Priests hole, p.1
Priest's Hole, page 1
PRIEST’S HOLE
K. J. PARKER
First published 2016 by Solaris
an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,
Riverside House, Osney Mead,
Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK
www.solarisbooks.com
ISBN: 978-1-78618-059-9
Copyright © K. J. Parker 2016
‘Notes on Irongrove Lodge’ by Jonathan Oliver © Rebellion Publishing Ltd 2016
Cover art by Oz Osborne
The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.
NOTES ON IRONGROVE LODGE
JONATHAN OLIVER
I DON’T KNOW why London should feature so heavily as a location for Irongrove Lodge. If we were to talk about the true location of the house, we would have to admit to ourselves that it is nowhere. Yet the history of London – thousands of years of the sacred and profane – seems to draw the house, just as the house draws those it has chosen.
London is relatively close; a couple of hours by train – engineering works and strikes permitting – but I have never found Irongrove Lodge there. I have walked the streets mentioned in the histories, I’m even in possession of a photograph that shows the house residing in a London borough, but I have never, on visiting the city, found myself standing at the door of the property.
It is infuriating. Evidently Irongrove Lodge is close, reachable, but it hasn’t yet revealed itself to me in the flesh.
To dedicate my life to the discovery of one house would seem to most nonsensical. I no longer have any friends. I’m estranged from my family, although this has little to do with my studies and more to do with what I did, a long time ago. As a result of my actions, I spent many years indoors. There, even the sky was bounded by walls. I never found my redemption within. They talked often of rehabilitation, and in the end they were satisfied that is what had been achieved; the forms said so, and in that place paperwork and structured assessment were sacred.
When I left, I found that the world was too big. I stood on the threshold and experienced a moment of terrifying vertigo, as if with the first step I would fall and carry on falling forever.
You can’t find the sort of redemption I seek in church, or within the community. Most doors are closed to me. The Crown and the government may be satisfied that I have paid my dues, but people have long memories, and even if they hadn’t, the papers were more than ready to remind them of what I had done. The media were hungry for my story, and perhaps if I had agreed to talk to them I wouldn’t find myself in the dire financial straits that presently plague me. But they would have taken my words and changed them. They would have looked for a satisfying ending or resolution where none is to be found. This tale is mine to tell, and I will seek my own end.
It is true that when I finally find Irongrove Lodge I will once more be bounded by walls. It is true that, like my former residence, it will be a place of many doors; but unlike that place – that formalised hell that took so much of my life – in Irongrove Lodge some of the doors will open to me.
PRIEST’S HOLE
K. J. PARKER
I HATE THIS house. It’s freezing cold, it eats people and it stinks of petrol.
The Zulu king Shaka, they tell me, once disposed of the mother of his hated foe by shutting the old lady up in a hut with a hyena. Observe the subtlety. The hyena is a notorious coward, for all that his jaw can crush a man’s skull like a biscuit. Only when he’s starving hungry and entirely desperate will he attack living prey of any kind, let alone that monster surpassing all monsters, a human. So, to begin with, while the old lady and the hyena were reasonably comfortable, she could repel him with a shout or an unkind word. He’d slink away into the shadows and cower. But, as time passed and hunger took its toll, she got weaker and he got more frantically desperate, terror (trapped in a confined space with a horrible monster) and the overriding necessity of food tearing his poor pea brain apart; the moment came when fear crumbled and gave way, and the terrified animal broke the terrified old woman up into something useful that he could consume and digest. History doesn’t record whether they let the hyena go after it had done the business; I hope they did, for reasons that will become apparent in due course.
I have no idea which terrified creature I am in this analogy. In theory – keep an eye on that word, it’s dangerous – it’s all over now. But I’m getting weaker, and the house is very hungry.
THE JOB WAS a piece of cake, no bother at all. I was being paid to be a middle-aged businessman, and all I had to do was walk into a bank and pay in a cheque. It was something to do with avoiding tax. You’d be surprised and depressed how often it turns out to be about tax. This amazing talent, and what’s it good for? Screwing the Revenue. Ah, glory.
I propped up his photograph against the cornflake packet while I ate breakfast. Let the record show that I no longer eat cornflakes; breakfast is a serious matter and should consist of eggs and pork derivatives, and I keep the cereal packet purely and simply as a useful stop to rest things against – photographs mostly, but also briefings, dossiers, files, the very occasional non-fiction paperback.
He had an interesting face, the man in the picture. He had a nose like the beak of a Roman galley. You could be defeated and oppressed by having a nose like that, or you could regard it as your spearhead, crash through life with it like an icebreaker. I guess my man chose the latter approach; clearly he’d made a lot of money, or he wouldn’t be needing to diddle his taxes. He had plenty of thick white hair, wavy, I’m guessing he went white quite early, because he didn’t look a day over sixty, possibly younger than that. Vigorous, bursting with vitality. In the photo he was smiling, and I don’t think it was just because someone had told him to say ‘cheese’. I got the impression he smiled a lot. But a very strong jaw (crunch up your skull like a biscuit? Probably best not to put yourself in a position where you’d find out.) You could like this man quite easily, right up to the very last minute, when it’d be too late.
