Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel Read online

  “You can…” said Nina meaningfully, leaving the risks of stepping out of Barbara’s immediate presence unsaid.

  “Look!” said the administrator, holding her own phone triumphantly in front of Barbara’s face. “Loki. My cat. You remember?”

  Barbara squinted at it and awwed.

  “I don’t like cats,” said the orderly in his languid Caribbean accent. “I can’t stand them.”

  The nurse gave him a look that was ten percent pity and ninety percent gloating. The man didn’t even have one cat!

  “On account of the fact,” continued the orderly, “that my grandmother – God rest her – was killed by one.”

  “Killed by a cat?” said Barbara.

  The orderly, who, slouched in his seat, legs splayed, looked surprisingly relaxed given the situation, nodded slowly. “Killed her.”

  “A normal cat?” said the administrator. “I mean, not a tiger or a lion or anything?”

  “A big fat ginger tom. Came and sat on her face while she slept. Smothercated her. As God is my witness.”

  “That’s awful,” said Barbara.

  “My great grandma’s sister drowned in a washing tub,” said the administrator.

  Apparently, dead grandmas trumped cats. The game had changed.

  Rod swept the corridors, finding any remaining staff who had not been questioned. Rod showed the picture on his phone to a lab technician who had just emerged from an office with a rack of specimen bottles.

  “Have you seen this woman?”

  “No,” said the lab tech. “No, wait. That’s the Koloba in room thirty-something, isn’t it?”

  “And – and this is important – did she see you?”

  “That’s an odd question.”

  “Aye. And?”

  “No. I think the only times I’ve ever been in there she was asleep.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes,” said the lab tech suspiciously. “Why?”

  “Nothing, that’s fine,” said Rod, turned away and then turned back. “What’s a lab guy doing in an old lady’s room while she’s asleep?”

  The lab tech looked affronted.

  “Can’t a feller steal Quality Street from an old lady now and then?”

  Rod gave him a look that suggested the answer was probably ‘no’.

  “It’s not as though she’ll remember,” said the lab tech. “She probably thinks she ate them.”

  Rod found Kathy by the makeshift surgical screen barricades they’d set up to stop anyone going within earshot or eyeline of Barbara’s room.

  “All off duty staff have been contacted,” she said. “One’s coming in because she’s not sure if she’s met Barbara or not.”

  “Good work, Kathy.”

  “Why thank you, Campbell. Your approval and validation is all that I crave.”

  “Sarky. What I don’t get is why the Koloba allows this to continue.”

  “It’s an involuntary thing. The Koloba doesn’t know it’s obliterating people.”

  “But it could move host, surely. It could live in a human body that doesn’t have dementia.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t know it has dementia,” said Kathy. “How can you know that your mental powers are failing when you can’t remember what it is you’ve forgotten? Or maybe it does know but it doesn’t care. It’s very, very old. Perhaps this is what it wants. Perhaps it’s tired of being omniscient.” She raised her chin and stared at him with an over-exaggerated gravitas. “Intelligence can be such a burden.”

  “Are you going to use that line in the job interview?”

  “Have you heard something?”

  “Sorry, no. But if we manage to save the day here, this will be excellent ammo for those ‘Give me an example of a time when’ questions they’ll be asking at the interview.”

  “Oh, and speaking of memory. It’s the Azhur-Banipal shad Nekku.”

  “Eh?”

  “The Stone of the King in Crimson. The picture you drew. I knew it would come to me.”

  Before long, there were four Morags and five Cattresses by the Bloody Big Book chamber.

  “Hey,” complained Morag, “what did we do to deserve an extra one of you?”

  “She insisted on going off in her own direction,” said Cattress dismissively.

  “I wonder where I might have gone to?” said another Morag.

  “Perhaps to meet the rescue party.”

  “Perhaps she got out.”

  Morag looked along the corridor. Baby universes crowded around them, aisles bifurcating, shooting off like wild growths. There was no knowing where the exit now lay. “Lucky her.”

