by Holt, Tom
‘Where are we?’ Paul said, looking round. Behind him, he could see a tall, spiky, bare-topped mountain, set in a flat plateau of black shingle. Volcanic ash? Should’ve paid attention in geography, instead of doodling Klingon battle-cruisers on the back cover of his exercise book.
Benny said a name, but it didn’t mean anything to Paul. ‘I meant, what country?’
‘Oh,’ Benny replied. ‘Iceland. Very remote, see. In the middle of fucking nowhere, nobody can hear you scream. Come on, it’s a long walk to where I parked the helicopter.’
Benny was right about that; but he didn’t seem concerned about the possibility of pursuit, and if there’d been one, Benny wasn’t the sort to turn a blind eye to it. That was comforting, at least.
‘Benny,’ Paul said, after about an hour.
‘Hm?’
‘I think I know why you don’t want Sophie to wake up.’
Longish silence. All Paul could see was half the back of Benny’s head, the rest of it obscured by Sophie’s hair. ‘Well,’ Benny said, ‘you aren’t stupid. In fact, I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out.’
‘So,’ Paul said. ‘So you’re the—?’
He couldn’t say the word; but Benny laughed and said it for him. ‘The traitor? Yup, that’s me.’
‘And you don’t want Sophie waking up because that’d be the end of Countess Judy.’
Half the back of Benny’s head nodded slightly. ‘That’s right.’
‘Because you, um, you’re in love with her.’
Benny’s silence was thoughtful rather than anything else. ‘Not sure about that any more,’ he said. ‘Oh, I was once. Very much so. Wouldn’t have married her otherwise.’
‘Married her?’
‘Yup. She’s my third – no, scratch that – fourth wife. I keep forgetting Tanya, because she only hung around for a week. That’s right, Judy was number four, after Tanya but before Heidi. I think,’ he added after a moment. ‘Anyway, yes, we were married. She left me, of course, but not for anybody else, which is a consolation, I guess. Actually, it isn’t, but who cares?’
Paul nodded, though of course Benny couldn’t see. ‘So you weren’t captured by the Fey at all. You were, well, bait.’
‘Yup.’
‘For Ricky?’
‘Do me a favour. For you.’
It was as though Benny had momentarily lapsed from English into an obsolete dialect of Portuguese. ‘Me?’ Paul repeated.
‘Well, naturally. You’re the one she needed to get shot of, after all.’
‘Me? Why, for God’s sake?’
Benny sighed. ‘Because you were whatsername’s boyfriend; you know, this one here. Name’s on the tip of my tongue.’
‘Sophie. But that can’t be right, because she dumped me.’
‘You reckon.’
‘Yes,’ Paul snapped, ‘it was hardly a grey area. She wrote me this letter, and—’ He faltered. ‘She wrote me a letter,’ he mumbled.
Benny’s laugh came out as a thunderous snort. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘You might’ve got a letter, and it might have been in her handwriting, but I’m prepared to bet you my front teeth in a simple platinum setting that Judy wrote it, for reasons so obvious they’re visible from orbit. All that stuff about a transfer to the Los Angeles office . . . You believed all that?’
‘Well,’ Paul said. ‘Yes, actually.’
‘Good God. Anyway, that’s why Judy wanted you killed; but of course when she asked the rest of them for permission, you being partnership property and all, they said no, find someone cheaper. So she had to find some other way. First step, naturally, was getting you assigned to the heroism department, because she figured someone as monumentally feckless as you’d only last two minutes.’ Benny sighed. ‘But something went wrong there.’
‘It did? I mean—’
‘Yes,’ Benny said slowly. ‘At the time we thought it was dead handy, since Ricky had shoved off to try and use your Door thing to find this place; it meant you’d be put in with me, and I’d have no trouble at all arranging for you to meet with a nasty accident. But—’ Benny shook his head, as though he still couldn’t believe it. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘Dunno why; I mean, look at you, what’s to like? But I just couldn’t. So I had to go and do all the monster-fighting and vampire-staking, all on my own, enough work for two people full-time, while I had you swanning round the office filling in bloody stupid forms. I kept asking myself, why am I doing this? Apart from anything else, it was getting embarrassing every time I had to go and report to Judy; nope, not dead yet, still not dead, wasn’t all that dead last time I looked, sorry, will try harder. I had to make out you were some kind of naturally gifted superhero, one look at you and the dragons and chimeras and enormous man-eating slugs just rolled over and died of fright.’
