Douglas Adams

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

to my mother,

who liked the bit about the horse


AUTHOR’S NOTE

The physical descriptions of St Cedd’s College in this book, in so far as they 
are specific at all, owe a little to my memories of St John’s College, 
Cambridge, although I’ve also borrowed indiscriminately from other colleges as 
well. Sir Isaac Newton was at Trinity College in real life, and Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge was at Jesus. 

The point is that St Cedd’s College is a completely fictitious assemblage, and 
no correspondence is intended between any institutions or characters in this 
book and any real institutions or people, living, dead, or wandering the night 
in ghostly torment. 

This book was written and typeset on an Apple Macintosh Plus computer and 
LaserWriter Plus printer using MacAuthor word-processing software. 

The completed document was then printed using a Linotron 100 at The Graphics 
Factory, London SW3, to produce a final high-resolution image of the text. My 
thanks to Mike Glover of Icon Technology for his help with this process. 

Finally, my very special thanks are due to Sue Freestone for all her help in 
nursing this book into existence. 

Douglas Adams

London, 1987


CHAPTER 1

This time there would be no witnesses. 

This time there was just the dead earth, a rumble of thunder, and the onset of 
that interminable light drizzle from the north-east by which so many of the 
world’s most momentous events seem to be accompanied. 

The storms of the day before, and of the day before that, and the floods of the 
previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged with rain, but all that 
actually fell in the gathering evening gloom was a dreary kind of prickle. 

Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the low hills 
and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a kind of tower, 
alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning. 

It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of magma from 
one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at a peculiar angle, as 
if oppressed by something altogether more terrible than its own considerable 
weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages dead. 

The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly along the 
bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so further on, the river ran down 
a ravine and disappeared underground. 

But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was not entirely 
without life. There was a single dim red light guttering deep within it. 

The light was only just visible -- except of course that there was no one to 
see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light. Every few 
minutes it grew a little stronger and a little brighter and then faded slowly 
away almost to nothing. At the same time a low keening noise drifted out on the 
wind, built up to a kind of wailing climax, and then it too faded, abjectly, 
away. 

Time passed, and then another light appeared, a smaller, mobile light. It 
emerged at ground level and moved in a single bobbing circuit of the tower, 
pausing occasionally on its way around. Then it, and the shadowy figure that 
could just be discerned carrying it, disappeared inside once more. 

An hour passed, and by the end of it the darkness was total. The world seemed 
dead, the night a blankness. 

And then the glow appeared again near the tower’s peak, this time growing in 
power more purposefully. It quickly reached the peak of brightness it had 
previously attained, and then kept going, increasing, increasing. The keening 
sound that accompanied it rose in pitch and stridency until it became a wailing 
scream. The scream screamed on and on till it became a blinding noise and the 
light a deafening redness. 

And then, abruptly, both ceased. 

There was a millisecond of silent darkness. 

An astonishing pale new light billowed and bulged from deep within the mud 
beneath the tower. The sky clenched, a mountain of mud convulsed, earth and sky 
bellowed at each other, there was a horrible pinkness, a sudden greenness, a 
lingering orangeness that stained the clouds, and then the light sank and the 
night at last was deeply, hideously dark. There was no further sound other than 
the soft tinkle of water. 

But in the morning the sun rose with an unaccustomed sparkle on a day that was, 
or seemed to be, or at least would have seemed to be if there had been anybody 
there to whom it could seem to be anything at all, warmer, clearer and brighter 
-- an altogether livelier day than any yet known. A clear river ran through the 
shattered remains of the valley. 

And time began seriously to pass. 


CHAPTER 2

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its 
rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with 
which it was having a problem. 

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the grey 
rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. The 
horse’s tail moved a little, swishing slightly to try and move a little air, but 
that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video 
recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother 
of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, 
thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed 
things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, 
that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. 

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to 
believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to 
believe things they’d have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never 
heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, 
which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt 
Lake of Utah. 

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed that the 
valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and 
the Monk’s horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink. This made for a certain 
difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore 
made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and 
dangerous. Hence the immobility of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which 
had had to put up with a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the 
opinion that this was one of the silliest. 

How long did the Monk believe these things? 

Well, as far as the Monk was concerned, forever. The faith which moves 
mountains, or at least believes them against all the available evidence to be 
pink, was a solid and abiding faith, a great rock against which the world could 
hurl whatever it would, yet it would not be shaken. In practice, the horse knew, 
twenty-four hours was usually about its lot. 

So what of this horse, then, that actually held opinions, and was sceptical 
about things? Unusual behaviour for a horse, wasn’t it? An unusual horse 
perhaps? 

No. Although it was certainly a handsome and well-built example of its species, 
it was none the less a perfectly ordinary horse, such as convergent evolution 
has produced in many of the places that life is to be found. They have always 
understood a great deal more than they let on. It is difficult to be sat on all 
day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them. 

On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of 
another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever. 

When the early models of these Monks were built, it was felt to be important 
that they be instantly recognisable as artificial objects. There must be no 
danger of their looking at all like real people. You wouldn’t want your video 
recorder lounging around on the sofa all day while it was watching TV. You 
wouldn’t want it picking its nose, drinking beer and sending out for pizzas. 

So the Monks were built with an eye for originality of design and also for 
practical horse-riding ability. This was important. People, and indeed things, 
looked more sincere on a horse. So two legs were held to be both more suitable 
and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; 
the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and 
smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and 
nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. 
A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most 
preposterous things. 

This Monk had first gone wrong when it was simply given too much to believe in 
one day. It was, by mistake, cross-connected to a video recorder that was 
watching eleven TV channels simultaneously, and this caused it to blow a bank of 
illogic circuits. The video recorder only had to watch them, of course. It 
didn’t have to believe them all as well. This is why instruction manuals are so 
important. 

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good was bad, that 
the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a lot of money sent to a 
certain box number, the Monk started to believe that thirty-five percent of all 
tables were hermaphrodites, and then broke down. The man from the Monk shop said 
that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new 
improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-
tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen 
entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without 
generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three 
times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of 
replacing the motherboard of the old model. 

That was it. Done. 

The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could believe what it 
liked, including the idea that it had been hard done by. It was allowed to keep 
its horse, since horses were so cheap to make. 

For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be three, forty-
three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven hundred and three, it 
roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric trust in rocks, birds, clouds and 
a form of non-existent elephant- asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on 
this high rock, overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of 
the Monk’s belief, pink. Not even a little bit. 

Time passed. 


CHAPTER 3

Time passed. 

Susan waited. 

The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn’t ring. Or the phone. She 
looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time that she could 
legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already, of course, but that had 
been in her own time, so to speak. They were well and truly into his time now, 
and even allowing for traffic, mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, 
it was now well over half an hour past the time that he had insisted was the 
latest time they could possibly afford to leave, so she’d better be ready. 

She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but didn’t 
believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was 
beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible 
happened to him soon maybe she’d do it herself. Now there was an idea. 

She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news on television. 
The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control and watched something on 
another channel for a bit. She didn’t know what it was, but it also made her 
cross. Perhaps she should phone. She was damned if she was going to phone. 
Perhaps if she phoned he would phone her at the same moment and not be able to 
get through. 

She refused to admit that she had even thought that. 

Damn him, where was he? Who cared where he was anyway? She didn’t, that was for 
sure. 

Three times in a row he’d done this. Three times in a row was enough. She 
angrily flipped channels one more time. There was a programme about computers 
and some interesting new developments in the field of things you could do with 
computers and music. 

That was it. That was really it. She knew that she had told herself that that 
was it only seconds earlier, but this was now the final real ultimate it. 

She jumped to her feet and went to the phone, gripping an angry Filofax. She 
flipped briskly through it and dialed a number. 

‘Hello, Michael? Yes, it’s Susan. Susan Way. You said I should call you if I was 
free this evening and I said I’d rather be dead in a ditch, remember? Well, I 
suddenly discover that I am free, absolutely, completely and utterly free, and 
there isn’t a decent ditch for miles around. Make your move while you’ve got 
your chance is my advice to you. I’ll be at the Tangiers Club in half an hour.’ 

She pulled on her shoes and coat, paused when she remembered that it was 
Thursday and that she should put a fresh, extra-long tape on the answering 
machine, and two minutes later was out of the front door. When at last the phone 
did ring the answering machine said sweetly that Susan Way could not come to the 
phone just at the moment, but that if the caller would like to leave a message, 
she would get back to them as soon as possible. Maybe. 


CHAPTER 4

It was a chill November evening of the old-fashioned type. 

The moon looked pale and wan, as if it shouldn’t be up on a night like this. It 
rose unwillingly and hung like an ill spectre. Silhouetted against it, dim and 
hazy through the dampness which rose from the unwholesome fens, stood the 
assorted towers and turrets of St Cedd’s, Cambridge, a ghostly profusion of 
buildings thrown up over centuries, medieval next to Victorian, Odeon next to 
Tudor. Only rising through the mist did they seem remotely to belong to one 
another. 

Between them scurried figures, hurrying from one dim pool of light to another, 
shivering, leaving wraiths of breath which folded themselves into the cold night 
behind them. 

It was seven o’clock. Many of the figures were heading for the college dining 
hall which divided First Court from Second Court, and from which warm light, 
reluctantly, streamed. Two figures in particular seemed ill-matched. One, a 
young man, was tall, thin and angular; even muffled inside a heavy dark coat he 
walked a little like an affronted heron. 

The other was small, roundish, and moved with an ungainly restlessness, like a 
number of elderly squirrels trying to escape from a sack. His own age was on the 
older side of completely indeterminate. If you picked a number at random, he was 
probably a little older than that, but -- well, it was impossible to tell. 
Certainly his face was heavily lined, and the small amount of hair that escaped 
from under his red woollen skiing hat was thin, white, and had very much its own 
ideas about how it wished to arrange itself. He too was muffled inside a heavy 
coat, but over it he wore a billowing gown with very faded purple trim, the 
badge of his unique and peculiar academic office. 

As they walked the older man was doing all the talking. He was pointing at items 
of interest along the way, despite the fact that it was too dark to see any of 
them. The younger man was saying ‘Ah yes,’ and ‘Really? How interesting...’ and 
‘Well, well, well,’ and ‘Good heavens.’ His head bobbed seriously. 

They entered, not through the main entrance to the hall, but through a small 
doorway on the east side of the court. This led to the Senior Combination Room 
and a dark-panelled anteroom where the Fellows of the college assembled to slap 
their hands and make ‘brrrrrr’ noises before making their way through their own 
entrance to the High Table. 

They were late and shook off their coats hurriedly. This was complicated for the 
older man by the necessity first of taking off his professorial gown, and then 
of putting it back on again once his coat was off, then of stuffing his hat in 
his coat pocket, then of wondering where he’d put his scarf, and then of 
realising that he hadn’t brought it, then of fishing in his coat pocket for his 
handkerchief, then of fishing in his other coat pocket for his spectacles, and 
finally of finding them quite unexpectedly wrapped in his scarf, which it turned 
out he had brought after all but hadn’t been wearing despite the damp and bitter 
wind blowing in like a witch’s breath from across the fens.

He bustled the younger man into the hall ahead of him and they took the last two 
vacant seats at the High Table, braving a flurry of frowns and raised eyebrows 
for interrupting the Latin grace to do so. 

Hall was full tonight. It was always more popular with the undergraduates in the 
colder months. More unusually, the hall was candlelit, as it was now only on 
very few special occasions. Two long, crowded tables stretched off into the 
glimmering darkness. By candlelight, people’s faces were more alive, the hushed 
sounds of their voices, the clink of cutlery and glasses, seemed more exciting, 
and in the dark recesses of the great hall, all the centuries for which it had 
existed seemed present at once. High Table itself formed a crosspiece at the 
top, and was raised about a foot above the rest. Since it was a guest night, the 
table was set on both sides to accommodate the extra numbers, and many diners 
therefore sat with their backs to the rest of the hall. 

‘So, young MacDuff,’ said the Professor once he was seated and flapping his 
napkin open, ‘pleasure to see you again, my dear fellow. Glad you could come. No 
idea what all this is about,’ he added, peering round the hall in consternation. 
‘All the candles and silver and business. Generally means a special dinner in 
honour of someone or something no one can remember anything about except that it 
means better food for a night.’ 

He paused and thought for a moment, and then said, ‘It seems odd, don’t you 
think, that the quality of the food should vary inversely with the brightness of 
the lighting. Makes you wonder what culinary heights the kitchen staff could 
rise to if you confined them to perpetual darkness. Could be worth a try, I 
think. Got some good vaults in the college that could be turned over to the 
purpose. I think I showed you round them once, hmmm? Nice brickwork.’ 

All this came as something of a relief to his guest. It was the first indication 
his host had given that he had the faintest recollection who he was. Professor 
Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology, or ‘Reg’ as he insisted on 
being called had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen 
Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly, in that it was colourful, flitted prettily hither 
and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct. 

When he had telephoned with the invitation a few days previously, he had seemed 
extremely keen to see his former pupil, and yet when Richard had arrived this 
evening, a little on the late side, admittedly, the Professor had thrown open 
the door apparently in anger, had started in surprise on seeing Richard, 
demanded to know if he was having emotional problems, reacted in annoyance to 
being reminded gently that it was now ten years since he had been Richard’s 
college tutor, and finally agreed that Richard had indeed come for dinner, 
whereupon he, the Professor, had started talking rapidly and at length about the 
history of the college architecture, a sure sign that his mind was elsewhere 
entirely.

