CHAPTER TWELVE

The dragon stirred.

Curious animals, dragons. Awake, they have the intelligence of a small rock. Being much closer in evolutionary terms to their dinosaur ancestors than most of their contemporaries in the animal kingdom, they retain the subsidiary brain at the base of the spine, to which the majority of motor functions and other mundane day-to-day concerns are delegated. The tennis-ballsized lump of grey splodge in their heads barely ticks over during the day; it operates the eyelids, handles sneezing and a few other respiratory odds and ends, and keeps a subconscious track of the stock market and commodity prices, using the inbuilt organic modem located down and a little to the right of the bladder. Otherwise, it just sits there not doing much, until consciousness puts the chairs up on the tables and closes up for the night. And then the dreams come, flooding the upper brain with thoughts so huge they’d blow out the walls of a human mind: thousand-year thoughts, intricate as clockwork and lace, deep as oceans, teeming with precepts and hypotheses, paradigms, abstracts and equations, concepts so utterly alien to a two-ton forty-foot lizard that it could never begin to understand them in its conscious state.

Dragons dream in at least seventeen dimensions, drifting like wind-blown leaves from past to future, soaring like birds over the dividing lines that separate alternate realities, sampling base-eight gravities in continua where sound moves faster than light and the universe isn’t so much curved as dimpled, flirting with the possibilities of movement in the z-squared axis, redefining every constant a million times each second. This goes some way towards explaining why dragons love dark, cool places where they can sleep undisturbed, snuggled up on golden batteries from which their forebrains draw the vast quantities of raw power needed to fuel their imaginations; because without the gold, silver, jewels and other isotopes of wealth the dreams simply won’t come. Nobody knows why this should be, although accountants seem able to understand it on a purely intuitive level.

Amelia Carrington’s dragon was, of course, slightly different from the rest of its kind; hardly surprising, since it had been conceived and born in a vat of green slime in a lock-up garage in Ravenscourt Park. Its dreams were wild, fast and dark, and saturated with disturbing images of its own imminent death. Not that it minded that particularly; when the future is as real and immediate as the present or the past, the end is no more intimidating than any other arbitrary point on the circumference of the circle. What prompted it to stir, shiver and grunt was nothing at all to do with fear, a sensation as irrelevant to dragonkind as income tax. It was something small, a tiny inconsistency, an equation that failed to balance at the twenty thousandth decimal place. A human brain simply couldn’t have registered it.

The dragon woke up.

Snarl, it thought. Hungry. Cramp in big flappy flying-with thing. It stretched its neck and snapped up a mutton carcass from the overhead rack so thoughtfully provided by the management, spread and refolded its wings, yawned to the melting point of glass and went back to sleep.

A human. The dragon placed her on the table of its mental centrifuge and spun her until the future separated from the past. The residue was quite interesting; strong influences, restraining rather than inspiring, so that it saw them as clamps and buckles.

The precipitate was a confusing jumble of shapes and colours, red for blood, silver for tears, black for anger and a faintly nauseating pink for the purely human emotion whose name temporarily escaped it. Lots of pink; it tinged the edges of everything, like the marinade in Chinese pork. The dragon wondered how so much emotion could be fitted into such a small container without breaking something.

Its own death. Smaller than it would have expected, rounder and smoother. There would be a moment in a dream when the circle was welded shut. No bad thing, since the dream would go on for ever, uninterrupted by the distractions of consciousness. The human’s death, by contrast, was a messy thing, like the frayed end of a broken rope. In fact, there was an unusual quality about it, so different from the sad peterings-out of ordinary humans. It wasn’t a whole number, it was a fraction. It was recurring.

None of our business, the dragon thought, because we won’t be there to see it. By then, the circle will have closed, excluding all irrelevant data. But still—

The prophecy. The greatest dragon ever born, only the strongest, bravest hero that ever lived will prevail against it. Of course, all prophesies are garbage, apart from the true ones.

The dragon grunted and shuffled about. Under its vast, smooth belly, krugerrands clinked and share certificates crinkled; six dozen infra-red movement sensors woke up, accessed their programming, grumbled and went back to sleep.

