Ye Gods! Page 10

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said, ‘this is a No Smoking carriage.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Virgil replied. ‘Only here, the train smokes the people. Sit down and have a rest. It gets a bit hairy in a minute.’

  ‘Not again!’

  Apollo nodded.

  ‘Honestly,’ Minerva said. ‘We’re going to have to get him one of those collars with a little bell on it. Right, then, where did you see him last?’

  ‘Piccadilly Circus,’ Apollo said. Minerva raised both eyebrows.

  ‘Really,’ she said. ‘Well, well, fancy that. No prizes for guessing where he’s gone, then.’

  ‘Let’s not be too hasty about this,’ Apollo said. ‘Maybe he just wanted to catch a train or something.’

  Minerva ignored him. ‘You stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and see where Pluto’s got to.’

  After a long search she eventually found the ex-God of the Dead lying down, in a beautifully-tailored box, in the cupboard under the Stairs of the Dawn. She made an exasperated noise and tapped on the side of the box with her foot.

  ‘Job for you,’ she said. ‘Up you get.’

  ‘I’ve retired,’ Pluto murmured sleepily. ‘Go away.’

  ‘If you’re not up and dressed in five minutes,’ warned Minerva, ‘it’s a wet sponge down the back of the neck for you, my lad. We’ll be in the observation saloon.’

  When she got back to the saloon, Apollo was studying the Earth through some kind of optical instrument, which he unsuccessfully tried to hide between his knees when he realised his sister was back in the room. Minerva made a familiar clicking noise with her tongue and held out her hand. Reluctantly, Apollo gave her the instrument.

  ‘How does it work?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ Apollo replied. ‘Apparently it sort of picks up waves of random particles activated by disturbances in the fabric of possibility.’

  Minerva frowned. She was hopeless with gadgets but refused to admit it. ‘Like a smoke detector, you mean?’

  ‘Something like that, yes.’

  ‘Got anything?’

  Apollo shook his head. ‘He left a trail of fused alternatives all the way down to somewhere under the Cafe Royal, but then the screen just went white and started bleeping at me, so I switched it off. My guess is that it means he’s already entered, you know . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Minerva hurriedly. Gods do not like to mention the place directly beneath the cellars of Hamley’s by name if they can help it. Bad vibes.

  ‘Which means,’ Apollo went on, ‘he’s effectively given us the slip, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Minerva said, and as she spoke Pluto walked in. He was wearing a black dressing-gown and slippers, and he was yawning. He hadn’t had a haircut or trimmed his fingernails for a very long time.

  ‘Well?’ he asked sleepily. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘We need someone to go out to, er, Regent Street for us,’ Minerva said.

  Pluto scowled. ‘Oh come on, Min,’ he said. ‘You know that place gives me the willies.’

  Minerva gave him a look. ‘Don’t be such a baby,’ she said.

  ‘All right,’ said Pluto, ‘you go.’

  ‘It’s your kingdom.’

  ‘Was,’ Pluto reminded her. ‘I sold out to an Anglo-French consortium, remember? They were going to try and link it up with the Paris metro. Bloody silly idea if you ask me, but . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ Minerva interrupted, ‘now, if you’ve quite finished, you can be getting along. We’re looking for a Hero, tall, muscular, blond, the usual thing, answers to Jason Derry. I’ll put him up on the screen for you.’

  Minerva fiddled with the controls for a moment, and a thousand-mile-high hologram of General De Gaulle appeared in the night sky just below the Great Bear. ‘Whoops,’ said Minerva, ‘sorry, wrong disc. Now, try that.’

  General De Gaulle was sucked back into the heart of the Pole Star and was replaced by Jason Derry, standing with one foot on the severed head of a huge reptile and looking bored. ‘That’s him,’ Minerva said. Jason vanished.

  Pluto stood scowling at where the hologram had been for a few seconds and then tightened the cord of his dressing gown. ‘Dangerous, is he?’ he asked.

