Sleeps With Angels

All The News, All The Time, From Everywhere

On the first of August, Rex killed the pig.

He didn’t do it willingly, but none of us was really sorry to see it go. It was an enormous, bad-tempered bastard that we’d been keeping in a shed around the back of the office for months, feeding it on an outrageous stinking swill that Harry kept going in a big pot with scraps and garbage begged and borrowed from some of the schools in the area.

If it had been left to us, the pig would have starved to death, because it smelled like a sewer and attacked anything that moved, but Rex made us draw up a feeding rota, and every four days it fell to me to approach the shed with two buckets of swill, gingerly open the door, and pitch the buckets inside before slamming the door shut again. For such a big animal, with such little legs, the pig was colossally quick, and it had jaws like bolt cutters.

Rex was ashamed of the pig. It was the living, breathing, grunting embodiment of just how badly the Globe was doing. The yard behind the office was choked with empty cages and wire boxes and wooden stalls, where once there had been a thriving menagerie of goats and sheep and chickens and rabbits and pigeons and even the odd badger or two. Now they were all gone, and all we had was the pig.

Still, he put off killing it as long as he could. He and Harry went out onto the moors and trapped crows. Local poachers sometimes brought in foxes or rabbits. Ben produced his astrological charts. Lucie examined the interior of everyone’s teacup. And in this way the Globe continued to bring the news to our particular little corner of Derbyshire. It wasn’t very exciting news, but considering what we had to work with it was a miracle we got a paper out at all.

But it wasn’t enough. The advertisers started to fall away, leaving us with great gaping holes in the paper, which I was sent out to fill with microscopically-nitpicking accounts of Women’s Institute meetings, weddings and funerals. I went to so many weddings and funerals that the vicar only half-jokingly suggested I might like to stand in for him sometimes.

And it still wasn’t enough. Rex watched the paper haemorrhaging money, looked bankruptcy in the face, and killed the pig.

He did it in the afternoon, when the Summer heat had built up enough in the newsroom to make the air stand still despite the fans, and the staff were quietly nodding off over their typewriters.

My fan had just run down again, and I’d got up to wind its clockwork when there was this incredible unearthly screech from outside and everyone in the office sat bolt upright.

We all looked at each other, and that awful noise came again. It was the sound of every nightmare HP Lovecraft ever had coming to destroy civilisation. It was the sound of a man discovering that his entire family had been wiped out in a gas explosion. It was the sound of a thousand young children being hurled into the whirling blades of a combine harvester.

It stopped.

I looked at Ben and raised an eyebrow. He said, “You don’t suppose he’s…” and Lucie shrieked as the back door of the office opened and an awful apparition stepped through.

Rex was covered in blood from head to toe. It was dripping from his nose and his earlobes and the point of the foot-long butcher’s knife he was holding in his hand. He was breathing hard but his eyes were shining.

“Biggest one-day fall in the Dow for two years,” he panted, pointing the knife at me. “Forest fires threaten Malibu. Government troops clash with logging company employees in Borneo. Russia devalues the ruble for the third time this year. Moon Sagan and Buff Rodney say, ‘This time it’s the real thing’.” He took a ragged breath. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “If we’re going out, we’re going out in style. Type, you bastards!”

At the desk behind me, Harry heaved a huge sigh. “That’ll be pork chops all round, then,” he said.

The Globe’s favourite watering hole was the Royal Oak, by virtue of the fact that the paper’s offices were right next door, but I preferred the Duke Of York, which was half a mile away on the other side of the village but had the advantage of being half a mile away from the nearest newspaper office.

This early in the evening, the Duke was almost empty. Before The Crash, it had done a roaring trade in the summer from tourists visiting the local caves and hard-core walkers setting off on the notorious Gilbert Dyke Walk, which managed to take in some of the most inhospitable scenery in Northern England between here and Hadrian’s Wall. These days, the pub got by on a deal with a microbrewery in Castleton and some quite staggering customer loyalty among the locals, although tourists were starting to drift back again.

