CHAPTER SEVEN

Dennis Tanner was reading his obituary when the call came through.

He’d found it eighteen months ago, in the back of one of the trade journals, while looking for a piece on applied demonology in the petrochemicals industry. Dennis Norman Azog Tanner, 18801997, and a list of his various discoveries, publications and achievements. At the time he’d been bewildered, terrified and extremely annoyed that they’d left out his 1989 Gandalf award (the bauxite find at Wayatumba; still the biggest on record). Now it was just a useful reference for dates and names.

‘Call for you from Carringtons,’ his mother said. ‘That pushy tart.’

Coming from her, that was praise indeed, and it could only refer to Amelia Carrington - his god-daughter, for what little it was worth. She’d been a revolting child, he remembered; top of the class in everything, played six musical instruments and kept winning rosettes at gymkhanas. Of course, the winged horse was an advantage.

‘Fine,’ Dennis Tanner said, closing the journal and putting it away in his desk drawer. ‘Put her through.’

Click, pause; then, ‘Uncle Dennis.’

He frowned. He was only Uncle Dennis when she wanted something, and anything the managing partner of Carringtons wanted from a sole practitioner with an office over a chemist’s shop couldn’t be good. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Pretty good.’ That low, husky voice, Marlene Dietrich with her mouth full of chocolate. Pure effective magic, of course. Unadjusted, she sounded like a mouse on helium. ‘Reason I’m calling, I’ve got something that’s rather in your line, and I thought it might be fun if we looked at it together.’

Being mostly humanoid, Dennis Tanner didn’t have the wonderfully expressive ears of his goblin ancestors. If he had, they’d have been right back, like a worried cat’s. ‘Something in my line,’ he repeated. ‘You mean minerals.’

‘Bauxite, yes. Jerome Hernandez in our Christchurch office thinks he’s on to something, but apparently there’s high levels of ambient thaumaton radiation, which means he can’t get a clear reading. I seem to remember something in that April ‘76 article of yours in the Gazette about cutting through thaumaton interference, so I thought I’d give you a shout.’

Dennis leaned back in his chair and groped for a cigar. Very flattering, of course, that she’d read his article, even though it was groundbreaking stuff and still the last word on the subject. But if she remembered it, including the date and everything, why didn’t she just look it up, instead of ringing him? Letting a trade rival know that there was a whiff of a big bauxite find in-Christchurch office, did she say? Presumably not Hampshire, so New Zealand somewhere. Not the sort of thing a sensible person would do. And for all her many faults, Amelia was sensible. Smart as a smart bomb, in fact.

‘Thaumaton radiation,’ he said slowly, playing for time. ‘Well, basically, it’s caused by the decay of compromised magic particles in a powerful Effective field. Eberhard and Chang—’

‘I know all that, Uncle Dennis,’ Amelia interrupted, and her voice changed slightly: a shark’s fin breaking the surface of an ocean of dark brown honey. ‘What I need to know is, what can we do about it? I mean, Jerome’s a nice enough boy and very sound on basic scrying, but if what he’s saying about the scale of the thing’s anything to go by, we need to cut to the chase on this one, start out the way we mean to end up, you know? So, naturally, I thought of you.’

Quite, Dennis said to himself; and if that’s right, it’s the first natural thought you ever had in your life. ‘I’d be interested,’ he said carefully. ‘What’s the deal?’

‘Joint venture.’ Dennis nearly dropped the phone. ‘Your expertise, we do the legwork and the boring stuff-the legal side, contractors, all that. Obviously we’ll organise the money. Basically, you find the stuff, we dig it up and flog it.’

Joint venture. Dennis tried to light his cigar and scorched the tip of his nose instead. It was his experience, painfully and often bloodily acquired, that anything that seems too good to be true is probably too good to be true. And as far as trustworthiness was concerned, Amelia Carrington was a British government dossier. Even so.

‘Sounds good,’ he managed to croak. ‘When are you free?’

‘Right now.’ Alarm bells. Amelia I-can-window-you-five-minutes-next-January Carrington, free right now. An urge to grow a beard and flee the country gripped Dennis Tanner like a mole wrench, but he suppressed it. There was an old goblin saying: your enemy is never more vulnerable than when he’s trying to be clever. And if there was one resource Dennis Tanner had every confidence in, it was his own cleverness. ‘Fantastic,’ he said. ‘Your place or mine?’

