Mythfits Read online

  “Best to keep our voices down for this part,” said Clovenhoof. He indicated movement above them. Ben looked up and saw tiny shafts of light coming from gaps between the floorboards above their heads. Not only was it possible to see the movement of people’s feet, but he could hear the murmur of their conversation as well.

  “You made a tunnel under the pub?” Ben whispered, sotto voce.

  “They’ve got builders in doing the septic tank. They didn’t notice when I borrowed a shovel and a few breeze blocks.”

  “You didn’t think digging your own tunnel was a bit … dangerous?”

  “I’ve spent most of my working life underground, boy,” grinned Clovenhoof. “Besides, as Nerys pointed out, it would be foolish to limit my drinking to opening hours. Mind you, they need to get some more Lambrini on order.”

  “But this is stealing, Jeremy,” said Ben. His expression changed as he gazed around at the barrels revealed in the faint light. “Oh, wait. Is this a real ale pub?”

  Clovenhoof fished a glass from a nearby box and pressed it into Ben’s hand. “One of the best, I’m told.”

  “Pass me one of those glasses,” hissed Nerys, pushing forwards. “We can all crash at your place tonight.”

  *

  “So you like my new place?” asked Clovenhoof, swaying back up the ladder a couple of hours later.

  “I grew up in rural Wales,” said Nerys, “and I’ve never, ever wanted to go back to that sort of place. You can’t imagine the frustration of living a three hour drive from a decent clothes shop. But this—” she waved an unsteady hand at the view beyond the phone box, “—this is pretty good.”

  “What do you do when you want a snack after the pub?” asked Ben. “Is there a kebab shop here?”

  Clovenhoof laughed. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  He reached up and pulled away the tin foil. A tent pole had been wedged across the ceiling above it, corner to corner. Spitted on the pole, underneath the phone box’s light bulb, was the brown remains of some unfortunate animal.

  “Oh, God,” said Nerys.

  “That’s right,” said Clovenhoof proudly. “Got my own twenty-four hour kebab rotisserie. Who wants some?”

  “That’s a duck,” said Ben. “A duck from the duck pond.”

  “Not just a duck,” said Clovenhoof. “This is an organic, locally reared duck, slow cooked under a forty watt bulb.” He took a pitta bread from his little shelf. “Served with chilli sauce and wild salad greens.”

  “Wild salad greens?” said Nerys.

  “Grass. Bit of pond weed if you want something fancy.”

  “No,” said Nerys firmly as Clovenhoof made to pluck some gamey looking meat from his makeshift rotisserie. “God in heaven, no.”

  “Isn’t there a real kebab shop?” said Ben.

  “No,” said Clovenhoof pouting. “There’s nothing at all in walking distance.”

  Ben’s face fell. “Well we can’t drive. I mean: I can’t drive anyway; but Nerys can’t either. She’s drunk loads of beer.”

  Clovenhoof clapped him on the shoulder. “Let me tell you something. Things work a little differently around here. We don’t have to worry about the conventional means of getting around. There’s always an alternative. Come with me.”

  He led them across the car park to where the builders’ vehicles were parked alongside a few cars.

  “Which one d’you fancy? We can go cross-country, grab something from the chippie, and be back before anyone notices. Piece of cake.”

  “Cross country?” hiccupped Nerys.

  Clovenhoof ignored her look of horror as he hoisted himself into the cab of the big yellow digger and hollered at them to climb aboard.

  “Jeremy, you can’t possibly know how to work this!” said Nerys, squished in a corner of the cab.

  “I’ve been watching the guys operate them,” said Clovenhoof. “It can’t be difficult. It’s just waggling levers and stuff. I mean those guys are Neanderthals so, if they can do it— Look! The engine’s started. I know the next part: there’s a go pedal and a stop pedal.”

  Nerys opened her mouth to say that it wasn’t that simple, but apparently it was. The vehicle lurched forward and Clovenhoof steered it towards the soft ground at the side of the pond.

  “I can’t get comfy,” complained Ben. “There are things sticking in me.”

