THE BRITISH MUSEUM.Rhys opened his eyes.
“Hi there! Do you know what the elastic limit is of the small intestine, for application to Hooke’s law?”
Rhys closed his eyes again.
This was hell.
He’d always suspected he’d go to hell. As a child he’d spent time visiting his uncle’s farm, and on the wall of the bathroom there’d been posters charting the virtuous way to heaven and the easy way to hell. Happy children holding the hands of their righteous parents had attended Sunday school, learned to sing together, prayed regularly, eaten well and eventually risen up a steep and thorny hill into glorious sunlight; while scruffy wretched children had travelled through licentiousness and vice, in plush railway carriages and over shining tracks, into the damned pit. As a seven-year-old boy sat on the toilet in the clean white bathroom, he hadn’t know what licentiousness was, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, it meant him.
“How about the death of the female pope?” the voice went on. “Hell, you gotta know this one. What is the name of the old workhorse in George Orwell’s Animal Farm?”
Rhys opened one gummy eyelid to double-check how his presumably fiery surroundings could have manifested the cheerful voice that would ask such a question.
The gatekeeper of hell appeared to be an Asian woman. Straight black hair cut into a bob of subtle angles and infinite bounce, a long white coat, sensible black trousers and boots that occupied the fine line where sensible became silly. And, as if you might not get the idea without it, a stethoscope hanging round her neck. The gatekeeper of hell was a doctor, and this doctor was—
“Stuck on page seventy-three of A Thousand and One Wacky Facts You Ought to Know.” She added, “I don’t usually ask these questions. Usually, when I’m on night shift, I catch up with the clerking or chat to the nurses. But since everyone here was all ‘He’s been clawed by a wendigo’ I figured I’d do the personal touch.”
Rhys raised one hand, which seemed a very long way away, and made a gesture that was at once Hold that thought and Water please.
Water was provided, in a blue plastic mug.
He drank a little at a time, shuddering with relief.
Hell, it turned out, was a spare bedroom with a poster on the wall proclaiming STEEL GREEN ELECTRONICS–THE ONLY PLACE FOR THINGS WHICH GLOW, BEEP, FIZZ OR FLICKER!!! Get your special introductory offer today–free pencil with every order of over £200!!!!!
Beneath it, a picture of a reassuringly chunky nerd, screwdriver in one hand, spanner in the other, gave him a look that was all technical heroism and chin. Rhys slunk further into the bed, between Thunderbirds sheets that could only be infernal.
“Now, I gotta ask you some questions,” went on the doctor, laying her damned quiz book aside and reaching for a clipboard.
As her pen skidded across the page, each word was intoned carefully.
“Question 1: Do You Know Who You Are?” “Um… Rhys?”
“Well done!” exclaimed the doctor. “I’m Dr Seah, lovely to meet you–in a totally professional way, or whatever. Next question: Do you have a history of substance abuse?”
“What?”
“Come on, come on, don’t be shy. Everyone’s been there.”
“Is this hell?” he croaked.
Dr Seah hesitated. “Interesting question,” she conceded. “Your devil dude said something like ‘For this is hell nor am I outta it’ and then there’s all this BS about how anywhere that wasn’t in God’s sight was like, hell. But then again, if this is as bad as things get, then you’re sorted. That said,” she flicked her hair away from her face with the chewed end of her biro, “it depends on how you feel about Kentish Town.”
Rhys had a feeling that the world was a long way off and anything it wished to say to him would take a long time to reach its cognitive destination. This being so, he lost no time moving onto his next question:
“Am I dead?”
“Oh God, are you? Because if you are, you should totally declare that.”
There was a creak by the bedroom door. He turned his head–itself an exercise worthy of mechanical aid–and there she was: black hair streaked with blue, purple boots and a sheepish expression.
“Hi, Rhys.”
“Ms Li?” he rasped.
She perched on the end of the bed, gingerly. “How’s, uh… how are you coping with being stabbed and everything?”
“Lacerated,” corrected Dr Seah. “Stabbed is more kind of pokey pokey; our druid here got lacerated.”
“I thought I was dead,” he ventured in the tone of a man hoping to be persuaded otherwise.
Sharon hesitated. Compassion and efficiency briefly fought across her features. Then, “Don’t be daft, it was only a bloody wendigo!”
“ ‘Only’ a wendigo?” Rhys squeaked.
