by Holt, Tom
‘But you tried to kill me,’ Paul pointed out.
‘Yes, so I did.’ Judy sighed. ‘But you’re too much trouble to kill, Mr Carpenter. Trying to dispose of you has wasted my time and my energy, and I’m getting behind on the things I ought to be doing. My fault; when I had you posted to the heroism department, I foolishly failed to notice that you are indeed a hero; and heroes can’t just be snuffed out as easily as palace guards in a swashbuckler. It’s far more convenient and cost-effective for me to give in and admit defeat. Take back your girl, Mr Carpenter, and may you both live happily ever after. As a residence, she isn’t worth the effort.’
Now there was a bed, the hospital type with little wheels, standing beside the desk; in it lay Sophie, the way she’d been in Judy’s dormitory. As Paul watched, his eyes itching (but it was only the cold, he assured himself) she muttered something and turned restlessly in her sleep, the way she generally did just before she woke up. Very tentatively, he reached out and touched her, as if to check that she was real.
The shock was painful, like brushing against an electric fence. It was the same sensation he’d felt when the fake Melze had tried to hold his hand. ‘No, thanks,’ he repeated. ‘I think I’ll stick with the real real Sophie, if it’s all the same to you.’
Quite unexpectedly, Countess Judy laughed, even clapped her hands. ‘Well done, Mr Carpenter,’ she said cheerfully. ‘You know, just occasionally, now and then, I can see a little tiny bit of your great-uncle in you. I have to say,’ she added, as the bed and the most recent fake Sophie vanished, ‘that one would’ve fooled most people in the trade. So, I think we understand each other now, don’t we?’
Oink, Paul thought. ‘Do we?’
‘I believe so.’ Countess Judy leaned back in her chair and rested her chin on her fingertips. Molto elegante, like a middle-period Sophia Loren without that slightly bovine quality around the jawline. ‘You’re in possession right now, but dear Benny won’t let you wake her up; more to the point, you may have her, but I have you, since you haven’t got the stamina to stay awake.’ As she said it, Paul felt steel clamps snap shut around his arms, pinning him to the chair. ‘Sorry about that,’ Judy said. ‘A bit too James Bond for my taste and scarcely original, but I can’t make the effort to be subtle right now.’
But Paul only shook his head. ‘There’s some reason why you can’t kill me, isn’t there?’ he said. ‘Otherwise you’d have done it already, as soon as I dozed off. And you can’t lock me up in your stupid dungeon, either. And these gadgets—’ He raised his arms, which passed through the clamps as though they weren’t there, which of course they weren’t. ‘Seems to me that your effective magic’s a bit of a contradiction in terms. Doesn’t work on me any more, does it?’
Judy clapped her hands again, but this time slowly, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘Only certain very elementary procedures; the ones that don’t hurt, mostly. We can try the ones that do hurt if you like, and see if they’re still working.’
At once, Paul felt as though all his teeth were being drilled at the same time, without anaesthetic. ‘Pain, you see,’ Judy was saying, ‘is effective magic in its purest form. There is no such thing as pain, it’s always all in the mind, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A few drops of liquid or a whiff of gas puts it out of action completely. But without the drops or the gas, you can know as surely as anything that it’s just electrical impulses in your nerves, and it’ll still hurt enough to stop your heart or burst a blood vessel in your brain.’ She shook her head. ‘If ever I have the time, I’m going to write a book about beauty and pain. They’re so alike in so many ways: neither of them really exist, but both of them are strong enough to override the strongest human mind and turn the wisest and bravest of us all into clowns. Someone who can command beauty and pain – well, they’d have all the bases covered, as we say where I come from. Don’t you agree?’
There was only a tiny bit of Paul’s mind still sticking up above the flood of pain, like Mount Ararat in the Bible. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘It’s bullshit. And you can’t kill me or put me in your bloody coal cellar, so fuck you.’
Whereupon the pain stopped, and Judy jerked back in her chair as though she’d been slapped. ‘How dare you talk to me like that?’ she said; and Paul thought that if she had a heart, it wouldn’t have been in it.
