2

Matt turned and looked at a face straining up over a broad chest. The weird first impression that registered was of a deconstructed panda—above the face was a full head of snow-white hair, but the eyebrows beneath were bushy and black.

“Hello?” said the man again when Matt failed to respond. His eyes swivelled warily back to the spot where the kids had all disappeared.

“DO YOU HAVE A HEARING IMPAIRMENT?” the man asked.

“Sorry,” Matt replied, finally hurrying over. “Sorry. Just hang on while I untie these…” He grunted in concentration.

The knots securing the man’s wrists and ankles to the handles on the roundabout were tied with what appeared to be rough rope. But when Matt tried undoing them he was disconcerted to find that the rope had an oddly hairy feel. Also, the more he tugged at the knots, the tighter they became.

“You will need a blade.” The man winced as the rope contracted around his wrists.

“Blade, right.” Matt began tapping his pockets and looking back out towards his bike, wondering if he had a penknife in the little tool kit under the seat.

“I think you’ll find that the one they dropped will be sharp enough,” the man said, just managing not to make it sound too patronising.

Matt’s eyes strayed to the scimitar thing lying on the ground. The blade was pewter-grey, the handle leatherbound and worn. It looked like one of those toy plastic ones that came with a shield and a Roman helmet and cost ninety-nine pence back when Woolworth’s had been a magic emporium full of cheap treats.

Yet it didn’t feel much like plastic when Matt picked it up. In fact, the handle was strangely warm to the touch, and the thing sang with a metallic zing when he hefted it. The curved blade was a bit awkward to use, but incredibly sharp. In fact, he didn’t even have to do any sawing. The fibres of the rope melted away at the knife’s touch. Within seconds, Matt had freed the man’s hands; he sat up with a groan and began massaging his wrists as Matt went to work on his ankles. Two more swipes of the blade and the rope fell away, the fibres writhing on the ground as if they’d been burned. The man swung his legs over and stood, swaying. Matt took a step back to survey the children’s would-be victim. Without warning, the man let out a hiss of air, swooned, and sat back down heavily. Matt reached forward only to be waved away.

“No, it’s nothing. Pins and needles in my foot, which will pass, I’m sure.” The man smiled and held out a hand. “Porter’s the name.”

“Mathew Danmor. People call me Matt.” Matt shook the hand. It was smooth and dry.

Porter tried his feet again and didn’t wince this time. Like Matt, he wasn’t tall; unlike Matt, he had a full figure. He was clean-shaven and wore a three-piece suit of sage green over a white shirt and a red-and-black striped tie. There were highly polished brown brogues on his feet and, from the way he held his back straight when he stood, Matt would have put money on there being a bit of military in his background.

“It goes without saying that I am delighted to meet you, Matt Danmor,” Mr. Porter said.

“Are you okay?” Matt asked. “I mean, they didn’t…”

“No, they did not. I am perfectly fine, thanks to you.” Porter smiled and glanced at a splash of crow guano glistening on the elbow of his suit. He brushed it away and Matt frowned. Despite the fact that the roundabout resembled something that thirty crows had used repeatedly for target practise, Mr. Porter had managed to emerge unscathed.

“Should I call an ambulance?” Matt asked.

The morning light brightened by the second. Matt found his phone near where he’d dropped it. It was cool to the touch and lit up when he pressed the power button.

“Ambulance? Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary,” Mr. Porter beamed.

There was something about that smile. Matt found himself reminded of moving to a house in Bristol with his family when he was six, and being made to fetch a ball that his brother had just kicked into next door’s garden. The ball had taken a deflection off

Matt’s shoulder and so, despite his protestations, retrieval responsibility was his. There had, up to that point, been no neighbourly introductions. In the time it had taken to walk through the garden, out on to the street and up to next door’s front door, Matt’s brother had graphically described the neighbours as potential cannibals, vampires, zombies, or a combination of all three, the whole fabricated gory lot embellished with blood-curdling descriptions of the acts they had perpetrated, and would perpetrate, on Matt.

Quaking with fear, Matt had rung the doorbell. The door creaked open to reveal a septuagenarian man with twinkling eyes who’d listened to Matt stammering his request without protest. The man fetched the ball, while his silver-haired wife rustled up two chocolate biscuits and a glass of lemon squash, much to Matt’s delighted relief and his brother’s chagrin. The neighbour, whose name was Wil, exuded warmth and good humour and became Matt’s friend from that day on. But it was Wil’s eyes Matt always remembered. Full of kindness, oozing wisdom and a glint that—even at an early age—taught Matt that his brother’s taunts and petty niggles were just meaningless drops in the cosmic ocean. Matt caught a glimpse of that exact same wise and sanguine look in Porter’s eyes as he smiled. He didn’t seem to be that bothered about what had been about to happen to him. Which, of course, made him either a saint or a complete grade-A headcase.

“What about the police?” Matt said. “I know they’re pretty hot on knife crime.”

“Yes,” Mr. Porter said dubiously. “Still, no harm actually done…”

“No harm?” protested Matt. “They were about to make you into a kebab.” He held the knife up. “I mean, just look at this thing.”