And the dream swept on, riding the lightning into far galaxies of intervals, sequences and primes until the human was too small even for a sleeping dragon to see. Humans; so what? Their salvation was their ignorance of their own supreme triviality, without which the sheer bulk of proportion would flatten them into faint smears. In spite of that, however, a flavour of her stayed with it as it danced on a five-thousand-light-year-diameter pinhead. It would know her again when they met, and for the first time the dragon would feel (permeating right through into its inert forebrain) compassion.

When is a door not a door? When it’s a wall.

The wall opened, and Colin Gomez, of all people, walked in through it. Emily looked up from the corner where she’d been sitting and stared at him for a moment, too stunned to be relieved or angry. Anybody else, but not him—

‘What the hell,’ she demanded, ‘is going on?’

He looked at her, and in his eyes she recognised the comforting thought that he wasn’t going to have to try and explain himself, make excuses, apologise politely, to somebody who’d be dead in a minute or so. She sprang to her feet, but she wasn’t quick enough; he took a paper bag out of his pocket, emptied it on the floor, and dived back through the wall, which healed up as though it had never been breached.

Paper bag, she thought. White things all over the floor; cross between broad beans and bits of dried-up chewing gum. She knew what they were. Not good at all.

The reason why dragons’ teeth fetch such a high price on the open market is that, sown like seedcorn on any flat, non-ferrous surface, they sprout into savagely psychotic spectral warriors. There are drawbacks. The warriors come fully armed, but their equipment is hopelessly antiquated - sword, shield, breastplate, helmet, a spear or two if you’re lucky but don’t count on it-and although they fight with unbelievable ferocity until they run out of enemies or are themselves cut down, they’re not bulletproof. Clearly this limits their relevance to modern warfare, and they’re chiefly used as assassins, riot police and for crowd control at music festivals. To Emily, armed with nothing but a thermos flask and a plate of cheese sandwiches, they nevertheless posed a serious problem.

‘Colin,’ she called out. ‘Mr Gomez. Get back here right now.’

No answer, not that she’d really been expecting one (and besides, could sound pass through that wall? She doubted it). The teeth, meanwhile, were sprouting, little white arms and legs, little bumps, like the knobbles on potatoes, for heads. Spiders, she thought, and she lifted her foot and stamped on the nearest one. The pain was excruciating, even through the sole of her shoe, and the little white thing carried on growing. Oh, she thought.

A plate of sandwiches and a thermos. She could break the plate; that’d give her a sharp edge, and the thermos would just about do as a club, for one hit. It was what Kurt Lundqist or Ricky Wurmtoter or Archie St Clair Lutterworth would’ve done. Bruno Schlager had taken out a whole platoon of dark elves with a plastic fork, and hadn’t the great Nepalese maestro Ram Lai Bahadur once disembowelled twenty Imperial Guards with a comb and a toothbrush?

The first couple of warriors were knee-high now; crash-test dummies with round featureless white heads and faint lines to mark where their armour would be. Two things that Lundqvist, Wurmtoter, Lutterworth, Schlager and Bahadur all had in common. One, they were all men. Two, eventually they were all killed.

Emily stepped back until the wall got in the way. They were at the badly moulded reproduction-terracotta-warrior stage now, just starting to acquire faces, their hair still just a faint pattern of impressed lines. Probably the spectral-warrior equivalent of teenagers, she thought. Yetch.

Now, she thought, would be a really good time for Frank to come through the wall.

So perfect, in fact, would the timing have been that she actually looked round, expecting to see the thin black lines spreading on the whitewashed surface like ink soaking into blotting paper. But they didn’t, and while she was looking the other way the first warrior must’ve finished growing, because when she looked back, there he was, six feet eight of lean muscle, shining armour and gormless expression. He had a short sword in one hand and a round shield about the size of a lollipop lady’s sign in the other. He hadn’t moved yet.

Right. Here goes. Emily smiled. ‘Hello, boys,’ she said brightly. ‘Who wants a nice cup of tea and a sandwich?’ Of course it shouldn’t have worked. If she’d tried it in the practical in her college mid-year exams, they’d have failed her on the spot. Spectral warriors, they’d have told her as they helped her pack, are programmed to be ruthless, unthinking killers. Try that in the field, they’d have told her, and they’ll be sending you home in a small plastic bag.