  “Man up!” yelled Clovenhoof, and put his foot down. The digger roared forward as the fat wheels toppled a bicycle. The cab tipped to the left.

  “Ow!” yelled Ben, reaching behind at whatever was prodding him.

  The digger’s boom swung down and round.

  “You’re leaning on the controls!” snapped Nerys.

  “They’re jabbing into me,” Ben replied.

  “Well, get off them. You can play later,” said Clovenhoof.

  “I can’t!”

  The arm swung down into the pond. The digger’s progress came to an abrupt halt as the bucket bit into the muddy bottom.

  All was still for a long moment. Individually, they managed to pull themselves upright.

  “Well done, Kitchen,” said Clovenhoof.

  “They were really digging into me,” Ben whined. “I think I’ve bruised my kidneys.”

  The digger remained steady, although it leaned precariously sideways above the edge of the pond.

  “Right,” said Nerys. “Ben, you need to lift that arm up again.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Whatever you did the first time: do the opposite.”

  Ben hovered over the controls, hesitating.

  “Come on,” yelled Clovenhoof. “Chippy will be closed!”

  Ben chose a lever and pulled it decisively. Unfortunately it was the one that controlled the bucket. It scooped relentlessly into the pond bed, pulling the digger sideways until it tipped over into the water.

  *

  Morning came and the phone box was not a happy place. Clovenhoof had refused to give up his chair and breast pillow, so Nerys and Ben spent a soggy and uncomfortable night squashed into the remaining space on the floor. Remarkably, Nerys had fallen asleep a few times, but it was not restful. Suffering not only with a hangover but also lack of sleep, it took Nerys a while to realise that all of the noises weren’t coming from inside her head.

  “Something going on outside,” she said muzzily. “Can’t see a thing through these windows. Fogged up.”

  “Steam from our wet clothes,” said Clovenhoof, mushing his dry lips.

  “Condensed duck fat from the kebab thing,” corrected Ben, running his finger down a window pane.

  “What’s going on out there?” said Nerys.

  Ben grunted and cleared a pane with his sleeve. “The big crane thingy’s outside by the pond.”

  They disengaged themselves with plenty of cursing and grumbling and fell out onto the grass in grateful release. The builders who had been installing the septic tank the day before were now trying to haul the digger out of the pond with the crane.

  “That digger’s going to take a bit of retrieving,” said Nerys. “We’re lucky they haven’t realised it was us that crashed it.”

  “Jeremy,” said Ben slowly, “that tunnel of yours.”

  “Yes?”

  “Am I right in thinking that it goes underneath that part there: where the crane is parked up?”

  “Yes, that would be about right.”

  “And your tunnel…”

  “What about it?”

  “How well supported is it really? I mean, could it support a big heavy weight like a crane.”

  “Hell, no,” said Clovenhoof.

  Very deliberately, Ben said: “I think it would be a good idea if we all went and got into Nerys’s car now.”

  The crane had its stabilising feet in place and one of the builders was wading into the water to attach a line to the partially submerged digger.

  Clovenhoof, Ben and Nerys walked briskly over to her car and climbed inside as the crane started to lift. An ominou
s vibration ran through the ground. Ducks on the pond quacked and took to the air.

  “Drive,” said Ben. “Drive quickly.”

  Nerys tried not to look in the rear view mirror as she accelerated away, but she couldn’t help herself. The crane fell forward as a chasm opened below it. The last thing she saw, as a plume of dust blasted up and engulfed the pub, was the phone box toppling into the ground.

  “Oh, my God!” she said. “It’s vanished.”

  “Wow, it is like the TARDIS,” said Clovenhoof, lying down on the back seat and closing his eyes. “Wake me when we get home.”

  IN TROUBLE AGAIN

  Saint Christopher glanced up as Saint Valentine walked in. “Ah, you’ve been called to the headmaster’s office too, eh?”

  Valentine looked at the tiny chair into which Christopher was wedged. “That looks uncomfortable.”

