In Your Dreams

by Holt, Tom

  ‘Mr Carpenter,’ she repeated, materialising out of her office like a Starfleet away team. ‘I was wondering, could you spare me a moment?’

  Oh well, Paul thought; and then, Never mind, there’ll be other days. ‘Sure,’ he said, trying to sound polite.

  She was looking at him. Her eyes, he noticed, were large and a very light blue, almost silver.

  ‘You’re not in a hurry, or anything?’ she said.

  ‘Um, no. Not at all.’

  Judy di Castel’Bianco was silent for a moment, studying him intensely, like a cat watching a mouse. ‘If you’re concerned about getting out of the building after the door is locked, I do of course have a key.’

  ‘Great,’ Paul said helplessly. ‘Fine.’

  Another second and a half of intense scrutiny; then: ‘If you’d care to follow me,’ she said, and disappeared. For a moment, Paul was rooted to the spot. Then it occurred to him that she must’ve just walked round the corner and he hadn’t been paying attention. He followed, and there she was, opening the door of the small conference room.

  Today the room was L-shaped, its long side at right angles to the street. Judy di Castel’Bianco sat down at the head of the long, polished walnut table and nodded towards a chair on her left. As Paul sat down, it struck him that something was odd, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  ‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ she said, steepling her unusually long fingers on the table top. ‘First, I should mention that it’s not this firm’s policy to interfere in any way in the personal lives of members of staff; nor is it my place as a partner to pass judgement or anything of that sort. However, I’m aware that my decision to assign Ms Pettingell temporarily to our Los Angeles office may be having repercussions on your—’ She frowned slightly. ‘Your relationship,’ she said, and she spoke the word as if it were an unfamiliar loanword from a foreign language and she wasn’t quite sure how it should be pronounced.

  ‘Actually—’ Paul started to say, but apparently she couldn’t hear him. She was looking past him; only just, a matter of fifteen degrees or so. It was as if she couldn’t actually see him, but had a fairly good idea of where he was likely to be.

  ‘Obviously,’ she went on, ‘if Ms Pettingell’s assignment is causing any difficulties in your respective personal lives, I and we as a firm naturally regret that most sincerely. However—’ She hesitated, apparently unsure about something. ‘If I may speak frankly,’ she went on, ‘and please note that I’m making these observations in a purely unofficial capacity; I can’t help but feel that this situation may actually be all for the best, in that the relationship’ (the same slight stumble over the word) ‘in question was perhaps not entirely advisable, considering the interests of both parties. I don’t claim any special insight in these matters, but you might care to consider the position in that light.’

  Judy di Castel’Bianco stopped speaking and looked at him, as though they were in a play and she’d just given him his cue. Paul looked back at her, and wondered what the hell he was supposed to say. He hadn’t noticed before how extremely high and sharp her cheekbones were. Who were the Fey, anyhow?

  ‘It’s all right, actually,’ he mumbled, ‘we’d just sort of, well, split up. I mean, it was her idea rather than mine, but I think we both knew we weren’t, you know, going anywhere. I mean, I’d sort of got the idea that maybe—’

  Mercifully, she interrupted before Paul could embarrass himself into a coma. ‘Fortuitous,’ she said. ‘It would appear, then, that the situation has worked out quite well. Presumably it will be easier for you to adjust, if you aren’t faced with the prospect of working closely with Ms Pettingell while coming to terms with the cessation of the relationship.’

  It took Paul a moment or so to translate that. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I guess we both need a bit of space,’ he added. (That was what Sophie would have said.) ‘So, like you were saying, you’ve done us both a bit of a favour, really. So,’ he went on, though he knew that trying to make awkward silences better by filling them with the first words that come into your head is like dowsing a fire with petrol, ‘no hard feelings, is about it, really. It’s all just, um, perfectly fine.’

  ‘Indeed.’ Now she was looking off to his other side, just a tad. ‘It’s very fortunate that you feel that way. I trust I haven’t offended you by raising the subject.’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ Paul said quickly. ‘Best to get it all out in the open, and, um, very nice of you to care, I mean be concerned.’ How old was she? The line of her mouth was so hard you could’ve engraved glass with her lips, but her skin was as smooth as a sixteen-year-old’s. ‘Um, was that it? Or—’

  ‘That’s all,’ Judy di Castel’Bianco replied. ‘Thank you for your time. If you’d care to follow me, I’ll see that you leave the building without any problems.’

