In Your Dreams (28 page)

Paul hadn't been expecting that. ‘'S all right,' he mumbled.

‘Also—' The Countess was holding out a small rectangular piece of paper. ‘Reimbursement,' she said, ‘for out-of-pocket expenses.'

He took the paper: a cheque, for a hundred pounds. ‘Thank you,' he said; and then, ‘Why?'

She was practically fidgeting. ‘Come now, Mr Carpenter, you know what they say about gift horses. Do you want the money or not?'

He looked at it again. One hundred pounds; and drawn on a proper bank, not the Bank of the Dead. ‘But you don't have to,' he said slowly. ‘I mean, what's it for?'

‘I told you,' she snapped. ‘It's what you had to pay to get that box from the lawyers. Or have you suddenly come into money, and a hundred pounds is neither here nor there?'

The signature was just a squiggle; pity. He'd have been interested in knowing which of the partners had signed the cheque. ‘But it's my stuff,' he said quietly. ‘The firm doesn't have to pay for me to get my own things. I mean, it's really kind of you and all that, but I can't take it.'

‘For God's sake—' The look on Countess Judy's face was terrifying. ‘Just take the goddamn cheque and get out of my office.'

Paul shook his head and put the cheque down on the desk. ‘No,' he said. ‘I'm very sorry, but I can't. Really.'

For a moment, he thought that the Countess was going to hit him; she stood up, but then it was as though an invisible hand had shoved her down into her chair. ‘Very well,' she said icily, ‘that's up to you. Far be it from me to lecture you about gratitude. I take it that now you're independently wealthy, you won't be needing the salary review that was scheduled at the end of the month. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.'

She looked down at the papers on her desk. Paul could feel her willing him to leave; also, he could feel her failing. He couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make things worse. He turned, at last, to leave.

‘Oh, Mr Carpenter.' He stopped, but didn't look round. ‘If you don't have anything else to do, there's always the Mortensen printouts. It's been quite a while since you did anything about them, so there's probably quite a backlog. Julie will bring them down to you if you ask her.'

Quite why that made Paul feel so angry, he wasn't quite sure, but it did. He turned round slowly and faced her. ‘Right,' he said. ‘Will do. But it's not fair, you not giving me a pay rise.' He realised how ridiculous that sounded; after all, he was pathetically useless at his job, so fairness really didn't come into it. He waited for her to make the point, but she didn't. ‘I mean,' he went on, ‘just because I wouldn't take your cheque. That's all.'

A look had crept into Countess Judy's eye that he couldn't place; at any rate, she didn't seem quite so apprehensive about looking at him. ‘Perhaps your principles do you credit, Mr Carpenter,' she said. ‘However, I'd find this display of conspicuous integrity a little more convincing if I didn't happen to know that you have indeed come into money lately. Obviously, it makes a difference.'

You what?
Paul thought. ‘I'm sorry, I don't quite—'

‘Come, now,' she went on – crafty, that was it; she was looking crafty. ‘You've been – supplementing your income, let's say – which is why you don't need the money; that's what's behind that little exhibition we had just now. You must have a farily low opinion of our intelligence, Mr Carpenter.'

‘I really haven't got the faintest—'

‘Indeed. You were sent to deal with a wyvern, on behalf of a client. You dispatched the creature, so I gather, but I don't seem to have any record of you surrendering the eye-stone. Did it simply slip your mind, Mr Carpenter? Or weren't you aware how valuable they are? But of course you must be, or else why did you go to the trouble of prising it loose, a squeamish individual like yourself? Clearly, that's where your new-found wealth derives from, and I have to say, it's not the sort of behaviour we expect from our employees. I'm disappointed. However, in light of your contribution to the release of Mr Wurmtoter, we're prepared to overlook it on this occasion. You'd do well, though, not to express your contempt for us in future by brandishing our own money under our noses. Tactless, Mr Carpenter; you should know better than that.'

It was probably just as well that Paul's voice appeared to have been turned off at the mains. Instead of replying, he fished out the matchbox containing the stone (it'd have been rather more impressive a gesture if he hadn't had to turn out both his jacket pockets before he could find it) and tossed it on the desk in front of Judy di Castel'Bianco. Her hand shot out and covered it, then lay quite still.

