9

As a conversation stopper, it was a metre-thick, steel-reinforced, ten-storey-high concrete wall. The silence that followed was heavy with child, too—quadruplets by the depth of it. Matt finally broke its waters with a very loud swallow.

“Your uncle’s been kidnapped? When?”

“This afternoon. I was away from the office and he decided to go out for some air.” Kylah shook her head and tears welled in her eyes. She reached for the desk and parked her backside on it, turning away.

It took Matt completely by surprise. Seeing hard-as-nails Kylah with a heart was like finding a milky praline surprise in a bitter dark chocolate Easter egg. When she spoke, her voice rose with every word until it petered out altogether. “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve warned him. He’s so stubborn. I should have stayed here, but I had a meeting in London, and—”

“Is it the lot that were in the play area?” Matt asked.

“Yes.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “Definitely a Ghoulshee snatch squad.”

“At least they didn’t try and sacrifice him this time.”

“No. They’re threatening to do that later, along with all the other captives.”

“Shit,” Matt said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

“Thanks,” Kylah said, but her eyes wouldn’t quite meet his. “There is another reason I decided to tell you all this. I felt you deserved to know what’s going on, considering.”

“Considering what?” Matt asked. There was something about the tilt of Kylah’s head that suggested he wasn’t going to like what was coming next very much.

“Considering they’ve tried to kill you three times already.”

“Three times?”

“The car crash, the weir and the ristag attack on the bike.”

She was right. He frowned and looked at his shoes as the truth of it sank in. Not only was it unpalatable, but it pressed the big button marked “unprovoked attack on innocent party” in Matt’s head. The result was an outpouring of angry whining.

“But what the hell have I got to do with a bunch of bloody Ghoulshee, for crying out loud? What exactly have I done to deserve all this attention?”

Kylah shrugged. “I have no idea. You’ll have to ask Silvy that yourself.”

“As if that’s likely to happen,” Matt scoffed.

Kylah stayed ominously silent.

“Is it likely to happen?” Matt asked.

She kept looking at him with those big gold-flecked eyes.

“It’s going to happen, isn’t it?”

“From what I saw of her in the photo on your phone—”

“I don’t remember showing you that.” Matt frowned.

“Let’s not get bogged down in the detail of what you have and haven’t shown us,” Kylah said hastily. “From what I saw of her, she looks like a seventh-order priestess. That’s pretty high up in the necromancy stakes. Plus, she’s a soothsayer. Makes it quite difficult to take her by surprise. She’s acting under the zealous guise of a religious order and you, for some reason, appear to be a fly in their holy ointment.” There was no mistaking the distaste in her tone.

“So, are you saying that they see me as a threat?”

“I can’t think of any other reason they’d come after you. And they tend not to give up. The thing about the Ghoulshee is that, to achieve what they have achieved in getting themselves over here through an inter-dimensional rip—”

A sudden gust rattled the windows.

“Whoa,” Matt said. “What the hell is an interdimensional rip? Sounds pretty serious in a Star Trek kind of a way.”

“About as serious as you can get,” Kylah explained with a fixed smile, “since it’s a breach in the barrier between our two worlds.”

“How many Ghoulshee are we talking about?”

Outside, another blast of air shook the windows. Matt looked around. “What’s with the wind?”

Kylah shrugged in annoyance. “Some curse they managed to throw on this place a while ago. Every time you mention the word Ghoul-them, the windows rattle. Pathetic, I know.”

“Okay, so this rip has allowed a few Ghoul—a few of them to sneak in over here. Is that a big problem?”

Kylah tilted her head and pursed her lips. “Not if it were just a few of them. The fact is that they’re all over here. Lock, stock, and shrunken-head-decorated barrel.”

“I thought you said before that they were a disaffected socio-economic group, seeking cultural independence.”

“They are. But what you must have forgotten me mentioning was the religious aspect of their social set-up. Tied up with their demands is a belief in a few very unsavoury gods who they have to appease on a regular basis, hence the need for human sacrifice. Added to that is the prediction of one Greck of Bibilia, who prophesied that 2014 would be the year of the ‘rendering.’”

Matt frowned. “Rendering? I know you can buy rendered chicken nuggets at Cheap Save. I only ever had them once. Wasn’t impressed. Bloody awful stuff, if you ask me. Kept a couple as erasers though…” Matt dried up when he saw Kylah’s expression. “That’s a funny smile you’ve got there,” he said.

“Do you know what rendered means, Matt?”

“What’s left after you take the normally edible bits away?”

