I was sitting at my desk with my feet up, filing my nails, when Martin Josephs walked in. Big man, black, probably a shifter with those eyes, probably a bear with those shoulders, he was looking around the dingy Victorian hall as if he might be trying to find the town council, then saw my desk under the pale fluorescent light and headed for me instead. I’d pegged him for a client straight away and you only get one chance to make a first impression. Unfortunately, I plumped for Cherry.
He hesitated, and I swung Cherry’s legs down from the desk with aggravating slowness and gave him a bored pink lipstick smile. “Hi,” I said. “This is the Old World Advice Bureau. Can I help you?”
Martin Josephs was already in the system, not that the system knew this, since whoever entered his details had managed to misspell his date of birth. Probably an ongoing issue, then. I tapped triumphantly at my antique laptop with Cherry’s incredibly long fingernails and flounced off to the office to pin down an advisor. “They’re all busy,” I reported back. “You’ll have to wait.”
He waited. I went back to filing my nails and fished a fresh piece of bubblegum out of my desk drawer. It was pink. Cherry likes pink, especially hot pink, especially in combination with heavy eyeliner and high heels and too much mascara. Cherry reads HELLO! and ignores the phone and checks her makeup in front of impatient clients at reception. Martin Josephs, with his shoulders and soft New World drawl, would expect me to be Cherry, I thought.
He sort of shifted in his chair, like they do when they want to make conversation. “Do you live round here?” he said. “I haven’t seen you in town.”
It’s never a good idea to be too specific about your address. “Well, I don’t live in Appleton proper,” I said, paying extra close attention to my thumbnail and frowning hard. “Is it raining again?”
We managed a few platitudes about the weather. Martin Josephs leaned on the other side of my desk and gave me this real sweet smile. Hey, I thought, surprised, you’re cute, and he said, “So what are you reading?”
“HELLO!” I said. “They’ve got a spread on Kate’s thirty-three best outfits. Isn’t she skinny these days?”
A sheen of unmistakable indifference passed across his face and I regretted Cherry’s choice of reading material. Cherry had been a mistake. I should have been Charis, the bright-eyed kid rereading The Faerie Queene and chatting about her voluntary work, all too clearly just out of university with no idea what to do with her life. No heels, no makeup, no HELLO!
So I’d blown this one. I blew a perfect pink bubble to console myself as Martin Josephs followed his advisor cutely out of my waiting room. Girl, I said to myself, with the conviction of disastrous experience, the waiting room of the Bureau is not the place to find a date. No one turns up here unless their life’s already the sort of mess you don’t want to get involved with. It was totally true and it even almost helped.
I was still pissed, though. I hate it when I make this sort of mistake. After work, I swung home by way of the one wine bar in Appleton, where no one cares if you drink alone. Appleton’s a decaying rural market town that probably wouldn’t exist at all without the Amory family, whose big industrial lace-making machines gave Appleton a reason to exist back in the nineteenth century, but I actually don’t live in Appleton, so I wasn’t too concerned about anyone seeing me anyway. Charis doesn’t drink, but Cherry likes cheap cocktails, or expensive cocktails if someone else is buying them. I thought I might as well be Cherry for the night.
I occupied a dusty corner of the bar and sucked a cherry off a cocktail stick with Cherry’s hot pink lips. And that was when the bear came through the window in a shower of broken glass.
Everything that happens at the Old World Advice Bureau is strictly confidential. We can’t tell anyone who’s been to see us, or what they wanted to ask us, or whether they may have absentmindedly eaten someone and are now in urgent need of a shortcut back to the New World through the looking glass portals. Well, maybe we could break confidence on that last one, but it would involve a lot of paperwork and anguished consultation with senior management. In any case, I’m just the receptionist, so I shouldn’t know anything about anyone’s problems. Sometimes I’m not even sure I should know our clients’ names.
In the case of Martin Josephs, I’d taken his details to Nancy in the office and she’d said, “Oh yes, him,” and grimaced. “Nice young man. Such a pity. I really don’t know what I can do for him. Immigration problem.” Which is how strict confidentiality of the sort practiced by the Bureau usually works out.
So I knew what the bear’s problem was. He must have come over from the New World on a temporary visa and couldn’t convince the Home Office to make it permanent. Nice young man: pity, but there it is.
I wasn’t expecting him to fall into my favorite (read: only) bar with a carved-up Leszy in a headlock. It was early on a Monday night and I was the only one there, except for the girl behind the bar, who ducked hurriedly. A moment later, the alarm went off.
