In Your Dreams

by Holt, Tom

  Mr Tanner’s mum’s laugh was like the distant tinkling of silver bells in the still air of morning. ‘Get stuffed, Chris,’ she said. ‘I could carry a titchy little thing like that balanced on my nose.’

  Paul edged sideways an inch or so. ‘In that case,’ he muttered, ‘maybe you won’t be needing me after all. Perhaps I should just—’

  ‘No you don’t, lover,’ chirruped Mr Tanner’s mum. ‘I’ve been wondering what you’d look like all sweaty. Talking of which, has some joker turned the heating down? This place was like a fridge all yesterday.’

  Christine shrugged; nothing to do with her. ‘I’ll leave you two to it, then,’ she said. ‘If you go now, the Countess is downstairs with clients in the boardroom – you won’t have to disturb her.’

  The thought of going into Countess Judy’s office bothered Paul, but he couldn’t very well say anything; furthermore, all the way down the stairs and through the maze of corridors he had to put up with Mr Tanner’s mum leering at him, in a way that elicited at least one snigger from a passing secretary.

  ‘Have you got to do that?’ he muttered, as she licked her lips for the third time in as many minutes.

  ‘For crying out loud, Paul, I’m a goblin,’ she snapped. ‘It’s like cats with bits of string, it’s not a conscious decision or anything. You don’t think I’m not sick to the back teeth chasing about after you?’ She sighed. ‘It’s practically a duty. The sooner I’ve dealt with you, the sooner I can get on. It’s like those computer games, where you’ve got to beat the dead boring level before you can move up to the interesting ones.’

  Even with the door closed, Paul could tell from the outside that Countess Judy wasn’t in her room. It was the difference between a light bulb turned on and off. Even so, he knocked on the door and counted to thirty before cautiously turning the handle and going in.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said aloud. ‘Are we in the right room?’

  Behind him, Mr Tanner’s mum laughed. ‘Think about it,’ she said.

  Bare walls, plain wooden floorboards, a ratty old chipboard desk, a plastic stacking chair and the filing cabinet. Paul couldn’t help standing in the doorway and staring. ‘But it wasn’t like this the—’

  ‘I said think about it,’ Mr Tanner’s mum repeated. ‘Like the old Fey proverb: who needs a coach when you’ve got a pumpkin? So long as she’s in the room, it’s like Versailles – or,’ she added, ‘a tart’s boudoir, depending on your aesthetic standards; any kind of decor, soft furnishings, Old Masters on the wall, you name it. When she’s not in it, why should she care? It’s the old light-inside-the-fridge paradox; that’s basically what the Fey are all about.’

  Paul nodded. That made sense; except that the filing cabinet looked exactly the same as it had when he’d caught a glimpse of it the other night. The crummy old government-surplus desk had looked like priceless Louis Quinze. ‘Can we not hang about in here any longer than we need to?’ he said. ‘Sounds silly, I know, but—’

  He tailed off. For once, Mr Tanner’s mum wasn’t grinning, leering or fluttering so much as a single eyelash. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘there are days when you aren’t quite as dumb as you look. You grab the top end, and let’s get out of here before I throw up.’

  Paul took hold of his end of the filing cabinet and, when Mr Tanner’s mum got to ‘three’, he tried to lift. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, straightening up in pain, ‘that thing’s heavy. What’s she got in it, for pity’s sake?’

  Mr Tanner’s mum scowled at him. ‘There are also days,’ she said, ‘when you make depleted uranium look like gossamer. Trust me, you don’t want to ask questions like that in a place like this.’

  Paul was puzzled. ‘Depleted uranium?’

  ‘As in dense.’

  ‘Oh, right. So you don’t think we should try taking the drawers out first, make it easier to carry?’

  ‘No.’

  Whatever else Mr Tanner’s mum might have been, she surely was strong. Once she’d taken the weight at her end, all Paul really had to do was help steer, and open the cashier’s room door with his spare hand once they’d got there.

  ‘Oh, great,’ Melze sang out as they backed the cabinet through the doorway. ‘I’ve been waiting for that. Can you put it there in the corner, just next to the bookshelf? Thanks.’

  Just a moment, Paul thought. ‘You’ve been waiting for it?’ he asked.

