The Dream Thief

by Catherine Webb

  ‘Right,’ intoned Lyle with a slow nod. ‘Of course. That’s what it is. The train appears to be on fire.’

  ‘Oh you noticed,’ sarcasm dripped off Lin’s voice. ‘Insight!’

  ‘Where’s Tess?’

  ‘She isn’t with you?’

  ‘No.’

  Lin’s face seemed to sink for a moment into something that might almost have been fear. ‘Then . . .’

  There came a voice from outside the train. It screamed, ‘Bigwig! Bigwig bloody help me bloody now!’

  It was a child’s voice.

  CHAPTER 22

  Greybags

  The whole train was watching.

  Greybags, seemingly a child barely older than Tess, was backing across the rough stone ballast of the tracks, one hand holding Tess by the hair, the other with a knife across her throat. This was attracting tuts of disapproval from the train’s occupants but no attempt was made at rescue since, really, it was none of their business and what if they only made it worse?

  Lin dropped down onto the tracks with Lyle behind her, and the two advanced slowly towards the retreating children, thus proving to the satisfaction of all onlookers that the situation was being handled and well done.

  ‘Miss Lin!’ shrilled Tess, ‘some of your demon-lady magic please!’

  ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up!’ whined Greybags, dragging her head back further by a fistful of her hair. Tess’s face was white, tears shimmering in her eyes, her lips curled in pain, but still she called, ‘Miss Lin! Summat special now, please!’

  Lyle stepped carefully past Lin, head on one side and face locked in an expression of disinterested curiosity.

  ‘Mister Lyle!’ If there hadn’t been a blade at her neck, Tess would have bounced with glee. ‘You ain’t dead!’

  ‘But - but you should . . .’ whimpered Greybags as Lyle approached, ‘you were . . . you should be . . .’

  ‘For someone as old as you are, Greybags,’ tutted Lyle, ‘and in such an interesting biological predicament yourself, you’re a right idiot when it comes to advanced bio-chemical metabolic interactions.’

  ‘Don’t come nearer! I’ve got the child an’ . . . an’ children can’t get hurt, them’s the rules. You never hurt children never an’ . . . an’ I’ll hurt her, an’ then that’ll be the end of the story an’ . . . an’ . . .’

  Lyle stopped a few paces away from the gibbering Greybags, head on one side, hands buried casually in his coat pockets. ‘You’d hurt Tess?’ he asked carefully.

  Greybags gave a sound halfway between a giggle and a whine. ‘Don’t you come closer!’

  ‘I’m not. Look, here I am, not coming any closer. I mean, obviously, you’re going to have problems in the long term despite this, because if I do come closer and you do kill Tess, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill you and there’ll be bugger-all you can do about it. And since you’re threatening me with the Paddington prospect of killing her, and that’s really the only thing you can threaten me with, I’m actually somewhat less than impressed, owing to the previous logic of she dies/you die herein discussed. ’ Out of his pocket he pulled a small bundle wrapped in red and white cloth. Greybags stiffened at the sight of it, but when unwrapped it turned out to be nothing more than a couple of thick, dark orange-coloured ginger biscuits. Lyle broke off a corner and took a bite, then another, then another, and, as if only finally aware at the last piece of all the eyes fixed in horrified fascination upon him added, ‘Don’t mind me. I’m waiting for you to come up with something resembling a good idea, Greybags. You can think of a good idea, can’t you? I mean, someone as old as you, should have a smart thought now and then? Miss Lin? Would you like some biscuit?’

  Lin didn’t answer so, with a shrug, Lyle kept on eating. From every window of the train, every face and every eye, Tess and Lin and Greybags included, watched, hypnotised by the slow movement of Lyle’s jaw.

  ‘Not like my ma used to make,’ he admitted conspiratorially, when the last bite had been taken and the crumbs wiped unconsciously away from the front of his coat. ‘God, but she’s a terrible cook. Did your ma make you biscuits, Greybags?’ No answer. ‘Miss Lin, Greybags did have a mother, didn’t he? I mean, Tseiqin don’t just hatch, right?’