‘Here, I think.’ Amelia’s voice had just the right modulation of distaste. ‘No disrespect, Uncle Dennis, but I think our facilities are just a tad more cutting-edge than yours.’ Slight pause. ‘Shall I send a car, or—?’

‘Thanks,’ Dennis replied through gritted teeth. ‘The bus’ll do me fine. See you soon, then.’

‘Ciao.’

He sat for a while with the phone in his hand, thinking serious thoughts. Old Tosser Carrington, for example. A complete idiot blessed with ridiculously good luck and just enough vicious low cunning to survive; back in the nineteen-hundreds they’d been good mates, two young newly qualified magicians trying to make it in the merciless cut and thrust of the Canberra sorcery trade. When they’d quit Oz to give the old country a go, they’d had some kind of vague idea of setting up in partnership: Dennis on corporate magic and minerals, Tosser handling the private-client and pest-control side. But within a few weeks of getting here, Tosser had been practically handed an apprenticeship at Mortimers on a plate, leaving Dennis to fend for himself. True, the first job he’d applied for had been at J. W. Wells, and the rest was history, as his obituary was at pains to point out. Nevertheless, the old resentment was still there, logged and ticketed and archived in Dennis’s monumental grudge collection. The thought that, now he was down on his luck and scratching a living in inner-city Nowheresville, Tosser Carrington’s equally obnoxious daughter was going to wave a magic wand and make him rich and famous once again was a bit too much to swallow.

A trap, then. Well, she was perfectly capable of it, but why bother? If she meant him harm, why go to such ridiculous lengths? Damaging people, getting rid of them entirely, was easy-peasy for someone like Amelia. Which reminded him of something. Carringtons. Better Mousetraps.

Dennis’s nostrils flared. He believed in coincidences to the same extent that the Pope believes in Odin. The possibility that this stuff was somehow Carpenter-related gave him a pain in his midriff. He scowled, rebuking himself for his own dimness. Lights should have gone on when Amelia had mentioned New Zealand: last known address of Paul and Sophie Carpenter, location of the vast bauxite deposit with which he and his erstwhile partners had paid those two unmitigated pests off after the nasty business with Theo van Spee and custardspace. He shivered. He could feel dark, slimy tendrils of Carpenter curling softly around him, poised to crush him into pulp.

Yes, but a joint venture with Carringtons-Dennis Tanner knew all about tides in the affairs of men, and he was Australian enough to know that any tide can be ridden if you’re handy enough with your surfboard. And, of course, he had one special weapon that Amelia had almost certainly underestimated and quite possibly clean forgotten about. He frowned, then grinned the great, unique Tanner grin. Then he rang through to the front office.

‘Mum,’ he said, ‘get your coat. We’re going out.’

In the bottom left-hand corner of the big screen, which at that precise moment was filled with Russell Crowe’s hugely amplified armpit, a door opened.

Luckily, it was the mid-afternoon showing, so nobody noticed as Frank Carpenter stepped out from under Russell’s coat, nipped smartly down the Door’s foldaway stairs and darted up the centre aisle. Thanks to Mr Sprague’s excellent report on the Catford multiplex blaze, he had no trouble finding the small patch of smouldering carpet. He jumped up and down on it a few times, emptied the bottle of Evian he’d brought with him over the embers and retraced his steps. Job done.

The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in West London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out the fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.

He had shirts, of course-three of them. One of them was a sort of blotchy off-white, with frayed cuffs and collar. One of them was yellow, with a striking Paisley motif, a birthday present from his mother. He’d been wearing the third for three days now, and even when it was pristine from the launderette it was hardly a thing of beauty. When a man’s got a date with the girl he thinks he may be in love with, he may well find himself having to reassess his entire shirt philosophy. Also, he decided, trousers. And socks. And stuff.

Of course, Frank thought as he wandered in through the door, I could be really daring and hell-for-leather go-for-it and buy a suit. Probably that’s what Alexander the Great would’ve done, and possibly also Napoleon and Robert E. Lee. Also, with a suit you get a jacket as well as the trousers, which’d be two birds with one stone. On the other hand, there’s no point in overdoing it. I mean, suppose it doesn’t work out and I haven’t met the girl of my dreams?