‘Oh,’ Paul said.
‘You can bloody well say that again. Anyhow,’ Benny went on, quickening his step a little, ‘since that obviously wasn’t working, she got a little bit anxious. That’s why she had me plant the bomb in your office.’
Paul nearly choked. ‘You.’
‘Me. Oh, come on,’ Benny added scornfully. ‘You very nearly caught me at it, remember? I practically had to throw you out the door, that night. Dunno whether I was trying to do it right or not,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, I made a lovely job of the arming mechanism and all that stuff – I’m a dwarf, after all, we’re good with mechanical things. But I still reckon that if I was really trying to scrag you, I wouldn’t have told the first goblin I met that you’d got a pound of raw liver stashed in your filing cabinet. Greedy little buggers, goblins,’ he added with distaste. ‘I told him, don’t you go stealing it, mind, you’ll get into all sorts of trouble. Would he listen? Would he hell as like.’
‘I see,’ Paul said; and even as he said it, he knew it was something of an understatement.
‘Judy wasn’t half pissed off about it,’ Benny went on. ‘The rest of them, they’re not stupid, they knew perfectly well she must’ve had something to do with it, but of course they couldn’t say anything; not with the amount of money she brings in for the firm every year. So she blamed me – even then I don’t think she guessed I’d done it on purpose, just thought I was useless. She’s always made that mistake, where I’m concerned. That’s when she decided killing you wasn’t the right approach; you just didn’t seem to want to hold still and be killed. So she dreamed up – sorry, no pun intended – she cooked up the hostage-rescue scenario, sent me off to the basement and sent you to fetch me. Now that really ought to have worked; would’ve worked, too, if that bloody goblin hadn’t stuck her oar in. See, I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill you, but I had no trouble kidding myself that if you got locked up in the dungeons, that’d be all right. Sooner or later, Judy’d decide you weren’t a threat any more and let you go; maybe I’d be able to persuade her, given time. Deep down, I realised that was all bull; if you ended up in the dungeons, you’d stay there till you rotted. But it wasn’t the same as actually finishing you off, so that was all right. I was mad as hell when Rosie burst in and whisked you away. Anyhow,’ he said, ‘there’s the helicopter, look. And in case you’re wondering, no, I’m not going to chuck you in the ocean halfway across the Atlantic or anything like that. No point any more, I’ve blown it completely as far as Judy’s concerned. No bad thing, either. Incredible pair of legs, but not a very nice personality.’
Paul hesitated. He could see the helicopter below them in a small hollow; he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to get in it. ‘We’re taking Sophie, right?’ he said.
Benny shrugged. ‘Well, I was assuming you’d refuse to get in without her.’
‘Quite right. So if you deliberately crash the helicopter into a mountain or something, Sophie’d be killed too. She’d die in her sleep.’
For a moment, Paul wondered if Benny had got the point. ‘You know what,’ he said, ‘that hadn’t occured to me. Smart. But don’t worry about it, I’m not the self-sacr
ificing type. Besides,’ he added, almost carelessly, ‘my fiancée wouldn’t like it.’
‘Your—’
‘Oh, didn’t I mention that? I’m engaged. Again,’ Benny added, rather superfluously. ‘Come to think of it, that’s probably why I decided to pack it all in with Judy and save you. She’s quite fond of you, you see, in a motherly sort of way; it was one of the things we talked about, actually, when we were locked up together in the fake dungeon, waiting for Judy to come and let us out. Nice kid, softhearted; and of course, it’s never exactly bad business to marry the boss’s sister.’
Oink? Paul thought; then he understood. ‘Monika?’ he gasped. ‘You’re planning to marry my car?’
Benny tutted disapprovingly. ‘She’s not your car,’ he said, ‘she belongs to the firm. And anyway, you’ll be better off getting the bus or the train – it saves money. Trust me on that,’ he added, ‘I’m the cashier, remember?’
‘But—’ Paul couldn’t think of a polite way to put it. ‘She’s a car, dammit,’ he said. ‘Won’t that, er, make difficulties?’