Mr. Porter fussed with the top button of his shirt. “The thing is, I do try to avoid the authorities here in Oxford if I possibly can.”

It was such a bizarre and incongruous thing to say that, for a long ten seconds, Matt didn’t speak. Finally, he managed, “Are you on the run or something?”

“Only from Mrs. Porter. Her punishment for the wrong proportion of Tanqueray to Schweppes is severe in the extreme.”

Matt didn’t laugh. “Those kids weren’t just calling you names. They were—”

“I know,” Mr. Porter held up his hands. “And, strictly speaking, we should absolutely contact the police. But one also has to consider how they might react to such a story.”

“What do you mean?”

“Where are my attackers?”

“On the street somewhere.”

Mr. Porter nodded but his lips had gone very thin. “Much as it irks me to say this, imagine yourself a police officer called to the park by an elderly gentleman and a young man. There are ropes on the ground. They’ll find a knife on you. Tainted as they are by the worst aspects of society and its vices, they will, undoubtedly, look for…other explanations.”

Matt stared at Mr. Porter in horror. “You mean—”

“A tiff between two admittedly unlikely lovers after a little jogging, exactly.”

“Jogging? You mean dogging.”

“Do I? Yes, of course I do. Regardless, one partner takes umbrage and calls the police with a ridiculous story just to cause embarrassment to the other.”

“But—”

“Matt, please don’t think that I am implying anything, but if you have had dealings with the police at any stage in your young life, you must know that they are programmed for cynicism.”

Matt had, indeed, had dealings with the police in casualty on a regular basis, so he knew that Mr. Porter was right. They wouldn’t see the young Samaritan having rescued the respectable man from The Hannibal Lecter Under Twelve Admiration Society. They would see an old queen and a rent boy.

“And obviously, there’s the knife,” Mr. Porter added. “It would take some explaining.”

Matt stared at the blade and immediately hid it behind his back while glancing out to the street to see who was watching.

“But those kids…” Matt began, unsure of how to finish it.

“Indeed, those…kids.” Mr. Porter nodded and sent another sympathetic smile Matt’s way. “My office is just a few streets away. I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Have you had any breakfast yet?”

On cue, Matt’s stomach did an impression of a mountain lion warning off a rival.

“Excellent,” Mr. Porter said and started walking towards the park entrance. “We’re down near the canal. First left off Albert Street.”

Matt stared after him, confusion simmering in his brain. What the hell was going on? After all that, was he meant to simply follow this bloke? Half of him wanted to walk away, but the other half was too intrigued and bewildered by what he’d just witnessed for that. Besides, he really was quite hungry.

Matt picked his bike up from where he’d left it on the pavement, and they walked down Clarendon Street, Porter striding along at a fair pace with Matt pushing his bike alongside, silence hanging between them.

“I think it has stopped raining,” said Mr. Porter eventually. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the sun made an appearance later this morning. I think we’ve had enough precipitation for a good while, don’t y—”

Matt stopped walking. “Look, Mr. Porter, I’m genuinely delighted that you’re unharmed, but I think I’m going to explode unless I get some answers here. Why were those children trying to stick a scimitar in your chest?”

“Children, yes,” Mr. Porter said but with an odd, faraway expression. “How many did you actually see, Matt?”

“Eight. Seven on the ground and Charlie Manson organizing the spit roast above you on the roundabout.”

“Shall we cross here?” Mr. Porter suggested, guiding Matt across the road.

Exasperated, Matt followed.

“Children,” Mr. Porter mused as they walked. “In a play area. Clever, that.”

“What?” Matt said.

Mr. Porter didn’t slow down or stop. He strode along like a major on the way to inspect the troops. But he cleared his throat as if he’d come to some sort of conclusion.

“Matt, you look like a nice, normal sort of chap.”

Yeah, thought Matt, casting his mind back to his usual cursory glance in the bathroom mirror last evening. He had looked normal. At least, the mirror hadn’t cracked or anything. But then, a crate full of black mambas looked just like any normal old crate until you opened the lid and inspected the contents.

“What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?” Matt asked.

“It means that sometimes you just have to accept what you find as…what you find.”

“Not following,” Matt said.

“Well, clearly, I was the victim of a magging.”

“A magging?” Matt said. “I think you mean mugging.”

“Exactly. They wanted thingummy…um, you know…”

“Money?” Matt suggested.

“Yes, money. They wanted money.”

“Muggers usually threaten, take the money and run. They don’t stand around howling at the sky and hissing at each other.”

“Perhaps they were hissing to express their disapproval at your intervention.” Mr. Porter was almost running now. Matt got the distinct impression that he was fishing in uncharted waters with an illegal pole.

“Well, they weren’t rehearsing a scene from ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ I know that,” Matt argued. “To me, they looked like a bunch of very small but determined psychopaths.”

Mr. Porter took a sharp left and, panting, drew up outside a heavy wooden door in a red brick wall. It was an oversized garage of the lockup-under-the arches-at-Waterloo Station school of architecture. It had a curved, sludgy brown roof and a sign above the door that read HIPPOSYNC ENTERPRISES. Still wheezing slightly, Mr. Porter opened the door and stepped inside.