“Exactly. Added to the Ghoulshee’s very short list of charms is a penchant for cannibalism. The ‘rendering’ is a ceremony whereby they take what’s left after the prime cuts are gone and make it into a kind of human porridge. In very large batches.”

Matt swallowed loudly. Human porridge was not an image he relished filing away in his imaginings cupboard. He zeroed in on something else she’d said. “When you say ‘prime cuts,’ do you mean—”

“I mean that I think you’ll agree that stopping them would be a good thing.”

Matt nodded. Three times. Stopping them seemed like a very good thing, indeed.

“The problem is we don’t know where they are,” Kylah added.

“How many are we talking about?”

Kylah looked up to the ceiling as she calculated. “About a million and a half.”

Another silence. Sextuplets, this time.

“You can’t find a million and a half Ghoulshee?”

The rattling got a bit louder.

“It’s not as simple as it sounds,” Kylah said.

“Obviously.”

Kylah pushed away from the desk and started pacing again. She moved with ease, well-balanced, like a dancer. Matt could watch her all day. “This interdimensional rip, which is highly illegal in and of itself, has allowed them to push through an extra-dimensional field. It means they’re here, but at the same time they’re not.”

“Glad we’ve cleared that one up, then,” Matt said with a little shake of his head.

Kylah paused and bit her lip. Finally she raised a finger. “Think of it like a tiny hole in a baked-bean tin, through which an invisible bubble of botulism has grown. In the middle of your lunch is this lethal ball of toxin. From the outside, there’s nothing to see. And, unless you can find the tiny hole the things got in through, you have no idea there’s even anything wrong until you start seeing two of everything and your muscles forget how to breathe.”

“So, we’re looking for a tiny hole?”

“Yes. Somewhere, there’s a tiny hole through which they’ve squeezed a bit of their own dimension. It’s outside normal space and time, so it doesn’t take up much room unless you’re actually in it, in which case it does. Got it?”

“I may need a diagram.” Matt frowned. “How big a tiny hole are we talking about?”

“Big enough for them to get in and out of.”

“So, a man-sized tiny hole?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“That’s not what I’d call a tiny hole.”

Kylah sighed and started pacing again. “What I mean is that it needs to be big enough to get one person through, not a million and a half. They’d have walked in a line.”

The thing with Kylah, Matt realised, was that he was still not quite sure whether she was taking the urine or not. Sometimes there was a minute clue in the way she shot him little glances, but not always. It would have been much better if a little light lit up on her head every time she used sarcasm or irony. Come to think of it, it would be a bloody good idea to have one whenever you spoke to someone from Germany.

“All I know is that I’m never going to eat baked beans again,” he muttered.

“It’s likely they’ll have chosen somewhere remote and quiet,” Kylah said.

“Like Colwyn Bay?”

“No. It’s around here somewhere. The fact that they’ve been active and abroad here attests to them being close by. That’s where you fit in. You’re unique in that you’ve had actual physical contact with one of them.” Kylah sounded like she was forcing the last sentence out through glued-together incisors.

Matt slumped back in his chair. “Don’t remind me.”

“Doesn’t sound like it was too much of a hardship.”

“That’s not fair,” Matt said.

“Anyway, I’m still clueless as to why they singled you out,” she tilted her head again to look at him, eyes narrowing. “You don’t have any Romany blood, do you? Like the French and fois gras, some of my lot have a thing for gypsies and seventh sons. What you’d dismiss as superstitious timewasters, the Fae would revere as being highly gifted, even magical.”

Matt shook his head, trying to ignore that last word. “My dad was from Cornwall. My mum was Welsh. She sometimes wore head scarves, but that was about as Romany as she ever got.”

Kylah shrugged. “Well, anyway, the point is that Silvy would have left her mark on you and we can use that to trace her.”

“What do you mean ‘left her mark’? Like John Wayne and a branding iron?”

“Sort of. It’s a bit like a fingerprint, only in Fae terms. From what I saw of you and her together, I expect it’s all over you.”

“Look,” Matt bristled, “that stuff was meant to be private.”

Kylah smiled, pleased at the response she’d got. “That was a joke. And I’m only talking about the time in the Carp.”

“Yeah, well,” Matt said, not sure if Kylah was smiling at her alleged joke or at a genuine and tawdry sock-drawer memory. He decided to drag the conversation back to the point, because he couldn’t stand her smirk. “So, this supernatural fingerprint thing, how do you get at it?”

“Well, back at the institute we have scanners and aura separators that would tease yours out from hers, but we can’t do that here.”