Then I’d be broken-hearted and all alone in the world, and stuck with a useless set of clothes I’ll never wear again. You’ve got to be practical, play the odds, have a fall-back position; like Hannibal, the Duke of Wellington or Field Marshal Montgomery.

An escalator took Frank up two floors, and he found himself in a place where there were shirts. Lots of shirts. Everywhere he looked, shirts pressed in on him like the souls of the dead in the underworld, each one seeming to reach out to him, begging him to take them out of there into the light. The reckless courage that had got him in through the Door was ebbing fast. There were too many of the damned things, and how could anybody be expected to choose between them? By one set of criteria, they were all practically identical - two sleeves, collar, buttons, everything a boy could ever need in terms of weather exclusion neatly contained in one simple-to-operate package. Looked at from the other relevant perspective, the variety was stunning. Patterned and plain, stripes going up and down and side to side, colours representing every conceivable fragmentation of the spectrum, combinations of every colour imaginable; and the bitch of it was, some of these shirts were right and some of them were wrong, and he had no idea of how the rules worked. All he knew was that if you got it right, you looked a million dollars and lovely women melted into your arms like ice cream on a hot day, and if you got it wrong, children pointed at you in the street. It was, he couldn’t help thinking, a bit like the other incomprehensible scary thing, the one he was buying the shirt for. Finding the right one, having the wit to know it when you’d found it, keeping it, looking after it properly, never letting it go. Washing it occasionally. Ironing. Life is so much easier, of course, if you never bother.

That had been easy enough back in Wayatumba, South Island, where Frank had lived in a pretty remote place and had never got opportunities to meet many shirts. Here, though, they were everywhere you looked. You couldn’t ignore them, sooner or later you had to bite the bullet and find a way of coping, unless you wanted to have nothing to look forward to but a lonely old age wearing nothing but vests and polo-necks. And sometimes, when life steams up your mind’s glasses and you can’t see the pattern that governs your destiny, you just have to trust to providence and synchronocity and take a chance. Frank pulled himself together, clenched his muscles till the tendons twanged, and grabbed the first shirt that came to hand. It was pink.

So much for providence and synchronicity. He put it back with the strained delicacy of someone handling something dead, looked again and gave up. It was too difficult. Given, say, three shirts to choose from, he could probably reach a decision if he took his time. Three hundred, however, was too many.

I don’t actually have to do this, Frank told himself. I could Portable Door back home, wash, dry and iron the shirt I’m wearing and still be in good time for lunch. And yes, all right, using magic so I don’t have to do a perfectly simple thing that everybody else but me can cope with may be a bit pathetic and sad, but so what? Surely magic’s there for the pesky little things in life rather than the great big important stuff that only matters to governments and multinational companies; or if it isn’t, it damn well should be.

He played that thought back, and sighed. Well, quite; and while you’re at it, feed the world and give peace a chance. All in all, it was probably just as well he’d never been tempted to go into the magic business. Just think of all the damage he could’ve done, even in the very short space of time he’d have been likely to survive.

The hell with it, he thought. Quick look round, then into the changing room, where he spread the Door over the full-length mirror and stepped through.

Mr Sprague was mildly surprised to see him. ‘Not business,’ Frank explained quickly. ‘Need a favour. Won’t take a minute. Please?’

‘Not business,’ Mr Sprague repeated, as if speaking a foreign language he didn’t understand.

‘No. Personal. Look, it’ll take longer to explain than to do it, so—’

‘All right.’ Mr Sprague scowled. ‘You don’t expect me to go into that thing, do you?’

‘What? Oh, the Door.’ Frank laughed. ‘You don’t want to worry about that. Perfectly safe. And if you’re really, really busy—’

‘Yes?’

‘I promise I’ll get you back here one second after we leave. Deal?’

‘Urn.’

‘One second before we leave.’

Sigh. ‘Well, if you really insist—’

‘Thanks.’ Frank held the Door open. ‘After you.’

‘Are you sure that thing’s—?’