“You can leave your bicycle here; it will be quite safe.”

Inside the door of the Hipposync Enterprises lay a coir mat with Welcome written on it. A long corridor ran the length of the building, with four sets of doors on either side, plus one at the end facing the entrance. There were no windows, just three fluorescent strips, which illuminated the corridor with a garish light. One of the bulbs flickered constantly. The walls were a drab green, and the doors looked old and heavy and gleamed with shiny brown paint. On the wall near to the welcome mat was a cartoon sign hanging at a jaunty angle from a blue drawing pin:

You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.

Matt had seen the same sign a dozen times in as many cramped and joyless offices. Someone’s idea of a good laugh, no doubt, but one that, in Matt’s experience, evoked nothing but groans of contempt for its banal clichéd message. At Hipposync, someone had seen fit to cross out “…but it helps,” and amend it with, “…but we are equal opportunity employers.”

Under the poster and underlined in red was:

AVOID ACCIDENTS IN THE WORKPLACE. PROTECTION MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES. LOST TALISMANS MUST BE REPORTED TO MRS. HOBLIP IMMEDIATELY.

“I see someone has a sense of humour,” Matt said.

Mr. Porter peered at the note and nodded. “Unfortunately, it is not Mrs. Hoblip. She had hers surgically removed at eighteen months of age. Bit of a fad in those days amongst her…” Mr. Porter stopped mid-sentence and cleared his throat again. “But overall, we run a pretty tight ship.”

“You’re not related to someone called Linda Marsh, by any chance?” murmured Matt, but Mr. Porter didn’t answer. He was already striding up the corridor.

“I’m right at the end,” he said over his shoulder. Matt followed, reading the signs above the doors: “Citizenship,” “Asylum,” and “KOL.”

“What’s KOL?” Matt asked.

“Knowledge of Life. Your lot have become very strict on settlement applications.”

“You’re something to do with immigration, then?” Matt asked, as light began to dawn in his head.

“Something, yes.” Mr. Porter nodded with a funny little smile. They passed another door, this one with DC Farmer, Scribe Services stuck on it in embossed blue Dymo-tape.

“Writes stuff down. In 450 languages. At the same time,” said Mr. Porter.

Matt toyed with asking, but by then they’d arrived at a door that had “PORTER” written above it in big gold lettering.

“Here we are,” said Mr. Porter jovially as he opened the door and stepped inside. “The one place where I can feel absolutely safe.”

Matt had time to appreciate that the office was much bigger than he’d expected it to be before his legs went from beneath him. A second later, he was face-down on the carpet, more shocked than hurt. In fact, the landing had been surprisingly soft, while the sudden, overriding sensation he had was not of agony but of fresh pine. It was everywhere. Not the overpowering, eye-watering disinfectant reek that was used with such little success to try and mask the ammonia stench of urine in men’s toilets. No, this was zesty and fresh. The smell, combined with the prickling in his cheeks, led to him realising that the carpet was full of real pine needles. Feeling like an idiot for tripping, Matt tried to lever himself up. But something was sticking into the small of his back, stopping him from moving, and he realised with dumb amazement that he hadn’t fallen; he’d been thrown.

From behind him he heard Mr. Porter speak. “Kylah, please. There is absolutely no need for this.”

“Look at the alarm. It’s gone haywire. I’m telling you, he’s packing iron.” Girl’s voice. Youngish. No nonsense.

“Even so, give him the benefit of a little doubt. This is not the way to treat guests.”

The pressure on his spine eased and he swivelled his head around to see Mr. Porter looking highly embarrassed, but extending a hand to help him up. Matt brushed pine needles from his jeans and brow, looking around properly for the first time. The room was cluttered. Well…half of it was. Big windows looked out across an open stretch of yard towards the canal and the towpath on the other bank, and it was this view that cut the room in two.

On one side of the windows, the room was a junk shop box-room where dressers, wardrobes, hat-stands, and stacked chairs lined the wall. The other half looked more like an office—all clean lines, light wood, filing cabinets and a pine desk. Very businesslike. Much like the girl who stood in front of the desk on that side, glaring at Matt with almost unbridled hostility.

“Matt Danmor, this is my niece, Kylah,” Porter made the introductions.

Matt wanted to say hello, but it seemed someone had squirted superglue onto the roof of his mouth. Instead, he contented himself with an imbecilic nod while he studied the girl and tried to work out something drop-dead witty to say.

She was no more than five foot two, dark-haired and olive-skinned. She wore a tight black cardigan over a white blouse and black trousers, in a non-provocative way that still somehow did enough to show that she had all the right bits in all the right places. Miss Hipposync Enterprises 2014, of that there was no doubt. And, like all those girls on calendars or in films or magazines that he looked at and harmlessly fantasized over, completely out of Matt’s league. On one level, knowing that helped. But it still took another ten seconds until finally his brain decided to lend a hand and put him out of his misery by ungluing his tongue, thought it still felt like it had at least one granny-knot in it.

“Was it something I said?” he mumbled. If he’d hoped for a chortle or even a twitch at the corner of her mouth to acknowledge his stunning repartee, he was disappointed.

“Where’s the iron?” she demanded.