“Four whole days you’ve spent tucked up in here,” said Dr Seah. “Do you know how much nutmeg you need to expel the contagion of a wendigo’s claws?”
“I think I need a tissue.”
“Poor chicken! Sharon said you get allergies.”
“It’s fine,” he whimpered as a tissue was dabbed against his reddening nose. “I can… can handle the… aaahh… aacchh… acchhii…”
‘You thought about anti-histamines?” offered Dr Seah.
“They make me dro… drow…”
“What, even the ones with caffeine in?”
“I think it’s a brain thing,” Sharon explained, tapping her skull with the subtlety of a cruise missile in an oil refinery.
“How can you be a druid and have allergies?” exclaimed the diminutive doctor as Rhys’s face contorted with the effort of trying not to sneeze.
“He’s an urban druid.”
“What do they do?”
“They… Okay, so I don’t really know what they do, yeah, because of how Rhys gets these allergies whenever he tries to do a spell. But I’m sure if he wasn’t like, dribbling snot all the time, he’d do amazing things.”
“I’m right here!” he wailed in protest.
“You’re busy,” retorted Dr Seah. “Now, I’m going to leave some antihistamines in your pocket. I mean, I know they’re not your thing and you don’t want to take them but, seriously, drugs are cool–I mean, like medicinal drugs–they’re awesome.”
Rhys opened his mouth to explain that, look, no, he understood that, physiologically speaking, anti-histamines would probably work and he appreciated from a rational perspective that there was possibly a psychosomatic element to his physical reactions, but really, the problem wasn’t going to be solved overnight and actually he needed space to deal with it in his own way…
“He’s giving me this look of like, ‘Oh what the fuck,’ ” whispered Dr Seah to Sharon. “See the way his left eyebrow twitches? There’s thirteen muscles doing just that one nervous tic.”
“Are there?” exclaimed Sharon, peering down to study Rhys’s face. “That’s kind of cool.”
Dr Seah patted Rhys on the hand. “Also,” she explained, reverting to her professional voice for the ignorant, “there’s some stitches in you which you Must Not Pull, yes? Drink Lots of Fluids. Don’t Pick Fights With Wendigos. Anything else? Just Say No. I guess that covers most of it. You gonna be okay with him?” she asked Sharon, scooping up an oversized medical bag which, Rhys couldn’t help but notice, was adorned with rubber flowers and a badge proclaiming I THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
“Yeah,” sighed Sharon. “It’ll be fine.”
“Coolio! Bye then, till next time. Try not to get anything nasty!” sang out Dr Seah. “And stay clear of curses!” The door clunked shut behind her.
Rhys looked at Sharon.
Sharon smiled uneasily.
He realised he was staring so looked away.
Then he realised he was deliberately not looking at her. After a moment of confusion he fixed his gaze on her left ear, hoping to give an impression of interest but without causing discomfort.
Sharon’s smile faltered. “Okay,” she said. “I think you gotta know something important. While I am up for like, bringing you chicken soup and putting the telly in here and that, there is no way–no way–I’m doing the brow-mopping thing.”
“The—”
“It’s not because I’m not feeling bad about what happened to you. It’s just that there’s feeling bad and then there’s compromising your principles.”
“Does brow-mopping compromise principles?”
This was something Sharon had thought through. “You know that thing where the guy gets injured, heroically fighting off monsters and that? And then he gets all romantically feverish and kind of sexily sweaty and stuff? And then there’s this girl who sits by him and mops his brow with cold water? I can’t be having any of that. I just don’t see how it makes any sense, because you know how the girl is usually ‘Do I care?’ at the start, and by the end is ‘Wow I love this guy, he’s needy’? And I’ve never got why I should come over all vapid for needy. Or, in fact, why sweaty is sexy. Sweaty smells. Anyway…” She paused to consider what she’d just said, then added, “Anyway, I’ve got spirits to free, dogs to banish, wendigos to kick and cities to save and that. And while, like I said, I’m there with the tins of soup business, you’re okay now, and you’re gonna stay okay. Okay?”
Rhys found himself distracted by a new thought.
Up till now part of his mind had been experiencing a delay between receipt of a signal and the actual processing of information attached. Now, it groaned, shuddered, and hit “Reset”. Thoughts tumbled into his brain, and words tumbled straight back out.
“Ms Li,” he said, “where am I and what is going on?”