‘Positive. I use it myself, every day.’

Head bowed, fingers crossed, eyes screwed shut, Mr Sprague edged through the Door and disappeared. Shaking his head, Frank followed him, and walked out into the M&S changing room. ‘There,’ he said, closing the Door and catching it as it fell off the surface of the mirror, ‘you see? Safe as—’

His mouth froze. He looked at the curtain in front of him, the mirror behind, the narrow space in between. Then he ripped open the curtain, plunged through it and stood for a moment, completely stunned.

No sign of Mr Sprague. Vanished. Gone.

When she was a little girl, Emily Spitzer was terrified of spiders. Her father, being that sort of man, refused to deal with them when she came sobbing. Life, he used to say, is full of scary things. The sooner you learn how to deal with them for yourself, the better. You’ll learn to be resourceful, self-reliant. You have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Not knowing any better, Emily took him at his word; and, since she was the sort of person who has to do everything well, she quickly transformed herself from a perfectly normal junior arachnophobe into the champion spider-hunter of the Home Counties. She learned how to approach quietly, not making sudden movements that’d be likely to spook them and send them scuttling away into their inaccessible fastnesses under the skirting board. She learned the quick, wristy swat with a slipper heel or a rolled-up teen-fashion magazine, the precise amount of forward allowance to compensate for the last-second panic scuttle. By the age of ten, she was squashing spiders for her friends and their parents, at 25p a time. When she passed the entrance exam for magic college and had to choose a specialisation, it was almost inevitable that she’d opt for pest control; after all, it was no more than spider-hunting on a slightly larger scale, but with access to vastly more efficient forms of slipper heel. If she doubted her decision, it was only because pest control wasn’t one of the fast-track disciplines that got you a partnership before you were thirty, unlike, say, Media & Entertainment or spiritual conveyancing. The danger aspect of it didn’t bother her in the least, since she knew all about fear and how easy it was to overcome. Piece of cake, she thought. Line up those supernatural monsters and let me at ‘em.

Her first encounter with giant spiders (arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii) changed all that. It was, perhaps, unfortunate that the class tutor who was demonstrating basic giant-spider-management skills got his head bitten off, leaving Emily to lead the rest of the tutor group to safety through a thousand acres of Atkinsoniihaunted forest. As the goblins say, though, it’s the burned child who fears the baptism of fire. On her return from that memorable field trip, as soon as she was out of intensive care, she amended her father’s first law of survival by adding to it three small but very important words. Henceforth, it went

You have nothing to fear but fear itself and scary things.

As the taxi stopped outside the offices of Zimmerman and Schnell in Lombard Street, it was in Emily’s mind to share her guiding principle with Erskine Cannis. She had an idea that it might help him survive until, say, next Wednesday. She wasn’t prepared to rate his life expectancy any higher than that, mostly because by then she would almost certainly have killed him herself.

‘I think you’ll find,’ he was saying, as the taxi drove off and left them at the kerbside, ‘that section 47, paragraph 5(c) of the third schedule to the Endangered Species Preservation Order 1997 includes all three of the major European subspecies of Atkinsonii as category 6, which means you can’t destroy them with Class B explosives in a metropolitan district or the Isle of Wight without express permission from the secretary of state. Of course, if they turn out to be arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii erythrostomata, there is a general licence during March and April—’

‘We’re here,’ Emily said, loudly and clearly. ‘Now then—’

‘The distinguishing marks of erythrostomata, as I scarcely need to remind you—’

‘Shut your face and carry the bags.’

The woman at the front desk asked them their names and the purpose of their visit; Emily replied, ‘Pest control,’ and the woman gave them each a little plastic badge. Then they sat and waited for a long time, until Mr Ahriman from Maintenance saw fit to come down and claim them as his own.

‘Big bastards,’ he said, in the voice of someone who’s seen rather more than he wanted to. ‘Big hairy bastards with ten legs—’

‘Ah,’ said Erskine, smirking, ‘arachnis grandiforma Atkinsonii pachythorax. In which case, schedule four applies.’ Mr Ahriman shot him a terrified glance. ‘What’s he talking about?’