“Can’t we go back to yours?” Matt asked, trying to be helpful.

“Yes, but it would mean killing you, because we don’t have time to get you there any other way.”

Another silence. Twins.

“That seems a bit drastic,” Matt croaked

“Really?” Kylah said with a mischievous glint. “I thought that would be right up your street.”

“Well, it would have been,” Matt said, feeling like he was riding a bike backwards, “except that now you’re telling me that all this stuff, which no one else can explain and I’ve put down to a doolally gene, may in actual fact be explicable, so long as I—”

“Buy into the existence of the Fae.” Kylah watched him closely.

“Exactly,” Matt said.

Kylah gave him a sympathetic little nod. “I know it’s hard for you, but if it’s any consolation, you’re not alone. Some big names have struggled—Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, C.S. Lewis, Vlad the Impaler. Even Jung wrestled with it. Of course, he went down the road of meaningful coincidences when what he meant was that he couldn’t explain how or why certain things happened unless someone made them happen. Synchronicity, he called it. That’s us in a nutshell.”

“Okay, so you’re a Jungian construct. Knowing that doesn’t really help much.”

“No, but that’s because trying to put it in your terms is really difficult.” She went back to the window and faced him, both hands on the sill behind her. The light threw her curves into silhouette. “We can make things happen that appear inexplicable to you, but to us it’s like turning on an electric light. It’s simply a different kind of ‘natural.’ The power is simply there, like gravity or sunlight. It’s an altered contextual reality, that’s all.”

Matt remained perplexed, but his headache was beginning to downgrade from crushing-anvil to gnawed-at-by-a-rabid-badger and he was thankful for that, if not for the unsatisfying explanation. And there must have been moronic pleading in his expression, because Kylah was willing to offer more.

“Look,” Kylah said, “it’s a bit like your lot and nuclear power. We look at what you’re doing and can’t understand how anyone can mess around with anything so bloody dangerous. Mind you, that Higgs Boson ride at the Hadron Collider is the best ever.”

Matt looked for signs of the sarcasm light but realised after fifteen worrying seconds that there wasn’t going to be one.

“That’s just physics,” he said, trying not to sound too lame.

“And what we do is just—for want of a better word—supernatural. The same but different. Okay, some of it is pretend, an illusion. A way of making people see things the way we want them to. But the real stuff, changing the way things exist in the world, that takes a bit of practise. It isn’t easy. That’s my point with the inter-dimensional rip.”

“The baked-bean tin,” Matt said, pleased with himself for remembering the analogy. “Yes, that. It takes an awful lot of juice. More than any one person could provide. That’s the thing about using Fae power, it’s pretty draining. So the Ghoulshee have harnessed it from lots of different sources. A million and a half sources, to be exact. To do that you need complete discipline, a rigid mindset. They live by controlling everything, leaving nothing to chance.”

“Bit like the Nanny State, then?”

“I was thinking more Nazi than nanny, although I see where you’re coming from. So they will try and eliminate any risk to their crusade. And you obviously pose a threat.”

Matt made a scoffing bulldog face. “Why?”

“You already asked me that one.”

His shoulders slumped in defeat. “But what can I do?”

“Silvy’s trace. With a bit of luck, that should lead us straight to wherever it is they’re hiding.”

“What about your uncle?”

“We’re in desperate need of intel. We have no agents over there, so what we need is a quick reconnaissance. Small squad, in and out, find out as much as we can.”

Matt nodded. It all sounded very military, and about as appealing as cold stew. Mr. Porter’s part in this remained a niggly little stone in his sock. “Why, exactly, do they want your uncle, again? I mean he struck me a very nice chap, but what sort of clout does he have? Politically, I mean?”

“Let’s just say he’s a bit of a figurehead.”

Matt leaned back in the chair, pondering. Finally, he said. “I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I think I’m beginning to believe you.”

Kylah smiled, and it lit up the room. “Good. Now can we get a look at that pendant of yours?”

“Of course, but it’s back at the flat and my bike’s at the hospital and—”

“You won’t need your bike. We can use this.” Kylah crossed to a green metal filing cabinet and pulled open the top drawer. From it she took a polished blue and purple doorknob, which looked well-used and old.

“Australian onyx,” Kylah said, in response to his unasked question.

“Right,” Matt said. Onyx was one of those words, like clerihew or dwile flonking. He’d heard of it but hadn’t a clue what it meant. “But how’s it going to help us get to my flat? Doesn’t look like it would seat two. Okay, that bulbous end might fit snugly into a single orifice, but probably not both of us at the same time.”