This evening, however, the only occupants of the place were Seth the landlord, and Liam Goodkind, editor and proprietor of the Chronicle, Belton’s other newspaper.

I stood in the doorway for a few moments, sensing disaster, but both Seth and Liam noticed me at the same time and nodded hello. Liam waved me over to his corner table as well, and by then it would just have looked rude to turn round and walk out again, so I went over and sat down.

“I don’t want any trouble, Liam,” I said.

“Well, me neither, old son,” he told me. Raising his voice, he said, “Seth, get this boy a drink.” He raised an eyebrow at me.

“Lager and lime,” I said, feeling miserable.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He slapped me on the knee. “Rex won’t sack you for having a drink with me.”

“You sacked Robbie Whittaker for having a drink with Rex.”

“Robbie was a bad lad.” Liam lifted his glass and took a thoughtful sip of whisky. “He was robbing me blind. And he couldn’t write to save his life. Had to go.”

Seth came over with my pint glass of lager and lime on a tray. He was a little bald man with a port-wine stain down the right side of his face. He’d been the Duke’s landlord for about twenty years but most of the locals still regarded him as a newcomer. I hadn’t been in Belton nearly as long as he had, and it was faintly depressing to know that I still had several decades ahead of me before I was regarded as anything but That Bloke from London.

“Anything else, gents?” Seth asked us, and Liam shooed him back behind the bar with a languid wave of his hand.

When Seth was more or less out of earshot, Liam said, “I heard about the pig.”

“I told you, I don’t want any trouble.”

He looked offended. “How can this be trouble? Two newspapermen discussing business over a drink. How can it be trouble?”

“It can be trouble in all sorts of ways, Liam. You know that.” I took a mouthful of my drink and became nostalgic for the days of refrigeration, the days when you could just put your hand into one of those plastic bar-top buckets and scoop up a handful of ice cubes and drop them into your lager and lime.

“You’re too suspicious,” Liam told me. His attire today was Country Gentleman In Summer: white flannels, checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows to show muscular forearms dotted with freckles and hazed with fine sandy hair, a pair of battered old brogues and a Guards tie, even though the nearest he had ever been to the military was when he sold fifteen hundred acres of his land to the Ministry of Defence to use as a firing range. He looked every inch the Gentleman Farmer, but he had once been managing editor of a newspaper in Manchester, until the death of his universally-disliked father had brought him back to the village.

“I’m not going to tell you what we got,” I said. “You’ll have to read it in the paper.”

“Well, of course I will.” He smiled and took a tin of small cigars and a lighter from the breast pocket of his shirt. “I’m a big fan of the Globe. I’m going to miss it.”

I shook my head and took another drink.

He lit a cigar and blew out smoke. “Look, old son.” He put tin and lighter back into his pocket. “Let’s not beat around the bush, eh? The pig’s gone. Now Rex will have to rely on local news.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Maybe Rex will be able to get his hands on some scabby sheep off the moors,” he went on. “The odd rabbit. How’s that going to help you? No national or international news, the advertisers are going to abandon ship.”

It was, unfortunately, a perfectly accurate summing-up of the Globe’s prospects. I drank some more of my lager and lime and wished I’d gone straight home.

“So how about you come and work for me?”

I snorted beer down my nose. Liam watched me with detached interest while I coughed and gasped for breath, then he said, “You’re a good lad. I’ve always liked your style. There’s a deputy’s chair waiting for you at the Chronicle.”

I mopped my face with my hankie. “I’d rather have my balls bitten off by a horse, Liam,” I said, half-laughing with surprise at the offer. “I wouldn’t work under you if you were the last editor on Earth.”

He didn’t get angry. He just became very still. “You won’t remember what you were like when you arrived here,” he told me calmly. “You were lucky we didn’t just take you out onto the Manchester Road and leave you there.”

I looked at him, trying to decide whether to punch him or not.

“You weren’t even human when Lenny Hammond found you out on the moors,” he went on. “Just an animal dressed in rags.”

I stood up.

“You want to try and work out which side of your bread the butter’s on,” Liam continued. “We’ve been good to you. Rex has been good to you. But you’re a good journalist and you owe this place more than staying with the Globe as it goes down.”

