoffrey  Anstey's
bathroom  wall.  He  then  spent a minute or two dabbing at his
nose with a handkerchief, and prodding it tenderly to  see  how
much it hurt, which turned out to be quite a lot. He sighed and
stuffed the handkerchief back in his pocket.
     A  few  seconds  later  the waiter returned bearing a herb
omelette and a single  breadstick.  Dirk  explained  that  this
wasn't  what  he had ordered. The waiter shrugged and said that
it wasn't his fault.
     Dirk had no idea what to say to this, and said so. He  was
still  having  a  great deal of difficulty speaking. The waiter
asked Dirk if he knew that he had broken his nose and Dirk said
that yedth, dthagg you berry budge, he  did.  The  waiter  said
that  his  friend  Neil  had once broken his nose and Dirk said
that he hobed it hurd like  hell,  which  seemed  to  draw  the
conversation to a close. The waiter took the omelette and left,
vowing never to return.
     When  the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a
moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew  that  he
was  perfectly  safe doing this because she would simply not be
able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping  at  the
lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.
     He  knew  that  before  consulting  the  I  Ching, even an
electronic one, he should try  and  compose  his  thoughts  and
allow them to settle calmly.
     This was a tough one.
     However  much  he  tried  to clear his mind and think in a
calm and collected way, he was unable to stop Geoffrey Anstey's
head  revolving  incessantly   in   his   mind.   It   revolved
disapprovingly,  as if pointing an accusing finger at Dirk. The
fact that it did not have an  accusing  finger  with  which  to
point only served to drive the point it was trying to make home
all the harder.
     Dirk  screwed  up  his  eyes  and attempted to concentrate
instead on  the  problem  of  the  mysteriously  vanished  Miss
Pearce,  but  was  unable to get much of a grip on it. When she
had used to work for him she would often disappear mysteriously
for two or three days at a time, but the papers didn't make any
kind of fuss about it then. Admittedly,  there  weren't  things
exploding  around  her  at  the time, at least, not that he was
aware  of.  She  had   never   mentioned   anything   exploding
particularly.
     Furthermore, whenever he thought of her face, which he had
last seen on the television set in Geoffrey Anstey's house, his
thoughts  tended  instantly  to sink towards the head which was
busy revolving thirty-three and a third times  a  minute  three
floors  beneath  it.  This  was  not  conducive to the calm and
contemplative mood he was seeking. Nor was the very loud  music
on the caf&#1080;'s music system.
     He   sighed,   and  stai-ed  at  the  electronic  I  Ching
calculator.
     If he wanted to get his thoughts into some kind  of  order
then  maybe  chronological order would be as good a one as any.
He decided to cast his mind back to the beginning of  the  day,
before any of these appalling things had happened, or at least,
before they'd happened to him.
     First there had been the fridge.
     It  seemed to him that by comparison with everything else,
the problem of what to do about his fridge had  now  shrunk  to
fairly  manageable  proportions. It still provoked a discemible
twinge of fear and guilt, but here, he thought, was  a  problem
which he could face up to with relative calm.
     The  little  book of instructions suggested that he should
simply  concentrate  "soulfully"  on  the  question  which  was
"besieging"  him,  write  it  down,  ponder  on  it,  enjoy the
silence, and then  once  he  had  achieved  inner  harmony  and
tranquillity he should push the red button.
     There  wasn't  a  red  button, but there was a blue button
marked "Red", and this Dirk took to be the one.
     He concentrated for a while on the question,  then  looked
through  his  pockets  for  a piece of paper, but was unable to
find one. In the end he wrote his question, "Should I buy a new
fridge?" on a corner of his napkin. Then he took the view  that
if he was going to wait until he had achieved inner harmony and
tranquillity  he could be there all night, so he went ahead and
pushed the blue button marked "Red" anyway. A symbol flashed up
in a corner of the screen, a hexagram which looked like this:

     ************ ***********
     *************************
     ************ ***********
     ************ ***********
     ************ ***********
     *************************
      3 : CHUN

     the I Ching calculator then scrolled this text Across  its
tiny LCD display:

      "THE JUDGEMENT OF KING WEN:
       "Chun  Signifies  Difficulties At Outset, As Of Blade
Of
      Grass Pushing Up  Against  Stone.  The  Time  Is  Full
Of
       Irregularities  And  Obscurities:  Superior  Man Will
Adjust
      His Measures As In Sorting The Threads Of The Warp
       And  Woof.  Firm  Correctness  Will  Bring  At   Last
Success.
      Early Advances Should Only Be Made With Caution.
        There   Will   Be  Advantage  In  Appointing  Feudal
Princes.
      "LINE 6 CHANGES:
      "THE COMMENTARY OF THE DUKE OF CHOU:
      "The Horses And The Chariot Obliged To Retreat.
      Streams Of Bloody Tears Will Flow."

     Dirk considered this for a few moments, and  then  decided
that  on  balance it appeared to be a vote in favour of getting
the new fridge, which, by a  staggering  coincidence,  was  the
course of action which he himself favoured.
     There  was  a  pay  phone in one of the dark corners where
waiters slouched moodily at one another. Dirk threaded his  way
through  them,  wondering whom it was they reminded him of, and
eventually deciding that it was the small crowd  of  naked  men
standing  around  behind  the  Holy  Family  in  Michelangelo's
picture of the same name, for no more apparent reason than that
Michelangelo rather liked them.
     He telephoned an acquaintance of his called Nobby  Paxton,
or  so  he  claimed, who worked the darker side of the domestic
appliance supply business. Dirk came straight to the point.
     "Dobby, I deed a fridge."
     "Dirk, I been saving one against the day you'd ask me."
     Dirk found this highly unlikely.
     "Only I wand a good fridge you thee, Dobby."
     "This  is  the  best,   Dirk.   Japanese.   Microprocessor
controlled."
     "What  would  a  microprothethor  be  doing  id  a fridge,
Dobby?"
     "Keeping itself cool, Dirk. I'll get the lads to bring  it
round  right  away.  I  need  to get it off the premises pretty
sharpish for reasons which I won't trouble you with."
     "I apprethiade thid, Dobby," said Dirk. "Froblem  id,  I'm
not at home at preddent."
     "Gaining access to houses in the absence of their owner is
only one  of  the  panoply  of  skills  with  which my lads are
blessed. Let me know if you find anything  missing  afterwards,
by the way."
     "I'd  be  happy  to, Dobby. Id fact if your ladth are in a
mood for carting thtuff off I'd be glad if  they  would  thtart
with my old fridge. It badly needth throwing away."
     "I  shall see that it's done, Dirk. There's usually a skip
or two on your street these days. Now,  do  you  expect  to  be
paying  for  this  or  shall I just get you kneecapped straight
off, save everybody time and aggravation all round?"
     It was never one hundred per cent clear  to  Dirk  exactly
when  Nobby  was  joking  and  he was not keen to put it to the
test. He assured him that he would pay him,  as  soon  as  next
they met.
     "See  you  very soon then, Dirk," said Nobby. "By the way,
do you know you sound  exactly  as  if  someone's  broken  your
nose?"
     There was a pause.
     "You there, Dirk?" said Nobby.
     "Yed," said Dirk. "I wad judd liddening to a reggord."
     "Hot Potato!" roared the hi-fi in the caf&#1080;.
      "Don't pick it up. pick it up, pick it up.
      "Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on."
     "I  said,  do  you  know you sound exactly as if someone's
broken your nose?" repeated Nobby.
     Dirk said  that  he  did  know  this,  thanked  Nobby  for
pointing it out, said goodbye, stood thoughtfully for a moment,
made another quick couple of phone calls, and then threaded his
way  back through the huddle of posing waiters to find the girl
whose coffee he had appropriated sitting at his table.
     "Hello," she said, meaningfully.
     Dirk was as gracious as he knew how.
     He bowed to her very politely, doffed his hat,  since  all
this  gave him a second or so to recover himself, and requested
her permission to sit down.
     "Go ahead," she said,  "it's  your  table."  She  gestured
magnanimously.
     She  was small, her hair was neat and dark, she was in her
mid-twenties, and was looking quizzically at the half-empty cup
of coffee in the middle of the table.
     Dirk   sat   down   opposite   her   and   leant   forward
conspiratorially.  "I  expeg," he said in a low voice, "you are
enquirigg after your coffee."
     "You betcha," said the girl.
     "Id very bad for you, you dow."
     "Is it?"
     "Id id. Caffeide. Cholethderog in the milgg."
     "I see, so it was just my health you were thinking of."
     "I was thiggigg of meddy thiggs," said Dirk airily.
     "You saw me sitting at the  next  table  and  you  thought
`There's  a  nice-looking girl with her health in ruins. Let me
save her from herself.'"
     "In a nudthell."
     "Do you know you've broken your nose?"
     "Yeth, of courth I  do,"  said  Dirk  crossly.  "Everybody
keepth - "
     "How long ago did you break it?" the girl asked.
     "Id  wad  broked for me," said Dirk, "aboud tweddy middidd
ago."
     "I thought so," said the girl.  "Close  your  eyes  for  a
moment."
     Dirk looked at her suspiciously.
     "Why?"
     "It's all right," she said with a smile, "I'm not going to
hurt you. Now close them."
     With  a  puzzled  frown,  Dirk  closed his eyes just for a
moment. In that moment the girl reached over  and  gripped  him
firmly  by  the  nose,  giving  it  a  sharp twist. Dirk nearly
exploded  with  pain  and  howled  so  loudly  that  he  almost
attracted the attention of a waiter.
     "You  widge!"  he  yelled, staggering wildly back from the
table clutching his face. "You double-dabbed widge!"
     "Oh, be quiet and sit down," she said. "All right, I  lied
about  it  not  going  to  hurt  you, but at least it should be
straight now, which will save you a lot  worse  later  on.  You
should  get  straight  round to a hospital to have some splints
and padding put on. I'm a nurse, I know what I'm doing.  Or  at
least, I think I do. Let's have a look at you."
     Panting  and  spluttering,  Dirk  sat  down once more, his
hands cupped round his nose. After a few long seconds he  began
to prod it tenderly again and then let the girl examine it.
     She  said,  "My  name's Sally Mills, by the way. I usually
try to introduce myself properly before physical intimacy takes
place, but sometimes," she sighed, "there just isn't time."
     Dirk ran his fingers up either side of his nose again.
     "I thigg id id trader," Dirk said at last.
     "Straighter,"  Sally  said.  "Say  `straighter'  properly.
It'll help you feel better. "
     "Straighter," said Dirk. "Yed. I thee wad you mead."
     "What?"
     "I see what you mead."
     "Good,"  she  said  with  a sigh of relief, "I'm glad that
worked.  My  horoscope  this  morning   said   that   virtually
everything I decided today would be wrong."
     "Yes,  well  you  don't want to believe all that rubbish,"
said Dirk sharply.
     "I don't," said Satly. &#1061;
     "Particularly not The Great Zaganza."
     "Oh, you read it too, did you?"
     "No. That is, well, not for the same reason."
     "My reason was  that  a  patient  asked  me  to  read  his
horoscope  to  him  this  morning just before he died. What was
yours?"
     "Er, a very complicated one."
     "I see," said Sally, sceptically. "What's this?"
     "It's a calculator," said Dirk.  "Well,  look,  I  mustn't
keep  you.  I  am  indebted  to  you,  my  dear  lady,  for the
tenderness of your ministrations and the loan of  your  coffee,
but  lo!  the  day  wears  on,  and  I am sure you have a heavy
schedule of grievous bodily harm to attend to."
     "Not at all. I came off night duty at  nine  o'clock  this
morning,  and  all I have to do all day is keep awake so that I
can sleep normally tonight. I have nothing better to do than to
sit arnund talking to strangers in caf&#1080;s.  You,  on  the  other
hand,  should  get yourself to a casualty department as soon as
possible. As soon as you've paid my bill, in fact."
     She leant over  to  the  table  she  had  originally  been
sitting  at and picked up the running-total lying by her plate.
She looked at it, shaking her head disapprovingly.
     "Five cups of coffee, I'm afraid. It was a long  night  on
the wards. All sorts of comings and goings in the middle of it.
One patient in a coma who had to be moved to a private hospital
in  the  early  hours.  God knows why it had to be done at that
time of night. Just creates unnecessary trouble. I wouldn't pay
for the second croissant if I were you. I  ordered  it  but  it
never came."
     She pushed the bill across to Dirk who picked it up with a
reluctant sigh.
     "Inordinate,"  he  said,  "larcenously inordinate. And, in
the circumstances, adding a  15  per  cent  service  charge  is
tantamount  to jeering at you. I bet they won't even bring me a
knife."
     He turned and tried, without any real hope of success,  to
summon  any  of  the gaggle of waiters lounging among the sugar
bowls at the back.
     Sally Mills took her bill and Dirk's and attempted to  add
them up on Dirk's calculator.
     "The  total seems to come to `A Suffusion of YelIow'," she
said.
     "Thank you,  I'll  take  that,"  said  Dirk  turning  bask
crossly  and  relieving her of the electronic I Ching set which
he put into his pocket. He resumed his hapless  waving  at  the
tableau of waiters.
     "What do you want a knife for, anyway?" asked Sally.
     "To  open  this,"  said  Dirk, waggling the large, heavily
Sellotaped envelope at her.
     "I'll get you one," she said. A young man sitting  on  his
own at another nearby table was looking away at that moment, so
Sally quickly leaned across and nabbed his knife.
     "I  am indebted to you," said Dirk and put out his hand to
take the knife from her.
     She held it away from him.
     "What's in the envelope?" she said.
     "You are an extremely inquisitive and  presumptuous  young
lady," exclaimed Dirk.
     "And you," said Sally Mills, "are very strange."
     "Only," said Dirk, "as strange as I need to be."
     "Humph,"  said  Sally. "What's in the envelope?" She still
wouldn't give him the knife.
     "The envelope is not yours,"  proclaimed  Dirk,  "and  its
contents are not your concern."
     "It looks very interesting though. What's in it?"
     "Well, I won't know till I've opened it!"
     She looked at him suspiciously, then snatched the envelope
from him.
     "I insist that you - " expostulated Dirk, incompletely.
     "What's your name?" demanded Sally.
     "My name is Gently. Mr Dirk Gently."
     "And not Geoffrey Anstey, or any of these other names that
have been crossed out?" She frowned, briefly, looking at them.
     "No," said Dirk. "Certainly not."
     "So you mean the envelope is not yours either?"
     "I - that is - "
     "Aha! So you are also being extremely... what was it?"
     "Inquisitive  and presumptuous. I do not deny it. But I am
a  private  detective.  I  am  paid  to  be   inquisitive   and
presumptuous.  Not as often or copiously as I would wish, but I
am nevertheless inquisitive and presumptuous on a  professional
basis."
     "How sad. I think it's much more fun being inquisitive and
presumptuous  as  a hobby. So you are a professional while I am
merely an amateur of Olympic standard. You don't  look  like  a
private detective."
     "No  private  detective  looks  like  a private detective.
That's one of the first rules of private detection."
     "But  if  no  private  detective  looks  like  a   private
detective,  how  does  a private detective know what it is he's
supposed not to look  like?  Seems  to  me  there's  a  problem
there."
     "Yes,  but  it's  not  one that keeps me awake at nights,"
said Dirk in exasperation. "Anyway, I am not as  other  private
detectives. My methods are holistic and, in a very proper sense
of   the   word,   chaotic.  I  operate  by  investigating  the
fundamental interconnectedness of all things."
     Sally Mills merely blinked at him.
     "Every particle in the universe," continued Dirk,  warming
to  his  subject  and  beginning to stare a bit, "affects every
other  particle,  however  faintly  or  obliquely.   Everything
interconnects  with  everything.  The  beating of a butterfly's
wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic  hurricane.
If  I could interrogate this table-leg in a way that made sense
to me, or to the table-leg, then it could provide me  with  the
answer  to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody
I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared
to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way
bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution.  It  is
only  a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom
I have met entirely by chance, probably know  things  that  are
vital  to  my  investigation,  if  only I knew what to ask you,
which I don't, and if only I could  be  bothered  to,  which  I
can't."
     He  paused,  and  said,  "Please  will you let me have the
envelope and the knife?"
     "You make it sound as if someone's life depends on it."
     Dirk dropped his eyes for a moment.
     "I rather think somebody's life  did  depend  on  it,"  he
said.  He  said  it  in  such a way that a cloud seemed to pass
briefly over them.
     Sally Mills relented and passed the envelope and the knife
over to Dirk. A spark seemed to go out of her.
     The knife was too blunt  and  the  Sellotape  too  thickly
applied.  Dirk  struggled  with  it  for  a few seconds but was
unable to slice through it. He sat back  in  his  seat  feeling
tired and irritable.
     He  said,  "I'll  go  and ask them if they've got anything
sharper," and stood up, clutching the envelope.
     "You should go and get your nose fixed," said Sally  Mills
quietly.
     `"Thank you," said Dirk and bowed very slightly to her.
     He picked up the bills and set out to visit the exhibition
of waiters  mounted  at  the rear of the cafe. He encountered a
certain  coolness  when  he  was  disinclined  to  augment  the
mandatory  15  per  cent  service  charge  with  any  voluntary
additional token of his personal  appreciation,  and  was  told
that  no,  that  was the only type of knife they had and that's
all there was to it.
     Dirk thanked them and walked back through the caf&#1080;.
     Sitting in his seat talking to Sally Mills was  the  young
man  whose  knife  she had purloined. He nodded to her, but she
was deeply engrossed in conversation with her  new  friend  and
did not notice.
     "...in  a coma," she was saying, "who had to be moved to a
private hospital in the early hours. God knows why it had to be
done at that time of night. Just creates  unnecessary  trouble.
Excuse  me  rabbiting  on, but the patient had his own personal
Coca-Cola machine and sledge-hammer with him, and that sort  of
thing  is.all  very well in a private hospital, but on a
shortstaffed NHS ward it just makes me tired, and I talk too
much when  I'm  tired.  If  I suddenly fall insensible to the
floor, would you let me know?"
     Dirk walked on, and then noticed that Sally Mills had left
the book she had  been  reading  on  her  original  table,  and
something about it caught his attention.
     It  was a large book, called Run Like the Devil. In
fact it was extremely large and  a  little  dog-eared,  looking
more  like  a puff pastry cliff than a book. The bottom half of
the         cover         featured          the          normal
woman-in-cocktail-dress-framed-in-the-sights-of-a-gun,    while
the top half was entirely taken  up  with  the  author's  name,
Howard Bell, embossed in silver.
     Dirk  couldn't  immediately work out what it was about the
book that had caught his eye, but he knew that some  detail  of
the  cover  had  struck  a  chord with him somewhere. He gave a
circumspect glance at the girl whose coffee he  had  purloined,
and  whose five coffees and two croissants, one undelivered and
uneaten, he had subsequently paid for. She wasn't  looking,  so
he purloined her book as well and slipped it into the pocket of
his leather coat.
     He  stepped  out  on  to the street, where a passing eagle
swooped out of the sky at him, nearly forcing him into the path
of a cyclist, who cursed and swore at him  from  a  moral  high
ground that cyclists alone seem able to inhabit.