  Christopher nodded. “Standard management technique. Give ’em crappy chairs. Make ’em feel small. Make ’em feel lowly.” He jerked his head back to indicate the office door. “Gabriel’s got so good at it, even Hell’s sending its managers up to learn from him.” He gave Valentine’s clothing the once-over. “New shirt?” Looking a bit, um, disco there, aren’t we?”

  Valentine’s face clouded over. He didn’t smile often, and his drooping jowls wobbled like a pair of mournful saddlebags. He flicked miserably at the medallion hanging on his chest. “It’s bloody expected of me. All the blessed dead expect me to be some sort of love god. I only wear this stuff to please them but— I miss the old days: the real old days when hair shirts were made from actual hair. A man could feel like a proper Christian. This synthetic stuff is rubbish. I can’t help feeling comfortable, and what’s the point in that, I ask you?”

  Christopher sighed. “You’re in for a treat then. I doubt whatever Gabriel’s got in mind will be anything like comfortable. Anyway, those old days, those real old days…”

  Valentine nodded. He knew what Christopher was about to say. “Yeah, yeah. Never happened. I know.” Both of the saints had been officially ‘deleted’ in 1969, declared to be ‘historically inaccurate’ by Pope Paul VI.

  “Deleted!” spat Christopher indignantly. “You can’t imagine how much I hate that tosser.”

  “I can,” said Valentine. “You tell me all the time. But, yes, I’m no happier about it than you. If we were still ‘real’ saints we wouldn’t have to work in this place.”

  “Well I reckon you had it good for a while, doing that archery-coaching gig. That was much better than being in here.”

  Valentine spluttered. “It was a pagan travesty! A ridiculous idea that came through their wretched suggestion box. If I ever find out who set me up with that whole Cupid Academy thing, I’ll shove an arrow so far up their—”

  “Whoa, steady!”

  “Sorry Christopher, sorry. It’s just that I’ve never found out who did that.”

  “Probably just as well.” Christopher reddened slightly and glanced at the floor.

  Valentine looked around the management suite of the Non-Specific Prayer Assessment Unit. A poster by the watercooler showed a cheery has-been saint in a telephony headset with the inspirational motto: When they pray to no-one in particular, YOU can be that no-one for them!

  “We make the best of a bad lot,” he said. “Or at least we try to. How come we’re in trouble again? It’s not as if we’ve done anything wrong.”

  Christopher looked at him sidelong. “Apart from us causing all those problems that’s gone and got us in trouble, you mean?”

  “Wasn’t our fault!” Valentine’s face quivered with indignation.

  “It’s how things are. I’ve been knocking around this place ever since they stopped me taking my own prayers. I sit on the phones and I listen to the lost and the lonely sending up their miscellaneous prayers. They don’t call it the Oh-god-oh-god-help-me-helpline for nothing. I follow the scripts and try to keep up with the performance targets. I’ve taken all the crappy rules they’ve thrown at me, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that there are winners and losers. And we’re always the losers. Doesn’t matter what we do, management is management and they’ll always come out on top.”

  “Yes, but it just isn’t fair! Any idiot could see what was going to happen!”

  “Take my advice, Valentine: don’t go saying that around Gabriel. You do know it was his idea, don’t you?”

  “I thought it came in through the suggestion box.”

  “I think they’ve scrapped that. Apparently someone kept making deliberately stupid suggestions.” Christopher, studied his fingernails. “Mind you, this latest wheeze has got to be up there with the best of them. Worst day on the phones since I started here.”

  Valentine stared at Christopher. “What – worse than that day you dozed off in the middle of a call and advised the cardiac surgeon to try a bump start?”

  “He could have been clearer. He was blathering on about being stuck on a bypass! But, yes. Even worse than that.”

  “Worse than the day Gabriel caught you making chicken noises at that lad who was nervous about driving on the motorway for the first time?”

  “Gabriel completely misunderstood what I was doing there, I was just clearing my throat to deliver the motivational script. And yes, worse than that.”

  Valentine let out a soft whistle.

