"Sally, whilst I appreciate the offer, I'm not going anywhere.
I've lived in this house all my life, and through winters far worse than this."
"No-one's doubting your ability to cope, Maureen," Sally patronized.
"You're a very ... hardy woman.
But with all the fuel bill rises over the summer ..."
"I have plenty of wood stockpiled for the fire," Maureen lied, "which won't cost me a penny and keep me warm all winter long if necessary."
"Oh," said Sally, a little taken back by Maureen's apparent resourcefulness.
"Perhaps, I could make you a thermos flask of soup then?"
Maureen was about to tell her that it was all right, she had plenty of soup; which was again a lie. Maureen expected that she would ride out the snow living off whatever she could find in the cupboards.
However before she could respond to Sally, there was a large bang from within the house, like a sledge hammer hitting wood.
"What was that?" exclaimed Sally, in such a flurry of excitement she nearly burst through the front door into the hall.
"That?" said Maureen, braced behind the door to ensure that damned woman did not set one foot inside her house.
"That's nothing."
"But I heard something!
It was coming from inside your house."
There was another large bang, identical to the first.
"There it is again," squealed Sally.
"Do you think it's robbers?"
"In this snow, I seriously doubt it.
It's probably just the cats knocking the firewood over.
They're terrors at times."
Sally seemed unconvinced.
"Are you sure?
We've got a baseball bat; Simon says we can never be too careful in this day and age.
I could go and get it?"
"It's alright," Maureen smiled.
"The cats are always doing this.
Gave me an awful fright the first time it happened too."
"You should be careful.
Someone your age shouldn't be getting shocks like that."
"Well, I'm not dead yet," said Maureen, slightly offended.
A third bang came from the house.
"I'll have to go Sally; they will have all my nicely stacked firewood all over the place unless I stop them."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes Sally, I'll be fine. Rest assured that if I get into any difficulties, I will be straight round."
Sally smiled, but just stood there, as if still expecting an invitation inside.
"Sally," said Maureen.
"The door?
I'm letting out what little hot air I have," which was about the only truthful thing she'd said in this entire conversation.
"Oh, oh yes," Sally replied.
"Of course."
Then gathering her senses, she took a step back off the porch, suddenly engulfed in a flurry of white.
"You get back inside and keep yourself warm.
If you ..."
Maureen never heard the rest as she slammed the door shut.
"That bloody woman, I'm sure she won't leave me alone until I'm dead," Maureen told the cats who had been purring at her feet this entire time.
"And will then continue to bug me in the afterlife."
A fourth bang echoed round the cottage.
"All right, all right," she shouted, then mumbling to herself, "I am in my eighties, you know.
I take time to get places."
She opened the door under the stairs and reached for the cord to turn on the light bulb crudely fixed into the side of the wall.
Descending down was a set of old rickety wooden stairs.
She really needed to get them replaced - especially the loose one, second from the bottom.
Perhaps she could ask Ernest to have a look at it sometime, before she took a tumble and broke a hip or something.
Oh that would please Sally and Simon no end, she thought to herself.
"Then they could kidnap me," she told the cats who followed her down, "take me to their house where they could look after the old invalid, smother me with kindness and bore me with stories of their never ending home renovation project in my last remaining days."
Nicholas purred, and rubbed himself around her legs.
It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the offers of help, it was the way they forced it upon her.
She'd seen their sort before; it wasn't so much about helping someone as being seen by others to appear to be helping.
That, and the fact they were just so damn nosey.
Her previous neighbours, the Philips, had lived in the house next door for near on fifty years, and whilst they weren't beyond a neighbourly chat if they saw each other over the garden fence, they largely kept themselves to themselves, respecting Maureen's privacy.
With Sally and Simon, they seemed to relish in regaling her in every observation they had made; from when she went into the village to commenting on those visitors who "seemed to come at strange times of the day or night".
Maureen was almost thankful that she had fewer visitors than twenty or thirty years ago.
She took her time down the creaking stairs, a hand on the ancient grey stone wall.
An astute observer would have noticed that the stone here was much older than the cottage above, although Maureen didn't know by how many years.
Half way down, the stairs stopped on a small landing, before turning one hundred and eighty degrees and continuing down into the cellar.
A bare bulb hung overhead, which Maureen turned on via pulling on another cord.
The cellar was large but there wasn't a lot of stuff down here; several boxes stacked in one corner, an old standing lamp in another, a shelf along one wall with the flower pots she'd brought indoors back in the autumn and now seemed to be doing a roaring trade in mushrooms.
The walls were made of the same large grey stone of the stairway.
In the centre of the wall that would technically separate her house from her neighbours' was a huge oak door.
It was nearly twice as wide as Maureen's front entrance and tall enough that it reached right to the ceiling.
By rights it should have connected Maureen's cottage with Simon and Sally's except, as Maureen knew, this was the only cottage that had a cellar.
The bang came again, and had anyone other than her cats been with Maureen that day, they would have observed that it was caused by someone thumping on the other side of the door.
"All right, all right," Maureen shouted.
She took a solitary iron key that hung on a rusty nail beside the door and placed it in the keyhole.
Using both hands to turn it, it clunked unlocked.