Chapter 11

     Into  the well-kempt grounds that lay just on the owtskins
of a well-kempt  village  on  the  fringes  of  the  well-kempt
Cotswolds turned a less than well-kempt car.
     It  was  a  battered  yellow Citro&#1082;n 2CV which had had one
careful owner but also three suicidally reckless ones. It  made
its way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked
for  from  life was to be tipped into a restful ditch in one of
the adjoining meadows and there allowed to settle  in  graceful
abandonment,  instead  of which here it was being asked to drag
itself all the way up this long gravelled drive which it  would
no  doubt  soon  be called upon to drag itself all the way back
down again, to what possible purpose it was beyond its  wit  to
imagine.
     It  drew  to a halt in front of the elegant stone entrance
to  the  main  building,  and  then  began  to  trundle  slowly
backwards  again  until  its  occupant yanked on the handbrake,
which evoked from the car a sort of strangled "eek".
     A door  flopped  open,  wobbling  perilously  on  its  one
remaining  hinge,  and there emerged from the car a pair of the
sort of legs which soundtrack editors are unable to see without
needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all  over,  for  reasons
which  no  one besides soundtrack editors has ever been able to
understand. In this particular  case,  however,  the  saxophone
would  have  been  silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which
the same soundtrack editor would almost certainly have  slapped
all over the progress of the vehicle.
     The  owner  of the legs followed them in the usual manner,
closed the car door tenderly, and then made her  way  into  the
building.
     The car remained parked in front of it.
     After  a  few  minutes  a porter came out and examined it,
adopted a disapproving manner and then, for  lack  of  anything
more positive to do, went back in.
     A  short  time later, Kate was shown into the office of Mr
Ralph Standish, the Chief Consultant Psychologist  and  one  of
the   directors   of  the  Woodshead  Hospital,  who  was  just
completing a telephone conversation.
     "Yes,  it  is  true,"  he  was  saying,  "that   sometimes
unusually  intelligent  and sensitive children can appear to be
stupid. But, Mrs Benson, stupid children can  sometimes  appear
to  be  stupid as well. I think that's something you might have
to consider. I know it's  very  painful,  yes.  Good  day,  Mrs
Benson."
     He  put  the  phone  away  into  a desk drawer and spent a
couple of seconds collecting his thoughts before looking up.
     "This is very short notice, Miss, er, Schechter," he  said
to her at last.
     In  fact  what  he  had said was, This is ve short notice,
Miss, er-" and then he had paused and peered  into  another  of
his desk drawers before saying "Schechter".
     It  seemed  to  Kate  that  it  was  very odd to keep your
visitors' names in a  drawer,  but  then  he  clearly  disliked
having  things  cluttering  up his fine, but severely designed,
black ash desk because there was nothing on it at all.  It  was
completely  blank,  as  was  every other surface in his office.
There was nothing on the small  neat  steel  and  glass  coffee
table  which  sat  squarely between two Barcelona chairs. There
was nothing on top of the two expensive-looking filing cabinets
which stood at the back of the room.
     There were no bookshelves - if there were any  books  they
were presumably hidden away behind the white doors of the large
blank  built-in  cupboards  -  and although there was one plain
black picture frame hanging on the wall, this was presumably  a
temporary aberration because there was no picture in it.
     Kate looked around her with a bemused air.
     "Do  you  have  no ornaments in here at all, Mr Standish?"
she asked.
     He was, for a moment, somewhat taken aback by  her
transatlantic directness, but then answered her.
     "Indeed  I  have  ornaments,"  he  said;  and  pulled open
another drawer. He pulled out from this a small china model  of
a  kitten  playing with a ball of wool and put it firmly on the
desk in front of him.
     "As a psychologist I am aware of the important  role  that
ornamentation   plays  in  nourishing  the  human  spirit,"  he
pronounced.
     He put the china kitten back in the  drawer  and  slid  it
closed with a smooth click.
     "Now."
     He clasped his hands together on the desk in front of him,
and looked at her enquiringly.
     "It's  very  good  of  you  to  see me at short notice, Mr
Standish - "
     "Yes, yes, we've established that."
     "- but I'm sure you  know  what  newspaper  deadlines  are
like."
     "I  know  at  least  as  much as I would ever care to know
about newspapers, Miss, er - "
     He opened his drawer again.
     "Miss Schechter, but - "
     "Well that's partly what made me approach you," lied  Kate
charmingly.  "I  know  that  you have suffered from some, well,
unfortunate publicity here, and thought you might  welcome  the
opportunity to talk about some of the more enlightening aspects
of  the  work  at  the  Woodshead  Hospital."  She  smiled very
sweetly.
     "It's only because you come to me with the highest
recommendation from my very good friend and colleague Mr, er - "
     "Franklin,  Alan  Franklin,"  prompted  Kate,  to save the
psychologist  from  having  to  open  his  drawer  again.  Alan
Franklin  was a therapist whom Kate had seen for a few sessions
after the loss of her husband Luke.  He  had  warned  her  that
Standish, though brilliant, was also peculiar, even by the high
standards set by his profession.
     "Franklin,"  resumed  Standish, "that I agreed to see you.
Let me warn you instantly that if I see any resumption of  this
'Something  nasty  in the Woodshead' mendacity appearing in the
papers as a result of this interview I will, I will - "
     "`- do such things -
     `What they are yet I know not - but they shall be
     ` The terror of the Earth '," said Kate, brightly.
     Standish narrowed his eyes.
     "Lear, Act 2, Scene  4,"  he  said.  "And  I  think
you'll find it's `terrors' and not `terror'."
     "Do you know, I think you're right?" replied Kate.
     Thank  you, Alan, she thought. She smiled at Standish, who
relaxed into pleased superiority. It was odd,  Kate  reflected,
that  people  who  needed to bully you were the easiest to push
around.
     "So  you  would  like  to  know   precisely   what,   Miss
Schechter?"
     "Assume," said Kate, "that I know nothing."
     Standish smiled, as if to signify that no assumption could
possibly give him greater pleasure.
     "Very  well,"  he  said.  "The  Woodshead  is  a  research
hospital. We specialise in the care and study of patients  with
unusual  or  previously  unknown  conditions,  largely  in  the
psychological  or  psychiatric  fields.  Funds  are  raised  in
various  ways. One of our chief methods is quite simply to take
in private patients at exorbitantly high fees, which  they  are
happy  to pay, or at least happy to complain about. There is in
fact nothing to complain about because patients who come to  us
privately are made fully aware of why our fees are so high. For
the  money  they  are  paying,  they  are, of course, perfectly
entitled to complain - the right to  complain  is  one  of  the
privileges  they  are  paying  for.  In some cases we come to a
special arrangement under which, in return for being  made  the
sole  beneficiaries of a patient's estate, we will guarantee to
look after that patient for the rest of his or her life."
     "So  in  effect  you  are  in  the  business   of   giving
scholarships to people with particularly gifted diseases?"
     "Exactly.  A very good way of expressing it. We are in the
business of giving scholarships  to  people  with  particularly
gifted diseases. I must make a note of that. Miss Mayhew!"
     He had opened a drawer, which clearly contained his office
intercom.  In  response  to  his  summons  one of the cupboards
opened, and tumed out to be a door  into  a  side  office  -  a
feature  which  must  have  appealed  to some architect who had
conceived an ideological dislike of  doors.  From  this  office
there emerged obediently a thin and rather blank-faced woman in
her midforties.
     "Miss  Mayhew,"  said Mr Standish, "we are in the business
of giving  scholarships  to  people  with  particularly  gifted
diseases."
     "Very  good, Mr Standish," said Miss Mayhew, and retreated
backwards into her office, pulling the door closed  after  her.
Kate wondered if it was perhaps a cupboard after all.
     "And  we  do  have  some  patients  with some really quite
outstanding diseases at the moment," enthused the psychologist.
"Perhaps you would care to come and  see  one  or  two  of  our
current stars?"
     "Indeed  I  would.  That  would  be  most  interesting, Mr
Standish, you're very kind," said Kate.
     "You have to be kind in this job," Standish  replied,  and
flicked a smile on and off at her.
     Kate  was  trying  to  keep some of the impatience she was
feeling out of her manner. She did not take to Mr Standish, and
was beginning to feel that there was a kind of Martian  quality
to him. Furthermore, the only thing she was actually interested
in  was  discovering whether or not the hospital had accepted a
new admission in the early hours of the  morning,  and  if  so,
where he was and whether she could see him.
     She  had originally tried the direct approach but had been
rebuffed by a mere telephone receptionist on the  grounds  that
she  didn't  have  a name to ask for. Simply asking if they had
any tall, well-built, blond men  in  residence  had  seemed  to
create entirely the wrong impression. At least, she insisted to
herself  that  it  was  entirely  the wrong impression. A quick
phone call to Alan Franklin had set her up for this  altogether
more subtle approach.
     "Good!"  A  look  of  doubt  passed  momentarily  over  Mr
Standish's face, and he summoned Miss Mayhew from  out  of  her
cupboard again.
     "Miss Mayhew, that last thing I just said to you - "
     "Yes, Mr Standish?"
     "I assume you realised that I wished you to make a note of
it for me?"
     "No, Mr Standish, but I will be happy to do so."
     "Thank  you," said Mr Standish with a slightly tense look.
"And tidy up in here please. The place looks a - "
     He wanted to say that the place looked  a  mess,  but  was
frustrated by its air of clinical sterility.
     "Just tidy up generally," he concluded.
     "Yes, Mr Standish."
     The  psychologist  nodded  tersely, brushed a non-existent
speck of dust off the top of his desk,  flicked  another  brief
smile  on  and  off  at  Kate  and then escorted her out of his
office into the corridor which was immaculately laid  with  the
sort  of  beige  carpet  which  gave  everyone who walked on it
electric shocks.
     "Here, you see," said Standish,  indicating  part  of  the
wall  they were walking past with an idle wave of his hand, but
not making it in any way clear what it was he wished her to see
or what she was supposed to understand from it.
     "And this," he said, apparently pointing at a door hinge.
     "Ah," he added, as the door swung open towards them.  Kate
was  alarmed  to  find  herself giving a little expectant start
every time a door opened anywhere in this place. This  was  not
the sort of behaviour she expected of a worldly-wise New Yorker
journalist,  even  if  she didn't actually live in New York and
only wrote travel articles for  magazines.  It  still  was  not
right  for  her  to be looking for large blond men every time a
door opened.
     There was no large blond man. There was instead  a  small,
sandy-haired girl of about ten years old, being pushed along in
a wheelchair. She seemed very pale, sick and withdrawn, and was
murmuring something soundlessly to herself. Whatever it was she
was  murmuring seemed to cause her worry and agitation, and she
would flop this way then that in her  chair  as  if  trying  to
escape  from  the  words  coming  out  of  her  mouth. Kate was
instantly moved by the sight of her, and on  an  impulse  asked
the nurse who was pushing her along to stop.
     She  squatted  down  to  look kindly into the girl's face,
which seemed to please the nurse a little, but Mr Standish less
so.
     Kate did not try to demand the  girl's  attention,  merely
gave  her  an  open  and friendly smile to see if she wanted to
respond, but the girl seemed unwilling or unable to. Her  mouth
worked  away  endlessly,  appearing almost to lead an existence
that was independent of the rest of her face.
     Now that Kate looked at her more closely  it  seemed  that
she  looked  not  so much sick and withdrawn as weary, harassed
and unutterably fed up. She needed a little  rest,  she  needed
peace, but her mouth kept motoring on.
     For  a  fleeting  instant  her eyes caught Kate's, and the
message Kate received was along the lines  of  "I'm  sorry  but
you'll  just have to excuse me while all this is going on". The
girl took a deep breath, half-closed her  eyes  in  resignation
and continued her relentless silent murmuring.
     Kate  leant  forward  a  little in an attempt to catch any
actual words, but she couldn't make anything out. She  shot  an
enquiring look up at Standish.
     He said, simply, "Stock market prices."
     A look of amazement crept over Kate's face.
     Standish   added  with  a  wry  shrug,  "Yesterday's,  I'm
afraid."
     Kate  flinched  at   having   her   reaction   so   wildly
misinterpreted,  and hurriedly looked back at the girl in order
to cover her confusion.
     "You mean," she  said,  rather  redundantly,  "she's  just
sitting  here  reciting  yesterday's  stock market prices?" The
girl rolled her eyes past Kate's.
     "Yes," said Standish. "It took a lip reader  to  work  out
what  was  going  on. We all got rather excited, of course, but
then  closer  examination  revealed   that   they   were   only
yesterday's  which  was  a  bit  of  a disappointment. Not that
significant a case really. Aberrant behaviour.  Interesting  to
know why she does it, but - "
     "Hold  on  a  moment,"  said  Kate,  trying  to sound very
interested rather than absolutely horrified,  "are  you  saying
that  she  is  reciting  -  what? - the closing prices over and
over, or - "
     "No. That's an interesting feature of course.  She  pretty
much keeps pace with movements in the market over the course of
a whole day. Just twenty-four hours out of step."
     "But that's extraordinary, isn't it?"
     "Oh yes. Quite a feat."
     "A feat?"
     "Well,  as a scientist, I have to take the view that since
the information  is  freely  available,  she  is  acquiring  it
through  normal  channels. There's no necessity in this case to
invent any supernatural or paranonnal dimension. Occam's razor.
Shouldn't needlessly multiply entities."
     "But has anyone  seen  her  studying  the  newspapers,  or
copying stuff down over the phone?"
     She looked up at the nurse, who shook her head, dumbly.
     "No,  never actually caught her at it," said Standish. "As
I said, it's quite a feat. I'm sure a stage magician or  memory
man could tell you how it was done."
     "Have you asked one?"
     "No. Don't hold with such people."
     "But  do you really think that she could possibly be doing
this deliberately?" insisted Kate.
     "Believe me, if you understood as much about people  as  I
do,  Miss,  er - you would believe anything," said Standish, in
his most professionally reassuring tone of voice.
     Kate stared into the tired, wretched  face  of  the  young
girl and said nothing.
     "You  have to understand," said Standish, "that we have to
be rational about this.  If  it  was  tomorrow's  stock  market
prices,  it  would  be  a  different  story.  That  would  be a
phenomenon of an entirely different character which would merit
and demand the most rigorous study. And I'm sure we'd  have  no
difficulty  in  funding the research. There would be absolutely
no problem about that."
     "I see," said Kate, and meant it.
     She stood up, a  little  stiftly,  and  brushed  down  her
skirt.
     "So,"  she said, and felt ashamed of herself, "who is your
newest patient? Who  has  arrived  most  recently,  then?"  She
shuddered  at  the  crassness  of  the non sequitur, but
reminded herself that she was there  as  a  journalist,  so  it
would not seem odd.
     Standish  waved  the nurse and the wheelchair with its sad
charge on their way. Kate glanced back at the  girl  once,  and
then  followed  Standish  through  the swing-doors and into the
next section of corridor, which was identical to  the  previous
one.
     "Here, you see," said Standish again, this time apparently
in relation to a window frame.
     "And this," he said, pointing at a light.
     He  had  obviously  either  not  heard her question or was
deliberately ignoring it. Perhaps, thought Kate, he was  simply
treating it with the contempt it deserved.
     It  suddenly  dawned  on  her  what  all  this Here you
see, and And thising was about. He was asking her to
admire the quality of the decor. The windows were sashes,  with
finely  made  and beautifully painted beads; the light fittings
were of a heavy dull metal, probably nickel-plated - and so on.
     "Very fine," she said accommodatingly,  and  then  noticed
that  this  had  sounded  an  odd  thing to say in her American
accent.
     "Nice place you've got here,"  she  added,  thinking  that
that would please him.
     It did. He allowed himself a subdued beam of pleasure.
     "We  like to think of it as a quality caring environment,"
he said.
     "You must get a lot of people wanting to come here,"  Kate
continued,  plugging away at her theme. "How often do you admit
new patients? When was the last -?"
     With her left hand she carefully restrained her right hand
which wanted to strangle her at this moment.
     A door they were passing was slightly ajar, and she tried,
unobtrusively, to look in.
     "Very well, we'll take a  look  in  here,"  said  Standish
immediately, pushing the door fully open, on what transpired
to be quite a small room.
     "Ah yes," Standish  said,  recognising  the  occupant.  He
ushered Kate in.
     The  occupant of the room was another non-large, non-blond
person. Kate was beginning  to  find  the  whole  visit  to  be
something  of  an emotionally wearing experience, and she had a
feeling that things were not about to ease up in that respect.
     The man sitting in the bedside chair  while  his  bed  was
being  made up by a hospital orderly was one of the most deeply
and disturbingly tousled people that Kate  had  ever  seen.  In
fact  it was only his hair that was tousled, but it was tousled
to such an extreme degree that it seemed to  draw  all  of  his
long face up into its distressed chaos.
     He seemed quite content to sit where he was, but there was
something  tremendously  vacant  about  his  contentedness - he
seemed literally to be  content  about  nothing.  There  was  a
completely empty space hanging in the air about eighteen inches
in  front of his face, and his contentedness, if it sprang from
anything, sprang from staring at that.
     There was also a sense that he was waiting for  something.
Whether  it  was  something  that  was  about  to happen at any
moment, or something that was going  to  happen  later  in  the
week,  or  even  something that was going to happen some little
while after hell iced over and British Telecom got  the  phones
fixed  was by no means apparent because it seemed to be all the
same to him. If it happened he was  ready  for  it  and  if  it
didn't - he was content.
     Kate    found   such   contentedness   almost   unbearably
distressing.
     "What's the matter with him?" she said quietly,  and  then
instantly  realised  that she was talking as if he wasn't there
when he  could  probably  speak  perfectly  well  for  himself.
Indeed, at that moment, he suddenly did speak.
     "Oh, er, hi," he said. "OK, yeah, thank you."
     "Er,  hello," she said, in response, though it didn't seem
quite to fit. Or rather, what he had said didn't seem quite  to
fit.  Standish  made  a  gesture  to her to discourage her from
speaking.
     "Er, yeah, a bagel would be fine," said the contented man.
He said it in a flat kind  of  tone,  as  if  merely  repeating
something he had been given to say.
     "Yeah,  and  maybe some juice," he added. "OK, thanks." He
then relaxed into his state of empty watchfulness.
     "A very unusual condition," said  Standish,  "that  is  to
say,  we  can  only  believe  that  it is entirely unique. I've
certainly never heard of anything remotely like it. It has also
proved virtually impossible to verify beyond question  that  it
is  what it appears to be, so I'm glad to say that we have been
spared the embarrassment of attempting to give the condition  a
name."
     "Would  you  like  me to help Mr Elwes back to bed?" asked
the orderly of Standish. Standish nodded. He didn't  bother  to
waste words on minions.
     The orderly bent down to talk to the patient.
     "Mr Elwes?" he said quietly.
     Mr Elwes seemed to swim up out of a reverie.
     "Mmmm?"  he  said,  and  suddenly looked around. He seemed
confused.
     "Oh! Oh? What?" he said faintly.
     "Would you like me to help you back to bed?"
     "Oh. Oh, thank you, yes. Yes, that would be kind."
     Though clearly dazed and bewildered, Mr  Elwes  was  quite
able  to  get himself back into bed, and all the orderly needed
to supply was reassurance and encouragement. Once Mr Elwes  was
well  settled, the orderly nodded politely to Standish and Kate
and made his exit.
     Mr Elwes quickly lapsed back into  his  trancelike  state,
lying  propped  up  against  an escarpment of pillows. His head
dropped forward slightly and he stared at  one  of  his  knees,
poking up bonily from under the covers.
     "Get me New York," he said.
     Kate  shot  a  puzzled glance at Standish, hoping for some
kind of explanation, but got none.
     "Oh, OK," said Mr Elwes, "it's 541 something. Hold on." He
spoke another four digits of a number in his dead, flat voice.
     "What is happening here?" asked Kate at last.
     "It took us rather a long time to work it out. It was only
quite by the remotest chance that someone discovered  it.  That
television was on in the room... "
     He  pointed  to  the small portable set off to one side of
the bed.
     ". . .tuned to one of those chat programme  things,  which
happened  to  be  going  out live. Most extraordinary thing. Mr
Elwes was sitting here muttering about how much  he  hated  the
BBC - don't know if it was the BBC, perhaps it was one of those
other  channels  they  have now - and was expressing an opinion
about the  host  of  the  programme,  to  the  effect  that  he
considered  him  to  be  a  rectum  of  some  kind,  and saying
furthermore that he wished the whole thing was over  and  that,
yes,  all  right  he  was coming, and then suddenly what he was
saying  and  what  was  on  the  television   began   in   some
extraordinary way almost to synchronise."
     "I don't understand what you mean," said Kate.
     "I'd  be surprised if you did," said Standish. "Everything
that Elwes said was then  said  just  a  moment  later  on  the
television  by a gentleman by the name of Mr Dustin Hoffman. It
seems that Mr Elwes here knows everything that this Mr  Hoffman
is  going  to  say just a second or so before he says it. It is
not, I have to say, something that Mr  Hoffman  would  be  very
pleased  about if he knew. Attempts have been made to alert the
gentleman to the problem, but he  has  proved  to  be  somewhat
difficult to reach."
     "Just  what  the  shit  is  going on here?" asked Mr Elwes
placidly.
     "Mr Hoffman is, we believe, currently  making  a  film  on
location somewhere on the west coast of America."
     He looked at his watch.
     "I think he has probably just woken up in his hotel and is
making his early morning phone calls," he added.
     Kate was gazing with astonishment between Standish and the
extraordinary Mr Elwes.
     "How long has the poor man been like this?"
     "Oh,  about  five years I think. Started absolutely out of
the blue. He was sitting having dinner with his family one  day
as  usual  when  suddenly  he  started  complaining  about  his
caravan. And then shortly afterwards about  how  he  was  being
shot.  He  then  spent  the  entire night talking in his sleep,
repeating the same apparently meaningless phrases over and over
again and also saying that he didn't think much of the way they
were written. It was a very trying time for his family, as  you
can  imagine,  living  with  such a perfectionist actor and not
even realising it. It now seems very  surprising  how  long  it
took  them to identify what was occurring. Particularly when he
once woke them all up in the early  hours  of  the  morning  to
thank them and the producer and the director for his Oscar."
     Kate,  who  didn't  realise  that  the  day was still only
softening her up for what was to  come,  made  the  mistake  of
thinking that it had just reached a climax of shock.
     "The  poor  man,"  she  said  in  a  hushed voice. "What a
pathetic state to be in. He's just  living  as  someone  else's
shadow."
     "I don't think he's in any pain."
     Mr  Elwes  appeared  to  be  quietly  locked  in  a bitter
argument which seemed to touch on the definitions of the  words
"points" "gross", "profits" and "limo".
     "But  the  implications  of  this are extraordinary aren't
they?" said Kate. "He's actually saying  these  things  moments
before Dustin Hoffman?"
     "Well, it's all conjecture of course. We've only got a few
clear instances of absolute correlation and we just haven't got
the opportunity  to  do  more  thorough  research.  One  has to
recognise that those few instances of direct  correlation  were
not rigorously documented and could more simply be explained as
coincidence.  The  rest  could  be  merely  the  product  of an
elaborate fantasy."
     "But if you put this case next to that of the girl we just
saw... "
     "Ah, well we can't do that you see. We have to judge  each
case on its own merits."
     "But they're both in the same world..."
     "Yes,  but  there  are  separate  issues. Obviously, if Mr
Elwes here could demonstrate significant precognition  of,  for
instance,  the  head  of the Soviet Union or, better still, the
President of the United States, then  clearly  there  would  be
important  defence issues involved and one might be prepared to
stretch a point on the question of what  is  and  what  is  not
coincidence and fantasy, but for a mere screen actor - that is,
a screen actor with no apparent designs on political office - I
think  that, no, we have to stick to the principles of rigorous
science.
     "So," he added, turning to leave, and  drawing  Kate  with
him,  "I  think  that  in  the  cases of both Mr Elwes and, er,
what-was-her-name, the charming girl in the wheelchair, it may
be that we are not able to be of much more help to them, and we
may need the space and facilities for more deserving cases."
     Kate could think of nothing to say to this  and  followed,
seething dumbly.
     "Ah,  now here we have an altogether much more interesting
and promising case," said Standish, forging  on  ahead  through
the next set of double doors.
     Kate  was  trying to keep her reactions under control, but
nevertheless even someone as glassy and Martian as Mr  Standish
could  not help but detect that his audience was not absolutely
with him. A little extra brusqueness and impatience crept  into
his  demeanour,  to  join  forces  with the large quantities of
brusqueness and impatience which were already there.
     They paced down the corridor for a few seconds in silence.
Kate was looking for other ways  of  casually  introducing  the
subject  of  recent  admissions,  but  was forced to concede to
herself that you cannot attempt to introduce the  same  subject
three  times  in  a  row  without  beginning to lose that vital
quality of casualness. She glanced as  surreptitiously  as  she
could  at  each  door they passed, but most were firmly closed,
and the ones that were not revealed nothing of interest.
     She glanced out of a window as they  walked  past  it  and
noticed  a  van  turning  into  a roar courtyard. It caught her
attention in the brief instant that  it  was  within  her  view
because  it very clearly wasn't a baker's van or a laundry van.
Baker's vans and laundry vans advertise their business and have
words like "Bakery" and "Laundry" painted on them, whereas this
van was completely blank. It had absolutely nothing to  say  to
anyone nnd it said it loudly and distinctly.
     It was a large, heavy, serious-looking van that was almost
on the  verge of being an actual lorry, and it was painted in a
uniform dark metallic grey. It reminded Kate of the  huge
gun-metal-grey freight lorries which thunder through Bulgaria and
Yugoslavia on their way from Albania with nothing but the  word
"Albania"  stencilled  on their sides. She remembered wondering
what it was that the Albanians exported in  such  an  anonymous
way,  but  when on one occasion she had looked it up, she found
that  their  only  export  was  electricity  -  which,  if  she
remembered  her  high school physics correctly, was unlikely to
be moved around in lorries.
     The large,  serious-looking  van  turned  and  started  to
reverse  towards  a  rear entrance to the hospital. Whatever it
was that the van usually carried, Kate thought,  it  was  about
either to pick it up or deliver it. She moved on.
     A few moments later Standish arrived at a door, knocked at
it gently  and looked enquiringly into the room within. He then
beckoned to Kate to follow him in.
     This  was  a  room  of  an  altogether   different   sort.
Immediately  within the door was an ante-room with a very large
window through which the main room could be seen. The two rooms
were clearly sound-proofed from each other, because the anteroom
was  decked  out with monitoring equipment and computers,
not one of which but didn't hum loudly to itself, and the  main
room contained a woman lying in bed, asleep.
     "Mrs Elspeth May," said Standish, and clearly felt that he
was introducing  the  top of the bill. Her room was obviously a
very good one - spacious and furnished comfortably  and
expensively. Fresh flowers stood on every surface, and the
bedside table on which Mrs May's knitting lay was of mahogany.
     She herself was a comfortably shaped,  silver-haired  lady
of late middle age, and she was lying asleep half propped up in
bed  on a pile of pillows, wearing a pink woolly cardigan. Aher
a moment it became clear to Kate that though she was asleep she
was by no means inactive. Her head lay back peacefully with her
eyes closed, but her right hand was clutching a pen  which  was
scribbling  away  furiously  on  a large pad of paper which lay
beside her. The hand, like the wheelchair girl's mouth,  seemed
to  lead  an  independent  and  feverishly busy existence. Some
small pinkish electrodes were taped to Mrs May's forehead  just
below  her hairline, and Kate assumed that these were providing
some of the readings which danced across the  computer  screens
in  the  ante-room  in which she and Standish stood. Two
whitecoated men and a woman sat  monitoring the equipment, and a
nurse  stood  watching through the window. Standish exchanged a
couple of brief words with them on the  current  state  of  the
patient, which was universally agreed to be excellent.
     Kate  could  not  escape  the impression that she ought to
know who Mrs May was, but she didn't and was forced to ask.
     "She is a medium," said Standish a little crossly,  "as  I
assumed  you  would know. A medium of prodigious powers. She is
currently in a trance and engaged in automatic writing. She  is
taking  dictation.  Virtually  every  piece  of  dictation  she
receives is of inestimable value. You have not heard of her?"
     Kate admitted that she had not.
     "Well, you are no doubt familiar with the lady who claimed
that Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert  were  dictating  music  to
her?"
     "Yes,  I  did hear about that. There was a lot of stuff in
colour supplements about her a few years ago."
     "Her claims were, well, interesting, if that's the sort of
thing you're  interested  in.  The  music  was  certainly  more
consistent  with  what  might  be  produced  by  each  of those
gentlemen quickly and before breakfast, than it was  with  what
you   would  expect  from  a  musically  unskilled  middle-aged
housewife."
     Kate could not let this pomposity pass.
     "That's a rather  sexist  viewpoint,"  she  said,  "George
Eliot was a middle-aged housewife."
     "Yes,  yes," said Standish testily, "but she wasn't taking
musical dictation from the deceased  Wolfgang  Amadeus.  That's
the  point  I'm making. Please try and follow the logic of this
argument and do not introduce irrelevancies. If I  felt  for  a
moment that the example of George Eliot could shed any light on
our  present  problem,  you  could  rely  on me to introduce it
myself.
     "Where was I?"
     "I don't know."
     "Mabel. Doris? Was that her name? Let us call  her  Mabel.
The  point  is  that  the easiest way of dealing with the Doris
problem was simply to ignore it. Nothing very important  hinged
on  it  at alI. A few concerts. Second rate material. But here,
here we have something of an altogether diffenent nature."
     He said this last in hushed tones and turned to study a TV
monitor which stood among the  bank  of  computer  screens.  It
showed a close-up of Mrs May's hand scuttling across her pad of
paper.  Her  hand largely obscured what she had written, but it
appeared to be mathematics of some kind.
     "Mrs May is, or so she claims, taking dictation from  some
of  the  greatest physicists. From Einstein and from Heisenberg
and Planck. And it is very hard to dispute her claims,  because
the  information  being produced here, by automatic writing, by
this...untutored lady, is in fact physics of  a  very  profound
order.
     "From  the  late  Einstein  we  are  getting more and more
refinements to our picture of how time  and  space  work  at  a
macroscopic  level,  and from the late Heisenberg and Planck we
are increasing our understanding of the fundamental  structures
of  matter at a quantum level. And there is absolutely no doubt
that this information is edging us closer  and  closer  towards
the elusive goal of a Grand Unified Field Theory of Everything.
     "Now this produces a very interesting, not to say somewhat
embarrassing  situation  for  scientists  because  the means by
which the information is reaching us  seems  to  be  completely
contrary to the meaning of the information."
     "It's like Uncle Henry," said Kate, suddenly.
     Standish looked at her blankly.
     "Uncle Henry thinks he's a chicken," Kate explained.
     Standish looked at her blankly again.
     "You  must  have  heard  it,"  said Kate. "`We're terribly
worried about Uncle Henry. He thinks he's  a  chicken.'  `Well,
why  don't you send him to the doctor?' `Well, we would only we
need the eggs.'".
     Standish stared at her as if a small but perfectly  formed
elderberry tree had suddenly sprung unbidden from the bridge of
her nose.
     "Say that again," he said in a small, shocked voice.
     "What, all of it?"
     "All of it."
     Kate  stuck  her  fist on her hip and said it again, doing
the voices with a bit more dash and Southern accents this time.
     "'That's brilliant," Standish breathed when she had done.
     "You must have  heard  it  before,"  she  said,  a  little
surprised by this response. "It's an old joke."
     "No," he said, "I have not. We need the eggs. We need the
     eggs.  We  need the eggs. `We can't send him
to the doctor because we need the eggs.'  An  astounding
insight  into  the central paradoxes of the human condition and
of  our  indefatigable  facility  for   constructing   adaptive
rationales to account for it. Good God."
     Kate shrugged.
     "And   you   say   this  is  a  joke?"  demanded  Standish
incredulously.
     "Yes. It's very old, really."
     "And are they all like that? I never realised."
     "Well - "
     "I'm astounded,"  said  Standish,  "utterly  astounded.  I
thought  that  jokes  were  things  that  fat  people  said  on
television and I never listened to them.  I  feel  that  people
have been keeping something from me. Nurse!"
     The  nurse  who  had been keeping watch on Mts May through
the window jumped at being barked at unexpectedly like this.
     "Er, yes, Mr Standish?" she  said.  He  clearly  made  her
nervous.
     "Why have you never told me any jokes?"
     The nurse stared at him, and quivered at the impossibility
of even knowing how to think about answering such a question.
     "Er, well... "
     "Make  a note of it will you? In future I will require you
and all the other staff in this hospital to  tell  me  all  the
jokes you have at your disposal, is that understood?"
     "Er, yes, Mr Standish - "
     Standish looked at her with doubt and suspicion.
     "You do know some jokes do you, nurse?" he challenged her.
     "Er, yes, Mr Standish, I think, yes I do."
     "Tell me one."
     "What, er, now, Mr Standish?"
     "This instant."
     "Er,  well, um - there's one which is that a patient wakes
up after having, well, that is, he's been to, er,  to  surgery,
and  he wakes up and, it's not very good, but anyway, he's been
to surgery and he says to the doctor when he wakes up, 'Doctor,
doctor, what's wrong with me, I can't feel my  legs.'  And  the
doctor  says,  `Yes, I'm afraid we've had to amputate both your
arms.' And that's it really. Er, that's why  he  couldn't  feel
his legs, you see."
     Mr Standish looked at her levelly for a moment or two.
     "You're on report, nurse," he said.
     "Yes, Mr Standish."
     He turned to Kate.
     "Isn't  there  one about a chicken crossing a road or some
such thing?"
     "Er, yes," said Kate, doubtfully. She felt she was  caught
in a bit of a situation here.
     "And how does that go?"
     "Well," said Kate, "it goes `Why did the chicken cross the
road?'"
     "Yes? And?"
     "And the answer is `To get to the other side'."
     "I  see."  Standish  considered  things for a moment. "And
what does this chicken do when it arrives at the other side  of
the road?."
     "History does not relate," replied Kate promptly. "I think
that falls  outside  the  scope  of the joke, which really only
concerns itself with the journey of the chicken across the road
and the chicken's reasons for making it. It's a little  like  a
Japanese haiku in that respect."
     Kate  suddenly found she was enjoying herself. She managed
a surreptitious wink at the nurse, who had no idea what to make
of anything at all.
     "I see," said Standish once again, and  frowned.  "And  do
these,  er,  jokes  require  the preparatory use of any form of
artificial stimulant?"
     "Depends on the joke, depends on who it's being told to."
     "Hmm, well I must say, you've certainly opened up  a  rich
furrow for me, Miss, er. It seems to me that the whole field of
humour could benefit from close and immediate scrutiny. Clearly
we  need  to  sort out the jokes which have any kind of genuine
psychological value from  those  which  merely  encourage  drug
abuse and should be stopped. Good."
     He  turned  to address the white-coated nesearcher who was
studying the TV monitor on which  Mrs  May's  scribblings  were
being tracked.
     "Anything fresh of value from Mr Einstein?" he asked.
     The  researrher  did not move his eyes from the screen. He
replied, "It says `How would you like  your  eggs?  Poached  or
boiled?'"
     Again, Standish paused.
     "Interesting,"  he  said,  "very  interesting. Continue to
make at careful note of everything she writes. Come." This last
he said to Kate, and made his way out of the room.
     "Very strange people, physicists," he said as soon as they
were outside again. "In  my  experience  the  ones  who  aren't
actually  dead  are  in  some way very ill. Well, the afternoon
presses on and I'm sure that you are keen to get away and write
your article,  Miss,  er.  I  certainly  have  things  urgently
awaiting my attention and patients awaiting my care. So, if you
have no more questions - "
     "There  is  just one thing, Mr Standish." Kate decided, to
hell with it. "We need to emphasise that it's up to the minute.
Perhaps if you could spare a couple more minutes  we  could  go
and see whoever is your most recent admission."
     "I think that would be a little tricky. Our last admission
was about a month ago and she died of pneumonia two weeks after
admission."
     "Oh, ah. Well, perhaps that isn't so thrilling. So. No new
admissions  in the last couple of days. No admissions of anyone
particularly large or blond or Nordic, with a  fur  coat  or  a
sledgehammer  perhaps.  I  mean,  just  for  instance."  An
inspiration struck her. "A re-admission perhaps?"
     Standish regarded her with deepening suspicion.
     "Miss, er - "
     "Schechter."
     "Miss Schechter, I begin to get the impression  that  your
interests in the hospital are not - "
     He  was interrupted at that moment by the swing-doors just
behind them in the corridor being pushed open. He looked up  to
see who it was, and as he did so his manner changed.
     He  motioned  Kate  sharply  to  stand aside while a large
trolley bed was wheeled through the  doors  by  an  orderly.  A
sister  and  another nurse followed in attendance, and gave the
impression that they were the entourage in a procession  rather
than merely nurses about their normal business.
     The occupant of the trolley was a delicately frail old man
with skin like finely veined parchment.
     The  rear section of the trolley was inclined upwards at a
very slight angle so that the old man could survey the world as
it passed him, and  he  surveyed  it  with  a  kind  of  quiet,
benevolent  horror.  His  mouth  hung  gently open and his head
lolled very slightly, so  that  every  slightest  bump  in  the
progress  of the trolley caused it to roll a little to one side
or the other. Yet in spite of his fragile listlessness, the air
he emanated was that  of  very  quietly,  very  gently,  owning
everything.
     It  was  the  one  eye  which conveyed this. Each thing it
rested on, whether it was the view through  a  window,  or  the
nurse  who  was holding back the door so that the trolley could
move through it without impediment, or whether  it  was  on  Mr
Standish,  who suddenly was all obsequious charm and obeisance,
all seemed instantly gathered up into the domain ruled by  that
eye.
     Kate  wondered  for a moment how it was that eyes conveyed
such an immense amount of information about their owners.  They
were,  after  all, merely spheres of white gristle. They hardly
changed as they got older, apart from getting a bit redder  and
a  bit  runnier. The iris opened and closed a bit, but that was
all. Where  did  all  this  flood  of  information  come  from?
Particularly  in  the  case  of a man with only one of them and
only a sealed up flap of skin in place of the other.
     She was interrupted in this line of thought  by  the  fact
that at that instant the eye in question moved on from Standish
and  settled  on her. The grip it exerted was so startling that
she almost yelped.
     With the frailest of faint motions the old  man  signalled
to  the  orderly  who  was  pushing  the  trolley to pause. The
trolley drew to a halt and when the noise of its rolling wheels
was stilled there was, for a moment, no other noise to be heard
other than the distant hum of an elevator.
     Then the elevator stopped.
     Kate returned his look with a little smiling frown  as  if
to say, "Sorry, do I know you?" and then wondered to herself if
in  fact she did. There was some fleeting familiarity about his
face, but she couldn't quite catch it.  She  was  impressed  to
notice  that  though this was only a trolley bed he was in, the
bed linen that  his  hands  lay  on  was  real  linen,  freshly
laundered and ironed.
     Mr  Standish coughed slightly and said, "Miss, er, this is
one of our most valued and, er, cherished patients, Mr-"
     "Are you quite comfortable,  Mr  Odwin?"  interrupted  the
Sister  helpfully.  But there was no need. This was one patient
whose name Standish most certainly knew.
     Odin quieted her with the slightest of gestures.
     "Mr Odwin," said Standish, "this is Miss, er - "
     Kate was about to introduce herself once more when she was
suddenly taken completely by surprise.
     "I know exactly who she is," said  Odin  in  a  quiet  but
distinct voice, and there was in his eye for a moment the sense
of an aerosol looking meaningfully at a wasp.
     She tried to be very formal and English.
     "I'm  afraid,"  she  said  stiffly,  "that  you  have  the
advantage of me."
     "Yes," said Odin.
     He gestured to the  orderly,  and  together  they  resumed
their   leisurely  passage  down  the  corridor.  Glances  were
exchanged between Standish and the Sister, and  then  Kate  was
startled  to notice that there was someone else standing in the
corridor there with them.
     He had not, presumably, appeared there by  magic.  He  had
merely  stood  still when the trolley moved on, and his height,
or rather his lack of it, was such that he had simply  hitherto
been hidden behind it.
     Things had been much better when he had been hidden.
     There  are some people you like immediately, some whom you
think you might learn to like in the fullness of time, and some
that you simply want to push away from you with a sharp  stick.
It  was  instantly  apparent into which category, for Kate, the
person of Toe Rag fell.  He  grinned  and  stared  at  her,  or
rather,  appeared  to stare at some invisible fly darting round
her head.
     He ran up, and before she could prevent him, grabbed  hold
of her right hand in his and shook it wildly up and down.
     "I,  too,  have  the advantage of you, Miss Schechter," he
said, and gleefully skipped away up the corridor.

Chapter 12

     The large, serious-looking grey van  moved  smoothly  down
the  driveway,  emerged  through  the  stone  gates  and dipped
sedately as it turned off the gravel and on to the  asphalt  of
the  public  road. The road was a windy country lane lined with
the wintry silhouettes of leafless oaks  and  dead  elms.  Grey
clouds  were piled high as pillows in the sky. The van made its
stately progress away down the lane and soon was lost among its
further twists and turns.
     A few minutes later  the  yellow  Citro&#1082;n  made  its  less
stately  appearance  between  the  gates. It turned its splayed
wheels up on to the camber of the lane and set off  at  a  slow
but difficult rate in the same direction.
     Kate was rattled.
     The  last few minutes had been rather unpleasant. Standish
was clearly an oddly behaved man at  the  best  of  times,  but
after  their  encounter  with  the  patient named Odwin, he had
turned unequivocally hostile. It was the  frightening  hosulity
of one who was himself frightened - of what, Kate did not know.
     Who was she? he had demanded to know. How had she wheedled
a refenence  out  of  Alan  Franklin,  a  respected  man in the
profession? What was she after? What - and this  seemed  to  be
the  big  one - had she done to arouse the disapprobation of Mr
Odwin?
     She held the car grimly to the road as it  negotiated  the
bends  with  considerable  difficulty and the straight sections
with only slightly less. The car had landed her in court on one
occasion when one of its front  wheels  had  sailed  off  on  a
little expedition of its own and nearly caused an accident. The
police  witness in court had referred to her beloved Citro&#1082;n as
"the alleged car" and the name had subsequently stuck. She  was
particularly  fond  of the alleged car for many reasons. If one
of its doors, for instance, fell off she could put it  back  on
herself, which is more than you could say for a BMW.
     She  wondered  if  she looked as pale and wan as she felt,
but the rear-view mirror was rattling around under the seat  so
she was spared the knowledge.
     Standish  himself  had become quite white and shaky at the
very idea of anybody crossing Mr Odwin and had dismissed out of
hand Kate's attempts to deny that she knew anything of  him  at
all.  If  that  were the case, he had demanded of her, why then
had Mr Odwin made it perfectly clear that he knew her? Was  she
accusing  Mr  Odwin of being a liar? If she was then she should
have a care for herself.
     Kate did  not  know.  The  encounter  with  Mr  Odwin  was
completely  inexplicable  to  her.  But  she  could not deny to
herself that the man packed some kind of punch. When he  looked
at you you stayed looked at. But beneath the disturbing quality
of   his  steady  gaze  had  lain  some  even  more  disturbing
undercurrents. They were  more  disturbing  because  they  were
undercurrents of weakness and fear.
     And as for the other creature. . .
     Clearly  he  was  the cause of the stories that had arisen
recently in the more extremely abhorrent sectors of the tabloid
press about there being "Something Nasty in the Woodshead". The
stories  had,  of  course,   been   offensive   and   callously
insensitive  and  had  largely been ignored by everybody in the
country except for those very few millions  who  were  keen  on
offensive and callously insensitive things.
     The  stories  had claimed that people in the nrea had been
"terrorised"  by  some   repulsively   deformed   "goblin-like"
creature who regularly broke out of the Woodshead and committed
an impressively wide range of unspeakable acts.
     Like  most  people,  Kate  had assumed, insofar as she had
thought about it at all, that what had  actually  happened  was
that  some  poor  bewildered mental patient had wandered out of
the grounds and given a couple of passing old ladies a bit of a
turn, and that the slavering hacks  of  Wapping  had  done  the
rest. Now she was a little more shaky and a little less sure.
     He - it - had known her name.
     What could she make of that?
     What   she  made  of  it  was  a  wrong  turning.  In  her
preoccupation she missed the turning that would take her on  to
the  main road back to London, and then had to work out what to
do about it. She could simply do  a  three-point  turn  and  go
back,  but  it  was  a long time since she had last put the car
into reverse gear, and she was frankly a bit nervous about  how
it would take to it.
     She  tried  taking the next two right turns to see if that
would set her straight, but she had  no  great  hopes  of  this
actually  working,  and was right not to have. She drove on for
two or three miles, knowing that she was on the wrong rmad  but
at  least,  judging from the position of the lighter grey smear
in the grey clouds, going in the right direction.
     After a while she settled down to this new route. A couple
of signposts she passed made it  clear  to  her  that  she  was
merely  taking  the  B  route back to London now, which she was
perfectly happy to do. If she had thought about it in  advance,
she would probably have chosen to do so anyway in preference to
the busy trunk road.
     The trip had been a total failure, and she would have done
far better  simply  to  have  stayed  soaking  in  the bath all
afternoon. The whole experience had been thoroughly disturbing,
verging on the frightening, and she had drawn a complete  blank
as  far as her actual objective was concemed. It was bad enough
having an objective that she  could  hardly  bring  herself  to
admit  to,  without  having  it completely fall apart on her as
well. A sense of stale futility  gradually  closed  in  on  her
along with the general greyness of the sky.
     She  wondered if she was going very slightly mad. Her life
seemed to have drifted completely out of  her  control  in  the
last  few  days,  and  it  was  distressing to realise just how
fragile her grip was when it could so easily be shattered by  a
relatively minor thunderbolt or meteorite or whatever it was.
     The  word  "thunderbolt"  seemed  to  have  arrived in the
middle of that thought without warning and she didn't know what
to make of it, so she just let it lie there at  the  bottom  of
her  mind,  like the towel lying on her bathroom floor that she
hadn't been bothered to pick up.
     She longed for some sun to break through. The miles ground
along under her wheels, the clouds ground  her  down,  and  she
found  herself  increasingly  thinking of penguins. At last she
felt she could stand it no more and decided that a few minutes'
walk was what she needed to shake her out of her mood.
     She stopped the car at the  side  of  the  road,  and  the
elderly  Jaguar  which  had  been  following  her  for the last
seventeen miles ran straight into the back of her, which worked
just as well.

