Carpet Diem Page 4

  “Really, honey, it is a rug,” Lily said, soothingly. “You can stand on it.”

  “I know,” said Simon, apologetically, “But it just doesn’t seem right. I feel like I’m walking on the Turin Shroud or something.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” she giggled. “The Turin Shroud is a fake.”

  That didn’t help. However, Simon did notice that her breasts jiggled very pleasantly when she laughed and silently resolved to be funny in her company as often as possible.

  “So, that’s it?” Simon asked, pleadingly.

  “Pretty much,” she answered.

  “Yes. As long as you are happy to agree that you will choose to give your living room carpet to the one of us whose offer is most attractive to you, we’ll come back tomorrow to make our offers,” said Daniel.

  “I suppose so,” answered Simon. “Do I have to choose straight away?”

  “I honestly hadn’t thought about it,” Daniel admitted.

  “Of course not, honey. We’ll give you, say, overnight to think about it?” Lily answered.

  Simon considered the gravity of what was being asked of him before giving the only answer he could think of.

  “OK.”

  He had a horrible feeling it wouldn’t be.

  ----

  Once outside, the unexpected and largely unwelcome visitors climbed into a black car that glistened like wet rubber, with tinted windows and no visible marque.

  “Must you keep calling him ‘honey’? You sound like a prostitute.”

  Daniel touched the steering wheel and the car’s engine purred into life.

  “You think calling him ‘Mr Debovar’ is better?” she snarked.

  “I was being respectful.”

  “You were being patronising.”

  “At least I’m not trying to seduce him with false hopes of grubby sex.”

  “It’s not my fault he’s heterosexual and … deprived,” she smiled triumphantly. “And I’m hot.”

  Daniel sighed and looked heavenwards. This would all be over soon.

  The sooner the better.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  That night, Simon took a particularly long bath, even by his standards. He had to reheat it twice. When he finally got into bed, near midnight, he was so exhausted and the bed so particularly comfortable and welcoming that he was asleep almost before his head hit the pillow.

  Thus, he was utterly unaware of the conversation happening in his back garden, just an hour later.

  “What do you mean you’ve never broken into a house before? You’ve been in and out of this house a million times,” Gabby whispered, flicking her blonde, elfin hair out of her eyes.

  Luke was carefully appraising the kitchen window, deciding whether he would fit through it. Even after all this time, he still found it hard to be annoyed at her when he looked in her eyes. She seemed to have only grown more elegant, more graceful with time. Sadly, she was not actually any more graceful than she’d ever been. And she was being annoying.

  “That’s because he’s ordered pizza! The door is open and he’s expecting me. And he stays upstairs.”

  “Well, surely you’ve seen it done on TV.”

  “I’ve seen the A-Team save an African country with a van and a garage full of crap, but that doesn’t make me MacGyver.”

  “I liked him better in Stargate.”

  “What? Who?”

  “MacGyver. Well, thingy double-barrel Anderson - you know, the actor. He was much better looking in Stargate.

  … “Sorry. I’m rambling. I’m nervous.”

  “I know,” Luke said, as calmly as he could manage, “Can we concentrate on this, please?”

  Gabby kissed him on the cheek, apologetically.

  What happened next was … unusual.

  While it was not inconceivable that Simon did not hear the breaking of his kitchen window, it was at least unlikely that he should have slept through the resounding thud of a man falling off his kitchen counter via a plate, a glass and a pizza cutter.

  “Shh!” Gabby whispered, helpfully, frantically waving her arms as if to blow the sound waves away.

  Luke was afraid to move, convinced that any further noise would be guaranteed to alert Debovar to his presence. He waited for the sound of a creaking bed; of footsteps on the floor above. And all the while he tried not to think about the pain in his side, where his landing hand had punched the air from his lungs.

  But the house was silent, except for a light snore.

  Astonished, he gave Gabby a tentative ‘thumbs up’. She began to climb in after him.

  “No, wait!” he hissed, pointing at the back door.

  “Oh,” she mouthed, carefully extracting herself from the window pane.

  Luke quietly opened the door. She stepped out of the dark into the faint green light of the microwave clock.

  “Oh, you’ve broken his plate. Maybe we should leave him some money to replace it?”

  Luke stared; still amazed that she could be so thoughtful and utterly inappropriate at the same time.

  “Let’s just get on with this, OK? If we survive, I’ll buy him a tea set.”

  “OK,” she answered, clearly hurt by his tone.

  It was going to be a long night.

  ----

  Coming downstairs after his morning bath, Simon wondered what time Daniel and Lily would return. As difficult as it was to accept, he was almost looking forward to it. Firstly, they had been polite, friendly and honest, as far as he could tell. And they didn’t stink.

  Although, now that Simon thought about it, he had a vague notion that Lily had smelled ever so slightly of vanilla ice cream by the time she left. He wondered briefly whether the mixture of food and sexuality in his subconscious was something to worry about.

  Secondly, it was actually sort of exciting. The world was much more interesting than he had ever realised. And he was, albeit through no action of his own, right at the heart of something very important. He was living in ‘interesting times’. If they ever made a biography of his life, now, it would definitely be on the SyFy channel. In fact, he’d probably be something of an internet hero. He wondered who else in the world might already know what he had learned.

