The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  ‘It’s like so big as how you can’t never measure it cos it goes on for ever an’ ever an’ ever, an’ that’s how spoilt an’ snotty you is!’

  ‘Excuse me!’

  Thomas’s voice cut through the row. All eyes turned to him. He smiled meekly, and pointed out of the window behind Tess. ‘Forgive the interruption,’ he mumbled, ‘but they seem to be wanting our attention.’

  Every eye now turned from Thomas to the thing just outside the window. Running along the parallel track to their train was a great fat black locomotive, chuffing thick white smoke from its chimney stack, between which bursts could be faintly seen the unmistakeable form of Lin, covered in coal dust, standing on the ballast truck and waving merrily. Driving the train in the main compartment was Horatio Lyle.

  He was waving with one hand, the other was locked on a lever of some sort, and from his gestures, Tess had the feeling he wanted her to open the door. She reached out for the handle, and as she depressed it, saw Lin crouch on her uneven platform of coal, ready to spring. ‘My guv’nor’s gonna be so mad at you,’ Tess declared firmly and, with a shove, pushed the door open onto the whirling night.

  They had stood on Paddington Station and watched the smoke of the slow train depart. And at some point shortly after, Lin had said, ‘Can you even drive this?’

  Lyle had said, ‘Of course I can bloody drive a train! It is the pinnacle of modern technological achievement, a device whose impact on society itself we are only just beginning to comprehend, a tool of sublime craft, beauty and relative design simplicity. Of course I can bloody drive a train! It’s - you know - just a question of working out which bit does what. Which I’m sure can’t be too hard! Besides, that isn’t the important question right now.’

  ‘I don’t know, it seems reasonably important from my technologically ignorant point of view,’ murmured Lin, just loud and sarcastically enough for Lyle to hear.

  He’d scowled. ‘The question is,’ he had said, ‘how well can you jump?’

  The door opened.

  Cold rushing night air snapped and pulled at Tess, sucking her towards the darkness of the tracks between the two rattling trains.

  Lin jumped.

  She didn’t know much about fighting lions; she didn’t like being on trains, too much iron, far too much iron, just being near them gave her a headache; she didn’t really understand machines or how they worked, didn’t really understand the English and why they were so pleased with themselves, wondered sometimes at children, feared that she was losing her mind in liking humans at all, but through all this, all the doubt and confusion that she hid so well, Lin Zi knew one thing about herself that would never change.

  She was bloody good at jumping.

  Tess ducked as Lin leapt, which was what saved her from getting a pair of sensible, intricately laced black leather boots in the head. She had a vague impression of the foreign lady uncoiling like a striking snake, fingers first, so that it seemed for a moment that she still had feet in one train and arms in another, but that moment was fleeting and then Lin’s fingers had caught the top of the train and her feet were pivoting up from under her and swinging straight inside the carriage. Greybags scrambled towards the corridor door, whimpering piteously and flapping at his protectors to do something, anything, as Lin landed on the compartment floor, straightened up and grinned.

  ‘Ta-da! And I’m not even descended from monkeys!’ she exclaimed cheerfully.

  On the engine behind her, Lyle, after a certain amount of tentative fumbling, had found what he hoped was the valve which controlled his locomotive’s speed, and was throwing fat shovels of coal into the hissing, spitting red furnace to put more speed into his train.

  Thomas felt the knife-thrower draw a blade, ready to hurl at Lin and, without thinking, half turned his body and buried his teeth as hard as he could in the hand that still held his arm. The knife-thrower gave a yowl of pain and tried to drag himself free but Thomas had locked his jaws like a vice, and clung on for dear life as his teeth rattled in his skull. Thomas and the knife-thrower were in Greybags’ way as he made for the corridor, and with the others rising to their feet, there was no room to move so he scrambled on all fours across the soft carriage seat. Lin’s hand closed round his ankle and he whined, ‘Never done nothin’!’ as she dragged him back.