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Emily said firmly. ‘And even if it did, we aren’t going to start letting off nukes in the middle of the City of London, so you can forget about that for a start. Technical stuff,’ she told Mr Ahriman blandly - he’d gone ever such a funny colour - ‘nothing for you to worry about. You just leave everything to us and we’ll have them out of there in a brace of shakes. Oh, while I think of it,’ she added, ‘we’ll need some dust sheets and a couple of big rolls of sticky tape. Could you possibly organise that for us? Thanks.’

Mr Ahriman left them outside a door on the third floor marked No Unauthorised Entry and scuttled back into the lift. When the doors had closed behind him, Erskine said, ‘What are the dust sheets for?’

‘Nothing,’ Emily replied. ‘It’s just to give him something to do, let him feel he’s contributing. And another thing,’ she said. ‘When we’re on a job, don’t you ever talk about trade stuff in front of the punter again. Got that?’

‘Of course.’

She sighed. Rebukes, even when pitched at bollocking level, just seemed to soak away into Erskine, like water into sand. Instead of cringing or taking offence like a normal human being, he was grateful. That was too much. It wasn’t natural. It was inhuman. ‘Good,’ she said weakly. ‘Glad we’ve got that sorted out. Now, then.’

Her mind had gone blank. She couldn’t think what she was supposed to do next.

Of course, Emily said to herself, I’m used to working solo. Having someone else along flusters me. Even so; it wasn’t good. On the other side of the door was an unspecified number of giant spiders (the ten-leg variety; oh, joy): lightning-fast, bodies as big as cows, legs like scaffolding, stings that went through five-mil Kevlar like it wasn’t there, venom sacks holding more poison that a party conference-dammit, she needed to be focused, tuned, in touch with the grimly single-minded little girl with the torch in one hand and the slipper in the other who feared nothing (except fear itself) and who got the job done. And instead, here she was, mind like a teenager’s bedroom, dithering.

‘Right,’ she snapped, her voice a trifle shrill, ‘prime the stun grenades, and-no, scratch that, set up up the Everleigh scanners and then prime the grenades. Or is it the other way round?’

Panic.

Emily had heard the stories, of course. Everyone in the trade had heard them. Hugo van Leipzig, winner of five consecutive Siegfrieds, suddenly freezing in the middle of a routine manticore clearance. Gordon Shirasaya, five hundred and seven authenticated vampire stakings, taken down by a poxy little Class Seven because he lost the plot at the critical moment and dropped his tent peg. It was the thing you dreaded and never ever talked about in the bar at seminars, the sudden, unexplained onset of crippling fear in the course of a piece-of-shit milk run. It happened, everybody knew that. Basically, if you’d already lasted more than eighteen months in the trade, you knew for stone-cold certain that, sooner or later, that was how you were going to die. But this isn’t that, screamed a voice inside Emily’s head; she thought about it, as dispassionately as she could, and had to agree. It wasn’t fear, she’d know it if it was. She’d feel the twisting in her stomach, the vicious twinge in the bladder, the loosening of the bowels. Not fear, then: something worse. It was-it was just woolly-mindedness, plain and simple. Somewhere in her head a door or a window had been left open, and she couldn’t concentrate.

‘Grenades first, isn’t it?’ The voice just behind her had lost that insufferable cockiness. Erskine was worried. Not good. ‘Then the scanner, and then—’

‘Then the thunderflashes, masks on, and then the gas bottles.’ Emily was almost sobbing with relief as she said it. Her mind was clear again, and of course she knew what to do. ‘Sorry about that,’ she heard herself say. ‘Just had a funny five seconds. Got those primers in, have you?’

‘Nearly. Look, are you feeling all right? Only—’

‘Of course I am, I’m fine. And get a move on with those primers. If we stand out here chatting all day they’ll register our body heat and then we’ll be really screwed. Or didn’t they tell you that at college?’

Erskine handed her the first grenade in dead silence. Oops, Emily thought. Not making the most brilliant first impression here. Not, she added quickly, that it matters a flying fuck what that young stick of celery thinks. Even so.

‘Right,’ she said; and, with the fluency of long practice, she breathed in deep and out again, and kicked open the door.

