Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

Nothing – the formae just wouldn’t catch. But I was starting to recognise the sensation. It was the same feeling I had when I couldn’t do magic in fairyland. I wondered if the oubliette was also part of an intrusion by fairyland into our world. That would explain why Foxglove could leap about and maybe also why she slept down there.

I went back to my book.

Since I was stuck there I’d decided to see if I could get all the way through ‘The Music of the Ainur’, the first bit of The Silmarillion and something I’ve never managed to do before. Tolkien and my dad had weirdly convergent ideas about the musical nature of the universe, although my dad would probably have been more forgiving of Melkor’s improvisation. You know, providing it didn’t step on his solo.

During the draggy passages I calculated what might be happening while I was tucked into my personal tertiary subspace manifold.

They knew that I’d encountered Lesley, and where, so there’d be no mucking about or down period while everyone wondered where I was. Say an hour, tops, to pull the CCTV at Wetherspoon’s and Holborn, and confirm that I’d got into a fake police car.

Or was it a real one? We knew Chorley and Lesley had contacts in the Met.

If it was real then snatching me would have blown his cover – good. I hope they threw the bastard to the wild Seawoll. That’d learn him.

A kidnapped police officer, even one as accident-prone as me, is always a priority case. So no more than a couple of hours with ANPR and CCTV to track the police car, fake or otherwise, and work out where the switch to a van took place. The big variable was how long it would take them to identify the van. And I guessed the answer to that, given the operation had been planned by Lesley, was probably never.

So what next?

Zach would have been brought in again. Fuck, everyone on the Little Crocodiles list who Seawoll and Stephanopoulos even thought might be worth a tug would be tugged. That would include Patrick Gale and Camilla Turner. And they wouldn’t be interviewed in the ABE suites, either. Nightingale would be out with Guleed, putting the frighteners on the demi-monde. And a whole web of contacts and arrangements that we’d painstakingly built up over the last couple of years would be strained to breaking point.

I wondered what Beverley was doing, and hoped it didn’t involve major property damage.

So I reckoned I was on my own. All I had to do was escape from a trap devised by the most devious fucker I’d ever met and a woman who once caught an entire gang selling counterfeit Gucci bags while on her coffee break. A woman who knew me better than I knew myself.

Or at least thought she did.

I let the words on the page blur out and let myself sense my surroundings. Assuming I really was in a bubble of fairyland, or more like an interface where the bubble intersected with the real world, then it must be the bubble that interfered with the formae I needed to create to produce a magical effect.

And if it had an effect on something I created, then it stood to reason that I should be able to detect that effect, the way the fingers can feel the rough surface of the board through the chalk.

We really were going to have to come up with some terminology one of these days. I supposed we could leave it to Abigail, if we didn’t mind having the basic magical particle called the Wicked and possessed with the qualities of positive or negative charge, pro and anti-ship and bae.

There. I felt a ripple above me like a raindrop in a puddle – looked up and saw Foxglove drop onto the landing mat with her arms full of flimsy white takeaway bags.

I jumped up and stepped forward.

There was a flicker of movement and suddenly I was slammed back against the wall with Foxglove’s face centimetres from my own and an ominously cold line across my throat. I was close enough to see little flecks of silver and gold that surrounded her pupils. Later I would speculate that those colours were unlikely to have been produced by the melanin concentration in her iris or Tyndall scattering in her stroma. But at that precise moment I was a bit more worried about what I assumed was a knife at my throat.

Behind her on the landing mat the white takeaway bags were still bouncing.

Without moving my head I glanced down to confirm that she was holding something to my throat with her right arm while pinning me to the wall with her left. I seriously doubted it was a paintbrush.

I looked back up at Foxglove who, when she was sure she had my full attention, stepped back and raised her knife for my inspection. It had a wickedly curved blade of white stone shading to a translucent pink at the edges – agate, I learnt later. I didn’t even know you could chip and polish a stone to such a beautiful, smooth and, above all, sharp edge.

Foxglove gave me a meaningful look and tilted her head to one side.

‘Never even occurred to me,’ I said.

Foxglove looked sceptical but backed away, the knife vanishing under her smock.

‘And you’ve made a mess,’ I said, straightening my collar to hide the tremor in my hands.

One of the white bags had split and was leaking orange coloured sweet and sour sauce onto the landing mat. Foxglove frowned at me as if it was my fault.

‘I’ll clean it up, shall I?’ I said, and she skipped back to give me room.

Fortunately it was just the sauce. The rest of the generic plastic food containers had stayed sealed. I surreptitiously checked for receipts or any other identification but there was none.

Foxglove approached with a roll of kitchen roll held out as a peace offering.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and finished cleaning up, dumped the rubbish into one of the plastic bags and held it out to Foxglove for disposal. She gave it, and then me, a suspicious look.

‘There’s no bin down here,’ I said. ‘So you’ve got to get rid of it.’

After a while I put it down on the mat, took what looked to be half the food and retreated to my bed. Foxglove took her half and retreated to hers. In addition to what was left of the tub of sweet and sour sauce I had pork balls and egg fried rice but no, I noticed, cutlery. I looked across the oubliette at Foxglove, who saw and raised her eyebrow.

‘I know a knife and fork are out of the question,’ I said. ‘But what about a spoon?’

In answer she opened her rice tray and stuck her face in it and methodically ate the whole lot without coming up for air. Towards the end I could see her long tongue through the semi-transparent sides of the tray, snaking around to get the last bits. When it was all done she looked straight at me with a triumphant smile.

There were bits of rice stuck to her face so I ripped a couple of sheets off the kitchen roll and, cautiously, crossed the floor to hand them over. She took them graciously enough and wiped her face. I went back to my bed and ate with my fingers.

Afterwards I packed up the rubbish in the last plastic bag and left it pointedly in the middle of the landing mat. Then I washed my hands, unwrapped the toothbrush and cleaned my teeth. Foxglove sat cross-legged on her bed and watched me with interest while picking the occasional sliver of food out of her teeth with her fingernail.

The daylight coming in through the hole began to fade.

At this time of year sunset was around nine o’clock, which meant it had been at least twenty-four hours since I’d been taken.

‘I’m having a wee,’ I said. ‘You better not be looking.’

She shrugged and lay down on her futon – I chose to believe that she kept her eyes averted and thank God it was just a wee.

She was under her duvet by the time I’d washed my hands so I got under mine before it was too dark to see. I lay there with my eyes closed and tried to feel the changes in the vestigia around me. I thought for a moment, while I was drifting off, that I felt a bubble rhythmically expand and contract as if it were breathing.