There were twelve of them, all motionless, looking straight at her. She took a deep breath.

- But the other thing about spectral warriors is that, in spite of their unnatural genesis and peremptory growth, they’re still basically just soldiers. And what does a soldier do, arriving at a new and unfamiliar posting to find a nice girl handing out tea and sarnies? Cut her head off and jump up and down on her mangled trunk? Don’t be silly.

The spectral lance corporal nodded, and slowly extended his new, unused arm. Straight away, Emily wedged the flask top into his hand and poured him some tea.

‘Bit of a cock-up with the catering,’ she said cheerfully, ‘so you’ll all have to share. Also, there’s no sugar, but I do have some sweeteners.’ From her bag she produced a little green plastic tube. She held it over the cup and pressed the lid, discharging little white pellets. ‘Pass the cup along,’ she said, ‘and dig into the sandwiches.’

The lance corporal took a swig of tea and handed the cup on, then reached for a sandwich. For thirty seconds or thereabouts, Emily was kept busy refilling the cup and passing the plate round. Then, orderly as a line of dominoes, the spectral warriors slowly keeled over and crashed to the floor.

Lucky, she thought as she stepped over the lance corporal, that she’d forgotten to return the tranquillisers to store after she’d dealt with the dragon in the National Lombard in Fenchurch Street. Lucky, too, that they’d been the extra-strong concentrated variety-one tablet guaranteed to knock a fully grown manticore out cold for six hours, or your money back and your funeral expenses paid. It was, of course, only a temporary expedient. Sooner or later, they were going to wake up again, and chances were they’d have headaches and be extremely cross with her. Only one thing to do, therefore. She tugged a warrior’s sword out of its scabbard and pressed it against his throat. Spiders, she thought.

The sword point wasn’t very sharp; designed for strength, presumably. A needle-sharp point would just snap off if you stabbed it against armour. A certain degree of force seemed to be called for.

Right, Emily thought. But there’s no tearing hurry. Soon as they start showing signs of waking up, I’ll kill the lot of them. Just not yet.

She looked round at the table, where she’d put down the empty plate. It was loaded with fresh sandwiches. She wasn’t surprised. The thermos was probably full again, too. If you’re planning on keeping a prisoner long-term in a sealed, doorless room, something of the sort is pretty much essential. So, she thought; even if I do slaughter the lot of them, I still won’t be getting out of here in a hurry. And Colin Gomez has got the rest of the teeth I pulled out of that dragon, and even if the same trick works a second time, there’s only about four tranquillisers left. Yup, still screwed. Just checking.

In which case, why bother scragging the warriors after all? If they came to and killed her, they’d be doing her a favour. Otherwise, all she had to look forward to was staring at the walls and eating sandwiches, until such time as Colin Gomez figured out a way of killing her that she couldn’t counter. Wouldn’t take him long, but why hang about? Only delaying the inevitable. And besides, she’d died before, and it didn’t seem to have done her any harm—

Yes, but that was because Frank Carpenter had been around with his Portable Door; and that was only because Mr Sprague was paying him to save the insurance company the cost of a heavy claim. But Mr Sprague wasn’t there any more. Would Frank be along to undo her death if he wasn’t getting paid for it? Well, probably he would, if he found out that she’d died. But she couldn’t rely on that. Psychology of young men in love: he calls, leaves messages, no reply, so he assumes he’s been issued with the regulation cold shoulder and slouches away to wallow in misery for a bit, until some other girl comes along. Somehow, the human race has contrived to find this sort of thing unbearably romantic for thousands of years. As far as Emily was concerned, it wasn’t even slightly romantic, just damned inconvenient.

Let the spectral warriors kill her, then? No, absolutely not. Quite apart from the being-dead aspect of it, she was buggered if she was going to let the spiders win. Over her dead body, in fact.