After that, it was all a bit of an anti-climax. The stun grenades made the whole building shake, and in the complete dead silence that followed she fitted together the three parts of the Everleigh scanner as coolly as if she was putting the little brush thing on her vacuum cleaner at home. Thunderflashes - ho hum, yawn; slip the mask on, turn calmly round to make sure that Erskine’s mask was clipped down properly, then out come the cyanide-gas bottles, twiddle the valve screws, close the door, sit down on the floor, set the timer, get out the latest Robert Harris and chill for ten minutes while the gas does its work—

‘Excuse me,’ Erskine said. ‘What are you doing?’

Emily looked up from her book. ‘Reading,’ she said.

‘But—’ Shocked expression, as if she was doing something disgusting. ‘Shouldn’t you be monitoring life signs on the Everleigh scanner?’

‘Nah.’ She yawned. ‘You can, if you like. Personally, I find watching a digital readout counting down from three thousand doesn’t really light my fuse. Tell you what,’ she said pleasantly. ‘Why don’t you go and find someone to make us a nice cup of tea? Milk and no sugar.’

‘I-Certainly, right away.’ For a split second, she honestly believed he was going to click his heels.

When Erskine had gone she tried to read, but her eyes just seemed to skid off the page. She shut the book, leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes. Whatever had happened to her back then - not fear; not fear of death, anyhow, but there are other scary things in the world - it hadn’t been any fun at all, and she needed to figure out what it was before she went any further. Was it, Emily asked herself, just that she’d been working alone for so long that any disruption to her customary procedures was enough to thrown her off balance? Or was it Erskine’s unique ability to create irritation and self-doubt? She considered the evidence-no problem at all concentrating now-and reluctantly decided that it was none of the above.

True, it was the first time she’d had a trainee tied to her tail, but there’d been plenty of times when the client, or the office manager or the head of security or some other pest had tagged along and got under her feet, and on those occasions she hadn’t gone all soft in the head. Quite the reverse: the annoyance had only made her more focused, as she’d sublimated the irritation into cold, grim determination to do the job and get out of there before she murdered a customer. No, it was something else, something she couldn’t isolate and label. She hadn’t frozen, or let annoyance distract her. Instead, there’d been a moment when she hadn’t been herself, almost as if—

The monitor beeped, and Emily glanced down. All the indicators were flatlined, and the infra-red showed nine large stationary biomasses, cooling steadily at the appropriate rate. She checked the toxicity level and used her E-Z-Teek telekinesis remote to tap into the building’s environmental controls and set the extractor fans running. Simple, routine magic. Another day at the office.

Three minutes later, Erskine came back carrying two mugs. One had The World’s Greatest Boss written on the side, and the other one was decorated with dancing cartoon pigs.

‘Just waiting for the gas to clear,’ she said brightly. ‘You’d better ring Ibbotsons and tell them we’re ready for clean-up. There were nine of them, so they’ll probably need two skips.’

‘Oh.’ Erskine’s face fell. ‘I missed it.’

‘What?’

He shrugged, rather ostentatiously. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring Ibbotsons. Straight away.’

Emily felt an urge to jab the air with her finger and bark out ‘Make it so,’ but she fought it down. ‘No rush,’ she said. ‘Ten minutes before we can go in there. Loads of waiting about in this game,’ she added. ‘You really should bring something to read.’

This time when Erskine went away she had no trouble getting into her book; in fact, it was rather nice to have an obedient gofer to do the phoning and fetch the tea, and she found herself wondering what on earth all the fuss had been about. So yes, she’d had a funny turn; but it had happened before the serious business started, it had only lasted a second or two, and once she’d got back into the swing of things it had faded away completely. Lot of fuss about nothing, she reassured herself; you’re just a bit wound up because of having the idiot along.

‘I called Ibbotsons,’ Erskine reported, sounding as though he’d just come back from being the first man to reach the South Pole. ‘They’re sending two skips and a crane, just in case.’

Emily frowned. ‘You weren’t to know,’ she said, ‘but the crane’s a scam. Means they can charge an extra ten per cent, and they know perfectly well they won’t need it. You’ve got to watch them like a hawk or they’ll fatten the bill like a Christmas turkey.’

‘Oh.’ He looked so very guilty and sad that she cheered up considerably. ‘Shall I call them back and—?’

