Mo thrashes around until her back is against the door; her eyes roll and I give a desperate yank on the tentacle with my free hand. The pain is indescribable: it feels like I've just grabbed hold of a mass of razor blades. Something black and oily is squirting out around the knife blade and I try to keep my hand out of it. How long is it going to take Capital Laundry Services to answer the sodding phone and get a Plumber out here? Too fucking long-a quarter of an hour at least. Maybe I can do something else-
A steel vice closes around my left ankle and yanks my shin against the doorframe so hard I scream and drop the knife. Another one wraps around my waist like an animated hawser and constricts violently. Mo valiantly lends a hand and succeeds in elbowing me under the chin: I see stars for a second or two and fumble around with a left hand that feels like a lump of raw meat for that dropped multitool. There's got to be a better way. If I've remembered my Gadget Man cigarette lighter… I reach into my pocket and, instead, find my palmtop. Illumination dawns.
The light of its display is a mycoid green glow in the darkness. A thousand miles away something is roaring at me. Icons shimmer, hovering above the screen. I thumb one of them, an ear with a red line through it, smearing blood across the glass as I cut in the anti-sound field and pray that it works.
5. OGRE REALITY
I WAKE UP TO DISCOVER MY BACK FEELS AS IF THE All Blacks have been performing a victory dance on it, my ankle's been turned on a lathe, and my left hand worked over with a steak tenderiser. I open my eyes; I'm lying on the floor, legs stretched out, and Mo is leaning over me. "Are you all right?" she asks, in a ragged voice.
"Death shouldn't hurt like this," I croak. I blink painfully and wonder what the hell happened to her shirt-it looks as if it's been used as a nest by a family of hungry ferrets. "It had you for longer-"
"Once you began hacking at it," she begins, then pauses to clear her throat. "It let go. Think you can stand up? You turned that gadget on and the thing just vanished. Whipped back under the door and sort of faded out. Turned translucent and-went away."
I look round. I'm lying in a sticky black puddle of something that isn't blood, thankfully-or, at least, not human blood. The light is normal for a dingy vestibule with an energy-saver bulb, and the tentacles have gone from the walls. "My phone," I say, pushing my back up against the wall. "I threw it out-"
Mo heaves herself upright and staggers to the front door, bends down and picks something up delicately. "You mean this?"
She drops it beside me, in about three separate pieces.
"Fuck. That was meant to call the Plumbers."
"Come upstairs, you'd better explain." She pauses. "If you think it's safe?"
I try to laugh but a vicious stabbing pain in my ribs stops me. "I don't think that thing will be coming back any time soon: I fuzzed its eigenvector but good."
She unlocks the inner door and we stumble up three flights of stairs, then she opens another door and I somehow end up slumped across another overstuffed sofa from the Planet of the Landlords, gasping with pain. She double-locks and deadbolts the door then flops into an armchair opposite me. "What the hell was that?" she asks, rubbing her throat.
"That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.' "
"Yes, but-"
"What I said earlier? We live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology, all possible parallel universes coexisting. That thing was an agent someone summoned from elsewhere to, um-"
"Fuck with our metabolic viability," she suggests.
"Yeah, that." I pause and take stock of my ribs, ankle, and general frame of mind. My hands are shaking slightly and I feel clammy and cold with the aftershock, but not entirely out of control. Good. "You mentioned something about coffee." I lever myself upright. "If you tell me where it is…"
"Kitchen's over there." I realise there's a breakfast bar and a cramped cooking niche behind me. I shamble over, fumble for the light switches, check there's water in the kettle, and begin scooping instant out of the first available jar. Mo continues: "My neck hurts. Do you have lots of, uh, reality excursions in this line of work?"
"That's the first I've ever had follow me home," I say truthfully. Fred the Accountant doesn't count.
"Well I am glad to hear that." Mo stands up and goes somewhere else-bathroom, at a guess; I need the caffeine so badly that I don't really notice. While the kettle boils I root out a couple of mugs and some milk, and when I turn round she's back in the armchair wearing a clean T-shirt. I fill the mugs. "Milk, no sugar. Bathroom's behind you on the left," she adds, noncommittally.
One splash of water on my face later I'm back on the sofa with a mug of coffee, beginning to feel a bit more human-Neanderthal, maybe.
"What was that thing doing here?" she asks me.
"I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to know."
"Really?" She glares at me. "Trouble has a bad habit of following you around. First time I meet you, an hour later some Middle Eastern thugs stick me in the trunk of their car, drive me halfway round Santa Cruz, lock me in a cupboard, and gear up to sacrifice me. Second time I meet you, an hour later some random bad dream with too many tentacles ambushes me in my front hall." She pauses for a thoughtful moment. "Now granted, you seem to turn up in time to stop them, but, on the balance of prior probabilities, there appears to be a statistical correlation between you appearing in my life and horrible things happening. What's your excuse?"
I shrug painfully. "What can I say? There seems to be a positive correlation in my life between people telling me to talk to you and horrible things happening to me. I mean, it's not as if I make a habit of letting random nightmares with too many tentacles come along on a date, is it? Parenthetically speaking," I add hastily.
"Huh. Well then. Got any ideas as to why this is happening, Mr. Spy Guy?"
"I am not a spy," I say, nettled, "and the answer-" is right in front of my pointy nose if I'd bloody well focus on it, I suddenly realise.
"Yes?" she prompts, noticing my pause.
"Those guys who officially didn't abduct you." I take a sip of coffee and wince; I'm not used to the instant stuff she uses. "And who weren't officially talking about sacrificing you. I want you to tell me everything you didn't officially tell anyone who debriefed you. Like the whole truth."
"What makes you think I didn't tell-" She stops.
"Because you were afraid nobody would believe you. Because you were afraid they'd think you were a nut. Because there were no witnesses and nobody wanted to believe anything had happened to you in the first place because they'd have had to fill in too many forms in triplicate and that would be bad. Because you didn't owe the bastards anything for fucking up your life, if you'll excuse my French." I wave a hand in the general direction of the doorway. "I believe you. I know something really stinks around here. If I can figure out what it is, stopping it features high on my list of priorities. Is that enough for you?"
Mo grimaces, a strikingly ugly expression. "What's to say?"
"Lots. Your calclass="underline" if you won't tell me what happened, I can't try and sort things out for you."
She sips her coffee as it cools. "After we met, I went home thinking everything was going to be okay. You, or the Foreign Office, or whoever, would sort things out so I could come home. It was all just a mix-up, right? I'd get my visa sorted out and be allowed to go back home without any more problems."
Another mouthful of coffee. "I walked back to my condo. That's one of the things I liked about UCSC: the town's small enough you can walk anywhere. You don't have to drive as long as you don't mind getting to SF being a royal pain. I was turning over a problem I'm working on, a way to integrate my probability formalism with Dempster-Shaffer logic. Anyhow, I stopped off at a convenience store to buy some stuff I was running out of and who should I run into but David? At least, I thought it was David." She frowns. "I thought he was out east, and I really didn't want to see him anyway-I mean, I'm over him. He's history."