  He didn’t wonder for long though as two things happened in quick succession that caused him to very nearly fall the rest of the way down the stairs.

  Firstly, the doorbell rang. Having been afraid of hearing it for much of the weekend, Simon was instinctively jarred by the noise - which, of course, meant that Daniel and Lily were back.

  Under other circumstances, Simon would have been preparing to pay attention to the smell when he opened the door, to confirm his suspicion about Lily. However, now that he could see into the living room, he was too busy trying to comprehend what he could see. Or rather, what he couldn’t see.

  Simon’s living room carpet was so out of style with the rest of his furnishings that it looked ridiculously out of place, but something about it had always drawn Simon to it and made him feel comfortable.

  Looking now at bare boards, he felt a very long way from comfortable.

  ----

  Across the road, two very tired carpet thieves were debating what to do next.

  “Can it please be sleep?” Gabby asked, piteously.

  “I don’t know. If we have a shot of espresso each, once an hour, we could just stay up all day and not need to sleep,” said Luke.

  “That’s not actually good for us, you know. What we should really do is get some sleep now – staying up all night is bad for our bodies.”

  “If this all goes wrong, our bodies are not going to be much use to anyone. Other than, perhaps, as fertiliser.”

  “What are they going to fertilise?”

  “Exactly.”

  Luke paused before asking, “So, three sugars?”

  ----

  Simon was struggling to regain his balance for long enough to finish walking down the stairs. After trying and failing a few times, he decided the best option
was to sit down exactly where he was and call for assistance.

  “Help,” he yipped, quietly.

  Thankfully, the ears he hoped would hear him were substantially more receptive than the most sensitive human ears, even on their best day, when they could hear an individual pin drop in an industrial pin-making factory.

  Thus, Simon’s front door flew past him and landed just inside the kitchen. Which was less unexpected than one might imagine, all things considered.

  In the place where the door used to be stood the familiar and strangely reassuring figures of Daniel and Lily. Both looked concerned, yet confused as to why they had just removed the door somewhat forcibly from its hinges to rescue a man who, at this point, looked in danger of nothing more serious than a nasty carpet burn on his backside.

  “What is it?” Lily asked, stepping into the house. “What’s wrong?”

  The best Simon could manage was a feeble “Eep!” and to point, meekly, toward the living room.

  Taking this as a fairly clear indication that something was amiss in that area, and that this was an invitation to both of them to enter and see for themselves what had gone wrong (which was, in fact, exactly what Simon had been trying to convey), the angel and demon stepped into the archway between the hall and living room.

  “Ah,” said Daniel, matter-of-factly.

  “Bollocks,” said Lily.

  The two turned to Simon, who was fervently wishing to wake up and find himself in bed, three days ago.

  Several lifetimes seemed to pass before anyone moved. It was, unsurprisingly, Daniel who spoke first.

  “Is it safe to assume that you did not spend last evening lifting the Rug, cleaning it and rolling it up neatly for us?”

  “Ess,” squeaked Simon, nodding.

  “Right,” the angel answered.

  Simon felt himself starting to cry.

  “It’s OK, honey,” said Lily, starting toward him.

  “It is not,” said Daniel, coldly.

  Simon knew things were bad now. But at least Lily was stroking him. And he hadn’t exploded. That was good.

  ----

  Having made Simon a cup of milky tea and transported him to the sofa - which was a good foot further to the left than usual - Lily and Daniel had taken seats at opposite sides of the room. Again. Daniel stared intensely at the floorboards. Lily stared equally intensely at him.

  After much contemplation of exactly what could have gone wrong, and after some time spent wondering what exactly the creators of the universe would do to the person who managed to lose the one thing in the world that they most wanted not to be lost, Simon finally managed to place the vast majority of his wits back where they belonged. There were one or two, he was sure, that had been scared away forever. Not really knowing where to start, he defaulted to instinct.

  “Hello,” he half whispered. “Sorry, I just realised, I haven’t said hello. Very rude. Thank you for the tea.”

  Daniel glanced up at Lily, before replying. “Welcome back Mr Debovar. I’m delighted you’ve rejoined us. Is there any chance that you can tell us what happened to your carpet?”

  “It’s not here,” Simon replied.

  “Yes, we’d realised that,” he answered.

  “I was asleep,” Simon offered, pointing half-heartedly at the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry Mr. Debovar,” said Daniel, standing, “are you saying that you, who wakes up before his alarm every morning, slept soundly through the noise of someone completely rearranging your living room and removing your carpet?”

  “Ah.” It was Lily.

  Daniel jerked his head toward her with a severity that Simon found disturbing.

  “‘Ah’ what?”

  “I think that’s exactly what happened,” Lily answered.

  Daniel softened at this. “Really?”

  Simon realised that the disbelief in Daniel’s voice betrayed the fact that he really had thought Simon was hiding something, which rather unsettled him even further.

  “I really wanted Simon to get a good night’s sleep, so he’d be clear headed for today and, well…” she trailed off.

