Deep Secret (Magids 1) - Page 33

(Later: I found out she’s called Zinka Fearon and everyone I asked says she’s marvellous.)

As soon as Tansy-Ann’s yells died away into the distance, I fled back here to my room and started writing this. Widow spiders! I thought to myself as I came up in the lift. Rats! Massage! How the hell does she think she knows rats enjoy mazes? And what has Tarot to do with any of it?

Nick banged at my door and came in a while back. It was after midnight by then. And we both said, “Where the hell have you been?” at the same instant, which made us both laugh. Then he said that I didn’t miss much, not eating with the guests – it was dead boring, and one of them was a man called Something White he’s always hated. He’d escaped before the end and looked for me, because Universe Three was showing The Princess Bride and he wanted to see it with me.

“But you’ve seen The Princess Bride three times already, to my certain knowledge!” I said.

“I still wanted to see it,” he said. “I went by myself in the end. But that wasn’t what I came to say. That prat with the silver car who gave you the money – he’s here.”

“I know!” I said feelingly. “I’ve been wondering if we summoned him up by doing the Witchy Dance. It just seems so unlikely – here, of all places.”

“Well,” Nick said, looking rather odd, “you could be right. I’ll tell you – I was just coming out of the lift just now, and I saw him standing up at the end of the corridor where the mirrors are—”

“About ten reflections of him. I know,” I said, thinking of the fabulous Nordic type.

“No,” Nick said. “No, that was one of the odd things. There was only him. No reflections at all. But then the walls and the mirrors started turning round him. Like a wheel. I mean, I saw the edges of the mirrors as they went round past him. Honestly.”

We stared at one another queasily. Nick doesn’t say things like that unless they’re true. And I could see he was not having me on. “Remind me never to do the Witchy Dance again,” I said.

“I think it’s this hotel,” Nick said. “It’s the weirdest place.”

“And full of weird folk,” I agreed.

That was over an hour ago at least. I kept plugging away at the keyboard because there is a disco going on downstairs. Another weird thing about this hotel is that you can’t hear a thing from any of the people chasing about in it, but you can hear the disco loud and clear through four floors. But I think it’s stopped now. I might get some sleep, with luck.

[1]

From the account of Rupert

Venables

Scarlatti played in my car all the way to Wantchester. I bore it. I even changed the tapes myself so that Andrew, sitting solidly beside me, should not notice there were three of us. Andrew was remarkably cheerful. He looked out at the wintry landscape and smiled as if it were high summer and blue sky, instead of bare fields under sulky grey rolls of snowcloud. He had just designed the perfect vacuum cleaner, he said. New principles. Should last through the twenty-first century. He asked me to drop him outside the Cathedral in Wantchester. This I did. He ducked out of the car briskly. And then ducked back in to look at me gravely.

“There’s a presence in this car,” he said. “Does it worry you?”

“No,” I said, somewhat thunderstruck. “It’s quite benign.”

“How about that!” Stan said as I drove on up the empty market street. “The man’s a psychic empathy!”

“I suppose he had to be, or he wouldn’t have got into the barn that evening,” I said, slowing down to swing into the hotel car park. “But it’s unlikely that I – What the—?”

A horribly battered car blocked the archway. At the moment when I swung in behind it, its driver hurled open his door and rushed, waving and gesticulating, upon a car stopped just beyond the entry. Against that car, two heads were bobbing, one high and dark, the other low and like a lion’s mane – that lion having been dragged backwards through a hedge recently, of course. I did not even need the sight of two hands, spiked like stilettos, coming into view with a memorable flick, flick, flick, to know what I was seeing here.

“I don’t believe this!” I said, and backed away in a howling half-circle.

“What’s going on? What’s up?” Stan wanted to know.

“Mallory,” I said through clenched teeth, as I went forward on the other lock. “At her tribal dances again in the car park. What’s she doing here? I put an exclusion round my working after Andrew walked in, I know I did! I put an exclusion on Mallory particularly!” On the other side of the road there was a much smaller archway, which I remembered from my first visit. This proves how useful it is to inspect a site before doing a working in it. The notice on the smaller archway said HOTEL STAFF ONLY. I drove through it like a bullet. Beyond, as I had hoped, was a smaller car park, only half full. “Let’s pretend I’m the chef,” I said, and roared over to the far corner.

“Steady, steady!” Stan said. He was treating me like a horse again. He said soothingly. “That writer fellow on your programme – he’s called Mallory. Must be some relation. Must have been fixed up months ago. It can’t be anything to do with the working.”

I put my chin on the steering wheel, the better to feel my teeth grind. “There’s no such thing as coincidence, Stan. And the fact remains that she ought not to be here!”

“Yes, but she is and you have to live with it,” he said. “Just keep out of her way. Better put up a Don’t Notice round this car if you’re going to leave it here. I don’t need the manager sniffling around me.”

I put a blanket of modesty round the car as I unloaded my bags. When I walked away from it, even I could have taken it for a dismal, ordinary, slightly battered car like Mallory’s, like all the other cars around it. I hurried in through the Staff door. I wanted to get hidden in my hotel room before Mallory finished her fandango. I could still hardly believe she was here. Perhaps, I thought, I had made a mistake, and it was somebody else dancing beyond that archway.

I got to the foyer. The placid, stately area I remembered from my last visit was bedlam. Beards. Embraces. Heaps of luggage. Everyone in T-shirts. A roar of greetings. The only other person wearing a suit besides me was also wearing a floor-length cloak. While I waited for the maddeningly slow Finnish receptionist to find my key, I saw, upside down in the ceiling mirrors, a row of robed and cowled figures processing through the crowd. People drew back from them and pulled luggage out of their way, but otherwise failed to look at them. I could see why. Even upside down and in reflection, they gave off a strong smell of – well – power that was unright.

Tags: Diana Wynne Jones Magids Fantasy
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