‘Reg’ had never actually taught Richard, he had only been his college tutor, 
which meant in short that he had had charge of his general welfare, told him 
when the exams were and not to take drugs, and so on. Indeed, it was not 
entirely clear if Reg had ever taught anybody at all and what, if anything, he 
would have taught them. His professorship was an obscure one, to say the least, 
and since he dispensed with his lecturing duties by the simple and time-honoured 
technique of presenting all his potential students with an exhaustive list of 
books that he knew for a fact had been out of print for thirty years, then 
flying into a tantrum if they failed to find them, no one had ever discovered 
the precise nature of his academic discipline. He had, of course, long ago taken 
the precaution of removing the only extant copies of the books on his reading 
list from the university and college libraries, as a result of which he had 
plenty of time to, well, to do whatever it was he did. 

Since Richard had always managed to get on reasonably well with the old 
fruitcake, he had one day plucked up courage to ask him what, exactly, the 
Regius Professorship of Chronology was. It had been one of those light summery 
days when the world seems about to burst with pleasure at simply being itself, 
and Reg had been in an uncharacteristically forthcoming mood as they had walked 
over the bridge where the River Cam divided the older parts of the college from 
the newer. 

‘Sinecure, my dear fellow, an absolute sinecure,’ he had beamed. ‘A small amount 
of money for a very small, or shall we say non-existent, amount of work. That 
puts me permanently just ahead of the game, which is a comfortable if frugal 
place to spend your life. I recommend it.’ He leaned over the edge of the bridge 
and started to point out a particular brick that he found interesting. ‘But what 
sort of study is it supposed to be?’ Richard had pursued. ‘Is it history? 
Physics? Philosophy? What?’ 

‘Well,’ said Reg, slowly, ‘since you’re interested, the chair was originally 
instituted by King George III, who, as you know, entertained a number of amusing 
notions, including the belief that one of the trees in Windsor Great Park was in 
fact Frederick the Great. 

‘It was his own appointment, hence “Regius”. His own idea as well, which is 
somewhat more unusual.’ 

Sunlight played along the River Cam. People in punts happily shouted at each 
other to fuck off. Thin natural scientists who had spent months locked away in 
their rooms growing white and fishlike, emerged blinking into the light. Couples 
walking along the bank got so excited about the general wonderfulness of it all 
that they had to pop inside for an hour. 

‘The poor beleaguered fellow,’ Reg continued, ‘George III, I mean, was, as you 
may know, obsessed with time. Filled the palace with clocks. Wound them 
incessantly. Sometimes would get up in the middle of the night and prowl round 
the palace in his nightshirt winding clocks. He was very concerned that time 
continued to go forward, you see. So many terrible things had occurred in his 
life that he was terrified that any of them might happen again if time were ever 
allowed to slip backwards even for a moment. A very understandable fear, 
especially if you’re barking mad, as I’m afraid to say, with the very greatest 
sympathy for the poor fellow, he undoubtedly was. He appointed me, or rather I 
should say, my office, this professorship, you understand, the post that I am 
now privileged to hold to -- where was I? Oh yes. He instituted this, er, Chair 
of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened 
after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the 
three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could 
then take the rest of my career off.’ 

‘And your predecessors?’ 

‘Er, were much of the same mind.’ 

‘But who were they?’ 

‘Who were they? Well, splendid fellows of course, splendid to a man. Remind me 
to tell you about them some day. See that brick? Wordsworth was once sick on 
that brick. Great man.’ 

All that had been about ten years ago. 

Richard glanced around the great dining hall to see what had changed in the 
time, and the answer was, of course, absolutely nothing. In the dark heights, 
dimly seen by the flickering candlelight, were the ghostly portraits of prime 
ministers, archbishops, political reformers and poets, any of whom might, in 
their day, have been sick on that same brick. 

‘Well,’ said Reg, in a loudly confidential whisper, as if introducing the 
subject of nipple-piercing in a nunnery, ‘I hear you’ve suddenly done very well 
for yourself, at last, hmmm?’ 

‘Er, well, yes, in fact,’ said Richard, who was as surprised at the fact as 
anybody else, ‘yes, I have.’ 

Around the table several gazes stiffened on him. 

‘Computers,’ he heard somebody whisper dismissively to a neighbour further down 
the table. The stiff gazes relaxed again, and turned away.

‘Excellent,’ said Reg. ‘I’m so pleased for you, so pleased.’ 

‘Tell me,’ he went on, and it was a moment before Richard realised that the 
Professor wasn’t talking to him any more, but had turned to the right to address 
his other neighbour, ‘what’s all this about, this,’ he flourished a vague hand 
over the candles and college silver, ‘...stuff?’ 

His neighbour, an elderly wizened figure, turned very slowly and looked at him 
as if he was rather annoyed at being raised from the dead like this. 

‘Coleridge,’ he said in a thin rasp, ‘it’s the Coleridge Dinner you old fool.’ 
He turned very slowly back until he was facing the front again. His name was 
Cawley, he was a Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, and it was 
frequently said of him, behind his back, that he regarded it not so much as a 
serious academic study, more as a chance to relive his childhood. 

‘Ah, is it,’ murmured Reg, ‘is it?’ and turned back to Richard. ‘It’s the 
Coleridge Dinner,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘Coleridge was a member of the 
college, you know,’ he added after a moment. ‘Coleridge. Samuel Taylor. Poet. I 
expect you’ve heard of him. This is his Dinner. Well, not literally, of course. 
It would be cold by now.’ Silence. ‘Here, have some salt.’ 

‘Er, thank you, I think I’ll wait,’ said Richard, surprised. There was no food 
on the table yet. 

‘Go on, take it,’ insisted the Professor, proffering him the heavy silver salt 
cellar. 

Richard blinked in bemusement but with an interior shrug he reached to take it. 
In the moment that he blinked, however, the salt cellar had completely vanished. 

He started back in surprise. 

‘Good one, eh?’ said Reg as he retrieved the missing cruet from behind the ear 
of his deathly right-hand neighbour, provoking a surprisingly girlish giggle 
from somewhere else at the table. Reg smiled impishly. ‘Very irritating habit, I 
know. It’s next on my list for giving up after smoking and leeches.’ 

Well, that was another thing that hadn’t changed. Some people pick their noses, 
others habitually beat up old ladies on the streets. Reg’s vice was a harmless 
if peculiar one -- an addiction to childish conjuring tricks. Richard remembered 
the first time he had been to see Reg with a problem -- it was only the normal 
Angst that periodically takes undergraduates into its grip, particularly when 
they have essays to write, but it had seemed a dark and savage weight at the 
time. Reg had sat and listened to his outpourings with a deep frown of 
concentration, and when at last Richard had finished, he pondered seriously, 
stroked his chin a lot, and at last leaned forward and looked him in the eye. 

‘I suspect that your problem,’ he said, ‘is that you have too many paper clips 
up your nose.’ 

Richard stared at him. 

‘Allow me to demonstrate,’ said Reg, and leaning across the desk he pulled from 
Richard’s nose a chain of eleven paper clips and a small rubber swan. 

‘Ah, the real culprit,’ he said, holding up the swan. ‘They come in cereal 
packets, you know, and cause no end of trouble. Well, I’m glad we’ve had this 
little chat, my dear fellow. Please feel free to disturb me again if you have 
any more such problems.’ 

Needless to say, Richard didn’t. 

Richard glanced around the table to see if there was anybody else he recognised 
from his time at the college. 

Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s Director of 
Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him at all. This was 
hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three years here assiduously 
avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a beard and pretending to be 
someone else. 

Next to him was a man whom Richard had never managed to identify. Neither, in 
fact, had anyone else. He was thin and vole-like and had the most 
extraordinarily long bony nose -- it really was very, very long and bony indeed. 
In fact it looked a lot like the controversial keel which had helped the 
Australians win the America’s Cup in 1983, and this resemblance had been much 
remarked upon at the time, though not of course to his face. No one had said 
anything to his face at all.

No one. 

Ever. 

Anyone meeting him for the first time was too startled and embarrassed by his 
nose to speak, and the second time was worse because of the first time, and so 
on. Years had gone by now, seventeen in all. In all that time he had been 
cocooned in silence. In hall it had long been the habit of the college servants 
to position a separate set of salt, pepper and mustard on either side of him, 
since no one could ask him to pass them, and to ask someone sitting on the other 
side of him was not only rude but completely impossible because of his nose 
being in the way. 

The other odd thing about him was a series of gestures he made and repeated 
regularly throughout every evening. They consisted of tapping each of the 
fingers of his left hand in order, and then one of the fingers of his right 
hand. He would then occasionally tap some other part of his body, a knuckle, an 
elbow or a knee. Whenever he was forced to stop this by the requirements of 
eating he would start blinking each of his eyes instead, and occasionally 
nodding. No one, of course, had ever dared to ask him why he did this, though 
all were consumed with curiosity. 

Richard couldn’t see who was sitting beyond him. 

In the other direction, beyond Reg’s deathly neighbour, was Watkin, the Classics 
Professor, a man of terrifying dryness and oddity. His heavy rimless glasses 
were almost solid cubes of glass within which his eyes appeared to lead 
independent existences like goldfish. His nose was straight enough and ordinary, 
but beneath it he wore the same beard as Clint Eastwood. His eyes gazed 
swimmingly around the table as he selected who was going to be spoken at 
tonight. He had thought that his prey might be one of the guests, the newly 
appointed Head of Radio Three, who was sitting opposite -- but unfortunately he 
had already been ensnared by the Music Director of the college and a Professor 
of Philosophy. These two were busy explaining to the harassed man that the 
phrase ‘too much Mozart’ was, given any reasonable definition of those three 
words, an inherently self-contradictory expression, and that any sentence which 
contained such a phrase would be thereby rendered meaningless and could not, 
consequently, be advanced as part of an argument in favour of any given 
programme-scheduling strategy. The poor man was already beginning to grip his 
cutlery too tightly. His eyes darted about desperately looking for rescue, and 
made the mistake of lighting on those of Watkin. 

‘Good evening,’ said Watkin with smiling charm, nodding in the most friendly 
way, and then letting his gaze settle glassily on to his bowl of newly arrived 
soup, from which position it would not allow itself to be moved. Yet. Let the 
bugger suffer a little. He wanted the rescue to be worth at least a good half 
dozen radio talk fees. 

Beyond Watkin, Richard suddenly discovered the source of the little girlish 
giggle that had greeted Reg’s conjuring trick. Astonishingly enough it was a 
little girl. She was about eight years old with blonde hair and a glum look. She 
was sitting occasionally kicking pettishly at the table leg. 

‘Who’s that?’ Richard asked Reg in surprise. 

‘Who’s what?’ Reg asked Richard in surprise. 

Richard inclined a finger surreptitiously in her direction. ‘The girl,’ he 
whispered, ‘the very, very little girl. Is it some new maths professor?’ 

Reg peered round at her. ‘Do you know,’ he said in astonishment, ‘I haven’t the 
faintest idea. Never known anything like it. How extraordinary.’ 

At that moment the problem was solved by the man from the BBC, who suddenly 
wrenched himself out of the logical half-nelson into which his neighbours had 
got him, and told the girl off for kicking the table. She stopped kicking the 
table, and instead kicked the air with redoubled vigour. He told her to try and 
enjoy herself, so she kicked him. This did something to bring a brief glimmer of 
pleasure into her glum evening, but it didn’t last. Her father briefly shared 
with the table at large his feelings about baby-sitters who let people down, but 
nobody felt able to run with the topic. 

‘A major season of Buxtehude,’ resumed the Director of Music, ‘is of course 
clearly long overdue. I’m sure you’ll be looking forward to remedying this 
situation at the first opportunity.’ 

‘Oh, er, yes,’ replied the girl’s father, spilling his soup, ‘er, that is... 
he’s not the same one as Gluck, is he?’ 

The little girl kicked the table leg again. When her father looked sternly at 
her, she put her head on one side and mouthed a question at him. 

‘Not now,’ he insisted at her as quietly as he could. 

‘When, then?’ 

‘Later. Maybe. Later, we’ll see.’ 

She hunched grumpily back in her seat. ‘You always say later,’ she mouthed at 
him. 

‘Poor child,’ murmured Reg. ‘There isn’t a don at this table who doesn’t behave 
exactly like that inside. Ah, thank you.’ Their soup arrived, distracting his 
attention, and Richard’s. 

‘So tell me,’ said Reg, after they had both had a couple of spoonsful and 
arrived independently at the same conclusion, that it was not a taste explosion, 
‘what you’ve been up to, my dear chap. Something to do with computers, I 
understand, and also to do with music. I thought you read English when you were 
here -- though only, I realise, in your spare time.’ He looked at Richard 
significantly over the rim of his soup spoon. ‘Now wait,’ he interrupted before 
Richard even had a chance to start, ‘don’t I vaguely remember that you had some 
sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?’ 

‘Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, 
but...’ 

‘Oh, now, don’t underestimate the abacus,’ said Reg. ‘In skilled hands it’s a 
very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be 
made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of 
an important piece of work.’ 

