She had saved every poster. Even those from early clicks, when she was just in very small print as A Girl. They were thumb-tacked to the walls. Ginger's face - and his own stared at him from every angle.
There was a large mirror at one end of the poky room, and a couple of half-burned candles in front of him.
Victor deposited the girl carefully on the narrow bed and then stared around him, very carefully. His sixth, seventh and eighth senses were screaming at him. He was in a place of magic.
'It's like a sort of temple,' he said. 'A temple to . . . herself.'
'It gives me the willies,' said Gaspode.
Victor stared. Maybe he'd always successfully avoided being awarded the pointy hat and big staff, but he had acquired wizard instincts. He had a sudden vision of a city under the sea, with octopuses curling stealthily through the drowned doorways and lobsters watching the streets.
'Fate don't like it when people take up more space than they ought to. Everyone knows that.'
I'm going to be the most famous person in the whole world, thought Victor. That's what she sail. He shook his head.
'No,' he said aloud. 'She just likes posters. It's just ordinary vanity.'
It didn't sound believable, even to him. The room fairly hummed with . . .
. . . what? He hadn't felt anything like it before. Power of some sort, certainly. Something that was brushing tantalizingly against his senses. Not exactly magic. At least, not the kind he was used to. But something that seemed similar while not being the same, like sugar compared with salt; the same shape and the same colour, but . . .
Ambition wasn't magical. Powerful, yes, but not magical . . . surely?
Magic wasn't difficult. That was the big secret that the whole baroque edifice of wizardry had been set up to conceal. Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointyhat business.
The trick was to do magic and get away with it.
Because it was as if the human race was a field of corn and magic helped the users grow just that bit taller, so that they stood out. That attracted the attention of the gods and - Victor hesitated - other Things. outside this world.
People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.
All over the entire room, sometimes.
He pictured Ginger, back on the beach. I want to be the most famous person in the whole world. Perhaps that was something new, come to think of it. Not ambition for gold, or power, or land or all the things that were familiar parts of the human world. Just ambition to be yourself, as big as possible. Not ambition for, but to be.
He shook his head. He was just in some room in some cheap building in some town that was about as real as, as, as, well, as the thickness of a click. It wasn't the place to have thoughts like this.
The important thing was to remember that Holy Wood wasn't a real place at all.
He stared at the posters again. You just get one chance, she said. You live for maybe seventy years, and if you're lucky you get one chance. Think of all the natural skiers who are born in deserts. Think of all the genius blacksmiths who were born hundreds of years before anyone invented the horse. All the skills that are never used. All the wasted chances.
How lucky for me, he thought gloomily, that I happen to be alive at this time.
Ginger turned over in her sleep. At least her breathing was more regular now.
'Come on,' said Gaspode. 'It's not right, you being alone in a lady's boodwah.'
'I'm not alone,' Victor said. 'She's with me.'
'That's the point,' said Gaspode.
'Woof,' Laddie added, loyally.
'You know,' said Victor, following the dogs down the stairs, 'I'm beginning to feel there's something wrong here. There's something going on and I don't know what it is. Why was she trying to get into the hill?'
'Prob'ly in league with dread Powers,' said Gaspode.
'The city and the hill and the old book and everything,' said Victor, ignoring this. 'It all makes sense if only I knew what was connecting it.'