  “And he was getting a good night’s sleep under your influence, meaning nothing short of violent evisceration was going to wake him up,” Daniel finished for her.

  “Pretty much.”

  Simon was afraid that Daniel had considered violent evisceration an option a moment ago.

  Another long silence ensued, during which Daniel occasionally sighed, before walking to the window, looking out for a while, and then sitting back down again. Lily sat back in her chair, playing with a strand of hair and looking at Daniel with something between irritation and guilt.

  Finally, her patience wore out. “I presume it’s not out the window, then?”

  “Pardon?” Daniel looked confused.

  “Well, since the obvious thing to do next is to start looking for the damned thing, I assume you’ve been discounting ‘out the window’ before we start looking somewhere else.”

  Daniel’s face changed again. It was scary.

  “Firstly, I’m not the one who put Sleeping Beauty out for the count and lost the Rug in the first place. Secondly, it’s not a damned thing unless you get your hands on it; until then, it’s just as likely to be a blessed thing!”

  They seethed at each other. Simon imagined there would have been some major sexual tension between these two, had they been predisposed to having sex.

  “Excuse me,” Simon finally interjected, “You said neither of you was good or bad.”

  “Yes,” said Daniel, visibly trying to calm down. “So?”

  “Well, it’s just that you said it would be damned if she got it, and blessed if you got it. Doesn’t that mean she’s bad and you’re good?” Considering how wary he now was of the angel, Simon wasn’t sure whether to hope he was right or not.

  “No, honey,” Lily answered. “Blessed and damned mean exactly the same thing – just from different perspectives.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Simon. “How can damned not be bad?”

  “Think of it this way: haven’t you ever had sex that was so sensuous, so absorbing, so completely mind-blowing that you described it as ‘damned good’?”

  Simon looked at her piteously, desperately trying not to give away that he hadn’t, that he was now thinking about it with her, and that his penis was way ahead of him.

  “Think who you’re talking to,” said Daniel.

  Lily paused. “OK, haven’t you ever had a buttery that was perfectly toasted, with just the right amount of butter and a perfect layer of melting Golden Syrup, so that when it disintegrated on your tongue, you thought ‘damn, that’s good’?”

  “Oh, yes!” Simon was glad to be back on familiar territory.

  “Damned is just a little more ‘earthy’ than blessed. Mother has a slightly more sensual notion of life. She doesn’t have the celestial broom up her arse that his boss has,” Lily nodded her head dismissively at Daniel.

  Daniel rolled his eyes in a way that suggested he had had this discussion before. Simon was leaning quite heavily towards handing the carpet over in the sensual direction of Lily. If he ever got it back.

  “Wait a minute!” Simon said. “Doesn’t the fact that the carpet has been stolen from me mean that I am no longer the owner? And doesn’t that mean that I don’t have to make the decision anymore?”

  He felt a sudden leap of elation as the burden lifted from him.

  “Sadly not,” answered Daniel. “Yesterday, when you agreed to give the Rug to one of us, we all officially entered into a contract which is binding for as long as we all remain alive or, in our case, exist.”

  Simon tried to swallow, but his tongue was huge.

  “It’s OK, we’re not allowed to kill you,” Lily reassured him, “unless you refuse to honour the contract.”

  The fact that they were not “allowed” to kill him did not give Simon any peace of mind whatsoever, as it confirmed his suspicion that Daniel, at least,
had certainly planned to kill him earlier, if not now.

  “How do I honour the contract if I don’t have the carpet to give you?”

  “Well,” said Daniel, “You’ll have to get it back.”

  “Oh.” Simon tried very hard not to cry again. “How do I do that?”

  “First we have to find out where it is,” said Daniel. “Thankfully, as the owner, you have certain rights regarding that information; rights which we, as seekers of the Rug, do not have. Therefore, all you need to do is find out who stole the Rug, find out where it is now and get it from them.”

  Simon resisted repeating himself, but there was no other way to say it:

  “How do I do that?”

  ----

  The caffeine was kicking in nicely. Gabby sat scribbling circles furiously on a sheet of newspaper, while Luke paced the floor like an expectant father.

  “What will they do now?” Gabby asked, nervously.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know, I’d…” Luke trailed off, realising he knew exactly what he’d do. “Oh Hell,” he closed his eyes as he said the name. “Faunt.”

  “They’re not allowed to go to Faunt! It’s in the Rules,” Gabby protested.

  “No, they’re not,” Luke agreed, “But he is.”

  ----

  “What, like letters, you mean?”

  “No, Mr Debovar, ‘Faunt’, as in ‘of information’, sort of,” Daniel answered. “Faunt is the only person who will definitely know where the carpet is.”

  “How?” asked Simon.

  “It’s … quite complicated. Faunt was empowered by a triptychal naming curse to know everything.”

  Lily groaned, frustrated. “I can’t believe you’re explaining the naming magic. Why does he need to know that?”

  Of course, now that Simon knew there was something else to know, it transpired that he did, in fact, want to know what a triptychal naming curse was. It was the first time in a long time Simon had actually wanted to hear about something he knew nothing about.