In Your Dreams

by Holt, Tom

  Communication; that was the key. All Paul had to do was figure out how to get through to the little scaly horror, and everything would be peachy.

  Communication: communication begins with information, and information is about the only thing the twenty-first century’s good at. In his wallet, Paul had a whole deck of little plastic rectangles which held, in digital form, every single bit of information about him in the whole world. He pulled them out: Visa card, social-security card, video-library card, mobile-top-up card, Boots bonus-point card – a Tarot pack containing his entire past, present and future – and began stuffing them into the slot, one after another. Puffs of smoke came out like on a really bad day at the Vatican. As the last one vanished into the black hole, he stood back and waited. Inevitably, the wyvern would by now have a complete picture of Paul Carpenter, his station in life, his obligations, resources, passions, habits. From these, the canny creature would realise that Paul wasn’t its enemy, just a friend it hadn’t met yet. It would come out, they’d exchange expressions of mutual respect in sign language, and nobody would have to die or get their fingers bitten.

  He waited. Nothing happened. Then, just as Paul was starting to wonder what had gone wrong, the slot burped at him.

  Shit, he thought.

  He spent the next ten minutes trying to fish around inside the slot with a plastic ruler, until that got eaten too. He tried kneeling beside the machine and singing into it: music is a purer form of communication than words – whales sing to each other, and you never read about mugged whales. Then he tried pleading, and threats.

  Come along, Paul urged himself, this is pathetic. What would Jean-Luc Picard do? But it occurred to him that every time Jean-Luc found himself at the mercy of an unseen super-intelligent adversary, it turned out to be a lost, frightened little orphan who really only wanted to go home. Suddenly, the idea of a stiff jolt of SlayMore made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, he had no cash for a ride back to the office, and the bloody machine had swallowed his card.

  What would Benny do? Well Paul knew the answer to that, it was on the little bit of paper he’d so recklessly ignored. What would Mr Wurmtoter do? Or Mr Tanner, or Professor van Spee? He considered these questions for a while, and then realised that he was asking the wrong questions. The right question, of course, was: what would Paul Carpenter do, assuming Paul Carpenter’s IQ was at least double his shoe size?

  ‘Having problems?’ said a voice to his left.

  He jumped up – he’d been crouching on the ground so that he could whisper into the slot without having to crick his neck – and looked round to see who’d spoken. There was a beautiful girl standing next to him – tall, willowy, natural redhead, lovely smile that almost managed to conceal the fact that it had only just evolved from a rather distinctive grin—

  ‘You,’ Paul growled. Then he remembered. ‘I thought you were off on maternity leave or something.’

  ‘I am,’ the flame-haired beauty replied. ‘Been for my check-up. Harley Street, just over there.’ She waved a hand in some direction or other. ‘Only goblin gynaecologist in Western Europe.’

  ‘Right,’ Paul said. ‘And I suppose that – skin you’re wearing is just some old thing you found at the back of the wardrobe.’

  ‘I like to look nice,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied. ‘What’s wrong with that? I mean, which would you rather look at, this or a six-months-pregnant goblin?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘the answer to your question is yes.’

  Mr Tanner’s mum took a step towards the bank machine and sniffed. ‘Let me guess,’ she said.

  ‘Wyvern, right? And you’ve been feeding it plastic.’

  Paul nodded. ‘That’s a mistake, isn’t it?’

  She smiled. ‘’Fraid so,’ she said. ‘Only two ways to shift wyverns, short of high explosives: gas ’em or starve ’em. Me, I’d have gone for fifty mil of SlayMore mixed twenty-five to one—’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Paul interrupted. ‘But I haven’t got any bloody SlayMore, have I? And I can’t go back to the office to get any, because—’

  ‘Right.’ She was not-sniggering. ‘Well, in that case, you’re left with Plan C.’

  ‘Plan what?’

  She twitched her nose at him; probably a goblin thing. ‘Best summed up in the words of the late Richard Nixon: when you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. Lucky it’s a doe and not a buck.’

  ‘Is it? How’d you know that?’