  That made him wince, reminding him of the only time he’d been in the place after the front door was locked. That was, of course, the time he’d tried to rescue Sophie from the armed goblins who’d kidnapped her. ‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, but she’d already left the room.

  As he’d feared, the goblins were already coming out to play. He’d seen them once or twice since that first traumatic encounter, but the sight of them still made him want to find the nearest sofa and hide behind it. It wasn’t any one thing in particular – the red eyes, the pig, ape, dog faces, the coarse brown and grey fur, the claws – more the overall effect of everything put together.

  But if goblins spooked Paul, it was nothing compared to the effect that Countess Judy seemed to have on goblins. They didn’t seem to like her at all. As she rounded a corner with Paul in tow and walked into a small knot of them, busily playing toss-the-fire-extinguisher, they spun round, shrieked and scampered away in all directions. A small, rat-faced specimen they bumped into on the second-floor landing backed into a corner with its paws over its eyes, whimpering. Another jumped down a whole flight of stairs to get out of her way, landing painfully on one knee and crawling off like a wounded crab. Either the Countess didn’t notice or she was so used to that sort of thing that it didn’t occur to her to make any comment; but Paul couldn’t help noticing that every time she came within fifteen yards of a goblin, her skin actually seemed to glow with a very faint blue light, which clashed horribly with her lipstick.

  All in all, he was relieved when the front door closed behind him; in fact, he told himself, he could probably use a drink.

  For once, the pub on the corner wasn’t too crowded, and he was able to sit down at a table in the corner. Plenty to think about; in fact, the trick would be not thinking about most of it. For example: what made the Countess think that she was under some kind of obligation to explain, or even to apologise? That didn’t strike Paul as being JWW’s style at all; nobody had apologised or made excuses when he found out that he wasn’t actually allowed to resign, on pain of being made to do horrible things to himself and others. Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway if he still had the Portable Door – he could be in Hollywood, California in the time it took to fish the Door out of its cardboard tube and spread it on the wall. But Ricky Wurmtoter had the Door now, so that wasn’t an option; besides, there wouldn’t be any point going, would there? It occurred to him to wonder whether Mr Wurmtoter had relieved him of the thing just in case he was tempted to go over there and make a nuisance of himself, hanging around in the front office while she hid out back. Unlikely, he decided. He felt sure that JWW had more efficient ways of stopping him from being a pest—

  Pest. Pest control. Yuck.

  In the morning, he’d be reporting to Mr Shumway, assuming he managed to get through the rest of the stuff he had to read without falling asleep. A few days ago, he’d have thought it was impossible to imagine a situation where he’d actually be pining for the Mortensen printouts, or the long afternoons he’d spent staring at photographs of bleak Australian desert, scrying them for hidden bauxite deposits. Now, apparently, he was set on a course that would probably, at some stage
, involve him in actual physical danger. After all, it stood to reason that if sorting out dragons and monsters and whatever called for the services of your Ricky Wurmtoters and Benny Shumways, warlike men whose time came expensive, then inevitably those buggers must be dangerous – teeth and claws and all manner of unpleasantness posing a severe risk to one’s health. Paul wasn’t sure he liked the idea of that, not one little bit. Up till then, telling JWW where to stick their job and risking the full force of Mr Tanner’s warped imagination had been out of the question. But.

  But there was a substantial difference between being magically compelled to wander up and down Oxford Street wearing nothing but a coat of blue emulsion, announcing to all the world that you’re a little flower fairy, and actual definitive death. Although Paul was probably more afraid of Mr Tanner than of anyone else he’d ever met in his entire life, he was fairly sure that Tanner wouldn’t go so far as to kill him dead if he refused to carry on working for the old firm. A dragon, on the other hand, or a werewolf or a gorgon or a manticore – if it came to a contest between himself and a dangerous creature, with death as the prize for coming second, he had a feeling that the smart money would be on the fire-breathing, scale-armoured, razor-clawed professional killer, not on Mrs Carpenter’s little boy who came over all faint at the sight of needles. True, Benny Shumway was going to train him, but in his heart of hearts he felt that that probably wouldn’t be quite enough. Groaning pallets stacked high with sows’ ears aren’t unloaded every morning at the gates of the silk-purse factory.

