The basement was single-storey, and in the centre was a service elevator large enough to hold a truck. The floor space was about half the size of a soccer pitch but roughly trapezoid in shape with solid steel uprights spaced at regular intervals supporting the building above me and diagonally cross-braced to the walls and each other. The area was filled with floor-to-ceiling storage racks, all meticulously labelled and stocked with a bewildering variety of goods: clothes, tinned food, ping-pong balls, spare dishwasher parts, bottles of wine, packets of seeds. There was even an entire rack devoted to movies and TV series on DVD40 – more than one could ever watch in a lifetime.
I walked towards the service elevator and stairway block, intending to continue my explorations on the next floor up, but when I turned a corner I stopped dead as a Hollow Woman was walking towards me, pushing a shopping trolley full of empty jam jars. Unlike the Hollow Men, who typically wore a dark suit, hat and white shirt, the female version of the Hollow Man was dressed in denim dungarees and a gingham shirt. She wore gloves, but instead of a hat she had a red-spotted headscarf wrapped around where her head would have been. Although devoid of life and essentially nothing but a set of clothes given movement and purpose by Shandar’s power, these dungaree-clad drones seemed more to do with storekeeping than defence, because as I stood there, hardly daring to move, the Hollow Woman simply walked straight past me and carried on to place the items in the trolley on a shelf, then make a quick note on a pad detailing what was stored where.
I turned and climbed noiselessly up the stairs to the next level, which was more of the same: racks and racks of stores. Clothes, huge forty-gallon drums of peanut butter, a complete set of
Hollow Men were milling around while trucks offloaded more goods to be stored either in the sub-basements below or the office space above, as the large service elevator went both ways. There were too many Hollow Men here to avoid being spotted, so I hastily made my way up another flight of steps and came to a door marked ‘Lobby’. I pushed it open a crack and peered out.
The entrance atrium was triangular. The sunlight had turned a deep orange in anticipation of setting, and was now throwing a warm glow upon the wood marquetry, stainless steel and marble interior. The high ceiling was covered with a large painting that depicted the Mighty Shandar’s numerous achievements – magical exploits, created animals, finest spells, biggest castles. It all looked very much as though the painter was eager to massage Shandar’s ego – the wizard was always portrayed in a heroic way, his foot on the head of a defeated Dragon, dopey things like that. To my right I could see the main entrance with what looked like airtight doors, currently secured open. There were eight Hollow Men in the lobby, all motionless. I took a homing snail from my bag and wrote on the shell in very small letters:
I then took the tiny hood off the snail’s head and they41 yawned, waved both sets of antennae at me and looked around. I laid them on the floor and then, after a moment’s pause to get their bearings, they were off like a rocket, zigzagging towards the entrance. If the Hollow Men on guard duty saw the snail, they did not consider them a threat and the last I saw of the heroic gastropod was as they slid out into the daylight and then hurtled off in the direction of the M5. Snails often navigated by motorway – fewer obstructions, well signposted and the white lines a low-friction surface conducive to sustained speed. They’d probably get the message in Penzance in about two hours, so long as the plucky mollusc could figure out the Button Trench.
