What do I ask for when I get there?
Only for what you need.
If you travel in need and travel light
You can get there by candle-light.”
The lift stopped and the door opened as he finished. I pushed Maree out, saying, “Thanks. Yes. That sounds central.” As I said it, the other lift opened and Nick stepped out. He was looking so shut-away and non-committal that all I liked to say to him was “Oh, there you are. Come to my room and I’ll get us something to eat from Room Service.”
“I’m not very hungry,” he said.
“Maybe you aren’t,” Will told him cheerfully, “but I am. I can eat anything you can’t manage.”
That was the right approach with Nick, seemingly. Nick came along beside us as I trundled Maree round the first mirr
ored corner and along the corridor beyond. The node had been tampered with again. We turned another corner and still had not reached my room. It occurred to me to wonder if this happened whenever Gram White made transit to or from Thalangia. I asked Will.
“Not only that,” he said, “someone else has been at it too. Your room’s been further off every time I’ve been up here.”
This time it was so far off that we reached Nick’s room first. Nick said he wanted to get a sweater and would catch us up.
“We’ll wait for you,” Will and I said, almost in chorus. We didn’t want to lose him again. “And where’s Maree’s room?” I asked while Nick unlocked the door.
Nick pointed to the next door along. “There. Why?”
I didn’t like to say that Janine had suggested I take Maree there. “Just want to check something,” I said. “Where would Maree keep her key?”
“Top right-hand pocket of her jacket,” Nick said. I could tell by his deadpan face that he guessed it had something to do with his mother.
Wincing rather, I got the key from Maree’s pallid pocket and let myself into a hotel room much smaller than mine, filled with a surprising number of possessions. At a rough guess, I would have said it contained all Maree’s worldly goods. There was a grey and skinny teddy bear on the bed that looked as if it had been carried around by its neck for years, the vet-case on top of a heap of things on the floor, a computer set up on the dressing-table and several boxes of much-read-looking books. And, as I had suspected, something felt wrong. Something felt very wrong, but I couldn’t tell where it was. But it felt so wrong that when Will started innocently pushing Maree in after me, I told him to stay out and, at all costs, to keep Maree outside. Will sensed the wrongness too. He nodded and backed out. I climbed about among the heaps, unavailingly searching.
“Try the computer,” Nick said from the doorway. He was engulfed in a big furry blue sweater and shivering as if he had only just now noticed how cold and shocked he had been. “She uses her computer a lot.”
I climbed over a book box and turned on the computer. As the screen lit, I did almost without thinking what I always do with any computer of my own, and put out a scan for viruses, Magid-style. The result was startling. VIRUS OPERATES, the screen told me. The space behind filled with dry clustering twigs, more and more of them, until the screen looked like dense undergrowth, and there was a sense of something looking out at me from among them. The twigs grew thorns, vicious ones, and with their burgeoning came every feeling of frustration, despair and humiliation I had ever known – and some I had not, particularly the humiliations. And it caught me.
I stood and stared at the clustering twigs, writhing with several kinds of shame, thinking I might as well give up and go home and die. I was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing was even worth fighting for because everything I touched was going to go wrong. Nothing—
An exclamation from Nick snapped me out of it. He was pointing to the bed. A shadowy thornbush seemed to be growing upon it. It was sending spiteful sprays up through the pillow, thrusting clumps of spines up through the duvet, and several spiky shoots were even pushing through the grey teddy bear. My shame and despair were wiped away by anger. So this was why Janine wanted Maree to lie down! No doubt the original intention was to have left Maree stripped in the lane for Dakros to find along with the other murdered heirs – and she must have been quite annoyed, Janine, to find I had retrieved Maree. So she had suggested this instead, knowing that in Maree’s present condition these spectral thorns would finish her off. Somehow it angered me particularly to see them attacking that evidently loved teddy bear.
“It’s the Thornlady,” Nick said. “Maree had dreams about it. That’s why we did the Witchy Dance in Bristol. To get rid of it.”
“It wouldn’t have worked,” I said. “It’s a damned goddess. Her computer’s rigged so that every time Maree used it the manifestations get stronger.” My respect for Maree increased, now I knew she must have been fighting this all the time.
“Can you get rid of it?” Nick asked me.
“Yes, but it’ll be a long job,” I said. Any kind of theurgy and workings connected with deities always take long strenuous hours to undo. Sometimes you have to request the help of another god. I sighed. This was another item in the stack of things accumulating for me to do tomorrow. “We’ll just lock it up for now and keep well away.”
We did that. I felt drained. Those thorns were powerful. We went on down the corridor and round another corner, with me only wanting to get to my room, clean up and rest before starting on the next part. And there was my room at last. There was something stuck to the middle of the door, just below the number.
“Yuk!” said Will. “That wasn’t there when I last came up.”
It was one of the foulest of the foul sigils. It made me frankly retch. Its foulness was such that it was perceptible to Nick and even to Maree too. Nick’s shivering increased to shudders. Maree gave a mumbling cry and tried to cover her face. I had no doubt that Janine had just been putting the thing here before she came down in the lift. I clenched my teeth and went to get rid of it.
“No, not you,” Will said, shoving me aside. “It’s aimed personally at you, you fool!” He scooped at the sigil with both hands – hands that were used to scooping farmyard muck every day – and almost instantly threw the double handful down on the carpet with a yelp, where he stamped on it and ground it in with his substantial shoe. For a second or so there was a truly filthy smell. “As I said – yuk!” Will said, wiping his hands hard on his coat.
There was now a smooth rounded hollow in my door, but at least it was a clean hollow. I unlocked the door and we all trooped in. Will had left lights on. I could see Rob as a large mound under my duvet and a spread of fine black hair on my pillow, apparently asleep. Once I had made sure that he was breathing and unharmed by the foulness that had been on my door, I quite deliberately left him alone. I simply pushed Maree in her wheelchair to where Rob could see her if he deigned to open the one beautiful black-fringed eye that was visible, and went to the phone.
“Hamburgers and chips all round?” I asked Will.