“Iron? Like, in getting the creases out of clothes? Not my strong point, actually…”

“I mean the ferric stuff,” snapped Kylah. “Rusts in the rain. Made from ore by smelting.” She made the process sound like something heinous.

Could be a wind-up, thought Matt. But the look on Kylah’s face was straight from the Mel Gibson-as-Wallace-leading-the-Scots-into-battle school of aggression. He made himself think harder.

“My dad gave me a small tyre iron I carry on my key ring,” he said. “It’s in my bag.” He started undoing the buckles of his rucksack.

“Stay right where you are,” Kylah ordered, and Matt noticed that she held something in her hand. It was long and had a bulbous, egg-shaped end, which glowed a yellow-green colour as Matt watched. “Now,” said Kylah. “Put the bag against the wall and stand away from it.”

Matt did as he was told, realizing that this day probably couldn’t get much weirder if a headless horseman burst in and asked for directions to the Bodleian. Kylah moved toward the rucksack, and the glowing thing in her hand glowed ever brighter. A second thought struck Matt. Weird as the day was turning out to be, it was well worth it to be able to watch Kylah moving with cat-like grace across the floor.

She chose that moment to look up at him with suspicion written all over her face, and Matt prayed he wasn’t dribbling. Apparently satisfied that he was not going to rush back and undo the buckles, she hurried to another room (which, from the noise of taps running, Matt assumed was a bathroom) from which she emerged with a wet towel. Gingerly, she threw the towel over the rucksack so as to completely cover it. Matt noted that the glowing egg thing glowed a little less as she did it.

“Kylah is also head of security here at Hipposync,” Mr. Porter said with an apologetic air while making his hands into claw shapes and baring his teeth. Matt couldn’t help noticing that he did this with one eye on Kylah to ensure that she didn’t see. She shot him a suspicious glance, but Mr. Porter knitted his fingers together and his expression melted back into serene amusement. “Right,” he said, “I promised you a breakfast. Full English suit you?”

“Uh, yes. Think I could manage that,” Matt said.

Mr Porter got to his feet. “Okey-dokey,” he said with alacrity, and moved with surprising speed towards the door. “I’ll just go and sort that out with Mrs. H while you explain to Kylah all about this morning’s little…situation.” With that, he was out of the door and whistling down the corridor.

“Uncle Ernest?” Kylah yelled after him.

“Canteen?” said Matt.

The whistling receded, leaving Kylah to mutter under her breath before she turned towards Matt.

“What situation?” she asked through clenched teeth.

Matt couldn’t help but notice that her eyes, though currently full of unmitigated frustration, were large and expressive and of an extraordinary bright blue, flecked with little motes of yellow gold.

“Has anyone ever told you that you have the most amazing eyes?”

All the saliva turned to sand in Matt’s mouth. What the hell was he thinking of? Christ, that sounded like number four in the world’s top twenty crap chat-up lines. He’d never said anything like that to anyone in his life. He felt himself turn crimson from the knees up.

“That’s not very polite,” Kylah said.

Matt hesitated. He had expected derision, or even a “puh-lease,” brush off. He had not expected a sour accusation of bad manners.

“I mean it,” he stammered. “They’re amazing.”

“Amazing is one way of describing them, I suppose. The kids at school preferred ‘goggle-eyes’ or ‘straighty.’ My parents were going to get them squinted, but the apothecary said I’d grow into it.” She shook her head. “You good-looking ones are all the same. You think you’re better than the rest of us just because of some lucky genes. Please keep your sarcastic comments to yourself and let’s get back to the situation, shall we?”

Matt frowned, tried to smile and found the smile freezing on his lips. It was a piss-take, obviously. Some sort of deconstructed feminist irony number she was doing on him. It had to be, because the alternative was that she was suggesting that she was somehow not a traffic-stopping stunner, while he was not bad-looking. Laughable, but then why was there no sly “stuff that in your pipe and smoke it” smile on her lips? All that Matt saw was the slightly disgruntled look of someone feeling a little fed up with her lot, not liking having it shoved back in her face. Still, whatever was happening, it definitely wasn’t going the way he’d meant it to.

“Look, I didn’t mean to—”

Kylah held up her hand to stop him in mid-apology. “What situation?” she asked again, very slowly.

“Mind if I sit down?” Matt asked feebly. The tilting world was making him a little lightheaded.

Kylah gestured towards a chair.

“Right. Situation. Right,” he babbled. “Difficult to know where to begin. Maybe it started with the exploding saline bags…or with seeing Roberro trying to seduce another med student…or maybe it was the accident on Walton Street. Or, maybe it really only started with the kid howling on the roundabout as he held this over your uncle’s chest.” Matt reached for the six-inch long blade he’d stuffed in his belt. “Could have done me a real injury throwing me down like that with this thing where it was. Doesn’t bear thinking about.” He put the curved blade on the table in front of him, and saw Kylah shoot up out of her chair like she’d been electrocuted. The glowing egg-wand thing was now a pulsating orange like a miniature sun.

Someone knocked on the door. Kylah looked from the weapon to Matt and then back to the weapon again. All Matt could do was shrug. She backed away and, still looking at the scimitar, opened the door to her uncle. Mr. Porter struggled in under the weight of a huge tray laden with plates and silver platters. The smell of cooked bacon was almost palpable.