  ‘Depends what you mean by dangerous,’ Apollo said. ‘In general terms, globally speaking, yes he very probably is. On the other hand, I don’t imagine he’ll try and bite you.’

  ‘Sod it,’ said Pluto, ‘I think I’ll take the dog.’

  The train stopped.

  Jason looked out of the window. There was nothing to see.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked. Virgil looked at him gravely.

  ‘You should know better than to ask questions like that, son of Jupiter,’ he replied. ‘Particularly here, of all places.’

  ‘Why?’ Jason asked. ‘We haven’t broken down or anything, have we?’

  ‘No,’ Virgil said, looking down at the floorboards, ‘not exactly. This is where we were supposed to come to. It’s what you told me you wanted to do.’

  Jason nodded. ‘So why aren’t the doors opening?’ he asked.

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘This isn’t a station,’ Virgil told him. ‘If anything, it’s a state of mind. This is where the train stops, but you can’t get out here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re probably the first person in the history of Creation ever to ask that,’ Virgil replied. ‘The doors don’t open here for pretty much the same reason as they don’t open the windows on Concorde. The environment out there is somewhat hostile.’

  ‘Is it?’ Jason looked hard, but he couldn’t see a trace of any sort of environment, hostile or not; there was just that sort of darkness that means that all you can see is your reflection in the window. He said as much to Virgil.

  ‘That,’ Virgil answered, ‘is the whole point. There is nothing out there. It’s probably the largest accumulation of nothing in the entire cosmos.’

  ‘Oh,’ Jason said. ‘In that case,’ he added, after a pause, ‘someone’s been pulling my leg.’

  ‘Really?’ Virgil studied his fingertips. ‘And who might that have been?’

  Jason felt a slight twitching under his scalp. ‘Oh, just someone I met,’ he said. ‘And he told me that - well, something I was looking for was to be found at the Underground stop directly under Hamley’s. And I said that as far as I knew there wasn’t one, and he said I should ask you to take me there. So I did, and now you’re telling me I can’t get out here.’

  ‘I said nothing of the kind,’ Virgil replied. ‘All I said was that if you’re so incredibly fed up with life that you want to get out here, the doors aren’t going to aid and abet you. That’s all.’

  Jason leaned back in his seat and sighed. That seemed to be that, he told himself. And yet . . .

  ‘Virgil,’ he said, ‘can I ask you something?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said the Mantuan.

  ‘If you had a little voice in the back of your head,’ said Jason, ‘that kept telling you to . . . no, suggesting that you do things that you really don’t want to do, because they’re dangerous and you don’t understand why they need doing anyway, how would you react?’

  ‘I’d have a lobotomy,’ Virgil replied unhesitatingly. ‘Nothing worse than a chatty brain, I always say.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jason. ‘Only I have this awful feeling that I ought to get off the train here and go and look for - well, the thing. It. I don’t want to,’ he added, ‘not one little bit, but somehow I feel that I should. Do you understand?’

  Virgil nodded. ‘Indeed,’ he replied sadly. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you. Lots of people get that.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jason, encouraged. ‘Do they?’

  ‘Yes, masses,’ Virgil replied. ‘Just before they get killed. A lot of people do get killed, you see, and . . .’

  ‘Will I get killed if I get out of this carriage?’ Jason asked. ‘For certain,
I mean; no possibility of survival.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Virgil.

  ‘What are my chances, then?’

  ‘I really couldn’t guess,’ said the poet. ‘You see, no mortal has ever been where you’re proposing to go. Or at least never gone and come back. Therefore, reliable data is a bit thin on the ground.’

  ‘Ah, the hell with that,’ Jason said, striving to sound cheerful. ‘Nobody had been to America before Columbus.’

  Virgil looked at him and leaned forward. ‘Have you ever considered,’ he asked, ‘how many people before Columbus tried to get to America but failed because they fell off the edge of the world?’

  ‘But that’s . . .’