Chapter 13

     With a delicious shock of rage  Kate  leapt,  invigorated,
out  of her car and ran to harangue the driver of the other car
who was, in turn, leaping out of his in order to harangue her.
     "Why don't you look where you're  going?"  she  yelled  at
him.  He  was  a  rather  overweight  man  who had been driving
wearing a long leather coat and a rather ugly red hat,  despite
the  discomfort  this obviously involved. Kate warmed to him
for it.
     "Why don't I look where I'rn going?" he replied  heatedly.
"Don't you look in your near-view mirror?"
     "No," said Kate, putting her fists on her hips.
     "Oh," said her adversary. "Why not?"
     "Because it's under the seat."
     "I  see," he replied grimly. "Thank you for being so frank
with me. Do you have a lawyer?"
     "Yes I do, as a matter of fact," said Kate.  She  said  it
with vim and hauteur.
     "Is  he  any good?" said the man in the hat. "I'm going to
need one. Mine's popped into prison for a while."
     "Well, you certainly can't have mine."
     "Why not?"
     "Don't  be  absurd.  It  would  be  a  clear  conflict  of
interest."
     Her  adversary  folded his arms and leant back against the
bonnet  of  his  car.  He  took  his  time  to  survey   the
surroundings.  The  lane  was  growing  dim as the early winter
evening began to settle on the land. He then leant into his car
to turn on his hazard warning indicators. The rear amber lights
winked prettily on the scrubby grass of the roadside. The front
lights were buried in the rear of Kate's Citro&#1082;n and were in no
fit state to wink.
     He resumed his leaning posture and looked Kate up and down
appraisingly.
     "You are a driver," he said, "and I use the  word  in  the
loosest  possible  sense,  i.e.  meaning  merely  somebody  who
occupies the driving seat of what I will for the moment call  -
but  I use the term strictly without prejudice - a car while it
is proceeding along the road, of stupendous, I would  even  say
verging  on  the  superhuman,  lack  of  skill. Do you catch my
drift?"
     "No."
     "I mean you do not drive well. Do you know you've been all
over the road for the last seventeen miles?"
     "Seventeen miles!" exclaimed Kate. "Have you been
following me?"
     "Only  up  to  a point," said Dirk. "I've tried to stay on
this side of the road."
     "I see. Well, thank you in turn for being  so  frank  with
me.  This,  I need hardly tell you, is an outrage. You'd better
get yourself a damn good  lawyer,  because  mine's  going  to
stick red-hot skewers in him."
     "Perhaps I should get myself a kebab instead."
     "You  look as if you've had quite enough kebabs. May I ask
you why you were following me?"
     "You looked as if you knew where you were going. To  begin
with at least. For the first hundred yards or so.".
     "What the hell's it got to do with you where I was going?"
     "Navigational technique of mine."
     Kate narrowed her eyes.
     She  was about to demand a full and instant explanation of
this preposterous remark  when  a  passing  white  Ford  Sierra
slowed down beside them.
     The  driver  wound  down  the window and leant out. "Had a
crash then?" he shouted at them.
     "Yes."
     "Ha!" he said and drove on.
     A second or two later a Peugeot stopped by them.
     "Who was  that  just  now?"  the  driver  asked  them,  in
reference to the previous driver who had just stopped.
     "I don't know," said Dirk.
     "Oh,"  said the driver. "You look as if you've bad a crash
of some sort."
     "Yes," said Dirk.
     "Thought so," said the driver and drove on.
     "You don't get the same quality of passers-by these  days,
do you?" said Dirk to Kate.
     "You  get hit by some real dogs, too," said Kate. "I still
want to know why you were following me. You realise  that  it's
hard for me not to see you in the role of an extremely sinister
sort of a person."
     "That's  easily  explained,"  said Dirk. "Usually I am. On
this occasion, however, I simply got lost. I was forced to take
evasive action by a large grey oncoming van which took  a
proprietorial view of the road. I only avoided it by nipping down
a side lane in which I  was  then  unable  to  reverse.  A  few
turnings  later nnd I was thoroughly lost. There is a school of
thought which says that you  should  consult  a  map  on  these
occasions,  but  to  such people I merely say, `Ha! What if you
have no map to consult? What if you have a map but it's of  the
Dordogne?'  My  own  strategy  is to find a car, or the nearest
equivalent, which looks as if it knows  where  it's  going  and
follow  it.  I  rarely  end up where I was intending to go, but
often I end up somewhere that I needed to be. So  what  do  you
say to that?"
     "Piffle."
     "A robust response. I salute you."
     "l  was going to say that I do the same thing myself
sometimes, but I've decided not to admit that yet."
     "Very wise," said Dirk. "You don't want to give  away  too
much at this point. Play it enigmatic is my advice."
     "I  don't  want  your advice. Where were you trying to get
before suddenly deciding that driving seventeen  miles  in  the
opposite direction would help you get there?"
     "A place called the Woodshead."
     "Ah, the mental hospital."
     "You know it?"
     "I've  been  driving  away  from it for the last seventeen
miles and I wish it was further. Which ward will you be  in?  I
need to know where to send the repair bill."
     "They  don't  have  wards,"  said  Dirk. "And I think they
would be distressed to hear you call it a mental hospital."
     "Anything that distresses 'em is fine by me."
     Dirk looked about him.
     "A fine evening," he said.
     "No it isn't."
     "I see," said Dirk. "You have, if I may say so, the air of
one to whom her day has not been a source of joy  or  spiritual
enrichment."
     "Too damn right, it hasn't," said Kate. "I've had the sort
of day  that  would  make  St  Francis  of  Assisi kick babies.
Particularly if you include Tuesday in with today, which is the
last time I was actually conscious. And now look. My  beautiful
car. The only thing I can say in favour of the whole shebang is
that at least I'm not in Oslo."
     "I can see how that might cheer you."
     "I  didn't  say  it  cheered  me.  It  just about stops me
killing myself. I  might  as  well  save  myself  the  bother
anyway, with people like you so keen to do it for me."
     "You  were  my  able assistant, Miss Schechter."  "Stop
doing that!"
  "Stop doing what?"
     "My name! Suddenly every stranger I meet  knows  my  name.
Would you guys please just quit knowing my name for one second?
How  can  a  girl be enigmatic under these conditions? The only
person I met who didn't seem to know my name was the only one I
actually introduced myself to. All right," she  said,  pointing
an  accusing  finger at Dirk, "you're not supernatural, so just
tell me how you knew my name. I'm not letting go  of  your  tie
till you tell me."
     "You haven't got hold of - "
     "I have now, buster."
     "Unhand me!"
     "Why  were  you  following me?" insisted Kate. "How do you
know my name?"
     "I was following you for exactly the  reasons  stated.  As
for your name, my dear lady, you practically told me yourself."
     "I did not."
     "I assure you, you did."
     "I'm still holding your tie."
     "If  you are meant to be in Oslo but have been unconscious
since Tuesday, then presumably you were at the  incredible
exploding check-in counter at Heathrow   Terminal   Two. It was
widely reported in the press. I expect you  missed  it  through
being  unconscious.  I myself missed it through rampant apathy,
but the events of today have rather forced it on my attention."
     Kate grudgingly let go of his tie, but  continued  to  eye
him with suspicion.
     "Oh yeah?" she said. "What events?"
     "Disturbing ones," said Dirk, brushing himself down. "Even
if what  you  had  told  me  yourself  had  not  been eoough to
identify you, then the fact of your having also been  today  to
visit the Woodshead clinched it for me. I gather from your mood
of  belligerent  despondency  that the man you were seeking was
not thene."
     "What?"
     "Please, have it," said Dirk, rapidly pulling off his  tie
and  handing it to her. "By chance I ran into a nurse from your
hospital earlier today. My first encounter with her  was  one
which,   for  various  reasons,  I  was  anxious  to  terminate
abruptly. It was only while I was standing on  the  pavement  a
minute  or  two later, fending off the local wildlife, that one
of the words I had heard her say struck me, I may say, somewhat
like  a  thunderbolt.  The  idea  was   fantastically,   wildly
improbable.  But  like  most fantastically, wildly improbable
ideas it was at least as worthy  of  consideration  as  a  more
mundane  one  to  which  the facts had been strenuously bent to
fit.
     "I returned to question her  further,  and  she  confirmed
that  a somewhat unusual patient had, in the early hours of the
morning, been transferred from the hospital, apparently to  the
Woodshead.
     "She  also  confided  to  me that another patient had been
almost indecently curious to find out what had become  of  him.
That  patient  was  a Miss Kate Schechter, and I think you will
agree, Miss Schechter, that my methods of navigation have their
advantages. I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I
think I have ended up where I needed to be."

Chapter 14

     After about half an hour a hefty man from the local garage
arrived with a pick-up truck, a  tow-rope  and  a  son.  Having
looked  at  the situation he sent his son and the pick-up truck
away to deal with another job, attached the tow-rope to  Kate's
now defunct car and pulled it away to the garage himself.
     Kate  was  a  little quiet about this for a minute or two,
and then said, "He wouldn't have done that if I hadn't been  an
American."
     He  had  recommended  to  them  a small local pub where he
would come and look for them when he had made his diagnosis  on
the  Citro&#1082;n. Since Dirk's Jaguar had only lost its front right
indicator light, and Dirk insisted that he hardly  ever  turned
right  anyway,  they  drove  the short distance there. As Kate,
with some reluctance, climbed into Dirk's  car  she  found  the
Howard  Bell  book which Dirk had purloined from Sally Mills in
the caf&#1080;, and pounced on it. A few minutes later, walking  into
the pub, she was still trying to work out if it was one she had
nead or not.
     The  pub combined all the traditional English quatities of
horse brasses, Formica and  surliness.  The  sound  of  Michael
Jackson   in   the   other   bar   mingled  with  the  mournful
intermittence of the glass-cleaning  machine  in  this  one  to
create  an  aural  ambience which perfectly matched the elderly
paintwork in its dinginess.
     Dirk bought himself and Kate a drink each, and then joined
her at the small comer table she had found away from  the  fat,
T-shirted hostility of the bar.
     "I have read it," she announced, having thumbed her way by
now through  most  of  Run  Like the Devil. "At least, I
started it and read the first couple of chapters. A  couple  of
months  ago,  in fact. I don't know why I still read his books.
It's pcrfectly clear that his editor doesn't." She looked up at
Dirk. "I wouldn't have thought it was your sort of thing.  From
what little I know of you."
     "It isn't," said Dirk. "I, er, picked it up by mistake."
     "'That's what everyone says," replied Kate. "He used to be
quite  good,"  she  added  "if  you liked that sort of thin. My
brother's in publishing in New York, and he says Howard  Bell's
gone  very strange nowadays. I get the feeling that they're all
a little afraid of him and he quite likes  that.  Certainly  no
one  seems  to have the guts to tell him he should cut chapters
ten to twenty-seven inclusive. And  all  the  stuff  about  the
goat.  The  theory is that the reason he sells so many millions
of copies is that nobody ever does read them. If  everyone  who
bought  them  actually read them they'd never bother to buy the
next one and his career would be over."
     She pushed it away from her.
     "Anyway," she said, "you've very cleverly told  me  why  I
went  to  the Woodshead; you haven't told me why you were going
there yourself."
     Dirk shrugged. "To see what it was like,"  he  said,
non-commitally.
     "Oh  yes?  Well,  I'll  save  you the bother. The place is
quite horrible."
     "Describe it. In fact start with the airport."
     Kate took a hefty swig at  her  Bloody  Mary  and  brooded
silently  for  a  moment  while the vodka marched around inside
her.
     "You want to hear about the airport as well?" she said  at
last.
     "Yes."
     Kate drained the rest of her drink.
     "I'll  need  another  one,  then," she said and pushed the
empty glass across at him.
     Dirk braved the bug-eyedness of the batman and returned  a
minute or two later with a refill for Kate.
     "OK," said Kate. "I'll start with the cat."
     "What cat?"
     "The  cat  I needed to ask the next-door neighbour to look
after for me."
     "Which next-door neighbour?"
     "The one that died."
     "I see," said Dirk. "Tell you what, why don't I just  shut
up and let you tell me?"
     "Yes," said Kate, "that would be good."
     Kate  recounted  the  events  of  the last few days, or at
least, those she was conscious for, and then moved  on  to  her
impressions of the Woodshead.
     Despite  the  distaste  with  which  she  described it, it
sounded to Dirt like exactly the sort of place he would love to
retire to, if possible tomorrow. It combined  a  dedication  to
the  inexplicable,  which was his own persistent vice (he could
only think of it as such, and sometimes would rail  against  it
with  the  fury  of an addict), with a pampered self-indulgence
which was a vice to which he would love to be able to aspire if
he could ever but afford it.
     At last Kate related  her  disturbing  encounter  with  Mr
Odwin  and his repellent minion, and it was as a result of this
that Dirk remained sunk in a  frowning  silence  for  a  minute
afterwards.  A  large  part of this minute was in fact taken up
with an internal struggle about whether or not he was going  to
cave in and have a cigarette. He had recendy foresworn them and
the  struggle was a regular one and he lost it regularly, often
without noticing.
     He decided, with triumph, that he would not have one,  and
then  took  one  out  anyway.  Fishing out his lighter from the
capacious pocket of his coat  involved  first  taking  out  the
envelope  he  had  removed from Geoffrey Aristey's bathroom. He
put it on the table next to the book and lit his cigarette.
     "The check-in girl at the airport..." he said at last.
     "She drove me mad," said Kate, instantly. "She  just  went
through  the  motions  of doing her job like some kind of blank
machine. Wouldn't listen, wouldn't think. I  don't  know  where
they find people like that."
     "She  used  to be my secretary, in fact," said Dirk. "They
don't seem to know where to find her now, either."
     "Oh. I'm sorry," said Kate immediately, and then reflected
for a moment.
     "I expect you're going to say that she  wasn't  like  that
really  "  she  continued. "Well, that's possible. I expect she
was just shielding herself from the frustrations of her job. It
must drive you insensible working at  an  airport.  I  think  I
would  have  sympathised  if I hadn't been so goddamn frustated
myself. I'm sorry, I didn't know. So that's what you're  trying
to find out about."
     Dirk  gave  a  non-committal  type  of nod. "Amongst other
things," he said. Then he added, "I'm a private detective."
     "Oh?" said Kate in surprise, and then looked puzzled.
     "Does that bother you?"
     "It's just that I have  a  friend  who  plays  the  double
bass."
     "I see," said Dirk.
     "Whenever  people meet him and he's struggling arnund with
it, they all say the same thing, and it drives him crazy.  They
all say, `I bet you wished you played the piccolo.' Nobody ever
works  out  that  that's  what  everybody else says. I was just
trying to work out if there was something that everybody  would
always say to a private detective, so that I could avoid saying
it."
     "No.  What happens is that everybody looks very shifty for
a moment, and you got that very well."
     "I see." Kate looked disappointed. "Well, do you have  any
clues  - that is to say, any idea about what's happened to your
secretary?"
     "No," said Dirk, "no idea. Just a vague image that I don't
know what  to  make  of."  He  toyed  thoughtfully   with   his
cigarette,  and  then  let his gaze wander over the table again
and on to the book.
     He picked it up and looked it over, wondering what impulse
had made him pick it up in the first place.
     "I don't really know anything about Howard Bell," he said.
     Kate was surprised at the  way  he  suddenly  changed  the
subject, but also a little relieved.
     "I  only  know,"  said Dirk, "that he sells a lot of books
and that they all look pretty much like  this.  What  should  I
know?"
     "Well, there are some very strange stories about him."
     "Like what?"
     "Like  what  he  gets  up  to  in  hotel suites all across
America. No one knows the details, of course, they just get the
bills and pay them because they don't like to  ask.  They  feel
they're  on safer ground if they don't know. Particularly about
the chickens."
     "Chickens?" said Dirk. "What chickens?"
     "Well apparently,"  said  Kate,  lowering  her  voice  and
leaning  forward  a  little,  "he's always having live chickens
delivered to his hotel room."
     Dirk frowned.
     "What on earth for?" he said.
     "Nobody knows. Nobody ever knows  what  happens  to  them.
Nobody  ever  sees  them  again.  Not,"  she said, leaning even
further forward, and  dropping  her  voice  still  further,  "a
single feather."
     Dirk  wondered  if  he  was  being hopelessly innocent and
na&#1086;ve.
     "So what do people think he's doing with them?" he asked.
     "Nobody," Kate said, "has the faintest  idea.  They  don't
even  want  to  have  the faintest idea. They just don't
know."
     She shrugged and picked the book up again herself.
     "The other thing David - that's my brother  -  says  about
him is that he has the absolute perfect bestseller's name."
     "Really?" said Dirk. "In what way?"
     "David  says  it's the first thing any publisher looks for
in a new author. Not, `Is his stuff  any  good?'  or,  `Is  his
stuff  any  good  once you get rid of all the adjectives?' but,
`Is his last name nice and short and his first name just a  bit
longer?'  You  see?  The `Bell' is done in huge silver letters,
and the  `Howard'  fits  neatly  across  the  top  in  slightly
narrower  ones. Instant trade mark. It's publishing magic. Once
you've got a name like that then whether you can actually write
or not is a minor matter. Which in Howard Bell's case is now  a
significant  bonus.  But it's a very ordinary name if you write
it down in the normal way, like it is here you see."
     "What?" said Dirk.
     "Here on this envelope of yours."
     "Where? Let me see."
     "That's his name there, isn't it? Crossed out."
     "Good heavens, you're right," said Dirk,  peering  at  the
envelope.  "I  suppose  I didn't recognise it without its trade
mark shape."
     "Is this something to do  with  him,  then?"  asked  Kate,
picking it up and looking it over.
     "I  don't  know  what  it  is,  exactly," said Dirk. "It's
something to do with a contract, and it may be something to  do
with a record."
     "I can see it might be to do with a record."
     "How can you see that?" asked Dirk, sharply.
     "Well, this name here is Dennis Hutch, isn't it? See?"
     "Oh  yes. Yes, I do," said Dirk, examining it for himself.
"Er, should I know that name?"
     "Well," said Kate slowly, "it depends if you're  alive  or
not, I suppose. He's the head of the Aries Rising Record Group.
Less  famous  than the Pope, I grant you, but - you know of the
Pope I take it?"
     "Yes, yes," said Dirk impatiently, "white-haired chap."
     "That's him. He seems to be about the only person of  note
this  envelope  hasn't  been  addressed to at some time. Here's
Stan Dubcek, the head of Dubcek, Danton, Heidegger, Draycott. I
know they handle the ARRGH! account."
     "The...?"
     "ARRGH! Aries Rising Record Group Holdings.  Getting  that
account made the agency's fortunes."
     She looked at Dirk.
     "You  have  the air," she stated, "of one who knows little
of the record business or the advertising business."
     "I have that honour," said Dirk, graciously inclining  his
head.
     "So what are you doing with this?"
     "When  I manage to get it open, I'll know," said Dirk. "Do
you have a knife on you?"
     Kate shook her head.
     "Who's Geoffrey Anstey, then?" she asked. "He's  the  only
name not crossed out. Friend of yours?"
     Dirk paled a little and didn't immediately answer. Then he
said, "This strange person you mentioned, this `Something Nasty
in the Woodshead' creature. Tell me again what he said to you."
     "He  said,  `I,  too,  have  the  advantage  of  you, Miss
Schechter.'" Kate tried to shrug.
     Dirk weighed his thoughts uncertainly for a moment.
     "I think it is just possible," he said at last, "that  you
may be in some kind of danger."
     "You  mean  it's  possible that passing lunatics may crash
into me in the road? That kind of danger?"
     "Maybe even worse."
     "Oh yeah?"
     "Yes."
     "And what makes you think that?"
     "It's not entirely clear to me yet," replied Dirk  with  a
frown.  "Most of the ideas I have at the moment have to do with
things that are completely  impossible,  so  I  am  wary  about
sharing them. They are, however, the only thoughts I have."
     "I'd  get some different ones, then," said Kate. "What was
the Sherlock Holmes principle? `Once you  have  discounted  the
impossible,  then whatever remains, however improbable, must be
the truth."'
     "I  reject  that  entirely,"  said  Dirk,  sharply.   "The
impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely
improbable  lacks.  How  often  have you been presented with an
apparently rational explanation of something which works in all
respects other than one, which is just that  it  is  hopelessly
improbable? Your instinct is to say, `Yes, but he or she simply
wouldn't do that.'"
     "Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
     "Ah  yes,"  said  Dirk,  slapping the table and making the
glasses jump, "your girl in the wheelchair - a perfect example.
The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market
prices apparently out of thin air  is  merely  impossible,  and
therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is
maintaining  an  immensely  complex  and  laborious  hoax of no
benefit to herself is hopelessly  improbable.  The  first  idea
merely  supposes  that  there is something we don't know about,
and God knows there are enough of those. The  second,  however,
runs  contrary  to  something fundamental and human which we do
know about. We should therefore be very suspicious  of  it  and
all its specious rationality."
     "But you won't tell me what you think."
     "No."
     "Why not?"
     "Because  it  sounds  ridiculous.  But  I think you are in
danger. I think you might be in horrible danger."
     "Great. So what do you suggest I do about it?"  said  Kate
taking  a  sip  of her second drink, which otherwise had stayed
almost untouched.
     "I suggest," said Dirk seriously, "that you come  back  to
London and spend the night in my house."
     Kate  hooted  with  laughter  and  then  had to fish out a
Kleenex to wipe tomato juice off herself.
     "I'm sorry, what is so extraordinary about that?" demanded
Dirk, rather taken aback.
     "It's just the most wonderfully perfunctory  pick-up  line
I've  ever heard." She smiled at him. "I'm afraid the answer is
a resounding `no'."
     He was,  she  thought,  interesting,  entertaining  in  an
eccentric kind of way, but also hideously unattractive to her.
     Dirk  felt  very  awkward.  "I  think  there has been some
appalling misunderstanding," he said. "Allow me to explain that
- "
     He was interrupted by the sudden arrival in their midst of
the mechanic from the garage with news of Kate's car.
     "Fixed it," he said. "In fact there were  nothing  to  fix
other than the bumper. Nothing new that is. The funny noise you
mentioned  were  just  the  engine. But it'll go all right. You
just have to rev her up, let in the ctutch, and then wait for a
little bit longer than you might normally expect."
     Kate thanked him a little stiffly for this advice and then
insisted on atlowing Dirk to pay the &#1105;25 he  was  charging  for
it.
     Outside, in the car park, Dirk repeated his urgent request
that Kate  should go with him, but she was adamant that all she
needed was a good night's sleep and that everything would  look
bright  and clear and easily capable of being coped with in the
morning.
     Dirk insisted that they should  at  least  exchange  phone
numbers.  Kate  agreed  to  this  on  condition that Dirk found
another route back to London and didn't sit on her tail.
     "Be very careful," Dirk called to her as her car  grumbled
out on to the road.
     "I  will,"  shouted  Kate,  "and  if  anything  impossible
happens, I promise you'll be the first to know."
     For a brief moment, the  yellow  undulations  of  the  car
gleamed  dully  in  the  light leaking from the pub windows and
stood out against the heavily hunched greyness of the night sky
which soon swallowed it up.
     Dirk tried to follow her, but his car wouldn't start.

Chapter 15

     The clouds sank more heavily over the land, clenching into
huge sullen towers, as Dirk, in a sudden excess of  alarm,  had
to  call  out the man from the garage once again. He was slower
to arrive with his truck this time and bad-tempered with  drink
when at last he did.
     He  emitted  a few intemperate barks of laughter at Dirk's
predicament, then fumbled  the  bonnet  of  his  car  open  and
subjected  him  to  all kinds of muttered talk about manifolds,
pumps, alternators and starlings and resolutely  would  not  be
drawn  on  whether  or  not  he was going to be able to get the
thing to go again that night.
     Dirk was unable to get a meaningful answer, or at least an
answer that meant anything to him, as to what was  causing  the
rumpus in the alternator, what ailed the fuel pump, in what way
the  operation of the starter motor was being disrupted and why
the timing was off.
     He did at last  understand  that  the  mechanic  was  also
claiming  that  a  family  of starlings had at some time in the
past made their nest  in  a  sensitive  part  of  the  engine's
workings   and   had  subsequently  perished  horribly,  taking
sensitive parts of the engine with them, and at this point Dirk
began to cast about himself desperatety for what to do.
     He noticed that the mechanic's pick-up truck was  standing
nearby  with  its engine still running, and elected to make off
with this instead. Being a slightly less  slow  and  cumbersome
runner  than  the  mechanic  he  was able to put this plan into
operation with a minimum of difficulty.
     He swung out into the lane, drove off into the  night  and
parked  three miles down the road. He left the van's lights on,
let down its tyres and hid himself behind a tree.  After  about
ten  minutes  his Jaguar came hurtling round the corner, passed
the van, hauled itself to an abrupt halt  and  reversed  wildly
back  towards  it.  The mechanic threw open the door, leapt out
and hurried over to reclaim his property, leaving Dirk with the
opportunity he needed to leap from behind the tree and  reclaim
his own.
     He  spun  his  wheels pointedly and drove off in a kind of
grim triumph, still  haunted,  nevertheless,  by  anxieties  to
which he was unable:to give a name or shape.
     Kate, in the meantime, had joined the dimly glowing yellow
stream  that  led  on  eventually through the westem suburbs of
Acton and Ealing and into the heart of London. She  crawled  up
over  the  Westway  flyover and soon afterwards turned north up
towards Primrose Hill and home.
     She always enjoyed driving up alongside the park, and  the
dark  night  shapes  of the trees soothed her and made her long
for the quietness of her bed.
     She found the nearest parking space she could to her front
door, which was about thirty yards distant. She climbed out  of
the  car  and  carefully  omitted  to  lock  it. She never left
anything of value in it, and she  found  that  it  was  to  her
advantage  if  people didn't have to break anything in order to
find that out. The car had  been  stolen  twice,  but  on  each
occasion it had been found abandoned twenty yards away.
     She  didn't  go  straight  home but set off instead in the
opposite direction to get some milk and  bin  liners  frmm  the
small  corner  shop  in  the  next  street. She agreed with the
gentle-faced Pakistani who ran it  that  she  did  indeed  look
tired,  and should have an early night, but on the way back she
made another  small  diversion  to  go  and  lean  against  the
railings of the park, gaze into its darkness for a few minutes,
and  breathe  in some of its cold, heavy night air. At last she
started to head back towards her flat. She turned into her  own
road  and  as she passed the first street lamp it flickered and
went out, leaving her in a small pool of darkness.
     That sort of thing always gives one a nasty turn.
     It is said that there  is  nothing  surprising  about  the
notion  of,  for  instance,  a  person  suddenly thinking about
someone  they  haven't  thought  about  for  years,  and   then
discovering the next day that the person has in fact just died.
There  are  always  lots  of people suddenly remembering people
they haven't thought about for ages, and always lots of  people
dying.  In  a  population  the size of, say, America the law of
averages means that this particular coincidence must happen  at
least ten times a day, but it is none the less spooky to anyone
who experiences it.
     By  the  same  token, there are light bulbs burning out in
street lamps all the time, and a fair few of them must  go  pop
just  as  someone  is  passing  beneath them. Even so, it still
gives the person concerned a nasty  tum,  especially  when  the
very  next  street  lamp  they pass under does exactly the same
thing.
     Kate stood rooted to the spot.
     If one coincidence  can  occur,  she  told  herself,  then
another  coincidence  can occur. And if one coincidence happens
to occur just after another coincidence, then that  is  just  a
coincidence. There was absolutely nothing to feel alarmed about
in  having  a  couple  of  street  lamps  go  pop. She was in a
perfectly normal friendly street with  houses  all  around  her
with  their  lights on. She looked up at the house next to her,
unfortunately just as the lights in its front window chanced to
go out. This was presumably because the occupants  happened  to
choose  that  moment to leave the room, but though it just went
to show what a truly extraordinary thing coincidence can be  it
did tittle to improve her state of mind.
     The  rest  of  the street was still bathed in a dim yellow
glow. It was only the few feet immediatety around her that were
suddenly dark. The next pool of light was just a few  footsteps
away  in  front  of her. She took a deep breath, pulled herself
together, and walked towards it, reaching its  very  centre  at
the exact instant that it, too, extinguished itself.
     The  occupants of the two houses she had passed on the way
also happened to choose that moment to leave their front rooms,
as did their neighbours on the opposite side of the street.
     Perhaps a  poputar  television  show  had  just  finished.
That's  what  it  was.  Evervone was getting up and turning off
their TV sets and  lights  simultaneously,  and  the  resulting
power  surge  was  blowing  some of the street lamps. Something
like that. The resulting power surge was also making her  blood
pound a little. She moved on, trying to be calm. As soon as she
got  home  she'd  have  a  look  in  the  paper to see what the
programme had been that had caused three street lamps to blow.
     Four.
     She stopped and stood  absolutely  stitl  under  the  dark
lamp.  More  houses were darkening. What she found particularty
alarming was that they darkened at the  very  moment  that  she
looked at them.
     Glance - pop.
     She tried it again.
     Glance - pop.
     Each one she looked at darkened instantly.
     Glance - pop.
     She  realised  with  a  sudden start of fear that she must
stop herself looking at the  ones  that  were  still  lit.  The
rationalisations  she  had  been  trying  to construct were now
running around inside her head screaming to be let out and  she
let  them go. She tried to lock her eyes to the ground for fear
of extinguishing the  whole  street,  but  couldn't  help  tiny
glances to see if it was working.
     Glance - pop.
     She  froze  her  gaze, down on to the narrow path forward.
Most of the road was dark now.
     There were three remaining street lamps  between  her  and
the  front  door which led to her own flat. Though she kept her
eyes averted, she thought she could detect on the periphery  of
her  vision  that  the  lights of the flat downstairs from hers
were lit.
     Neil lived there. She couldn't remember his last name, but
he was a part-time bass-player and antiques dealer who used  to
give  her  decorating advice she didn't want and also stole her
milk - so her relationship with him had always  remained  at  a
slightly  frosty  level.  Just  at  the moment, though, she was
praying that he was there to tell her what was wrong  with  her
sofa,  and  that his light would not go out as her eyes wavered
from the pavement in front of her,  with  its  three  remaining
pools of light spaced evenly along the way she had to tread.
     For  a  moment  she tried turning, and looked back the way
she had come. All was darkness, shading off into the  blackness
of  the  park  which  no  longer  calmed  but menaced her, with
hideously imagined thick, knotted roots and treacherous,  dark,
rotting litter.
     Again she turned, sweeping her eyes low.
     Three pools of light.
     The  street  lights  did  not  extinguish as she looked at
them, only as she passed.
     She squeezed her eyes closed and visualised exactly  where
the  lamp  of  the next street light was, above and in front of
her. She raised her head, and carefully opened her eyes  again,
staring  directly  into  the  orange glow radiating through the
thick glass.
     It shone steadily.
     With her eyes locked fast on it so that it burnt squiggles
on her retina, she moved  cautiously  forward,  step  by  step,
exerting  her  will on it to stay burning as she approached. It
continued to glow.
     She stepped forward again. It continued to glow. Again she
stepped, still it  glowed.  Now  she  was  almost  beneath  it,
craning her neck to keep it in focus.
     She  moved  forward once more, and saw the filament within
the glass flicker and quickly die away, leaving an  after-image
prancing madly in her eyes.
     She  dropped  her  eyes  now  and  tried  looking steadily
forward, but wild shapes were leaping everywhere and  she  felt
she  was  losing  control. The next lamp she took a lunging run
towards, and again, sudden darkness enveloped her arrival.  She
stopped  there  panting,  and  blinking, trying to calm herself
again and get her vision sorted out. Looking towards  the  last
street  lamp, she thought she saw a figure standing beneath it.
It was a large form, silhouetted with jumping  orange  shadows.
Huge horns stood upon the figure's head.
     She stated with mad intensity into the billowing darkness,
and suddenly screamed at it, "Who are you?"
     There  was  a pause, and then a deep answering voice said,
"Do you have anything that can get these bits of floorboard off
my back?"

