Authors: Tim Davys

Yok (42 page)

“I'm going to need to disinfect this office afterward,” Fox sighed.

But she, too, had been seized by the magic around Vincent, and the trance into which he put himself and the others.

He got them to build a palace. A castle taken from fairy tales not yet written. Moats, drawbridges, towers, and spires. Ballrooms, atriums, and secret passageways. Gilded cupolas, arched stairwells, and optical illusions. Vincent's ideas surpassed one another in wild excess. The contractors protested; Fox, who believed that budget limitations should be a parameter, put in her veto, but the force behind Vincent's will conquered them all. With each day he ate and slept less and less. He allowed no one to rest, he allowed no objections, and when the fourth week reached its end all of them, including Fox, were sincerely tired of him, and glad it was over.

O
n the morning of the first of May, the appointed day for the presentation, Vincent Hare woke up with a peculiar feeling of not wanting to finish the project. He was 40 years, 86 days, and 1 hour old. During the night the hourglass of time had again turned in his head, and the sand was running indefatigably. There were thousands and more thousands of details to refine and develop on
Casa Magnifica
, and the mood he found himself in the past ten days had been an intoxication he already missed. For that reason, to the surprise of his teammates, he let out a heavy sigh when he opened the door to Fox's office right before lunch, and together with the others carried the model out to get Bombardelli's assessment.

Even as they crossed the threshold, something happened to the office. Silence spread, concentration electrified the air, and scattered whispers soon died out. Within a minute or two all the personnel at the firm gathered around Fox and Hare's fairy-tale castle. Bombardelli did not delay. The rattlesnake came quickly slithering through the office area, and then circled mutely around the model to view it from all angles. No one said anything. The attentiveness was magical and strange all at once.

At last it was Diego Tortoise who broke the silence.

“This is unbelievable,” he said. “This is the most beautiful building I've ever seen.”

A hurricane of applause and cheers broke out. Bombardelli wrapped himself around Fox and Hare in turn. The great architect seemed speechless with emotion for a few moments.

“My friends!” he then exclaimed, getting everyone to fall silent. “This was better than I could dream of. I will retire to this house. Here you see Bombardelli's new boss, and her new partner!”

It was like setting off a sound curtain. The applause and cheers never seemed to end. Daniela Fox would succeed Rattlesnake Bombardelli, Vincent Hare would be the firm's new partner.

Epilogue

T
he next morning Vincent Hare woke up as the second of two partners in Bombardelli & Partners. He had been hired at the architectural office 13 years, 49 days, and about 3 hours earlier, and even before getting the job he had challenged Diego Tortoise to a race.

He pulled on his bathrobe and went into the kitchen. On the way he passed the hall, where the morning newspaper waited below the mail slot. In the kitchen he measured out water and coffee and turned on the coffeemaker. While the hot water ran through the ground coffee, he squeezed three oranges and then put two pieces of ice in the glass. As the ice melted he poured coffee into a dark green cup, and finally sat down at the kitchen table with coffee, orange juice, and the newspaper. But it took several minutes before he realized he wasn't reading; he hadn't even glanced at the headlines on the front page.

He had won.

The idea distracted him. What was surprising was that this not only pleased him; it fulfilled him. He felt a kind of satisfaction he had not felt since .Â .Â . He did not recall that he had ever felt that way. It wasn't right. Life once again showed its banal side. A partnership was worldly and worth nothing in relation to the great questions of life. He played with the idea of excusing the feeling by giving himself a different explanation. Perhaps it was passion that made him the winner? Perhaps the moral of the story was that he had abandoned himself completely, and thereby won? Something to write up on the Knowledge Account? But he was the first to dismiss that sort of stereotypical connection in every other case. It was the partnership itself, which he had jokingly talked about and pretended to strive for so many years, that made him happy.

Think if Mom had known, thought Vincent. And his next thought was spontaneously about Maria Goat. Of course she would hear about his new partnership in time, but could this perhaps be an excuse to call her even today?