‘So an electric one would be particularly pointless,’ said Richard.

‘True enough,’ conceded Reg. 

‘There really wasn’t a lot this machine could do that you couldn’t do yourself 
in half the time with a lot less trouble,’ said Richard, ‘but it was, on the 
other hand, very good at being a slow and dim- witted pupil.’ 

Reg looked at him quizzically. 

‘I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply,’ he said. ‘I could hit 
a dozen with a bread roll from where I’m sitting.’ 

‘I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach 
anything to anybody?’ 

This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and 
down the table. 

Richard continued, ‘What I mean is that if you really want to understand 
something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces 
you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your 
pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. 
And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a 
complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, 
you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns 
more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?’ 

‘It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils,’ came a low growl from 
somewhere on the table, ‘without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy.’ 

‘So I used to spend days struggling to write essays on this 16K machine that 
would have taken a couple of hours on a typewriter, but what was fascinating to 
me was the process of trying to explain to the machine what it was I wanted it 
to do. I virtually wrote my own word processor in BASIC. A simple search and 
replace routine would take about three hours.’ 

‘I forget, did you ever get any essays done at all?’ 

‘Well, not as such. No actual essays, but the reasons why not were absolutely 
fascinating. For instance, I discovered that...’ 

He broke off, laughing at himself. 

‘I was also playing keyboards in a rock group, of course,’ he added. ‘That 
didn’t help.’ 

‘Now, that I didn’t know,’ said Reg. ‘Your past has murkier things in it than I 
dreamed possible. A quality, I might add, that it shares with this soup.’ He 
wiped his mouth with his napkin very carefully. ‘I must go and have a word with 
the kitchen staff one day. I would like to be sure that they are keeping the 
right bits and throwing the proper bits away. So. A rock group, you say. Well, 
well, well. Good heavens.’

‘Yes,’ said Richard. ‘We called ourselves The Reasonably Good Band, but in fact 
we weren’t. Our intention was to be the Beatles of the early eighties, but we 
got much better financial and legal advice than the Beatles ever did, which was 
basically ‘Don’t bother’, so we didn’t. I left Cambridge and starved for three 
years.’ 

‘But didn’t I bump into you during that period,’ said Reg, ‘and you said you 
were doing very well?’ 

‘As a road sweeper, yes. There was an awful lot of mess on the roads. More than 
enough, I felt, to support an entire career. However, I got the sack for 
sweeping the mess on to another sweeper’s patch.’ 

Reg shook his head. ‘The wrong career for you, I’m sure. There are plenty of 
vocations where such behaviour would ensure rapid preferment.’ 

‘I tried a few -- none of them much grander, though. And I kept none of them 
very long, because I was always too tired to do them properly. I’d be found 
asleep slumped over the chicken sheds or filing cabinets - - depending on what 
the job was. Been up all night with the computer you see, teaching it to play 
“Three Blind Mice”. It was an important goal for me.’ 

‘I’m sure,’ agreed Reg. ‘Thank you,’ he said to the college servant who took his 
half-finished plate of soup from him, ‘thank you very much. “Three Blind Mice”, 
eh? Good. Good. So no doubt you succeeded eventually, and this accounts for your 
present celebrated status. Yes?’

‘Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.’ 

‘I feared there might be. Pity you didn’t bring it with you though. It might 
have cheered up the poor young lady who is currently having our dull and crusty 
company forced upon her. A swift burst of “Three Blind Mice” would probably do 
much to revive her spirits.’ He leaned forward to look past his two right-hand 
neighbours at the girl, who was still sitting sagging in her chair. 

‘Hello,’ he said. 

She looked up in surprise, and then dropped her eyes shyly, swinging her legs 
again. 

‘Which do you think is worse,’ enquired Reg, ‘the soup or the company?’ 

She gave a tiny, reluctant laugh and shrugged, still looking down. 

‘I think you’re wise not to commit yourself at this stage,’ continued Reg. 
‘Myself, I’m waiting to see the carrots before I make any judgements. They’ve 
been boiling them since the weekend, but I fear it may not be enough. The only 
thing that could possibly be worse than the carrots is Watkin. He’s the man with 
the silly glasses sitting between us. My name’s Reg, by the way. Come over and 
kick me when you have a moment.’ The girl giggled and glanced up at Watkin, who 
stiffened and made an appallingly unsuccessful attempt to smile good- naturedly. 

‘Well, little girl,’ he said to her awkwardly, and she had desperately to 
suppress a hoot of laughter at his glasses. Little conversation therefore 
ensued, but the girl had an ally, and began to enjoy herself a tiny little bit. 
Her father gave her a relieved smile.

Reg turned back to Richard, who said, suddenly, ‘Do you have any family?’ 

‘Er... no,’ said Reg, quietly. ‘But tell me. After “Three Blind Mice”, what 
then?’ 

‘Well, to cut a long story short, Reg, I ended up working for WayForward 
Technologies...’ 

‘Ah, yes, the famous Mr Way. Tell me, what’s he like?’ 

Richard was always faintly annoyed by this question, probably because he was 
asked it so often. 

‘Both better and worse than he’s represented in the press. I like him a lot, 
actually. Like any driven man he can be a bit trying at times, but I’ve known 
him since the very early days of the company when neither he nor I had a bean to 
our names. He’s fine. It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your 
phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.’

‘What? Why’s that?’ 

‘Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking. When he 
has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people 
themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering 
machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has 
one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have 
phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in 
a blue folder.’ 

‘A blue one, eh?’ 

‘Ask me why he doesn’t simply use a tape recorder,’ said Richard with a shrug. 

Reg considered this. ‘I expect he doesn’t use a tape recorder because he doesn’t 
like talking to himself,’ he said. ‘There is a logic there. Of a kind.’ 

He took a mouthful of his newly arrived porc au poivre and ruminated on it for a 
while before gently laying his knife and fork aside again for the moment. 

‘So what,’ he said at last, ‘is the role of young MacDuff in all this?’ 

‘Well, Gordon assigned me to write a major piece of software for the Apple 
Macintosh. Financial spreadsheet, accounting, that sort of thing, powerful, easy 
to use, lots of graphics. I asked him exactly what he wanted in it, and he just 
said, “Everything. I want the top piece of all-singing, all-dancing business 
software for that machine.” And being of a slightly whimsical turn of mind I 
took him literally. 

‘You see, a pattern of numbers can represent anything you like, can be used to 
map any surface, or modulate any dynamic process -- and so on. And any set of 
company accounts are, in the end, just a pattern of numbers. So I sat down and 
wrote a program that’ll take those numbers and do what you like with them. If 
you just want a bar graph it’ll do them as a bar graph, if you want them as a 
pie chart or scatter graph it’ll do them as a pie chart or scatter graph. If you 
want dancing girls jumping out of the pie chart in order to distract attention 
from the figures the pie chart actually represents, then the program will do 
that as well. Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of 
seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each 
gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your 
company. Great for producing animated corporate logos that actually mean 
something. 

‘But the silliest feature of all was that if you wanted your company accounts 
represented as a piece of music, it could do that as well. Well, I thought it 
was silly. The corporate world went bananas over it.’ 

Reg regarded him solemnly from over a piece of carrot poised delicately on his 
fork in front of him, but did not interrupt. 

‘You see, any aspect of a piece of music can be expressed as a sequence or 
pattern of numbers,’ enthused Richard. ‘Numbers can express the pitch of notes, 
the length of notes, patterns of pitches and lengths.’ 

‘You mean tunes,’ said Reg. The carrot had not moved yet. 

Richard grinned. 

‘Tunes would be a very good word for it. I must remember that.’ 

‘It would help you speak more easily.’ Reg returned the carrot to his plate, 
untasted. ‘And this software did well, then?’ he asked. 

‘Not so much here. The yearly accounts of most British companies emerged 
sounding like the Dead March from Saul, but in Japan they went for it like a 
pack of rats. It produced lots of cheery company anthems that started well, but 
if you were going to criticise you’d probably say that they tended to get a bit 
loud and squeaky at the end. Did spectacular business in the States, which was 
the main thing, commercially. Though the thing that’s interesting me most now is 
what happens if you leave the accounts out of it. Turn the numbers that 
represent the way a swallow’s wings beat directly into music. What would you 
hear? Not the sound of cash registers, according to Gordon.’

‘Fascinating,’ said Reg, ‘quite fascinating,’ and popped the carrot at last into 
his mouth. He turned and leaned forward to speak to his new girlfriend. 

‘Watkin loses,’ he pronounced. ‘The carrots have achieved a new all- time low. 
Sorry, Watkin, but awful as you are, the carrots, I’m afraid, are world-
beaters.’ 

The girl giggled more easily than last time and she smiled at him. Watkin was 
trying to take all this good-naturedly, but it was clear as his eyes swam at Reg 
that he was more used to discomfiting than being discomfited. 

‘Please, Daddy, can I now?’ With her new-found, if slight, confidence, the girl 
had also found a voice. 

‘Later,’ insisted her father. 

‘This is already later. I’ve been timing it.’ 

‘Well...’ He hesitated, and was lost. 

‘We’ve been to Greece,’ announced the girl in a small but awed voice. 

‘Ah, have you indeed,’ said Watkin, with a little nod. ‘Well, well. Anywhere in 
particular, or just Greece generally?’ 

‘Patmos,’ she said decisively. ‘It was beautiful. I think Patmos is the most 
beautiful place in the whole world. Except the ferry never came when it said it 
would. Never, ever. I timed it. We missed our flight but I didn’t mind.’ 

‘Ah, Patmos, I see,’ said Watkin, who was clearly roused by the news. ‘Well, 
what you have to understand, young lady, is that the Greeks, not content with 
dominating the culture of the Classical world, are also responsible for the 
greatest, some would say the only, work of true creative imagination produced 
this century as well. I refer of course to the Greek ferry timetables. A work of 
the sublimest fiction. Anyone who has travelled in the Aegean will confirm this. 
Hmm, yes. I think so.’ 

She frowned at him. 

‘I found a pot,’ she said. 

‘Probably nothing,’ interrupted her father hastily. ‘You know the way it is. 
Everyone who goes to Greece for the first time thinks they’ve found a pot, don’t 
they? Ha, ha.’ 

There were general nods. This was true. Irritating, but true. 

‘I found it in the harbour,’ she said, ‘in the water. While we were waiting for 
the damn ferry.’ 

‘Sarah! I’ve told you...’ 

‘It’s just what you called it. And worse. You called it words I didn’t think you 
knew. Anyway, I thought that if everyone here was meant to be so clever, then 
someone would be able to tell me if it was a proper ancient Greek thing or not. 
I think it’s very old. Will you please let them see it, Daddy?’ 

Her father shrugged hopelessly and started to fish about under his chair. 

‘Did you know, young lady,’ said Watkin to her, ‘that the Book of Revelation was 
written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me 
it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, 
yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn’t it, with that kind of dreaminess you get 
when you’re killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and 
then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair. I find that 
very suggestive. Perhaps you should write a paper on it.’ He nodded at her. 

She looked at him as if he were mad. 

‘Well, here it is,’ said her father, plonking the thing down on the table. ‘Just 
a pot, as you see. She’s only six,’ he added with a grim smile, ‘aren’t you, 
dear?’ 

‘Seven,’ said Sarah. 

The pot was quite small, about five inches high and four inches across at its 
widest point. The body was almost spherical, with a very narrow neck extending 
about an inch above the body. The neck and about half of the surface area were 
encrusted with hard-caked earth, but the parts of the pot that could be seen 
were of a rough, ruddy texture. 

Sarah took it and thrust it into the hands of the don sitting on her right. 

‘You look clever,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think.’ 

The don took it, and turned it over with a slightly supercilious air. ‘I’m sure 
if you scraped away the mud from the bottom,’ he remarked wittily, ‘it would 
probably say “Made in Birmingham”.’ 

‘That old, eh?’ said Sarah’s father with a forced laugh. ‘Long time since 
anything was made there.’ 

‘Anyway,’ said the don, ‘not my field, I’m a molecular biologist. Anyone else 
want to have a look?’ 

This question was not greeted with wild yelps of enthusiasm, but nevertheless 
the pot was passed from hand to hand around the far end of the table in a 
desultory fashion. It was goggled at through pebble glasses, peered at through 
horn-rims, gazed at over half-moons, and squinted at by someone who had left his 
glasses in his other suit, which he very much feared had now gone to the 
cleaner’s. No one seemed to know how old it was, or to care very much. The young 
girl’s face began to grow downhearted again. 

‘Sour lot,’ said Reg to Richard. He picked up a silver salt cellar again and 
held it up. 

‘Young lady,’ he said, leaning forward to address her. 

‘Oh, not again, you old fool,’ muttered the aged archaeologist Cawley, sitting 
back and putting his hands over his ears. 

‘Young lady,’ repeated Reg, ‘regard this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this 
simple hat.’ 

‘You haven’t got a hat,’ said the girl sulkily. 

‘Oh,’ said Reg, ‘a moment please,’ and he went and fetched his woolly red one. 

‘Regard,’ he said again, ‘this simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple 
woolly hat. I put the salt cellar in the hat, thus, and I pass the hat to you. 
The next part of the trick, dear lady... is up to you.’ 

He handed the hat to her, past their two intervening neighbours, Cawley and 
Watkin. She took the hat and looked inside it. 