  ‘Tut,’ replied Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘Who hasn’t done his reading assignments, then? Page 774 of the office-procedures manual; it’s wyvern breeding season, as you ought to know but obviously don’t. What you’ve got there is a broody young doe. Probably got half a dozen eggs. Crisp new Bank of England tenners are their preferred nest material.’

  ‘Oh,’ Paul replied, and for some reason he blushed. Mr Tanner’s mum had the knack of making anything remotely concerned with procreation sound totally obscene. ‘How does that help?’ he added.

  She gave him a pitying look. ‘Shut up and keep perfectly still,’ she said. ‘At this point I’d usually say it won’t hurt a bit, but I read somewhere that lying makes you fat.’ She snapped her fingers, and—

  Paul managed to keep from a forced landing on the hard pavement by flapping his wings. That was fine, except that it made him think, Wings? What wings? and that interfered with the instinct that was keeping him airborne. He tried to remedy that by flapping harder, but all that achieved was to zoom him fast and head first into the wall.

  That hurt; also, it hadn’t done anything to solve his gravity problems, which were starting to get urgent again. He flapped wildly, but all he was managing to do was hang in the air, like the cat in the cartoons when it’s just run off the edge of a cliff. Help! he tried to shout, but all that came out was a terrified kitten-like mewing. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to contend with, a monster came rushing at him, a vulture-beaked, leather-winged feathered dragon, swooping through the air with its talons flexed and its claws out—

  —Which grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and lifted him into the air, yelling, How many times have I told you, you’re not to play outside without asking first in some form of speech that didn’t need words. The expression maternal instinct had just formed inside his mind when a Himalaya-sized Mr Tanner’s mum swatted the monster with a rolled-up newspaper, volleying both of them to the ground in a confused and painful heap.

  ‘Ow!’ Paul yelled, and realised he’d yelled it in English; also, he was sitting on the monster, which had suddenly shrunk down to the size of a small King Charles spaniel.

  ‘Get up, you’re squashing it,’ commanded Mr Tanner’s mum, pulling him out of the way and placing her stilettoed heel firmly on the wyvern’s neck. She’d shrunk, too, which was something. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t be doing with, it’s cruelty to animals.’

  Paul flopped against the wall. ‘What did you do to me?’ he gasped.

  ‘Turned you into a baby wyvern, of course,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied calmly. ‘It’s a well-known fact, mummy wyverns in the nesting season can’t tell their own offspring from strangers. So, soon as it heard a baby in distress, it was out of there like a ferret up a Yorkshireman’s trousers.’ She beamed at him. ‘Job done. Mind, it’ll be a bit pissy when it wakes up, so if I was you I’d kill it now.’

  Paul scowled at her. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Absolutely not. You can’t go around killing things just because they’re inconvenient—’

  The wyvern woke up, and bit him in the leg.

  After that, things got a bit confused, what with Paul trying to stamp on the wyvern’s head with a foot he’d have been better off using to stand on. It was probably falling on it that made it let go of his leg, though Mr Tanner’s mum insisted that she’d felled it with a well-aimed kick from her steel-toecapped Roland Cartiers. By the time he’d staggered to his feet again, everything had gone quiet.

  ‘See?’ said Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘You changed you
r tune pretty quick.’

  ‘But—’ Paul hadn’t bothered looking at the wyvern to see if it was all right. But it didn’t matter, because one glance at it told him there wasn’t any rush.

  ‘Poor little cow,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said. ‘Still, that’s the pest-control game for you.’

  Paul waited to see if it moved, but it didn’t. ‘It’s dead,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘’Course it’s dead,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said. ‘You were sitting on its windpipe for about half a minute. They may be fierce little bastards, but they’re fragile. It’s like I always say, in seven cases out of ten the bum is mightier than the sword.’

  Paul’s knees had gone wobbly, and it probably wasn’t due to the pain from his savaged ankle. ‘I killed it,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t going to do that.’

  Mr Tanner’s mum grinned at him. ‘Drat,’ she said. ‘Still, there you go. Omelettes and eggs. Talking of which,’ she added quickly, ‘you’d better get a wriggle on if you want to nip inside and make them open the vault.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘The eggs, stupid. Wyverns’ eggs. They’re solid gold with a diamond shell, worth an absolute bomb. You don’t want some light-fingered cashier getting to them before you do.’