  ‘You can say that,’ Virgil interrupted him, ‘because you don’t know what you’re talking about. And,’ he added, ‘I’m buggered if I’m going to waste my time telling you, because very shortly you won’t exist any more. Or at least, if I tell you, then you soon won’t exist any more, because you’ll leave the train. Whereas if I scare you shitless about what’s out there instead of telling you the truth, then you won’t leave the train and therefore you won’t die. Clever, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Jason, ‘you lost me quite early on, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s a bifurcation,’ Virgil said. ‘To be precise, it’s an Impossibility Frontier. It’s impossible for a mortal to know what’s out there and live to tell the tale. You have to follow one of the two alternatives - know and die, stay ignorant and live. There is no third choice.’

  ‘Isn’t there?’

  ‘No.’

  Jason grinned disconcertingly and lashed out at the window with the Sword of Glycerion, still in its canvas bag. The glass smashed, and the train vanished. So did Virgil, the light, the Sword and - agonisingly - the sandwiches. The only thing that didn’t vanish was Jason.

  ‘Good dog,’ Pluto lied.

  Cerberus, the triple-headed Hellhound, ignored him and growled again. The guard went white but stood his ground.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he insisted, ‘but unless it’s a guide dog, you can’t take it on the train. Rules is rules.’

  Pluto shrugged. ‘Do you contain bone marrow?’ he asked.

  The guard gave him a bewildered look. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘It said on one of those commercials,’ Pluto replied. ‘It’s good for dogs, apparently. How about calcium? They’re supposed to need a lot of calcium.’

  ‘Here . . .’

  ‘I know,’ Pluto said miserably, ‘I don’t enjoy it much either, all this threatening and menacing and so on. It’s this damned dog that causes all the trouble. I’d leave him behind, but if he sees me going out and I don’t take him with me, he grabs the lead in his mouths and jumps up at me and barks. I don’t actually like dogs much, to tell you the truth.’

  The guard swallowed hard and tried not to look at the six small, round red eyes that were fixed on him. ‘Are you sure,’ he said quietly, ‘that it isn’t a guide dog?’

  ‘Positive,’ Pluto said.

  ‘Looks like a guide dog to me.’

  ‘Does it? Oh I see. Yes, it’s a guide dog all right.’

  ‘Fine,’ said the guard. ‘Now go away, please.’

  Pluto shook his head sadly and walked over to the escalator. There was a sign saying that dogs should be carried on the escalator, but it had clearly been put there by someone who hadn’t considered all the possibilities.

  ‘Next,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, ‘you take the patera in your right hand . . .’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘No. I mean yes. Then you pick up the simpulum in your left hand, dip it in the sacred barley meal . . .’

  ‘What sacred barley meal?’

  ‘Drat,’ said Ms. Fisichelli. ‘Oh well, never mind. I usually use muesli anyway. It’s not quite right, sure, but the worst that happens is the prophesy turns out ten minutes fast. Now place the simpulum on the patera and count to ten.’

  Mary closed her eyes. ‘One two three four . . .’

  There was a sudden roar, and a cold blue flame sprang out of the sacred tripod, much to the surprise of Ms. Fisichelli, who was leaning on it. There was no harm done, however, since the flame didn’t seem to know that fire is supposed to burn. It simply played up and down her sleeve a couple of times and then subsided to something like Gas mark 4.

  ‘However did you manage that?’ said the Pythoness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mary confessed, ‘it just sort of happened. Why, isn’t it supposed to?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Ms. Fisichelli confessed. ‘Only it never has when I’ve tried it. I usually end up having to use meths and a lighter.’

  Mary smiled, slightly embarrassed, and murmured something about beginner’s luck. Then, as directed, she placed the patera over the flame, sprinkled more of the sacred muesli, and poured a libation from the small silvergilt cornucopia. The flame started to rise again, only this time it lifted the patera up with it.

  ‘Zippy,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, impressed. ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

  ‘No,’ Mary said, looking away. ‘What now?’

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ said the Pythoness, ‘we should now sacrifice a kid, a lamb and a white dove. However, I have the neighbours to think of, so I generally skip all that. Sometimes, though, I do pop in a casserole. Less blood and saves me having to cook an evening meal.’