  ‘Nasty little specimen,’ she hissed, and then had to let go as Mr Majestic, resplendent in cheap silk and expensively curled moustache swung his cane as hard as he could towards Lin’s face. She ducked then straightened up as the cane over-shot her, grabbed Mr Majestic’s hand and gave it a short sharp twist.

  At the front of the train, the driver was somewhat startled to see a locomotive, without any carriages and only one, inappropriately dressed, oil-stained driver, pull up level to him on the track beside his. The driver was waving and shouting something, but through the belch of the furnace and the great gouts of smoke and steam, he couldn’t hear what, so he shrugged helplessly.

  ‘Bloody brake!’ shouted Lyle over the din. ‘Bloody brake!’

  The driver smiled a bewildered, helpless smile. Cursing, Lyle threw more coal into his furnace, heard the pipes squeak in overheated indignation, saw the pressure gauge mount another few frightened points towards the red, and his train accelerated.

  In Greybags’s compartment, Lin’s predicament, which she had thought reasonably good, was becoming complicated by the organ grinder, who, with an expression of benign boredom on his face, had somehow managed to crawl onto the seat behind her and wrap one arm across her neck. While she knew a hundred exciting and only occasionally lethal ways to deal with the problem, her situation was further complicated by the ringmaster’s constant treading on her feet and clawing at her arms which made manoeuvring in the tight, hot confines of the compartment next to impossible and she lost her grip on Greybags. Thomas was still locked tooth-to-hand with the knife-thrower, while Tess was crawling on her hands and knees away from the rush towards the corridor.

  The noise was attracting attention, Tess could hear people stirring in other compartments, and prayed to all the gods that had never listened to her before for good manners to keep everyone appropriately disinterested in the events of the night. She saw Greybags, also on his hands and knees crawling for the door to the corridor and, worming through the legs of the over-occupied ringmaster grabbed Greybags’ ankle with both hands, flopped to the floor and shouted, ‘Oi! You ain’t doin’ nothin’!’

  He kicked and twisted and mewled, but Tess’s fingers were locked round his foot with no intention of letting go. She had that very special expression of utter wilfulness on her face usually reserved for baths and bedtime, and which brooked no argument at all. It was by no means a dignified struggle and, for a quick minute, all that could be heard was the impolite grunting and humphs of people too breathless to curse. For a moment Greybags’s foot slipped free of Tess’s fingers and he made a break for the corridor, but she was there again, flopping half in and out of the compartment to get hold of him and bring him with a great ‘phwamph!’ to the floor. The knife-thrower took a handful of Thomas’s hair in his hand and tried to pry Thomas’s teeth free by physically dragging his head away. He was as surprised as Thomas to discover that the young man’s reaction to this was to stamp very hard, petulantly and repeatedly on the join between the elder man’s foot and ankle until he howled in pain. The organ grinder and ringmaster were trying to drag Lin towards the open door and the roaring night outside, and for all that she kicked and punched and dug her elbows in, bared her teeth and swore in an exciting range of languages, inch by inch they were pushing her closer. Now her right foot dangled on the edge, now her right shoulder was being eased out into the blackness, now her right arm, now the side of her head. Just one more push and . . .

  But what that might have been, no one ever found out as, with a scream of brakes tortured beyond endurance, the whole train lurched backwards like a frightened rabbit, slamming every passenger in every compartment against the furthes
t wall, shattering the glass of every other lantern from first to third class and plunging the train into mish-mashed darkness.

  The reason for this sudden and desperate stop in the night that nearly burst the gears which controlled it, was standing in an oil-stained bulging beige coat about three inches from the front of the panting green engine, holding a bright ball of white light in his right hand and looking up at the belching metal face of the engine with a slightly bewildered expression. A few hundred yards further on, another locomotive, black and creaking in distress, sat on the opposite track going chuga . . . chuga . . . chuga . . .