‘What were you planning on doing?’ he asked sweetly. ‘Going to fire me?’ He laughed. ‘I think I’ll wake up now, if you don’t mind. And when I do, I’m going to wake up Sophie as well. And then you’ll be finished. For ever. So if anybody’s getting the sack—’
This time, the pain was in Paul’s chest and left arm, presumably intended to simulate a heart attack. There was an awful lot of it, but it didn’t actually hurt; it was a back projection of pain, as phoney as the polystyrene rocks in the old Star Trek. ‘Don’t bother,’ he said. ‘You’re wasting time, and you haven’t got a lot of it left. You know,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘apart from that little dragon thing – and I sat on it by accident, so it doesn’t really count – you’ll be the first living creature I’ve more or less intentionally killed. I won’t feel good about it, but it could be a whole lot worse. Like, I could’ve trodden on an ant or something.’
‘You idiot.’ Anger and fear, and some contempt in there too. ‘He can’t always be in there to protect you, and if you kill me, my people will hunt you down and you’ll die in your sleep, and then we’ll see. We’re always there, as soon as the light goes out, as soon as your eyelids start to itch. Just think about that, will you? You think you’re tired now, you just wait, when you’re dying of exhaustion because it’s better than what’ll happen if you shut your eyes just for a second. And when you do—’
‘Oh, piss off,’ Paul said wearily, and opened his eyes.
He was in the helicopter. He was awake, and in the real world, flying through a storm in total darkness over the icy-cold Atlantic Ocean, with a treacherous dwarf at the controls and the only girl he’d ever really love lying in a coma beside him. So that was all right. ‘Benny?’ he called out.
‘What?’
‘How much further?’
‘Search me. I’m lost.’
Paul grinned. Lost, in a storm in total darkness over the ice-cold Atlantic Ocean. ‘No worries,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Wake me up when we get there – I’m going to have forty winks.’
Which he proceeded to do; and dreamed about being back at school and being called up to recite a poem he hadn’t learned in front of the whole class, with everybody sniggering at him. Just that: no girls, no dungeons, no grey shapes, no death threats, just humiliation, inadequacy and ordinary stuff like that. It felt like coming home again after the War.
When Paul woke up again, feeling cheerful and refreshed (bizarre enough in itself; usually when he woke up he felt like he’d just crawled out of a sporadically cleaned toilet), they were still flying, but it was bright daylight, and through the window he could see an endless blue-grey carpet with white frilly bits. ‘Benny?’
‘It’s all right, I know where we are,’ Benny called back. ‘It’s not where we’re supposed to be, but what the hell. If nobody ever got lost, they’d never have discovered America.’
‘I’m not bothered,’ Paul sang back; then he sneezed. He still had the cold, apparently, but it wasn’t interfering significantly with his general euphoria. ‘It’s not like I had much on for today, anyhow. No, I wanted to ask you: What’re we going to do? About Judy, I mean.’
Silence. Then Benny sighed. ‘I’ve been thinking about that all night,’ he said. ‘And you’re right, we can’t leave your bit of stuff asleep for the rest of her life – we’re going to have to wake her up. But first, we’re going to try something. You still got that watch?’
Watch? Oh yes, watch. ‘You know about that?’
‘’Course I do, you think I’m stupid or something? Anyway, the idea is, use the watch to make one second that’ll last for ever, and then stick Judy in it. It’ll be boring as hell for her an
d she won’t like it, but it’s got to be better than killing the bitch.’
Paul thought that over for a moment. ‘You can do that?’
‘No idea,’ Benny replied. ‘It’s never been done before, and I wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it. But Theo van Spee might, or Mr Wells senior, John Wellington; but God only knows where he’s buggered off to. Someone’ll know how to go about it. Agreed?’
Paul nodded. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘So long as there’s no risk to Sophie, you can do what you like.’
‘You sound cheerful,’ Benny growled. ‘What’s got into you?’
‘A good night’s sleep,’ Paul replied. ‘Does wonders for you. You should try it some time.’
‘Very funny.’ Benny didn’t sound all that amused. ‘I haven’t been to sleep since nineteen – when was the year when Eddie the Eagle was in the Winter Olympics? Whenever that was.’