The Leszy was no one I recognized, and I would have, because you just can’t get the local Leszys out of the Bureau. Something to do with rising sap and the effects of acidic soils on non-native tree spirits, I gather. I leapt up, then remembered I was still Cherry, with her heels and handbag and exceedingly inconvenient pink miniskirt. “Oh hell no,” I said out loud, as the bear crashed onto another ill-fated table, and started to sift feverishly through Cherry’s handbag for my phone. Probably the alarm had already alerted the police, but that was no excuse for not calling 999. “This is not my problem—”
The bear gave a deafening roar and hurled the Leszy across the bar, where he slammed into a wall of bottles and tumbled on top of the unlucky girl, who shrieked. Glass and leaves rained down around them. After a stunned moment, the Leszy let out a groan.
I looked up. The bear was looking straight at me.
I was seriously regretting being Cherry. I have a couple of tricks up my sleeve, obviously, because when you run reception for an organization that provides free advice to confused and disoriented supernaturals having trouble integrating into the Old World their ancestors left a thousand years ago it often helps to speak the universal language, i.e., violence, but there’s not much you can do face to face with a nine-foot-tall grizzly, especially when you’re wearing heels. I calculated the distance to the door, assayed a prefatory sidle, then made a break for it.
The bear was faster. He caught me halfway across the threshold, his massive claws already retracting, and growled through shrinking teeth, “It’s the girl from the Bureau, isn’t it?” His fur was flattening into Martin Joseph’s clothes, in that silky, slippery way shifters have that makes you think maybe they were wearing clothes all along. “Cheryl? Sherry? Stop struggling, I’m not going to hurt you.”
Shit, I thought, hostage situation.
That changed things. I guessed it was my problem after all. The Leszy was starting to pull himself up behind the bar, eyes glowing, and there were sirens going off in the distance. The police would be here at any minute.
“What do you want?” I said, trying to think of some way to keep this from ending up in a stand-off. We’ve had a few too many of those since all these permanent New World portals started opening up.
The native supernatural types (witness Exhibit C here) are pretty well integrated, because most of us are descended from people who slipped through temporary cracks between the worlds and then found they couldn’t go home again, while most of the non-integrated natives (witness Exhibit C’s parents) went looking for more congenial worlds when the portals stabilized in the aftermath of that disaster at CERN. Our first-generation New World immigrants, however, not infrequently experience culture shock on a literally epic scale. Perhaps I should be grateful, since it is what pays the bills, but I wasn’t at all keen on getting mixed up in some imported New World feud, especially once the police got involved. They’ve all had cultural sensitivity training, but I didn’t think that would help much in dealing with an enraged grizzly bear.
I yelped as Martin Josephs hustled me out of the bar into the miserable January night. “I want a way out of here,” he said, gripping my shoulder bruisingly. The wind drove the rain into my face, lashing my legs like a whip. “Where’s the nearest portal?”
He wasn’t worried about being caught on camera, or he hadn’t been here long enough to realize it was a likelihood. We went straight down Gold Street, past the dark charity shop windows and the health food shop in the medieval almshouse, and two police cars howled back the other way towards the bar, where the Leszy would have some explaining of his own to do. I teetered alongside Martin Josephs like an adolescent gazelle, regretting Cherry’s heels more than ever. “How would I know?”
“You work for the Bureau, don’t you?”
“I’m just a receptionist—”
“Don’t play dumb,” he snarled. “Take me to the portal right now!”
“All right,” I said, placatingly, “all right, I’ll—ow, my ankle!” I stumbled, slipped his grip, and Charis was off along Fore Street before Martin Josephs knew what was happening.
Charis wears glasses and mismatched clothes and, importantly, flat shoes. Also her hair is dark and frazzled, not sleekly golden. She smells the same as Cherry, though, which is something of a drawback when you’re dealing with a shifter, but I thought the change might throw him for a moment or two. I was pretty sure both of Martin Josephs’ shapes were faster than me, so I needed every advantage I could get.
There were a couple of people hanging around outside the cinema alley, which is never very crowded, but the weather had kept most people inside tonight. I pounded along the pedestrianized high street and took the turning down towards M&S and the multistory car park. It was the car park I was heading for. If I could reach it before Martin Josephs caught me, I had a chance.
I was going to pay for this tomorrow. I was out of breath already. Something caught at Charis’ backpack and I skidded into the empty first floor of the car park and between heartbeats switched to Charybdis, who is at her best in the dark.
Charybdis is my very last resort, my ace in the hole, as Charis, who has a taste for old pulp fiction, would say. I’ve only been Charybdis twice at the Bureau, because you don’t bust out Charybdis for just any pissant pixie who can’t work out how to get a TV license and doesn’t see why they have to. For one thing, it’s surprisingly expensive to steam-clean walls.
Charybdis likes dim, enclosed spaces. The car park is built like a great brick castle, with bulbous corners and crenellated walls, but inside the stories stack up low and shadowed, lit insufficiently by flickering bulbs that reach only as far as the nearest pillar. I flung Charybdis’ tentacles out across the walls and windows, plunging everything into deeper gloom, and somewhere in the midst of my thrashing net Martin Josephs said in his New World drawl, “Aw, shit. You’re a glamour-worker.”