In that case, Emily was either going to have to kill the spectral warriors in their sleep or find a way out of there. She considered the options. The mass-slaughter option had one thing going for it, a quality which the alternative so demonstrably lacked. It could be done. After all, she told herself, it’s not as if they’re people. They’re teeth; and if a tooth starts hurting, you trot along to the dentist and have it drilled or pulled. A simple, guilt-free occurrence, and you don’t tend to get the ghosts of all your past teeth standing over your bed rattling their fillings at you in your sleep and giving you nightmares.

Correction: they were teeth. Not any more, though.

Emily swore, threw the sword across the room and sat down on the floor. All right, she asked herself, what would Captain Picard do in her shoes? Well, obviously he’d engage the warriors in meaningful dialogue, convince them that it was in all their best interests to work together to find an effective but non-violent way of getting out of there, probably involving reconfiguring the biostatic matrix on some handy electronic gadget he just happened to have with him—

Not like that in real life, of course. True, the tube of tranquillisers had been a lucky break. But tranks were the sort of thing she tended to carry about, being an essential commodity in her line of work, so it wasn’t the same at all, not cheating. And apart from them, everything else she had about her person was just so much useless junk. Look at it, for crying out loud (she started turning out her pockets onto the bare stone floor).

Lipstick. Compact. Three ballpoint pens, two non-functional (but if we could somehow reverse the polarities, we could rig up some kind of interplexing beacon …). Kleenex. The silver paper from a roll of Polo mints. A comb. A small cardboard tube.

Emily blinked.

A small cardboard tube: the sort of thing you find behind the lavatory door when an inconsiderate person’s been using it before you. Apart from the Blue Peter crew and maybe the Andrex puppy, nobody on earth could have a use for one. Except that she’d seen one just like it-absolutely just like it-in the hands of Frank Carpenter.

Come off it, she said to herself. One bog-roll tube looks pretty much like another. And just because one specimen contains the Portable Door, that doesn’t mean they all do. It’s just a cardboard tube I must’ve picked up somewhere, though why on earth I’d want to do that—

She remembered.

The dragon; the same one whose teeth were cluttering up the floor she was sitting on. The dragon who’d turned a billion dollars into ash, but who died guarding this plain brown cardboard cylinder. Now what would a creature devoted to acquiring and hoarding items of great value want with the core out of a toilet roll?

Hardly able to breathe, Emily poked about inside it with her fingertip. There was something in there all right. Something rubbery, thin, rolled up. It could, of course, turn out to be the board from a travelling Ludo set. Only one way to find out.

But it couldn’t be the Door, because Frank had it. He’d used it to get in and out of Sprague’s office, and when she’d come through into this room it had stayed behind with him, she was absolutely sure about that. Besides-what was she thinking?- if this was the dragon’s tube, it had been there in her pocket ever since she’d killed the bloody thing, so Frank couldn’t have been using it ever since. The whole point was, there was only one Portable Door in existence.

Only—

She poked a little further, and a corner slid out. Gripping it between forefinger and thumb, she pulled gently. The roll of thin plasticky sheet fell into her lap. She picked it up, and it unrolled like unruly wallpaper.

The Portable Door.

That was the moment when one of the spectral warriors grunted and stretched in his sleep, inadvertently kicking Emily’s ankle. She jumped, nearly dropped the Door, juggled with it, caught it and hugged it to her.

Right, she thought. Sod this.

Facing the wall, she pressed the plastic sheet against it. It attached itself immediately, and she watched as it seemed to soak into the plasterwork, leaving behind a rectangle of thin black lines that grew steadily thicker and darker as she looked at them. When is a wall not a wall? Funny you should mention that.

Curiously enough, her door handle was different: an anodised aluminium lever instead of a round brass knob. She reached out, closed her eyes and gripped it. It felt faintly warm.

Where do you want to go today?

Emily hesitated. Out of here probably wasn’t a precise enough answer. Home? No. Gomez’s office, so I can smash his face in? Tempting, but on balance, not a good idea. I can go anywhere I like, she thought: Rome, Lisbon, Marrakesh—

None of the above. The question, she realised, had only one answer because, of course, the Door didn’t belong to her. And however nice it was to fantasise about what she’d do if she had a Door of her very own, the fact was that she didn’t. Unless, of course, there really were two of them.

Only one way to find out. Wherever Frank is, Emily thought, and pushed down the handle.