Benny shrugged. ‘I like a challenge,’ he said. ‘There’ll be some way to put her right again, you can bank on that. Till then at least, I’ll know I’ve got a significant other I can trust implicitly. Like the telly ad used to say, why can’t everything in life be as reliable as a Volkswagen?’
As if on cue, it started to snow. Benny pulled open the helicopter door (he had to stand on tiptoe to reach the handle) and swung Sophie in as though she was a bag of shopping. ‘You can ride in the back with her,’ he said, ‘and for crying out loud, make sure she doesn’t shift about, bang her head, anything like that.’
Paul looked at him. ‘She’s going to wake up sooner or later,’ Paul said, ‘I won’t leave her like this.’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Benny replied. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind getting in. Quite apart from the fact that every second we’re here we’re risking getting caught by Judy’s people, it’s perishing cold with the door wide open.’ He sneezed like a cannon shot.
‘All right,’ Paul said, and he scrambled in. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Home,’ Benny said, with a faint sigh. ‘Lots of things I’ve got to do. What sort of a fist has that dozy little tart of Judy’s been making with my job, by the way? If she’s mucked up my filing system, I’ll wring her insubstantial bloody neck.’
‘Actually, she seemed to be handling it okay,’ Paul replied mildly. ‘What was the point of her, by the way?’
‘Plan B,’ Benny said. ‘If you were in love with your childhood sweetheart, you wouldn’t worry too much about what had happened to your previous bird. I wasn’t keen on the idea from the start, to be honest with you. I mean, she was just too perfect, too tailor-made, even a complete nitwit like you had to realise that. Presumably that’s what happened?’ he queried.
‘Well, partly,’ Paul told him. ‘Also, the real one happened to phone me out of the blue; or rather, someone got into her dreams and made her want to. And—’ Paul grinned, though Benny couldn’t see; he was busy with the controls. ‘She wasn’t the girl of my dreams after all.’
‘Close, but no cigar, as Bill Clinton would say?’
‘Sort of.’ Paul shrugged. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, looking down at Sophie’s still, pale face, ‘the Girl of My Dreams isn’t the girl of my dreams, either.’
‘Not sure I follow,’ Benny said. ‘Not sure I can be fucked to try. Hold on tight, now; I’m a bloody good pilot, but the pedals on this thing are a long way down.’ Paul sniffed. By the feel of it, he’d caught Benny’s cold; the same one, presumably, that had been floating round the office for weeks. Or not, because Benny had been away long enough to have got over it, if it was the office special. Did the Fey get colds? Like it mattered.
Never having done much flying, Paul didn’t realise quite how soporific the experience can be until it was nearly too late. He caught himself just as he was on the point of closing his eyes; bad business, that would be, when the Queen of the Fey was after him and he was in the same confined space as her at best ambivalent ex-husband. He dug his fingernails into his arm, blinked furiously, made a point of ignoring the flock of sheep that dogged his peripheral vision as they formed up to spell out the words COUNT US! Sleep lapped at the backs of his eyelids like the sea against a wall, gradually eroding, continually probing for a way through. It had been a long time since he’d had any proper sleep, and his adrenalin reserves were more or less played out. Sooner or later—
Damn, Paul thought; but I only closed my eyes for a split second, to rest them. I must wake up, right now. I really have to wake up now. I shall count to three, and then I’ll wake up. Snff. Bloody cold.
Zzzzz.
Paul was in Countess Judy’s office, sitting across the desk from her. She was reading some big fat document, and he knew that he wasn’t important enough to interrupt her till she’d finished. On the desk in front of him lay a strange collection of objects; a screwdriver, a pen, an old-fashioned wind-up watch that had seen better days, a Sea Scout badge and a bit of glass out of a busted flame-effect electric fire. There was also a photograph album, and since he was bored and Countess Judy didn’t look like she even knew he was there, he decided to flip through it to pass the time. So he picked it up, but the pages were all hazy and fuzzy, as though he hadn’t got his reading glasses on. But of course, how stupid. Paul took the lump of coloured glass and pressed it carefully into his eye socket. At once the fuzziness cleared, and the photographs were as sharp as could be.