Paul laughed, assuming it was supposed to be a joke. In mid-snigger, he realised that it wasn’t. ‘But that’s impossible,’ he said. ‘No human being can—’
‘Not a human being, am I? Thank God,’ Benny added fervently. ‘Our lot may be on the compact side, y-axis-wise, but we can teach you tall bastards a thing or two about staying awake. No, that year – early 1980s, wasn’t it? – that was the year Judy dumped me, and I got the distinct impression that the Land of Nod was off limits to me for the duration. I could be wrong, but it’s not an area where trial and error seems the wise approach.’
‘But Benny,’ Paul said quietly. ‘If I wake Sophie up, it’ll be over, won’t it? You can finally get some sleep. Wouldn’t that be worth it?’
Benny thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said. ‘To continue the Olympic theme, another thing we dwarves can do pretty well for ever is carry a torch. We’ll try it my way, or not at all. Got that?’
‘Got it,’ Paul said, and sprayed the back of Benny’s chair with a fine dew of nasal residue. ‘Don’t blame me,’ he added, reaching into his pocket and finding that the hanky had just been a dream. ‘It’s your rotten cold I’ve got.’
‘Dwarves don’t get colds,’ Benny said airily. ‘Now shut up while I try and land this thing.’
‘Oh, right. What’s the matter, turbulence or something?’
‘No, I’ve never done it before.’
‘Eek,’ Paul said. ‘I mean, you must’ve. You can’t learn to fly without being taught how to land.’
‘Who said I ever learned to fly?’ Benny replied. ‘Now, I wonder what this knob here does.’
It’s not visible from the street, or from the air, come to that, unless you know what you’re looking for; in fact, it’s only there if you say the magic words in the right order and your security code is up to date. But there’s a helicopter landing pad on the roof of 70 St Mary Axe, and Benny landed on it as gracefully as a mayfly settling on the petals of a rose. Which meant that either he’d been kidding or he was very, very lucky.
‘It’s all right,’ he called out over his shoulder, as he cut the engine. ‘It’s safe, you can come out now.’
Paul uncurled slowly. ‘You sure?’
‘Chicken,’ Benny replied, leaning across and opening the passenger door. ‘Anyway, that was the easy part. Now we’ve got to get to our offices without Dennis Tanner seeing. Not supposed to leave the office without telling reception. He can get really snotty about it sometimes.’
Benny led the way across the roof to a trapdoor. He grabbed the iron ring and tugged, but it wouldn’t move. ‘Bolted,’ he muttered in disgust.
Paul looked round. No other way off the roof that he could see. ‘What’re we going to do now?’ he said.
‘And you’re the one who’s supposed to be the trainee sorcerer,’ Benny replied. ‘Magic. Just watch.’
Benny walked back fifteen paces, took a run-up, jumped and landed with both feet together on the trapdoor. It collapsed under him, and he vanished. A split second later, Paul heard a dull thump.
‘Are you okay?’ he called down the hole.
‘Fine,’ replied a somewhat ragged voice from down below. ‘Good magic, that – I learned it from some guys at a rugby club I used to belong to. Hold on, I’ll get the ladder.’
Getting Sophie down was a grim business; Paul was terrified of dropping her, Benny was rather more concerned about waking her up, and in the end she slithered down the last few rungs on her back, until Benny was able to catch her. Fortunately, a gentle snore reassured both of them that no harm had been done.
‘Problem is what to do with her till we’ve figured out how to do the swap-over,’ Benny said, hoisting Sophie over his shoulder. ‘Not your office, it’s the first place Judy’d look. Ditto mine. Strongroom’s out, it’s perishing cold down there and she might wake up. Ricky’s room, maybe, but I don’t trust him not to wake her. Which leaves the closed-file store or the women’s toilet, and I’m not setting foot in there.’
‘Why not?’
‘Embarrassed,’ Benny said shortly. ‘Closed-file store, then. Good hiding place, nobody ever goes in there unless they’re daft or crazy or suicidal or they want an old file really, really badly. We can dump her in the weapons locker. Reinforced steel door, and there’s only two keys, mine and Ricky’s.’