  “Oh yes. Bloody stupid idea. Who ever heard of Heaven making outbound prayers?”

  “Gabriel keeps on about being proactive.”

  “If Gabriel’s so keen on being proactive he should have read through them scripts before he went off on his so-called retreat, shouldn’t he?”

  “Didn’t Gabriel write them then?” said Valentine.

  Christopher snorted. “Outsourced it. Apparently that’s what we’re doing now. Well it’s what Gabriel is doing.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means you make some other sucker do your work for you.”

  “Oh.” Valentine thought for a moment. “Hey, I’ve got an idea…”

  “Way ahead of you buddy,” said Christopher. “Way ahead. I got one of the recently deceased to cover a shift last week while I got in some quality time on the internet.”

  “Looking at the train webcams again?”

  “Yeah…” Christopher shuffled his feet. “Anyway Gabriel came after me. I told him I was outsourcing, but apparently, it’s not appropriate for our level.”

  “What is our level, exactly?” asked Valentine.

  “Pond scum, mate, pond scum.”

  “So who wrote the scripts, then?”

  “Chaucer.”

  “Well that explains a lot. Chaucer always was a bit fruity, in my opinion.”

  “Turns out that he’s fancied writing erotica, ever since he got hold of a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey.”

  Valentine shook his head and sniffed. “Dreadful. Dreadful. In my day, that just wouldn’t have been allowed. Certainly wouldn’t be permitted in the Heavenly library.”

  “Stupid idea,” Christopher muttered. “First off, we get a prompt up on the screen to say we’ve got to make an outbound call to some punter—”

  “Client, Christopher, you know how Gabriel hates it if we don’t call them clients.”

  “Client, punter, whatever. Mistake number one: nobody’s checking to see what the client is doing, are they? When they make a prayer to us, it’s their choice. They may have found some quiet time in church, or they might be falling off a cliff; but at least we’re not going to take them by surprise. These outbound prayers are coming at people when they least expect it. I called one who was fast asleep, dreaming about eating his dinner. I come at him with all this chatter about making things up with his wife – who’s lying next to him in bed, obviously – and the next thing I know, he’s got the two things muddled. Goes and bites her, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s the language,” said Valentine, shaking his head, face prim. “I thought there were spelling mistakes in there.”

  “
Which bit?”

  “Where it said: Take comfort and satisfaction from Titus. As you know, I’m always keen to suggest bible study.”

  “You thought the ‘u’ was missing?” said Christopher.

  “I thought someone couldn’t spell succour, either. I was halfway through a call and got so flustered, didn’t know if I was coming or going.”

  “I didn’t mind the language so much,” said Christopher, “but some of the people we were saying those things to… Who selected the clients, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “The sheet I worked on had something about pensions at the top.”

  Christopher slammed his hand down on the arm of the chair. “I knew it! We were targeting old folks with these porno scripts! There was one care home where the doctor got accused of mixing up the drugs. They thought he’d been handing out Viagra, the old blokes were so worked up—”

  Valentine nudged Christopher in the ribs as Gabriel’s office door opened. “Shush now,” he whispered.

  “Gentlemen, perhaps you’d like to join me,” said Gabriel.

  Christopher stood and took a deep breath. He would stay calm and focussed. He would stay calm and focussed.

  Gabriel sat them in low chairs in front of his desk. He took his own, higher seat, fixing them with a long stare. Opening a file he began to read from it.

  “We’ve had some sub-optimal results from the pair of you during the recent campaign,” he commented, eyes fixed on the file.

  Valentine nodded. Christopher clamped his lips firmly together.

  “I must confess to being a little disappointed at the lack of judgement shown by you both. Valentine is still learning the ropes, but Christopher: as a more experienced member of the team, I find your conduct both foolhardy and irresponsible.”

  Christopher leapt to his feet, “How can I be irresponsible when I was doing exactly what I was told, you moron?” he bellowed.

  Gabriel raised his eyes. “Please sit down, Christopher. We’ve discussed your anger management issues before. I’m not comfortable with you destroying the furniture, either. Please stop that.”