‘Where’s it gone?’ she asked, staring into the hat. 

‘It’s wherever you put it,’ said Reg. 

‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘I see. Well... that wasn’t very good.’ 

Reg shrugged. ‘A humble trick, but it gives me pleasure,’ he said, and turned 
back to Richard. ‘Now, what were we talking about?’ 

Richard looked at him with a slight sense of shock. He knew that the Professor 
had always been prone to sudden and erratic mood swings, but it was as if all 
the warmth had drained out of him in an instant. He now wore the same distracted 
expression Richard had seen on his face when first he had arrived at his door 
that evening, apparently completely unexpected. Reg seemed then to sense that 
Richard was taken aback and quickly reassembled a smile. 

‘My dear chap!’ he said. ‘My dear chap! My dear, dear chap! What was I saying?’ 

‘Er, you were saying “My dear chap”.’ 

‘Yes, but I feel sure it was a prelude to something. A sort of short toccata on 
the theme of what a splendid fellow you are prior to introducing the main 
subject of my discourse, the nature of which I currently forget. You have no 
idea what I was about to say?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Oh. Well, I suppose I should be pleased. If everyone knew exactly what I was 
going to say, then there would be no point in my saying it, would there? Now, 
how’s our young guest’s pot doing?’ 

In fact it had reached Watkin, who pronounced himself no expert on what the 
ancients had made for themselves to drink out of, only on what they had written 
as a result. He said that Cawley was the one to whose knowledge and experience 
they should all bow, and attempted to give the pot to him. 

‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘yours was the knowledge and experience to which we 
should bow. Oh, for heaven’s sake, take your hands off your ears and have a look 
at the thing.’ 

Gently, but firmly, he drew Cawley’s right hand from his ear, explained the 
situation to him once again, and handed him the pot. Cawley gave it a cursory 
but clearly expert examination. 

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘about two hundred years old, I would think. Very rough. Very 
crude example of its type. Utterly without value, of course.’ 

He put it down peremptorily and gazed off into the old minstrel gallery, which 
appeared to anger him for some reason. 

The effect on Sarah was immediate. Already discouraged, she was thoroughly 
downcast by this. She bit her lip and threw herself back against her chair, 
feeling once again thoroughly out of place and childish. Her father gave her a 
warning look about misbehaving, and then apologised for her again. 

‘Well, Buxtehude,’ he hurried on to say, ‘yes, good old Buxtehude. We’ll have to 
see what we can do. Tell me...’ 

‘Young lady,’ interrupted a voice, hoarse with astonishment, ‘you are clearly a 
magician and enchantress of prodigious powers!’ 

All eyes turned to Reg, the old show-off. He was gripping the pot and staring at 
it with manic fascination. He turned his eyes slowly to the little girl, as if 
for the first time assessing the power of a feared adversary. 

‘I bow to you,’ he whispered. ‘I, unworthy though I am to speak in the presence 
of such a power as yours, beg leave to congratulate you on one of the finest 
feats of the conjurer’s art it has been my privilege to witness!’ 

Sarah stared at him with widening eyes. 

‘May I show these people what you have wrought?’ he asked earnestly.

Very faintly she nodded, and he fetched her formerly precious, but now sadly 
discredited, pot a sharp rap on the table. 

It split into two irregular parts, the caked clay with which it was surrounded 
falling in jagged shards on the table. One side of the pot fell away, leaving 
the rest standing. 

Sarah’s eyes goggled at the stained and tarnished but clearly recognisable 
silver college salt cellar, standing jammed in the remains of the pot. 

‘Stupid old fool,’ muttered Cawley. 

After the general disparagement and condemnation of this cheap parlour trick had 
died down -- none of which could dim the awe in Sarah’s eyes -- Reg turned to 
Richard and said, idly: 

‘Who was that friend of yours when you were here, do you ever see him? Chap with 
an odd East European name. Svlad something. Svlad Cjelli. Remember the fellow?’ 

Richard looked at him blankly for a moment. 

‘Svlad?’ he said. ‘Oh, you mean Dirk. Dirk Cjelli. No. I never stayed in touch. 
I’ve bumped into him a couple of times in the street but that’s all. I think he 
changes his name from time to time. Why do you ask?’ 


CHAPTER 5

High on his rocky promontory the Electric Monk continued to sit on a horse which 
was going quietly and uncomplainingly spare. From under its rough woven cowl the 
Monk gazed unblinkingly down into the valley, with which it was having a 
problem, but the problem was a new and hideous one to the Monk, for it was this 
-- Doubt. 

He never suffered it for long, but when he did, it gnawed at the very root of 
his being. 

The day was hot; the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the grey 
rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. But 
strange things were beginning to fizz in its brain, as they did from time to 
time when a piece of data became misaddressed as it passed through its input 
buffer. 

But then the Monk began to believe, fitfully and nervously at first, but then 
with a great searing white flame of belief which overturned all previous 
beliefs, including the stupid one about the valley being pink, that somewhere 
down in the valley, about a mile from where he was sitting, there would shortly 
open up a mysterious doorway into a strange and distant world, a doorway through 
which he might enter. An astounding idea. 

Astoundingly enough, however, on this one occasion he was perfectly right. 

The horse sensed that something was up. 

It pricked up its ears and gently shook its head. It had gone into a sort of 
trance looking at the same clump of rocks for so long, and was on the verge of 
imagining them to be pink itself. It shook its head a little harder. 

A slight twitch on the reins, and a prod from the Monk’s heels and they were 
off, picking their way carefully down the rocky incline. The way was difficult. 
Much of it was loose shale -- loose brown and grey shale, with the occasional 
brown and green plant clinging to a precarious existence on it. The Monk noticed 
this without embarrassment. It was an older, wiser Monk now, and had put 
childish things behind it. Pink valleys, hermaphrodite tables, these were all 
natural stages through which one had to pass on the path to true enlightenment. 

The sun beat hard on them. The Monk wiped the sweat and dust off its face and 
paused, leaning forward on the horse’s neck. It peered down through the 
shimmering heat haze at a large outcrop of rock which stood out on to the floor 
of the valley. There, behind that outcrop, was where the Monk thought, or rather 
passionately believed to the core of its being, the door would appear. It tried 
to focus more closely, but the details of the view swam confusingly in the hot 
rising air. 

As it sat back in its saddle, and was about to prod the horse onward, it 
suddenly noticed a rather odd thing. 

On a flattish wall of rock nearby, in fact so nearby that the Monk was surprised 
not to have noticed it before, was a large painting. The painting was crudely 
drawn, though not without a certain stylish sweep of line, and seemed very old, 
possibly very, very old indeed. The paint was faded, chipped and patchy, and it 
was difficult to discern with any clarity what the picture was. The Monk 
approached the picture more closely. It looked like a primitive hunting scene. 

The group of purple, multi-limbed creatures were clearly early hunters. They 
carried rough spears, and were in hot pursuit of a large horned and armoured 
creature, which appeared to have been wounded in the hunt already. The colours 
were now so dim as to be almost non- existent. In fact, all that could be 
clearly seen was the white of the hunters’ teeth, which seemed to shine with a 
whiteness whose lustre was undimmed by the passage of what must have been many 
thousands of years. In fact they even put the Monk’s own teeth to shame, and he 
had cleaned them only that morning. 

The Monk had seen paintings like this before, but only in pictures or on the TV, 
never in real life. They were usually to be found in caves where they were 
protected from the elements, otherwise they would not have survived. 

The Monk looked more carefully at the immediate environs of the rock wall and 
noticed that, though not exactly in a cave, it was nevertheless protected by a 
large overhang and was well sheltered from the wind and rain. Odd, though, that 
it should have managed to last so long. Odder still that it should appear not to 
have been discovered. Such cave paintings as there were were all famous and 
familiar images, but this was not one that he had ever seen before. 

Perhaps this was a dramatic and historic find he had made. Perhaps if he were to 
return to the city and announce this discovery he would be welcomed back, given 
a new motherboard after all and allowed to believe -- to believe -- believe 
what? He paused, blinked, and shook his head to clear a momentary system error. 

He pulled himself up short. 

He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to... to... 

The Door was The Way. 

Good. 

Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn’t have 
a good answer to. 

Brusquely he tugged the horse’s head round and urged it onward and downward. 
Within a few minutes more of tricky manoeuvring they had reached the valley 
floor, and he was momentarily disconcerted to discover that the fine top layer 
of dust that had settled on the brown parched earth was indeed a very pale 
brownish pink, particularly on the banks of the sluggish trickle of mud which 
was all that remained, in the hot season, of the river that flowed through the 
valley when the rains came. He dismounted and bent down to feel the pink dust 
and run it through his fingers. It was very fine and soft and felt pleasant as 
he rubbed it on his skin. It was about the same colour, perhaps a little paler. 

The horse was looking at him. He realised, a little belatedly perhaps, that the 
horse must be extremely thirsty. He was extremely thirsty himself, but had tried 
to keep his mind off it. He unbuckled the water flask from the saddle. It was 
pathetically light. He unscrewed the top and took one single swig. Then he 
poured a little into his cupped hand and offered it to the horse, who slurped at 
it greedily and briefly. 

The horse looked at him again. 

The Monk shook his head sadly, resealed the bottle and replaced it. He knew, in 
that small part of his mind where he kept factual and logical information, that 
it would not last much longer, and that, without it, neither would they. It was 
only his Belief that kept him going, currently his Belief in The Door. 

He brushed the pink dust from his rough habit, and then stood looking at the 
rocky outcrop, a mere hundred yards distant. He looked at it not without a 
slight, tiny trepidation. Although the major part of his mind was firm in its 
eternal and unshakeable Belief that there would be a Door behind the outcrop, 
and that the Door would be The Way, yet the tiny part of his brain that 
understood about the water bottle could not help but recall past disappointments 
and sounded a very tiny but jarring note of caution. 

If he elected not to go and see The Door for himself, then he could continue to 
believe in it forever. It would be the lodestone of his life (what little was 
left of it, said the part of his brain that knew about the water bottle). 

If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to the Door and it wasn’t 
there... what then? 

The horse whinnied impatiently. 

The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for 
dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his 
function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to 
be, what else was the meaning of Belief? 

The Door would still be there, even if the door was not. 

He pulled himself together. The Door would be there, and he must now go to it, 
because The Door was The Way. 

Instead of remounting his horse, he led it. The Way was but a short way, and he 
should enter the presence of the Door in humility. 

He walked, brave and erect, with solemn slowness. He approached the rocky 
outcrop. He reached it. He turned the corner. He looked. 

The Door was there. 

The horse, it must be said, was quite surprised. 

The Monk fell to his knees in awe and bewilderment. So braced was he for dealing 
with the disappointment that was habitually his lot that, though he would never 
know to admit it, he was completely unprepared for this. He stared at The Door 
in sheer, blank system error. 

It was a door such as he had never seen before. All the doors he knew were great 
steel-reinforced things, because of all the video recorders and dishwashers that 
were kept behind them, plus of course all the expensive Electric Monks that were 
needed to believe in it all. This one was simple, wooden and small, about his 
own size. A Monk-size door, painted white, with a single, slightly dented brass 
knob slightly less than halfway up one side. It was set simply in the rock face, 
with no explanation as to its origin or purpose. 

Hardly knowing how he dared, the poor startled Monk staggered to his feet and, 
leading his horse, walked nervously forward towards it. He reached out and 
touched it. He was so startled when no alarms went off that he jumped back. He 
touched it again, more firmly this time. 

He let his hand drop slowly to the handle -- again, no alarms. He waited to be 
sure, and then he turned it, very, very gently. He felt a mechanism release. He 
held his breath. Nothing. He drew the door towards him, and it came easily. He 
looked inside, but the interior was so dim in contrast with the desert sun 
outside that he could see nothing. At last, almost dead with wonder, he entered, 
pulling the horse in after him. 

A few minutes later, a figure that had been sitting out of sight around the next 
outcrop of rock finished rubbing dust on his face, stood up, stretched his limbs 
and made his way back towards the door, patting his clothes as he did so. 


CHAPTER 6

‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:’

The reader clearly belonged to the school of thought which holds that a sense of 
the seriousness or greatness of a poem is best imparted by reading it in a silly 
voice. He soared and swooped at the words until they seemed to duck and run for 
cover. 

‘Where Alph, the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.’

Richard relaxed back into his seat. The words were very, very familiar to him, 
as they could not help but be to any English graduate of St Cedd’s College, and 
they settled easily into his mind. 

The association of the college with Coleridge was taken very seriously indeed, 
despite the man’s well-known predilection for certain recreational 
pharmaceuticals under the influence of which this, his greatest work, was 
composed, in a dream. 

The entire manuscript was lodged in the safe-keeping of the college library, and 
it was from this itself, on the regular occasion of the Coleridge Dinner, that 
the poem was read. 

‘So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.’

Richard wondered how long it took. He glanced sideways at his former Director of 
Studies and was disturbed by the sturdy purposefulness of his reading posture. 
The singsong voice irritated him at first, but after a while it began to lull 
him instead, and he watched a rivulet of wax seeping over the edge of a candle 
that was burning low now and throwing a guttering light over the carnage of 
dinner. 