I turned to go.

“I’m trying to turn this village into the centre of news-gathering for the whole North of England,” he said. “It’ll put us on the map, give us a lot of clout. And you could help me do that. I’m offering you a chance to do that.”

I took a single halting step. Then another one. The next one came easier, and the next, and by the time I was through the door and out on the pavement it was no trouble at all to walk away from Liam’s offer. He was like a radio station; the further away from him you were, the weaker his message became, until finally you couldn’t hear him at all.

Liam and Rex were locked in a duel to the death. They pretended it was about who ran the better paper, but it was really about Alice, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much if it hadn’t been for the Crash.

I had missed the Crash. Those who saw it said it was like a swarm of tiny black flies on their monitor screens, or a driving hailstorm, or a slowly-blossoming flower. Nobody knew where it came from, or who had written it, but the Crash blew through every firewall on Earth as if they weren’t there. It took down economies, destroyed telecommunications networks, and effectively ended the War, all in about twenty minutes.

There was chaos, of course, and I missed all that too. When I finally came round, that day in Rex’s office, the elves had already come out of their millennia-long exile and had simply taken over the country.

Well, no. That’s not exactly true; they didn’t simply take over the country. They put the country to the sword. They killed hundreds of thousands of people; they laid waste to towns and cities. They forbade us to have internal combustion and mains electricity and telecommunications and a Government and, for reasons which escaped everyone, a music industry. The Crash and the chaos that attended the end of the War brought us to our knees, and they were never going to let us get to our feet again.

We waited for the rest of the world to notice our plight and come to our rescue, but the rest of the world had its own problems. The United States were no longer united; California was just the wealthiest nation in a continent of intermittently-warring countries. It was going to be another decade at least before Continental Europe emerged from what, by all accounts, was a bizarre Dark Age. Australia and New Zealand had come through the Crash pretty well, but only a die-hard optimist would have held their breath waiting for help from that quarter. We were all alone, trapped on an island with countless twitchy sylvan psychopaths.

Bizarrely, there were some compensations. For instance, it turned out that magic actually worked.

Well, maybe not magic per se, but all that weird fringe stuff like crystal ball-gazing and tealeaf-reading and palmistry and astrology and cutting open animals and reading the future in their entrails.

It turned out, in those days following the elvish Occupation, that these things always had worked. They just never worked as ways of foretelling the future. What no one had ever cottoned on to was that they all told you what was happening, or what had happened, somewhere in the world. This of course was useless, unless you were a journalist, where explaining what’s happening or what has already happened is part of the art.

The elves thought it was really funny that we had got it so wrong for so many years. They thought it was so funny that it was the only form of communication they allowed us to use. You could find yourself flayed to death for trying to start a local postal service, but the elves smiled benignly on you if you started reading animal entrails.

It was one of those fields of endeavour where size really does matter. The interior of a rabbit, read by an expert, might, at a pinch, tell you what was going on in London. A pig would give you access to some random gossip and hard news from across the Atlantic. Cut open a cow, however, and the world was your oyster. The guts of an oyster might, if you were lucky, give you a clue to where you left your favourite socks.

That was how the Chronicle had scored over us, over and over again. After years and years as a national newspaperman, Liam had inherited a farm so enormous that it seemed obscene to describe it as a smallholding. He had access to hundreds of cattle, seemingly thousands of pigs, and uncountable numbers of chickens. Liam’s animals gave the Chronicle access to news the Globe could only dream about.

Some people were better at it than others. Rex wasn’t bad, but only the best-intentioned critic would have described him as an expert at reading the entrails of recently-deceased animals.

Alice, on the other hand, was an absolute star. When Alice left Rex and moved in with Liam, the Chronicle became, in its way, as well-informed as any national newspaper had been in the days before the Crash. Alice could slaughter a chicken and ask it any question you wanted, and the geometries of its guts would tell you the answer.