  Paul frowned into the two millimetres of froth at the bottom of his glass. Officially, he no longer cared. He’d just lost the only girl he’d ever loved (correction: the only girl out of the hundred or so he’d loved who’d ever loved him back), and accordingly his life was without meaning and worthless, and any dragon who relieved him of it would be doing him a favour. Officially. In his heart of hearts, however, Paul wasn’t quite so sure about that. And besides: what if the dragon didn’t kill him outright but left him horribly chewed up and burned, blinded, imprisoned in a wheelchair, only able to communicate with the outside world by wiggling his ears in semaphore? Somehow he knew instinctively that he wouldn’t like that at all.

  He turned the problem over in his mind as he dragged home on the bus. The answer came to him in a flash of pure white light while he was in the bath. It was blindingly obvious and brilliantly simple.

  Take, for example, a kamikaze pilot. First, he has to do his basic training: this is how an aeroplane works, this is how to read a map, this is how you take off and land, this is how to make the aircraft go left or right, up or down. Months of classwork and one-to-one tuition later, he’s ready. He’s passed the written tests and the practicals, clocked up his thirty solo hours, attained the exacting standard required of a fighter pilot. He climbs into the cockpit, and never comes back. Meanwhile his slow-witted, cack-handed classmate who flunked navigation and turned his flying instructor’s hair prematurely grey by bouncing down the runway like a rubber ball, survives the war and goes on to found a multinational electronics corporation. Moral: it doesn’t always pay to do your very best.

  With that comforting thought to snuggle up with, Paul fell asleep as soon as his briskly towelled head hit the pillow. He dreamed.

  He dreamed that he was back in the wilds of rural Gloucestershire, in the dark and the rain; and here are the strange children, fixing his car. Here is Carrot-top, handing him the bill, as Monika purrs contentedly on the floodlit forecourt. Here is Paul, explaining that he didn’t have that much cash on him, but—

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ says Carrot-top, looking up at him with round, violet eyes. ‘On the house. Least we could do, seeing it’s you.’

  A moment, while the penny drops. ‘Me,’ Paul repeats, suddenly wary. ‘What about me?’

  Carrot-top smiles. ‘You’re him,’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ says Paul. ‘Am I?’

  ‘’Course you are,’ interrupts another child, all golden hair and missing front teeth. ‘We knew it soon as we saw you. You’re Paul Carpenter, aren’t you? Him. The chosen one.’

  Oink? Paul thinks. ‘I’m not sure I quite—’

  ‘Hang on a sec,’ says Carrot-top; and she darts back into the workshop, while all the other children – there’s rather a lot of them, apparently – come out of the shadows and stand round him, all staring at him as though he is the answer that’s been inadvertently written up on the blackboard instead of the question. Then Carrot-top comes back, lugging along with her a huge calf-bound book, as big as the office-procedures manual, if not bigger. ‘Here you are, look,’ says Carrot-top, and she thrusts the book at him, open somewhere near the middle.

  ‘I don’t actually—’ he starts to say; but there on the page right under his nose is a picture of a good-looking, clean-cut youth, and underneath it the words—

  PAUL CARPENTER

  The Chosen One

  ‘Oh,’ he says; and then, feeling a right prawn for not knowing, ‘Chosen for what?’

  One of the other kids, a mop-headed brunette with glasses, clicks her tongue. ‘To lead your people to the chosen land, of course, silly. Here, look, it tells you all about yourself in the book. Pages 256 to 312 inclusive.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Paul says. ‘Can I have a look at that, please?’ So they hand him the book; and it’s written in normal English letters, and he can see his name repeated over and over again, but the rest of it’s in French, or Italian, or possibly Spanish, and although he can make out about one word in ten, that’s not enough to give him the sense of it; and just as he comes to a bit in Turkish (which apparently he can understand) they take the book away from him and close it with a snap.