  “How long are we going to be in here?” said the Cattress with the ripped sleeve.

  “Could be a while,” said Morag. “Could be days.”

  “So, we’re going to starve then,” said another Cattress.

  Morag reached into her pocket and produced half a breakfast bacon roll, wrapped up in a paper bag. Three other Morags did the same. Four halves of bacon bap. It wasn’t much.

  Morag was suddenly struck with a vision of a grim and endless future: tribes of Morag Murrays and Jonathan Cattresses roaming the infinite corridors of a nightmarish museum, scavenging weapons and food from the display shelves, and resorting to murder when the meagre food ran out.

  “Is it strictly cannibalism if you eat yourself?” one of the other Morags asked.

  “Okay,” said another Morag, “we need some way of identifying which of us is which. If only so I don’t get paired up with cannibal Morag at any point.”

  “Hey, you were all thinking it,” said cannibal Morag.

  “Yeah,” said Morag, pulling her hair back into a ponytail. “But you were the one that said it. Right, I’m Ponytail Morag.”

  Rod and Kathy waited at the lift for the woman who was coming in to sit in Barbara’s presence and thus secure her own survival. With her in place, anyone who had ever met the demented, omniscient Koloba (and was still alive) would be in the room with her.

  Rod and Kathy watched the lift numbers climb.

  “You know,” said Rod, “when I was a kid – I mean when I was just a tot – I used to think that when I closed my eyes the world just went away. Is that stupid?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Right. So, I shouldn’t tell you that I also thought I was the only real person in the world and everyone else was imaginary, not really human but like a puppet or summat?”

  “Oh, that’s perfectly ordinary solipsism. Every child goes through that.”

  The lift dinged.

  Rod had half-expected the lift would be empty, that the woman had been forgotten out of existence between the ground and the eighth floor, but when the door slid open there was a middle-aged woman whose expression was in part worried and in part peeved that she had to come into work on her day off.

  “Angie,” said Kathy.

  “What is this about?” asked the off-duty nurse.

  “Do you know this woman?” said Rod and showed her the picture Nina had sent him.

  “Barbara Gudge,” said Angie.

  “And she’s met you? She’s seen you?”

  “Yes. I don’t understand.”

  “This way, Angie, please,” said Kathy.

  Halfway down the corridor, just outside an office door, a rack of specimen bottles lay dropped and scattered on the floor.

  “Bugger,” said Rod softly.

  “What?” said Kathy.

  “The Quality Street thief wasn’t as sneaky as he thought.”

  Vivian met Professor Sheikh Omar in the lobby of the Library of Birmingham. She had expected him to be alone but there was a man standing beside and slightly behind him. They were both well into their middle years but were otherwise a contrasting pair. Omar was tall and imposing, like a vulture. The other man was small and slight, like a vole. Omar was balding but wore it well. The other had immaculately coiffured silver hair that looked like a wig but almost certainly wasn’t. Omar looked as if he had se
en the world and wrestled half of it. The other man looked as if he would faint in fear if he got so much as a crease in his lilac shirt.

  Professor Omar was the head of the Department of Intertextual Exegesis at Birmingham University and, for want of a better description, one of the finest occultists in the city. Vivian surmised that the little man was Maurice, his assistant or batman or sorcerer’s familiar or whatever he called him, who she was given to understand was rarely far from his side.

  “Vivian,” said Omar, smiling.

  He had good teeth, she noticed. Not false teeth, not mangled and realigned by unnecessary orthodontics, but a set of well-maintained gnashers. Vivian approved.

  He shook her hand, warmly but professionally. “I had expected an invitation but not necessarily so soon. Interviews aren’t until Thursday.”

  “The invitation was for you alone,” she said pointedly.

  “Oh, Maurice is here to carry my tools.” Maurice mutely raised a brown Gladstone bag as evidence. “When I’m working I prefer to keep my hands like my morals,” said Omar. “Unencumbered. Besides, the devil makes work for idle little hands like his.”