And that, in the end, was what this stupid little war was about. Rex wanted Alice back, and he thought that if he just kept going she would, in time, realise she’d made a mistake and had gone off with the wrong bloke. It wasn’t the most bizarre situation I had ever seen, but it was up there in the Top Five.

“Liam just tried to sign me up,” I said.

Rex looked up from his desk. He’d had a bath and changed his clothes and slapped on some aftershave to try and cover the residual smell of pig’s blood, but if I was a betting man I would have been putting money on him scrubbing himself raw for the next week to get rid of the stink.

“Liam’s always trying to sign up my staff,” he said, going back to the page of copy he’d been reading when I came in. “He tried to sign up Harry last month.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “Harry threatened to kill him if he ever did it again.”

“I just thought you should know.”

He looked up at me again, a fearsome-looking little gnome of a man with the sweetest nature of anyone I’d ever met. He sighed and pointed at the chair he kept for visitors. “Sit down.”

I sat.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I was tempted.”

He thought about this confession for a few moments. “I can’t offer you any more money.” He clasped his hands in front of him on top of Harry’s copy. I knew it was Harry’s, even reading it upside-down, because it was full of commas. Harry put commas in everywhere; he just couldn’t help himself

“It’s not the money, Rex,” I said. “Why do you carry on? He’s got half the livestock in the county, he’s got thirty-odd journalists, he’s got that sodding steam-powered press, he’s got that witch —” I stopped. “Sorry.” ‘That witch’ was Alice.

He shrugged. “I’m not going to give up,” he told me. “Despite what I said earlier, we are going to keep on reporting the news until we absolutely cannot report the news any more. Even if we have to exist solely on local stories.”

“If we do that we’ll last about a fortnight,” I told him. “The advertisers will just go over to the Chronicle.”

He leaned forward. “If I have to pay for this paper out of my own pocket,” he said calmly, “this paper will continue to be published every Thursday.” He sat back. “We got some useful copy out of the pig; I think if we’re creative we can spin it out for another three or four issues. What do you think?”

“I think you’re crazy, if you want the honest truth,” I told him. “You and Liam.”

He chuckled. “Go home. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’m doing Ernie Hazlewright’s funeral in the morning.”

Rex looked sadly at me and propped his chin on his hand. “I’m going to miss old Ernie,” he said. “He was a proper old lad. Fought in the Falklands. You make sure you do a good job on Ernie.”

I sat and looked at him and I felt my shoulders start to slump, the way they always did when we had conversations like this. The Globe was like a black hole; I could get out far enough to peek over the event horizon, but I couldn’t escape the gravity of its impending doom. Rex was going to ride the paper as it went down the tubes, and I was going to be sitting alongside him in the front seat.

It was a lovely Spring morning, fresh and cool. I could smell the dew-damp earth of the fields on either side of the road.

There were fifteen of us in the journalists’ pool, riding through the French countryside with a column of Alliance armour. The War was in its third year and it hadn’t gone nuclear yet, apart from places like Kiev and Istanbul. The Alliance was finally making some headway against the Union forces. Everyone felt pretty good.

A black and white road sign went past our humvee. On it was the name Ste. Ursule du Lac.

Only an optimist would have called this a village. It was just half a dozen houses and a school grouped around the Norman church of St Ursula. It was deserted.

The Union had something they called police battalions. They came in behind the fighting units, and when an area had been pacified, they were supposed to stay behind and make sure that law and order were restored.

That happened, sometimes. More often, the police battalions were just a euphemistic way of solving the knotty problem of what to do with an occupied and presumably annoyed civilian population. As the Union advance pressed westward to the Atlantic, they had left hundreds of empty villages in their wake. We’d been on the trail of this one particular battalion for a couple of days now.

Nobody was under any illusion that the Alliance forces were any better than the Union; there had been atrocity on both sides. But as journalists we knew which side our bread was buttered on. We were travelling with the Alliance; we were hardly going to file stories accusing them of human rights violations.

We pulled up in St Ursula’s little village square and dismounted from our various vehicles, stretching our legs. The Alliance had already come through here a few hours earlier and pronounced the coast clear, but soldiers fanned out to search the buildings while we journalists stood around smoking and chatting and doing pieces to camera. Someone unpacked a portable catalytic stove and brewed coffee. The smell drifted on the breeze.