  ‘He had a mother, once,’ replied Lin with a shrug. ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ answered Lyle, looking disinterested. Behind him, the train’s engine slowly went chuga . . . chuga . . . chuga. ‘My pa was always the cook of the house,’ he went on absently. ‘He wasn’t a very good cook either. But he did understand the importance of hot plum on a Thursday afternoon. Now, me? I’m not that good at cooking either. But it’s partly the ingredients. You would not believe how many people are putting chalk in their bread these days, or boiling oranges to make them look fat. Disgusting. Not that food is anything other than fuel for the intellect, of course.’

  He started on the second biscuit. The train went chuga . . . chuga . . . chuga . . . the ginger biscuit went snap between his fingers. They were the only sounds.

  ‘Do you want some?’ he asked finally, waving a piece towards Greybags. ‘I mean, since we’re stuck here waiting for you to make up your mind.’

  ‘I just want to be with the children,’ Greybags said.

  ‘No, technically speaking, you want to be a child,’ replied Lyle. ‘But since you aren’t, in fact, a child, merely a . . . curious biological adaptation . . . you have to steal the thoughts of children, the colours and the dreams and, I’ve got to tell you, the stupidity and the ignorance, because that’s all part of the growing-up thing, and so, in conclusion,’ he took another bite of biscuit, ‘you aren’t a child, you don’t want to be with the children, you’re just a parasite. A little stupid snotty parasite whose got himself into a ridiculous situation from which there is no really pleasant outcome.’

  ‘I ain’t!’

  ‘Oh, that’s so mature.’ Lyle sighed, rolling his eyes. ‘Fantastic deployment of logic. “I ain’t a snotty parasite . . . cos I ain’t!” Well reasoned. How sophisticated.’

  ‘You can’t hurt me!’ whined Greybags. ‘You can’t!’

  ‘Of course I can,’ said Lyle, ‘because at the end of the day, I’m big and you’re little, I’m strong and you’re weak, and I’m very, Paddington very angry. Are you sure you don’t want any of this biscuit? It’s the last one.’

  ‘Mister Lyle,’ whimpered Tess, ‘do summat!’

  ‘Nag nag nag. You know, that’s all I ever really get? I’m sure it was supposed to be the other way round, parents nagging children, and all that, but it doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.’ His eyes were two bright blacknesses blinking in reflected firelight. ‘Did your mama nag you, Greybags? Do this? Wear that? Say this? Not that? Probably more of the “not”s than the “do”s. You mustn’t run, mustn’t talk loudly, mustn’t say naughty words, mustn’t steal, mustn’t cheat, mustn’t lie . . . And then I suppose the day came when you realised your ma did all these things anyway, so why should you listen to her? Nothing to do with her wanting to make you better, oh no. Because you’re just a child, too little to understand that. Did your mama read you bedtime stories, Greybags?’

  He twitched, fingers tightening round the knife. Lyle grinned, half turned his head down to the ballast as if seeking some long-lost secret in the chaos. ‘My ma used to read me bedtime stories. They’d always begin, “Once upon a time” that’s how the best stories go, isn’t it? And in them the good would always be very very good, and the bad would always be very very bad, and the wicked would get their come-uppance and the good would live happily ever after and the children would be happy and the princes would marry the princesses and so on and so forth. Codswallop, of course, but important, wonderful, hopeful codswallop. A fairytale of how things should be, that’s what the stories were. Children should not be hurt. Parents should not die. Perfectly well-meaning scientists should not get poisoned and so on. What stories did your mama tell you, Greybags?’

  ‘I . . . I . . . I
don’t . . . it was . . . I don’t remember.’

