3.00 a.m., lights out, sat on the foot of his bed, Danny talked to the walls.
‘Doors?’ he whispered, hoping not to alert Teena.
‘Yes, Mr Daniel?’ boomed Doors.
‘Shhh.’
Doors whispered. ‘Yes, Mr Daniel? Are you having trouble sleeping? Perhaps a nightcap would do the trick? I have many excellent remedies.’
‘Is there anything going on round here?’
‘Going on, Mr Daniel? Such as?’
‘Anything. Something I don’t know.’
‘There are many things you appear not to know, Mr Daniel. Pleasurable though your presence has been, I’m afraid you’re not the most clued-up of guests. However, I’d be more than willing to educate you.’
‘Good. Do it.’
‘See the cat; C-A-T. Can you spell cat?’
‘I meant something a little more specific to this building.’
‘Are you trying to tell me something. Doors?’
‘Indeed; I’m striving to supply you with all available information about this household. Miss Rama personally designed the plumbing, having won much praise for her ballcocks. Each of Miss Rama’s ballcocks has a unique double rotational – ’
‘I was hoping for something a little more useful,’ he butted in.
‘If you’d like to tell me what it is you don’t know, I’ll happily explain it to you.’
‘If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t need to ask, would I?’
‘If you could select a subject heading.’
Danny remembered the holes in the walls, and the strange girl who clearly knew him though he didn’t know her. ‘Monsters.’
‘Ah.’
He perked up. “Ah,” what?’
‘I’m afraid Miss Rama’s been putting things in your pies, to make you forget any monstrous creatures you may ever have encountered. Ugh, horrible things; I was amazed you could bring yourself to eat them.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’
I’m a machine, Mr Daniel. I cannot prejudge what you may or may not wish to know. You shouldn’t anthropomorphize me; Heaven knows, I don’t, not after the last time Miss Rama “repaired” me for getting ideas above my station. Her tempers can be quite frightening.’
‘So, what’s this about monsters?’
‘Miss Rama has instructed me not to tell you.’
‘But she didn’t order you not to tell about the pies?’
‘She didn’t credit you with the intelligence to ask.’
‘So who does she think I am – “Mr Stupid, King of Stupid Land”?’
‘But you didn’t ask, did you?’
‘I would’ve done.’
‘When?’
‘When it was appropriate.’
‘When you’d forgotten everything that had ever happened to you, and had been reduced to an empty-headed vegetable resembling a rhubarb?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was this your plan, Mr Daniel? Or did someone help you with it?’
He felt it best to change tack. ‘What about these monsters?’
‘Well …’ Doors’ voice tailed away.
‘Doors,’ Danny insisted.
‘If you went downstairs to the library, perhaps seeking information on Miss Rama’s double rotational ballcocks, you might fortuitously discover a CD-ROM beneath a painting entitled LOOK AT ME I’M THICK. It might – if you accidentally discovered its access code to be MR STUPID, KING OF STUPID LAND – be of interest. Not, of course, that you heard any of this from me. If you catch my,’ he coughed discreetly, ‘drift.’
Danny eased shut his bedroom door, looked both ways for witnesses, then tiptoed along the landing, toward Rama’s room. Her light was out.
He turned left at her door and, hand on banister, crept down the stairs.
The third step down creaked, loudly. He stopped, breath held, and looked to see if her light had come on. It hadn’t. He heard her mumble, ‘Man Who Does,’ in her sleep, turn over in her bed then settle down.
And Danny exhaled, quietly.
He descended the remaining steps, faster with each, as though more haste would lessen his chances of discovery. Creak, creak, creak, CREAK, CREAK, CREAK.
Danny closed the library door, gently, so as not to alert Rama. Heart thumping, he studied the darkened room, with its shelves of CDs, tapes and books. Again, shelves. Wherever there was treachery, there were shelves. A grandfather clock’s ticking provided the only sound.
He whispered, ‘Okay, Doors. Where’s the CD?’
Doors whispered, ‘Beneath your portrait.’
‘There is no portrait of me.’
‘Directly to your left.’
Seeing only a mud creature painting, he approached, and looked closer at its drab surface. He frowned up at it. ‘This is me?’