I wandered away from the main group. None of the buildings in the village seemed to be damaged. There was no sign that the War had come this way at all. But there were no villagers. There wasn’t even a stray dog.

The school was a little way up the single street from the square. I lit a cigarette and put my hands in my pockets and walked up to it. It was white, and there was a little black bell mounted on a swivel over the front door. I walked up the steps. Someone behind me was shouting.

I looked over my shoulder. One of the Alliance officers was running towards the school, shouting something and waving his arms. It was the little ginger-haired major from New Brunswick, the one who claimed he’d worked on the Chicago Tribune before the War. We all thought he was a dickhead, and did our best to ignore him.

I turned back to the door, turned the handle, and pushed.

“Anyway,’ said the ugly little man on the other side of the desk, “it’s not very much, but it’s something.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’ll keep you off the streets.”

I looked around me and blinked hard. I said, “Did you just offer me a job?”

Somewhere, between pushing open the door of St Ursula’s school and waking up in Rex’s office, three years had passed. I didn’t know how I had returned from France. I didn’t know the War was over. I didn’t know the elves had taken control of Britain.

I had turned up in the village a week or so earlier, an animal dressed in rags, as Liam put it. The village council didn’t know quite what to do with this raving madman. They’d cleaned me up and fed me and, when I didn’t seem too dangerous, Rex offered to give me a job at the Globe’s offices, sweeping up and moving rubbish and stuff.

I didn’t know why I came out of it when I did. Maybe Rex said something that brought me back from wherever I had gone to hide.

I didn’t know what I saw when that school door swung open, but late at night, when I was lying in bed, terrible things beat on the thin walls of sleep, looking for me.

I opened my eyes.

There was a smell of burning in my bedroom.

I sat up. The light of a full moon was flooding in through the windows and falling on an elf which was sitting on the end of my bed smoking a spliff.

I shouted something and flopped back onto my pillows.

“You’re looking well,” said the elf. “Newspaper work obviously agrees with you.”

I said, “Did anyone see you come in?” Elves were not the most popular people in Britain. If anyone had seen this one enter my house the most optimistic thing I could look forward to would be a vigorous lynching.

It took a huge toke on the joint and blew out a stream of smoke that was silver in the moonlight. “It’s half past three in the morning,” it said. “Anyone out at this hour isn’t going to believe they saw me, even if they did. Which they didn’t.”

I sat up again and mashed the pillows down behind my back. The elf called itself 56K Modem. That wasn’t its real name, of course. The elves took whatever pleased them, including their names. Modem once told me its real name. It sounded like snow settling on a frosty road.

“What do you want?”

Modem tapped ash onto the floor. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”

“Do you want one?”

“No. But I’m rather hurt you didn’t offer.”

Modem was wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans. Its feet were bare and its fine grey hair was bound into a metre-long rope. I rubbed my face to try and wake myself up. “What do you want?”

“I heard that Rex killed the pig.”

“Everyone else knows about it. Why shouldn’t you?”

“It’s an interesting situation, don’t you think?”

“It’s a fascinating situation, but I really need to get some sleep so I’d appreciate it if you’d come to the point.” Modem had been visiting me, on and off, for a couple of years now. The first time, I had tried to run away screaming, but these days I was almost blasé about it, as if I wasn’t sitting in the same room with one of the most dangerous predators on the planet. I could even do small-talk with it.

On the other hand, I had never found out why Modem visited. It usually spent the time taking the piss out of us, telling me how pathetic we were and how brilliant the elves were. I had a feeling — and this was nothing more than a feeling — that, somewhere in the black hole of memory between St Ursula and Belton, I had done something for the elves, or been forced to do something for them. It was a prospect that brought me out in a cold sweat.

Modem looked at me and tipped its head to one side. The moonlight made it look ethereally beautiful. “We were wondering if you’d like us to intervene.”

“No. Can I get some sleep now?”