“Here we are,” said Mr. Porter. “A Mrs. Hoblip special.” He put the tray on a sturdy-looking oak desk and dabbed at his face with a handkerchief, smiling. “I see that you two are getting on well. Excellent.”

“Mr. Danmor—”

“Matt.” Matt earned a frosty glare for his trouble.

“Matt,” Kylah said, “was about to tell me about this morning’s situation. We’ve got to this part,” she pointed at the blade.

“Ah,” Mr. Porter said, the smile fading from his face quicker than Matt could have said “psychopath on a roundabout.”

“I don’t need to tell you that this is a machara,” added Kylah, glaring at her uncle.

“Not a scimitar, then?” asked Matt.

“No,” explained Kylah. “Scimitars are longer. Swords rather than daggers. This evil little weapon is the favourite of the Ghoulshee.”

“Blimey,” Matt said blankly. “I thought they made handbags.”

“Ghoulshee, not Gucci,” Kylah snapped. “But what bothers me is why we didn’t register this as soon as you walked in? Are you wearing some kind of cloaking device?”

Matt lifted up his fleece to show Kylah first his T-shirt, and then his belt, which was elaborately decorated with thin metallic links around the leather.

“Very devious,” she said, her eyes slits.

“A present from an old girlfriend,” Matt explained. “Sorry if it messed up your detector. It sets all the alarms off in airport security, too. You wouldn’t believe the times I’ve been pulled over and frisked—”

“The machara is a lethal weapon,” Kylah said, cutting him off.

“Hmm, machara, yes,” Mr. Porter mused. “I feared it might be. So, fried or scrambled eggs, Matt?”

Matt turned his gaze to Mr. Porter, who was smiling pleasantly again.

“Um…scrambled, I think.”

“I’m going to scream very loudly in a moment,” Kylah said, with quiet menace.

“Now, Kylah,” Mr. Porter said in what Matt assumed must be his firm voice. It sounded about as firm as soggy cardboard to Matt, but then he had a feeling that Mr. Porter didn’t do ranting and raving. Somehow, he didn’t need to. “Matt has done me a very big service this morning and I have promised him breakfast in return. So, let’s all eat and Matt can tell you the story as we avail ourselves of Mrs. Hoblip’s skill with a frying pan. Oh, and there’s coffee and toast for you, my dear, as I’m sure you haven’t eaten yet,” Mr. Porter added.

Kylah let out a nasal sigh and shook her head. But she took the proffered cup.

The food was delicious. Matt wasn’t quite sure why, but it was, without doubt, one of the best breakfasts he’d ever tasted. Was it the ambience in the room, redolent as it was of old wood, leather and fresh pine? Or was it that Kylah was sitting not ten feet away, munching toast and sipping coffee? While Matt concentrated hard on not dripping too much bacon fat on his T-shirt, she somehow managed to make munching toast look incredibly elegant.

“Situation, remember? I’m still waiting for an explanation,” she said after several moments of silent, or, as in Mr. Porter’s case, not so silent, chewing.

“Right,” Matt said, and put down the sausage he’d just pierced with his fork. He started with the saline incident, giving Kylah a blow-by-blow account of his day right up to the point at which he’d seen that grisly, grey appendage trying to poke its way out of the dagger-wielding kid’s sweatshirt. By the time he’d finished, her mouth had set into a line of grim irritation, which she vented on her still merrily chomping uncle.

“How many times have I asked you not to walk through that park when it’s not yet light, Uncle Ernest?”

“Too many times for me to remember, Kylah. However, it was almost light and I must have the exercise, as you well know.”

“Buy a rowing machine.”

Matt decided this needed clarification. “Excuse me, but I get the impression that this attack was not exactly unexpected?”

Kylah and Mr. Porter exchanged glances. Mr. Porter answered. “Not entirely, no.”

Kylah stared at the…wand. The egg was glowing very faintly. “Are you sure you don’t have any more iron on you?”

“It’s possible he has traces in his teeth or nails in his boots. It’s of no consequence,” Mr. Porter said with a dismissive wave.

“Could someone please explain to me what the hell is going on?” Matt didn’t mean it to sound so plaintive, but it did, even to his ears.

“Kylah?” prompted Mr. Porter.

She looked at her uncle, aghast. “He doesn’t have any clearance,” she said.

“For what?” Matt asked.

“For this.” Kylah waved her arms to take in the room. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

“Why? What exactly do you do here?”

Mr. Porter chuckled. “We publish, buy and sell esoteric texts here at Hipposync. Things no one else will touch.”

Kylah shook her head. “At least that’s what it says we do at Companies’ House. But what we really do is highly confidential. You’d have to sign an official document…”

“I don’t have any problem with that,” Matt said, aware that there was a lot more going on here than was visible on the surface.

Kylah took a good twenty seconds to think before she spoke again. “Okay. I’ll tell you what it is we do here, if you allow us to use some equipment to extract the information about the attack from your memory.”

“Extract?”

“Yes. It allows us to copy what you saw, so that we can analyse it.”

