Then Nick pushed open the doors into the Grand Lobby and we were not out of place at all. I had forgotten the Masquerade. There were people wandering about there in every conceivable kind of dress, including a large shiny caterpillar with at least five sets of human legs. There were Vikings, aliens of all sorts, Grim Reapers, people in cloaks, several blood-soaked corpses, and scores of stunning girls in robes with strategic holes in them. Some were in next to nothing. One, whose costume consisted of two leather straps and thigh-high red boots, caused Nick’s head and mine to whip round after her. We nearly lost Maree over that.
The sudden laughing, vivid crowd seemed to make Maree very restless. She stirred from side to side of her chair and made several attempts to get out of it. While Nick and I were distracted by the straps and red boots, she succeeded. Nick ran after her frantically, diving among aliens and tripping on the train of a queen. He caught her beside the caterpillar.
We had just got her back, coaxed her into the chair and set off again when we found ourselves face-to-face-to-face with Rick Corrie, as himself, and two young gentlemen tightly laced into bright silk crinolines, each carrying a fringed parasol.
“Those are interesting costumes,” one of them fluted at us. And the other asked, in a strong counter-tenor, “What section are you three entered in?”
Nick, who appeared to know them well, answered airily. “Extra-terrestrial, of course. We’re victims of a mining disaster out in Tau Centauri.”
“Oh,” said Rick Corrie. “Maybe that accounts for the rumour. I heard you were coming as a centaur, Nick.”
“Er,” said Nick. “I was – but the legs wouldn’t work. We did this instead at the last minute.”
Nick was sweating as we finally pushed Maree out into the corridor beyond. He wiped golden dust around his face with his sleeve and said he hoped we didn’t meet anyone else. Naturally the next turn in the corridor brought us slap up against Ted Mallory and Tina Gianetti, who both stared.
“Nice idea, shame about the execution,” Ted Mallory said. “You all look terrible. What have you done to yourself, Maree?”
Maree recognised him. She mumbled and shifted. I said hurriedly, “She’s the Moon Dowager from that short story by H. C. Blands.”
Mallory of course had never heard of the story but, as I had hoped, he did not like to admit it. He took Gianetti’s arm and moved on, saying, “Well, on with the motley, Tina.” But he was faintly suspicious, enough to turn and look at us over his shoulder and to add in a slightly puzzled way, “I like that costume even less than the centaur get-up, Nick. Don’t expect me to award you any prizes.”
We rounded the corner to the lifts, feeling limp, both of us. Neither lift was there. Nick pounded his thumb on the call buttons. “This is almost worse than everything else!” he was saying, when both lifts arrived together. “I can’t bear to meet anyone else I know,” he said, watching a crowd of people surrounding an angel with a harp surge out of the lift on the right.
The lift on the left contained Janine.
Rupert Venables continued
If Janine was disconcerted, you could have fooled me. She stood in the doorway of the lift and stared pleasantly down at Maree. “Dear, dear,” she said. “What can have happened to my niece?”
She was still wearing that bloodstained jumper. I noticed it the way you do notice things, vividly, when something this shocking happens. The apparent blood, from this close, resolved itself into a cluster of moistly shiny red strawberries. I tore my eyes from them and met Janine’s. “I don’t know what happened to Maree exactly,” I said. “You tell me.”
A perfectly horrible little smile flitted on Janine’s face, gleeful and secretly gloating. It took in my blistered face as well as Maree’s blanched little figure. “I’ve no idea,” she said. “But I think she ought to go to her room and lie down.”
Janine clearly thought she was quite safe. She had no notion, of course, that I knew she had been on Thalangia. But surely, I thought, seeing Nick was with me would show her – Here I began to wonder what mixture of feelings Nick must be having. If it was bad for me, meeting Janine like this, it was surely ten times worse for Nick. I looked round for him and there was no sign of him. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. But Will was standing a few feet away, staring at Maree in evident horror. And Maree knew Janine. Her bleached hands were flailing limply and she was trying to say something.
Janine, still smiling, cocked her face sweetly down towards Maree. “What’s the poor little thing trying to say, do you think?”
Seeing Will standing there made me feel better. I wanted to hurl accusations at Janine. I wanted to show her I knew what she had done. But it would have done no good. She knew as well as I did that there was no kind of Earthly evidence to connect her with Maree’s condition. Instead, I leant forward over the handle of the chair, across Maree’s head. “She’s trying to tell you,” I said, “that someone has sewn six rabbit’s testicles to your right breast.”
Janine’s head jerked upright. She stared at me for a second, obviously wondering if I had said what she thought she heard. Then she settled for looking puzzled and distant, turned and stalked gracefully away.
Will pounced forward. “My God, Rupe! What the hell—?”
“Get in the lift with us,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.” I looked round again for Nick, but he was still nowhere to be seen. It was the deftest vanishing trick I had ever come across. I just hoped he would turn up again. Will and I crowded into the lift beside the wheelchair and its drooping white occupant, and I gave Will a summary of events as we hummed slowly upwards.
“Lord!” he said. “No wonder you look such a mess! And I’ve never heard even you be that rude to a strange woman before! I couldn’t think what – and what about the centaur, Rob?”
“We’ll get it out of him somehow,” I said. “But I think you saved his life by running into him. He was obviously supposed to take them back to Thalangia with him.”
“But what are you going to do about Janine and this man White?” Will wanted to know. “There’s no evidence against them except Nick’s and she’s his mother!”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m going to have to send Nick to Babylon with Maree – if he turns up – so we could lose that evidence anyway.” I looked up at the indicator and found we were passing the fourth floor. Nearly there. “Will, tell me your Babylon verse. I need it.”
“You certainly will,” he said. “It’s the central one.” And he recited rapidly:
“How hard is the road to Babylon?
As hard as grief or greed.