Chapter 16

     There was another  pause,  of  a  different  and  slightly
disordered quality.
     It  was  a  long  one.  lt hung there nervously, wondering
which direction it was going to get broken from.  The  darkened
street took on a withdrawn, defensive aspect.
     "What?"  Kate  screamed  back  at  the figure, at last. "I
said... what?"
     The great figure stirred. Kate still  could  not  see  him
properly because her eyes were still dancing with blue shadows,
seared there by the orange light.
     "1 was," said the figure, "glued to the floor. My father -
"
     "Did  you...are  you..."  Kate quivered with
incoherent rage "are you responsible. . .for all  this?"
She  turned  and  swept  an  angry  hand  around  the street to
indicate the nightmare she had just traversed.
     "It is important that you know who I am."
     "Oh yeah?" said Kate. "Well let's get the name down  right
now  so  I  can take it straight to the police and get you done
for  breach  of  something  wilful  or   other.   Intimidation.
Interfering with - "
     "I  am Thor. I am the God of Thunder. The God of Rain. The
God of the High Towering Clouds. The God of Lightning. The  God
of  the  Flowing Currents. The God of the Particles. The God of
the Shaping and the Binding Forces. The God of  the  Wind.  The
God of the Growing Crops. The God of the Hammer Mjollnir."
     "Are  you?"  simmered  Kate.  "Well, I've no doubt that if
you'd picked a slack moment to mention all that, I  might  have
taken  an  interest, but right now it just makes me very angry.
Turn the damn lights on!"
     "I am - "
     "I said turn the lights on!"
     With something of a sheepish glow,  the  streetlights  all
came  back  on,  and  the  windows  of  the  houses all quietly
illuminated themselves once more. The lamp  above  Kate  popped
again almost immediately. She shot him a warning look.
     "It was an old light, and infirm," he said.
     She simply continued to glare at him.
     "See,"  he  said,  "I  have your address." He held out the
piece of paper she had given him at the  airport,  as  if  that
somehow explained everything and put the world to rights.
     "I - "
     "Back!"  he  shouted, throwing up his arms in front of his
face.
     "What?"
     With a huge rush of wind a swooping eagle dropped from out
of the night sky, with its talons outspread to  catch  at  him.
Thor  beat  and  thrashed  at  it  until the great bird flailed
backwards, turned, nearly  crashed  to  the  ground,  recovered
itself,  and  with great slow beats of its wings, heaved itself
back up through the air and perched on top of the street  lamp.
It  grasped  the lamp hard with its talons and steadied itself,
making the whole lamppost quiver very slightly in its grip.
     "Go!" shouted Thor at it.
     The eagle sat there and peered down at  him.  A  monstrous
creature  made more monstrous by the effect of the orange light
on which it perched, casting  huge,  flapping  shadows  on  the
nearby  houses,  it had strange circular markings on its wings.
These were markings that Kate wondered if she had seen  before,
only  in  a  nightmare,  but  then  again,  she was by no means
certain that she was not in a nightmare now.
     There was no doubt that she had  found  the  man  she  was
looking  for.  The  same  huge form, the same glacial eyes, the
same look of arrogant exasperation and slight muddle, only this
time his feet were plunged into huge hide  boots,  great  furs,
straps  and thongs hung from his shoulders, a huge steel horned
helmet stood on his head, and  his  exasperation  was  directed
this  time  not at an airline check-in girl but at a huge eagle
perched on a lamppost in the middle of Primrose Hill.
     "Go," he shouted at it again. "The  matter  is  beyond  my
power!  All  that I can do I have done! Your family is provided
for. You I can do nothing more for! I myself am  powerless  and
sick."
     Kate  was  suddenly  shocked  to see that there were great
gouges on the big man's left forearm where the  eagle  had  got
its talons into him and ripped them through his skin. Blood was
welling up out of them like bread out of a baking tin.
     "Go!"  he  shouted  again.  With  the  edge of one hand he
scraped the blood off his other arm and flung the  heavy  drops
at  the  eagle,  which  reared back, flapping, but retained its
hold. Suddenly the man leapt high into  the  air  and  grappled
himself  to  the  top of the lamppost, which now began to shake
dangerously under their combined weight. With  loud  cries  the
eagle  pecked viciously at him while he tried with great swings
of his free arm to sweep it from its perch.
     A door opened. It was the front door of Kate's house and a
man with grey-rimmed spectacles and  a  neat  moustache  looked
out. It was Neil, Kate's downstairs neighbour, in a mood.
     "Look,  I really think - " he started. However, it quickly
became clear that he simply  didn't  know  what  to  think  and
retreated back indoors, taking his mood, unsatisfied, with him.
     The  big  man  braced himself, and with a huge leap hurled
himself through the air and landed with  a  slight,  controlled
wobble  on  top of the next lamppost, which bent slightly under
his weight. He crouched, glaring at  the  eagle,  which  glared
back.
     "Go!" he shouted again, brandishing his arm at it.
     "Gaarh!" it screeched back at him.
     With  another  swing  of  his arm he pulled from under his
furs a great short-handled sledge-hammer and hefted  its  great
weight  meaningfully  from one hand to another. The head of the
hammer was a roughly cast piece of  iron  about  the  size  and
shape of a pint of beer in a big glass mug, and its shaft was a
stocky,   wrist-thick  piece  of  ancient  oak  with  leather
strapping bound about its handle.
     "Gaaaarrrh!" screeched the eagle again, but  regarded  the
sledgehammer  with keen-eyed suspicion. As Thor began slowly to
swing the hammer, the eagle shifted its weight tensely from one
leg to the other, in time to the rhythm of the swings.
     "Go!" said Thor again, more,  quietly,  but  with  greater
menace.  He rose to his full height on top of the lamppost, and
swung the hammer faster and faster in a great circle.  Suddenly
he  hurled it directly towards the eagle. In the same instant a
bolt of high voltage electricity erupted from the lamp on which
the eagle was sitting, causing  it  to  leap  with  loud  cries
wildly  into  the  air.  The hammer sailed harmlessly under the
lamp, swung up into the air and out over the  darkness  of  the
park,  while Thor, released of its weight, wobbled and tottered
on top of his lamppost, spun round and  regained  his  balance.
Flailing  madly at the air with its huge wings, the eagle, too,
regained control of itself, flew upwards, made one last  diving
attack  on Thor, which the god leapt backwards off the lamppost
to avoid, and then climbed up and away into the  night  sky  in
which  it  quickly became a small, dark speck, and then at last
was gone.
     The hammer came bounding back from out of the sky, scraped
flying sparks from the paving-stones with its head, turned over
twice in the air and then dropped its head back to  the  ground
next to Kate and nested its shaft gently against her leg.
     An  elderly  lady  who had been waiting patiently with her
dog in the shadows beneath  the  street  lamp,  which  was  now
defunct,  sensed, correctly, that all of the excitement was now
over and proceeded quietly past them. Thor waited politely till
they had passed and then approached Kate, who  stood  with  her
arms  folded  watching  him. After all the business of the last
two or three  minutes  he  seemed  suddenly  not  to  have  the
faintest  idea  what  to  say  and  for the moment merely gazed
thoughtfully into the middle distance.
     Kate formed the distinct impression that thinking was, for
him, a separate activity from  everything  else,  a  task  that
needed  its  own  space.  It  could not easily be combined with
other activities such as walking or talking or  buying  airline
tickets.
     "We'd  better  take a look at your arm," she said, and led
the way up the steps to her house. He followed, docile.
     As she opened the front door she found Neil  in  the  hall
leaning  his  back  against  the  wall  and  looking  with grim
pointedness at a Coca-Cola vending machine standing against the
opposite wall and taking up an inordinate amount  of  space  in
the hallway.
     "I  don't know what we're going to do about this, I really
don't," he said.
     "What's it doing there?" asked Kate.
     "Well, that's what I'm asking you, I'm afraid," said Neil.
"I don't know how you're going to get it up the  stairs.  Don't
see  how  it  can  be  done to be perfectly frank with you. And
let's face it, I don't think  you're  going  to  like  it  once
you've  got  it up there. I know it's very modern and American,
but think about it, you've  got  that  nice  French  cherrywood
table,  that sofa which will be very nice once you've taken off
that dreadful Collier Campbell covering like I keep  on  saying
you  should,  only  you won't listen, and I just don't see that
it's going to fit in, not in either sense.  And  I'm  not  even
sure  that  I  should allow it, I mean it's a very heavy object
and you know what I've said to you about  the  floors  in  this
house. I'd think again, I really would, you know."
     "Yes, Neil, how did it get here?"
     "Well,  your  friend  here delivered it just an hour or so
ago. I don't know where he's been working out, but I must say I
wouldn't mind paying his gym a visit.  I  said  I  thought  the
whole  thing  was  very doubtful but he would insist and in the
end I even had to give him a hand. But I must say that I  think
we  need  to have a very serious think about the whole topic. I
asked your friend if he liked Wagner but he didn't respond very
well. So, I don't know, what do you want to do about it?"
     Kate took a deep breath. She suggested to her  huge  guest
that  he  carry  on  upstairs  and  she would see him in just a
moment. Thor lumbered past, and was an absurd  figure  mounting
the stairs.
     Neil  watched  Kate's  eyes  very closely for a clue as to
what, exactly, was going on, but Kate was as blank as she  knew
how.
     "I'm  sorry,  Neil," she said, matter-of-factly. "The Coke
machine will go. It's all a  misunderstanding.  I'll  get  this
sorted out by tomorrow."
     "Yes,  that's  all  very well," said Neil, "but where does
all this leave me? I mean, you see my problem."
     "No, Neil, I don't."
     "Well,  I've  got  this...thing  out  here,   you've   got
that...person  upstairs,  and  the  whole thing is just a total
disruption."
     "Is there anything I can do to make anything any better?"
     "Well it's not as easy as that, is it? I mean, I think you
should just think about it a bit, that's all. I mean, all this.
You told me you were going away. I heard the bath running  this
afternoon. What was I to think? And after you had gone on about
the cat, and you know I won't work with cats."
     "I  know;  Neil.  That's why I asked Mrs Grey next door to
look after her."
     "Yes, and look what happened  to  her.  Died  of  a  heart
attack. Mr Grey's very upset, you know."
     "I don't think it had anything to do with me asking her if
she would look after my cat."
     "Well, all I can say is that he's very upset."
     "Yes, Neil. His wife's died."
     "Well,  I'm  not  saying anything. I'm just saying I think
you should think about it. And what on earth are we going to do
about all this?" he added, re-addressing his attention  to  the
Coca-Cola machine.
     "I've  said that I will make sure it's gone in the morning
Neil," said Kate. "I'm quite happy to  stand  here  and  scream
very loudly if you think it will help in any way, but - "
     "Listen,  love,  I'm  only  making  the  point. And I hope
you're not going to be making a lot of noise up  there  because
I've got to practise my music tonight, and you know that I need
quiet  to concentrate." He gave Kate a meaningful look over the
top of his glasses and disappeared into his flat.
     Kate stood and silently counted as much of one to  ten  as
she  could  currently remember and then headed staunchly up the
stairs in the wake of the God of Thunder, feeling that she  was
not  in  a mood for either weather or theology. The house began
to throb and shake to the sound of the  main  theme  of  The
Ride  of  the  Valkyries  being  played  on a Fender
Precision bass.

Chapter 17

     As Dirk edged his way along the Euston Road, caught in the
middle of a rush hour traffic jam that had started in the  late
nineteen  seventies  and  which,  at  a  quarter to ten on this
Thursday evening, still showed no signs of abating, he  thought
he caught sight of something he recognised.
     It  was  his  subconscious  which  told  him  this  - that
infuriating part of a person's brain which  never  responds  to
interrogation  merely  gives  little meaningful nudges and then
sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.
     "Well of course I've just  seen  something  I  recognise,"
Dirk muttered mentally to his subconscious. "I drive along this
benighted  thoroughfare  twenty  times  a  month.  I  expect  I
recognise every single matchstick lying in  the  gutter.  Can't
you  be  a little more specific?" His subconscious would not be
hectored though, and was dumb. It had nothing further  to  add.
The   city   was  probably  full  of  grey  vans  anyway.  Very
unremarkable.
     "Where?" muttered Dirk to himself fiercely, twisting round
in his seat this way and that. "Where did I see a grey van?"
     Nothing.
     He was thoroughly hemmed in by the traffic and  could  not
manoeuvre  in  any  direction, least of all forward. He erupted
from his car and started to jostle his  way  back  through  the
jammed  cars  bobbing  up  and  down  to  try and see where, if
anywhere, he might have caught a glimpse of a grey van.  If  he
had  seen one, it eluded him now. His subconscious sat and said
nothing.
     The traffic was still not moving, so he  tried  to  thread
his  way further back, but was obstructed by a large motorcycle
courier edging his way forward on a huge grimy  Kawasaki.  Dirk
engaged  in  a  brief altercation with the courier, but lost it
because the courier was unable  to  hear  Dirk's  side  of  the
altercation;  eventually  Dirk  retreated  through  the tide of
traffic which now was beginning slowly to  move  in  all  lanes
other  than  the one in which his car sat, driverless, immobile
and hooted at.
     He felt suddenly elated by the braying of the motor horns,
and as he swayed and bobbed his way back through the snarled up
columns of cars, he suddenly found that he reminded himself  of
the  crazies  he had seen on the streets of New York, who would
career out into the road to explain  to  the  oncoming  traffic
about  the  Day  of Judgement, imminent alien invasions and
incompetence and corruption in the Pentagon.  He  put his hands
above  his head and started to shout out, "The Gods are walking
the Earth! The Gods are walking the Earth!"
     This further inflamed  the  feelings  of  those  who  were
beeping  their  horns  at  his  stationary car, and quickly the
whole rose through a  crescendo  of  majestic  cacophony,  with
Dirk's voice ringing out above it.
     "'The Gods are walking the Earth! The Gods are walking the
Earth!"  he  hollered.  "The Gods are walking the Earth ! Thank
you!" he added, and ducked down into his car, put it into Drive
and pulled away, allowing the whole  jammed  mass  at  last  to
seethe easily forward.
     He  wondered why he was so sure. An "Act of God". Merety a
chance, careless phrase by which people were  able  to  dispose
conveniently  of  awkward phenomena that would admit of no more
rational explanation. But it was the chance carelessness of  it
which  particularly  appealed  to Dirk because words used
carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often
allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
     Ao  inexplicable disappearance. Oslo and a hammer: a tiny,
tiny coincidence which struck a tiny, tiny  note.  However,  it
was a note which sang in the midst of the daily hubbub of white
noise,  and other tiny notes were singing at the same pitch. An
Act of God, Oslo, and a hammer. A man with a hammer, trying  to
go  to  Norway, is prevented, loses his temper, and as a result
there is an "Act of God".
     If, thought Dirk, if a being were immortal he would  still
be alive today. That, quite simply, was what "immortal" meant.
     How would an immortal being have a passport?
     Quite simpty, how? Dirk tried to imagine what might happen
if - to  pick  a name quite at random - the God Thor, he of the
Norwegian ancestry and the great hammer, were to arrive at  the
passport  office  and try to explain who he was and how come he
had no birth certificate. There would be no shock,  no  horror,
no  loud exclamations of astonishment, just blank, bureaucratic
impossibility. It wouldn't  be  a  matter  of  whether  anybody
believed him or not, it would simply be a question of producing
a  valid  birth  certificate.  He  coutd  stand  there wreaking
miracles all day if he liked but at close of  business,  if  he
didn't have a valid birth certificate, he would simply be asked
to leave.
     And credit cards.
     If, to sustain for a moment the same arbitrary hypothesis,
the God  Thor  were  alive  and  for  some  reason  at large in
England, then he would probably  be  the  only  person  in  the
country who did not receive the constant barrage of invitations
to  apply  for  an  American Express card, crude threats by the
same post to take their American Express cards away,  and  gift
catalogues  full  of  sumptuously  unpleasant  things, lavishly
tooled in naff brown plastic.
     Dirk found the idea quite breathtaking.
     That is, if he were the only god at large  -  which,  once
you were to accept the first extravagant hypothesis, was hardly
likely to be the case.
     But imagine for a moment such a person attempting to leave
the country,  armed  with  no passport, no credit cards, merely
the power to throw thunderbolts and who  knew  what  else.  You
would  probably have to imagine a scene very similar to the one
that did in fact occur at Terminal Two, Heathrow.
     But why, if you were a Norse god, would you be needing  to
leave the country by means of a scheduled airline? Surely there
were  other means? Dirk rather thought that one of the perks of
being an immortal divine might be the ability to fly under your
own power. From what he remembered of his reading of the  Norse
legends  many  years  ago, the gods were continually flying all
over the place and there was never any mention of them  hanging
around in departure lounges eating crummy buns. Admittedly, the
world  was  not,  in  those  days,  bristling with airtraffic
controllers, radar, missile  warning  systems  and  such  like.
Still,  a quick hop across the North Sea shouldn't be that much
of a problem for a god, particularly if the weather was in your
favour, which, if you were the God of Thunder, you would pretty
much expect it to be, or want to know the  reason  why.  Should
it?
     Another tiny note sang in the back of Dirk's mind and then
was lost in the hubbub.
     He  wondered  for a moment what it was like to be a whale.
Physically, he thought, he was probably well placed to get some
good insights, though whales  were  better  adapted  for  their
lives of gliding about in the vast pelagic blueness than he was
for  his  of struggling up through the Pentonville Road traffic
in a weary old Jaguar - but what he was thinking of,  in  fact,
was  the whales' songs. In the past the whales had been able to
sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean  to
another  because  sound travels such huge distances underwater.
But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there
is no part of the ocean that is not  constantly  jangling  with
the  hubbub of ships' motors, through which it is now virtually
impossible for  the  whales  to  hear  each  other's  songs  or
messages.
     So  fucking  what, is pretty much the way that people tend
to view this problem,  and  understandably  so,  thought  Dirk.
After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right,
mammals, burping at each other?
     But  for  a  moment  Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and
sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information  noise
that  daily  rattled  the lives of men he thought he might have
heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
     As he turned north into Islington and began the long  haul
up past the pizza restaurants and estate agents, he felt almost
frantic at the idea of what their lives must now be like.

Chapter 18

     Thin  fingers  of  lightning  spread  out across the heavy
underside of the great clouds which hung from the  sky  like  a
sagging  stomach. A small crack of fretful thunder nagged at it
and dragged from it a few mean drops of greasy drizzle.
     Beneath the sky ranged a vast assortment of wild  turrets,
gnarled  spires  and  pinnacles which prodded at it, goaded and
inflamed it till it seemed it would burst and drown them  in  a
flood of festering horrors.
     High  in  the  flickering  darkness,  silent figures stood
guard behind long shields, dragons crouched gaping at the  foul
sky as Odin, father of the Gods of Asgard, approached the great
iron  portals  through  which led to his domain and on into the
vaulted halls of Valhalla: The air was full  of  the  noiseless
howls  of great winged dogs, welcoming their master to the seat
of his rule. Lightning searched among the towers and turrets.
     The  great,  ancient  and  immortal  God  of  Asgard   was
returning  to  the  current site of his domain in a manner that
would have surprised even him centuries ago in the years of the
prime of his life - for  even  the  immortal  gods  have  their
primes, when their powers are rampant and they both nourish and
hold  sway  over  the  world of men, the world whose needs give
them birth -  he  was  returning  in  a  large,  unmarked  grey
Mercedes van.
     The van drew to a halt in a secluded area.
     The cab door opened and there climbed down from it a dull,
slow-faced  man  in  an unmarked grey uniform. He was a man who
was charged with the work he did in life because he was not one
to ask questions - not  so  much  on  account  of  any  natural
quality of discretion as because he simply could never think of
any  questions to ask. Moving with a slow, rolling gait, like a
paddle being pulled through porridge, he made his  way  to  the
rear  of  the  van  and  opened  the  rear doors - an elaborate
procedune  involving  the  co-ordinated  manipulation  of  many
sliders and levers.
     At  length  the  doors  swung  open,  and if Kate had been
present she might for a moment have been jolted by the  thought
that  perhaps  the  van was carrying Albanian electricity after
all. A haze of light greeted  Hillow  -  the  man's.  name  was
Hillow  -  but  nothing about this struck him as odd. A haze of
light was simply what he expected to  see  whenever  he  opened
this  door.  The first time ever he had opened it he had simply
thought to himself, "Oh. A haze of light. Oh well," and more or
less Ieft  it  at  that,  on  the  strength  of  which  he  had
guaranteed  himself  regular employment for as long as he cared
to live.
     The haze of light subsided and coalesced into the shape of
an old, old man in a trolley bed attended  by  a  short  little
figure  whom  HiIlow  would  probably have thought was the most
evil-looking person he had ever seen if he had had a  mind  to
recall the other people he had seen in his life and run through
them  all one by one, making the comparison. That, however, was
harder than Hillow wished to work. His only concern at  present
was  to  assist  the small figure with the decanting of the old
man's bed on to ground leveI.
     This was fluently achieved. The legs and wheels of the bed
were a  miracle   of   smoothly   operating   stainless   steel
technology.  They  unlocked,  rolled, swivelled, in elaborately
interlocked movements which made the negotiating  of  steps  or
bumps all part of the same fluid, gliding motion.
     To  the  right  of  this  area  lay  a  large ante-chamber
panelled in finely carved wood with great marble torch  holders
standing  proudly  from  the  walls.  This in turn led into the
great vaulted hall  itself.  To  the  left,  however,  lay  the
entrance  to the majestic inner chambers where Odin would go to
prepare himself for the encounters of the night.
     He hated all this. Hounded from his bed,  he  muttered  to
himself, though in truth he was bringing his bed with him. Made
to  listen  once again to all kinds of self indulgent clap-trap
from his bone-headed thunderous son who would not accept, could
not accept, simply did not have the intelligence to accept  the
new realities of life. If he would not accept them then he must
be extinguished, and tonight Asgard would see the extinction of
an immortal god. It was all, thought Odin fractiously, too much
for  someone at his time of life, which was extremely advanced,
but not in any particular direction.
     He wanted merely to stay in his hospital, which he  loved.
The  arrangement which had brought him to that place was of the
sweetest kind and though it was not without its cost, it was  a
cost  that simply had to be borne and that was all there was to
it. There were new realities, and he  had  learned  to  embrace
them.  Those  who  did  not  would  simply  have  to suffer the
consequences. Nothing came of nothing, even for a god.
     Aher tonight he could return to his life in the  Woodshead
indefinitely,  and  that  would  be  good.  He  said as much to
Hillow.
     "Clean white  sheets,"  he  said  to  Hillow,  who  merely
nodded, blankly. "Linen sheets. Every day, clean sheets."
     Hillow manoeuvred the bed arnund and up a step.
     "Being a god, Hillow," continued Odin, "being a god, well,
it was  unclean, you hear what I'm saying? There was no one who
took care of the sheets. I mean really took care of them. Would
you think that? In a situation like mine? Father of  the  Gods?
There  was no one, absolutely no one, who came in and said, `Mr
Odwin,'" - he chuckled to himself -  "they  call  me  Mr  Odwin
there,  you  know.  They  don't  quite know who they're dealing
with. I don't think they could handle it, do you,  Hillow?  But
there  was  no  one  in all that time who came in and said, `Mr
Odwin, I have changed your bed and you have clean  sheets.'  No
one.  There  was constant talk about hewing things and ravaging
things and splitting things asunder. Lots of big talk of things
being mighty, and of things being riven, and of things being in
thrall to other things, but very little attention given,  as  I
now realise, to the laundry. Let me give you an example..."
     His  reminiscences were for a moment interrupted, however,
by the arrival of his vehicle at  a  great  doorway  which  was
guarded by a great sweaty splodge of a being who stood swaying,
arms akimbo, in their path. Toe Rag, who had been preserving an
intense  silence  as  he  stalked  along just ahead of the bed,
hurried  forward  and  had  a  quick  word  with  the  sweating
creature,  who  had  to  bend,  red-faced,  to  hear  him. Then
instantly the  sweaty  creature  shrank  back  with  glistening
obsequiousness  into  its  yellow  lair, and the sacred trolley
rolled forward into the great  halls,  chambers  and  corridors
from which great gusty echoes roared and fetid odours blew.
     "Let  me  give  you  an  example, Hillow," continued Odin.
"Take this place for example. Take Valhalla. . ."

Chapter 19

     Turning north was  a  manoeuvre  which  normally  had  the
effect of restoring a sense of reason and sanity to things, but
Dirk could not escape a sense of foreboding.
     Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have
helped,  but  it  was  such mean and wretched rain to come from
such  a  heavy  sky  that  it  only  increased  the  sense   of
claustrophobia  and  frustration  which gripped the night. Dirk
turned on the car wipers which  grumbled  because  they  didn't
have  quite  enough  rain  to  wipe away, so he turned them off
again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen.
     He turned on the wipers again, but they still  refused  to
feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked
in protest. The streets turned treacherously slippery.
     Dirk  shook  his  head. He was being quite absurd, he told
himself, in the worst possible way. He had allowed  himself  to
become  fanciful  in  a  manner  that  he  quite  despised.  He
astounded himself at the wild fantasies he  had  built  on  the
flimsiest  amount  of,  well  he would hardly call it evidence,
mere conjecture.
     An accident at an airport. Probably a simple explanation.
     A man with a hammer. So what?
     A grey van which Kate Schechter had seen at the  hospital.
Nothing  unusual  about that. Dirk had nearly collided with it,
but again, that was a perfectly commonplace occurrence.
     A Coca-Cola machine: he hadn't taken that into account.
     Where did a Coca-Cola machine fit into these wild  notions
about  ancient gods? The only idea he had about that was simply
too ridiculous for words and he refused even to acknowledge  it
to himself.
     At  that  point  Dirk found himself driving past the house
where, that very moming, he had encountered a client of his who
had had his severed head placed on a revolving record turntable
by a green-eyed devil-figure waving a scythe and a blood-signed
contract who had then vanished into thin air.
     He peered at it as he passed, and when a  large  dark-blue
BMW  pulled out from the kerb just ahead of him he ran straight
into the back of it, and for the second time that day he had to
leap out of his car, already shouting.
     "For God's sake can't you look  where  you're  going?"  he
exclaimed,  in  the  hope of bagging his adversary's best lines
from the outset. "Stupid people!" he continued, without pausing
for breath. "Careering all over the place. Driving without  due
care  and  attention! Reckless assault!" Confuse your enemy, he
thought. lt was a little like phoning somebody up,  and  saying
"Yes?  Hello?"  in  a testy voice when they answered, which was
one of Dirk's favourite  methods  of  whiling  away  long,  hot
summer  afternoons. He bent down and examined the palpable dent
in the rear of the BMW, which was quite obviously, damn  it,  a
brand new one. Blast and bugger it, thought Dirk.
     "Look  what  you've  done to my bumper!" he cried. "I hope
you have a good lawyer!"
     "I am a  good  lawyer,"  said  a  quiet  voice  which  was
followed  by  a  quiet  click.  Dirk  looked  up  in  momentary
apprehension. The quiet click was only the  sound  of  the  car
door closing.
     The man was wearing an Italian suit, which was also quiet.
He had quiet glasses, quietly cut hair, and though a bow-tie is
not, by its very nature, a quiet object, the particular bow-tie
he wore  was,  nevertheless,  a very quietly spotted example of
the genre. He drew a slim wallet from his  pocket  and  also  a
slim  silver  pencil.  He  walked  without  fuss to the rear of
Dirk's Jaguar and made a note of the registration number.
     "Do you have a card?" he enquired as he  did  so,  without
looking  up.  "Here's  mine,"  he  added,  taking  one from his
wallet. He made a note on the  back  of  it.  "My  registration
number,"  he  said,  "and  the  name  of  my insurance company.
Perhaps you would be good enough to let me  have  the  name  of
yours.  If you don't have it with you, I'll got my girl to call
you."
     Dirk sighed, and decided there was no point in putting  up
a  fight  on  this  one.  He  fished  out his wallet and leafed
through the various business cards that seemed to accumulate in
it as if from nowhere. He toyed for a second with the  idea  of
being Wesley Arlott, an ocean-going yacht navigation consultant
from,  apparently, Arkansas, but then thought better of it. The
man had, after all, taken his registration number, and although
Dirk had no particular  recollection  of  paying  an  insurance
premium  of late, he also had no particular recollection of not
paying one either, which was a reasonably  promising  sign.  He
handed  over  a bonafide card with a wince. The man looked at
it.
     "Mr Gently," he said.  "Private  investigator.  I'm  sony,
private holistic investigator. OK."
     He put the card away, taking no further interest.
     Dirk  had  never  felt  so patronised in his life. At that
moment there was another quiet click from the other side of the
car. Dirk looked across to see  a  woman  with  red  spectacles
standing  there  giving  him  a  frozen half smile. She was the
woman he had spoken with over  Geoffrey  Anstey's  garden  wall
this  morning,  and  the  man,  Dirk  therefore  supposed,  was
probably her husband. He  wondered  for  a  second  whether  he
should  wrestle them to the ground and question them rigorously
and violently, but he was suddenly feeling immensely tired  and
run down.
     He  acknowledged the woman in red spectacles with a minute
inclination of his head.
     "All done, Cynthia," said the man and flicked a  smile  on
and off at her. "It's all taken care of."
     She  nodded faintly, and the two of them climbed back into
their BMW and after a moment or two pulled  away  without  fuss
and  disappeared away down the road. Dirk looked at the card in
his hand. Clive Draycott. He was  with  a  good  firm  of  City
solicitors.  Dirk  stuck  the  card away in his wallet, climbed
despondently back into his car, and drove on back to his house,
where he found a large golden eagle sitting  patiently  on  his
doorstep.