“I think you’ve worked in that A&E of yours for far too long,” Kylah said, shaking her head. “It isn’t for transporting, it’s for gaining entry.”

“You mean it’s a ticket?”

“Sort of,” Kylah said. “It has its limits, in that it can only take you to places you’ve been before. You have to be able to see where you want to go. There are other devices for unknown destinations, but this is an Aperio. A very valuable tool.”

“So,” Matt said, “You hang on to the handle and say Aperio-here-we-go and Robert’s your mother’s brother. I see.”

“Sarcasm is such an ugly trait,” Kylah said, narrowing her eyes. “Here, hold it. What does it look like to you?”

Matt ran his fingers over the smooth, polished surface. “A glass door handle?”

“Exactly. So what we need is a door.”

“But the door we want is in my flat,” Matt pointed out with exaggerated patience.

Kylah sighed. “I can see that this is going to be a long night. Come on.” She walked to the office door and placed the handle at hip height on the hinged side. She pushed hard, and when she took her hand away the handle remained.

“Very impressive. You’ve got some sort of Velcro thing going on there?”

“Since I’ve never been to your flat, you will have to do this,” Kylah said, ignoring him.

“Do what? Chant some gobbledygook? Throw fairy dust? What?”

“How about pretending that it opens into your flat and opening the door?”

Matt put his hand on the doorknob. It felt surprisingly firm. He turned it and pushed. To his utter amazement, the door opened. But at the same time he could see the original office door still sitting in its place.

“That’s…interesting.”

“Go on,” Kylah urged. “We haven’t got all night.”

Matt stuck his head through and gasped. Through the open doorway stood his pokey, damp bathroom as seen from the doorway from his bedroom. He half-stumbled, partly from shock and partly because he forgot the step down. “Shit,” he said, and quickly scooped up some underpants, throwing them behind the towel rail. With more than a little trepidation, he peeped into the toilet pan and almost screamed with joy to see clean, clear water nestling at the bottom of it.

“Hmm,” Kylah said as she joined him in the tiny space. “Interesting smell. Mushrooms, I think.”

“It’s an old flat,” Matt mumbled.

“Maybe, but it still makes Mrs Hoblip’s cupboard look like a loft apartment.” She stared at the interesting shapes the mould had made halfway up the wall behind the shower tray. “There’s one cardinal rule with the Aperio. Always bring the handle with you into the room. Doors have a tendency to be self-closers. It can be very embarrassing to be locked in somewhere a thousand miles away from where you just left. Very expensive, too.” She reached around for the knob, removed it, and shut the door. When she opened it again with the proper bathroom door handle, Matt’s unmade bedroom, with its very unmade bed, was there in all its glory.

“Um, maybe you should stay here,” Matt said, trying to remember when he’d last changed the sheets.

“Maybe I should,” Kylah agreed.

“I’ll only be a minute.”

The pendant was where he’d left it in the sitting room. Matt picked it up and stuffed it in his pocket. By the time he got back to the bedroom, a genuine miracle had taken place. His bed was made, all the CDs and books were back on the shelves and in some sort of size order, the curtains were open, and the windows had been cleaned. Matt dropped his bag and knew his jaw was doing an impression of a basking shark.

“How did you—”

“First thing you learn when you’re old enough to do stuff on your own. Boys generally can’t be bothered, but it’s a simple transformational charm. You imagine what it might have looked like the day you moved in. We’re borrowing from a state of previous temporal existence. I’ve merely superimposed that over today’s reality and there you go.”

“It’s bloody impressive,” Matt said in genuine awe. “I wondered where that mobile phone charger had got to, and that umbrella, oh, and that chair. Shame you can’t do the same for the bathroom.”

Kylah stood back and pushed open the bathroom door to reveal a gleaming, shiny, fungus-free bathroom. “Ta-dah.”

Matt collapsed onto the edge of the bed. “I think I’m going to cry,” he said. “Can you do anything else?”

“I have a few other tricks up my sleeve. Though I’m not in Silvy’s league.”

There it was again. Another sly little dig at what had happened between him and Silvy. Was it just her sardonic way, or could there be just a spot of real jealousy there? Dream on, Danmor.

“So what do they call you when you’re at home?” Matt said as he rummaged for a change of clothes. He aimed for charm but missed, and found himself floundering in an unfamiliar landscape. “Witch, is it? Or nymph, maybe? Not as in a “dirty magazine nymph” sense. That implies something altogether… different.” He saw Kylah’s eyebrows arch dangerously. “I was wondering if there’s a name for your type of supernatural creature,” Matt said, quickly.