  ‘No.’ The authority in Paul’s voice surprised him. ‘I’ve just killed the poor thing, I’m not going to steal its eggs too. Maybe if they’re left alone they’ll hatch—’

  ‘You bet they will,’ said Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘And then there’ll be five wyverns in this cash machine instead of just one.’ She hesitated. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘that’s not a bad idea, because then we’ll get called in to get rid of them. Five wyverns at a grand a time; our Dennis would love that.’

  Paul sighed. ‘What we’ll do,’ he said coldly, ‘is rescue the eggs and take them somewhere remote where they can hatch out in safety. Maybe we could call the RSPCA— What’s so funny?’

  Mr Tanner’s mum’s grin had a very faint soppy look to it. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Crazy as a barrelful of ferrets, but funny with it. They’re wyverns, dumbo. Soon as they’re old enough to walk, they’ll head straight for the nearest accumulation of wealth and start making nuisances of themselves. They’re small and fragile, but they can kill. And they do. Really,’ she added, shaking her head, ‘even for a human, you’re weird. What else do you want us to do? Knit little jackets for orphan vampire bats, and put out a saucer of milk for stray cholera bacilli?’

  There didn’t seem any point arguing with her; besides, Paul’s attitude seemed to be having the ghastly side effect of making her feel fond of him, something he wanted to avoid at all costs. Tough on the baby wyverns, of course, but their mum had just eaten all his personal plastic. ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘we’ll go and get the eggs. What’ll happen to them?’

  Mr Tanner’s mum looked sad. ‘They belong to the Bank,’ she said, ‘so they get the money. But we get ten per cent, which’ll please our Dennis. Or,’ she added, ‘we could keep them. Two for you, three for me – we’d be rich. Very rich.’

  Paul’s turn to hesitate. If the baby wyverns were doomed anyway, and if the blood money was going to go to JWW and the Bank . . . If he was rich, there were all sorts of things— But where would be the point in that? He was still bound to JWW by the terms of his contract, money couldn’t change that. And there was also a small matter of having to live with himself.

  ‘I don’t want them,’ he said. ‘You can have them, if you like.’

  Mr Tanner’s mum stared at him. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  Paul shrugged. He wasn’t sure himself. ‘Better you than the Bank, I suppose. Anyway, it was you who got rid of the wyvern, so I guess . . .’ He’d run out of things to say.

  ‘Thanks,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said quietly. ‘Nobody’s ever given me anything like that before. Not that I need the money, mind,’ she added, ‘but it’s the thought that counts.’

  It occurred to Paul that he’d probably just done a very stupid thing. ‘This doesn’t mean—’ he said quickly.

  ‘I know.’ The very lovely girl who Mr Tanner’s mum was being at that moment smiled at him, and there was no trace of a grin. ‘That’s what makes it – well, unusual, because you don’t fancy me rotten. Anyway,’ she said, suddenly brisk, ‘let’s get the eggs and get out of here.’

  Twenty minutes later, they had the eggs. They were heavy, but small enough to fit in the suitcase that Paul had brought along to hold his dragon-slaying gear. They wrapped up the dead wyvern in a black dustbin liner they’d begged from the Bank staff; Mr Tanner’s mum hoisted it up onto her shoulder, saying she had a use for it. Paul didn’t want to know what that might be.

  ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly, ‘thanks. I’d better be getting back.’

  ‘You’re trying to get rid of me,’ Mr Tanner’s mum replied (accurately). ‘But I’ve got cash for a cab fare, and you haven’t.’

  Paul smiled weakly. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said.

  Mr Tanner’s mum had no trouble finding a taxi; she raised her arm, and there one was. If it was magic, it was probably the simple, bitterly unfair kind that looks after pretty young women and leaves gormless-looking young men to fend for themselves. As they walked into reception together – Mr Tanner’s mum was holding Paul’s arm, and he was too preoccupied to make her stop – Melze looked up from whatever she’d been doing and stared at them. Correction; she stared at Paul and scowled at Mr Tanner’s mum. It took Paul a moment to figure out that Melze wouldn’t know who the lovely young female beside him really was.