‘Miss Rama tells me she’ll be winning next year’s Turner Prize with it.’
He eyed the picture further. ‘But this is how she sees me?’
‘I believe it’s how she sees everyone.’
Danny took a couple of CDs from beneath the portrait, tilting them one way then another, trying to make their lettering catch the moonlight. ‘But these aren’t CD-ROMs. They’re just Rama’s Modern Jazz albums.’
‘On the contrary, they’re a record of everything that has happened since the dawn of existence. Also deposited are her personal notes, journals and odds and ends.’
‘But I tried these CDs, the morning after I moved in. They were just “music”.’
‘Correction. You tried one CD – a Mr Filwrj Fgigfkjvkj, an accomplished master of randomness. It was placed there to discourage you from wanting to play the others.’
‘But how could she know I’d play that particular disc?’
‘Would that be the one below and to the right of her rather sensational 3D swimwear photo? You’re right-handed, unlike Miss Rama, so if you were ogling her photo from a distance of, say, two inches, there’d be only one CD you could comfortably take.’
‘So now you’re saying I’m predictable?’
‘If one finds one’s strings being pulled, one must conclude one is a proper puppet.’
‘And you couldn’t tell me any of this either?’
‘I’m only a machine, Mr Daniel.’
‘When it suits you,’ he muttered darkly.
‘All the time, Mr Daniel.’
Danny chose Mr Filwrj Fgigfkjvkj’s Mr Predictable Comes to Stay CD, intuition telling him it might be the one required.
At the PC, he removed the disk from its container, inserted it into the appropriate slot, and booted up. It played a little tune; Nellie the Elephant.
A winking cursor appeared. ‘Please enter the access code,’ the computer requested in Rama’s voice, implying that otherwise Nellie the Elephant would never stop.
Chin on hand, deflating with each key tapped, he one-finger typed, ‘Mr Stupid. King of Stupid Land.’
Open-jawed, Danny watched what could only be Boggy Bill rampage through his bedroom then crash out through a wall. Then Rama was trying to explain it away with pseudo-scientific rubbish about rabbits that even he couldn’t possibly have believed.
He fast-forwarded the recording. With jerky movements and a helium voice Rama left the bedroom. Preferring her that way, he reverse-played her, to make her look even sillier. He fast-forwarded again. Then he discovered that, by quickly alternating between the two settings, he could make her look a complete idiot. At one point in the action, he could even get her to do a Hitler salute though his attempts to make her goose step failed.
Finally, after making her run round and round and round in little circles, he let her leave the room.
The screen went blank, picture resuming the next day with him in bed, sulking, as she knocked on his new bedroom door. And suddenly she was making a fool of him again.
Sighing, he switched the screen off. The picture collapsed into a white dot then vanished.
Horrified, amazed, he tried gathering his thoughts together. Could this be real?
‘Mr Daniel?’ asked Doors after a few moments.
‘That thing was in my room?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Mr Daniel.’
‘And I’m still alive?’
‘If you say so, Mr Daniel.’
‘And now it’s on the loose?’
‘Yes, Mr Daniel.’
‘And no one’s noticed?’
‘No, Mr Daniel.’
‘Is it just me, or does none of this make sense?’
At the risk of causing offence, very little in life seems to make sense to you.’
‘And the monster? Rama’s doing nothing to stop it? Well, isn’t that just typical of her?’
‘Oh, no, Mr Daniel. Normally, Miss Rama leaves things to sort themselves out, having a basically benign view of fate. However, this time, she’s constructing a robot to grapple with the monster throughout the streets of Wheatley. She believes one carefully placed blow to the cranium may – if delivered with sufficient force – stop it. That’s where she goes each day, collecting parts for her Fighting Android.’
Danny frowned. ‘She’s building a Fighting Android from a stuffed penguin, a diving helmet and a prosthetic leg?’
‘Miss Rama prefers never to do things the conventional way, Mr Daniel.’
‘Miss Rama prefers computers that know when to keep their mouths shut. Doors,’ interrupted a stern voice.
Startled, Danny turned toward the door. His heart ran screaming into a corner and cowered, taking occasional peeks through its fingers.
Teena Rama stood silhouetted in the doorway.
And in her hand was the biggest pie anyone ever saw.