“I’m just a girl,” Kylah replied, with just the tiniest grimace to indicate a nerve gingerly touched. Yet Matt sensed that it was not because of the clumsy reference to female stereotypes that he’d made with his size-tens; it was subtler than that. After all, she had every right to call him a chauvinist warthog. But she didn’t. Instead, she opted for lifting up the edge of the conversational carpet and, using a neat little brush, sweeping everything underneath it.

“I’m just one of the Fae,” she said, before composing her face into a rueful smile. “Labels are so limiting, don’t you think?”

Suitably admonished for his attempt at small talk, and befuddled by the combination of not being called an idiot and her rueful smile, Matt sat up and went straight into feckless-bachelor-chancing-his-arm mode (one he was much more familiar with).

“Umm, the lounge could do with a quick onceover.”

“Done,” she said.

Matt walked back in and threw himself on the nice, clean, fresh-smelling sofa, unable to stop grinning. “I actually think I could live here now,” he said.

Kylah followed him in and leaned in the doorway, smiling. “It could do with a few touches, but I’ve seen worse.” Then she looked at Matt’s Warhol-print clock and her expression hardened. “Matt, I’m sorry to hurry you, but I’d like to look at that pendant.”

“It’s here,” he said holding it out to her.

Kylah backed away. “No, not here. We need a controlled environment, as well as an expert or two.”

“Hipposync?” Matt suggested.

Kylah nodded. Two minutes later, courtesy of the Aperio, they were back in Kylah’s half of the office. Matt watched, fascinated, as she produced a contraption made up of a small metal plate on struts spanning a tilting stone tablet, over which a thin stream of water constantly ran. The whole thing was about as big as an oversized soup bowl.

“Put the pendant on that, please,” Kylah said pointing at the plate.

“Dare I ask why?”

“Iron over running water. It diminishes its effect significantly. It’s all to do with density and magnetic flux.” She put on some odd-looking gloves and used a wooden stick to tease apart the coils of leather necklace enough to prod at the pendant. “This is Ghoulshee, all right.”

“Not that surprising, since one of their priestesses gave it to me,” Matt pointed out. “Is that why Silvy wanted me on the footbridge? Iron over running water and stuff?”

“Probably, but it’s mind-boggling all the same. Taking you to the river would negate the pendant’s effect and allow the attempt on your life, that I can understand. But making you wear it in the first place would make it twice as hard for them to do whatever it is they wanted to do to you.”

“I suppose it’s too much to expect any sense in all of this,” Matt muttered.

“Well, anyway, this pendant stays here over running water. It can’t do any harm there.” The phone rang and Kylah picked up on the second ring. “Are they here? Good, send them in straight away.”

The door opened, and the two beings who entered were very definitely not like anything Matt had seen before, Mrs. Hoblip included. They had khaki-coloured skin, and their sinewy legs, which gave them extraordinarily wide strides, were twice as long as their torsos. Their arms were angular, powerful and nut-brown, while their faces were long and smooth, with swept-back foreheads and startling green eyes. They wore brown uniforms that marked them out as some kind of military.

“Matt, these are sergeants Birrik and Keemoch from the SES.”

“I daren’t ask,” Matt tried not to stare.

“Special Elf Service, although they’re seconded from the Hemlock regiment, so strictly speaking they aren’t elves at all. They’re Sith Fand, and you have been warned. They won’t say anything if you call them the E word, but they won’t forget…ever.”

“Hi,” Matt said, forcing a smile while wondering what the hell a Sith Fand was.

“Hello, Mathew,” Birrik said, holding out a knotty hand.

“Matt.” Kemoch did the same.

Matt frowned. There was something terribly familiar in their voices and intonation.

“Of course,” Kylah explained, “you know these two by their human pseudonyms.”

“Dwayne and Alf?” Matt asked. He slipped on his stone glasses and the two sergeants transformed into pierced Dwayne and lumpy Alf. “Well, I’ll be buggered.”

“Careful what you wish for, Matt,” Birrik said in his best camp Dwayne voice. “You’re on Fae ground now, and things like that have a way of creeping up on you whilst you’re leaning over the sink washing a dirty teaspoon.”

Matt grinned, but Dwayne’s lips remained firmly clamped together and he felt his own smile die, before Kemoch and Birrik started howling with laughter.

“You should see your face,” said Birrik, wiping his eyes.

Matt shook his head. Like Kylah, the Sith Fand were about as easy to read as the Epic of Gilgamesh.