Colin Gomez looked at his watch. He was pleased at how miserable he felt. It showed character, he thought, to be so upset about killing Emily Spitzer. There had been times over his long years in the profession when he’d wondered if he was growing callous, insensitive to the human cost of doing his job. He’d remember old Mr Kropatchek, the Butcher of Lombard Street, his first boss, a man utterly devoid of compassion and scruple, and just occasionally he wondered if he was turning into him. Apparently not. Marty Kropatchek wouldn’t have thought twice about unleashing a whole lower jaw’s worth of spectral warriors in Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve if there’d been money in it, and he certainly wouldn’t have agonised about it after the event. Colin, by contrast, had been moping about the place ever since he’d emptied the bag and closed up the basement wall, to the extent that he’d hardly managed to get any work done since. So that was all right.

Twenty minutes: more than enough time for twelve spectral warriors to slaughter one unarmed girl. He sighed and rose from his chair. Better go and tidy up the mess.

There was the small matter of getting rid of the spectral warriors, but he knew how to do that. From the bag on his desk he picked out a dozen teeth. An equal number of warriors from separate sowings will invariably attack each other and, being implacable and perfectly matched, wipe each other out. Expensive-Colin was still dreading what his partners were going to say about it at the next finance meeting; they might even insist that the cost of the warriors should come out of Colin’s share of next quarter’s profits: bitterly unfair, he’d just have to be stoical about it-but effective, and right now he just wanted the whole wretched business done and out of the way.

Down the stairs, through the big door, down the hateful, vertiginous spiral staircase, never intended to accommodate someone of his weight and girth. He was well aware that the issue of why he’d been kept in the dark about the Portable Door was still entirely unresolved; something else to worry about. It hadn’t been a good day, in any respect.

In the top half of the Parker-Shaw Uniface, there’s a little sliding panel you can draw back and look in through, the sort of thing you get in prisons. Colin opened it, threw in the handful of teeth, and quickly slammed it shut. Another great merit of the Parker-Shaw is its soundproofing.

He gave it five minutes, more than enough time, then opened the door and went through.

Not a pretty sight. Spectral warriors can take an obscene amount of damage before they die, and Colin Gomez wished he’d had the sense to put his Wellington boots on before coming down. A quick headcount; twenty-four of them, only a few still attached to necks. So that was—

Twenty-four.

It was one of those moments when you feel completely hollow, like an egg sucked by a well-instructed grandmother. Two dozen heads; he swallowed hard and inspected them, one by one. It was hard to be sure, the state some of them were in, but he was fairly certain that none of them was Emily’s.

He slumped against a wall. Marvellous, he thought. Nigh on three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of stock in hand gone down the toilet, and to crown it all, the girl would appear to have escaped.

The practice of magic requires exceptional powers of mental discipline, and these stood Colin Gomez in good stead as he leaned there gazing at the mess. They made it possible for him not to think of what Amelia Carrington was going to say when he told her that he’d failed, again. That was just as well, since the blind panic would have paralysed him, and he needed a clear head—

He looked down at something lying near his feet on the floor. No pun intended, he thought.

Somehow-God only knew how-that bloody Spitzer girl had escaped. Furthermore, she now knew for stone-cold certain that he was out to get her. The chances of her being at her desk at nine sharp tomorrow morning were, therefore, slight. But if she’d done the sensible thing and put as much distance between herself and him as is possible on a curved planet, how the hell was he going to find her and finish the job?

He slid down the wall and sat in something sticky. Amelia Carrington might just let him off with a reduced profit share and a severe bollocking, if he brought Emily’s head in a jar along to the meeting. Otherwise, he was done for. And to think, he’d actually been feeling guilty about having her put down. Old Marty had been right. No place for bleeding hearts in the magic business.

Talking of which: he identified the sticky thing he’d been sitting on, picked it off his trouser seat and threw it away.

Finding a competent magical practitioner who doesn’t want to be found is the next best thing to impossible. There are wards and cloaks, invisibility charms and stealth locks, and even Krnka’s Mirror can be banjaxed if you’re savvy enough. Emily Spitzer hadn’t had much experience in that area, but she was resourceful, a quick study, and highly motivated; and if she had access to the sort of kit she’d have needed to get out of a self-sealing basement—

Kit like— oh, to take an example completely at random, a Portable Door.