  Mary shrugged. ‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ she said.

  ‘Usually, though,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, ‘I don’t bother. I’ve never noticed it make a blind bit of difference. You know how sometimes you can’t be bothered sacrificing just for one.’

  ‘Fine,’ Mary said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘We wait,’ said Ms. Fisichelli. ‘Sooner or later the god will manifest himself, and then we can . . . Oh hell!’

  The flame flickered, rose up, crackled and went bright green. The patera bobbed on the crest of the flame and started to sink slowly down onto the tripod. There was a foul smell of sulphur.

  ‘What’s up?’ Mary asked. ‘Have we got something wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, ‘that’s just the busy signal.’

  ‘Oh.’ Mary raised an eyebrow. ‘Does that mean we have to start all over again?’

  Ms. Fisichelli shook her head. ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘It used to, in the old days. But now there’s a sort of Redial facility. Watch.’

  She leaned forward and pressed an embossed lion’s head on one of the legs of the tripod. The flame became blue again and the patera started to climb back.

  ‘Look,’ Ms. Fisichelli said, and pointed to the heart of the flame.

  ‘Where?’ Mary said. ‘I can’t see any . . .’

  The words died on her lips. In the very centre of the flame a man’s face was slowly becoming visible; first just the eyes, then the lips, nose and chin. Then the fire seemed to mould itself into the shape of a head, the flames curling up from a fiery neck and flickering wildly to form the thick, curly hair. Mary gasped. The lips parted and the fire spoke.

  ‘Hello,’ it said, ‘this is Apollo speaking. I’m sorry there’s no-one here just now to take your call but if you’d care to leave a message I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Please speak clearly after you hear the tone. Thank you.’

  Ms. Fisichelli scowled. There was a sudden blare of trumpets that seemed to shake all the brains up inside Mary’s head.

  ‘Thia is Betty-Lou Fisichelli calling,’ the Pythoness said. ‘Er . . . Oh, dammit, I hate talking into these things . . . Look, would you please very kindly sort of descend or send down a messenger or a dream or something, when it’s convenient, of course, because we’ve had, well, it’s rather hard to explain, some very funny things have been happening and perhaps you should know about them, so please do call back, thank you. Message ends,’ she added.

  The fiery head nodded three times and slowly became nothing more than a random pattern of flames. The patera s
ank back. The fire went out.

  ‘Well,’ said the Pythoness, ‘that was a complete waste of time, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was the most amazing thing,’ Mary whispered, as much to herself as to the Pythoness. ‘He was so . . .’

  ‘And if he does call back,’ Ms. Fisichelli went on, ‘you can bet your shirt it’ll be while I’m in the bath or washing my hair or something. I really hate that, you know, having this great big burning face pop up at you while you’ve got your head over the washbasin. Still, there it is.’ She started to clear away the sacred implements.

  ‘Betty-Lou,’ said Mary, after a while.

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘What exactly is happening?’ Mary asked. ‘I mean, I know it must be important, because of what the entrails say, but . . .’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Ms. Fisichelli replied. ‘Maybe the entrails were wrong. I’ve never been entirely happy about divining with frozen chickens anyway, but I’m in enough trouble with the Residents’ Association as it is without killing chickens all over the place. Probably all a storm in a teacup.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘I think something funny happens to them when you defrost them in the microwave . . . Sorry, dear, what were you saying?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Mary. ‘Maybe we could work it out for ourselves. What’s happening, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the Pythoness stiffly. ‘Best leave that to the experts, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mary replied carefully, ‘sure thing, but don’t you think it’s meant as an omen?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Betty-Lou. ‘That’s why he’s got to be told.’

  ‘But surely the whole point of an omen is that it’s a sort of coded message,’ said her apprentice. ‘Which means that whoever sent it expected us to be able to understand it. So I thought . . .’

  ‘Fine,’ said the Pythoness with unwonted irony. ‘So you just tell me what it means when a red plastic nose suddenly materialises on the sacred image of Apollo.’