“Like some sort of memory video?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

Matt shook his head in wonderment. “Technology these days, eh?”

“So you’ll agree to that and swear to it?”

“Like I said, no problem. Now, what’s so hush-hush about this place?”

Matt peered at Mr. Porter and saw that, though a smile still played on his lips, it had become a sad, wintry shadow of itself.

“What are you?” Matt pressed. “MI5? Special Ops? What?”

“None of the above.” Kylah sighed as she said it. “My uncle, Mr. Porter…he’s…this is really quite difficult.”

“Nonsense,” Mr Porter chided her. “Matt, what is it you do again?”

“Ah, that’s where it’s sort of ironic. I’m a porter, too. At the hospital. For the time being anyway.”

“And do you know where the name Porter comes from?” Mr. Porter beamed.

Matt nodded. “Got an A in French GCSE and did a degree in English before I decided on medicine. So, port-eur, from the French. Doorkeeper.”

“Very good, Matt.” He nodded and sent his niece a smile of aproval.

Kylah took a breath, and decided to get it over with. “Hipposync Enterprises,” she said, “is a front for the Department of Fimmigration.”

The elongated silence that followed was punctuated only by the moist chewing noises of Mr. Porter enjoying his breakfast.

“You did say Fimmigration?” Matt asked.

“Yes,” said Mr. Porter. “As in Fae immigration.”

“As in Fae for faeries?”

“You’re really quite etymologically sharp, Matt, did you know that?” Mr. Porter was beaming now.

“Okay,” Matt said and laughed. He didn’t like the hollow sound it made. “This is a wind-up, right?”

“You wanted to know and we’re telling you.” Kylah was all business. She reached into a drawer and pulled out a green stone attached to a leather strap. “We monitor movements between here and there. The term Fae tends to cause the same sort of reaction as you just exhibited. But the people your side couldn’t come up with anything better. Hipposync, for want of a better word, is an embassy. Strictly speaking, you’re sitting in a chair in another dimension at this very moment.”

“Another dimension?”

Kylah shrugged. “It’s the easiest way to explain it. I could have gone for Avalon or Otherworld, Tír na nÓg, or Mag Mell. I mean, they all boil down to the same thing. We watch who comes in and out and keep an eye on who’s here already. I have to admit, it’s mainly one-way traffic. There are very few of your lot going through, due to the fact that you can’t normally see us and therefore don’t really know of our existence. So, by and large, it’s our lot who want to come this way.” “Our lot? You mean…”

“Homo elementus comes the closest, if you like Latin.”

Matt allowed himself a wry smile. This was all complete bollocks, but the breakfast was top notch, and Kylah was pretty good at keeping up the charade, as well as being very pleasant on the eye. He didn’t see any harm in playing along for a while.

“So what about what happened this morning?” he asked. “What was all that about?”

“Ghoulshee separatists. They’re fundamentalist Fae. They feel repressed and are fighting for their rights,” Kylah said with a look on her face that suggested that the toast she’d munched was, in fact, dried guano.

“Which are?” Matt finally bit into the very juicy sausage.

“The usual stuff that always arises when you’re motivated by emotional resentment of rival communities,” Kylah said. “They want parity for their language, freedom to practice their religions, and an end to political suppression.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“Put like that it does, doesn’t it? However, these are Ghoulshee we’re talking about, here. An end to political repression means they’re looking for the release of some political prisoners.”

“So?”

Mr. Porter looked up from eating a slice of marmalade-laden toast. “Most of them are in jail here, convicted serial killers. Apart from the one or two who are successfully running local councils.”

“Parity for their language sounds okay too, doesn’t it?” Kylah added. “Except that they have this way of screaming that leads to certain death. And as for religious practices, what they want is the freedom to come here at least four times a year to harvest victims for the torturous and cannibalistic rituals that pass for their worship.”

The sausage in Matt’s mouth did not have quite the flavour he thought it had all of a sudden. He pushed his plate away, rinsed his mouth out with some tea, and took a deep breath. This had gone far enough. A laugh was a laugh, but this was bordering on deranged. He’d make his excuses, thank them for their hospitality, and mosey on up to the weir for a reassuring look at his exit strategy.

“Right,” he said to an expectant Mr. Porter and his attractive niece. “Thanks for the breakfast—”

“But you’re thinking that we’re making this up as we go along,” Kaylah offered, “and oh, is that the time? You really must get going. Am I right?”

“In a nutshell,” Matt said, blinking several times.

“I don’t particularly care if you believe me or not, but the fact is you witnessed a Ghoulshee incursion this morning and an attempt on the Doorkeeper’s life. Even you should see how getting rid of one of the five would be a huge political blow.”

“Five,” said Matt, who now had one eye on the door. He made to get up but couldn’t. His backside seemed welded to the leather.

“Yes.” Mr. Porter took over from his niece, attacking a mushroom with vigour and seeming not to notice Matt’s writhing struggles. “Five of us. We’re sort of a family firm, but by this time none of us can remember when we divvied things up, or how. We keep in touch, though, solstices and equinoxes mainly. Although there are cards at Christmas, too.”

“Right,” Matt said, using both arms now to try to lever himself to his feet. Still nothing.