Chapter 20

     Kate rounded on her guest as soon as they were both inside
her flat  with  the  door  closed  and Kate could be reasonably
certain that Neil wasn't going to sneak back out  of  his  flat
and   lurk  disapprovingly  half  way  up  the  stairs.  The
continuing thumping of his bass was at least her  guarantee  of
privacy.
     "All  right," she said fiercely, "so what is the deal with
the eagle then? What is the deal with all  the  street  lights?
Huh?"
     The  Norse  God of Thunder looked at her awkwardly. He had
to remove his  great  horned  helmet  because  it  was  banging
against  the  ceiling and leaving scratch marks in the plaster.
He tucked it under his arm.
     "What is the deal," continued Kate,  "with  the  Coca-Cola
machine?  What  is the deal with the hammer? What, in short, is
the big deal? Huh?"
     Thor said nothing. He frowned for  a  second  in  arrogant
irritation, then frowned in something that looked somewhat like
embarrassment, and then simply stood there and bled at her.
     For  a  few  seconds  she  resisted the impending internal
collapse of her attitude, and then realised it was  just  going
to go to hell anyway so she might as well go with it.
     "OK,"  she  muttered, "let's get all that cleaned up. I'll
find some antiseptic."
     She went to rummage in the kitchen cupboard  and  returned
with a bottle to find Thor saying "No" at her.
     "No  what?"  she  said crossly, putting the bottle down on
the table with a bit of a bang.
     "That," said Thor, and pushed  the  bottle  back  at  her.
"No."
     "What's the matter with it?"
     Thor  just  shrugged and stared moodily at a corner of the
room. There was  nothing  that  could  be  considered  remotely
interesting  in  that  comer  of  the  room,  so he was clearly
looking at it out of sheer bloody-mindedness.
     "Look, buster," said Kate, "if I can call you buster, what
- "
     "Thor," said Thor, "God of - "
     "Yes," said Kate, "you've told me all  the  things  you're
God of. I'm trying to clean up your arm."
     "Sedra," said Thor, holding his bleeding arm out, but away
from her. He peered at it anxiously.
     "What?"
     "Crushed  leaves  of  sedra.  Oil  of  the  kernel  of the
apricot. Infusion of bitter orange  blossom.  Oil  of  almonds.
Sage and comfrey. Not this."
     He  pushed the bottle of antiseptic off the table and sank
into a mood.
     "Right!" said Kate, picked up the bottle and hurled it  at
him.  It  rebounded  off  his  cheekbone leaving an instant red
mark. Thor lunged forward in a rage, but Kate simply stood  her
ground with a finger pointed at him.
     "You  stay right there, buster!" she said, and he stopped.
"Anything special you need for that?"
     Thor looked puzzled for a moment.
     "That!" said Kate, pointing at the  blossoming  bruise  on
his cheek.
     "Vengeance," said Thor.
     "I'll have to see what I can do," said Kate. She turned on
her heel and stalked out of the room.
     Aher about two minutes of unseen activity Kate returned to
the room, trailed by wisps of steam.
     "All right," she said, "come with me."
     She  led  him  into  her  bathroom. He followed her with a
great show of reluctance, but he followed her.  Kate  had  been
trailed  by wisps of steam because the bathroom was full of it.
The bath itself was overflowing with bubbles and gunk.
     There were some bottles and pots, mostly empty,  lined  up
along  a small shelf above the bath. Kate picked them up one by
one and displayed them at him.
     "Apricot kernel oil," she said, and turned it upside  down
to emphasise its emptiness. "All in there," she added, pointing
at the foaming bath.
     "Neroli   oil,"   she  said,  picking  up  the  next  one,
"distilled from the blossom of bitter oranges. All in there."
     She picked up  the  next  one.  "Orange  cream  bath  oil.
Contains almond oil. All in there."
     She picked up the pots.
     "Sage  and  comfrey," she said of one, "and sedra oil. One
of them's a hand cream and the other's  hair  conditioner,  but
they're  all in there, along with a tube of Aloe Lip Preserver,
some Cucumber Cleansing Milk, Honeyed Beeswax  and  Jojoba  Oil
Cleanser,  Rhassoul  Mud, Seaweed and Birch Shampoo, Rich Night
Cream with Vitamin E, and a very great deal of cod  liver  oil.
I'm  afraid  I  haven't  got  anything  called `Vengeance', but
here's some Calvin Klein `Obsession'."
     She took the stopper from a bottle of  perfume  and  threw
the bottle in the bath:
     "I'll be in the next room when you're done."&#1061;
     With  that  she  marched out, and slammed the door on him.
She waited in the other room, firmly reading a book.

Chapter 21

     For about a minute Dirk remained sitting motionless in his
car a few yards away from his front door. He wondered what  his
next  move should be. A small, cautious one, he rather thought.
The last thing he wanted to have to contend with at the  moment
was a startled eagle.
     He  watched  it  intently.  It  stood  there  with  a pert
magnificence about its  bearing,  its  talons  gripped  tightly
round  the edge of the stone step. From time to time it preened
itself, and then peered sharply up  the  street  and  down  the
street,  dragging one of its great talons across the stone in a
deeply worrying manner. Dirk admired the creature  greatly  for
its  size  and  its  plumage  and  its general sense of extreme
air-worthiness, but, asking himself if he liked  the  way  that
the  light from the street lamp glinted in its great glassy eye
or on the huge hook of its beak, he had to admit  that  he  did
not.
     The beak was a major piece of armoury.
     It  was  a  beak  that would frighten any animal on earth,
even one that was already dead and in a tin. Its talons  looked
as  if  they  could  rip  up  a small Volvo. And it was sitting
waiting on Dirk's doorstep, looking up and down the street with
a gaze that was at once meaningful and mean.
     Dirk wondered if he should simply drive off and leave  the
country.  Did  he have his passport? No. It was at home. It was
behind the door  which  was  behind  the  eagle,  in  a  drawer
somewhere or, more likely, lost.
     He  could  sell  up.  The ratio of estate agents to actual
houses in the area was rapidly approaching parity. One of their
lot could come and deal with the house. He'd had enough of  it,
with its fridges and its wildlife and its ineradicable position
on the mailing lists of the American Express company.
     Or he could, he supposed with a slight shiver, just go and
see what  it  was  the eagle wanted. There was a thought. Rats,
probably, or a small whippet. All Dirk had, to  his  knowledge,
was  some  Rice  Krispies  and an old muffin, and he didn't see
those appealing to this magisterial creature  of  the  air.  He
rather fancied that he could make out fresh blood congealing on
the  bird's  talons,  but  he  told himself firmly not to be so
ridiculous.
     He was just going to have to go and face up to the  thing,
explain   that   he   was  fresh  out  of  rats  and  take  the
consequences.
     Quietly, infinitely quietly, he pushed open  the  door  of
his  car, and stole out of it, keeping his head down. He peered
at it from over the bonnet of the car. It hadn't moved. That is
to say, it hadn't left the district. It was still looking  this
way  and  that around itself with, possibly, a heightened sense
of alertness. Dirk didn't know in what  remote  mountain  eyrie
the  creature  had learnt to listen out for the sound of Jaguar
car door hinges revolving in their sockets, but the  sound  had
clearly not escaped its attention.
     Cautiously, Dirk bobbed along behind the line of cars that
had prevented  him from being able to park directly outside his
own house. In a couple of seconds all that separated  him  from
the extraordinary creature was a small, blue Renault.
     What next?
     He could simply stand up and, as it were, declare himself.
He would  be  saying, in effect, "Here I am, do what you will."
Whatever then transpired, the Renault could probably bear the
brunt.
     There was always the  possibility,  of  course,  that  the
eagle  would  be  pleased to see him, that all this swooping it
had been directing at him had been just its way of being matey.
Assuming, of course, that it was the same eagle. That  was  not
such  an  enormous  assumption.  The number of golden eagles at
large in North London at any one time was, Dirk guessed, fairly
small.
     Or maybe it was just nesting on his doorstep completely by
chance, enjoying a  quick  breather  prior  to  having  another
hurtle through the sky in pursuit of whatever it is that eagles
hurtle through the sky after.
     Whatever the explanation, now, Dirk realised, was the time
that he  had  simply  to  take his chances. He steeled himself,
took a deep breath and arose from behind the  Renault,  like  a
spirit rising from the deep.
     The  eagle  was  looking in another direction at the time,
and it was a second or so before it looked back  to  the  front
and  saw him, at which point it reacted with a loud screech and
stepped back an inch or two,  a  reaction  which  Dirk  felt  a
little  put  out  by.  It  then blinked rapidly a few times and
adopted a sort of perky expression of which Dirk did  not  have
the faintest idea what to make.
     He waited for a second or two, until he felt the situation
had settled  down again after all the foregoing excitement, and
then stopped  forward  tentatively,  round  the  front  of  the
Renault.  A number of quiet, interrogative cawing noises seemed
to float uncertainly through the air, and then after  a  moment
Dirk  realised that he was making them himself and made himself
stop. This was an eagle he was dealing with, not a budgie.
     It was at this point that he made his mistake.
     With his mind entirely taken up with eagles, the  possible
intentions  of  eagles, and the many ways in which eagles might
be  considercd  to  differ  from  small  kittens,  he  did  not
concentrate enough on what he was doing as he stepped up out of
the  road  and  on to a pavement that was slick with the recent
drizzle. As he brought his rear foot forward it caught  on  the
bumper  of the car he wobbled, slipped, and then did that thing
which one should never do to a large eagle of uncertain temper,
which was to  fling  himself  headlong  at  it  with  his  arms
outstretched.
     The eagle reacted instantly.
     Without  a  second's hesitation it hopped neatly aside and
allowed Dirk the space he needed to collapse heavily on to  his
own  doorstep.  It  then  peered  down at him with a scorn that
would have withered a lesser man, or at least a  man  that  had
been looking up at that moment.
     Dirk groaned.
     He had sustained a blow to the temple from the edge of the
step,  and it was a blow, he felt, that he could just as easily
have done without this evening. He  lay  there  gasping  for  a
second  or  two, then at last rolled over heavily, clasping one
hand to his forehead, the other to his nose, and looked  up  at
the  great  bird  in  apprehension,  reflecting bitterly on the
conditions under which he was expected to work.
     When it became clear to  him  that  he  appeared  for  the
moment  to  have nothing to fear from the eagle, who was merely
regarding him with a kind of quizzical, blinking doubt, he  sat
up,  and then slowly dragged himself back to his feet and wiped
and smaacked some of the dirt off  his  coat.  Then  he  hunted
through  his  pockets for his keys and unlocked the front door,
which seemed a little loose. He waited to see  what  the  eagle
would do next.
     With  a  slight  rustle  of  its  wings it hopped over the
lintel and into his hall. It looked around itself,  and  seemed
to  regard what it saw with a little distaste. Dirk didn't know
what it was that eagles expected of people's hallways, but  had
to admit to himself that it wasn't only the eagle which reacted
like  that.  The  disorder  was not that great, but there was a
grimness to it which tended to cast a pall over  visitors,  and
the eagle was clearly not immune to this effect.
     Dirk picked up a large flat envelope lying on his doormat,
looked  inside  it  to  check  that  it  was  what  he had been
expecting, then noticed that a picture  was  missing  from  the
wall.  It  wasn't  a  particularly  wonderful picture, merely a
small Japanese print that he had found in  Camden  Passage  and
quite liked, but the point was that it was missing. The hook on
the  wall  was  empty.  There  was  a chair missing as well, he
realised.
     The possible significance of this suddenly struck him, and
he hurried through to the kitchen. Many of his assorted kitchen
implements  had  clearly  gone.  The  rack  of  largely  unused
Sabatier  knives,  the  food  processor  and his radio cassette
player had all vanished,  but  he  did,  however,  have  a  new
fridge.  It  had  obviously  been  delivered  by Nobby Paxton's
felonious thugs and he would just have to make the usual little
list.
     Still, he had a new fridge and  that  was  a  considerable
load  off his mind. Already the whole atmosphere in the kitchen
seemed easier. The tension had lifted. There was a new sense of
lightness  and  springiness  in  the   air   which   had   even
communicated itself to the pile of old pizza boxes which seemed
now to recline at a jaunty rather than an oppressive angle.
     Dirk  cheerfully threw open the door to the new fridge and
was delighted to find it  completely  and  utterly  empty.  Its
inner  light  shone on perfectly clean blue and white walls and
on gleaming chrome  shelves.  He  liked  it  so  much  that  he
instantly determined to keep it like that. He would put nothing
in it at all. His food would just have to go off in plain view.
     Good. He closed it again.
     A  screech  and a flap behind him reminded him that he was
entertaining a visiting eagle. He turned to find it glaring  at
him from on top of the kitchen table.
     Now  that  he  was getting a little more accustomed to it,
and  had  not  actually  been  viciously  attacked  as  he  had
suspected he might be, it seemed a little less fearsome than it
had  at  first.  It  was  still  a serious amount of eagle, but
perhaps an eagle was a  slightly  more  manageable  proposition
than  he  had originally supposed. He relaxed a little and took
off his hat, pulled off his coat, and threw them on to a chair.
     The eagle seemed at this juncture to sense that Dirk might
be getting the wrong idea about it and flexed one of its  claws
at  him.  With  sudden  alarm  Dirk saw that it did indeed have
something that closely resembled congealed blood on the talons.
He backed away from it hurriedly. The eagle then rose up to its
full height on its talons and began to spread its  great  wings
out,  wider  and  wider,  beating  them very slowly and leaning
forward so as to keep its balance. Dirk did the only  thing  he
could  think  to do under the cincumstances and bolted from the
room, slamming the door behind him and jamming the  hall  table
up against it.
     A  terrible  cacophony  of  screeching  and scratching and
buffeting arose instantly from behind it. Dirk sat leaning back
against the table, panting and trying to catch his breath,  and
then  after  a while began to get a worrying feeling about what
the bird was up to now.
     It seemed to him that the eagle was actually  dive-bombing
itself  against  the  door. Every few seconds the pattern would
repeat itself - first a great beating of wings,  then  a  rush,
then  a  terrible cracking thud. Dirk didn't think it would get
through the door, but was alarmed that it might beat itself  to
death  trying.  The  creature  seemed to be quite frantic about
something, but what, Dirk could not even begin to  imagine.  He
tried  to calm himself down and think clearly, to work out what
he should do next.
     He should phone Kate and make certain she was  all  right.
 Whoosh, thud!
  He  should  finally open up the envelope he had been carrying
with  him  all  day  and  examine  its  contents.    Whoosh,
thud!
  For that he would need a sharp knife.  Whoosh, thud!
  Three rather awkward thoughts then struck him in fairly quick
succession.
     Whoosh, thud!
  First,  the  only sharp knives in the place, assuming Nobby's
removal people had left him  with  any  at  all,  were  in  the
kitchen.  Whoosh, thud!
  That  didn't  matter  so  much  in  itself,  because he could
probably find something in the house that would do.  Whoosh,
thud!
  The second thought was that the actual envelope itself was in
the pocket of his coat which he had left lying over the back of
a chair in the kitchen.  Whoosh, thud!
  The third thought was very similar to the second and  had  to
do  with  the  location  of  the  piece  of  paper  with Kate's
telephone number on it.  Whoosh, thud!
  Oh God.  Whoosh, thud!
  Dirk began to feel very, very tired at the way  the  day  was
working  out.  He  was deeply worried by the sense of impending
calamity, but was still by no means able to divine what lay  at
the root of it.  Whoosh, thud!
  Well, he knew what he had to do now...  Whoosh, thud!
  ...  so  there  was  no  point  in not getting on with it. He
quietly pulled the table away from the door.  Whoosh -
  He ducked and yanked the door open,  passing  smoothly  under
the  eagle  as  it  hurtled  out  into  the hallway and hit the
opposite wall. He slammed  the  door  closed  behind  him  from
inside  the  kitchen,  pulled his coat off the chair and jammed
the chair back up under the handle.  Whoosh, thud!
  The  damage  done  to  the  door  on  this  side   was   both
considerable  and impressive, and Dirk began seriously to worry
about what this behaviour said about the bird's state of  mind,
or  what the bird's state of mind might become if it maintained
this  behaviour   for   very   much   longer.      Whoosh...
scratch...
  The  same thought seemed to have occurred to the bird at that
moment,  and  after  a  brief  flurry  of  screeching  and   of
scratching  at the door with its talons it lapsed into a grumpy
and defeated silence, which after it  had  been  going  on  for
about  a  minute  became  almost  as disturbing as the previous
batterings.
     Dirk wondered what it was up to.
     He approached the door cautiously and very,  very  quietly
moved  the chair back a little so that he could see through the
keyhole. He squatted down and peered through it.  At  first  it
seemed  to  him  that  he could see nothing through it, that it
must be blocked by something. Then, a slight flicker and  glint
close  up  on  the  other  side suddenly revealed the startling
truth, which was that the eagle also  had  an  eye  up  at  the
keyhole  and  was busy looking back at him. Dirk almost toppled
backwards with the shock of the realisation,  and  backed  away
from the door with a sense of slight horror and revulsion.
     This  was  extremely  intelligent  behaviour  for an eagle
wasn't it? Was it? How could he find out? He couldn't think  of
any  ornithological experts to phone. All his reference books
were piled up in other rooms of the house, and he didn't  think
he'd  be  able  to  keep  on  pulling  off  the same stunt with
impunity, certainly not when he was dealing with an eagle which
had managed to figure out what keyholes were for.
     He retrealed to the kitchen sink and  found  some  kitchen
towel.  He folded it into a wad, soaked it, and dabbed it first
on his bleeding temple, which was swelling up nicely, and  then
on  his  nose  which  was  still  very  tender,  and had been a
considerable size for most of the day now. Maybe the eagle  was
an eagle of delicate sensibilities and had reacted badly to the
sight of Dirk's face in its current, much abused, state and had
simply lost its mind. Dirk sighed and sat down.
     Kate's  telephone,  which was the next thing he turned his
attention to, was answered by a machine when he tried  to  ring
it.  Her  voice  told him, very sweetly, that he was welcome to
leave a message after the beep, but warned that she hardly ever
listened to them and that it was much better  to  talk  to  her
directly,  only he couldn't because she wasn't in, so he'd best
try again.
     Thank you very much, he thought, and put the phone down.
     He realised that the truth of the matter was this: he  had
spent  the day putting off opening the envelope because of what
he was worried about finding in it. It wasn't that the idea was
frightening, though indeed it was frightening that a man should
sell his soul to a green-eyed man with a scythe, which is  what
circumstances were trying very hard to suggest had happened. It
was  just  that it was extremely depressing that he should sell
it to a green-eyed man with a scythe in exchange for a share in
the royalties of a hit record.
     That was what it looked like on the face of it. Wasn't it?
     Dirk picked up the other envelope, the one which had  been
waiting for him on his doormat, delivered there by courier from
a  large  London  bookshop where Dirk had an account. He pulled
out the contents, which were a  copy  of  the  sheet  music  of
Hot  Pototo,  written  by  Colin  Paignton,  Phil
Mulville and Geoff Anstey.
     The lyrics were, well, straightforward.  They  provided  a
basic  repetitive  bit  of  funk  rhythm  and a simple sense of
menace and cheerful callousness which had caught  the  mood  of
last summer. They went:

      Hot Potato,
      Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
      Quick, pass it on, poss it on, poss it on.
       You  don't  want  to  get  caught,  get  caught,  get
caught.
      Drop it on someone. Who ? Who ? Anybody.
      You better not have it when the big one comes.
      I said you  better  not  have  it  when  the  big  one
comes.
      It's a Hot Potato.

     And  so  on.  The  repeated  phrases  got  tossed back and
forward between the two members of the band, the  drum  machine
got heavier and heavier, and there had been a dance video.
     Was that all it was going to be? Big deal. A nice house in
Lupton Street with polyurethaned floors and a broken marriage?
     Things  had certainly come down a long way since the great
days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the
knowledge of the universe, achieve all  the  ambitions  of  his
mind  and  all  the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his
soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy
furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall and,  whap,
your head comes off.
     So  what  exactly was the deal? What was the Potato
contract? Who was getting what and why?
     Dirk rummaged through a drawer  for  the  breadknife,  sat
down  once  more,  took  the  envelope from his coat pocket and
ripped through the congealed strata of Sellotape which held the
end of it together.
     Out fell a thick bundle of papers.

Chapter 22

     At exactly the moment that the telephone rang, the door to
Kate's sitting-room opened. The Thunder God attempted to  stomp
in  through  it,  but  in fact he wafted. He had clearly soaked
himself very thoroughly in the stuff Kate had thrown  into  the
bath, then redressed, and torn op a nightgown of Kate's to bind
his  forearm with. He casually tossed a handful of softened oak
shards away into the comer of the room. Kate  decided  for  the
moment  to  ignore  both  the  deliberate  provocations and the
telephone. The former she could deal with and  the  latter  she
had a machine for dealing with.
     "I've  been reading about you," she challenged the Thunder
God. "Where's your beard?"
     He took the book, a one  volume  encyclopaedia,  from  her
hands and glanced at it before tossing it aside contemptuously.
     "Ha,"  he said, "I shaved it off. When I was in Wales." He
scowled at the memory.
     "What were you doing in Wales for heaven's sake?"
     "Counting the stones," he said with a shrug, and  went  to
stare out of the window.
     There  was  a  huge,  moping  anxiety  in  his bearing. It
suddenly occurred  to  Kate  with  a  spasm  of  something  not
entinely unlike fear, that sometimes when people got like that,
it  was because they had picked up their mood from the weather.
With a Thunder God it presumably worked the  other  way  round.
The sky ootside certainly had a restless and disgruntled look.
     Her reactions suddenly started to become very confused.
     "Excuse  me  if  this sounds like a stupid question," said
Kate, "but I'm a little at sea here. I'm not used  to  spending
the  evening  with  someone  who's  got a whole day named after
them. What stones were you counting in Wales?"
     "All of them," said Thor in a  low  growl.  "All  of  them
between  this  size...  " he held the tip of his forefinger and
thumb about a quarter of an inch apart, "...and this size."  He
held  his  two hands about a yard apart, and then put them down
again.
     Kate stared at him blankly.
     "Well... how many were thene?" she asked. It  seemed  only
polite to ask.
     He rounded on her angrily.
     "Count  them  yourself  if  you want to know!" he shouted.
"What's the point in my spending  years  and  years  and  years
counting  them,  so that I'm the only person who knows, and who
will ever know, if I just go and tell somebody else? Well?"
     He turned back to the window.
     "Anyway," he said, "I've been worried about it. I think  I
may  have  lost count somewhere in Mid-Glamorgan. But I'm not,"
he shouted, "going to do it again!"
     "Well, why on earth would you  do  such  an  extraordinary
thing in the first place?"
     "It  was a burden placed on me by my father. A punishment.
A penance." He glowered.
     "Your father?" said Kate. "Do you mean Odin?"
     "The All-Father,"  said  Thor.  "Father  of  the  Gods  of
Asgard."
     "And you're saying he's alive?"
     Thor turned to look at her as if she was stupid.
     "We are immortals," he said, simply.
     Downstairs,   Neil  chose  that  moment  to  conclude  his
thunderous performance on the bass, and  the  house  seemed  to
sing in its aftermath with an eerie silence.
     "Immortals are what you wanted," said Thor in a low, quiet
voice.  "Immortals are what you got. It is a little hard on us.
You wanted us to be for ever, so we  are  for  ever.  Then  you
forget  about  us. But still we are for ever. Now at last, many
are dead, many dying," he then added in a quiet voice, "but  it
takes a special effort."
     "I  can't  even  begin  to  understand what you're talking
about," said Kate, "you say that I, we - "
     "You can begin to understand," said Thor,  angrily,
"which  is why I have come to you. Do you know that most people
hardly see me? Hardly notice me at all? It is not that  we  are
hidden.  We  are here. We move among you. My people. Your gods.
You gave birth to us. You made us be what'you would not dare to
be yourselves. Yet you will not acknowledge us. If I walk along
one of  your  streets  in  this...  world  you  have  made  for
yourselves  without us, then barely an eye will once flicker in
my direction."
     "Is this when you're wearing the helmet?"
     "Especially when I'm wearing the helmet!"
     "Well- "
     "You make fun of me!" roared Thor.
     "You make it very easy for a girl," said  Kate.  "I  don't
know what - "
     Suddenly  the  room  seemed to quake and then to catch its
breath. All of Kate's insides wobbled violently and  then  held
very  still. In the sudden horrible silence, a blue china table
lamp slowly toppled off the table, hit the floor,  and  crawled
off  to  a  dark  corner  of the room where it sat in a worried
little defensive huddle.
     Kate stared at it and tried to be calm about it. She  felt
as if cold, soft jelly was trickling down her skin.
     "Did you do that?" she said shakily.
     Thor  was looking livid and confused. He muttered, "Do not
make me angry with you. You were very lucky." He looked away.
     "What are you saying?"
     "I'm saying that I wish you to come with me."
     "What? What about that?" She pointed at  the  small
befuddled  kitten  under the table which had so recently and so
confusingly been a blue china table lamp.
     "There's nothing I can do for it."
     Kate was suddenly so tired  and  confused  and  frightened
that  she  found  she was nearly in tears. She stood biting her
lip and trying to be as angry as she could.
     "Oh yeah?" she said. "I thought you were  meant  to  be  a
god. I hope you haven't got into my home under false pretences,
I..."  She  stumbled to a halt, and then resumed in a different
tone of voice.
     "Do you mean," she said, in a small voice, "that you  have
been here, in the world, all this time?"
     "Here, and in Asgard," said Thor.
     "Asgard," said Kate. "The home of the gods?"
     Thor  was  silent. It was a grim silence that seemed to be
full of something that bothered him deeply.
     "Where is Asgard?" demanded Kate.
     Again Thor did not speak. He was a man of very  few  words
and  enormously  long  pauses.  When  at last he did answer, it
wasn't at all clear whether he had been thinking all that  time
or just standing there.
     "Asgard is also here," he said. "All worlds are here."
     He  drew  out  from  under  his  furs his great hammer and
studied its head deeply  and  with  an  odd  curiosity,  as  if
something  about  it was very puzzling. Kate wondered where she
found  such  a  gesture  familiar  from.  She  found  that   it
instinctively  made  her  want  to  duck. She stepped back very
slightly and was watchful.
     When he looked up again, there was an altogether new focus
and energy in his eyes, as if he was gathering  himself  up  to
hurl himself at something. "
     "Tonight  I  must be in Asgard," he said. "I must confront
my father Odin in the great hall of Valhalla and bring  him  to
account for what he has done."
     "You mean, for making you count Welsh pebbles?"
     "No!"  said  Thor. "For making the Welsh pebbles not worth
counting!"
     Kate shook her head in exasperation. "I simply don't  know
what  to  make  of you at all," she said. "I think I'm just too
tired. Come back tomorrow. Explain it all in the morning."
     "No," said Thor. "You must see Asgard yourself,  and  then
you  will  understand. You must see it tonight." He gripped her
by the arm.
     "I don't want to go to Asgard," she insisted. "I don't  go
to  mythical  places  with  strange men. You go. Call me up and
tell me how it went in the morning. Give  him  hell  about  the
pebbles."
     She wrested her arm from his grip. It was very, very clear
to her that she only did this with his permission.
     "Now please, go, and let me sleep!" She glared at him.
     At  that moment the house seemed to erupt as Neil launched
into a thumping bass rendition of Siegfried's  Rheinfahrt  from
Act  1  of  G&#1078;tterd&#1076;mmerung,  just  to prove it could be
done. The walls shook, the  windows  rattled.  From  under  the
table  the  sound  of  the table lamp mewing pathetically could
just be heard.
     Kate tried to maintain her furious glare,  but  it  simply
couldn't be kept up for very long in the circumstances.
     "OK," she said at last, "how do we get to this place?"
     "There are as many ways as there are tiny pieces."
     "I beg your pardon?"
     "Tiny  things."  He held up his thumb and forefinger again
to  indicate  something  very  small.  "Molecules,"  he  added,
seeming  to  be  uncomfortable with the word. "But first let us
leave here."
     "Will I need a coat in Asgard?"
     "As you wish."
     "Well, I'll take one anyway. Wait a minute."
     She decided that the best way to deal with the astonishing
rigmarole which  currently  constituted  her  life  was  to  be
businesslike  about  it.  She found her coat, brushed her hair,
left a new message on her telephone answering machine and put a
saucer of milk firmly under the table.
     "Right," she said, and  led  the  way  out  of  the  flat,
locking  it carefully after them, and making shushing noises as
they passed Neil's door. For all the uproar  he  was  currently
making  he was almost certainly listening out for the slightest
sound, and would be out in a moment if he heard them  going  by
to  complain  about  the Coca-Cola machine, the lateness of the
hour, man's inhumanity to man, the weather, the noise, and  the
colour  of Kate's coat, which was a shade of blue that Neil for
some reason disapproved of most particularly. They  stole  past
successfully  and  closed  the  front door behind them with the
merest click.