The gurgling noise that the shit makes as it closes over the top of your head is quite unmistakable, and Colin Gomez heard it very clearly. What hurt him most of all was the unfairness of it; because he’d always been a good soldier, a true believer, and in spite of that-maybe, God help him, because of it-he’d been singled out to take the fall in whatever loathsome scheme Amelia Carrington was brewing up. Really, it was more than flesh and blood could bear. It was almost as bad as working for Enron.

Hell hath no fury like a true believer forced to revise his basic assumptions. Standing in the gore-flecked Carringtons basement with the blood of spectral warriors trickling down the inside of his trouser leg, Colin Gomez made his grand renunciation and declaration of war. It was a noble moment and he couldn’t help feeling rather good about it, but once the emotion had thinned out a bit he also couldn’t help noticing how frail his position was. Such resources as his position as a partner in the firm afforded him couldn’t be relied on for much longer; Amelia would be after him first thing in the morning, wanting to be told that Emily was dead, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to fend her off for very long. After that, he could only think of one possible ally he could call on. Assuming (sardonic little laugh) that he could find her.

Well. Maybe he couldn’t, but a phone signal probably could. Carringtons equipped their staff with Kawaguchiya NP6530s, total network coverage guaranteed everywhere; deep in the Earth’s magma layer, the craters of the Moon, even railway tunnels. And one thing a girl of Emily’s generation would never ever do, no matter what the circumstances, was switch off her mobile.

Colin Gomez took out his pocket diary and looked up her number.

Better, they say, to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Bullshit, Frank reflected, staring at the wooden rafters of the cabin. That’s a bit like saying it’s better to fall off the roof of a very tall building than to have stayed on the ground.

A man can get sick of the sight of rafters, even his own. But there was nothing else to claim his attention, so he carried on staring.

Love, he thought. What a bloody silly idea. Investing all your hopes, the whole point of living, in someone you’ve only just met, who you know next to nothing about, is on a par with putting all your money on a racehorse you’ve picked out of the list in the morning paper using a blindfold and a pin. Before he’d met her-well, his life had been empty and meaningless, but it hadn’t really bothered him so terribly much. He’d had the Door, after all; he’d amused himself with sightseeing trips through time and space, earned a little money, done a little collateral good. Now, having loved and lost, he had no interest in metaphysical tourism. No point. The landscape in the background might change, but he’d stay the same. Even the best holiday is no fun if you can’t stand the person you go with.

To have loved and lost; it made it sound like a competition we loved, I lost. If so, then in love as in freestyle knife-fighting, the silver medal isn’t worth having. Alternatively, to have lost your love sounds like sheer carelessness. (Where did you have it last? Have you checked all your pockets?) He hadn’t mislaid it. It hadn’t fallen down the back of the sofa. He’d offered her his heart, and she’d trodden on it.

That’s me, Frank thought. Squashed-rather than brokenhearted, with nothing to do and no place to go. That’s not tragic, not even sad. It’s just plain silly.

He still had the Door. No job running errands for Mr Sprague, though. But so what? The world was full of opportunities. Other insurance companies, for example. Pick one at random-that was how he’d first met George Sprague-make them an offer they couldn’t refuse, back to work. And who knew; maybe the genuine girl of his dreams was already there waiting for him, wherever there proved to be. More than one of her, even. For all he knew, they were queuing up somewhere, like people waiting to audition for The X Factor. Of course, he could stay exactly where he was, staring at rafters until he died of old age. Or he could get up off his arse, unfurl the Door like Columbus’s sails, and go exploring for strange new worlds.

Might as well, he decided. Nothing better to do.

Frank stood up and reached in his pocket for the Door. It wasn’t there.

In a sense, it was exactly what he’d been hoping for. A few minutes ago, if asked what he wanted most in the world, he’d probably have said, ‘To stop moping around thinking about Emily.’ Fine; another wish granted ahead of schedule by the genie of the rafters. Thoughts of lost love and post-romantic nihilism evaporated out of his brain like spit on a hot stove.