“I know that this is difficult material,” Mr. Porter added. “It must seem like we’re both escapees from the local Solarium.”

“He means sanatorium,” Kylah said, in an aside that hadn’t seen rain for a thousand years. “And there’s no point trying to get up until we’ve used the pentrievant. You agreed to that, and it’s a binding metaphysical contract.”

Matt sighed. “Is this some sort of cult? Only I’ve donated to ‘help the terminally deranged’ already.”

“Ah, yes. Assume lunacy on our part,” Mr. Porter said, smiling as widely as ever. “That’s a fairly standard human reaction when faced with incomprehensible supernatural explanations. All I can say to you is that you should try to remember the ‘children’ we saw this morning and rationalise them, if you can. I mean, did they look in any way human to you?”

Matt swallowed with difficulty. This was off-the-wall stuff. But the answer to Mr. Porter’s question was very definitely no. They had not looked human. But neither did a lot of kids between the ages of ten and seventeen these days.

“Exactly,” Kylah said, noting the absence of any denial from Matt. “The really interesting thing about all of this is why you saw them in the first place. The Ghoulshee should be invisible to the human eye. That’s the real conundrum here.”

“I’m the conundrum?” Matt said with a suppressed chortle. “Look, tell me where the hidden camera is so we can get this over with. Truth is, I’ve been at work all night and the charade is beginning to wear a bit thin.”

Mr. Porter shook his head. “No hidden cameras, Matt. This is the truth.”

“You did ask,” Kylah said. “There are thousands of us over here. Mostly well-behaved, because we all know that, if we transgress, back we go.”

“Okay, okay.” Matt said, feeling himself slide into a mildly angry humouring-the-weird-people mode. “Let’s assume that I believe you for one minute. Why? Why would your lot want to come over here? I mean, I presume you can do stuff, right? Give people tails and horns? Magic carpets? Water into wine? I mean, I’d have thought that the world was your oyster.”

Mr. Porter sighed. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you see, Matt, the problem with a society based on supernatural powers is that it isn’t aspirational. Some of our people are very good at teleportation; others can heal cuts with a poultice and some runes; one or two can eat a whole child in one sitting.”

“Dreables,” said Kylah with a little shudder.

“But the point is,” continued Mr. Porter, “it’s innate. There’s nothing you can do about it. You get what you get when you’re born. Yes, there are courses on skill development, but basically it’s potluck. That tends to breed resentment. Whereas your lot,” Mr. Porter gave Matt an indulgent smile. “You’re all born the same, with certain notable exceptions like Einstein or Pelé or Eddie the Eagle. That means you’re all aspirational. Anyone can be anything. Our lot find that very attractive. Look at the mobile phone. We don’t have anything like that. Yes, we have some people who can communicate by thought projection across continents, but day to day, we rely on carrier pigeon or men on donkeys. Here, any idiot can use a mobile phone.”

“Plus, here is where the gold is,” Kylah added.

“Gold?” Matt asked, trying to keep up.

“Why do you keep turning my statements into questions? It’s very irritating.”

“Kylah,” Mr. Porter warned.

Kylah glanced at her uncle and then turned back to Matt with a smile that might as well have had “plastic” stamped on its underside. “Gold is highly prized, not only for its rarity but because it is supernaturally inert. In other words, despite what the alchemists all claim, they can’t make it from anything.”

This is bollocks, Matt thought. Bollocks with a capital B in heavy type and underlined. Still, he couldn’t help but respond to their nonsense with a little bit of argument. “So what do all your people do here? Read palms? Gaze into crystal balls?”

“That’s a little bit patronizing, Matt,” said Mr. Porter as he sipped his second cup of tea.

Matt shook his head and shrugged. “Humour me.”

It was Kylah who answered. “We’re into everything. Finance, politics…”

“Very big in alternative medicine,” Mr. Porter added. “Take homeopathy. One of my nephews started the whole thing in the seventeenth century. The King’s Head in Canterbury, I believe it was. He bet his friend that he could turn five shilling’s worth of ague cure into ten thousand pounds by diluting it to buggery and getting the punters to buy it. Of course, he cured the first five by giving them the proper strength, but after that you were lucky to get one molecule in three million of the stuff. Bright spark was my Sam. Huge profit margin, too. Set the trend, of course. Now they’re all trying to outdo one another with ever more bizarre scams. Trouble is, your lot will pay for anything. I mean, we don’t mind as long as it doesn’t do any harm, and if there’s one thing the punters like, it’s a good listener. In effect, it’s merely sympathetic magic. I expect they’re still doing Reiki, are they?”

“My sister’s into it.” Matt nodded, feeling sweat break out on his forehead as he tried to make his legs respond to the order to get up.

“That was Sam’s brother Tobin’s idea. That’s sibling rivalry for you.” Mr. Porter gave an indulgent chuckle. “Do anything to cop a feel, would Tobin. Gallstones of a bear, crystal healing.” He shook his head. “You couldn’t make it up, could you?”

Matt smiled and looked around for the exit sign.