  ‘You bet. I hate having little piles of paper littered all over the floor.’

  Paul straightened up, trying to ignore the chorus of protests from his back. ‘You’re going to keep stuff in here?’

  Melze looked at him. ‘Paul, it’s a filing cabinet. You put papers in them, you don’t teach them the flute or take them on walking holidays looking at interesting old churches.’

  ‘But it’s full.’

  Melze laughed, and pulled open a drawer. ‘No, it’s not,’ she said. ‘Look, empty. Unless you count very old dead spiders.’

  Paul looked at the empty drawer, then back at Mr Tanner’s mum who lifted her shoulders in a tiny little shrug. ‘Well, anyway,’ Paul said, ‘there you go. I hope you’re very happy together.’

  ‘Actually, it’s not just for me, the top three drawers are for those Mortensen things. I gather you had a really fun time putting them in order.’

  ‘Yes, but you’ll never get all of them in just three drawers. There were mountains of them—’ He paused. Melze was stuffing armfuls of familiar-looking papers into the top drawer of the cabinet. ‘There,’ she said, ‘all done. Unless you’ve got a few more you’ve been keeping back for a rainy day.’

  ‘That’s all ?’ Paul gasped, but Melze just shrugged. ‘It’s got nice big drawers,’ she said (and, to Paul’s surprise, Mr Tanner’s mum didn’t say a single word). ‘So,’ she added, perhaps a bit too casually, ‘you free for lunch today?’

  Paul was about to say something – yes, probably – when Mr Tanner’s mum pushed past him and stood between him and Melze. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but he’s taken. There’ll be another one along in a minute.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Paul spluttered. But he didn’t get any further than that, because Mr Tanner’s mum elbowed him, very subtly and very effectively, in the solar plexus. He took a couple of steps back and thought about things for a bit, while Melze and Mr Tanner’s mum stared at each other like a couple of multinational companies playing hostile takeovers. It was Melze who broke eye contact first. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow then, maybe.’

  Mr Tanner’s mum’s jawline had gone all Mount Rushmore; now it relaxed into the classic grin.

  ‘In your dreams,’ she said; and, for some reason, that seemed to bother Melze; she turned her back on the pair of them and muttered something about having work she had to get on with. Mr Tanner’s mum clamped her hand round Paul’s elbow with a grip like a mole wrench and steered him out of the room.

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said, and you could’ve sharpened carbon steel on her voice. ‘Not one word, got it?’

  Paul was still too deeply interested in when it was going to stop hurting to argue; he’d explain it all to Melze later, he decided, when the little red and green lights had stopped flashing behind his eyelids.

  Neither of them spoke as Mr Tanner’s mum conducted him down the stairs; the only thing missing, Paul reckoned, was the raincoat over their wrists. She let go of his elbow when they reached the ground floor. ‘All right,’ she muttered, ‘so maybe I shouldn’t have hit you so hard. I’m a tad out of practice with my gentle hitting these days. But you’ve got to promise me; just this once, and it’s only for the next few days or so, try thinking with your brain instead of your—’

  That was rather more than Paul could take, coming from her. ‘Please,’ he said, with what he hoped was chilling courtesy, ‘just leave me alone, will you? For ever?’

  She shook her head at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why’ve I always got to pick the feckless, pathetic ones?’ She walked away before he could think of anything
to say.

  The rest of the week was almost disturbingly calm. A string of trivial pest-control enquiries filtered through from other departments; Cas Suslowicz sent Paul a memo asking him to find out how to evict a bad-luck dragon from the site of a multibillion-dollar mall development in Singapore (the answer was, surprisingly, surrounding the perimeter with ordinary garden twine soaked in creosote, the smell of which bad-luck dragons can’t abide); Mr Tanner sent Christine down with a client’s file and instructions to research cost-effective methods of dealing with an infestation of water nymphs in the swimming pool of a holiday camp on the north Lincolnshire coast (Paul spent three hours vainly searching for water-nymph references in the office-procedures manual; finally, in frustration, he scribbled Sharks? in pencil on the cover of the file, and went out to lunch; when he got back, the file had gone and in its place was a handwritten note from Mr Tanner saying, Good idea, thanks ); Professor van Spee himself, no less, summoned Paul to his office and asked him to draft a letter to a client advising on which varieties of garlic were most suitable for repelling which categories of vampire. Fortunately, Paul recalled having seen a Suttons seed catalogue in Benny Shumway’s desk drawer, with Post-It notes sticking out of the pages; he waited till Melze was out of the room (for some reason), then sneaked in and got it. As he’d hoped, Benny had scribbled copious notes in the margins, and he was therefore able to advise the professor’s client that Fleur de Lys and White Pearl were both equally good against ordinary night-stalking vampires, but Mersley White or Sultop were preferred in areas known to be infested with the rarer daywalking variety.