She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Client pays out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s no skin off our nose. I just don’t like to let them get out of hand. Word gets around if you’re not careful.’ Her monitor bleeped again; she closed her book and stood up. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s the all-clear. We can go in now and check that everything’s OK, and then we can sign off and go back to the office.’ She grinned. ‘Welcome to the pest-control business. What do you think of it so far?’

‘Well—’ Erskine said, and she opened the door.

He was bleating something about objective verification procedures as she peered into the darkened computer room. For a moment, the darkness puzzled Emily, until she glanced up and saw the swathes of dense black cobweb hanging like curtains from the ceiling. Even if the lights were still working, there was no way that stuff would admit the passage of a single photon. She sighed and pulled out her pocket torch.

The first spider she saw was about five yards from the door, curled up in the classic folded-legs configuration that meant it was no longer a problem. Just to be on the safe side, however, she monitored it for life signs with her Kawaguchiya XZ7700 SpydaSkan. Dead as the proverbial hammer. Next.

Emily edged forward, prodding her way with a telescopic probe. Even if the spiders were all dead, getting caught up in a patch of web was still something to be avoided. The revolting stuff ruined any article of clothing it came into contact with, and as for hair … She shuddered. Scary she’d learned to cope with, but there was no real, permanent defence against yucky. As a stray wisp snagged the back of her hand and welded itself to her skin, making her whimper as she pulled it away, it occurred to her that a routine check like this should really be left to junior staff-a trainee, say. Valuable hands-on experience, and cheaper for the client, too. The only factor that put her off the idea was the likelihood that Erskine would jump at the chance and quite possibly thank her afterwards, and she wasn’t sure she could stand that.

Seven more dead spiders. They’d made a thorough mess of the computers. Atkinsonii are classed as sentient-intelligent, and some veterans of the trade reckoned they were considerably brighter than most non-humanoid monsters once you got to know them, though their world-view was crude and violent and their love of country-and-western music was predictable but sad. One thing on which all the authorities agreed, however, was that they were extremely literal-minded, which meant that once they started hearing rumours about humans building a worldwide web, they abandoned their usual habitat in dark, remote forests and started making a serious nuisance of themselves. Monitors and CPU’s cracked open and with their wiring wrenched out littered the floor, and there was even a small, rather droopy proto-cobweb made out of modem cables slung between two desks in the far corner of the room.

Seven plus one makes eight; Emily stopped, and flicked the beam of her torch through the shadows. Another feature of Atkinsonii behaviour was their urge to crawl under something to die, so she knelt down and looked under the desks and tables. Nothing. She killed the torch beam and stood up, instinct ordering her to keep perfectly still. There had been nine quite distinct blips on the Everleigh, but so far she’d only found eight folded-up corpses. Of course, there was no way anything could have survived in there while it was pumped full of cyanide gas, and the Everleigh had also shown her nine perfect flatlines. At the back of her mind, a memory flickered: something about Atkinsonii acrodontis being able to slow down its bodily functions to simulate death and fool a scanner. These weren’t acrodontes, they were pachythoraces, but maybe the research was incomplete … Emily’s intestines prickled, and she called up the floor plan of the room in her mind’s eye, with special reference to the distance and vector of the doorway. If her theory was correct, it’d be nice to live long enough to write a short piece for the Gazette about it.

‘Hello.’ Bloody Erskine’s voice. ‘Are you all right in there?’ One of the few really useful things she’d learned in second year at college was that, ninety-five times out of a hundred, you make more noise going Sssh! than the person you’re trying to silence. Something about sibilants carrying further than dentals, labials and all the other types of articulated sound. She tried to remember if the article she’d read had mentioned whether pachythoraces understood English. Atkinsonii acrodontes were only fluent in Spanish, she recalled, while leptopodes were bilingual in Gujarati and (by some extraordinary quirk of evolution) Esperanto. But if the article had mentioned pachythoraces, she couldn’t remember what it’d said—

‘I said hello,’ Erskine bellowed. ‘Is anything the matter? Can I do anything to help?’