“It’s still very tribal, though,” Kylah said. “For example, there are lots of soothsayers in finance. Unfortunately, someone sent them rams’ entrails instead of goats’ in 2008. But as you know, what goes up must come down.”

“Are you saying that the global financial meltdown was all down to a sheep’s intestine?” Matt asked, trying not to let his jaw drop open more than it already had.

Kylah shrugged. Mr. Porter had moved to look out of the window, whistling softly.

“But hang on a minute,” Matt said, giving up his struggle for a moment to pursue a strand of their twisted logic. “Rewind. Your nephew, Sam? You said he had a real cure for the ague, whatever that was.”

“Probably malarial fever,” Mr. Porter said. “Used to have mosquitoes here, you know. Endemic in the Fenlands.”

“Well, anyway, my point is that if there was a cure, why not use it instead of trying to trick people?” It wasn’t brilliant as rational arguments went, but it was the best he could come up with at that moment.

Mr. Porter shifted his ample bottom in the seat, but Kylah nodded and lifted one eyebrow. “That’s the one thing about our lot that you need to understand. Caprice is what we’re all about. Trickery is a way of life. You lot have altruism, our lot have mischief and fraud. It’s what makes most of our people tick.”

“Nice,” Matt said. “So the bloke I work next to on the day shift might be a bloody warlock intent on swapping people’s x-ray results.”

Kylah shook her head in a derisive fashion. Her eyelashes really were long. “That’s just silly.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Warlocks are strictly military. You’re far more likely to come across one of the undead working in the mortuary, and the worst they get up to is swapping the labels on corpses’ toes. It’s a bit of a giggle, that’s all. Very sociable lot, the undead.”

“This Ghoulshee lot don’t sound very sociable,” Matt muttered. He wanted to add the words “even if they exist’,” but held them in check.

Mr. Porter nodded. “They do not believe in a symbiotic existence. In fact, they have openly expressed their political will to create a Ghoulshean state across both dimensions.”

“That would mean cancelling Christmas, would it?”

Kylah shrugged again. “Christmas, Easter…night and day.”

“Bit of luck for you that I turned up when I did this morning, then,” Matt said, plastering on a grin. “But now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to leave. So why don’t you get on with your thought…thingy?”

It should have read “Bedlam” above the entrance and not Hipposync, but they were good. Matt had to give it to them. March hares though they may have been, they had all the answers. L. Ron Hubbard would have been very jealous. But enough was enough. He’d play along, let them do their new-age “thought retrieval” crap and get out of there quicker than you could say sleight of hand.

“Okay.” Kylah picked up the green stone on the strap. “This is completely painless, I guarantee. And yes, at least five CCTV cameras will have seen you walk in here with my uncle, so we’re not going to do anything nasty to you, okay?”

Relief rippled through him on hearing that she’d read his anxiety and was on his wavelength.

“So, this will let you see what I saw this morning?”

“Exactly. I’ll be able to run IDs on the perpetrators and get them back to our people on the other side.”

Kylah stood and walked towards him. Was that a softening of her expression?

“What’s it like on your side, then?” he asked, deciding to indulge her as she moved behind him to strap on the pentrievant.

“Good fun in daylight. Nighttimes are spent indoors behind a garlic wreath with a hemlock bat. We have our issues, just like you do.”

Matt noticed that Kylah’s nails were painted a royal blue. Her fingers were cool on his forehead as she adjusted the stone.

“I owe you one for saving my uncle’s life,” she whispered close to his ear.

Her breath was warm. It made his throat tight. “It was nothing,” he croaked.

And, in truth, it had been almost nothing. Apart from shouting a bit and tapping a brat on the arse with a stick, he’d done very little. But another part of him, the part that had noticed the yellow flecks in her eyes, knew that there were very few occasions in life when one of the truly unattainable ones was this close. And even fewer occasions when he’d done something even quasi-heroic. So even if she was as flaky as a piece of salted cod, it was a now or never moment.

“I uh…don’t suppose you fancy a drink sometime, do you?”

“Hmmm,” she said. Amazing, how one syllable had such a capability for stopping you in your mental tracks and turning your vague hopes into something that smelled like what was left at the bottom of a milk carton after ten days on the windowsill in July.

Realisation sat up and waved at Matt. Of course. How stupid of him. There was bound to be a boyfriend with designer stubble, a perma-tan and a bank account the size of Luxembourg. Maybe even a castle in Transylvania.

Kylah’s eyes had become even bigger ovals of confusion. “I don’t think—” she began.

“Sorry,” Matt said, in that way he had of apologising for assuming he’d committed the despicable crime of social ineptitude. “Stupid of me.”

She kept looking at him as if he was a puppy behind bars in a dog compound. A strange, niggling disquiet began scratching at the inside of his skull.

“You’re a nice guy, Matt Danmor. But Fae and humans are not a good mix, and I haven’t had any reason to question that maxim so far.” Her eyes searched, his and they seemed full of genuine regret. “I’m sorry.”

The scratchy niggle grew into a jolt of panic as Kylah’s finger reached out to touch the green stone to the centre of his forehead. Was this a huge opportunity he was about to wave goodbye to?

“Hang on a minute,” Matt said, and put his hand on her wrist just as the pentrievant touched. “Wait…”