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, as the driver stuck his head out of the train and started shouting abuse, ‘I thought the brakes would be a little more efficient than that.’

  He gave the slightly nervous laugh of a man who has seen the face of mathematics and discovered it has a leer, and ignoring every word of abuse coming from the driver above, Lyle tossed his bubble of light aside, and jumped on to the train.

  Chaos had broken out among the gloom-soaked carriages.

  The British travelling public, although usually tactful to the point of total apathy, needed only one small push to move from polite acceptance of the woes and dangers of regular travel, to a state of such furious, bitter, acrimonious and, for the most part, pointless complaint that all sense and reason fell by the wayside and no sternly worded letter of indignation could explain their wrath. It was as if a lifetime of excellent manners had merely contained a beast of fiery rudeness and, at the provocation of the railways, this creature was now unleashed.

  So it was, as Lyle marched determinedly down the length of the train, that from every side he could hear the moaning and cursing of dislodged people. From first class came indignant shrills of, ‘I say!’ evolving into outbursts of, ‘An outrage!’; in second little men with nasal drawls intoned, ‘I shall complain, I shall! I shall complain!’ while from third class - Lyle had heard some language in his time, but this was creative in a way he hadn’t imagined possible.

  A shout of, ‘You little . . .!’ from the end of a carriage grabbed and held his attention. He ran towards it, and saw the object of the cry was at the same time running towards him, jacket torn and trousers flapping. Behind him, emerging from the half-gloom of the splintered shadows, Lyle saw a man with a curved, oddly weighted steel knife, draw the blade back to throw and shouted instinctively, ‘Thomas, get down!’

  Thomas, the running boy, obeyed automatically, too battered and bewildered, his head bleeding from the knock he’d taken when the train had thrown him against the wall, to question the source of this voice that seemed to know his name. Behind him the knife-thrower’s scowl darkened. His eyes were a pair of bright black plums in a pale face and he threw the blade even as Lyle ploughed head-first into a compartment of furiously bickering men, each competing as to who could be the more belligerent on the subject of the railways today. He heard the dull thump of the knife striking wood somewhere behind him, shouted, ‘Thomas? You all right?’ and heard in the distance a muffled, ‘Mister Lyle?’

  ‘Thomas, get out of the damn train! Run!’

  He heard a door open somewhere, rushed to the end of the carriage and stuck his head out of the window to see Thomas half scrambling, half falling the some-foot drop from the compartment door to the ballast floor. Lyle fumbled in his pockets, searching for something that would serve as an appropriate projectile even as he shouted, ‘Run, lad! Don’t let the driver move this damn train!’

  ‘Mister Lyle?’ shouted Thomas, obeying even as he called, ‘You’re alive!’

  ‘It’s only a temporary condition,’ Lyle snapped as footsteps thundered angry and fast in the corridor outside. ‘You!’ he added, grabbing one of the bewildered men by the collar. ‘Get out of this compartment now!’

  ‘Oi, you can’t just—’

  Lyle pulled something out of his coat pocket. It was a fat green bottle, corked and carefully labelled. ‘You can get out,’ he hissed, easing the cork back at arm’s length, ‘or you can pass out.’

  There was something in Lyle’s tone which suggested humour was not high on his list of priorities. It only took one man in the compartment to believe him, which he did, for the other three to follow his sudden and undignified break for the outside door. Lyle backed away from the corridor and, covering his mouth and nose with one sleeve, carefully dribbled liberal quantities of the clear thin liquid in the bottle across the floor round him. It hissed very quietly as it fell, giving off a thin low mist that shimmered into smelly nothingness in the air. Lyle pressed his back to the open window of the compartment, half turning his head to breathe fresher air as the knife-thrower stepped inside, blade already raised.

  ‘Now, just wait a moment!’ Lyle said as he saw the anger in the other man’s face. ‘Before you go throwing that knife of yours, can I offer you a whole series of excellent reasons - moral, philosophical, biological - why you shouldn’t.’