The first one: taken out in the country somewhere on a bright, frosty day. Sophie was sitting on a gate, wearing a red bobble-hat and knitted mittens; Paul was standing beside her, holding her hand, looking at her rather than at the camera. They were both laughing, and the laughter had solidified into a little cloud of white vapour, the way your breath does in winter. He knew, of course, that the picture was false; there had never been such a day, they’d never had time for romantic country walks in cheerful primary-coloured knitwear, and he was prepared to bet cash money that Sophie had never owned a red bobble-hat in all her life. It was a pretty image, but a plain lie. He turned the page.
The second one: Paul recognised the setting as the landing beside the Rialto bridge in Venice, because he’d Portable-Doored there many times during solitary lunch hours, before he and Sophie got together. It was moonlight in the photo; she was sitting with him at a café table, with the steep span of the bridge behind them, a gondola slightly out of focus over his right shoulder. She was wearing some kind of evening thing (Paul’s grasp of the technical vocabulary was vague at best) that made her bare shoulders look slim rather than bony, and seemed to drink up the moonlight and glow with it, and on her feet were high-heeled glass slippers. False, fake and phoney, just like the first one. Tsk.
The third one had no place in an album that might fall into the hands of children or persons of a nervous disposition. The background was lush green grass sprinkled with fat white daisies, and presumably it was meant to be warm midsummer weather, since neither of them exhibited so much as a single goosepimple. That hadn’t happened, either. Paul would have remembered if it had.
The fourth one was even more bizarre. In the background, a golden-thatched country cottage, doorway an impenetrable entanglement of climbing roses in full bloom. Sitting in deckchairs on the lawn on either side of a small rosewood tea-table, a handsome, well-preserved elderly couple watched their grandchildren playing tennis on the full-sized court next to the pony paddock. Paul had to look twice before he figured out that the principals were supposed to be Sophie and himself.
Then Paul realised that Countess Judy was looking at him, and had been doing so for some time. He snapped the album shut and mumbled an apology, but she waved it aside.
‘Would you like to keep it?’ she said.
Paul shook his head. ‘Thanks,’ he replied, ‘but it’s not real. None of that stuff happened, or else it won’t happen.’ He
sneezed. Fortunately, he had a dream handkerchief in his pocket. It even had his initials embroidered in one corner.
‘That could be changed,’ the Countess said; and a young woman stepped forward out of the shadows behind Judy’s chair: Sophie, but with a blank, empty look on her face. ‘I’m not saying you wouldn’t notice the difference,’ Judy said. ‘You’d be very conscious of it. This,’ she went on, flicking a thumb in the direction of the girl at her side, ‘is the young woman in the photographs. She’ll never criticise you, belittle you, make you feel stupid or awkward; she’ll never cheat on you or get bored with you or make demands or stop you doing what you want to do with your life. She’ll always be there for you, no whining or complaints or recriminations, no unfathomable mood swings; she won’t expect you to be telepathic or tell you to do something and then yell at you because you did it; she’ll appreciate you, admire you, love you till the day you die. She’ll be the girl of your dreams, but her face and voice and mannerisms and everything you recognise the real thing by will be exactly the same.’ Judy’s voice was soft as water, soothing and gentle, the way a mother’s voice should be but Paul’s mother’s never was. ‘I’m sorry I tried to fob you off with that cheap, tacky Demelza Horrocks; I underestimated you, assumed you were shallow, insensitive, immature; I thought that so long as you had a girl who was prepared to love you, you’d be happy. I was very stupid. But now I can make it up to you. I can give you perfection.’
Paul frowned. ‘No, thanks,’ he said.
Judy laughed, and the fake Sophie vanished. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was worth a try, I suppose, but I knew you wouldn’t settle for a walking, talking, living doll. Never mind.’ She leaned forward slightly and folded her hands on the desk. ‘Here’s the deal, Mr Carpenter. Give me ten minutes to set my affairs in order; I’ve found a replacement source, so all I have to do is vacate Ms Pettingell and move across. I trust there are no hard feelings.’
Paul wiped his dripping nose and looked at her. ‘I’ve won?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s no big deal,’ she said. ‘I’ve moved before, it’ll mean a day or so to adjust but that’s only a minor inconvenience, nothing more. Far more important to get matters settled before this ridiculous feud disrupts my schedule any further.’