He performed the frantic, pathetic ballet of the man who’s just lost something: the pirouetting round and round, the pocket-patting, the ratting-terrier crouch (bum in the air, head under the sofa), the pacing up and down with eyes glued to the floor, the whole business. But the cabin was very small and very sparsely furnished. If he’d dropped the Door, or if it had fallen out of his pocket, it’d have stood out on his bare, uncluttered floorboards like a haystack in a packet of needles. It wasn’t there. It had been there a short while ago, because he’d used it to come home with. But it wasn’t there now.

Had to be somewhere. Can’t have vanished as if by magic—

Frank closed his eyes and flopped against a wall. By magic was almost certainly how it had vanished; basically, the reverse of the procedure by which Dad had come by it in the first place. Looked at from that perspective, there was a kind of beautiful symmetry about it. From every other angle, he was utterly screwed. Not just because he’d lost the only valuable thing he’d ever owned; without it, he was several days’ gruelling walk from the nearest source of food, and there wasn’t so much as a stale Ritz cracker in the house.

He was looking around for something to prise the floorboards up with when he heard a creak behind him. He looked round, and saw a thin black line running horizontal across the back wall. As he stared at it, two more lines dropped down at each end, forming the outline of a rectangle.

He’d never seen the Door opening from the outside, of course, just as you’ve never sat in the back seat of your own car. It was only when the handle appeared that he realised what he was looking at.

He started to yelp with joy, then froze. The Door was opening. Someone was coming through it.

For one horrible second, he thought it might turn out to be himself. But it wasn’t; he’d never have been able to cram his foot into the narrow black court shoe that crossed the threshold into the cabin. But if it wasn’t him—

‘Hello,’ Emily said.

When Frank opened his mouth to reply, he had no idea what was going to come out of it. Could’ve been ‘That’s so wonderful, I thought I’d never see it again’; or ‘That’s so wonderful, I thought I’d never see you again’ (not his first thought, but valid nonetheless); or, if he’d been up to being cool and laid back about it all, ‘Hi, thanks for dropping in’; or even (it was there in his mind) ‘Oh God, the place is a real mess, it’s just I’ve been so busy lately’. As it was, he heard himself say, ‘It’s mine, you can’t have it, give it back.’

Emily stood perfectly still and looked at him (and he thought, Well, that’s buggered that up, well done, Frank); because, of course, she’d heard all five versions.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, ‘I didn’t mean—’

She winced, as though he’d shouted in her ear; then she had that let’s-get-it-over-with look on her face. ‘Frank,’ she said, ‘there’s something you ought to know about me.’

Not what he’d been expecting; in fact, for a moment he forgot all about the Door.

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Wh—’

‘No, please don’t say anything,’ she snapped. ‘Not anything at all, until I’ve explained.’

‘But—’

‘Quiet!’

She sounded just like his mother. At some point or other, all women do.

‘Now then.’ Emily perched on the edge of the table and gave him another look, but it wasn’t any of the looks in the handbook. ‘It’s a bit awkward. It’s got magic in it, for a start.’

Frank knew he wasn’t allowed to speak, but nodding was presumably still permitted. He nodded.

‘When you say something—’ Pause. ‘Basically, it’s a side effect of drinking trolls’ blood.’ He must’ve pulled a face, because she gave him a don’t-be-such-a-cissy look which, he couldn’t help thinking, was a little bit much. ‘It was an accident,’ she went on, ‘I was doing a job earlier, a troll cut himself, I must’ve got a drop of his blood on my finger or something. Anyway,’ she continued, ‘it means that when you say something-well, I hear it, obviously, but I also hear what you really mean. What you wanted to say but didn’t. I can’t help it,’ she added, ‘it’s just magic, occupational hazard, and—’

Frank could feel his face burning; the perfect beetroot impersonation. Absolutely no need for her to tell him to be quiet now. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Now you know. There’s an antidote, and I had a dose before I met you tonight and we went to your Mr Sprague’s office, but it sort of wore off, and—’

He didn’t need troll’s blood to let him know what Emily was feeling, just as you don’t need to hear it ticking to know that a black pointy-nosed cylinder with fins is a bomb. It was, after all, exactly how he’d be feeling, in her shoes. Embarrassed, of course. Angry. Stress levels off the dial. And scared.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Say something.’