  ‘That’s sad.’ Lyle scrunched up his now empty red and white cloth wrapping and stuffed it back into his pocket. He fumbled in the bulging mass of his pockets until he found something else - a little silver flask - which he pulled out and started unscrewing. ‘Not to remember the stories.’

  ‘I . . . I take . . . I need . . . the stories are . . . the children who . . . I need . . .’

  ‘You steal, actually,’ said Lyle casually, pausing with the flask held carefully in the air. ‘You steal other people’s childhoods because, as I said earlier, you’re not really a child, not any more. You’re just an old, old man who likes to think of childish things that aren’t his own. It’s a bit twisted, really.’

  ‘I . . . I . . . I ain’t . . .’

  ‘I don’t imagine your pa told you stories, Greybags. Poor Mr Majestic, he was a father once, and you made him into a prancing clown. You turned the whole circus into your story, and it was horrible and twisted. Poisoned little boy. Did your pa punish you when you were naughty? Did he have a coal shed with a bolt on the outside? Did he tell you that things in the night came for naughty little boys?’

  ‘Shut up shut up shut up!’

  ‘You’re old, Greybags. Lin told me. You’re so, so old, an ancient mumbling toothless crone in a child’s skin. Your thoughts are petty cruel nothings, your mind is an empty black and white shell that you have to fill with stolen dreams because you’ve lost all the dreams you ever had. You’re old enough to wither, age, rot and die. Old enough to have seen your parents die, be buried and be skeletons together in the earth, old enough to . . .’

  ‘Stop it!’

  Paddington

  ‘. . . have thrown dust on their graves, seen the world and the things men do, to understand that life isn’t like it is in the stories, the beautiful stories where the good end happily.’

  ‘Stop it! I hate you!’

  ‘Mister Lyle,’ whispered Tess as the knife bit tighter to her throat.

  ‘Quiet, Tess, the grown-ups are having a conversation,’ he replied casually, ‘you’re too young to understand.’

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’ shrieked Greybags. ‘I’ll kill her!’

  Lyle shrugged. ‘Very well,’ he said casually, ‘you’ll kill her and I’ll kill you and it’ll be a right bloody mess. But you know what? I probably won’t care. Because at the end of the day,’ he sighed and stretched, ‘I am a grown-up who has seen people die and I have suffered and felt grief and loss and all that lot, so frankly, if Tess was to snuff it right now, I’d only really kill you because society expects it. It’s not like a grown-up is really up to feeling anything any more, not like a child. But you understand that, don’t you, Greybags? Being as you are, so very, very old.’

  ‘Stop it!’ he shrieked. ‘Stop it!’

  ‘I’m sorry, stop what? I was just having a polite discussion with a peer.’

  ‘I’m a child a child a child. I’m a child. I’m a—’

  ‘Lambkin,’ breathed Lin softly, eyes glowing in the night.

  ‘Mister Lyle!’ wailed Tess, closing her eyes.

  ‘You’re a lonely grey old crone too scared to ever grow up,’ concluded Lyle brightly. ‘All the other children managed it but poor little Greybags was just too damn scared to grow up and now—’

  ‘I hate you, you don’t understand. I hate you. Always think you’re right an’ you don’t understand nothin’. I’ll kill you!’ Greybags’s scream sliced through the night as, with a shove and a snarl of fury, he pushed Tess to one side and lunged, blade-first straight for Lyle’s chest. Lin stepped forward but Lyle waved her back, raised his silver drinking flask to arm’s length and gave a final twist of the cap. Inside the flask, something went slosh and Lyle threw it down hard in front of Greybags’ feet. The flask clattered onto the loose ballast, something inside starting to go sssss. Greybags hesitated in his mad lunge and opened his mouth to say, ‘But it ain’t nothin’!’

  ‘Well . . . no,’ replied Lyle. ‘Not really.’

  And as Greybags looked up with horror in his eyes, eyes far, far too old and knowing to be in a child’s face, Lyle smiled and said, ‘Good night, children. Sweet dreams.’