Chapter 23

     The sheets which tumbled out on to  Dirk's  kitchen  table
were  made  of  thick  heavy  paper,  folded  together, and had
obviously been much handled.
     He sorted them out, one by one, separating them from  each
other,  smoothing them out with the flat of his hand and laying
them out neatly in rows on the kitchen table, clearing a space,
as it became necessary, among the old newspapers, ashtrays  and
dirty  cereal bowls which Elena the cleaner always left exactly
where they were, claiming, when challenged on  this,  that  she
thought he had put them there specially.
     He  pored over the papers for several minutes, moving from
one to another, comparing them with each other,  studying  them
carefully, page by page, paragraph by paragraph, line by line.
     He couldn't understand a word of them.
     It  should  have  occurred  to  him, he realised, that the
greeneyed, hairy, scythe-waving giant might differ  from  him
not only in general appearance and personal habits, but also in
such matters as the alphabet he favoured.
     He  sat  back  in  his seat, disgruntled and thwarted, and
reached for a cigarette, but the packet in  his  coat  was  now
empty.  He picked up a pencil and tapped it in a cigarette-like
way, but it wasn't able to produce the same effect.
     After a minute or two he became acutely conscious  of  the
fact  that  he  was  probably  still  being watched through the
keyhole by the eagle and he found that this made it  impossibly
hard  to  concentrate  on  the problem before him, particularly
without a cigarette. He scowled to himself. He knew  there  was
still  a  packet  upstairs  by  his bed, but he didn't think he
could handle the sheer ornithology involved in going to get it.
     He tried to stare at the papers for a little  longer.  The
writing, apart from being written in some kind of small, crabby
and  indecipherable runic script, was mostly hunched up towards
the left-hand side of the paper as if swept there  by  a  tide.
The righthand side was largely clear except for an occasionai
group  of characters which were lined up underneath each other.
All of it, except for a slight sense of undefinable familiarity
about the layout, was completely meaningless to Dirk.
     He turned his attention back to the envelope  instead  and
tried  once more to examine some of the names which had been so
heavily crossed out.
     Howard Bell, the incredibly wealthy  bestselling  novelist
who  wrote bad books which sold by the warehouse-load despite -
or perhaps because of - the fact that nobody read them.
     Dennis Hutch, record company magnate. Now that  he  had  a
context  for  the  name, Dirk knew it perfeetly well. The Aries
Rising Record Group which had been founded on  Sixties  ideals,
or  at least on what passed for ideals in the Sixties, grown in
the Seventies and then embraced the materialism of the Eighties
without  missing  a  beat,  was  now  a  massive  entertainment
conglomerate  on  both  sides of the Atlantic. Dennis Hutch had
stepped up into the top seat when its founder  had  died  of  a
lethal  overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence
of a Ferrari and a bottle  of  tequila.  ARRGH!  was  also  the
record label on which Hot Potato had been released.
     Stan  Dubcek,  senior  partner  in the advertising company
with the silly name which now owned most  of  the  British  and
American  advertising  companies  which had not had names which
were quite as silly, and had therefore been swallowed whole.
     And here, suddenly, was another name  that  was  instantly
recognisable, now that Dirk was attuned to the sort of names he
should  be  looking  for. Roderick Mercer, the world's greatest
publisher of the world's sleaziest newspapers. Dirk  hadn't  at
first  spotted the name with the unfamiliar "...erick" in place
after the "Rod". Well, well, well. . .
     Now here were  people,  thought  Dirk  suddenly,  who  had
really got something. Certainly they had got rather more than a
nice  little house in Lupton Road with some dried flowers lying
around the place. They also had the great advantage  of  having
heads  on  their  shoulders  as  well,  unless  Dirk had missed
something new and dramatic on the news. What did that all mean?
What was this contract? How come everybody whose hands  it  had
been  through  had  been  so astoundingly successful except for
one, Geoffrey Anstey?  Everybody  whose  hands  it  had  passed
through  had  benefited  from  it except for the one who had it
last. Who had still got it.
     It was a hot potato. .
      You better not have it when the big one comes.
  The notion suddenly formed in Dirk's mind that it might  have
been  Geoffrey  Anstey himself who had overheard a conversation
about a hot potato, about getting rid of it, passing it on.  If
he remembered correctly the interview he had read with Pain, he
didn't say that he himself had overheard the conversation.
      You better not have it when the big one comes.
     The notion was a horrible one and ran on like this:
     Geoffrey  Anstey  had  been  pathetically  na&#1086;ve.  He  had
overheard this conversation, between - who? Dirk picked up  the
envelope  and ran over the list of names - and had thought that
it had a good dance rhythm. He had not for  a  moment  realised
that  what  he  was  listening to was a conversation that would
result in his own hideous death. He had got a hit record out of
it, and when the real hot potato was actually handed to him  he
had picked it up.
      Don't pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.
     And  instead  of  taking the advice he had recorded in thc
words of the song...
      Quick, pass it on, pass it on, pass it on.
     ... he had stuck it behind the gold record  award  on  his
bathroom wall.
     You better not have it when the big one comes.
     Dirk  frowned and took a long, slow thoughtful drag on his
pencil.
     This was ridiculous.
     He had to got some cigarettes if he  was  going  to  think
this  through  with  any  intellectual rigour. He pulled on his
coat, stuffed his hat on his head and made for the window.
     The window hadn't been opened for -  well,  certainly  not
during  his  ownership  of  the  house,  and  it  struggled and
screamed at the sudden unaccustomed invasion of its  space  and
independence. Once he had forced it wide enough, Dirk struggled
out  on  to the windowsill, pulling swathes of leather coat out
with him. From here it was a bit of  a  jump  to  the  pavement
since there was a lower ground floor to the house with a narrow
flight of steps leading down to it in the front. A line of iron
railings separated these from the pavement, and Dirk had to get
clear over these.
     Without  hesitating  for a moment he made the jump, and it
was in mid-bound that he realised he had not pickcd up his  car
keys from the kitchen table where he'd left them.
     He  considered  as  he  sailed gracelessly through the air
whether or  not  to  execute  a  wild  mid-air  twist,  make  a
desperate  grab backwards for the window and hope that he might
just manage to hold on to  the  sill,  but  decided  on  mature
reflection  that  an error at this point might just conceivably
kill him whereas the walk would probably do him good.
     He landed heavily on the far side of the railings, but the
tails of his coat became entangled with them and he had to pull
them off, tearing part of the lining in the process.  Once  the
ringing  shock  in  his knees had subsided and he had recovered
what little composure the events of the day had left him  with,
he  realised  that it was now well after eleven o'clock and the
pubs would be shut, and he might have a longer walk than he had
bargained for to find some cigarettes.
     He considered what to do.
     The current outlook and state of mind of tbe eagle  was  a
major factor to be taken into account here. The only way to get
his  car  keys  now  was  back  through the front door into his
eagleinfested hallway.
     Moving with great caution he tip-toed back up the steps to
his front door, squatted down and, hoping that the  damn  thing
wasn't  going  to  squeak,  gently  pushed  up  the flap of the
letterbox and peered through.
     In an instant a talon was hooked into the back of his hand
and a great  screeching  beak  slashed  at  his  eye,  narrowly
missing  it but scratching a great gouge across his much abused
nose.
     Dirk howled with pain and lurched backwards,  not  getting
very  far  because  he still had a talon hooked in his hand. He
lashed out desperately and hit at the  talon,  which  hurt  him
considerably,  dug  the sharp point even further into his flesh
and caused a great, barging flurry on the far side of the door,
each tiniest movement of which tugged heavily in his hand.
     He grabbed at the great claw with his free  hand  and  and
tried  to  tug it back out of himself. It was immensely strong,
and was shaking with the  fury  of  the  eagle,  which  was  as
trapped  as he was. At last, quivering with pain, he managed to
release himself, and pulled his injured hand back, nursing  and
cuddling it with the other.
     The  eagle pulled its claw back sharply, and Dirk heard it
flapping  away  back  down  his  hallway,   emitting   terrible
screeches  and  cries,  its  great  wings  colliding  with  and
scraping thc walls.
     Dirk toyed with the idea of burning the  house  down,  but
once the throbbing in his hand had begun to subside a little he
calmed  down  and  tried,  if  he could, to see things from the
eagle's point of view.
     He couldn't.
     He had not the faintest idea how things appeared to eagles
in general, much less to this particular eagle, which seemed to
be a seriously deranged example of the species.
     After a minute or so more of nursing his hand,
curiosity-allied to a strong sense that the eagle had definitely
retreated to the far  end  of  the  hall  and  stayed  there  -
overcame  him,  and  he  bent down once more to the letter-box.
This time he used his pencil to push the flap back upwards  and
scanned  the  hallway  from  a  safe position a good few inches
back.
     The eagle was clearly in view, perched on the end  of  the
bannister  rail,  regarding him with resentment and opprobrium,
which Dirk felt was a little rich coming from a creature  which
had  only  a moment or two ago been busily engaged in trying to
rip his hand off.
     Then, once the eagle was certain that it  had  got  Dirk's
attention,  it  slowly  raised itself up on its feet and slowly
shook its great wings out, beating them gently for balance.  It
was  this  gesture  that  had  previously  caused  Dirk to bolt
prudently from the room. This  time,  however,  he  was  safely
behind  a  couple of good solid inches of wood and he stood, or
rather, squatted his  ground.  The  eagle  stretched  its  neck
upwards  as  well, jabbing its tongue out at the air and cawing
plaintively, which surprised Dirk.
     Then he noticed something else rather surprising about the
eagle, which was  that  its  wings  had  strange,  un-eaglelike
markings on them. They were large concentric circles.
     The differences of coloration which delineated thc circles
were very  slight,  and  it  was  only  the  absolute geometric
regularity of them which made them stand out as clearly as they
did. Dirk had the very clear sense that the eagle  was  showing
him  these  circles,  and  that  that was what it had wanted to
attract his attention to all along.  Each  time  the  bird  had
dived  at  him,  he  realised  as  he thought back, it had then
started on  a  strange  kind  of  flapping  routine  which  had
involved opening its wings right out. However, each time it had
happened  Dirk had been too busily engaged with the business of
turning round and running  away  to  pay  this  exhibition  the
appropriate attention.
     "Have you got the money for a cup of tea, mate?"
     "Er,  yes thank you," said Dirk, "I'm fine." His attention
was fully occupied with the eagle, and  he  didn't  immediately
look round.
     "No, I meant can you spare me a bob or two, just for a cup
of tea?"
     "What?" This time Dirk looked round, irritably.
     "Or just a fag, mate. Got a fag you can spare?"
     "No,  I  was  just  going to go and get some myself," said
Dirk.
     The man  on  the  pavement  behind  him  was  a  tramp  of
indeterminate age. He was standing there, slightly wobbly, with
a  look  of  wild  and continuous disappointment bobbing in his
eyes.
     Not getting an  immediate  response  from  Dirk,  the  man
dropped  his  eyes  to the ground about a yard in front of him,
and swayed back and forth a little. He  was  holding  his  arms
out,  slightly  open,  slightly  away  from  his body, and just
swaying. Then he  frowned  suddenly  at  the  ground.  Then  he
frowned  at  another  part of the ground. Then, holding himself
steady while he made quite a major realignment of his head,  he
frowned away down the street.
     "Have you lost something?" said Dirk.
     The man's head swayed back towards him.
     "Have  I  lost  something?"  he  said  in querulous
astonishment. "Have I lost something?"
     It seemed to be the most astounding question he  had  ever
heard.  He  looked  away  again  for  a while, and seemed to be
trying to balance the question in the general scale of  things.
This  involved  a  fair  bit  more  swaying and a fair few more
frowns. At last he seemed to come up with something that  might
do service as some kind of answer.
     "The  sky?"  he said, challenging Dirk to find this a good
enough answer. He looked up towards it, carefully, so as not to
lose his balance. He seemed not to like what he saw in the dim,
orange, street-lit pallor of the clouds, and slowly looked back
down again till he was staring at a point just in front of  his
feet.
     "The ground?" he said, with evident great dissatisfaction,
and then was struck with a sudden thought.
     "Frogs?"  he  said,  wobbling  his  gaze up to meet Dirk's
rather bewildered one. "I used to like...frogs," he  said,  and
left his gaze sitting on Dirk as if that was all he had to say,
and the rest was entirely up to Dirk now.
     Dirk  was  completely  flummoxed.  He longed for the times
when life had been easy, life  had  been  carefree,  the  great
times he'd had with a mere homicidal eagle, which seemed now to
be  such  an  easygoing and amiable companion. Aerial attack he
could cope with, but not this nameless roaring guilt that  came
howling at him out of nowhere.
     "What do you want?" he said in a strangled voice.
     "Just  a  fag,  mate," said the tramp, "or something for a
cup of tea."
     Dirk pressed a pound coin into the man's hand  and  lunged
off  down  the street in a panic, passing, twenty yards further
on, a builder's skip from which the shape  of  his  old  fridge
loomed at him menacingly.

Chapter 24

     As  Kate  came  down  the steps from her house she noticed
that the temperature had dropped considerably. The  clouds  sat
heavily  on  the land and loured at it. Thor set off briskly in
the direction of the park, and Kate trotted along in his wake.
     As he strode along, an extraordinary figure on the streets
of Primrose Hill, Kate could not help but notice  that  he  had
been  right. They passed three different people on the way, and
she saw distinctly how their eyes avoided looking at him,  even
as  they  had to make allowance for his great bulk as he passed
them. He was not invisible, far from it. He simply didn't fit.
     The park was closed for the night, but Thor leapt  quickly
over  the  spiked  railings and then lifted her over in turn as
lightly as if she had been a bunch of flowers.
     The grass was damp and mushy, but still worked  its  magic
on  city  feet.  Kate did what she always did when entering the
park, which was to bob down and put the flats of her hands down
on the ground for a moment. She had never quite worked out  why
she  did  this,  and often she would adjust a shoe or pick up a
piece of litter as a pretext for  the  movement,  but  all  she
really  wanted  was  to feel the grass and the wet earth on her
palms.
     The park from this viewpoint was simply  a  dark  shoulder
that  rose  up  before them, obscuring itself. They mounted the
hill and stood on the top of it, looking over the  darkness  of
the rest of the park to where it shaded off into the hazy light
of  the heart of London which lay to the south. Ugly towers and
blocks stuck yobbishly up out of the  skyline,  dominating  the
park, the sky, and the city.
     A  cold,  damp  wind moved across the park, flicking at it
from time to time like the tail of a  dark  and  broody  horse.
There  was  an unsettled, edgy quality to it. In fact the night
sky seemed to Kate to be like a train  of  restless,  irritable
horses, their traces flapping and slapping in the wind. It also
seemed  to  her  as  if  the traces all radiated loosely from a
single centre, and that the centre was very close by  her.  She
reprimanded    herself    for    absurd   suggestibility,   but
nevertheless, it still seemed that all the weather was gathered
and circling around them, waiting on them.
     Thor once more drew out his hammer, and held it before him
in the thoughtful and abstracted manner  she  had  seen  a  few
minutes  before  in  her  flat.  He  frowned,  and seemed to be
picking tiny invisible pieces of dust off it. It was  a  little
like  a  chimpanzee  grooming its mate, or - that was it! - the
comparison was extraordinary, but  it  explained  why  she  had
tensed  herself  so watchfully when last he had done it. It was
like Jimmy  Connors  minutely  adjusting  the  strings  of  his
racquet before preparing to serve.
     He looked up sharply once again, drew his arm back, turned
fully  once,  twice, three times, twisting his heels heavily in
the mud, and then hurled his hammer with astonishing  force  up
to the heavens.
     It  vanished  almost  instantly into the murky haze of the
sky. Damp flashes sparked deep within the clouds, tracking  its
path  in  a  long  parabola  through the night. At the furthest
extent of the parabola it swung  down  out  of  the  clouds,  a
distant   tiny   pinpoint  moving  slowly  now,  gathering  and
redirecting its momentum for the return flight.  Kate  watched,
breathless, as the speck crept behind the dome of St Paul's. It
then  seemed  almost  as  if  it had halted altogether, hanging
silently and improbably in the air, before gradually  beginning
to  increase  microscopically  in  size  as it accelerated back
towards them.
     Then, as it returned, it  swung  aside  in  its  path,  no
longer  describing  a  simple parabola, but following instead a
new path which seemed to lie along the perimeter of a  gigantic
Mobius  strip which took it round the other side of the Telecom
Tower. Then suddenly it was swinging back in  a  path  directly
towards  them, hurtling out of the night with impossible weight
and speed like a piston in a shaft of light.  Kate  swayed  and
nearly  dropped  in  a  dead  faint  out of its path, when Thor
stepped forward and caught it with a grunt.
     The jolt of it sent a single heavy shudder down  into  the
earth,  and  then the thing was resting quietly in Thor's grip.
His arm quivered slightly and was still.
     Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn  certain  that
it  was  the  sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
     "Is this all part of what we have to do to go to  Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
     "We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
     At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect  was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth  part  of  a  degree.  Everything
shifted,  was  for  a  moment  minutely  out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
     This world was a much darker one and colder still.
     A bitter, putrid wind blew sharply, and made every  breath
gag  in the throat. The ground beneath their feet was no longer
the soft muddy grass of the hill, but a  foul-smelling,  oozing
slush.  Darkness  lay  over  all  the  horizon with a few small
exceptional fires dotted here and there in  the  distance,  and
one  great  blaze  of light about a mile and a half away to the
southeast.
     Here, great fantastical towers stabbed at the night;  huge
pinnacles  and  turrets  flickered in the firelight that surged
from a thousand windows. It was an edifice that mocked  reason,
ridiculed reality and jeered wildly at the night.
     "My  father's  palace,"  said  Thor,  "the  Great  Hall of
Valhalla where we must go."
     It was just on the  tip  of  Kate's  tongue  to  say  that
something  about the place was oddly familiar when the sound of
horses' hooves pounding through the mud came  to  them  on  the
wind.  At  a  distance,  between where they stood and the Great
Hall of Valhalla, a small number of flickering torches could be
seen jolting towards them.
     Thor once  more  studied  the  head  of  his  hammer  with
interest, brushed it with his forefinger and rubbed it with his
thumb.  Then  slowly he looked up, again he twisted round once,
then twice and a third time and then hurled  the  missile  into
the  sky.  This  time,  however, he continued to hold on to its
shaft with his right hand, while with his left he  held  Kate's
waist in his grasp.

Chapter 25

     Cigarettes  clearly  intended  to  make themselves a major
problem for Dirk tonight.
     For most of the day, except for when he'd  woken  up,  and
except  for  again  shortly after he'd woken up, and except for
when he had just encountered the  revolving  head  of  Geoffrey
Anstey, which was understandable, and also except for when he'd
been  in the pub with Kate, he had had absolutely no cigarettes
at all.
     Not one. They were out of his life, foresworn utterly.  He
didn't  need them. He could do without them. They merely nagged
at him like mad and made his life a living hell, but he decided
he could handle that.
     Now, however, just when he had suddenly  decided,  coolly,
rationally,  as  a  clear, straightforward decision rather than
merely a feeble surrender to craving, that he would, after all,
have a cigarette, could he find one? He could not.
     The pubs by this stage of the night were well closed.  The
late  night  corner shop obviously meant something different by
"late night" than Dirk did, and though Dirk was certain that he
could convince the proprietor of  the  rightness  of  his  case
through  sheer linguistic and syllogistic bravado, the wretched
man wasn't there to undergo it.
     A mile away there was a 24-hour filling  station,  but  it
turned  out  just to have sustained an armed robbery. The plate
glass was shattered and crazed round a tiny hole,  police  were
swarming over the place. The attendant was apparently not badly
injured, but he was still losing blood from a wound in his arm,
having  hysterics and being treated for shock, and no one would
sell Dirk any cigarettes. They simply weren't in the mood.
     "You could buy cigarettes in the blitz,"  protested  Dirk.
"People took a pride in it. Even with the bombs falling and the
whole city ablaze you could still get served. Some poor fellow,
just  lost  two  daughters and a leg, would still say `Plain or
filter tipped?' if you asked him."
     "I expect you would, too," muttered  a  white-faced  young
policeman.
     "It was the spirit of the age," said Dirk.
     "Bug off," said the policeman.
     And that, thought Dirk to himself, was the spirit of this.
He retreated, miffed, and decided to prowl the streets with his
hands in his pockets for a while.
     Camden   Passage.  Antique  clocks.  Antique  clothes.  No
cigarettes.
     Upper Street. Antique buildings  being  ripped  apart.  No
sign of cigarette shops being put up in their place.
     Chapel  Market,  desolate  at  night.  Wet  litter  wildly
flapping. Cardboard boxes, egg boxes, paper bags and  cigarette
packets - empty ones.
     Pentonville  Road. Grim concrete monoliths, eyeing the new
spaces in Upper Street where they hoped to spawn  their  horrid
progeny.
     King's  Cross  station.  They  must  have  cigarettes, for
heaven's sake. Dirk hurried on down towards it.
     The old frontage to the station reared up above the  area,
a  great  yellow  brick  wall  with  a clock tower and two huge
arches fronting the two great train sheds behind. In  front  of
this  lay the one-storey modern concourse which was already far
shabbier than the building, a hundred years its  senior,  which
it  obscured  and  generally messed up. Dirk imagined that when
the designs for the modern concourse  had  been  drawn  up  the
architects  had  explained that it entered into an exciting and
challenging dialogue with the older building.
     King's Cross is an area where terrible  things  happen  to
people,  to  buildings,  to  cars, to trains, usually while you
wait, and if you  weren't  careful  you  could  easily  end  up
involved  in  a  piece  of  exciting  and  challenging dialogue
yourself. You could have a cheap car  radio  fitted  while  you
waited, and if you turned your back for a couple of minutes, it
would  be  removed  while  you waited as well. Other things you
could have removed while you  waited  were  your  wallet,  your
stomach  lining,  your  mind and your will to live. The muggers
and pushers and pimps and hamburger salesmen, in no  particular
order, could arrange all these things for you.
     But  could  they  arrange  a packet of cigarettes, thought
Dirk, with a mounting sense of tension. He  crossed  York  Way,
declined a couple of surprising offers on the grounds that they
did  not  involve  cigarettes  in  any immediately obvious way,
hurried past the  closed  bookshop  and  in  through  the  main
concourse  doors, away from the life of the street and into the
safer domain of British Rail.
     He looked around him.
     Here things seemed rather strange and he wondered why, but
he only  wondered  this  very  briefly  because  he  was   also
wondering  if  there  was  anywhere open selling cigarettes and
there wasn't.
     He sagged forlornly. It seemed to him  that  he  had  been
playing  catch-up  with  the  world  all  day.  The morning had
started in about as disastrous a way as it was possible  for  a
morning to start, and he had never managed to get a proper grip
on  it  since.  He  felt like somebody trying to ride a bolting
horse, with one foot in a  stirrup  and  the  other  one  still
bounding  along hopefully on the ground behind. And now even as
simple a thing as a cigarette was  proving  to  be  beyond  his
ability to get hold of.
     He sighed and found himself a seat, or at least, room on a
bench.
     This  was not an immediately easy thing to do. The station
was more crowded than he had expected to find it at - what  was
it?  he  looked  up  at the clock - one o'clock in the morning.
What in the name of God was he doing on King's Cross station at
one o'clock in the morning, with no cigarette and no home  that
he  could reasonably expect to get into without being hacked to
death by a homicidal bird?
     He decided to feel sorry for himself. That would pass  the
time.  He  looked around himself, and after a while the impulse
to feel sorry for himself gradually subsided  as  he  began  to
take in his surroundings.
     What  was  strange about it was seeing such an immediately
familiar place looking so  unfamiliar.  There  was  the  ticket
office,  still  open  for  ticket sales, but looking sombre and
beleaguered and wishing it was closed.
     There was the W.H.Smith, closed  for  the  night.  No  one
would  be  needing any further newspapers or magazines tonight,
except for purposes of accommodation, and  old  ones  would  do
just as well for sleeping under.
     The pimps and hookers, drug-pushers and hamburger salesmen
were all  outside  in the streets and in the hamburger bars. If
you wanted quick sex or  a  dirty  fix  or,  God  help  you,  a
hamburger, that was where you went to get it.
     Here  were  the people that nobody wanted anything from at
all. This was where they gathered for shelter until  they  were
periodically shooed out. There was something people wanted from
them,  in fact - their absence. That was in hot demand, but not
easily supplied. Everybody has to be somewhere.
     Dirk looked from one to  another  of  the  men  and  women
shuffling  round  or  sitting hunched in seats or struggling to
try and sleep across benches that were specifically designed to
prevent them from doing exactly that.
     "Got a fag, mate?"
     "What? No, I'm sorry. No,  I  haven't  got  one,"  replied
Dirk,  awkwardly  patting his coat pockets in embarrassment, as
if to suggest the making of a search which  he  knew  would  be
fruitless.  He  was  startled to be summoned out of his reverie
like this.
     "Here you are, then." The old man offered  him  a  beat-up
one from a beat-up packet.
     "What?  Oh.  Oh  -  thanks.  Thank you " Momentarily taken
aback by the offer, Dirk nevertheless  accepted  the  cigarette
gratefully,  and took a light from the tip of the cigarette the
old man was smoking himself.
     "What you come hene for then?" asked the  old  man  -  not
challenging, just curious.
     Dirk  tried to look at him without making it seem as if he
was looking him up and down.  The  man  was  wildly  bereft  of
teeth,  had  startled and matted hair, and his old clothes were
well mulched down around him, but the eyes which sagged out  of
his  face  were fairly calm. He wasn't expecting anything worse
than he could deal with to happen to him.
     "Well, just  this  in  fact,"  said  Dirt,  twiddling  the
cigarette. "Thanks. Couldn't find one anywhere."
     "Oh ah," said the old man.
     "Got  this  mad  bird at home," said Dirk. "Kept attacking
me."
     "Oh ah," said the man, nodding resignedly.
     "I mean an actual bird," said Dirk, "an eagle."
     "Oh ah."
     "With great wings."
     "Oh ah."
     "Got hold of  me  with  one  of  its  talons  through  the
letter-box."
     "Oh ah."
     Dirk  wondered  if  it was worth pursuing the conversation
much further. He lapsed into silence and looked around.
     "You're lucky it didn't slash at  you  with  its  beak  as
well,"  said  the old man after a while. "An eagle will do that
when roused."
     "It did!" said Dirk. "It did! Look, right here on my nose.
That was through the letter-box as well. You'd scarcely believe
it! Talk about grip! Talk about reach! Look at what it  did  to
my hand!"
     He  held  it  out  for  sympathy.  The  old man gave it an
appraising look.
     "Oh ah," he said at  last,  and  retreated  into  his  own
thoughts.
     Dirk drew his injured hand back.
     "Know a lot about eagles, then, do you?"
     The man didn't answer, but seemed instead to retreat still
further.
     "Lot of people here tonight," Dirk ventured again, after a
while.
     The  man  shrugged.  He took a long drag on his cigarette,
half closing his eyes against the smoke.
     "Is it always like this? I mean, are there always so  many
people here at night?"
     The  man  merely  looked  down, slowly releasing the smoke
from his mouth and nostrils.
     Yet again, Dirk looked around. A man a few feet away,  not
so  old-looking  as Dirk's companion but wildly deranged in his
demeanour, had sat nodding hectically over a bottle of  cooking
brandy  all  this  time. He slowly stopped his nodding, screwed
with difficulty a cap on to the bottle, and slipped it into the
pocket of his ragged old coat. An old fat woman  who  had  been
fitfully  browsing  through  the bulging black bin liner of her
possessions began to twist the top of it together and fold it.
     "You'd almost think that something was about  to  happen,"
said Dirk.
     "Oh  ah,"  said  his  companion.  He  put his hands on his
knees, bent forward and raised himself painfully to  his  feet.
Though  he  was  bent  and  slow,  and  though his clothes were
dirt-ridden and tattered,  there  was  some  little  power  and
authority there in his bearing.
     The  air  which he unsettted as he stood, which flowed out
from the folds of his skin and ctothes, was richly pungent even
to Dirk's numbed nostrils. It was a smell  that  never  stopped
coming at you - just as Dirk thought it must have peaked, so it
struck  on  upwards  with renewed frenzy till Dirk thought that
his very brain would vaporise.
     He  tried  not  to  choke,  indeed  he  tried   to   smile
courteously  without allowing his eyes to run as the man turned
to him and said, "Infuse some blossom of the bitter orange. Add
some sprinklings of sage while it is still warm. This  is  very
good for eagle wounds. There are those who will add apricot and
almond  oil  and  even,  the heavens defend us, sedra. But then
there are always those that will overdo things.  And  sometimes
we have need of them. Oh ah."
     With  that he turned away once more and joined the growing
stream of pathetic, hunched and abused bodies that were heading
for the front exit from the station. In all  about  two,  maybe
three dozen were leaving. Each seemed to be leaving separatety,
each  for  his  or  her  entirely  independent reasons, and not
following too fast the one upon the other, and yet it  was  not
hard  to  tell, for anyone who cared to watch these people that
no one cared to watch or see, that they were  leaving  together
and in a stream.
     Dirk carefulty nursed his cigarette for a minute or so and
watched  them  intently  as  one  by one they left. Once he was
certain that there were no more to go, and that the last two or
three of them were at the door, he dropped  the  cigarette  and
ground  it  out with his heel. Then he noticed that the old man
had left behind his  crumpled  cigarette  packet.  Dirk  looked
inside  and saw that there were still two bedraggled cigarettes
left. He pocketed it, stood up, and  quietly  followed  at  a
distance that he thought was properly respectful.
     Outside on the Euston Road the night air was grumbling and
unsettled.  He loitered idly by the doorway, watching which way
they went - to the west. He took one of the cigarettes out  and
lit  it  and  then idled off westwards himself, around the taxi
rank and towards St Pancras Street.
     On the west side of St Pancras Street, just  a  few  yards
north  of  the  Euston  Road, a flight of steps leads up to the
forecourt of the old Midland Grand Hotel, the huge, dark gothic
fantasy of a building which stands, empty and desolate,  across
the front of St Pancras railway station.
     Over  the  top of the steps, picked out in gold letters on
wrought-iron-work, stands the name of the station.  Taking  his
time,  Dirk  followed  the  last  of the band of old tramps and
derelicts up these steps, which emerged just to the side  of  a
small,  squat,  brick building which was used as a car-park. To
the right, the great dark hulk of the old hotel spread off into
the night, its roofline a  vast  assortment  of  wild  turrets,
gnarled  spires  and pinnacles which seemed to prod at and goad
the night sky.
     High in the dim darkness, silent stone figures stood guard
behind long shields, grouped around pilasters  behind
wroughtiron railings. Carved dragons crouched gaping at the sky as
Dirk Gently, in his flapping leather coat, approached the great
iron portals which led to the hotel, and to the  great  vaulted
train  shed of St Pancras station. Stone figures of winged dogs
crouched down from the top of pillars.
     Here, in the bridged area between the hotel  entrance  and
the  station  booking  hall,  was  parked a large unmarked grey
Mercedes van. A quick glance at the front of it was  enough  to
tell  Dirk that it was the same one which had nearly forced him
off the road several hours earlier in the Cotswolds.
     Dirk walked into the booking  hall,  a  large  space  with
great panelled walls along which were spaced fat marble columns
in the form of tonch holders.
     At  this  time  of  night  the  ticket office was closed -
trains do not run all night from St Pancras - and beyond it the
vast chamber of the station itself, the great  Victorian  train
shed, was shrouded in darkness and shadow.
     Dirk stood quietly secluded in the entrance to the booking
hall and  watched  as  the  old  tramps and bag tadies, who had
entered the station by the main entrance  from  the  forecourt,
mingled  together in the dimness. There were now many more than
two dozen of them, perhaps as many  as  a  hundred,  and  there
seemed  to  be  about  them  an air of repressed excitement and
tension.
     As they moved about it seemed to Dirk after a while  that,
though he had been surprised at how many of them there had been
when  he  first arrived, there seemed now to be fewer and fewer
of them. He peered into the gloom trying to make out  what  was
happening.  He  detached  himself  from  his  seclusion  in the
entrance to the booking hall and entered the  main  vault,  but
kept himself nevertheless as close to the side wall as possible
as he ventured in towards them.
     There  were  definitely  fewer  still  of them now, a mere
handful left. He had a distinct sense of people  slipping  away
into the shadows and not re-emerging from them.
     He frowned at them.
     The shadows were deep but they weren't that deep. He began
to hurry  forward, and quickly threw all caution aside to reach
the small remaining group. But  by  the  time  he  reached  the
centre of the concourse where they had been gathered there were
none  remaining  at  all  and  he  was  left  whirling round in
confusion in the middle  of  the  great,  dark,  empty  railway
station.