‘You told me not to.’

‘I love you too.’

At which precise moment, Emily’s phone rang.

About ringtones. They are, of course, a statement: about who you think you are, who you want to be, who you want other people to think you are, all that. The trouble is, you choose them in quiet, restful moments, when you’re generally off your guard. At such a time, your judgement is usually subordinated to your whim, and even a normally rational person is capable of thinking that having your phone warble Crazy Frog or James Blunt is a really fun idea. Or, as in Emily’s case, the Laughing Policeman.

She cringed; which is a bit like saying the Second World War was a scuffle. At first, she pretended to ignore it, as if trying to make out that it was something going on in the street outside. Geography was against her there, though. She might just have got away with it if she’d gone with Rutting Stag, but basically she was on a hiding to nothing, and she knew it.

‘My phone,’ she whimpered. ‘Just a second.’

She scrabbled in her pocket and pulled it out, hating it. ‘Yes?’

‘Emily. Colin Gomez here.’

Colin Gomez had a carrying sort of voice, even over a mobile. Frank nodded, and stood up. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ he said.

‘Hello?’ Gomez, sounding faintly querulous. ‘Hello, are you there?’

En route to the kettle, Frank stopped and watched Emily. She’d gone ever such a funny colour, and she seemed to have forgotten about breathing and stuff. Then she smiled.

‘Mr Gomez,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you called. I’m going to kill you.’

‘What? It’s not a terribly good line, you’ll have to speak—’

‘And when I’ve done that,’ Emily went on, ‘I’m going to chop you up into little bits and feed you to the piranhas in Sally Krank’s office. Oh, and I quit. Goodbye.’

She stabbed a button so hard that Frank winced. Then she threw the phone across the room. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘My boss. He tried to murder me earlier. It’s all right,’ she added, ‘you can talk now.’

Frank pressed his lips together and shook his head.

‘Please?’

‘Yes, but—’ And then the Policeman started Laughing again.

‘Oh for crying out loud.’ Emily lunged across the cabin, snatched up the phone, stabbed it again and snapped, ‘What?’

‘There’s no need to shout,’ said Colin Gomez’s voice. ‘First, I’d like to apologise for what happened earlier.’

‘You total fucking ba—’

‘And,’ Gomez went on, ‘I need to know if you still want your job.’ Silence, apart from a faint rumbling from the kettle. ‘Hello? Are you still there?’

‘Yes, of course I bloody well am. What do you—?’

‘I can’t explain over the phone,’ Gomez said. ‘But—’ His voice lowered, so that she could barely hear it. ‘Let’s say there could well be some changes in the way the firm’s run, quite soon. Not entirely unconnected with the, um, incident.’

Frank looked at her. Troll’s blood, she’d said. Could he really love somebody it was impossible to lie to?

(Yes, he thought.)

‘I see,’ Emily said. ‘Oh, while I think of it, when we went to see Mr Pickersgill, he cut himself.’

‘I’m sorry, but I fail to see—’

‘Tastes like chicken.’

‘Ah.’ Long, long silence. ‘In which case,’ Gomez said brightly, ‘you believe me.’

‘No choice, really.’

‘Excellent. How soon can you be in my office?’

Emily smiled. ‘You’d be surprised.’

‘Actually, I wouldn’t. You’ve got it, haven’t you?’

Her eyebrows shot up, but she replied, ‘Long story.’ Slight hesitation. ‘If I come, you won’t try and kill me, will you?’

‘No.’

‘You’re right, actually, it would be. OK, I’ll be there.’ She stopped, and looked at Frank. ‘Soon. Something here I’ve got to take care of first.’

‘Be as quick as you can, then.’

‘No,’ she said, and hit the button.

They looked at each other. ‘Tea’s ready,’ Frank said.

Emily thought about what Gomez had just said-all of it. Then she dropped the phone on the floor and jumped on it. ‘So we won’t be interrupted,’ she said, and kissed him.