Modem looked hurt. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

The elves hated mankind, of course. They had been masters of the world for uncountable centuries. And then we had come along with our technologies and we had cut down the forests that were their natural habitats, driving them back and back until all they could do was watch as our cities were built and wait until we were vulnerable.

“We’re quite interested in Rex Preston,” Modem said.

I felt ice touch my heart. “Oh?”

The elf uncrossed its legs, recrossed them, brushed a piece of lint off the thigh of its jeans. “Actually, I’m interested in what you think of Rex Preston.”

I looked at it. “Why?”

Modem thought about it for a moment. “Professional curiosity?”

“He’s a newspaper editor. How on Earth can you be professionally curious about a newspaper editor?” The first rule about the elves was: you didn’t annoy the elves. That was the only rule, really, but I’d learned that there was some latitude. You could annoy some of them more than others; it was just impossible to tell which ones. You had to wing it.

“His paper is on its knees. His wife works for his competitor. He just killed his last animal. But he won’t give up.” Modem tipped its head to one side. “Personally, I find that kind of…devotion interesting. I’ve noticed something similar in the Resistance.”

I burst out laughing. The Resistance was a largely theoretical thing, armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge from the days when the Alliance was based in Southern England. They killed elves here and there — on the orders, legend said, of an ex-New Zealand Special Forces Colonel who had found himself stuck here just after the War. For every Resistance success, the elves destroyed a village or a town. Popular opinion had it that the Resistance had caused more loss of life than the elves themselves.

“Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said. “It would get in the way of putting the paper out.”

56K Modem looked at me and pursed its lips. “All the same,” it said, “perhaps he would bear watching.”

The elves had something roughly analogous to MI5. They called it the Library, and among other things it was charged with dealing with the Resistance. They hunted down ham radio operators and ham TV operators, they hunted down people who put together kit-cars in their garages or played guitars and sang to each other late at night. I thought this must be a pretty thankless task, but Modem seemed to find it fulfilling.

“Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said again.

“Harry Burns is.”

More ice around my heart. “Harry’s not with the Resistance either.”

“He’s at a meeting right now,” Modem told me. “Over on the outskirts of Sheffield. There are five of them in a house in Dore. They’re planning an assassination. We disapprove of assassinations.”

I shook my head. “Not Harry.”

“Harry’s ex-SAS. Good with munitions.” Modem blew gently on the burning coal at the end of the spliff. “An absolute star. No end to the things Harry can do with a few ounces of plastic explosive.”

“What do you want?” I shouted.

Modem looked taken aback. “It’s just this situation with Rex and Liam…”

“Yes!” I yelled. “Intervene! Do whatever you fucking well want!” We sat looking at each other from either end of the bed. “Are you happy now?”

Modem stood up. “I’m never what you’d call happy,” it told me.

Every village has a character. Sometimes, if the village is big enough or unfortunate enough, it might have more than one. Ernie Hazlewright was ours, a big, permanently-annoyed old man who lived just down the road from me. He was a legendary drinker and a brawler of some note, and he’d been barred from all three of the pubs in the area more times than anyone could remember.

By rights, he should have gone down fighting in a punch-up in the street, but he’d actually fallen into the river while walking home pissed out of his mind one night and drowned. I supposed it was a rather sad way for a Falklands veteran to go, but I wasn’t going to miss him.

Still, it was rather a good turnout in the little cemetery down by the river. About thirty people turned up, mostly Ernie’s old drinking buddies. I managed to get a few words from each of them.

The mourners had all gone off to the pub and I was chatting to the vicar when I saw Rex coming down the gravel path from the church. He stopped by Ernie’s grave and stood looking down at the coffin. I went over to him.

“He wasn’t a bad old lad really,” he said. “Just drank too much.”

“He was an absolute nightmare,” I said. “Coming home legless at all hours of the day and night, beating up his wife. You didn’t have to live near him.”

Rex nodded. “That’s true.”

“He smashed all my front windows once.”

“You haven’t been in to the office yet, have you,” he said.

I shook my head. “I came straight here.”