That sounded reassuring enough, though Paul had his doubts about whether any door could keep out Countess Judy and her followers. But he asked Benny if he’d mind taking off his Fey grey-shape robe and then folded it to make a pillow for Sophie (‘Ah, how sweet,’ Benny cooed, and mimed sticking a finger down his throat), and watched while the door was closed and locked. ‘Right,’ Paul said. ‘Now give me the key, please.’
Benny looked at him for a moment, as though deciding what would be the most appropriate way to slaughter him. Then he handed the key over without another word.
‘Now what?’ Paul asked.
‘I’ll go and have a word with Theo van Spee, if he’s in,’ Benny replied. ‘At least he may know where old Mr Wells has got to, even if he can’t do anything himself. You,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Dunno what to suggest, really. Piss off, keep out of sight and don’t talk to any strange women. You could even,’ he added, grinning, ‘do some work. You know, the stuff they pay you for.’
‘As opposed to getting killed and eaten,’ Paul replied gloomily, ‘which is what they bought me for. You know, there are times now and then when I wonder if wouldn’t have been better off going to law school, like my mum wanted me to.’
Benny thought about that for a moment. ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Not a great deal in it, but at least this way you get to keep your self-respect.’
Do some work, Paul thought. Well, why not? If he could remember as far back as, what, the day before yesterday, Mr Tanner had dumped a thick wad of bauxite pictures on his desk and snarled something about urgent. It was all pretty remote, but if it came to a point where allies could help him, maybe Dennis Tanner would be more inclined to be on his side if he’d just pinpointed the biggest bauxite find of the last hundred years. Crazy enough to be plausible, he decided, and headed for his office.
In fact, it was remarkably soothing, scrying for mineral deposits in a reasonably comfortable chair, his feet up on the desk, nobody chasing him or smiling meltingly at him out of deep blue eyes or hustling him down subterranean passages a few steps ahead of a posse of poor men’s Nazgul. If only there was some way he could get out of this ghastly mess with the Fey in one piece (and save Sophie, of course; that was the bit that mattered, wasn’t it?) he’d quite happily take his triple vow of poverty, tedium and obedience and sit here prodding photographs with his fingertip until he was old enough to retire. None of it had been of his choosing, after all; and all that garbage about heredity and being the chosen one who’d drive the Fey out of the real world for ever was slipping away like – well, like a dream. Paul peered down at his wrists; he’d taken off his jacket, and most of the blood had gone on its sleeves. All he could see were two very thin reddish-pink scars, and a few black flakes of dried blood. Surely there’d be more to
see than that if he’d actually succeeded and slashed his wrists badly enough to die.
Paul sneezed, and wiped his nose thoughtfully with the corner of his handkerchief. Did I die? Really? Unlikely. He ran over in his mind all the improbable things that had happened to him since Ricky Wurmtoter had come crashing in through his window. Wouldn’t it make more sense if he himself had broken the window – it had a tendency to stick, maybe he slammed it too hard trying to close it, and the splintered glass had cut his hands. Then he’d passed out from the shock and the sight of blood, and everything since then had been hallucinations and dreams. Fine; except that if that was really what had happened, Sophie wouldn’t be locked away in a steel safe full of rocket launchers on the floor below, and she’d really have left him and gone to California. That too was rather more likely than the alternative version, but there are times when you don’t want to follow the odds too slavishly.
Melze, he thought, as a tingle crossed the palm of his hand, indicating the presence of bauxite beyond the dreams of avarice. He sneezed again. Had he really come within a gnat’s whisker of falling in love with that? On balance, he’d rather get off with Mr Tanner’s mum; she might have little round red staring eyes and teeth that you could open corned-beef tins with when the little key thing broke off, but at least she was real, once you got past the outer rind of superimposed popsy. Memories, dreams, illusions, delusions: it occurred to him to wonder if there really was a stone-steeland-concrete Dungeon of the Fey anywhere in the world. He was inclined to doubt it, because it wasn’t necessary. Any human being, but particularly a human being like Paul Carpenter, was capable of constructing a far more unbreakable prison for himself inside his own head.
‘Hello.’
Paul froze, his finger between pictures. His nose was tickling again, but he fought back the impulse to sneeze. He didn’t want to look up, for fear of what he’d see.