  The knife-thrower hesitated, and it seemed for a moment to Lyle that he was actually considering it. Then his eyebrows tightened and he exclaimed incredulously, ‘No!’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Lyle raised his other hand to cover his face. ‘Then can I ask you - Are you feeling sleepy?’

  The knife-thrower hesitated, then his gaze slowly turned to the floor where for the first time he noticed the rapidly evaporating liquid spilt across the wood. ‘Um . . .’ he mumbled, and staggered a drunken step towards Lyle. ‘It . . . smells funny.’

  He staggered another pace, tried to throw the knife and fell face-forward onto the nearest seat. Lyle, still keeping his face turned to the open window, eased open the door behind him, and slipped out again into the fresh-aired night, to leave the man snoring in the dark.

  Lin picked herself up carefully, looked round the compartment and swore.

  She swore for two reasons. Firstly, because both the organ grinder and the ringmaster, both of whom had been knocked down by the shock of the braking train, were also picking themselves up, and had the look of men who both didn’t know when to quit, and hadn’t heard of chivalry to ladies. Secondly, because the jarring of the train had knocked the lantern which was the compartment’s only illumination off its hook and sent it flying into the door frame, where the glass had broken, the oil had spilt and now the little flame had caught and was beginning to burn merrily. This was also annoying for two reasons. Firstly because the train was now on fire, and secondly because that burning door had been her main way out.

  She said, ‘Gentlemen—’ and had to duck as a swipe of the ringmaster’s cane nearly took her ear off.

  Oh yes - one other problem. Of Tess, Thomas and Greybags, she could see no other sign.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ she began again, ‘let me just say how sorry I am that we have come to—’ She jumped a kick from the organ grinder’s left foot, grabbed hold of the stiff lines of the luggage rack above as she did so, and, swinging like an acrobat, planted both feet very firmly in his chest. He didn’t even have the breath to grunt but was spun backwards towards the open compartment door, clung onto the frame for a moment of slipping nothingness, and then with a little, ‘Eiiii! ’ fell out into the night.

  Lin landed on her feet just in time for the ringmaster to try to wrap his hands round her throat. She staggered back and felt the sudden burning heat of the flames on the compartment door. ‘Listen,’ she tried again reasonably but, with a snarl, the ringmaster was on her, knocking her down onto the carriage seat and trying to press the life out of her with his cane across her chest. ‘Really . . .’ she wheezed as black and white sparks started to spin across her vision, ‘I’m sure we can . . .’ She wriggled her arms up just about high enough so her fingers were level with the ringmaster’s temples. ‘Please don’t make me,’ she added, but if there had been any capacity for understanding in the ringmaster’s eyes, it had long since been wiped away, leaving nothing but petulant childish fury that would hear no reason.

  ‘Damn,’ she muttered as the world swam
into blackness, and struck out at the ringmaster’s temples.

  Her left hand hit, fingers slicing deep into the soft tissue just behind his eyes, but her right hand was caught by another before it had time to strike, which was odd, she thought, because both the ringmaster’s hands seemed to be occupied in throttling the life out of her.

  There was a strange smell on the air and the pressure across her chest was suddenly relaxed. She half shook her head to try to clear it and blinked up at the ringmaster, whose eyes were already drifting shut. A single slim steel needle glimmered in the side of his thick neck and behind him, she saw the flame-flickering shape of Horatio Lyle easing the ringmaster to the ground.

  ‘You and your . . .’ Lyle made a strange series of drunken dance-like gestures that Lin guessed were supposed to represent some sort of martial combat, and then shook his head and tutted. ‘Not sure if it’s all it’s cracked up to be?’

  Lin straightened, smoothed herself down primly and announced in a voice husky with too little air, ‘Mister Lyle, when you are trained to be a lethal killing machine more finely honed than any the Americans could invent for their petty civil war thingy, you will find how hard it is to incapacitate without actually maiming.’