  ‘See?’ they say. ‘That’s you, that is.’

  ‘Yes,’ he’s forced to admit. ‘That’s me. But what about me? What am I supposed to—?’

  They’re scowling at him. ‘You shouldn’t make fun,’ they’re saying. ‘That’s rude.’

  So Paul turns to Monika, who’s still quietly idling away behind them, and he asks her what they’re talking about. And she says, it’s obvious, it means that you’re the gepriesener Freiheitsbote, even a dummkopf like you ought to know that – But he doesn’t catch the rest of what she’s saying, because the kids are grabbing hold of him and lifting him up off the ground, carrying him on their shoulders round and round the courtyard, shouting, waving their arms, setting off the fire alarm, cheering like crazy. This is ridiculous; they couldn’t be more pleased with him if he was Lawrence of Arabia and he’d just scored the winning goal in the World Cup final, but at the same time they seem to know exactly who he is, so surely they ought to know he’s just an immature waste of space who’s just been dumped by the only girl—

  Paul opened his eyes. Not the fire bell after all; just the persistent tweeping of his alarm clock. He’d always had the impression that it didn’t think very much of him. This morning it sounded more than usually outspoken in its disapproval. You, some kind of Messiah or something? it seemed to be saying. Yeah, right. In your dreams.

  On Paul’s desk was a memo:

  To: PAC

  From: BS

  Re: Supplies

  Your first job for the department. We’re running low on basic supplies. Check the enclosed stockbook against the inventory and make out purchase requisitions for anything we need.

  BS

  He read the note twice, just to be sure. Could be worse, he thought; if I can spin this out for long enough, maybe I won’t have to die today. He opened the file that came with the memo. It was all pretty straightforward.

  Four hours later Paul had discovered that they were almost out of sulphur candles, yellow 12-volt detonators, .50-calibre Browning machine-gun ammunition and cyanide gas, and they could probably do with topping up on spare bear-trap springs, chainsaw oil, two-way radio-battery charger packs and SlayMore dragon pellets. He checked the unit prices in the suppliers’ list, remembering to deduct the 5 per cent trade discount, and filled out t
wo copies of the blue requisition forms and the yellow cashier’s slip. It occurred to him that maybe heroism wasn’t quite so bad after all. Lunchtime already, and not a drop of blood spilt or shed.

  Lunchtime—

  There hadn’t been anybody on the reception desk when he’d arrived that morning, but he’d been on the doorstep at one minute to nine, so it was reasonable to assume that she’d got in a little bit later than him, and . . . He caught himself at it. Somehow, in the last thirty-six hours, she had stopped meaning Sophie, and now meant Melze. Here we go again. One small step for a lemming, yet another giant leap for lemmingkind.

  Nevertheless. Paul jumped up, grabbed his coat, and raced for the front office like a Pamplona bull who hasn’t realised it was that time already. He very nearly made it; but Benny Shumway suddenly stepped out in front of him and called, ‘Hey, you.’

  Paul knew it was Mr Shumway by his voice and by the thickness of his spectacle lenses; otherwise, he’d have had trouble recognising him. His face was bright red, his beard had shrivelled down to charred wisps, and his suit was covered in white dust. His hands were red, too; not quite red, more of a sort of terracotta brown. He didn’t look at all well.

  ‘First-aid kit,’ he said. ‘In my office, left side of the desk, second drawer down. I’ll be in here,’ he added, and stepped back through the open door he’d appeared from. Paul vaguely remembered it was the closed-file store.

  For some reason, he ran up the stairs instead of just walking. There was a white tin box in the second drawer on the left, though it felt empty. He grabbed it, and ran back.

  Paul had never been in the closed-file store before, and under other circumstances he’d have found the time to gawp. It was a huge room, so vast that it looked like it had mirrors on all four walls and the ceiling, and it was crammed with wooden shelves overflowing with identical large, fat buff manila envelopes. At the most conservative estimate it had to be about the size of Westminster Abbey; put another way, many times larger than the whole of 70 St Mary Axe.