  Vivian traded looks with the pair of them that conveyed her displeasure but said no more.

  “Now,” said the professor cheerfully, “what is the nature of your current problem?”

  Vivian explained as they rode down to the Vault.

  “So, my good friend Morag Murray and a fatuous mandarin have endangered all existence with some clumsy handling of the mystical crockery,” said Omar.

  Vivian felt that such a flippant summary should be worthy of rebuke, but this was an entirely accurate assessment.

  “Quite,” she said. She opened the first door to the Vault and then paused before the second. “May I be candid, professor?”

  “Oh, please do,” said Omar.

  “You have a reputation.”

  “One tries.”

  “As an irresponsible dabbler in Venislarn affairs and a pedlar in stolen artefacts. Once we are through this door, you are to touch nothing.”

  “Understood, ma cherie. It is true that I, like Nero, am a fisher in the lake of darkness but any suggestion that I – we! – are thieves is nothing but slander. As I have told your colleague Rodney many a time, why would I stoop to theft when there is eBay to service all our needs?”

  “Very good. Then you won’t be offended if I say that Malcolm here has orders to shoot dead any person caught in the act of theft.”

  Omar looked at the security guard and the gloved hand that rested on his holstered pistol.

  “Such a fine figure,” said Omar. “Unquestionable authority made flesh.”

  Vivian opened the second door. “This way.”

  She led them along the central aisle that ran the full length of the Vault, which covered a subterranean area far larger than the library building on street level. Vivian strode briskly, Omar maintaining pace easily in long strides. Maurice scuttled along behind, the Gladstone bag tucked awkwardly under his arm as he scribbled notes in a spiral notepad.

  “A live Julia Set. The horns of Raa-ghul Yatz. The Pohnpei Papers. Son sleen pat’zhadoi. Two of them,” he muttered softly.

  “Eyes sharp, Maurice. Look there, the Begbie Manangel. I always wondered if you lot had removed it from public display or if its disappearance had simply been the work of dull and uncomprehending scrap thieves.”

  Vivian glanced at the wire mesh sculpture of a headless angel, a Faraday cage for gods.

  “Rod Campbell removed it under cover of darkness. It was officially reported as stolen. That list you’re compiling…”

  “Purely for our records. If we know you have it, then we know if we’re being offered a forgery on the open market. Oh!”

  This exclamation was directed to the boundary between this world and a much younger world. It was almost imperceptible. There was no sci-fi force field shimmer in the air. There was no mirror-like sheen. The gap between worlds was only visible as a disjointed seam in the floor tiles, a subtle shifting in the angle of the floor, a shelf where half a book abutted nothing at all. Morag Murray sat in a bored slump against an inexpertly carved Wos’ulin sacrifice pole.

  “Hail, thou that art highly favoured,” said Omar.

  Morag gave a listless wave.

  “Professor. Hi Maurice. Come to rescue me?”

  “Blessed art thou among women,” said Omar. He looked at the boundary line which was slowly edging outward. “First thing to do is stop this spreading any further.”

  He mimed rolling up his sleeves.

  “Maurice. Pens and the book of apotropaic wards, if you would. Oh, and green tea of course.”

  “Green tea?” said Morag. “What does that do?”

  Maurice had opened the Gladstone bag and removed a tartan thermos flask.

  “Settles my nerves,” said Omar.

  “You don’t suffer with nerves,” said Morag.

  “Green tea,” said Maurice by way of explanation.

  “I’m hungry,” said Barbara.

  “I’ll get you something,” said Paula the administrator with sycophantic urgency. This was Paula who, they had learned, owned a cat; whose great grandma’s sister had drowned in a washtub; who had broken both her wrists playing hockey; and who had once stolen a packet of crisps off Chris Evans (although whether she meant the ginger Radio DJ or Captain America was never made clear). “What would you like?”