Dropping dead would be a good start, Emily thought. She did her best to edit his voice out of her mind. Was that a very faint rustling sound, such as two-inch leg bristles might make as they rubbed against the leg of a desk? Needless to say, she’d gone in without anything even remotely resembling a weapon, unless you counted the Mordor Army Knife (one of whose more puzzling features was the lack of any kind of cutting edge; she could only assume that the users it was designed for had perfectly good claws and teeth for that sort of thing, so there wasn’t any call for a blade). Unleashing a twelve-foot collapsible ladder under its rapidly moving mandibles might disconcert the bastard for a moment or so, but would that be long enough for her to reach the doorway? Probably not. The RSPCA website recommended clapping your hands loudly and saying ‘Boo!’ as a humane, non-lethal alternative to blowing Atkinsonii to hell with rocket-propelled grenades, but she had a suspicion that the recommendation wasn’t the product of what she’d consider as valid hands-on experience. Emily took a very careful step backwards, and felt something brush against her shoulder.

Nuts, she thought.

The stickiness and strength of Atkinsonii gossamer makes it a revolting nuisance when there aren’t any live spiders around. In a spider-rich environment, it’s just a tad more significant. With exquisite delicacy, she moved her shoulder until the tendril started to tug on the fabric of her jacket. If, as was often the case, the web-builder was sitting up there in the centre seat of its creation, the slightest twitch on a strand would tell it everything it needed to know about her. That meant wriggling out of the jacket could prove fatal. On the other hand, staying put until the spider did its regular patrol was a guaranteed trip to Eternity. Under those circumstances, it was probably worth taking the risk that pachythoraces didn’t know English—

‘Help,’ Emily whispered. ‘I’m stuck.’

‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’ The surprise in Erskine’s voice was very mildly flattering, implying that he was reluctant to believe that a skilled, highly trained professional like her was capable of getting into trouble of any kind. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes:

Pause. ‘But surely, if you recalibrated the XZ7700 to scan for gossamer fragments, like it says you should do in the office procedures manual, it ought to have picked up any stray bits of web, and you shouldn’t have got caught. In which case, I don’t understand how—’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I didn’t do that,’ she hissed. ‘Reconwhatsit the scanner. I should’ve done but I forgot, all right? Now, at the back of the tool kit there’s a zip-up compartment with a neon-acetylene cutting torch in it. I want you to adjust the flame till it’s—’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘What?’

‘In the zip-up pocket. No torch. There’s half a roll of extra-strong mints, if that’s any use.’

It was a nasty blow, but Emily had handled worse. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Prime three more concussion grenades and pitch them in here, and then I want you to come in and haul me out while the spider’s counting stars. You’ll need to watch out for—’

‘Spider?’

‘Hphm.’

‘You mean there’s still one left alive in there?’

It was the constant, cumulative bombardment with snippets of the blindingly obvious that wore you down in the end. ‘I have reason to think so, yes. Now prime the bloody grenades like I told you, and then—’

‘We’re out of grenades. Sorry.’

Wince. Erskine was quite right, of course. She’d only brought four, and they’d all been used up in the preliminary strike. ‘All right,’ she whispered. ‘So what have you got? Cattle prod? Taser? Come on, for crying out loud, there must be something in the bag we can use, even if it’s just a poxy magic sword.’

Pause; then, ‘No, terribly sorry, nothing like that in here. This is very bad, isn’t it?’

If she had a knife, of course, or better still a pair of scissors, she could cut the cloth away from around the gossamer and be home and dry. Scissors. Scissor attachment on the Mordor Army Kn —

Emily froze. Now that definitely was a movement, somewhere in the darkness above her head. A tactical disaster, but at least she knew where the horrible thing was, whereas there was a chance it hadn’t made her yet, or why hadn’t it—?

Another movement. A big one, this time, and so fast that she never really had any chance of reacting to it. Swinging on a gossamer rope like five Siamese-twin Tarzans, the Atkinsonii swooped down on top of her. She felt its boot-leather belly slam into her face, breaking her nose. Without thinking, Emily cringed away, right into the thick of the gossamer net, which held her like a magnet. She filled her lungs with air for a really loud, pathetic, betraying-everything-she-stood-for B-movie scream, but she never made it that far. By the time her larynx had adjusted itself to the required shape, the spider had bitten her head off.