Well; I don’t have to think myself into their heads, but I find it helps. I don’t mean it leads to a better outcome, in practical business terms. It helps me, to cope with the procedure. Not that I’m complaining, or anything like that. Easy way to make a living. It’s just – well, identity issues. Who am I and what am I doing here? Like it matters.
To perform the transformation; ask me how I do it, I can’t tell you. Once I did it in front of the mirror (I bought a mirror specially, and hung it on the wall in the room), watched closely in the vain hope of perceiving the split second of change, when I stopped being just boring old me (who am I? Don’t know, don’t care) and became the target/victim/subject/object. Pointless. I stared and stared at the reverse-image me for what seemed like a very long time – I think it was about ten seconds – and then, without any sense of anything having happened, I was the other guy, the man in the photograph-du-jour propped up against the cornflake box. I could have burst into tears from sheer frustration, except that he (the man in the photo) wasn’t a big girl’s blouse like me and didn’t start blubbing the moment things didn’t go precisely the way he wanted them to.
One thing I’ve learned, doing this job. Nearly everybody’s better than me, in some, most or all respects.
Forgive me, I’m drivelling. Easily sidetracked, mind like a teabag. I turned into the white-haired bloke with the champion snout, put on a suit and a tie and went to the bank.
You don’t have to do anything, my agent told me (more about her later); just walk up to the counter, hand over the paying-in slip and the cheque, even you know the score; God knows, you’ve had practice paying in cheques. The bank CCTV will record the fact that you’ve been there, and that’s all that needs to be established. Easy peasy.
“Hello, Mr Morgan,” the woman behind the glass screen said. That threw me. I smiled at her, hoping that would do. Of course, I later rationalised, they’re trained to do that these days. They read your name off the cheque or the card or the paying-in slip, and they greet you with it as though they know you, as though you’re known and have an identity in their mind. It’s to make you feel loved and wanted, old-fashioned personal service, we really care when actually we don’t. Still, it gave me a bit of a shock, all the same. She knew me better than I knew myself.
All done. I walk out of the bank, as Mr Morgan, hail a taxi and get a ride back home. Front door, up the stairs, business with keys, into the room, not Mr Morgan any more. Afterwards, as usual, I spend a quarter of an hour just sitting and shaking all over. What I’m so scared of, I just don’t know. But it passes, and I’m me again, and I’ve just earned myself one thousand pounds.
Actually, I don’t charge nearly enough, given the value of my services to my clients. A fool to myself, I am. My own worst enemy. Excuse me; private joke.
I WAS BORN, not that it has anything to do with anything, in Wales, in a small town whose name my father could pronounce but I could never get my tongue around; we left there when I was five and moved to Ireland; three years there, then two in New Zealand, then back to Wales (north not south this time) for another three years, then Birmingham till I was thirteen, then Canada for eighteen months, a year in Melbourne, then Leeds until I was eighteen; three years at university in Durham, and then I moved to London, where I’ve been ever since. All this shifting around has left its mark on me. People who hear me for the first time assume I’m South African. The next time, they revise that and guess I was raised in Jamaica. The third time, curiosity gets the better of good manners and they ask me, where are you from? I resent this question, so sometimes I say Pitcairn or the Falklands, depending on whether I give a damn; the rest of the time, I explain that it’s a long story, and do my best to cut it short.
Where am I from? My father was born in India, the son of a Scottish administrator who stayed on for a while after Independence and a French mother (from Bayonne; she was more Basque than French). Dad came back to England when he was nine, grew up in Bristol, Norwich and Liverpool, studied at Cambridge, got his first tenured post in Reading. My mother was considerably younger than him, the sister of one of his students at Keele; she was Greek on her mother’s side and her father was Armenian, but she was brought up in Kent and spoke flawless BBC English, which she learned at drama school. Where am I from? I’m from my father mostly, because my mother left us in Birmingham, or was it Toronto? There was no divorce; she left me along with most of her clothes and some of her books. The last I heard she was in North Carolina, but that was some time ago. To conclude; if people can be said to have roots, I was raised hydroponically. When I was fourteen my father told me, you can be whatever you want to be. I suspect I shouldn’t have taken him quite so literally, but there you are.
SO THERE YOU have it. What do I do for a living? I’m a shape-shifter. Not a lot of us about – ever so many frauds, charlatans, imposters pretending to be genuine shape-shifters, but they cheat, they do it with makeup and costumes and crepe hair and God only knows what shameless deceptions. I’m the real thing. Really really real, for as long as I want to be. My blood group changes, for crying out loud; you can take a DNA sample from me, and it’ll be Him, the other guy, not me.