She pulled back the large bar that acted as a bolt, and then, again using both hands, she slowly pulled the door open.
Warm air rushed in.
The door opened to a passageway, only a metre or two in length and beyond that, a second doorway.
This hung open revealing one end of an ornate covered walkway.
To the left iron braziers punctuated a huge sandstone wall.
On the right, Maureen could see through the arches to the vista beyond:
blue skies and spring sunshine beating down on spires and steeples; beyond them plains and white crested mountains.
However, Maureen's attention was not captivated by the vista; she had seen it thousands of times before, but instead by the source of the banging.
"Sorry to disturb you, Maureen," said the eight foot troll, "but we've got a bit of a problem."
CHAPTER THREE - Mr West
It was snowing in New York.
The thick storm clouds overhead had turned afternoon into evening and filled the streets and avenues with their cargo.
On news of the storm's approach, most of the city had emptied, workers leaving their offices before the journey home became impassable.
Broadway was practically empty.
The clothing sellers who normally crowded the sidewalk were gone, having shut up and left hours ago, leaving a solitary figure making his way south through the shin deep snow.
He seemed unprepared for the weather.
His trousers were a size too big for him and his shirt was partly untucked.
Winds whipped around the city blocks like a serpent, striking from every direction with icy blasts, causing Mr West to draw his jacket ever tighter and vow to couple his plans with the weather forecast next time.
There were much easier ways to get from New Jersey to the meeting place in the heart of New York City.
However, Mr West had 'chosen' to take the Transit in, and walk, rather than take a cab, down from Penn Station.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
"Know your enemy," the training programs had told him, and he felt that by experiencing choice, he better understood the inhabitants of this world.
Choice was abhorrent to him.
Yes, he told himself, decisions often needed to be made, but that should only be done by those whose job function it was to make them for individuals, and then only after careful analysis and consultation.
Otherwise, you had what you had here... a chaotic system.
Of course the humans and dwarves, and even the elves would argue that without choice there was no freedom, but what use was freedom when all that was stopping people killing you or stealing from you was a thinly guised code of moral conduct.
With choice, it gave people the right to do bad things to others.
Where was the freedom from crime, the freedom of job security, the freedom of not having to worry about the course of your life?
No
, Mr West told himself,
the amount of choice here was bad.
Even worse it was so unproductive.
It made their enemies unpredictable and irrational, something that the data models still needed to take into account.
He stepped off the sidewalk to cross 27th street and jarred himself as the drop, hidden in snow, was more than he expected.
The snow soaked his trouser leg up to above the knee.
He hated New York, even their sidewalks weren't uniform.
No wonder they needed so many lawyers.
He was surprised to see that the Pizza restaurant was still open, and despite feeling slightly uncomfortable about it, 'chose' to stop and buy a slice.
If there was one redeeming feature of New York, and indeed, the whole of this realm, it was Pizza. Since the start of the operation here, he had tried just about every variety.
He ignored his logic which told him he did not need to eat and ordered a slice of pepperoni.
Pizza heated and bagged to go, Mr West left the relative warmth of the parlour and stepped out into the snow once again.
He didn't have far to go.
The awning of the next building marked his destination.
The shivering doorman saw him, swung into action, opening the door, and upon noticing the pizza, asked Mr West: "You get that from next door?"
Mr West nodded.
"Best Pizza in the city," the doorman exclaimed as Mr West shook himself off and stamped the snow from his feet.
He walked up the narrow passageway toward the lobby and elevator.
A member of cleaning staff was busy fighting a losing battle trying to mop the floor of melted snow the guests had brought in.
Mr West took the elevator to the twelfth floor, and knocked on door 1203.
He was expected and the door opened almost instantaneously.
Three men dressed immaculately in black suits and white shirts stood on the other side; so alike in every such way that it would be easy to confuse them for identical triplets.
They looked slightly nervous as Mr West entered.
The one who had answered the door closed it quickly behind West, whilst the other two stood up from the twin beds they had been sitting on.
Mr West grabbed the chair from the writing desk and sat down to face the huge window that looked out over the city.
Standing in front of it was a fourth man, much older than the other three but similarly dressed.
His cropped hair and beard were as white as the snow outside and his face was etched with a scowl as deep as his wrinkles.
"You're late, Mr West," the older man growled.
"Sorry," West replied nonchalantly, beginning to eat his pizza slice.
"Traffic was terrible."
The triplets looked nervously at each other and then to the older man.
He continued to scowl.
"Hmm?" Mr West queried as if someone had spoken, looking up from his losing battle to stop hot cheese from dribbling down his scraggly beard.
The older man gritted his teeth and a small hiss could be heard but whatever the older man's opinion of Mr West he held short of voicing it.
"Mr South," the older man asked, "now we're all finally here, could you update us on the operation."
Mr South looked nervous. "There's been a complication, Mr Magellan, sir."
"Complication?
What kind of complication?"
Mr West considered Mr Magellan closely.
Were those body tics, surprise, exasperation or worry?
Magellan was difficult to read.
"I was interrupted intercepting the target," Mr South continued.
Mr West watched the sweat starting to form on Mr South's brow, before South added, "all our simulations showed that if they had been interrupted then the humans would run off to get assistance."