“So you won’t have seen what we found in the yard when we came to work this morning.”

“No, of course not.”

“So the animals didn’t have anything to do with you, then.”

I frowned and felt my stomach start to contract. “What animals?”

Rex shrugged. “Well, I left Harry counting them, but it looked like fifteen or so chickens, half a dozen goats and four pigs. Three sows and a boar.”

I stared at him.

“Anything to do with your source, do you think?”

I had never kept anything from Rex. I had told him everything about myself, at least everything I could remember. He was the only person I had told about 56K Modem and its visits, and I thought it was probably the bravest thing I had ever done. Rex, of course, was an old-fashioned sort of newspaperman. A contact with the elves was literally beyond price, even if it might be morally suspect, and a good journalist always protects his sources.

“Modem came to see me last night,” I said. “It asked me if I wanted them to do something about this thing with you and Liam.”

Rex frowned. “Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s a game with them, Rex. They think we’re funny. They watch us like we’re some kind of soap opera or something.”

He scratched his head. “Well.” He turned and started to walk up the gravel path towards the entrance to the churchyard. I followed. “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or not.”

“Best not.”

“Aye, maybe you’re right.”

“Someone had better mention to Harry that the elves are on to him as well,” I said.

He glanced at me. “Did your source tell you that as well?” I nodded and he shook his head. “Why don’t they just pick him up then?”

“I told you, they love to play games. Modem said Harry was in Sheffield last night meeting with a Resistance cell.”

Rex put back his head and laughed. “Either your source was playing games, or it’s not as well-informed as we thought. Harry was nowhere near Sheffield last night.”

“Oh?” I was rather hurt. “Where was he then?”

“He was with me, burning down the Chronicle’s office.”

I stood still. Nobody I had spoken to this morning had mentioned anything about a fire, but I supposed they’d all had other things on their minds, like mourning Ernie and getting to the pub for opening time.

Rex walked a few more steps, then he turned and looked at me. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth hanging open,” he said. “He’d have done it to us.”

That was fair comment, I supposed. “You’ll never get away with it. He’ll know who it was.”

He smiled cheerily. “There’s knowing,” he said, “and there’s proving.”

I caught up with him. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Rex looked thoughtful. “No,” he said finally. “No, neither did I.” He looked about him, then started walking again. “We didn’t put him out of action permanently, anyway. Just sort of charred the office a bit. He’ll be up and running again in a couple of weeks. It’s actually rather funny.”

“How on Earth is trying to burn down your competitor’s office funny, Rex?”

He chuckled. “It’s just that Harry and I spend most of the night skulking around the Chronicle’s office, trying to put Liam out of action for a while so some of the advertisers will sign up with us, and this morning we find the back yard full of livestock, courtesy of your friends.” He shook his head. “I just found it funny, that’s all.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. I knew there would be some kind of price to pay, but there was no way of telling what it would be. Or what would happen when the elves didn’t find us amusing any longer.

“One of us ought to go over to the Chronicle’s office and do some kind of story,” Rex said.

I grinned. “You cheeky old sod.”

“It’d look suspicious if we didn’t. And it’s good copy anyway. ‘Local Newspaper Burns Down.’” He nodded to himself. “Good local copy. The cornerstone of a good local paper.” He looked at me. “Would you like to do that?”

“It would make my day,” I told him.

He nodded again. “Good lad. And if you see Alice, give her my regards.” And he walked away, head up, back straight, whistling a little tune, the happiest editor in Derbyshire.

v

This was written for the Lou Anders anthology Live Without A Net, the premise of which was that all the stories took place in worlds where the internet either did not exist or had been lost. There was a lot of good stuff in that book, and it’s worth tracking down, not least for the stories by Adam Roberts, John Meaney, and John Grant.

Lou gave me a space of about 6,000 words to fit my story into. I’ve never been quite happy with the pacing of this one; I’ve always thought it needs to be two or three thousand words longer. I occasionally take the MS out and read it and fiddle with the idea of doing a sort of Director’s Cut, but I always wind up putting it away again untouched. Maybe one day.