‘But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’

The small quantities of claret that he had allowed himself during the course of 
the meal seeped warmly through his veins, and soon his own mind began to wander, 
and provoked by Reg’s question earlier in the meal, he wondered what had lately 
become of his former... was friend the word? He seemed more like a succession of 
extraordinary events than a person. The idea of him actually having friends as 
such seemed not so much unlikely, more a sort of mismatching of concepts, like 
the idea of the Suez crisis popping out for a bun. 

Svlad Cjelli. Popularly known as Dirk, though, again, ‘popular’ was hardly 
right. Notorious, certainly; sought after, endlessly speculated about, those too 
were true. But popular? Only in the sense that a serious accident on the 
motorway might be popular -- everyone slows down to have a good look, but no one 
will get too close to the flames. Infamous was more like it. Svlad Cjelli, 
infamously known as Dirk. 

He was rounder than the average undergraduate and wore more hats. That is to 
say, there was just the one hat which he habitually wore, but he wore it with a 
passion that was rare in one so young. The hat was dark red and round, with a 
very flat brim, and it appeared to move as if balanced on gimbals, which ensured 
its perfect horizontality at all times, however its owner moved his head. As a 
hat it was a remarkable rather than entirely successful piece of persona! 
decoration. It would make an elegant adornment, stylish, shapely and flattering, 
if the wearer were a small bedside lamp, but not otherwise.

People gravitated around him, drawn in by the stories he denied about himself, 
but what the source of these stories might be, if not his own denials, was never 
entirely clear. 

The tales had to do with the psychic powers that he’d supposedly inherited from 
his mother’s side of the family who he claimed, had lived at the smarter end of 
Transylvania. That is to say, he didn’t make any such claim at all, and said it 
was the most absurd nonsense. He strenuously denied that there were bats of any 
kind at all in his family and threatened to sue anybody who put about such 
malicious fabrications, but he affected nevertheless to wear a large and flappy 
leather coat, and had one of those machines in his room which are supposed to 
help cure bad backs if you hang upside down from them. He would allow people to 
discover him hanging from this machine at all kinds of odd hours of the day, and 
more particularly of the night, expressly so that he could vigorously deny that 
it had any significance whatsoever. 

By means of an ingenious series of strategically deployed denials of the most 
exciting and exotic things, he was able to create the myth that he was a 
psychic, mystic, telepathic, fey, clairvoyant, psychosassic vampire bat. 

What did ‘psychosassic’ mean? 

It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all. 

‘And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced:

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted...’

Dirk had also been perpetually broke. This would change. 

It was his room-mate who started it, a credulous fellow called Mander, who, if 
the truth were known, had probably been specially selected by Dirk for his 
credulity. 

Steve Mander noticed that if ever Dirk went to bed drunk he would talk in his 
sleep. Not only that, but the sort of things he would say in his sleep would be 
things like, ‘The opening up of trade routes to the mumble mumble burble was the 
turning point for the growth of empire in the snore footle mumble. Discuss.’

‘...like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:’

The first time this happened Steve Mander sat bolt upright in bed. This was 
shortly before prelim exams in the second year, and what Dirk had just said, or 
judiciously mumbled, sounded remarkably like a very likely question in the 
Economic History paper. 

Mander quietly got up, crossed over to Dirk’s bed and listened very hard, but 
other than a few completely disconnected mumblings about Schleswig-Holstein and 
the Franco-Prussian war, the latter being largely directed by Dirk into his 
pillow, he learned nothing more. 

News, however, spread -- quietly, discreetly, and like wildfire. 

‘And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.’

For the next month Dirk found himself being constantly wined and dined in the 
hope that he would sleep very soundly that night and dream-speak a few more exam 
questions. Remarkably, it seemed that the better he was fed, and the finer the 
vintage of the wine he was given to drink, the less he would tend to sleep 
facing directly into his pillow. 

His scheme, therefore, was to exploit his alleged gifts without ever actually 
claiming to have them. In fact he would react to stories about his supposed 
powers with open incredulity, even hostility. 

‘Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!’

Dirk was also, he denied, a clairaudient. He would sometimes hum tunes in his 
sleep that two weeks later would turn out to be a hit for someone. Not too 
difficult to organise, really. 

In fact, he had always done the bare minimum of research necessary to support 
these myths. He was lazy, and essentially what he did was allow people’s 
enthusiastic credulity to do the work for him. The laziness was essential -- if 
his supposed feats of the paranormal had been detailed and accurate, then people 
might have been suspicious and looked for other explanations. On the other hand, 
the more vague and ambiguous his ‘predictions’ the more other people’s own 
wishful thinking would close the credibility gap. 

Dirk never made much out of it -- at least, he appeared not to. In fact, the 
benefit to himself, as a student, of being continually wined and dined at other 
people’s expense was more considerable than anyone would expect unless they sat 
down and worked out the figures. 

And, of course, he never claimed -- in fact, he actively denied -- that any of 
it was even remotely true. 

He was therefore well placed to execute a very nice and tasty little scam come 
the time of finals. 

‘The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!’

‘Good heavens...!’ Reg suddenly seemed to awake with a start from the light doze 
into which he had gently slipped under the influence of the wine and the 
reading, and glanced about himself with blank surprise, but nothing had changed. 
Coleridge’s words sang through a warm and contented silence that had settled on 
the great hall. After another quick frown, Reg settled back into another doze, 
but this time a slightly more attentive one. 

‘A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.’

Dirk allowed himself to be persuaded to make, under hypnosis, a firm prediction 
about what questions would be set for examination that summer. 

He himself first planted the idea by explaining exactly the sort of thing that 
he would never, under any circumstances, be prepared to do, though in many ways 
he would like to, just to have the chance to disprove his alleged and strongly 
disavowed abilities. 

And it was on these grounds, carefully prepared, that he eventually agreed --
only because it would once and for all scotch the whole silly -- immensely, 
tediously silly -- business. He would make his predictions by means of automatic 
writing under proper supervision, and they would then be sealed in an envelope 
and deposited at the bank until after the exams. 

Then they would be opened to see how accurate they had been after the exams. 

He was, not surprisingly, offered some pretty hefty bribes from a pretty hefty 
number of people to let them see the predictions he had written down, but he was 
absolutely shocked by the idea. That, he said, would be dishonest... 

‘Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!’

Then, a short time later, Dirk allowed himself to be seen around town wearing 
something of a vexed and solemn expression. At first he waved aside enquiries as 
to what it was that was bothering him, but eventually he let slip that his 
mother was going to have to undergo some extremely expensive dental work which, 
for reasons that he refused to discuss, would have to be done privately, only 
there wasn’t the money. 

From here, the path downward to accepting donations for his mother’s supposed 
medical expenses in return for quick glances at his written exam predictions 
proved to be sufficiently steep and well-oiled for him to be able to slip down 
it with a minimum of fuss. 

Then it further transpired that the only dentist who could perform this 
mysterious dental operation was an East European surgeon now living in Malibu, 
and it was in consequence necessary to increase the level of donations rather 
sharply. 

He still denied, of course, that his abilities were all that they were cracked 
up to be, in fact he denied that they existed at all, and insisted that he would 
never have embarked on the exercise at all if it wasn’t to disprove the whole 
thing -- and also, since other people seemed, at their own risk, to have a faith 
in his abilities that he himself did not, he was happy to indulge them to the 
extent of letting them pay for his sainted mother’s operation. 

He could only emerge well from this situation. 

Or so he thought. 

‘And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!’

The exam papers Dirk produced under hypnosis, by means of automatic writing, he 
had, in fact, pieced together simply by doing the same minimum research that any 
student taking exams would do, studying previous exam papers, and seeing what, 
if any, patterns emerged, and making intelligent guesses about what might come 
up. He was pretty sure of getting (as anyone would be) a strike rate that was 
sufficiently high to satisfy the credulous, and sufficiently low for the whole 
exercise to look perfectly innocent. 

As indeed it was. 

What completely blew him out of the water, and caused a furore which ended with 
him being driven out of Cambridge in the back of a Black Maria, was the fact 
that all the exam papers he sold turned out to be the same as the papers that 
were actually set. 

Exactly. Word for word. To the very comma. 

‘Wave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honey-dew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise...’

And that, apart from a flurry of sensational newspaper reports which exposed him 
as a fraud, then trumpeted him as the real thing so that they could have another 
round of exposing him as a fraud again and then trumpeting him as the real thing 
again, until they got bored and found a nice juicy snooker player to harass 
instead, was that. 

In the years since then, Richard had run into Dirk from time to time and had 
usually been greeted with that kind of guarded half smile that wants to know if 
you think it owes you money before it blossoms into one that hopes you will lend 
it some. Dirk’s regular name changes suggested to Richard that he wasn’t alone 
in being treated like this. 

He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within 
the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much 
in the light of common day. And he wondered at Reg’s asking after him like that, 
suddenly and out of the blue, in what seemed altogether too airy and casual a 
manner. 

He glanced around him again, at his lightly snoring neighbour, Reg; at little 
Sarah rapt in silent attention; at the deep hall swathed in darkly glimmering 
light; at the portraits of old prime ministers and poets hung high in the 
darkness with just the odd glint of candlelight gleaming off their teeth; at the 
Director of English Studies standing reading in his poetry-reading voice; at the 
book of ‘Kubla Khan’ that the Director of English Studies held in his hand; and 
finally, surreptitiously, at his watch. He settled back again. 

The voice continued, reading the second, and altogether stranger part of the 
poem... 


CHAPTER 7

This was the evening of the last day of Gordon Way’s life, and he was wondering 
if the rain would hold off for the weekend. The forecast had said changeable --
a misty night tonight followed by bright but chilly days on Friday and Saturday 
with maybe a few scattered showers towards the end of Sunday when everyone would 
be heading back into town. 

Everyone, that is, other than Gordon Way. 

The weather forecast hadn’t mentioned that, of course, that wasn‘t the job of 
the weather forecast, but then his horoscope had been pretty misleading as well. 
It had mentioned an unusual amount of planetary activity in his sign and had 
urged him to differentiate between what he thought he wanted and what he 
actually needed, and suggested that he should tackle emotional or work problems 
with determination and complete honesty, but had inexplicably failed to mention 
that he would be dead before the day was out. 

He turned off the motorway near Cambridge and stopped at a small filling station 
for some petrol, where he sat for a moment, finishing off a call on his car 
phone. 

‘OK, look, I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he said, ‘or maybe later tonight. Or call 
me. I should be at the cottage in half an hour. Yes, I know how important the 
project is to you. All right, I know how important it is, full stop. You want 
it, I want it. Of course I do. And I’m not saying that we won’t continue to 
support it. I’m just saying it’s expensive and we should look at the whole thing 
with determination and complete honesty. Look, why don’t you come out to the 
cottage, and we can talk it through. OK, yeah, yes, I know. I understand. Well, 
think about it, Kate. Talk to you later. Bye.’ 

He hung up and continued to sit in his car for a moment. 

It was a large car. It was a large silver-grey Mercedes of the sort that they 
use in advertisements, and not just advertisements for Mercedes. Gordon Way, 
brother of Susan, employer of Richard MacDuff, was a rich man, the founder and 
owner of WayForward Technologies II. WayForward Technologies itself had of 
course gone bust, for the usual reason, taking his entire first fortune with it. 

Luckily, he had managed to make another one. 

The ‘usual reason’ was that he had been in the business of computer hardware 
when every twelve-year-old in the country had suddenly got bored with boxes that 
went bing. His second fortune had been made in software instead. As a result of 
two major pieces of software, one of which was Anthem (the other, more 
profitable one had never seen the light of day), WFT-II was the only British 
software company that could be mentioned in the same sentence as such major U.S. 
companies as Microsoft or Lotus. The sentence would probably run along the lines 
of ‘WayForward Technologies, unlike such major U.S. companies as Microsoft or 
Lotus...’ but it was a start. WayForward was in there. And he owned it. 

He pushed a tape into the slot on the stereo console. It accepted it with a soft 
and decorous click, and a moment or two later Ravel’s Boléro floated out of 
eight perfectly matched speakers with fine- meshed matte-black grilles. The 
stereo was so smooth and spacious you could almost sense the whole ice-rink. He 
tapped his fingers lightly on the padded rim of the steering wheel. He gazed at 
the dashboard. Tasteful illuminated figures and tiny, immaculate lights gazed 
dimly back at him. After a while he suddenly realised this was a self service 
station and got out to fill the tank. 

This took a minute or two. He stood gripping the filler nozzle, stamping his 
feet in the cold night air, then walked over to the small grubby kiosk, paid for 
the petrol, remembered to buy a couple of local maps, and then stood chatting 
enthusiastically to the cashier for a few minutes about the directions the 
computer industry was likely to take in the following year, suggesting that 
parallel processing was going to be the key to really intuitive productivity 
software, but also strongly doubting whether artificial intelligence research 
per se, particularly artificial intelligence research based on the ProLog 
language, was really going to produce any serious commercially viable products 
in the foreseeable future, at least as far as the office desk top environment 
was concerned, a topic that fascinated the cashier not at all. 

‘The man just liked to talk,’ he would later tell the police. ‘Man, I could have 
walked away to the toilet for ten minutes and he would’ve told it all to the 
till. If I’d been fifteen minutes the till would have walked away too. Yeah, I’m 
sure that’s him,’ he would add when shown a picture of Gordon Way. ‘I only 
wasn’t sure at first because in the picture he’s got his mouth closed.’ 