Chapter 26

     The  only  thing  which  prevented  Kate screaming was the
sheer pressure of air rushing into her  lungs  as  she  hurtled
into the sky.
     When, a few seconds later, the blinding acceleration eased
a little,  she found she was gulping and choking, her eyes were
stinging and streaming to the extent that she could hardly see,
and there  was  hardly  a  muscle  in  her  body  which  wasn't
gibbering  with shock as waves of air pummelled past her,
tearing at her hair and clothes and making her knees, knuckles
and teeth batter at each other.
     She  had  to struggle with herself to suppress her urge to
struggle. On the one hand she absolutely certainly did not want
to be let go of. Insofar as she had any understanding at all of
what was happening to her she knew that she did not want to  be
let  go  of.  On  the  other  hand the physical shock of it was
facing some stiff competition from her sheer affronted rage  at
being  suddenly hauled into the sky without warning. The result
of this was that she struggled rather feebly and was  angry  at
herself  for  doing  so. She ended up clinging to Thor's arm in
the most abject and undignified way.
     The  night  was  dark,  and  the  blessing  of  this,  she
supposed, was that she could not see the ground. The lights she
had  seen  dotted  here  and  there  in  the distance now swung
sickeningly away beneath  her,  but  her  instincts  would  not
identify  them  as  representing ground. Already the flickering
beacons which shone from the insanely turreted building she had
glimpsed seconds before this outrage occurred were swaying away
behind her now at an increasing distance.
     They were still ascending.
     She could not struggle, she could  not  speak.  She  could
probably,  if  she  tried, bite the stupid brute's arm, but she
contented herself with the idea of this rather than the  actual
deed.
     The air was bad and rasped in her lungs. Her nose and eyes
were streaming,  and  this  made  it impossible for her to look
forward. When she did try it, just once, she caught a momentary
blurred glimpse of the head of the hammer streaking out through
the dark air of them, of Thor's arm grasping its stunted handle
and being pulled forward by  it.  His  other  arm  was  gripped
around  her  waist.  The strength of him defied her imagination
but did not make her any the less angry.
     She got the feeling that they were now skimming along just
beneath the clouds. Every now and then they would  be  buffeted
by  damp  clamminess, and breathing would become yet harder and
more noxious. The wet air tasted bitter, and deadly  cold,  and
her streaming wet hair lashed and slammed about her face.
     She  decided  that  the  cold was definitely going to kill
her, and after a while was convinced that she was beginning  to
lose  consciousness.  In  fact  she  realised  she was actually
trying to lose consciousness but  she  couldn't.  Time  slipped
into  a  greyness though, and she was less aware of how much of
it was passing.
     At last she began to sense that they were slowing and that
they were beginning to curve back downwards. This  precipitated
fresh  waves  of nausea and disorientation in her, and she felt
that her stomach was being slowly turned through a mangle.
     The air was, if anything, getting worse. It smelled worse,
tasted more acrid and seemed to be getting a  great  deal  more
turbulent.  They were definitely slowing now, and the going was
becoming more  and  more  difficult.  The  hammer  was  clearly
pointing  downwards  now, and finding its way along rather than
surging ahead.
     Down  still  further  they  went,  battling  through   the
thickening  clouds  that swirled round them till it seemed that
they must now reach all the way down to the ground.
     Their speed had dropped to the point where Kate felt  able
to look ahead now, though the acridity of the air was such that
she  was only able to manage a very brief glance. In the moment
that she  glanced,  Thor  released  the  hammer.  She  couldn't
believe  it.  He  released  it only for a fraction of a second,
just to change his grip on the thing, so  that  they  were  now
hanging  from  the shaft as it flew slowly forward, rather than
being pulled along by it. As he redistributed his  weight  into
this  new  posture he hoisted Kate firmly upwards as if pulling
up a sock. Down they went, and down further and further.
     There was now a roaring crashing sound borne in on them by
the wind from up ahead, and suddenly Thor was running,  leaping
over  rocky,  sandy  scrubland,  dancing  through  the  knotted
tussocks, and finally pounding and drumming his feet to a halt.
     They stood still at last, swaying, but the ground on which
they stood was solid.
     Kate breathed for a few seconds, bending over to catch her
breath. She then pulled herself up to her full height  and  was
about  to  deliver  a  full  account of her feelings concerning
these events at the top of her voice, when she suddenly got  an
alarming sense of where she was standing.
     Though  the  night  was dark, the wind whipping at her and
the pungent smell of it told her that some kind of sea was very
close by. The sound of wild crashing breakers told her that  in
fact  it  was more or less beneath her, that they were standing
very near to the edge of a cliff. She gripped the  arm  of  the
insufferable  god  who  had brought her here and hoped, vainly,
that it hurt him.
     As her reeling senses began gradually  to  calm  down  she
noticed  that  there was a dim light spreading away before her,
and after a while she realised that this  was  coming  off  the
sea.
     The  whole  sea  was  glowing  like  an  infection. It was
rearing itself up in the night,  lunging  and  thrashing  in  a
turmoil  of  itself  and  then  smashing  itself to pieces in a
frenzy of pain against the rocks of  the  coast.  Sea  and  sky
seethed at each other in a poisonous fury.
     Kate  watched  it  speechlessly,  and then became aware of
Thor standing at her shoulder.
     "I met you at an airport," he said, his voice breaking  up
in  the wind. "I was trying to get home to Norway by plane." He
pointed out to sea. "I wanted you to see why  I  couldn't  come
this way."
     "Where are we? What is this?" asked Kate fearfully.
     "In  your  world,  this  is  the North Sea," said Thor and
turned away inland again,  walking  heavily  and  dragging  his
hammer behind him.
     Kate  pulled  her  wet  coat  close around her and hurried
after him.
     "Well, why didn't you just fly home the way  we  just  did
but in, well, in our world?"
     The  rage  in  her  had  subsided into vague worries about
vocabulary.
     "I tried," responded Thor, still walking away.
     "Well, what happened?"
     "I don't want to talk about it."
     "What on earth's the point of that?"
     "I'm not going to discuss it."
     Kate  shuddered  in   exasperation.   "Is   this   godlike
behaviour?"  she  shouted.  "It  bothers  you so you won't talk
about it?"
     "Thor! Thor! Is it you?"
     This last was a thin voice trailing over  the  wind.  Kate
peered  into  the  wind.  Through  the  darkness  a lantern was
bobbing towards them from behind a low rise.
     "Is that you, Thor?" A little old  lady  came  into  view,
holding a lantern above her head, hobbling enthusiastically. "I
thought   that  must  be  your  hammer  I  saw.  Welcome!"  she
chirruped. "Oh, but you  come  in  dismal  times.  I  was  just
putting  the  pot  on and thinking of having a cup of something
and then perhaps killing myself, but then  I  said  to  myself,
just  wait  a  couple  of  days longer, Tsuliwa..., Tsuwila...,
Swuli..., Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis - I can  never  pronounce  my  own  name
properly  when  I'm talking to myself, and it drives me hopping
mad, as I'm sure you can imagine, such a  bright  boy  as  I've
always  maintained, never mind what those others say, so I said
to myself, Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis, see if anyone comes along, and if they
don't, well, then might be a good time to think  about  killing
myself.  And  look!  Now here you are! Oh, but you are welcome,
welcome! And I see you've brought  a  little  friend.  Are  you
going  to  introduce  me?  Hello,  my  dear,  hello!  My name's
Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis and I won't be at all offended if you stutter."
     "I... I'm, er, Kate," said Kate, totally flummoxed.
     "Yes, well I'm sure that will be all right," said the  old
woman  sharply. "Anyway, come along if you're coming. If you're
going to hang around out here all night I may as well just  get
straight  on  with  killing myself now and let you get your own
tea when you're quite ready. Come along!"
     She hurried on ahead, and in a very few yards they reached
a terrible kind of ramshackle structure of wood and  mud  which
looked  as  if it had become unaccountably stuck while half way
through collapsing. Kate glanced at Thor, hoping to  read  some
kind  of  reaction  from  him  to  give  her  a  bearing on the
situation, but he was occupied with his own  thoughts  and  was
clearly  not  about  to share them. Thene seemed to her to be a
difference in the way he moved, though. In the brief experience
she had of him he seemed constantly to be struggling with  some
internal and constrained anger, and this, she felt, had lifted.
Not  gone  away,  just  lifted.  He stood aside to allow her to
enter Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis's shack, and brusquely gestured  her  to  go
in.  He followed, ducking absurdly, a few seconds later, having
paused for a moment outside to survey what little could be seen
of the surrounding landscape.
     Inside was tiny. A few boards with  straw  for  a  bed,  a
simmering  pot  hung  over a fire, and a box tucked away in the
corner for sitting on.
     "And this is the knife I was thinking of using, you  see,"
said  Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis, fussing around. "Just been sharpening it up
nicely, you see. It comes up  very  nice  if  you  get  a  nice
sweeping  action  with the stone, and I was thinking here would
be a good place, you see? Here on the wall,  I  can  stick  the
handle  in this crack so it's held nice and firm, and then just
go fling! And fling myself at it. Fling! You see?
I wonder, should it be a little lower, what do  you  think,  my
dear? Know about these things, do you?"
     Kate  explained  that  she  did  not, and managed to sound
reasonably calm about it.
     "Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis," said Thor, "we have come not to  stay  but
to...Tsuli - please put the knife down."
     Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis   was  standing  looking  up  at  them  quite
chirpily, but she was also holding the knife,  with  its  great
heavy sweeping blade, poised over her own left wrist.
     "Don't  mind me, dears," she said, "I'm quite comfortable.
I can just pop off any time I'm ready. Happy  to.  These  times
are  not  to  live in. Oh, no. You go off and be happy. I won't
disturb your happiness with the sound  of  me  screaming.  I'll
hardly  make  a  sound  with  the  knife  as you go." She stood
quivering and challenging.
     Carefully, almost gently, Thor reached out  and  drew  the
knife away and out of her shaking hand. The old woman seemed to
crumple  as  it went, and all the performance faded out of her.
She sat back in a heap on her box. Thor squatted down in  front
of  her,  slowly  drew her to him and hugged her. She gradually
seemed to come back to life, and  eventually  pushed  him  away
telling  him not to be so stupid, and then made a bit of a fuss
of smoothing out her hopelessly ragged and dirty black dress.
     When once she had composed herself properly she turned her
attention to Kate and looked her up and down.
     "You're a mortal, dear, aren't you?" she said at last.
     "Well... yes," said Kate.
     "I can tell it from your fancy dress. Oh, yes.  Well,  now
you  see  what  the world looks like from the other side, don't
you, dear? What do you think then?"
     Kate explained that she did not yet know  what  to  think.
Thor  sat himself down on the floor and leant his big head back
against the wall, half-closing his eyes.  Kate  had  the  sense
that he was preparing himself for something.
     "It  used  to  be things were not so different," continued
the old woman. "Used to be lovely here, you know,  all  lovely.
Bit  of  give  and  take  between us. Terrible rows, of course,
terrible fights, but really it was all lovely.  Now?"  She  let
out  a  long  and tired sigh, and brushed a bit of nothing much
off the wall.
     "Oh, things are bad," she said, "things are very bad.  You
see  things  get  affected  by  things.  Our world affects your
world, your world affects our world. Sometimes it  is  hard  to
know exactly what that effect is. Very often it is hard to like
it,  either.  Most  of them, these days, are difficult and bad.
But our worlds are so nearly the same in so many ways. Where in
your world you have a building there will be a  structure  here
as  well. Maybe it will be a small muddy hillock, or a beehive,
or an abode like this one. Maybe it will be something a  little
grander, but it will be something. You all right, Thor, dear?"
     The Thunder God closed his eyes and nodded. His elbows lay
easily  across his knees. The ragged strips of Kate's nightgown
bound about his left forearm were limp and wet. He idly  pushed
them off.
     "And  where  there  is  something  which is not dealt with
properly in your world," the old lady pranled on, "as  like  as
not  it  will  emerge  in  ours.  Nothing disappears. No guilty
secret. No unspoken thought. It may be a new and mighty god  in
our  world,  or  it  may be just a gnat, but it will be here. I
might add that these days it is more often a gnat  than  a  new
and  mighty  god.  Oh,  there  are so many more gnats and fewer
immortal gods than once there were."
     "How can there be fewer immortals?" asked Kate.  "I  don't
want to be pedantic about it, but - "
     "Well,  there's  being  immortal,  dear,  and  then  again
there's being immortal. I mean, if I could just get this  knife
properly  secured  and  then  work up a really good fling, we'd
soon see who was immortal and who wasn't."
     "Tsuli..." admonished Thor, but didn't open his eyes to do
it.
     "One by one we're going, though. We are, Thor. You're  one
of  the  few  that  care.  There's  few enough now that haven't
succumbed to alcoholism or the onx."
     "What is that? Some kind of disease?" asked Kate. She  was
beginning  to feel cross again. Having been dragged unwillingly
from her flat and hurled across the whole of East Anglia on the
end of a hammer, she was irritated at being then just abandoned
to a conversation with an insanely  suicidal  old  woman  while
Thor  just  sat and looked content with himself, leaving her to
make an effort she was not in a mood to make.
     "It's an affliction, dear, which only gods get. It  really
means  that  you  can't take being a god any more, which is why
only gods get it you see."
     "I see."
     "In the final stages of it you simply lie  on  the  ground
and  after  a while a tree grows out of your head and then it's
all over. You rejoin the earth,  seep  into  its  bowels,  flow
through  its  vital  arteries, and eventually emerge as a great
pure torrent of water, and  as  like  as  not  get  a  load  of
chemical  waste  dumped  into you. It's a grim business being a
god nowadays, even a dead god.
     "Well," she said, patting her knees. Her eyes  hovered  on
Thor,  who had opened his eyes but was only using them to stare
at his own knuckles and fingertips. "Well, I hear you  have  an
appointment tonight, Thor."
     "Hmm," grunted Thor, without moving.
     "I  hear  you've  called  together  the Great Hall for the
Challenging Hour, is that right?"
     "Hmm," said Thor.
     "The Challenging Hour, hmm? Well, I know that things  have
not  been too good between you and your father for a long time.
Hmm?"
     Thor wasn't going to be drawn. He said nothing.
     "I thought it was quite dreadful about  Wales,"  continued
Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis.  "Don't  know  why  you stood for it. Of course I
realise that he's your father and the All-Father which makes it
difficult. But, Odin, Odin - I've known him for  so  long.  You
know  that he made a deal once to sacrifice one of his own eyes
in exchange for wisdom? Of course you do, dear, you're his son,
aren't you? Well, what I've always said is he should  stand  up
and  make  a  fuss  about  that particular deal, demand his eye
back. Do you know what I mean by that, Thor? And that  horrible
Toe  Rag.  There's someone to be careful of, Thor, very careful
indeed. Well, I expect  I  shall  hear  all  about  it  in  the
morning, won't I?"
     Thor  slid  his  back up the wall and stood up. He clasped
the old woman warmly by the hands and smiled a tight smile, but
said nothing. With a slight nod he gestured to Kate  that  they
were leaving. Since leaving was what she most wanted in all the
world  to  do she resisted the temptation to say "Oh yeah?" and
kick up a fuss about being treated like this. Meekly she bade a
polite farewell to the old woman and made her way out into  the
murky night. Thor followed her.
     She folded her arms and said, "Well? Where now? What other
great social events have you got in store for me this evening?"
     Thor  prowled  around  a  linle,  examining the ground. He
pulled out his hammer, and weighed  it  appreciatively  in  his
hands.  He  peered  out  into the night, and swung the hammer a
couple of times, idly. He  swung  himself  round  a  couple  of
times,  again not hard. He loosed the hammer, which bounded off
into the night and split open a casually situated rock a couple
of dozen yards away and then bounded back. He caught it easily,
tossed it up into the air and caught it easily again.
     Then he turned to her and looked her in the  eye  for  the
first time.
     "Would you like to see something?" he asked.

Chapter 27

     A  gust  of wind blew through the huge vaults of the empty
station and nearly provoked in Dirk a great howl of frustration
at the trail that had so suddenly gone cold on  him.  The  cold
moonlight draped itself through the long ranges of glass panels
that extended the length of the St Pancras station roof.
     It  fell  on empty rails, and illuminated them. It fell on
the train departures board, it fell on the sign which explained
that today was a Blue Saver Day and illuminated them both.
     Framed in the archway formed by the far end of the vaulted
roof were the fantastical forms of five great  gasometers,  the
supporting   superstructures   of   which   seemed   in   their
adumbrations to be tangled impossibly with each other, like the
hoops  of  an  illusionist's  conjuring  trick.  The  moonlight
illuminated these as well, but Dirk it did not illuminate.
     He  had  watched  upwards of a hundred people or so simply
vanish into thin air in a way that was  completely  impossible.
That  in  itself did not give him a problem. The impossible did
not bother him unduly. If it could not possibly be  done,  then
obviously it had been done impossibly. The question was how?
     He  paced  the  area  of  the  station  which they had all
vanished from, and scanned everything that could be  seen  from
every  vantage  point  within  it,  looking  for  any clue, any
anomaly, anything that might let him pass into whatever it  was
he  had  just  seen  a  hundred  people  pass into as if it was
nothing. He had the sense of a major party taking place in  the
near vicinity, to which he had not been invited. In desperation
he  started  to  spin  around  with his arms outstretched, then
decided this was completely futile and lit a cigarette instead.
     He noticed that as he had pulled out the packet,  a  piece
of  paper  had  fluttered  from  his  pocket,  which,  once the
cigarette was burning well, he stooped to retrieve.
     It was nothing exciting, just the bill he  had  picked  up
from  the  stroppy  nurse in the caf&#1080;. "Outrageous," he thought
about each of the items in turn as he scanned  down  them,  and
was  about  to  screw  it  up  and throw it away when a thought
struck him about the general layout of the document.
     The items charged were listed down the left hand side, and
the actual charges down the right.
     On his own bills when  he  issued  them,  when  he  had  a
client,  which was rare at the moment, and the ones he did have
seemed unable to stay alive long enough to  receive  his  bills
and  be  outraged  by them, he usually went to a little trouble
about  the  items  charged.  He  constructed   essays,   little
paragraphs  to  describe them. He liked the client to feel that
he or she was getting his or her money's worth in this  respect
at least.
     In  short,  the  bills  he  issued  corresponded in layout
almost exactly to the wad of papers with  indecipherable  runic
scripts  which  he  had  been  unable to make head or tail of a
couple of hours previously. Was that helpful? He  didn't  know.
If  the wad was not a contract but a bill, what might it be the
bill for? What services had been performed? They must certainly
have  been  intricate  services.  Or  at   least,   intricately
described  services.  Which professions might that apply to? It
was at least something to think about. He screwed up  the  caf&#1080;
bill and moved off to throw it into a bin.
     As it happened, this was a fortuitous move.
     It  meant  that he was away from the central open space of
the station, and near a  wall  against  which  he  could  press
himself inconspicuously when he suddenly heard the sound of two
pairs of feet crossing the forecourt outside.
     In  a  few  seconds,  they  entered  the  main part of the
station, by which time Dirk was well out  of  sight  round  the
angle of a wall.
     Being  well  out  of  sight  worked  less  well for him in
another respect, which was that for a while he  was  unable  to
see  the owners of the feet. By the time he caught a glimpse of
them, they had reached  exactly  the  same  area  where  a  few
minutes  previously  a  small  horde of people had, quietly and
without fuss, vanished.
     He was surprised by the red spectacles of  the  woman  and
the quietly tailred Italian suit of the man, and also the speed
with which they themselves then immediately vanished.
     Dirk  stood  speechless.  The same two damn people who had
been the bane of his  life  for  the  entire  day  (he  allowed
himself  this  slight  exaggeration  on  the grounds of extreme
provocation) had now flagrantly and deliberately disappeared in
front of his eyes.
     Once  he  was  quite  certain  that  they  had  absolutely
definitely  vanished  and  were  not  merely hiding behind each
other, he ventured out once more into the mysterious space.
     It was bafflingly ordinary. Ordinary tarmacadam,  ordinary
air,  ordinary  everything.  And  yet a quantity of people that
would have kept the Bermuda  triangle  industry  happy  for  an
entire  decade had just vanished in it within the space of five
minutes.
     He was deeply aggravated.
     He was so deeply aggravated that he thought he would share
the sense of aggravation by phoning someone up and  aggravating
them  -  as it would be almost certain to do at twenty past one
in the morning.
     This wasn't an entirely arbitrary thought - he  was  still
anxious  concerning  the  safety  of  the  American  girl, Kate
Schechter, and had not been  at  all  reassuned  to  have  been
answered  by  her  machine  when last he had called. By now she
should surely be at home  and  in  bed  asleep,  and  would  be
reassuringly livid to be woken by a meddling phone call at this
time.
     He  found  a  couple  of coins and a working telephone and
dialled her number. He got her answering machine again.
     It said that she had just out for the night to Asgard. She
wasn't certain which parts of Asgard they  were  going  to  but
they would probably swing by Valhalla later, if the evening was
up to it. If he cared to leave a message she would deal with it
in  the  morning  if she was still alive and in the mood. There
were some beeps, which rang on in Dirk's ear for seconds  after
he heard them.
     "Oh,"  he  said,  realising that the machine was currently
busy taping him, "good heavens. Well, I thought the arrangement
was that you were  going  to  call  me  befone  doing  anything
impossible."
     He   put  the  phone  down,  his  head  spinning  angrily.
Valhalla, eh? Was that where everybody  was  going  to  tonight
except  him?  He had a good mind to go home, go to bed and wake
up in the grocery business.
     Valhalla.
     He looked about him once again,  with  the  name  Valhalla
ringing  in his ears. There was no doubt, he felt, that a space
this size would make a good feasting hall  for  gods  and  dead
heroes,  and that the empty Midland Grand Hotel would be almost
worth moving the shebang from Norway for.
     He wondered if it made any difference knowing what it  was
you were walking into.
     Nervously,  tentatively,  he walked across and through the
space in question. Nothing.  Oh  well.  He  turned,  and  stood
surveying it for a moment or two while he took a couple of slow
drags  on  the  cigarette  he had got from the tramp. The space
didn't look any different.
     He walked back through it again, this time a  little  less
tentatively,  but with slow positive steps. Once again, nothing
happened, but then just as he was moving out of it at  the  end
he  half  fancied that he half heard a half moment of some kind
of raucous sound, like a burst of  white  noise  on  a  twisted
radio  dial.  He  turned  once  more,  and headed back into the
space, moving his head carefully round trying to  pick  up  the
slightest  sound. For a while he didn't catch it, then suddenly
there was a snatch of it that burst around him and was gone.  A
movement  and  another  snatch.  He moved very, very slowly and
carefully. With the most slight and gentle movements, trying to
catch at the sound he moved his head round what seemed  like  a
billionth  part of a billionth part of a degree, slipped behind
a molecule and was gone.
     He had instantly to duck to avoid a great  eagle  swooping
out of the vast space at him.

Chapter 28

     It  was another eagle, a different eagle. The next one was
a different eagle too, and the next. The air seemed to be thick
with eagles, and it was obviously impossible to enter  Valhalla
without  getting  swooped  on by at least half a dozen of them.
Even eagles were being swooped on by eagles.
     Dirk threw up his arms over his head to fend off the wild,
beating flurries, turned, tripped and fell down behind  a  huge
table  on  to  a  floor  of  heavy, damp, earthy straw. His hat
rolled under the table. He scrambled after it, stuffed it  back
firmly on his head, and slowly peered up over the table.
     The hall was dark, but alive with great bonfires.
     Noise  and  woodsmoke  filled  the  air, and the smells of
roasting pigs, roasting sheep, roasting  boar,  and  sweat  and
reeking wine and singed eagle wings.
     The  table  he  was  crouched  behind was one of countless
slabs of oak on trestles that  stretched  in  every  direction,
laden  with  steaming hunks of dead animals, huge breads, great
iron beakers slopping with wine and candles like wax  anthills.
Massive  sweaty  figures  seethed around them, on them, eating,
drinking,  fighting  over  the  food,  fighting  in  the  food,
fighting with the food.
     A yard or so from Dirk, a warrior was standing on top of a
table fighting a pig which had been roasting for six hours, and
he was clearly losing, but losing with vim and spirit and being
cheered  on  by  other  warriors who were dousing him down with
wine from a trough.
     The roof - as much of it as could  be  made  out  at  this
distance,  and by the dark and flickering light of the bonfires
- was made of lashed-together shields.
     Dirk clutched his hat, kept his head down and ran,  trying
to  make  his  way  towards  the  side  of the hall. As he ran,
feeling himself to be virtually invisible by  reason  of  being
completely  sober  and, by his own lights, normally dressed, he
seemed to pass  examples  of  every  form  of  bodily  function
imaginable, other than actual teeth-cleaning.
     The smell, like that of the tramp in King's Cross station,
who must  surely  be  here  participating,  was  one that never
stopped coming at you. It grew and grew until  it  seemed  that
your  head  had  to become bigger and bigger to accommodate it.
The din of sword on sword, sword on  shield,  sword  on  flesh,
flesh  on  flesh was one that made the eardrums reel and quiver
and want to cry. He was pummelled, tripped, elbowed, shoved and
drenched with wine as he scumed and  pushed  through  the  wild
throng,  but  arrived at last at a side wall - massive slabs of
wood and stone faced with sheets of stinking cow hide.
     Panting, he stopped for a moment, looked back and surveyed
the scene with amazement.
     It was Valhalla.
     Of that there would be absolutely no  question.  This  was
not  something  that  could be mocked up by a catering company.
And the  whole  seething,  wild  mass  of  carousing  gods  and
warriors  and  their caroused-at ladies, with their shields and
fires and boars did seem to fill a space that must be something
approaching the size of St Pancras station. The sheer heat that
rose off it all seemed as if it should suffocate the flocks  of
deranged eagles which thrashed through the air above them.
     And  maybe it was. He was by no means certain that a flock
of enraged eagles which thought that they might be  suffocating
would  behave significantly differently from many of the eagles
he was currently watching.
     There was something he  had  been  putting  off  wondering
while  he had fought his way through the mass, but the time had
come to wonder it now.
     What, he wondered, about the Draycotts?
     What could the  Draycotts  possibly  be  doing  here?  And
whene, in such a m&#1081;l&#1080;e, could the Draycotts possibly be?
     He  narrowed  his eyes and peered into the heaving throng,
trying to see if he could  locate  anywhere  a  pair  of  red
designer  spectacles or a quiet Italian suit mingling out there
with the clanging breastplates and the sweaty leathers, knowing
that the attempt was futile but feeling that it should be made.
     No, he decided, he couldn't see them. Not, he felt,  their
kind  of  party. Further reflections along these lines were cut
short by a heavy short-handled axe which  hurtled  through  the
air and buried itself with an astounding thud in the wall about
three inches from his left ear and for a moment blotted out all
thought.
     When he recovered from the shock of it, and let his breath
out, he  thought  that  it  was probably not somethiog that had
been thrown at  him  with  malicious  intent,  but  was  merely
warriorly  high spirits. Nevertheless, he was not in a partying
mood and decided to move on. He edged his way along the wall in
the direction which, had this actually been St Pancras  station
rather  than the hall of Valhalla, would have led to the ticket
office. He didn't  know  what  he  would  find  there,  but  he
reckoned  that  it  must  be  different to this, which would be
good.
     It seemed to him that things were generally quieter  here,
out on the periphery.
     The  biggest  and  best  of  the  good  tunes soemed to be
concentrated more strongly towanls  the  middle  of  the  hall,
whereas the tables he was passing now seemed to be peopled with
those  who  looked  as if they had teached that season in their
immortal lives when they preferred  to  contemplate  the  times
when  they  used to wrestle dead pigs, and to pass appreciative
comments to each other about  the  finer  points  of  dead  pig
wrestling  technique,  than  actually to wrestle with one again
themselves just at the moment.
     He overheard one remark to his companion that it  was  the
left-handed  three-fingered flat grip on the opponent's sternum
that was all-important at the crucial  moment  of  finally  not
quite falling over in a complete stupor, to which his companion
responded with a benign "Oh ah."
     Dirk stopped, looked and backtracked.
     Sitting  hunched  in  a  thoughtful  posture over his iron
plate, and clad in heavily stained and matted furs and  buckles
which  were,  if  anything,  more  rank  and  stinking than the
ensemble Dirk had last encountered him in, was Dirk's companion
from the concourse at King's Cross station.
     Dirk wondered how to approach him. A quick backslap and  a
"Hey!  Good  party.  Lot of energy," was one strategy, but Dirk
didn't think it was the right one.
     While he was wondering, an  eagle  suddenly  swooped  down
from  out  of the air and, with a lot of beating and thrashing,
landed on the table in front of the old man, folded  its  wings
and  advanced  on him, demanding to be fed. Easily, the old man
pulled a bit of meat off a bone and held it  up  to  the  great
bird,  which  pecked  it  sharply  but  accurately  out  of his
fingers.
     Dirk thought that this was the key to a friendly approach.
He leant over the table and picked up a small hunk of meat  and
offered  it in turn to the bird. The bird attacked him and went
for his neck, forcing him to try and beat the  savage  creature
off with his hat, but the introduction was made.
     "Oh ah," said the man, shooed the eagle away and shifted a
couple  of  inches along the bench. Though it was not a fulsome
invitation, it was at least an invitation. Dirk clambered  over
the bench and sat down.
     `"Thank you," said Dirk, puffing.
     "Oh ah."
     "If you remember, we - "
     At  that  moment  the  most tremendous reverberating thump
sounded out across Velhalla. It was the sound of a  drum  being
beaten,  but  it sounded like a drum of immense proportions, as
it had to be to make itself heard over the tumult of noise with
which the hall was filled. The drum  sounded  three  times,  in
slow and massive beats, like the heartbeat of the hall itself.
     Dirk  looked  up  to  see  where the sound might have come
from. He noticed for the first time that at the  south  end  of
the  hall,  to  which  he  had been heading, a great balcony or
bridge extended across most  of  its  width.  There  were  some
figures  up  there, dimly visible through the heat haze and the
eagles, but Dirk had a sense that whoever was up there presided
over whoever was down here.
     Odin, thought Dirk. Odin the All-Father must be up on  the
balcony.
     The  sound  of the revels died down quickly, though it was
several seconds before the reverberations of the noise  finally
fell away.
     When  all was quiet, but expectant, a great voice rang out
from the balcony and through the hall.
     The voice said, '"The time  of  the  Challenging  Hour  is
nearly  at  an end. The Challenging Hour has been called by the
God Thor. For the third time of asking, where is Thor?"
     A murmuring throughout the hall suggested that nobody knew
where Thor was and why he had not come to make his challenge.
     The voice said, "This is  a  very  grave  affront  to  the
dignity  of the All-Father. If there is no challenge before the
expiration  of  the  hour,  the  penalty  for  Thor  shall   be
correspondingly grave."
     The  drum beat again three times, and the consternation in
the hall increased. Where was Thor?
     "He's with some girl," said a voice above  the  rest,  and
there  were loud shouts of laughter, and a return to the hubbub
of before.
     "Yes." said Dirk, quietly, "I expect he probably is."
     "Oh ah."
     Dirk had supposed that he was talking to himself  and  was
surprised  to have elicited a response from the man, though not
particularly surprised at the response that had been elicited.
     "Thor called this meeting tonight?" Dirk asked him.
     "Oh ah."
     "Bit rude not to turn up."
     "Oh ah."
     "I expect everyone's n bit upset."
     "Not as long as there's enough pigs to go round."
     "Pigs?"
     "Oh ah."
     Dirk didn't immediately know how to go on from here.
     "Oh ah," he said, resignedly.
     "It's only Thor as really cares, you see,"  said  the  old
man.  "Keeps  on  issuing his challenge, then not being able to
prove it. Can't  argue.  Gets  all  confused  and  angry,  does
something  stupid,  can't  sort  it  out  and gets made to do a
penance. Everybody else just turns up for the pigs."
     "Oh ah." Dirk was  learning  a  whole  new  conversational
technique  and  was  astonished  at  how  successful it was. He
regarded the man with a new-found respect.
     "Do you know how many stones there are  in  Wales?"  asked
the man suddenly.
     "Oh ah," said Dirk warily. He didn't know this joke.
     "Nor  do I. He won't tell anybody. Says count 'em yourself
and goes off in a sulk."
     "Oh ah." He didn't think it was a very good one.
     "So this time he hasn't even turned up. Can't say I  blame
him. But I'm sorry, because I think he might be right."
     "Oh ah."
     The man lapsed into silence.
     Dirk waited.
     "Oh ah," he said again, hopefully.
     Nothing.
     "So,  er,"  said  Dirk,  going for a cautious prompt, "you
think he might be right, eh?"
     "Oh ah."
     "So.Old Thor might be right, eh? That's the  story,"  said
Dirk.
     "Oh ah."
     "In what way," said Dirk, running out of patience at last,
"do you think he might be right?"
     "Oh, every way."
     "Oh ah," said Dirk, defeated.
     "It's  no secret that the gods have fallen on hard times,"
said the old man, grimly. "That's clear for all  to  see,  even
for the ones who only care about the pigs,which is most of 'em.
And  when you feel you're not needed any more it can be hard to
think beyond the next pig,even if you used to  have  the  whole
world  there  with you. Everyone just accepts it as inevitable.
Everyone except Thor, that is. And now he's  given  up.  Hasn't
even  bothered  to turn up and break a pig with us.Given up his
challenge. Oh ah."
     "Oh ah," said Dirk.
     "Oh ah."
     "So, er, Thor's challenge then," said Dirk tentatively.
     "Oh ah."
     "What was it?"
     "Oh ah."
     Dirk lost his patience entirely and rounded on the man.
     "What was Thor's challenge to Odin?" he insisted angrily.
     The man looked round at him in slow surprise,lookcd him up
and down with his big sagging eyes.
     "You're a mortal, aren't you?"
     "Yes," said Dirk testily, "I'm a mortal. Of course  I'm  a
mortal. What has being a mortal got to do with it?"
     "How did you get here?"
     "I   followed  you."  He  pulled  the  screwed  up,  empty
cigarette packet out of his pocket and put  it  on  the  table.
"Thanks," he said, "I owe you."
     It was a pretty feeble type of apology, he thought, but it
was the best he could manage.
     "Oh ah." The man looked away.
     "What  was  Thor's  challenge  to Odin?" said Dirk, trying
hard to keep the impatience out of his voice this time.
     "What does it  matter  to  you?"  the  old  immortal  said
bitterly.  "You're  a  mortal.  Why should you care? You've got
what you want out of it, you and your  kind,  for  what  little
it's now worth."
     "Got what we want out of what?"
     "The deal," said the old immortal. "The contract that Thor
claims Odin has entered into."
     "Contract?" said Dirk. "What contract?"
     The  man's  face  filled with an expression of slow anger.
The bonfires of Valhalla danced deeply in his eyes as he looked
at Dirk.
     "The sale," he said darkly, "of an immortal soul."
     "What?" said Dirk. He had already considered this idea and
discounted it. "You mean a man has sold his soul to  him?  What
man? It doesn't make sense."
     "No,"  said  the  man, "that wouldn't make sense at all. I
said an immortal soul. Thor says that Odin has sold his soul to
Man."
     Dirk stared at him with horror and then slowly raised  his
eyes  to  the balcony. Something was happening there. The great
drum beat out again, and the hall of  Valhalla  began  to  hush
itself  once  more.  But  a  second or third drumbeat failed to
come. Something unexpected seemed to  have  occurred,  and  the
figures  on  the  balcony  were  moving  in some confusion. The
Challenging Hour was just expiring, but  a  challenge  of  some
kind seemed to have arrived.
     Dirk  beat  his  palms to his forehead and swayed where he
sat as all kinds of realisations finally dawned on him.
     "Not to Man," he said, "but to  a  man,  and  a  woman.  A
lawyer  and  an  advertiser.  I  said  it was all her fault the
moment I saw her. I didn't realise I might actually be  right."
He rounded on his companion urgently. "I have to get up there,"
he said, "for Gods' sake, help me."