  ‘Excellent,’ the professor said, when Paul took him the draft. ‘You seem to have mastered a notoriously difficult discipline in a short time, which suggests a natural aptitude. You might consider specialising in pest control once you’ve completed your trial periods in the other departments.’

  The unexpected praise had hit Paul harder than Mr Tanner’s mum’s elbow, and all he could do was grin feebly and shake his head. ‘I don’t think I’d like that,’ he mumbled. ‘Thanks all the same. Too much – well, killing and stuff. And I don’t think I’d really cope with the mortal peril terribly well, either.’

  ‘You think so?’ The professor seemed almost amused. ‘It seems to me that you’ve been handling it admirably over the past few weeks.’

  It took a moment for that one to sink in, by which time Paul had already started to say, ‘Well, it’s the killing that really bothers me, so—’ He stopped short and his mouth flopped open, like the tailgate of the lorry off the back of which good things fall. ‘’Scuse me,’ he said.

  The professor raised an eyebrow. ‘Come now, Mr Carpenter,’ he said. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. And,’ he added, lifting his glasses and rubbing his eyelids, ‘I have to admit that I’m not sure if I’d have been able to display such fortitude had I been in your position. You may have doubts about your courage, but I don’t. Good afternoon.’

  Somehow, staying in the professor’s room once you’d been dismissed was simply impossible, like defying gravity. Paul stumbled back to his office in a daze, and spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the door, trying very hard not to think about what he’d been told.

  Of course, he reflected bitterly, it would have to be bloody Friday today; now I’ll have the whole weekend to skulk timidly in, won’t that be fun? At least while I’m here I’ve got work and stuff to keep me occupied, and maybe just possibly someone would come and help me if I was attacked and started screaming the place down. At home, though —

  Quickly, Paul applied his mental handbrake. Don’t be silly, he told himself, it’s all taken care of – thanks to dear, good, brave, wise, thoughtful Uncle Ernie, who’d gone out of his way to make sure that Paul inherited that spectacularly useful Sea Scout badge. If something nasty did come for him in the middle of the night, all he’d have to do would be to wave it under their noses (assuming they had noses, of course) and they’d be off like rats up conduits. To think: he’d been worrying himself to a frazzle, and all the time the answer to his problems was right there, in his pocket.

  Or rather, it wasn’t.

  Brief panic break, followed by detailed search of pockets, floor, desk drawers, pockets again. He was feeling his jacket lining just in case it had slipped through a small hole when he remembered the last time he’d seen the badge; he’d put it on top of a pile of Mortensen printouts, to keep the goblins off them until they were collected. That was a week ago, and he hadn’t seen or even thought about the badge since.

  There was a remote chance it had fallen on the floor and got kicked under the desk, but Paul disposed of that hope fairly quickly. The obvious conclusion, therefore, was that someone had taken it – either casual kleptomania, or because they wanted it, or because they didn’t want him to have it. No prizes for guessing which hypothesis he inclined towards.

  The journey home that night was little short of terrifying. People kept coming up behind him; not that unusual for London in the rush hour, but Paul had no way of knowing whether any of the scurrying lemmings squashing past him on the pavement or crushing against him on the bus was a disguised goblin or a shapeshifting Fey assassin or even an unusually tall dwarf. To cap it all, the light bulb on the stairs had blown, and he had to creep up to his flat through shadows thicker and more menacing than anything he’d had to face on any of his trips to deposit the takings at the Bank of the Dead. When at last he was able to close his front door on the outside world and he’d conducted an inch-by-inch search of the flat, torch in one hand, his most lethal weapon (which happened to be a cheese knife left over when his parents moved to Florida) gripped in the other, he locked, chained and bolted the door and flumped bonelessly onto the sofa.