‘And you’re absolutely certain you didn’t see anything else suspicious?’ the 
policeman insisted. ‘Nothing that struck you as odd in any way at all?’ 

‘No, like I said, it was just an ordinary customer on an ordinary night, just 
like any other night.’ 

The policeman stared at him blankly. ‘Just for the sake of argument,’ he went on 
to say, ‘if I were suddenly to do this...’ -- he made himself go cross-eyed, 
stuck his tongue out of the corner of his mouth and danced up and down twisting 
his fingers in his ears -- ‘would anything strike you about that?’ 

‘Well, er, yeah,’ said the cashier, backing away nervously. ‘I’d think you’d 
gone stark raving mad.’ 

‘Good,’ said the policeman, putting his notebook away. ‘It’s just that different 
people sometimes have a different idea of what “odd” means, you see, sir. If 
last night was an ordinary night just like any other night, then I am a pimple 
on the bottom of the Marquess of Queensbury’s aunt. We shall be requiring a 
statement later, sir. Thank you for your time.’ 

That was all yet to come. 

Tonight, Gordon pushed the maps in his pocket and strolled back towards his car. 
Standing under the lights in the mist it had gathered a finely beaded coat of 
matte moisture on it, and looked like -- well, it looked like an extremely 
expensive Mercedes-Benz. Gordon caught himself, just for a millisecond, wishing 
that he had something like that, but he was now quite adept at fending off that 
particular line of thought, which only led off in circles and left him feeling 
depressed and confused. 

He patted it in a proprietorial manner, then, walking around it, noticed that 
the boot wasn’t closed properly and pushed it shut. It closed with a good 
healthy clunk. Well, that made it all worth it, didn’t it? Good healthy clunk 
like that. Old-fashioned values of quality and workmanship. He thought of a 
dozen things he had to talk to Susan about and climbed back into the car, 
pushing the auto-dial code on his phone as soon as the car was prowling back on 
to the road. 

‘...so if you’d like to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as 
possible. Maybe.’ 

Beep.

‘Oh, Susan, hi, it’s Gordon,’ he said, cradling the phone awkwardly on his 
shoulder. ‘Just on my way to the cottage. It’s er, Thursday night, and it’s, 
er... 8.47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I have those people from the States 
coming over this weekend to thrash out the distribution on Anthem Version 2.00, 
handling the promotion, all that stuff, and look you know I don’t like to ask 
you this sort of thing, but you know I always do anyway, so here it is. 

‘I just need to know that Richard is on the case. I mean really on the case. I 
can ask him, and he says, Oh sure, it’s fine, but half the time -- shit, that 
lorry had bright lights, none of these bastard lorry drivers ever dips them 
properly, it’s a wonder I don’t end up dead in the ditch, that would be 
something, wouldn’t it, leaving your famous last words on somebody’s answering 
machine, there’s no reason why these lorries shouldn’t have automatic light-
activated dipper switches. Look, can you make a note for me to tell Susan -- not 
you, of course, secretary Susan at the office -- to tell her to send a letter 
from me to that fellow at the Department of the Environment saying we can 
provide the technology if he can provide the legislation? It’s for the public 
good, and anyway he owes me a favour plus what’s the point in having a CBE if 
you can’t kick a little ass? You can tell I’ve been talking to Americans all 
week. 

‘That reminds me, God, I hope I remembered to pack the shotguns. What is it with 
these Americans that they’re always so mad to shoot my rabbits? I bought them 
some maps in the hope that I can persuade them to go on long healthy walks and 
take their minds off shooting rabbits. I really feel quite sorry for the 
creatures. I think I should put one of those signs on my lawn when the Americans 
are coming, you know, like they have in Beverly Hills, saying `Armed Response’. 

‘Make a note to Susan, would you please, to get an `Armed Response’ sign made up 
with a sharp spike on the bottom at the right height for rabbits to see. That’s 
secretary Susan at the office not you, of course. 

‘Where was I? 

‘Oh yes. Richard and Anthem 2.00. Susan, that thing has got to be in beta 
testing in two weeks. He tells me it’s fine. But every time I see him he’s got a 
picture of a sofa spinning on his computer screen. He says it’s an important 
concept, but all I see is furniture. People who want their company accounts to 
sing to them do not want to buy a revolving sofa. Nor do I think he should be 
turning the erosion patterns of the Himalayas into a flute quintet at this time. 

‘And as for what Kate’s up to, Susan, well, I can’t hide the fact that I get 
anxious at the salaries and computer time it’s eating up. Important long-term 
research and development it might be, but there is also the possibility, only a 
possibility, I’m saying, but nevertheless a possibility which I think we owe it 
to ourselves fully to evaluate and explore, which is that it’s a lemon. That’s 
odd, there’s a noise coming from the boot, I thought I’d just closed it 
properly. 

‘Anyway, the main thing’s Richard. And the point is that there’s only one person 
who’s really in a position to know if he’s getting the important work done, or 
if he’s just dreaming, and that one person is, I’m afraid, Susan. 

‘That’s you, I mean, of course, not secretary Susan at the office. 

‘So can you, I don’t like to ask you this, I really don’t, can you really get on 
his case? Make him see how important it is? Just make sure he realises that 
WayForward Technologies is meant to be an expanding commercial business, not an 
adventure playground for crunch- heads. That’s the problem with crunch-heads --
they have one great idea that actually works and then they expect you to carry 
on funding them for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their 
navels. I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop and close the boot properly. Won’t 
be a moment.’ 

He put the telephone down on the seat beside him, pulled over on to the grass 
verge, and got out. As he went to the boot, it opened, a figure rose out of it, 
shot him through the chest with both barrels of a shotgun and then went about 
its business. 

Gordon Way’s astonishment at being suddenly shot dead was nothing to his 
astonishment at what happened next. 


CHAPTER 8

‘Come in, dear fellow, come in.’ 

The door to Reg’s set of rooms in college was up a winding set of wooden stairs 
in the corner of Second Court, and was not well lit, or rather it was perfectly 
well lit when the light was working, but the light was not working, so the door 
was not well lit and was, furthermore, locked. Reg was having difficulty in 
finding the key from a collection which looked like something that a fit Ninja 
warrior could hurl through the trunk of a tree. 

Rooms in the older parts of the college have double doors, like airlocks, and 
like airlocks they are fiddly to open. The outer door is a sturdy slab of grey 
painted oak, with no features other than a very narrow slit for letters, and a 
Yale lock, to which suddenly Reg at last found the key. 

He unlocked it and pulled it open. Behind it lay an ordinary white- panelled 
door with an ordinary brass doorknob. 

‘Come in, come in,’ repeated Reg, opening this and fumbling for the light 
switch. For a moment only the dying embers of a fire in the stone grate threw 
ghostly red shadows dancing around the room, but then electric light flooded it 
and extinguished the magic. Reg hesitated on the threshold for a moment, oddly 
tense, as if wishing to be sure of something before he entered, then bustled in 
with at least the appearance of cheeriness. 

It was a large panelled room, which a collection of gently shabby furniture 
contrived to fill quite comfortably. Against the far wall stood a large and 
battered old mahogany table with fat ugly legs, which was laden with books, 
files, folders and teetering piles of papers. Standing in its own space on the 
desk, Richard was amused to note, was actually a battered old abacus. 

There was a small Regency writing desk standing nearby which might have been 
quite valuable had it not been knocked about so much, also a couple of elegant 
Georgian chairs, a portentous Victorian bookcase, and so on. It was, in short, a 
don’s room. It had a don’s framed maps and prints on the walls a threadbare and 
faded don’s carpet on the floor, and it looked as if little had changed in it 
for decades, which was probably the case because a don lived in it. 

Two doors led out from either end of the opposite wall, and Richard knew from 
previous visits that one led to a study which looked much like a smaller and 
more intense version of this room -- larger clumps of books, taller piles of 
paper in more imminent danger of actually falling, furniture which, however old 
and valuable, was heavily marked with myriad rings of hot tea or coffee cups, on 
many of which the original cups themselves were probably still standing. 

The other door led to a small and rather basically equipped kitchen, and a 
twisty internal staircase at the top of which lay the Professor’s bedroom and 
bathroom. 

‘Try and make yourself comfortable on the sofa,’ invited Reg, fussing around 
hospitably. ‘I don’t know if you’ll manage it. It always feels to me as if it’s 
been stuffed with cabbage leaves and cutlery.’ He peered at Richard seriously. 
‘Do you have a good sofa?’ he enquired.

‘Well, yes.’ Richard laughed. He was cheered by the silliness of the question. 

‘Oh,’ said Reg solemnly. ‘Well, I wish you’d tell me where you got it. I have 
endless trouble with them, quite endless. Never found a comfortable one in all 
my life. How do you find yours?’ He encountered, with a slight air of surprise, 
a small silver tray he had left out with a decanter of port and three glasses. 

‘Well, it’s odd you should ask that,’ said Richard. ‘I’ve never sat on it.’ 

‘Very wise,’ insisted Reg earnestly, ‘very, very wise.’ He went through a 
palaver similar to his previous one with his coat and hat. 

‘Not that I wouldn’t like to,’ said Richard. ‘It’s just that it’s stuck halfway 
up a long flight of stairs which leads up into my flat. As far as I can make it 
out, the delivery men got it part way up the stairs, got it stuck, turned it 
around any way they could, couldn’t get it any further, and then found, 
curiously enough, that they couldn’t get it back down again. Now, that should be 
impossible.’ 

‘Odd,’ agreed Reg. ‘I’ve certainly never come across any irreversible 
mathematics involving sofas. Could be a new field. Have you spoken to any 
spatial geometricians?’ 

‘I did better than that. I called in a neighbour’s kid who used to be able to 
solve Rubik’s cube in seventeen seconds. He sat on a step and stared at it for 
over an hour before pronouncing it irrevocably stuck. Admittedly he’s a few 
years older now and has found out about girls, but it’s got me puzzled.’ 

‘Carry on talking, my dear fellow, I’m most interested, but let me know first if 
there’s anything I can get you. Port perhaps? Or brandy? The port I think is the 
better bet, laid down by the college in 1934, one of the finest vintages I think 
you’ll find, and on the other hand I don’t actually have any brandy. Or coffee? 
Some more wine perhaps? There’s an excellent Margaux I’ve been looking for an 
excuse to open, though it should of course be allowed to stand open for an hour 
or two, which is not to say that I couldn’t... no,’ he said hurriedly, ‘probably 
best not to go for the Margaux tonight.’ 

‘Tea is what I would really like,’ said Richard, ‘if you have some.’

Reg raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you sure?’ 

‘I have to drive home.’ 

‘Indeed. Then I shall be a moment or two in the kitchen. Please carry on, I 
shall still be able to hear you. Continue to tell me of your sofa, and do feel 
free in the meantime to sit on mine. Has it been stuck there for long?’ 

‘Oh, only about three weeks,’ said Richard, sitting down. ‘I could just saw it 
up and throw it away, but I can’t believe that there isn’t a logical answer. And 
it also made me think -- it would be really useful to know before you buy a 
piece of furniture whether it’s actually going to fit up the stairs or around 
the corner. So I’ve modelled the problem in three dimensions on my computer --
and so far it just says no way.’ 

‘It says what?’ called Reg, over the noise of filling the kettle. 

‘That it can’t be done. I told it to compute the moves necessary to get the sofa 
out, and it said there aren’t any. I said “What?” and it said there aren’t any. 
I then asked it, and this is the really mysterious thing, to compute the moves 
necessary to get the sofa into its present position in the first place, and it 
said that it couldn’t have got there. Not without fundamental restructuring of 
the walls. So, either there’s something wrong with the fundamental structure of 
the matter in my walls or,’ he added with a sigh, ‘there’s something wrong with 
the program. Which would you guess?’ 

‘And are you married?’ called Reg. 

‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. A sofa stuck on the stairs for a month. Well, 
no, not married as such, but yes, there is a specific girl that I’m not married 
to.’ 

‘What’s she like? What does she do?’ 

‘She’s a professional cellist. I have to admit that the sofa has been a bit of a 
talking point. In fact she’s moved back to her own flat until I get it sorted 
out. She, well...’ 

He was suddenly sad, and he stood up and wandered around the room in a desultory 
sort of way and ended up in front of the dying fire. He gave it a bit of a poke 
and threw on a couple of extra logs to try and ward off the chill of the room. 

‘She’s Gordon’s sister, in fact,’ he added at last. ‘But they are very 
different. I’m not sure she really approves of computers very much. And she 
doesn’t much like his attitude to money. I don’t think I entirely blame her, 
actually, and she doesn’t know the half of it.’ 

‘Which is the half she doesn’t know?’ 

Richard sighed. 

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s to do with the project which first made the software 
incarnation of the company profitable. It was called Reason, and in its own way 
it was sensational.’ 

‘What was it?’ 

‘Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It’s funny how many of the best 
ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see there have already been 
several programs written that help you to arrive at decisions by properly 
ordering and analysing all the relevant facts so that they then point naturally 
towards the right decision. The drawback with these is that the decision which 
all the properly ordered and analysed facts point to is not necessarily the one 
you want.’ 

‘Yeeeess...’ said Reg’s voice from the kitchen. 