  The flask exploded.

  It wasn’t exactly an explosion, not in the traditional exothermic combustion sense of the term. Explosion implies flames, fire and much rending of garments. It was simply as if something very tight and loud was suddenly told, Hello! Would you like to go for a walk? and as if the wide world were not wide enough to accommodate it, it came bursting out of the flask in a tumble of tight pressure so fast and so loud and so enthusiastic that it seemed to shatter the air round it, pick up the ground and shake it, slam the breath out of every pair of lungs within reach, and the way it did this was with sound since, as Lyle would be the first to point out, sound was little more than a compression in the air. And both were a lot more than what they seemed.

  The blast of noise shattered the windows in the train, picked Lyle off his feet and sent him sprawling backwards, slammed into Tess’s ears and made them ring, echoed down the length of Paddington the train and sent people diving for cover. At the front of the train, where Thomas had been imposing, with all his aristocratic might, on the bewildered driver the need not to move the engine, the sound cracked the already bewildered pressure gauges and rolled like a billow of smoke onwards up the line.

  And then it was gone, as quickly as it had come, leaving only a high-pitched eeeeeeee in every bewildered ear that had heard it as the brain tried to work out what was real and what was not in the lingering, total silence.

  Not quite total.

  The chuga . . . chuga . . . chuga . . . of the train.

  The slow rattle of Lin’s footsteps over the loose ballast of the track.

  The crackling of splintered glass.

  The hissing of rising flames.

  The slow tumbling of hot steam from the engine.

  Tess, trying not to cry.

  Lyle knelt down next to her, hesitated, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a suspiciously stained and unappetisingly smeared handkerchief, spat into it once, and carefully wiped away the tears from her face.

  ‘Hello, Teresa,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Mister Lyle. I weren’t cryin’!’

  ‘Of course not. You know, blasts of that nature can cause spontaneous weeping-like effects as the pressure on the eyeball releases tears from the tear duct to . . . Oh, you get the idea.’

  A few feet away, Lin squatted by the side of another body.

  A child in adult’s clothes, lying still and silent on the track, chest rising and falling steadily, blood running out of one ear. She looked at it long and hard for a good moment, then bent down, picked the boy up with a great grunt, slung him over her shoulders and turned away from the tracks.

  ‘Miss Lin?’ Lyle called as she started to walk towards the shadows on the edge of the railway embankment. ‘Where are you going?’

  She paused, half turned, smiled. ‘Why, Mister Lyle, I’m going to take this poor child home of course!’ And with a half wave and a little smile, the sleeping Greybags slung across her back, Lin, the demon-lady Tseiqin, vanished into the night.

  Lyle helped Tess carefully onto her feet. She blew her nose loudly in his handkerchief and then offered it unconsciously back to him. He flinched and said, ‘Tell you what, Teresa, why don’t you keep it for now?’

  ‘I weren’t cryin’!’ she snapped.

  ‘Of course you weren’t,’ he replied gently, eyes sweeping the silent gazing faces on the train, watching them, unmoving. ‘Now, somewhere round here is a locomotive engine that I pinched from Paddington Station.’

  ‘You went an’ pinched a train?!’

  ‘Borrowed under extremely trying circumstances.’

  ‘You went an’ pinched a bloody train!’ Tess beamed through her puffy red eyes. ‘Oh, Mister Lyle! I is so proud of you!’

  He patted her absently on the head. ‘T
hat’s what I was afraid of.’ He sighed. ‘Come on, Tess. Let’s go home.’

  And so, Tess already cheered at the prospect of larceny, Lyle’s arm wrapped protectively round her shoulders in case anything else in the night should even dare think of harming her, never ever, ever again, they wandered on together, down the silent railway track.

  CHAPTER 23

  Dreams

  Time passes.

  When it has passed, what it leaves behind is this . . .

  ‘Miss Chaste? Miss Mercy Chaste?’

  ‘Yes? Who are you?’