to go back to your room and get some rest. You must be exhausted.”
An hour sitting peacefully at a desk; well, that’d take it out of you, for sure. “Thanks,” he said.
“Not at all. You’re doing a great job.”
Well, he thought as he climbed the stairs, anything’s possible. Maybe the attrition rate among hotel desk clerks is on a par with junior officers in the trenches in the First World War, and just still being there at the end of an hour’s enough to qualify you for the Silver Star. But he was inclined to doubt that. True, Mr Nordstrom had been a bit alarming, but all he’d actually done was ask for his key and a bottle of wine.
The elephant in the room can be ignored, with determination and practice, so long as it’s content to sit quietly in a corner, doing nothing more energetic than gently massaging its neck with the tip of its trunk. When it starts trumpeting and crushing the furniture, the only sensible course is to give in and officially recognise its presence. There is, Theo formally admitted to himself, something profoundly weird going on around here. This is not a normal hotel, the people aren’t regular people, it’s got something to do with Pieter’s bottle and a way of busting holes in the quantum partitions between alternate universes. If I was involved in any way, if I was still a physicist who gave a damn about all that stuff, I might be getting a little antsy at this point. Just as well I’m neither of those things, isn’t it?
In denial, the voice of his former analyst muttered in the depths of his memory. Too damn right, Theo replied. And why not? Denial’s the clove of garlic that keeps you from getting bitten. All around you, mystery and melodrama; but just so long as you’ve got your clove of garlic, you can carry on being the shoemaker in the little village at the foot of the mountain with the castle on it, and what the hell? Strangers may go up to the castle and not come back, but folks’ll always need shoes, come what may. So long as you’ve got your clove, there’s not a problem.
Provided, of course, that you don’t get bored.
It’s not something that the shoemaker needs to worry about, because there’s always someone banging on his door with a seam that needs stitching or a heel that rubs. But a hotel clerk who gets off work at (he checked his watch) 4 p.m. and the rest of the day’s his own, boredom is the maximum enemy. He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes, but he’d never felt wider awake in his entire life.
Suddenly, there was an impossibly loud bang, enough to shake the whole room and set the lights flickering. For a moment Theo was sure he was dreaming, reliving the moment when the VVLHC blew up (he did that quite often, for some reason); but then he heard voices shouting, doors banging, feet running, none of which featured in his all-too-familiar flashback. He slid off the bed, landing on the balls of his feet, and hurled himself at the door.
On the landing, the door of the room opposite was wide open, but there was nobody to be seen. The commotion was coming from downstairs. He hesitated for a moment, sniffed for smoke, then darted down the staircase as fast as he could go.
When he reached the lobby, he found out what had caused all the noise. A huge man – he didn’t need to see the face to identify Mr Nordstrom – was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. Call-me-Bill was kneeling over him, twisting a tourniquet fashioned from Mr Nordstrom’s idiotic cowboy tie around his blood-soaked elbow. Matasuntha was hurrying forward with a big black tin box. Another woman was tearing open a packet of gauze dressing. A shattered wine bottle lay on the ground a yard or so away.
“Dressing,” Call-me-Bill said, tense but calm, not looking up; the woman Theo didn’t know knelt beside him holding it, while he cut Nordstrom’s jacket sleeve lengthways with a pair of scissors. “It’s all right,” he went on, “it’s gone straight through and out the other side, and it’s missed the bone. Thanks,” he added, as the woman handed him the dressing and he pressed it carefully into place. “Bandage.” Matasuntha took a roll of crêpe bandage out of the tin box and gave it to