  Ten minutes later he’d stopped shaking, and was starting to feel just a little foolish. It hadn’t occurred to Paul before that maybe Professor van Spee had simply been winding him up. True, the professor didn’t look like he had a sense of humour, just as lions don’t appear to have pink wings; but wasn’t that a much likelier explanation than that someone was prepared to go to all the trouble of killing him? Who’d want to do that? Why murder someone who’d never really mattered in his entire life, a mere Mortensen-collator and part-time filing-cabinet-shifter’s assistant? Exactly. No motive. Getting into a state over a joke that had fallen flat and his own pathetic cowardice. Stumbling wearily into the kitchen, Paul traded the cheese knife (ought to give it a suitable name, now that he’d adopted it as his personal sidearm; Edam-cleaver, maybe, or Cheddar’s-bane) for a can opener, and fixed himself a rather indifferent dose of beans on toast. Then he sat down to watch the news.

  Just ordinary, everyday stuff: mundane scandals, normal crimes, the reassuringly familiar lies of politicians. Nothing about a civil war among the Fey, or werewolves in Surrey, or the release of hostages from the dungeons of Grendel’s Aunt. No big deal—

  The sitting-room window exploded in a snowstorm of broken glass. Something large and heavy tumbled through; it was alive, caught up in the curtain like an arena victim in a gladiator’s net. The curtain rail and pelmet came away from the wall, and the writhing bundle crashed down on Paul’s relatively new Ikea coffee table, crumbling it into dust and fragments. Paul was on his feet before he knew it, stumbling backwards until he couldn’t go any further because of the goddamned interfering wall. The thing was bouncing up and down on the floor like an incompetent escapologist, fighting with the curtain and only succeeding in tangling itself further; then it stopped moving for a whole second and a half – enough time to run away in, provided your legs work, which Paul’s didn’t. Then a tearing, slitting noise, and a bright steel tongue poked through the white curtain lining, like the beak of a baby chicken pecking through the eggshell. Paul stared in horrified fascination as the blade sawed its way along the length of the bundle. He’d seen a score of sci-fi movies where the alien monster fights its way out of its glistening cocoon before springing up, alert, gigantic and ready for instant may
hem. He hadn’t realised that they were really nature documentaries.

  But the thing that crawled painfully out of the cloth chrysalis wasn’t a multiple-eyed black-carapaced nightmare. It was Ricky Wurmtoter, dressed in faultless evening dress but no shoes or socks, and holding a sword. He struggled to his knees, looked up, saw Paul and grinned.

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ he panted. ‘I couldn’t remember if your flat’s 36 or 38.’ Then he closed his eyes and slowly toppled over, taking out the footstool as he went.

  ‘Mr Wurmtoter?’ Paul whispered.

  ‘Ricky, please.’ He reached out with his left hand, groping for the sword, which he’d dropped. ‘How’s things? Haven’t seen you in a—’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Ricky Wurmtoter took a moment to answer. ‘Actually,’ he murmured, ‘no. Bump on the head, probably two busted ribs, couple of extra holes in places where there shouldn’t be any, and there seem to be three of you, going round and round like a windmill. Other than that, bloody awful. How’s yourself?’

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ Paul answered automatically. ‘Look, should I call a doctor? I mean, no, sorry. Stay still, I’ll phone for a—’

  Ricky shook his head. ‘Please don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t like hospitals.’ He lifted his head, and Paul could see five ragged parallel lines of caked blood across his cheek. ‘Afraid of needles, actually,’ he said. ‘I’ll be fine if only I can get to a repair kit. You wouldn’t happen to have one lying about, would you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Paul said. ‘All I’ve got is aspirin and plasters. There used to be some cough mixture in the bathroom cabinet, but I think it must’ve been Sophie’s, because she took it with her when she walked out on me. Oh bugger, I’m talking drivel again.’

  Ricky laughed as he picked small needles of glass out of his hands. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, with a slightly hysterical edge to his voice that Paul found rather frightening. ‘What I really need is about a gallon of really strong black coffee.’ He paused, and a look of genuine terror filled his eyes. ‘You have got coffee, haven’t you?’