“Yeah, mister!” I said, falling back on Charis’ idea of proper dialogue. “You bet!”
He’d been so close on Charis’ heels I could practically smell his breath, although Charybdis does have a better sense of smell than Charis. She sees much better in the dark as well. Martin Josephs was shaking out his fur and claws as he backed towards the entrance, raising his grizzly head to sniff the air. “So are you a girl or a monster?”
I blocked off the doorway too. “That’s a rather personal question, isn’t it? Are you a bear or a man?”
“Touché,” said Martin Josephs, looking around rather more urgently. “Okay, look, who do you work for? The SIA? WHO? Dadzbóg? The Wiła?”
“What are you talking about? You know who I work for.”
“The Old World Advice Bureau?” he said incredulously. “Seriously? How much do they pay you?”
That was a sore point, actually. “Not enough. It is a charity.” I began to draw Charybdis’ tentacles closer around him. “You want to stop talking and start thinking what you’re going to say to the police? Because they’ll be here any minute.”
“No, wait—”
“I really don’t like being kidnapped. I’m just a receptionist. I think it’s very rude.”
I’m never quite sure if Charybdis’ voice booms so much because of her lung capacity or because her usual surroundings have such good acoustics. Martin Josephs’ ears went back; he looked pained, insofar as a grizzly can look pained, which honestly I would not have thought was possible, but apparently it is.
“I didn’t kidnap you,” he said. “I just need to get to the nearest portal. Please, Cheryl—”
“It was Cherry!” I snapped. “And I’m not telling you that! I don’t know who you’ve eaten!”
“No one! I’m undercover for MI5!”
I couldn’t help it. I slipped momentarily into Cherry and said, “Oh my god, seriously? You think I’m going to fall for that? How stupid do you think I am?”
“It’s true! I swear it’s true! Domestic counter-espionage! I’ve blown my cover and I need a shortcut back to London!”
“Yeah, yeah, very likely, I don’t think. I know what your problem is, Mr. Josephs. If you want some free advice, getting into fights in pubs is a terrible way to get your visa renewed. No need to thank me, it’s my job.”
“Look, I can see why you might not believe MI5 would be interested in a dead backwater like Appleton—”
“Hey! It’s only half an hour on the bus to Exeter!”
“—but a lot of other people are,” the bear went on doggedly. “The Amory factory does a lot of classified work for the Ministry of Defence. Protective gear and other things I’m not going to talk about. The Russians and Chinese have been interested for a while. Now the New Worlders have started sniffing round too. I don’t need to tell you they’re pretty keen on kevlar.”
Body armor that doesn’t involve iron. If I needed armor, I’d be pretty keen on kevlar too. “Really?” I said. I’d been in the Amory factory shop a few times. My mother used to go down with a shopping trolley when there was a sale on. “I thought the Amory factory made lace and… parachute silk…”
“They branched out during the war. Look it up.” He raised his head and sniffed again. “You really just work for the Bureau? Did you ever think about joining the Security Service? MI5 is always looking for good people. Or monsters, we’re equal opportunity.”
“What about your immigration issues?” I said suspiciously. “Nancy was really sorry for you.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of a cover story? Why do you think I couldn’t remember my own birthday?” His accent blurred, becoming authentically Mackem. “I was born in Sunderland! Just tell me where the nearest portal is and I’ll be in touch when I get back to London. Okay?”
It was not okay at all. I was pretty sure Martin Josephs was making the whole thing up, although he sounded as convincing as any grizzly bear telling me he worked for MI5 could have done. We get a lot of people telling ridiculous stories convincingly at the Bureau, though.
That said, I was getting tired of waiting for the police to show up, not least because it was such a miserable night. I was cold and grouchy and I hadn’t even finished Cherry’s cocktail. “It’s on the ground floor by the ticket machine,” I said, beginning to reel in my tentacles. There was no way Martin Josephs was getting his visa, so he might as well head home now and save everyone the trouble of deporting him. “Go on. Get out.”
I went home as Charis, because Charybdis doesn’t have a driving license and Cherry had already got me into enough trouble for one evening. Three days later, to my immense surprise, a letter arrived at my home address on very serious civil service letter paper, with a great deal to say about classified information and state secrets. It was even addressed to my real, that is to say legal, name. It wasn’t signed by Martin Josephs, but I wouldn’t have expected that.
He’d be in touch, it said, in handwriting on the back. Things to discuss, job offers to make, that sort of thing. Maybe I’d like to take a tour of the Amory factory: ring this number and ask for Steve. Oh, and thanks for the assistance the other night. Very much appreciated. He owed at least one of me a drink.
I read it twice in amazement. Well, damn. He was cute.
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Julia August likes history and fantasy, often together. As well as Kaleidotrope, her work has appeared in F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere. She is @JAugust7 on Twitter, j-august on Tumblr and j_august7 on Instagram. Find out more at juliaaugust.com. |