  Gosh, he thought.

  Then Melze looked away, her body language explaining to Paul that he didn’t exist. He felt a powerful urge to explain (‘It’s not what you think, really she’s this incredibly ugly goblin. Go on, turn back into a goblin so Melze can see . . .’) but resisted it manfully and pressed on towards the fire door. He wasn’t looking, but he had an idea that Mr Tanner’s mum was smirking.

  ‘Don’t know what you see in her, anyway,’ she said, as they climbed the first lot of stairs. ‘Mind you, she’s an improvement on that bony little cow who dumped you. Still, you want to make sure you keep her away from the cream cakes and the choccy biccies.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Paul replied. ‘Please.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  As Paul had hoped, the closed-file store was deserted. He shut the door, opened the suitcase, and handed over the wyvern’s eggs. They were still, he realised guiltily, quite warm.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Mr Tanner’s mum asked, as he held out the first pair to her. ‘If you’ve changed your mind—’

  ‘No, really.’ Mostly he just wanted rid of them. ‘You have them, just get them out of my sight.’

  ‘All right.’ Mercifully, she took them and loaded them into a cardboard box that she’d found on the floor. ‘Now you bugger off,’ she said. ‘I may see you later.’

  Paul fled.

  First, he checked to see if Benny was back yet from doing the banking. But his office was empty, and the small door was ajar. Paul made a special point of not looking through it. Instead, he went back to his own office and looked up ‘wyvern’ in the office-procedures manual’s index. There were lots of references, mostly to do with statutory limitations on when, where and with what they could be killed. In fact, he’d broken at least six laws that afternoon, not that he cared too much about that. Nowhere in the legislation did it say Thou shalt not kill wyverns; the message that came across was more along the lines of Thou shalt not kill wyverns the easy way, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

  Paul was just checking out the commentary on section 665(ix)(2) of the Small Dragons (Extermination) Regulations 1997 (wyverns may not be shot with a mechanical crossbow exceeding 9 feet in width on Sundays between 15th June and 3rd November, except in Scotland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man) when the door opened. This time, Mr Tanner’s mum had reverted to her goblin shape. On balance, Paul decided, trying not to stare at the finger-long tus
ks, the chin bristles, the little dribble of slaver, he preferred her that way. Less intimidating.

  ‘Got something for you,’ she said.

  She opened her hand, and something fell onto the desk in front of him: a single red gemstone about the size of a tiny nugget of coal.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said automatically. ‘Um, what is it?’

  Grin. ‘You don’t want to know.’

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s a wyvern’s third eye.’ Paul winced while managing to keep perfectly still. It was a knack that he’d acquired since he’d been working for JWW. ‘It was a right bitch getting it out. Broke two screwdrivers.’

  ‘Fine,’ Paul said. ‘What does it do?’

  Bigger grin. ‘Pick it up.’

  Paul hesitated. Clearly Mr Tanner’s mum thought he’d be too squeamish. Not so wide of the mark, at that, but he picked it up anyway. ‘Well?’

  ‘Very good. Now look at it.’

  He looked at it, focusing on the sharp, straight facet-lines. ‘I’m looking at it,’ he said. ‘It’s a small red stone, big deal—’ Something turned off his speech at the mains.

  It was like staring at a very small television through a dusty keyhole; but he could see a desk, and behind it—

  ‘In case you haven’t guessed,’ Mr Tanner’s mum said, ‘it shows you stuff you can’t normally see. If you practise, you can learn to see useful things. Otherwise, it just shows you your own true love, so it’s a bit wasted on you. I mean, who needs a fantastically rare stone when all you’ve got to do is nip down the stairs to reception? Still, it’s traditional: your first dragon – wyverns count as dragons, see, just about – you get to keep its eye.’ She clicked her tongue; Paul was still gazing into the stone, as if nothing else existed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. Really, if I’d known you had this thing about fat women—’