‘Well, Gordon’s great insight was to design a program which allowed you to 
specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give 
it all the facts. The program’s task, which it was able to accomplish with 
consummate ease, was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding 
steps to connect the premises with the conclusion. 

‘And I have to say that it worked brilliantly. Gordon was able to buy himself a 
Porsche almost immediately despite being completely broke and a hopeless driver. 
Even his bank manager was unable to find fault with his reasoning. Even when 
Gordon wrote it off three weeks later.’ 

‘Heavens. And did the program sell very well?’

‘No. We never sold a single copy.’ 

‘You astonish me. It sounds like a real winner to me.’ 

‘It was,’ said Richard hesitantly. ‘The entire project was bought up, lock, 
stock and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound 
financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something 
I would want to trust my weight to. I’ve recently been analysing a lot of the 
arguments put forward in favour of the Star Wars project, and if you know what 
you’re looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear. 

‘So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of 
years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the 
program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 
1.5. Odd, that.’ 

‘Do you have a copy?’ 

‘Certainly not,’ said Richard, ‘I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. Anyway, 
when the Pentagon bought everything, they bought everything. Every scrap of 
code, every disk, every notebook. I was glad to see the back of it. If indeed we 
have. I just busy myself with my own projects.’ 

He poked at the fire again and wondered what he was doing here when he had so 
much work on. Gordon was on at him continually about getting the new, super 
version of Anthem ready for taking advantage of the Macintosh II, and he was 
well behind with it. And as for the proposed module for converting incoming Dow 
Jones stock-market information into MIDI data in real time, he’d only meant that 
as a joke, but Gordon, of course, had flipped over the idea and insisted on its 
being implemented. That too was meant to be ready but wasn’t. He suddenly knew 
exactly why it was he was here. 

Well, it had been a pleasant evening, even if he couldn’t see why Reg had been 
quite so keen to see him. He picked up a couple of books from the table. The 
table obviously doubled as a dining table, because although the piles looked as 
if they had been there for weeks, the absence of dust immediately around them 
showed that they had been moved recently. 

Maybe, he thought, the need for amiable chit-chat with someone different can 
become as urgent as any other need when you live in a community as enclosed as a 
Cambridge college was, even nowadays. He was a likeable old fellow, but it was 
clear from dinner that many of his colleagues found his eccentricities formed 
rather a rich sustained diet -- particularly when they had so many of their own 
to contend with. A thought about Susan nagged him, but he was used to that. He 
flipped through the two books he’d picked up. 

One of them, an elderly one, was an account of the hauntings of Borley Rectory, 
the most haunted house in England. Its spine was getting raggedy, and the 
photographic plates were so grey and blurry as to be virtually 
indistinguishable. A picture he thought must be a very lucky (or faked) shot of 
a ghostly apparition turned out, when he examined the caption, to be a portrait 
of the author. 

The other book was more recent, and by an odd coincidence was a guide to the 
Greek islands. He thumbed through it idly and a piece of paper fell out. 

‘Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?’ called out Reg. ‘Or Darjeeling? Or PG Tips? 
It’s all tea bags anyway, I’m afraid. And none of them very fresh.’ 

‘Darjeeling will do fine,’ replied Richard, stooping to pick up the piece of 
paper. 

‘Milk?’ called Reg. 

‘Er, please.’ 

‘One lump or two?’ 

‘One, please.’ 

Richard slipped the paper back into the book, noticing as he did so that it had 
a hurriedly scribbled note on it. The note said, oddly enough, ‘Regard this 
simple silver salt cellar. Regard this simple hat.’ 

‘Sugar?’ 

‘Er, what?’ said Richard, startled. He put the book hurriedly back on the pile. 

‘Just a tiny joke of mine,’ said Reg cheerily, ‘to see if people are listening.’ 
He emerged beaming from the kitchen carrying a small tray with two cups on it, 
which he hurled suddenly to the floor. The tea splashed over the carpet. One of 
the cups shattered and the other bounced under the table. Reg leaned against the 
door frame, white-faced and staring. 

A frozen instant of time slid silently by while Richard was too startled to 
react, then he leaped awkwardly forward to help. But the old man was already 
apologising and offering to make him another cup. Richard helped him to the 
sofa. 

‘Are you all right?’ asked Richard helplessly. ‘Shall I get a doctor?’ 

Reg waved him down. ‘It’s all right,’ he insisted, ‘I’m perfectly well. Thought 
I heard, well, a noise that startled me. But it was nothing. Just overcome with 
the tea fumes, I expect. Let me just catch my breath. I think a little, er, port 
will revive me excellently. So sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ He waved in 
the general direction of the port decanter. Richard hurriedly poured a small 
glass and gave it to him. 

‘What kind of noise?’ he asked, wondering what on earth could shock him so much. 

At that moment came the sound of movement upstairs and an extraordinary kind of 
heavy breathing noise. 

‘That...’ whispered Reg. The glass of port lay shattered at his feet. Upstairs 
someone seemed to be stamping. ‘Did you hear it?’ 

‘Well, yes.’ 

This seemed to relieve the old man. 

Richard looked nervously up at the ceiling. ‘Is there someone up there?’ he 
asked, feeling this was a lame question, but one that had to be asked. 

‘No,’ said Reg in a low voice that shocked Richard with the fear it carried, ‘no 
one. Nobody that should be there.’ 

‘Then...’ 

Reg was struggling shakily to his feet, but there was suddenly a fierce 
determination about him. 

‘I must go up there,’ he said quietly. ‘I must. Please wait for me here.’ 

‘Look, what is this?’ demanded Richard, standing between Reg and the doorway. 
‘What is it, a burglar? Look, I’ll go. I’m sure it’s nothing, it’s just the wind 
or something.’ Richard didn’t know why he was saying this. It clearly wasn’t the 
wind, or even anything like the wind, because though the wind might conceivably 
make heavy breathing noises, it rarely stamped its feet in that way. 

‘No,’ the old man said, politely but firmly moving him aside, ‘it is for me to 
do.’ 

Richard followed him helplessly through the door into the small hallway, beyond 
which lay the tiny kitchen. A dark wooden staircase led up from here; the steps 
seemed damaged and scuffed. 

Reg turned on a light. It was a dim one that hung naked at the top of the 
stairwell, and he looked up it with grim apprehension. 

‘Wait here,’ he said, and walked up two steps. He then turned and faced Richard 
with a look of the most profound seriousness on his face.

‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘that you have become involved in what is... the more 
difficult side of my life. But you are involved now, regrettable though that may 
be, and there is something I must ask you. I do not know what awaits me up 
there, do not know exactly. I do not know if it is something which I have 
foolishly brought upon myself with my... my hobbies, or if it is something to 
which I have fallen an innocent victim. If it is the former, then I have only 
myself to blame, for I am like a doctor who cannot give up smoking, or perhaps 
worse still, like an ecologist who cannot give up his car -- if the latter, then 
I hope it may not happen to you. 

‘What I must ask you is this. When I come back down these stairs, always 
supposing of course that I do, then if my behaviour strikes you as being in any 
way odd, if I appear not to be myself, then you must leap on me and wrestle me 
to the ground. Do you understand? You must prevent me from doing anything I may 
try to do.’ 

‘But how will I know?’ asked an incredulous Richard. ‘Sorry I don’t mean it to 
sound like that, but I don’t know what...?’ 

‘You will know,’ said Reg. ‘Now please wait for me in the main room. And close 
the door.’ 

Shaking his head in bewilderment, Richard stepped back and did as he was asked. 
From inside the large untidy room he listened to the sound of the Professor’s 
tread mounting the stairs one at a time. 

He mounted them with a heavy deliberation, like the ticking of a great, slow 
clock. 

Richard heard him reach the top landing. There he paused in silence. Seconds 
went by, five, maybe ten, maybe twenty. Then came again the heavy movement and 
breath that had first so harrowed the Professor. 

Richard moved quickly to the door but did not open it. The chill of the room 
oppressed and disturbed him. He shook his head to try and shake off the feeling, 
and then held his breath as the footsteps started once again slowly to traverse 
the two yards of the landing and to pause there again. 

After only a few seconds, this time Richard heard the long slow squeak of a door 
being opened inch by inch, inch by cautious inch, until it must surely now at 
last be standing wide agape. 

Nothing further seemed to happen for a long, long time. 

Then at last the door closed once again, slowly. 

The footsteps crossed the landing and paused again. Richard backed a few slight 
paces from the door, staring fixedly at it. Once more the footsteps started to 
descend the stairs, slowly, deliberately and quietly, until at last they reached 
the bottom. Then after a few seconds more the door handle began to rotate. The 
door opened and Reg walked calmly in. 

‘It’s all right, it’s just a horse in the bathroom,’ he said quietly. 

Richard leaped on him and wrestled him to the ground. 

‘No,’ gasped Reg, ‘no, get off me, let me go, I’m perfectly all right, damn it. 
It’s just a horse, a perfectly ordinary horse.’ He shook Richard off with no 
great difficulty and sat up, puffing and blowing and pushing his hands through 
his limited hair. Richard stood over him warily, but with great and mounting 
embarrassment. He edged back, and let Reg stand up and sit on a chair. 

‘Just a horse,’ said Reg, ‘but, er, thank you for taking me at my word.’ He 
brushed himself down. 

‘A horse,’ repeated Richard. 

‘Yes,’ said Reg. 

Richard went out and looked up the stairs and then came back in. 

‘A horse?’ he said again. 

‘Yes, it is,’ said the Professor. ‘Wait --’ he motioned to Richard, who was 
about to go out again and investigate -- ‘let it be. It won’t be long.’ 

Richard stared in disbelief. ‘You say there’s a horse in your bathroom, and all 
you can do is stand there naming Beatles songs?’ 

The Professor looked blankly at him. 

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry if I... alarmed you earlier, it was just a slight 
turn. These things happen, my dear fellow, don’t upset yourself about it. Dear 
me, I’ve known odder things in my time. Many of them. Far odder. She’s only a 
horse, for heaven’s sake. I’ll go and let her out later. Please don’t concern 
yourself. Let us revive our spirits with some port.’ 

‘But... how did it get in there?’ 

‘Well, the bathroom window’s open. I expect she came in through that.’ 

Richard looked at him, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, 
through eyes that were narrowed with suspicion. 

‘You’re doing it deliberately, aren’t you?’ he said. 

‘Doing what, my dear fellow?’ 

‘I don’t believe there’s a horse in your bathroom,’ said Richard suddenly. ‘I 
don’t know what is there, I don’t know what you’re doing, I don’t know what any 
of this evening means, but I don’t believe there’s a horse in your bathroom.’ 
And brushing aside Reg’s further protestations he went up to look. 

The bathroom was not large. 

The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the age and nature of 
the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwise the fittings were 
stark and institutional. 

There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a small 
basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stains and chips in the enamel, 
and also a small basic basin with a toothbrush and toothpaste in a Duralex 
beaker standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably priceless panelling 
above the basin was a tin mirror- fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it 
had been repainted many times, and the mirror was stained round the edges with 
condensation. The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. 
There was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, with an 
old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly folded but 
threadbare small towels. There was also a large horse in the room, taking up 
most of it. 

Richard stared at it, and it stared at Richard in an appraising kind of way. 
Richard swayed slightly. The horse stood quite still. After a while it looked at 
the cupboard instead. It seemed, if not content, then at least perfectly 
resigned to being where it was until it was put somewhere else. It also 
seemed... what was it? 

It was bathed in the glow of the moonlight that streamed in through the window. 
The window was open but small and was, besides, on the second floor, so the 
notion that the horse had entered by that route was entirely fanciful. 

There was something odd about the horse, but he couldn’t say what. Well, there 
was one thing that was clearly very odd about it indeed, which was that it was 
standing in a college bathroom. Maybe that was all. 

He reached out, rather tentatively, to pat the creature on its neck. It felt 
normal -- firm, glossy, it was in good condition. The effect of the moonlight on 
its coat was a little mazy, but everything looks a little odd by moonlight. The 
horse shook its mane a little when he touched it, but didn’t seem to mind too 
much. 

After the success of patting it, Richard stroked it a few times and scratched it 
gently under the jaw. Then he noticed that there was another door into the 
bathroom, in the far corner. He moved cautiously around the horse and approached 
the other door. He backed up against it and pushed it open tentatively. 

It just opened into the Professor’s bedroom, a small room cluttered with books 
and shoes and a small single bed. This room, too, had another door, which opened 
out on to the landing again. 

Richard noticed that the floor of the landing was newly scuffed and scratched as 
the stairs had been, and these marks were consistent with the idea that the 
horse had somehow been pushed up the stairs. He wouldn’t have liked to have had 
to do it himself, and he would have liked to have been the horse having it done 
to him even less, but it was just about possible. 

But why? He had one last look at the horse, which had one last look back at him, 
and then he returned downstairs. 

‘I agree,’ he said. ‘You have a horse in your bathroom and I will, after all, 
have a little port.’ 

He poured some for himself, and then some for Reg, who was quietly contemplating 
the fire and was in need of a refill. 

‘Just as well I did put out three glasses after all,’ said Reg chattily. ‘I 
wondered why earlier, and now I remember.

‘You asked if you could bring a friend, but appear not to have done so. On 
account of the sofa no doubt. Never mind, these things happen. Whoa, not too 
much, you’ll spill it.’ 