V
incent Hare was musing in this way when there was an unexpected knock at the door. Because it still had not clouded over outside, Vincent knew it was early in the morning. It was with tense expectation that he went out in the hall and opened the door. The idea that someone had already sent flowers or a telegram both pleased and surprised him.

He opened the door, and stared right into a pair of yellow eyes that had seen most everything. Within the course of a second, everything changed. From the experience that the future lay open, it was all over.

Under the cowl Chauffeur Tiger's face was enormous, his fur gray and battered, his eyes hard and cold. In the background out in the stairwell Chauffeur Tiger's colleague was visible; they always came in twos.

“You don't need to bring anything with you,” said Chauffeur Tiger.

His voice was deep and raspy. His large coat smelled bad.

“You don't need to lock up, just come along,” he said. “You don't need any shoes, the car is right outside.”

The sand running.

Vincent heard it as a rumble that drowned out the fear.

Then it became silent.

This was the moment he had waited for. Like all stuffed animals in Mollisan Town, he knew that when the Chauffeurs came in their red pickup, it was over. The upper part of the hourglass was empty. But even though he had always known this would happen, he was seized with terror and panic.

“I can't go,” he protested. “I have .Â .Â . the coffeemaker is on. And I have a meeting after the Morning Rain I have to be at. If I don't go to that meeting, the project won't go ahead.”

Chauffeur Tiger grimaced.

“Let's go,” he said.

“But I have to get my notebook,” said Vincent. “I've got to have it.”

Chauffeur Tiger placed his large paw on the hare's shoulder and forced the stuffed animal across the threshold and out onto the stairs. The Chauffeur shoved Vincent ahead of him down toward the doorway, and even though he came up with a number of important, irrefutable arguments for why he could not already be fetched (one of them naturally had to do with his age), he knew that nothing he said would influence the Chauffeurs.

In the red pickup waiting down on the street, there were already three stuffed animals. Two wept quietly. The third, a wirehaired dachshund, began arguing the moment the Chauffeurs got in the truck and started the engine. Many of the dachshund's arguments Vincent himself could have used.

The pickup drove out on South Avenue, and the stuffed animals fell silent. Slowly the insight sank into all four of them. Life was over.

W
e are only stuffed animals,” said Vincent as the pickup drove out of the city and into the forest. “We know nothing besides this, besides Mollisan Town. Where are we going now? Where are you taking us?”

“What kind of question is that?” snarled Chauffeur Tiger, who sat behind the wheel.

“Where are we going?”

“Did you hear what the hare is asking?” Chauffeur Tiger growled to his associate. “He's wondering where we're taking him.”

His associate grunted, but it was hard to interpret the meaning of the grunt.

“But what happens after life in Mollisan Town?” asked Vincent.

“What do you mean?”

“The life after this one? There must have been a reason for everything that has happened up to now? What's in the forest? Beyond the forest?”

“Nothing,” Chauffeur Tiger answered. “There's nothing besides this.”

He shifted down to second as the asphalt road ended and they drove onto a narrow gravel path.

“But there must be something else,” said Vincent, realizing that he never had thought about that before, not like this: for real. “There must be some idea with placing all the stuffed animals in the city? The factories that manufacture us, who owns them? Who runs them?”

“What does that matter?” asked Chauffeur Tiger.

Vincent thought. He did not know whether it mattered. While the pickup drove deeper into the forest, his despair increased.

“But there must be someone behind all this. Is it Magnus? What is his plan?”

“Shut up now, Vincent Hare,” said Chauffeur Tiger. “There is no plan, there is no point, it just ends. Get it? The end.”

About
the Author

T
IM
D
AVYS
is a pseudonym. He is the author of
Amberville
,
Lanceheim
, and
Tourquai
, the first three books in the Mollisan
Town quartet. He lives in Sweden.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
for exclusive
information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by Tim Davys

Amberville

Lanceheim

Tourquai

Credits

Cover design and illustration by Jarrod Taylor

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

YOK
. Copyright Â© 2012 by Tim Davys. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Translated by Paul Norlen

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: 978-0-06-179747-7

Epub Edition Â© AUGUST 2012 ISBN: 9780062196644

12 13 14 15 16
OV
/
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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