‘That's better,' she said quietly. ‘Now, the Mortensen printouts.'

‘What?'

‘The Mortensen printouts,' she repeated. ‘Go and deal with them, please.'

Paul didn't say what he wanted to say; instead, he nodded and left the room. He didn't start shaking until he was halfway back to his office, which was in the wrong direction for Julie's room anyhow.

Cow
, he thought.
Horrible, evil, entirely justified cow. Not that I wanted the stupid thing anyway, but getting caught out like that
— He pulled himself together. He wasn't the first person ever, he reflected, to discover the harsh truth that our enemies are never more loathsome than when they're in the right—

That was it; the vague suspicion that he'd been carting around with him for so long had finally slotted into its allotted place, and he
knew
: Countess Judy was, somehow or other, the enemy. Suddenly he remembered the Sea Scout badge, pinned inside his jacket. So that was why she'd been – well, practically afraid of him. Creatures of darkness, and all that. He wondered if it'd burn her hand, the way it had burned Mr Tanner's mum. Only she, for all her faults, wasn't the enemy.

Julie had the Mortensen printouts all ready for him; bundles and bundles of them, all tied up with stationers' red tape. ‘That ought to keep you out of mischief for a while,' she said, as he hefted the load and staggered to the door. ‘I'll be down with some more when you've done those.'

An afternoon sorting printouts into date order turned out to be exactly what Paul needed: mindless repetitive work to occupy his hands and the superficial areas of his brain, while the rest of his mind slowly chewed over recent events. When going-home time finally drifted by and he set off for his flat, he discovered that he'd reached a decision (and without even trying to).

He'd believed Countess Judy when she'd told him that the prisoners were coming home. Fine. Unaccountably, but probably because he was an idiot, he'd taken it upon himself to assume a certain level of responsibility for them. But that was all over and done with now, so whatever the big thing was that was going on all around him – civil war among the Fey, vague threats from bicycles with Moses complexes, bizarre and powerful artefacts just happening to drop into his lap at precisely the right moment (Paul believed in coincidences, but he'd also managed to believe in Father Christmas until he was nearly eleven, so it was a good bet that anything he believed in was therefore, by definition, untrue) – whatever it was and whoever was involved, it was none of his business and quite definitely not his fault. Not his mess to tidy, not his dishes to wash, not his sink to unblock, not his socks to pair. Screw the lot of them. Because he wasn't allowed to quit, he'd just sit there nice and quiet and sort Mortensen printouts until either he or the partners retired or died. As a plan of campaign (he told himself, as he set his alarm and switched off the light) it was utterly flawless. It would work. It had to.

Paul had been asleep for several hours – he knew that because his left arm had pins and needles where he'd been lying on it – when something disturbed him and he sat up. At first he guessed that he'd fallen asleep with the bedside lamp still on, but that wasn't right, he had a razor-sharp mental image of himself pressing the switch. In which case, where was all this bright stuff coming from?

The answer was sitting at the foot of his bed. It was, by any objective standard, a very nice answer; beyond question the nicest human shape that had ever shared his bedroom with him, regardless of context. Where her short, flaxen hair ended and the pale glow began was hard to say, but the way it reflected off her golden skin was really quite—

‘Rosie?' he muttered. ‘Bloody hell, can't you find some other poor bastard to—?'

She moved her head a little, and her eyes were like an unexpected brick wall across a railway track.

‘You're not Rosie,' Paul said, his throat suddenly dry. ‘Mr Tanner's mother, I mean. You're someone else.'

Her perfect chin moved up and down, maybe as much as an inch.

‘You aren't a goblin at all, are you?'

She shook her head, but the glow didn't move with her. Now it seemed to be coming from just behind her back, giving the ridiculous impression that she had a pair of graceful snow-white wings. But that was daft, because if she had wings it'd mean she was an angel—

‘Look,' he said. ‘I mean, who are you?'

She shook her head again.
Fine
, Paul thought;
this no-names business is really starting to annoy me.
On the other hand, she hadn't winced or started when he'd said
Rosie
or
Mr Tanner's mum
. ‘I can tell you what I am, if you like,' she said.

(Her voice was like many things; chocolate and milk and rain falling on the roof, autumn sunshine and the soft hiss of waves on a shingle beach, home and safety and Melze when she was nine, and a great many other things that he'd imagined but never got around to experiencing.)