Chapter 29

     "O...dddddiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!"
     Thor  let  out  a bellow of rage which made the sky shake.
The heavy clouds let out a surprised grunt of  thunder  at  the
sheer volume of air that moved beneath them. Kate started back,
white with fear and shock, with her ears ringing.
     "Toe Rag!!!!"
     He  hurled his hammer to the ground right at his very feet
with both hands. He hurled it this  short  distance  with  such
astounding  force  that it hit and rebounded into the air up to
about a hundred feet.
     "Ggggrrrrrraaaaaaaah!!!!!!" With an immense  explosion  of
air  from his lungs he hurled himself up into the air after it,
caught it just as it was  beginning  to  drop,  and  hurled  it
straight back down at the ground again, catching it again as it
bounded  back  up,  twisting  violently  round  in  mid-air and
hurling it with all the force he could muster out to sea before
falling to the ground himself on his  back,  and  pounding  the
earth with his ankles, elbows and fists in an incredible tattoo
of rage.
     The hammer shot out over the sea on a very low trajectory.
The head  went  down  into the water and planed through it at a
constant depth of about  six  inches.  A  sharp  ripple  opened
slowly  but  easily across its surface, extending eventually to
about a mile as the hammer sliced its way  through  it  like  a
surgeon's  knife.  The  inner  walls  of  the  ripple  deepened
smoothly in its wake, falling away from the sheer force of  the
hammer,  till  a vast valley had opened in the face of the sea.
The walls of the valley wobbled and  swayed  uncertainly,  then
folded  up  and  crashed together in crazed and foaming tumult.
The hammer lifted its head and swung up high into the air. Thor
leapt to his feet and watched it, still pounding  his  feet  on
the ground like a boxer, but like a boxer who was perhaps about
to  precipitate a major earthquake. When the hammer reached the
top of its trajectory, Thor hurled his fist  downwards  like  a
conductor,  and  the hammer hurtled down into the crashing mass
of sea.
     That seemed to calm the sea for a moment in the  same  way
that  a  smack  in  the  face  will calm a hysteric. The moment
passed. An immense column of watcr crupted out  of  the  smack,
and  seconds  later  the  hammer  exploded  upwards  out of its
centre, pulling another huge column of water up from the middle
of the first one.
     The hammer somersaulted at the top of  its  rise,  turned,
spun,  and  rushed back to its owner like a wildly over-excited
puppy. Thor caught at it, but instead of stopping it he allowed
it to carry him  backwards,  and  together  they  tumbled  back
through  the  rocks for about a hundred yards and scuffled to a
halt in some soft earth.
     Instantly, Thor was back on  his  feet  again.  He  turned
round  and  round,  bounding  from  one  leg  to the other with
strides of nearly ten feet, swinging the hammer  round  him  at
arm's  length.  When  he  released it again it raced out to sea
once more, but this time it tore round the surface in  a  giant
semicircle, causing the sea to rear up around its circumference
to  form for a moment a gigantic amphitheatre of water. When it
fell forward it crashed like a  tidal  wave,  ran  forward  and
threw itself, enraged, against the short wall of the cliff.
     The  hammer  returned  to  Thor,  who  threw  it off again
instantly in a great overarm. It flew into a rock, hitting  off
a  fat  angry spark. It bounded off further and hit a spark off
another rock, and another. Thor threw himself forward on to his
knees, and with each rock the hammer hit he pounded the  ground
with  his  fist to make the rock rise to meet the hammer. Spark
after spark  erupted  from  the  rocks.  The  hammer  hit  each
successive  one  harder  and harder, until one spark provoked a
warning lick of lightning from the clouds.
     And then the sky began to move, slowly, like a great angry
animal uncoiling in its lair. The pounding sparks  flew  faster
and heavier from the hammer, more lightning licks arced down to
meet  them  from  the sky, and the whole earth was beginning to
tremble in something very like fearful excitement.
     Thor hauled his elbows up above his head and  then  thrust
them hard down with another ringing bellow at the sky.
     "O...ddddiiiiiiinnnnnn!!!!"
     The sky seemed about to crack open.
     "Toe Raaaaagggggggggg!!!!!!!!!"
     Thor  throw  himself  into the ground, heaving aside about
two skipsful of rocky carth. He shook with expanding rage. With
a deep groan the whole of the side of the cliff began slowly to
lean forward into the sea as he pushed  and  shook.  In  a  few
seconds  more  it  tumbled  heavily  into  the seething torment
beneath it as Thor clambered back, seized a rock the size of  a
grand piano and held it above his head.
     Everything seemed still for a fleeting moment.
     Thor hurled the rock into the sea.
     He regained his hammer.
     "O...!" he bellowed.
     "...Ddddddddinnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!"
     His hammer cracked down.
     A  torrent  of  water erupted from the ground, and the sky
exploded. Lightning flickered down like a white wall  of  light
for  miles  along the coast in either direction. Thunder roared
like  colliding  worlds  and  the  clouds  vomited  rain   that
shattered the ground. Thor stood exulting in the torrent.
     A  few minutes later and the violence abated. A strong and
steady rain  continued  to  fall.  The  clouds  were  cleansing
themselves  and  the weak rays of the early morning light began
to find their way through the thinning cover.
     Thor trudged back up from  where  he  had  been  standing,
slapping  and  washing the mud from his hands. He caught at his
hammer when it flew to him.
     He  found  Kate  standing  watching  him,  shivering  with
astonishment, fear and fury.
     "What was that all about?" she yelled at him.
     "I  just needed to be able to lose my temper properly," he
said. When this didn't seem to satisfy her he added, "A god can
show off once in a while can't he?"
     The huddled  figure  of  Tsuliwa&#1082;nsis  came  hurrying  out
through the rain towards them.
     "You're a noisy boy, Thor," she scolded, "a noisy boy."
     But  Thor was gone. When they looked, they guessed that he
must be the tiny speck hurtling northwards through the clearing
sky.

Chapter 30

     Cynthia Draycott peered over the  balcony  at  the  sceene
below them with distaste. Valhalla was back in full swing.
     "I hate this," she said, "I don't want this going on in my
life."
     "You  don't  have  to,  my  darling,"  said Clive Draycott
quietly from behind her, with his hands on her shoulders. "It's
all going to be taken care of right now, and it's going to work
out just fine. Couldn't be better in fact. It's  just  what  we
wanted.  You  know,  you  look fantastic in those glasses? They
really suit you. I mean really. They're very chic."
     "Clive,  it  was  meant  to  have  been  taken   care   of
originally. The whole point was that we weren't to be troubled,
we  could  just  do it, deal with it, and forget about it. That
was the whole point. I've put up with enough shit in my life. I
just wanted it to be good, 100  per  cent.  I  don't  want  all
this."
     "Exactly.  And  that's  why  this is so perfect for us. So
perfect. Clear breach of contract. We get everything we  wanted
now, and we're released from all obligations. Perfecto. We come
out  of  it  smelling of roses, and we have a life that is just
100 per cent good. 100 per cent. And clean. Just exactly as you
wanted it. Really, it couldn't be better for us. Trust me."
     Cynthia Draycott hugged herself irritably.
     "So what about this new...person? Something else  we  have
to deal with."
     "It'll  be  so  easy. So easy. Listen, this is nothing. We
either cut him in to it, or we cut  him  right  out.  It'll  be
taken  care of before we leave here. We'll buy him something. A
new coat. Maybe we'll have to buy him a new  house.  Know  what
that'll  cost us?" He gave a charming laugh. "It's nothing. You
won't ever even need to think about it.  You  won't  ever  even
need  to  think  about  not  thinking about it. It's... that...
easy. OK?"
     "Hm."
     "OK. I'll be right back."
     He turned and headed back into  the  ante-chamber  of  the
hall of the All-Fattier, smiling all the way.
     "So,  Mr...  " he made a show of looking at the card again
"... Gently. You want to act for these people do you?"
     "These immortal gods," said Dirk.
     "OK, gods," said Draycott. "'That's fine.  Perhaps  you'll
do  a  better  job  than the manic little hustler I had to deal
with first time out. You  know,  he's  really  quite  a  little
character,  our  Mr  Rag, Mr Rag. You know, that guy was
really quite amazing. He did everything he could,  tried  every
oldest  trick  in  the  book  to  freak me out, and give me the
run-around. You know how I deal with people like that?  Simple.
I ignore it. I just...ignone it. If he wants to play around and
threaten  and screech, and shovel in five hundred and seventeen
subclauses that he thinks he's going to catch me out on, that's
OK. He's just taking up time, but so what? I've got time.  I've
got  plenty  of  time  for people like Mr Rag. Because you know
what the really crazy thing is? You know  what's  really
crazy?  The  guy  cannot draw up an actual contract to save his
life. Really. To save...his...life. And I tell  you  something,
that's fine by me. He can thrash around and spit all he likes -
when  he  gets  tired  I  just  reel  him in. Listen. I draw up
contracts in the recond business. These guys are  just  minnows
by  comparison.  They're  primitive  savages.  You've met them.
You've dealt with them. They're primitive savages. Well, aren't
they? Like the Red Indians. They don't even know  what  they've
got.  You  know,  these  people are lucky they didn't meet some
real shark. I mean it. You know what  America  cost?  You  know
what  the  whole  United  States  of America actually cost? You
don't, and neither do I. And shall I tell you why? The  sum  is
so  negligible  that  someone could tell us what it was and two
minutes later we would have forgotten. It would have gone clean
out of our minds.
     "Now, compared with that, let me tell you, I am providing.
I am really providing. A private suite in the  Woodshead
Hospital?  Lavish  attention,  food,  sensational quantities of
linen. Sensational. You could practically buy the United
States of  America  at  today's  prices  for  what  that's  all
costing.  But you know what? I said, if he wants the linen, let
him have the linen. Just let him have it. It's fine. The  guy's
earned  it.  He can have all the linen...he...wants. Just don't
fuck with me is all.
     "Now let me  tell  you,  this  guy  has  a  nice  life.  A
nice  life.  And  I think that's what we all want, isn't
it. A nice life. This guy certainly did. And he didn't know how
to have it. None of  these  guys  did.  They're  just  kind  of
helpless  in  the modern world. It's kind of tough for them and
I'm just trying to help out. Let me tell  you  how  na&#1086;ve  they
are, and I mean na&#1086;ve.
     "My  wife,  Cynthia,  you've met her, and let me tell you,
she is the best. I tell you, my relationship with Cynthia is so
good- "
     "I don't want to hear about your  relationship  with  your
wife."
     "OK.  That's  fine.  That's  absolutely fine. I just think
maybe it's worth you getting to know a few things. But whatever
you want is fine. OK. Cynthia's in advertising. You know  that.
She is a senior partner in a major agency. Major. They did some
big  campaign, really big, a few years back in which some actor
is playing a god in this commercial. And he's  endorsing
something, I don't know, a soft drink, you know, tooth rot for
kids.
     And Odin at this time is just a down and out. He's  living
on  the streets. He simply can't get anything together, because
he's just not for this world. All that power,  but  he  doesn't
know  how  to  make it work for him here, today. Now here's the
crazy part.
     "Odin sees this commercial on the television and he thinks
to himself, `Hey, I could do that, I'm a god.' He thinks  maybe
he  could get paid for being in a commercial. And you know what
that would be. Pays even less than the United States of America
cost, you follow me? Think about it. Odin, the chief and  fount
of  all  the power of all of the Norse gods, thinks he might
be able to get paid for being in a television commercial
to sell soft drinks.
  "And this guy, this god, literally goes out and tries to find
someone who'll let him in a TV commercial. Pathetically  na&#1086;ve.
But also greedy - let's not forget greedy.
     "Anyway,  he happens to come to Cynthia's attention. She's
just a lowly account executive at the  time,  doesn't  pay  any
attention, thinks he's just a whacko, but then she gets kind of
fascinated by how odd he is, and I get to see him. And you know
what? It dawns on us he's for real. The guy is for real. A real
actual  god  with  the  whole panoply of divine powers. And not
only a god, but like, the main one.  The  one  all  the  others
depend  on for their power. And he wants to be in a commercial.
Let's just say the word again shall we? A commercial.
     "The idea was dumbfounding. Didn't the guy  know  what  he
had? Didn't he realise what his power could get him?
     "Apparently  not.  I  have  to tell you, this was the most
astounding moment in our lives. A...stoun...ding. Let  me  tell
you,  Cynthia  and  I  have  always  known  that we were, well,
special people, and that something special would happen to  us,
and here it was. Something special.
     "But look. We're not greedy. We don't want all that power,
all that  wealth.  And I mean, we're looking at the world here.
The whole...fucking...world. We  could  own  the  world  if  we
wanted  to.  But  who  wants  to  own  the  world? Think of the
trouble. We don't even want  huge  wealth,  all  those  lawyers
accountants  to deal with, and let me tell you I'm a layer. OK,
so  you  can  hire  people  to  look  after  your  lawyers  and
accountants for you, but who are those people going to be? Just
more  lawyers and accountants. And you know, we don't even want
the responsibility for it all. It's too much.
     "So then I have  this  idea.  It's  like  you  buy  a  big
property,  and  then  you sell on what you don't want. That way
you get what you want, and a lot of other people get what  they
want,  only  they  get  it  through you, and they feel a little
obligated to you, and they remember who  they  got  it  through
because  they  sign  a  piece of paper which says how obligated
they feel to you. And money flows back to pay for our Mr Odin's
very, very, very expensive private medical care.
     "So we don't have much, Mr Gently.  One  or  two  modestly
nice houses. One or two modestly nice cars. We have a very nice
life.  Very,  very  nice  indeed.  We  don't  need much because
anything we need is always made available  to  us,  it's  taken
care  of.  All we demanded, and it was a very reasonable demand
in the circumstances, was that we didn't want to know any  more
about  it.  We  take our modest requirements and we bow out. We
want nothing more than absolute peace and absolute quiet, and a
nice life because Cynthia's sometimes a little nervous. OK.
     "And then what happens this  morning?  Right  on  our  own
doorstep.   Pow.  It's  disgusting.  I  mean  it  is  really  a
disgusting little number. And you know how it happened?
     "Here's how it happened. It's our friend Mr Rag again, and
he's tried to be a clever tricky little voodoo lawyer. It's  so
pathetic.  He  has  fun  trying  to  waste my time with all his
little tricks and games and run-arounds, and then he  tries  to
faze  me  by  presenting  me  with  a bill for his time. That's
nothing. It's work creation. All lawyers do it. OK. So  I  say,
I'll take your bill. I'll take it, I don't care what it is. You
give  me your bill and I'll see it's taken care of. It's OK. So
he gives it to me.
     "It's only later I  see  it's  got  this  tricky  kind  of
subtotal  thing  in it. So what? He's trying to be clever. He's
given me a hot potato. Listen, the record business is  full  of
hot potatoes. You just get them taken care of. There are always
people  happy  to take care of things for you when they want to
make their way up the ladder. If they're worthy of their  place
on  the  ladder,  well, they'll get it taken care of in return.
You get a hot potato, you pass it on. I passed it  on.  Listen,
there  were  a  lot  of people who are very happy to get
things taken care of for me. Hey, you know? It was really funny
seeing how far and how fast that particular potato  got  passed
on.  That  told  me a lot about who was bright and who was not.
But then it lands up in my back garden, and  that's  a  penalty
clause  job  I'm  afraid.  The Woodshead stuff is a very
expensive little number, and I  think  your  clients  may  have
blown  it on that particular score. We have the whip hand here.
We can just  cancel  this  whole  thing.  Believe  me,  I  have
everything I could possibly want now.
     "But   listen,  Mr  Gently.  I  think  you  understand  my
position. We've been pretty frank with each other and I've felt
good about that. There are certain sensitivities  involved,  of
course,  and I'm also in a position to be able to make a lot of
things happen. So perhaps we can come to any one of a number of
possible accommodations. Anything you want, Mr Gently,  it  can
be made to happen."
     "Just  to  see  you  dead, Mr Draycott," said Dirk Gently,
"just to see you dead."
     "Well fuck you, too."
     Dirk Gently turned and left the room and went to tell  his
new client that he thought they might have a problem.

Chapter 31

     A  tittle while later a dark-blue BMVV pulled quietly nway
fran the otherwise deserted forecourt of St Pancras stadon  and
moved off up the quiet streets.
     Somewhat dejected, Dirk Gently put on his hat and left his
newly  acquired  and newly relinquished client who said that he
wished to be alone now and maybe turn into a rat  or  something
like some other people he could mention.
     He closed the great doors behind him and walked slowly out
on to  the  balcony  overlooking the great vaulted hall of gods
and  heroes,  Valhalla.  He  arrived  just  as  the  last   few
stragglers of the revels were fading away, presumably to emerge
at  the  same  moment  in  the  great  vaulted train shed of St
Pancras station. He stayed staring for a  while  at  the  empty
hall, in which the bonfires now were just fading embers.
     It  then  took  the very slightest flicker of his head for
him to perform  the  same  transition  himself,  and  he  found
himself  standing  in  a  gusty and dishevelled corridor of the
empty Midland Grand Hotel. Out in the great dark  concourse  of
St  Pancras  station  he  saw  again  the  last stragglers from
Valhalla shuffling away and out into the cold streets of London
to find benches that were designed not to be slept on,  and  to
try to sleep on them.
     He  sighed  and  tried to find his way out of the derelict
hotel, a task that proved more difficult than  he  anticipated,
as  immense and as dark and as labyrinthine as it was. He found
at last the great winding gothic staircase which  led  all  the
way  down  to  the huge arches of the entrance lobby, decorated
with carvings of dragons  and  griffins  and  heavy  ornamental
ironwork. The main front entrance was locked as it had been for
years,  and  eventually Dirk found his way down a side corridor
to an exit manned by a  great  sweaty  splodge  of  a  man  who
guarded  it  at  night. He demanded to know how Dirk had gained
entrance to the hotel and refused to be satisfied by any of his
explanations. In the end he had simply to allow Dirk to  leave,
since there was little else he could do.
     Dirk  crossed  from this entrance to the entrance into the
station booking hall, and then into the station itself.  For  a
while  he  simply  stood there looking around, and then he left
via the main station entrance, and descended  the  steps  which
led  down  on  to  the St Pancras Road. As he emerged on to the
street he was so surprised not to be instantly swooped upon  by
a  passing  eagle that he tripped and stumbled and was run over
by the first of the early morning's motorcycle couriers.

Chapter 32

     With a huge crash, Thor surged through the wall at the far
end of the great hall of Valhalla and stood ready  to  proclaim
to the assembled gods and heroes that he had finally managed to
break  through  to  Norway and had found a copy of the contract
Odin had signed buried deep in the side of a mountain,  but  he
couldn't because they'd all gone and there was no one there.
     "There's no one here," he said to Kate, releasing her from
his huge grip, "they've all gone."
     He slumped in disappointment.
     "Wh - " said Kate.
     "We'll  try  the old man's chambers," said Thor and hurled
his hammer up to the balcony, with themselves in tow.
     He stalked through the  great  chambers,  ignoring  Kate's
pleas, protests and general abuse.
     He wasn't there.
     "He's  here  somewhere,"  said  Thor angrily, trailing his
hammer behind him.
     "We'll go through the world divide,"  he  said,  and  took
hold of Kate again. They flicked themselves through.
     They were in a large bedroom suite in the hotel.
     Litter  and  scraps  of rotting carpet covered the floors,
the windows were grimy with years of neglect. Pigeon  droppings
were  everywhere,  and the peeling paintwork made it look as if
several small families of starfish had exploded on the walls.
     Thene was an abandoned trolleybed in  the  middle  of  the
floor  in  which an old man lay in beautifully laundered linen,
weeping from his one remaining eye.
     "I found the contract, you bastard," raged Thor, waving it
at him. "I found the deal you  did.  You  sold  all  our  power
to...to  a  lawyer  and a...an advertiser and, and all sorts of
other people. You stole our power! You couldn't  steal  all  of
mine  because  I'm  too  strong, but you kept me bewildered and
confused, and made bad things happen every time  I  got  angry.
You  prevented  me  getting back home to Norway by every method
you could, because you knew I'd find this! You and that  poison
dwarf  Toe  Rag.  You've  been  abusing  and humiliating me for
years, and - "
     "Yes, yes, we know all that," said Odin.
     "Well...Good!"
     "Thor - " said Kate.
     "Well I've shaken all that off now!" shouted Thor.
     "Yes, I see - "
     "I went somewhere I could get good  and  angry  in  pence,
when  I knew you'd be otherwise occupied and expecting me to be
here, and I had a hell of a good shout and  blew  things  up  a
bit, and I'm all right now! And I'm going to tear this up for a
start!"
     He  ripped right through the contract, threw the pieces in
the air and incinerated them with a look.
     "Thor - " said Kate.
     "And I'm going to put right all the things you made happen
so I'd be afraid of getting angry. The poor girl at the airline
check-in desk that got turned into a drink machine. Woof! Wham!
She's back! The jet fighter that tried to shoot me down when  I
was  flying  to Norway! Woof! Wham! It's back! See, I'm back in
control of myself!"
     "What jet fighter?" asked Kate. "You haven't told me about
a jet fighter."
     "It tried to shoot me down over the North Sea.  We  had  a
scrap  and  in the heat of the moment I, well, I turned it into
an eagle, and it's been bothering me ever since. So now  that's
dealt  with.  Don't look at me like that. I did what I could. I
took care of his wife by fixing one of  those  lottery  things.
Look,"  he  added  angrily, "all this has been very difficult
for me, you know. All right. What else?"
     "My table lamp," said Kate quietly.
     "And Kate's table lamp! It shall  be  a  small  kitten  no
more!  Woof!  Wham!  Thor  speaks  and  it is so! What was that
noise?"
     A ruddy glow was spreading across the London skyline.
     Thor, I think there's something wrong with your father."
     "I should bloody well hope so. Oh. What's  wrong?  Father?
Are you all right?"
     "I have been so very, very foolish and unwise," wept Odin,
"I have been so wicked and evil, and - "
     "Yes, well that's what I think, too," said Thor and sat on
the cnd of his bed. "So what are we going to do?"
     "I  don't  think  I  could  live  without my linen, and my
Sister Bailey, and... It's been so, so, so long, and I'm so, so
old. Toe Rag said I should kill you,  but  I...I  would  rather
have killed myself. Oh, Thor..."
     "Oh,"  said  Thor.  "I  see. Well. I don't know what to do
now. Blast. Blast everything."
     "Thor -"
     "Yes, yes, what is it?"
     "Thor, it's very simple what you do about your father  and
the Woodshead," said Kate.
     "Oh yes? What then?"
     "I'll tell you on one condition."
     "Oh really? And what's that?"
     "That you tell me how many stones there are in Wales."
     "What!"  exclaimed  Thor in outrage. "Away from me! That's
years of my life you're talking about!"
     Kate shrugged.
     "No!" said Thor. "Anything  but  that!  Anyway,  he  added
sullenly, "I told you."
     "No you didn't."
     "Yes   I   did.   I   said   I  lost  count  somewhere  in
Mid-Glamorgan. Well, I was hardly going to start again, was  I?
Think, girl, think!

Chapter 33

     Beating  a  path  through  the  difficult territory to the
north-east of Valhalla - a network of paths that seemed to lead
only to other paths and then back to the first paths again  for
another  try  -  went  two  figures, one a big, stupid, violent
creature with green eyes and a scythe which hung from its  belt
and  often  seriously impeded its progress, the other a small
crazed creature who clung on to the back  of  the  bigger  one,
manically  urging him on white actuaily impeding his progress
still further.
     They attained at last a long, low,  smelly  building  into
which  they  hurried shouting for horses. The old stable master
came forward, recognised them  and,  having  heard  already  of
their  disgrace, was at first disinclined to help them on their
way. 'The  scythe  flashed  through  the  air  and  the  stable
master's  head  started upwards in surprise while his body took
an affronted step backwards, swayed uncertainly, and  then  for
lack  of  any  further instructions to the contrary keeled over
backwards in its own time. His head bounded into the hay.
     His assailants hurriedly lashed up two horses  to  a  cart
and clattered away out of the stable yard and along the broader
thoroughfare which led upwards to the north.
     They  made  rapid progress up the road for a mile, Toe Rag
urging the horses on frantically with a long  and  cruel  whip.
After a few minutes, however, the horses began to slow down and
to  look  about  them  uneasily.  Toe  Rag  lashed them all the
harder, but they became more anxious still then  suddenly  lost
all  control  and  reared  in terror, turning over the cart and
tipping its occupants  out  on  the  ground,  from  which  they
instantly sprang up in a rage.
     Toe  Rag screamed at the terrified horses and then, out of
the corner of his eye, caught sight of what  had  so  disturbed
them.
     It wasn't so terrifying. It was just a large, white, metal
box, upturned on a pile of rubbish by the roadside and rattling
itself.
     The  horses  were rearing and trying to bolt away from the
big white rattling thing but they were impossibly entangled  in
their  traces.  They  were  only  working  themselves up into a
thrashing lather of panic. Toe Rag quickly realised that  there
would be no calming them until the box was dealt with.
     "Whatever it is," he screeched at the green-eyed creature,
"kill it!"
     Green-eye  unhooked his scythe from his belt once more and
clambered up the pile of rubbish to where the box was rattling.
He kicked it and it only rattled the  more.  He  got  his  foot
behind it and with a heavy thrust shoved it away down the heap.
The  big  white box slithered a foot or so then turned over and
toppled to the ground. It rested there for a moment and then  a
door, finally freed, flew open. The horses screamed in fear.
     Toe  Rag and his green-eyed thug approached the thing with
worried curiosity, then staggered back in horror as a great and
powerful new god erupted from its innards.

Chapter 34

     The following afternoon, at a  comfortable  distance  from
alI  these  events,  set at a comfortable distance from a well-
proportioned window  through  which  the  afternoon  light  was
streaming,  lay  an  elderly  one-eyed  man  in  a white bed. A
newspaper sat like a half-collapsed tent on the floor, where it
had been hurled two minutes before.
     The man was awake but not  glad  to  be.  His  exquisitely
frail  hands lay slightly curled on the pure white linen sheets
and quivered very faintly.
     His name was variously given as Mr  Odwin,  or  Wodin,  or
Odin.  He  was  - is - a god, and furthermore he was a confused
and startled god.
     He was confused and startled because of the report he  had
just been reading on the front page of the newspaper, which was
that  another  god had been cutting loose and making a nuisance
of himself. It didn't say so in so many  words  of  course,  it
merely  described  what  had happened last night when a missing
jet fighter aircraft had mysteriously erupted under full  power
from  out  of  a  house in North London into which it could not
conceivably have been thought to have fitted. It had  instantly
lost  its  wings and gone into a screaming dive and crashed and
exploded in a main road. The pilot had managed to eject  during
the  few seconds he had had in the air, and had landed, shaken,
bruised, but otherwise unharmed, and babbling about strange men
with hammers flying over the North Sea.
     Luckily, because of the time  at  which  the  inexplicable
disaster  had  occurred,  the  roads  were almost deserted, and
apart from massive damage to property, the only  fatalities  to
have  occurred  were the as yet unidentified occupants of a car
which was thought to have been  possibly  a  BMW  and  possibly
blue,  though  because  of  the  rather  extreme  nature of the
accidcnt it was rather hard to tell.
     He was very, very tired and did not want  to  think  about
it,  did  not  want  to think about last night, did not want to
think of anything other than linen sheets and how wonderful  it
was  when  Sister Bailey patted them down around him as she had
just now, just five minutes ago, and  again  just  ten  minutes
before that.
     The  American girl, Kate something, came into his room. He
wished she would just let him sleep. She  was  going  on  about
something  being  all fixed up. She congratulated him on having
extremely high blood pressure, high cholesterol  levels  and  a
very  dicky heart, as a consequence of which the hospital would
be very glad to accept him as a lifelong patient in return  for
his  entire  estate.  They  didn't  even  care to know what his
estate was worth, because it would  clearly  be  sufficient  to
cover a stay as brief as his was likely to be.
     She  seemed  to  expect  him  to  be pleased, so he nodded
amiably, thanked her vaguely and drifted, drifted  happily  off
to sleep.

Chapter 35

     The  same  afternoon  Dirk Gently awake, also in hospital,
suffering from mild  concussion,  scrapes  and  bruises  and  a
broken  leg.  He had had the greatest difficulty in explaining,
on admittance, that most of his injuries had been caused  by  a
small  boy  and  an eagle, and that really, being run over by a
motorcycle courier was a relatively restful experience since it
mostly involved lying down a lot and not being swooped on every
two minutes.
     He was kept under sedation - in other words,  he  slept  -
for most of the morning, suffering terrible dreams in which Toe
Rag and a green-eyed, scythe-bearing giant made their escape to
the  north-east  from  Valhalla,  where  they were unexpectedly
accosted and consumed by a newly  created,  immense  Guilt  God
which had finally escaped from what looked suspiciously like an
upturned refrigerator on a skip.
     He was relieved to be woken at last from this by a cheery,
"Oh it's you, is it? You nicked my book."
     He  opened  his eyes and was greeted by the sight of Sally
Mills, the girl he had been violently accosted by the  previous
day  in  the caf&#1080;, for no better reason than that he had, prior
to nicking her book, nicked her coffee.
     "Well, I'm glad to see you took my advice and came  in  to
have  your  nose  properly attended to," she said as she fussed
around him. "Pretty roundabout way you seem to have  taken  but
you're  here  and that's the main thing. You caught up with the
girl you were interested in did you? Oddly  enough,  you're  in
the very bed that she was in. If you see her again, perhaps you
could  give her this pizza which she arranged to have delivered
before checking herself out. It's all cold now, but the courier
did insist that she was very adamant it should be delivered.
     "I don't mind you nicking  the  book,  really,  though.  I
don't  know  why I buy them really, they're not very good, only
everyone always does, don't they? Somebody told  me  there's  a
rumour  he had entered into a pact with the devil or something.
I think that's nonsense, though I did hear another story  about
him which I much preferred. Apparently he's always having these
mysterious  deliveries  of  chickens to his hotel rooms, and no
one dares to ask why or even guess what it  is  he  wants  them
for,  because  nobody  ever  sees a single scrap of them again.
Well, I met somebody who knows exactly what he wants them  for.
The  somebody  I met once had the job of secretly smuggling the
chickens straight back out of his rooms again. What Howard Belt
gets out of it is a reputation for being  a  very  strange  and
demonic  man and everybody buys his books. Nice work if you can
get it is what I say. Anyway, I expect you don't want  to  have
me  nattering to you alt afternoon, and even if you do I've got
better things to do. Sister says you'll probably be  discharged
this  evening  so you can go to your own home and sleep in your
own bed, which I'm sure you'll much prefer.  Anyway,  hope  you
feel better, here's a couple of newspapers."
     Dirk took the papers, glad to be left alone at last.
     He  first  turned to see what The Great Zaganza had to say
about his day. The Great Zaganza said, "You are  very  fat  and
stupid  and persistently wear a ridiculous hat which you should
be ashamed of."
     He grunted slightly to himself about this, and  turned  to
the horoscope in the other paper.
     It said, "Today is a day to enjoy home comforts."
     Yes, he thought, he would be glad to get back home. He was
still  strangely  relieved  about getting rid of his old fridge
looked forwand to enjoying a new phase of fridge ownership with
the spanking new model currently  sitting  in  his  kitchen  at
home.
     Then  was  the  eagle  to  think about, but he would worry
about that later, when he got home.
     He turned to the front  page  to  see  if  there  was  any
interesting news.