  “Faces,” said Barbara.

  “Faces?”

  “It’s okay. I’ll do it,” said Eunice the nurse (who had two cats, had once held a hedgehog as large as a football and had turned down a date with Jason Statham).

  “I am kind of hungry myself,” said Marco the orderly (whose grandmother had been killed by a cat, who had accidentally taken two pounds of explosive aboard a jumbo jet and had, as a schoolboy, performed an excruciating rap song to the then Prime Minister).

  “I don’t think you’ll want anything that comes out of that machine,” said Nina.

  “Nina,” called Rod from behind the screens at the doorway.

  “Yo,” she called back.

  “I’m sending Angie through. She’s a nurse and she needs to join you. She’s fifty percent up to speed with what’s going on.”

  “Does she have any food on her?” said Nina.

  “No.”

  “Stuff some chocolate bars in her pockets. We’re getting kind of peckish in here.”

  “How can we eat at a time like this?” said administrator Paula.

  “Cos it’s sort of lunchtime,” said Nina.

  “But we could vanish at any moment.”

  “Can’t think of a better argument for why we should eat now. In fact,” she pulled up a takeaway app on her phone, “we ought to go out in style.”

  The band of Morags and Cattresses made their way through the shifting worlds they had unleashed. Pigtails Morag and No Shoes Morag led the way. Plaits Morag and Left Sleeve Up Morag brought up the rear. The three other Morags they had since encountered were spread out among the eight Cattresses. Plaits could feel the tension building among the men and was sure that her other selves could feel it too. They figuratively circled one another and Morag heard occasional mutters about “the wife” or “the mistress” or “the house”.

  “When we get out of here,” said Left Sleeve, “if we could each only take one item from our old home – before beginning a new life in some far-off city or whatever – what would you take?”

  “Most of our stuff is still up in Edinburgh,” said Plaits.

  “True, true.”

  “I’d want to take the pictures of mum and dad.”

  “We could make copies of those.”

  “Our vinyl copy of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood,” called one of the Morags from the middle of the line.

  “Really?” replied Left Sleeve. “It’s not a very good album.”

  “Ah, but the sentimental value,” said Plaits, recalling the secondary school boyfriend she had borr
owed it from.

  They entered a small gallery, lined with Fox Talbot’s antique photographs of the Kuyuncuk Dras’n-orgh in Nineveh. It wasn’t the first time they had come this way. Or, it wasn’t the first version of this place they had passed through. As before, the eyes of dead Venislarn followed them as they passed.

  “I know,” said a Morag somewhere, “we could all agree to try to get back with an old boyfriend. One each.”

  Plaits wasn’t sure there were enough exes to go round and then did a mental count and was surprised there were even a couple to spare.

  “Which one would you take?” said Pigtails.

  “Cameron Barnes,” replied six Morags in unison.

  They were a couple of knowing chuckles and a shaking of several heads.

  “Yep, definitely the one that got away,” said Left Sleeve.

  “There’s plenty more fish in the sea,” said Plaits.

  “You have the fish, I’ll have Cameron,” said Pigtails.

  “I don’t see why we should split up,” said Plaits. “We could all stick together and form a girl band.”

  There was a chorus of interested hmm noises.

  “That would be a lot of fun,” said Left Sleeve, “except that some manager would make us all dress up as Robert Palmer girls and try and get us to pout moodily at billionaires’ private parties. We’d spend all our time fighting off sex pests.”

  “Simple answer,” said Pigtails, stepping forward. “I’ll be manager. We take the bookings we want.”

  “Come off it,” said another Morag from the crowd. “We have no clue how to be a manager.”

  “Like we’ve never blagged our way through something tricky before! Who do we think’s harder to deal with, an August Handmaiden of Prein or a venue promoter?” asked Pigtails.

  “Yeah, do I need to remind you that we killed an August Handmaiden of Prein?” said Plaits. “I have a feeling we might not be cut out for public relations.”