There are limits, naturally. I can do women, but only very superficially; shoot x-rays into me and you’ll see male organs in there instead of female (that actually happened once; not my finest hour; awful mess; very nearly gave the clients their money back). I can’t do animals or inanimate objects. But, within those parameters, I can be anyone you want me to be, provided you have the money, and my charges are sensible going on ridiculously cheap, in context. Even so, I’ve reached the point where I only work when I want to or when I’ve got to, because I’ve spent all the money. That takes some doing, but I manage it, somehow. Not sure how, because my tastes are plain verging on Spartan, and if you look round this place you’d be hard put to it to find any things, any stuff, to show for the millions (literally) that have passed through my hands over the last five years. I could’ve been a serious diamond collector, I could’ve afforded it; or Old Master paintings, or medieval armour, or anything I damned well chose; or I could own streets of houses and a vast portfolio of stocks and shares. Never got round to any of that, never wanted to. Why be a rich man when I can be anyone I want? I could be Mr Gates or Mr Getty – walk into their bank, pass the retina scans and the fingerprint tests. Fortunately for them, I’m too scared to steal. Nobody could prove anything, needless to say, but you don’t need proof to put two and two together, and if you steal from the rich, you might find yourself encountering retribution outside the usual forms and the prescribed due process. Mostly, though, money just doesn’t interest me, in the same way fish aren’t obsessively fascinated by water. My idea of a really good meal is a cheeseburger and fries.
MY AGENT CALLED me.
“It’s a piece of cake,” she said. “Ten minutes of your time, and no heavy lifting. Of course, I said you’d do it.”
I’m attuned to her tone of voice, like a dog with its master. She was too cheerful. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. It’s the perfect job.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
She sighed down the phone at me. “Sometimes I despair of you,” she said. “I line you up a job that pays the price of a pair of quality shoes per second, and all you can do is moan at me. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be sleeping in a cardboard box in shop doorways.”
“What’s wrong –?”
“All right.” She always gets bad-tempered when she’s making me do something dangerous or horrible. “Look, there’s no risk to you, none whatsoever. Even a total wuss like you would be hard to find anything to be scared of.”
I find silence is the best response sometimes.
“There is a slight, very slight trace element of illegality,” she went on, after a pause. “Not, it goes without saying, on your part. All you need to do is stand in a certain place at a certain time, where a certain camera can get a good clear shot of you.”
Fine. Standing next to some form of event horizon that would be irrefutable proof in court; something with the date and time on it, in an instantly recognisable place a very long way away from where the actual crime was committed. Fine.
“I told you,” I said. “I’m through with alibi work.”
“For crying out loud.” She only shouts at me when she’s indefensibly in the wrong. “I don’t know what’s got into you lately, I really don’t. Here’s a perfectly good job I’ve worked really hard to get for you, paying really good money, and you turn round and spit in my face. You know your trouble? You’re just so bloody ungrateful.”
I made no comment. Just because something’s true doesn’t make it relevant.
“I mean, what is your problem with alibi jobs? Is it because they’re dishonest? Maybe you haven’t been paying attention, but your entire career is founded on –”
“I don’t want to go to jail.”
She fetched up a sigh from the very deepest cellar. It was wreathed in cobwebs and she’d been saving it for a special occasion. “We’ve been through this,” she said. “No court will ever convict you, because no court will ever recognise the existence of magic. I thought that was –”
“Don’t call it that.”
Silly of me, to expose a weakness. But there you go. I’m scared of what I can do, and I really don’t like thinking about it. Words like, well, the M word remind me of the appalling truth; I can do this stuff, but I don’t know how it works.
“I do apologise if I offended your delicate sensibilities, you total fucking primadonna. The fact, however, remains –”
“It’s not just having my picture taken, is it?”
A shot in the dark, but a clean hit. “Fine,” she snapped. “You’re also required to blow your nose. And that’s it. That’s absolutely everything, you have my word.”
I smiled. It was my idea, originally, back when alibi stuff was still exciting and new. You blow your nose in a paper tissue, which you stuff in a crack in the wall, or down between two dustbins, whatever, some hidden place that’s dry and where the garbage men won’t look. The CCTV captures you doing it. The investigators go along, retrieve the tissue, analyse the dried snot and provide irrefutable DNA evidence to corroborate the camera. Any suggestion that the man in the picture is someone else in a false beard is stillborn. For a while, I ran a series of variations on the same theme, so as not to repeat myself – traces of blood from a paper cut, spit on a styrofoam cup, and once I pissed against a wall in broad daylight, for my art. Now I can no longer be bothered. Let prosecutors notice the conspicuous coincidences. They still can’t prove anything.
Anyway, I was tired of arguing. “Just this once, then,” I said. “But this is the last time. I mean it.”
“Good boy.” I wish she wouldn’t say that. “I’ll send you the stuff. Got to go. Bye.”