All horse-related questions left Richard’s mind abruptly. 

‘I did?’ he said. 

‘Oh yes. I remember now. You rang me back to ask me if it would be all right, as 
I recall. I said I would be charmed, and fully intended to be. I’d saw the thing 
up if I were you. Don’t want to sacrifice your happiness to a sofa. Or maybe she 
decided that an evening with your old tutor would be blisteringly dull and opted 
for the more exhilarating course of washing her hair instead. Dear me, I know 
what I would have done. It’s only lack of hair that forces me to pursue such a 
hectic social round these days.’ 

It was Richard’s turn to be white-faced and staring. 

Yes, he had assumed that Susan would not want to come. 

Yes, he had said to her it would be terribly dull. But she had insisted that she 
wanted to come because it would be the only way she’d get to see his face for a 
few minutes not bathed in the light of a computer screen, so he had agreed and 
arranged that he would bring her after all. 

Only he had completely forgotten this. He had not picked her up. 

He said, ‘Can I use your phone, please?’ 


CHAPTER 9

Gordon Way lay on the ground, unclear about what to do. 

He was dead. There seemed little doubt about that. There was a horrific hole in 
his chest, but the blood that was gobbing out of it had slowed to a trickle. 
Otherwise there was no movement from his chest at all, or, indeed, from any 
other part of him. 

He looked up, and from side to side, and it became clear to him that whatever 
part of him it was that was moving, it wasn’t any part of his body. 

The mist rolled slowly over him, and explained nothing. At a few feet distant 
from him his shotgun lay smoking quietly in the grass. 

He continued to lie there, like someone lying awake at four o’clock in the 
morning, unable to put their mind to rest, but unable to find anything to do 
with it. He realised that he had just had something of a shock, which might 
account for his inability to think clearly, but didn’t account for his ability 
actually to think at all. 

In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, 
happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one 
thing has never been in doubt -- that you would at least know the answer when 
you were dead. 

Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant 
to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before. 

He sat up. The body that sat up seemed as real to him as the body that still lay 
slowly cooling on the ground, giving up its blood heat in wraiths of steam that 
mingled with the mist of the chill night air.

Experimenting a bit further, he tried standing up, slowly, wonderingly and 
wobblingly. The ground seemed to give him support, it took his weight. But then 
of course he appeared to have no weight that needed to be taken. When he bent to 
touch the ground he could feel nothing save a kind of distant rubbery resistance 
like the sensation you get if you try and pick something up when your arm has 
gone dead. His arm had gone dead. His legs too, and his other arm, and all his 
torso and his head. 

His body was dead. He could not say why his mind was not. 

He stood in a kind of frozen, sleepless horror while the mist curled slowly 
through him. 

He looked back down at the him, the ghastly, astonished-looking him- thing lying 
still and mangled on the ground, and his flesh wanted to creep. Or rather, he 
wanted flesh that could creep. He wanted flesh. He wanted body. He had none. 

A sudden cry of horror escaped from his mouth but was nothing and went nowhere. 
He shook and felt nothing. 

Music and a pool of light seeped from his car. He walked towards it. He tried to 
walk sturdily, but it was a faint and feeble kind of walking, uncertain and, 
well, insubstantial. The ground felt frail beneath his feet. 

The door of the car was still open on the driver’s side, as he had left it when 
he had leaped out to deal with the boot lid, thinking he’d only be two seconds. 

That was all of two minutes ago now, when he’d been alive. When he’d been a 
person. When he’d thought he was going to be leaping straight back in and 
driving off. Two minutes and a lifetime ago. 

This was insane, wasn’t it? he thought suddenly. 

He walked around the door and bent down to peer into the external rear-view 
mirror. 

He looked exactly like himself, albeit like himself after he’d had a terrible 
fright, which was to be expected, but that was him, that was normal. This must 
be something he was imagining, some horrible kind of waking dream. He had a 
sudden thought and tried breathing on the rear- view mirror. 

Nothing. Not a single droplet formed. That would satisfy a doctor, that’s what 
they always did on television -- if no mist formed on the mirror, there was no 
breath. Perhaps, he thought anxiously to himself, perhaps it was something to do 
with having heated wing mirrors. Didn’t this car have heated wing mirrors? 
Hadn’t the salesman gone on and on about heated this, electric that, and servo-
assisted the other? Maybe they were digital wing mirrors. That was it. Digital, 
heated, servo- assisted, computer-controlled, breath-resistant wing mirrors... 

He was, he realised, thinking complete nonsense. He turned slowly and gazed 
again in apprehension at the body lying on the ground behind him with half its 
chest blown away. That would certainly satisfy a doctor. The sight would be 
appalling enough if it was somebody else’s body, but his own... 

He was dead. Dead... dead... He tried to make the word toll dramatically in his 
mind, but it wouldn’t. He was not a film sound track, he was just dead. 

Peering at his body in appalled fascination, he gradually became distressed by 
the expression of asinine stupidity on its face. 

It was perfectly understandable, of course. It was just such an expression as 
somebody who is in the middle of being shot with his own shotgun by somebody who 
had been hiding in the boot of his car might be expected to wear, but he 
nevertheless disliked the idea that anyone might find him looking like that. 

He knelt down beside it in the hope of being able to rearrange his features into 
some semblance of dignity, or at least basic intelligence. 

It proved to be almost impossibly difficult. He tried to knead the skin, the 
sickeningly familiar skin, but somehow he couldn’t seem to get a proper grip on 
it, or on anything. It was like trying to model plasticine when your arm has 
gone to sleep, except that instead of his grip slipping off the model, it would 
slip through it. In this case, his hand slipped through his face. 

Nauseated horror and rage swept through him at his sheer bloody blasted 
impotence, and he was suddenly startled to find himself throttling and shaking 
his own dead body with a firm and furious grip. He staggered back in amazed 
shock. All he had managed to do was to add to the inanely stupefied look of the 
corpse a twisted-up mouth and a squint. And bruises flowering on its neck. 

He started to sob, and this time sound seemed to come, a strange howling from 
deep within whatever this thing he had become was. Clutching his hands to his 
face, he staggered backwards, retreated to his car and flung himself into the 
seat. The seat received him in a loose and distant kind of way, like an aunt who 
disapproves of the last fifteen years of your life and will therefore furnish 
you with a basic sherry, but refuses to catch your eye. 

Could he get himself to a doctor? 

To avoid facing the absurdity of the idea he grappled violently with the 
steering wheel, but his hands slipped through it. He tried to wrestle with the 
automatic transmission shift and ended up thumping it in rage, but not being 
able properly to grasp or push it. 

The stereo was still playing light orchestral music into the telephone, which 
had been lying on the passenger seat listening patiently all this time. He 
stared at it and realised with a growing fever of excitement that he was still 
connected to Susan’s telephone- answering machine. It was the type that would 
simply run and run until he hung up. He was still in contact with the world. 

He tried desperately to pick up the receiver, fumbled, let it slip, and was in 
the end reduced to bending himself down over its mouthpiece. ‘Susan!’ he cried 
into it, his voice a hoarse and distant wail on the wind. ‘Susan, help me! Help 
me for God’s sake. Susan, I’m dead... I’m dead... I’m dead and... I don’t know 
what to do...’ He broke down again, sobbing in desperation, and tried to cling 
to the phone like a baby clinging to its blanket for comfort. 

‘Help me, Susan...’ he cried again. 

‘Beep,’ said the phone. 

He looked down at it again where he was cuddling it. He had managed to push 
something after all. He had managed to push the button which disconnected the 
call. Feverishly he attempted to grapple the thing again, but it constantly 
slipped through his fingers and eventually lay immobile on the seat. He could 
not touch it. He could not push the buttons. In rage he flung it at the 
windscreen. It responded to that, all right. It hit the windscreen, careered 
straight back though him, bounced off the seat and then lay still on the 
transmission tunnel, impervious to all his further attempts to touch it. 

For several minutes still he sat there, his head nodding slowly as terror began 
to recede into blank desolation. 

A couple of cars passed by, but would have noticed nothing odd -- a car stopped 
by the wayside. Passing swiftly in the night their headlights would probably not 
have picked out the body lying in the grass behind the car. They certainly would 
not have noticed a ghost sitting inside it crying to himself. 

He didn’t know how long he sat there. He was hardly aware of time passing, only 
that it didn’t seem to pass quickly. There was little external stimulus to mark 
its passage. He didn’t feel cold. In fact he could almost not remember what cold 
meant or felt like, he just knew that it was something he would have expected to 
feel at this moment. 

Eventually he stirred from his pathetic huddle. He would have to do something, 
though he didn’t know what. Perhaps he should try and reach his cottage, though 
he didn’t know what he would do when he got there. He just needed something to 
try for. He needed to make it through the night. 

Pulling himself together he slipped out of the car, his foot and knee grazing 
easily through part of the door frame. He went to look again at his body, but it 
wasn’t there. 

As if the night hadn’t produced enough shocks already. He started, and stared at 
the damp depression in the grass. 

His body was not there. 


CHAPTER 10

Richard made the hastiest departure that politeness would allow. 

He said thank you very much and what a splendid evening it had been and that any 
time Reg was coming up to London he must let him, Richard, know and was there 
anything he could do to help about the horse. No? Well, all right then, if 
you’re sure, and thank you again, so much. 

He stood there for a moment or two after the door finally closed, pondering 
things. 

He had noticed during the short time that the light from Reg’s room flooded out 
on to the landing of the main staircase, that there were no marks on the 
floorboards there at all. It seemed odd that the horse should only have scuffed 
the floorboards inside Reg’s room. 

Well, it all seemed very odd, full stop, but here was yet another curious fact 
to add to the growing pile. This was supposed to have been a relaxing evening 
away from work. 

On an impulse he knocked on the door opposite to Reg’s. It took such a long time 
to be answered that Richard had given up and was turning to go when at last he 
heard the door creak open. 

He had a slight shock when he saw that staring sharply up at him like a small 
and suspicious bird was the don with the racing-yacht keel for a nose. 

‘Er, sorry,’ said Richard, abruptly, ‘but, er, have you seen or heard a horse 
coming up this staircase tonight?’ 

The man stopped his obsessive twitching of his fingers. He cocked his head 
slightly on one side and then seemed to need to go on a long journey inside 
himself to find a voice, which when found turned out to be a thin and soft 
little one. 

He said, ‘That is the first thing anybody has said to me for seventeen years, 
three months and two days, five hours, nineteen minutes and twenty seconds. I’ve 
been counting.’ 

He closed the door softly again. 

Richard virtually ran through Second Court. 

When he reached First Court he steadied himself and slowed down to a walking 
pace. 

The chill night air was rasping in his lungs and there was no point in running. 
He hadn’t managed to talk to Susan because Reg’s phone wasn’t working, and this 
was another thing that he had been mysteriously coy about. That at least was 
susceptible of a rational explanation. He probably hadn’t paid his phone bill. 

Richard was about to emerge out on to the street when instead he decided to pay 
a quick visit to the porter’s lodge, which was tucked away inside the great 
archway entrance into the college. It was a small hutchlike place filled with 
keys, messages and a single electric bar heater. A radio nattered to itself in 
the background. 

‘Excuse me,’ he said to the large black-suited man standing behind the counter 
with his arms folded. ‘I...’ 

‘Yes, Mr MacDuff, what can I do for you?’ 

In his present state of mind Richard would have been hard-pressed himself to 
remember his own name and was startled for a moment. However, college porters 
are legendary for their ability to perform such feats of memory, and for their 
tendency to show them off at the slightest provocation. 

‘Is there,’ said Richard, ‘a horse anywhere in the college -- that you know of? 
I mean, you would know if there was a horse in the college, wouldn’t you?’ 

The porter didn’t blink. 

‘No, sir, and yes, sir. Anything else I can help you with, Mr MacDuff, sir?’ 

‘Er, no,’ said Richard and tapped his fingers a couple of times on the counter. 
‘No. Thank you. Thank you very much for your help. Nice to see you again, er... 
Bob,’ he hazarded. ‘Good-night, then.’ 

He left. 

The porter remained perfectly still with his arms folded, but shaking his head a 
very, very little bit. 

‘Here’s some coffee for you, Bill,’ said another porter, a short wiry one, 
emerging from an inner sanctum with a steaming cup. ‘Getting a bit colder 
tonight?’ 

‘I think it is, Fred, thanks,’ said Bill, taking the cup. 

He took a sip. ‘You can say what you like about people, they don’t get any less 
peculiar. Fellow in here just now asking if there was a horse in the college.’ 

‘Oh yes?’ Fred sipped at his own coffee, and let the steam smart his eyes. ‘I 
had a chap in here earlier. Sort of strange foreign priest. Couldn’t understand 
a word he said at first. But he seemed happy just to stand by the fire and 
listen to the news on the radio.’ 

‘Foreigners, eh.’ 

‘In the end I told him to shoot off. Standing in front of my fire like that. 
Suddenly he says is that really what he must do? Shoot off? I said, in my best 
Bogart voice, “You better believe it, buddy.”’

‘Really? Sounded more like Jimmy Cagney to me.’ 

‘No, that’s my Bogart voice. This is my Jimmy Cagney voice -- “You better 
believe it, buddy.”’ 

Bill frowned at him. ‘Is that you