‘That'd be nice,' Paul croaked.

Her lips curved round a smile. ‘I'm the girl of your dreams,' she said. ‘Don't you recognise me?'

Chapter Nine

‘Y
ou what?'

Paul said. ‘The girl of your dreams,' she repeated. ‘Oh come on, Paul, get a grip. I've been visiting you since you were thirteen, you should know me by now.'

Paul sat up, trying to get a better look at her face, but she shifted a little and the light dazzled him. ‘Sorry,' he said, ‘but you aren't at all familiar. And I think I'd remember if I'd seen you,' he added awkwardly.

She giggled. ‘Silly,' she said. ‘That's just you. You always forget your dreams the moment you wake up. Pity,' she added, in a tone of voice that he couldn't quite identify, but which made the hairs on the back of his neck curl. ‘Some of them were really – nice. You should dream more often, you know that?'

She'd said ‘Paul'
, he thought – she could say names without doing the whole salted-slug bit. ‘I still don't follow,' he said. ‘If you're, like, a recurring dream or something, how come I can see you now that I'm awake? I am awake,' he added, mostly to himself. ‘I can feel the pins and needles in my arm. Ouch,' he said, by way of vindication.

‘Of course you're awake,' she replied, ‘that's why you don't recognise me. Nice pyjamas, by the way. A lot of men couldn't get away with red paisley. What happened to the green and brown check? You always looked good in them.'

‘They got frayed, I threw them out—' He stopped dead. ‘How the hell do you know about my pyjamas?' he snapped. ‘You're not –
real
, are you?'

She raised an eyebrow. Paul slowly turned a deep puce colour and pulled the sheet up to his neck. ‘Anyhow,' she went on, ‘since you aren't going to do the to-what-do-Iowe-the-pleasure bit, I'd better just tell you. Listening?'

Paul nodded.

‘Splendid. Right, here goes.' She pursed her lips and took a deep breath. ‘You want to know why I'm here, right? Well, we couldn't help overhearing – we don't eavesdrop as a rule, but it was pretty hard to miss, really – you were thinking, why should you get mixed up in all the stuff that's going on, it's none of your business, blahdy-blahdy. And that's
so wrong
, Paul, really it is. It's – oh, this is annoying, what I want to say is, after everything we've been to each other you really ought to trust me, but of course you can't remember, so that's no good. The point is, you really do have to get involved, because it's very much to do with you—' She hesitated, frowned. ‘And me too, if you must know, because it's not just you they've got their claws into, it's me as well. Us, in fact. All of us. And that's just not right, because—'

‘Just a minute,' Paul said grimly. ‘What exactly is that supposed to mean,
all of us
? You mean it's not just—'

Her smirk was plain as anything, even through the blinding glow. ‘Not just me, that's right.'

‘How many?'

‘That'd be telling. Oh, don't pull faces. Several, all right?'

‘No, it's not all right,' Paul wailed. ‘You make it sound like a – a
harem
, or something.'

She giggled. ‘You can be very sweet sometimes, you know that? All right, at least three. Will that do? Anyway, we're doing the best we can, but there's ever so many more of them than there are of us, and sometimes they just don't play fair, and when we're gone – well, we're gone for ever, and I really don't want to talk about that. I shouldn't be having to explain. It's your uncle's fault, for not telling you when you were little. But you've got to be careful, Paul, you've got to
pay attention
, is the main thing. I know you, for two pins you'll let the whole thing wash over you and carry on doing those stupid Mortensen things and never even notice who's not there.' She paused, as if she expected him to react. He didn't. ‘Now I expect you're thinking I'm just a by-product of really strong Canadian Cheddar on top of a long, hard week, and of course you're absolutely right; but you're not imagining the pain in your hand, I can tell you that for nothing. I know it's all suddenly started piling in on top of you like a bookshelf collapsing, but there's a reason for that, obviously. I mean, men like your uncle don't up and die just like that; and I know they say
for tax reasons
and everybody assumes they know what that means, but there's a hell of a lot more to it, you take my word for it. It's
war
, Paul, and unless you get off your bum and start pulling your weight, we'll all be really screwed, and then where'll you be? Sleeping alone for ever is where, and that'll be the least of your problems. Do you understand?'