In Your Dreams (52 page)

For a moment, Ricky seemed to waver and flicker, like a faulty video; then he turned into Countess Judy. She didn't look the same as she had back in Paul's office, though: shorter, thinner, and was that a big red bruise on the side of her face?

‘I underestimated you,' she said. ‘Instead of being just a minor nuisance, you're a major nuisance. Congratulations on your promotion.'

Paul didn't move. ‘First of all, I'd like to thank my agent,' he said. ‘You don't frighten me any more, you know.'

‘I don't?' Countess Judy looked puzzled. ‘You sure? Because if I was in your shoes I'd be very scared.'

‘And if I was in your shoes I'd be limping. You couldn't hurt me then, and you can't hurt me now.'

‘Ah,' Judy said, and suddenly her face melted into a huge grin. ‘But earlier, you had a cold. Now, it looks like you're cured. In which case,' she added, ‘I'm gonna break your fucking neck.'

With that, she lunged forward, grabbing at him with her outstretched left hand. Paul weaved sideways; she didn't get hold of him but her nails ploughed his cheek, almost but not quite hard enough to draw blood. ‘Tell me where that stupid girl is,' she snarled, ‘and I'll let you go. Last offer, and then you're dead.'

‘How do you mean, earlier I had a cold?'

‘You know perfectly well—' She grabbed at him again, but he found that keeping out of her way wasn't so hard after all; he just had to watch her and move his feet. ‘But he's gone, hasn't he? You're on your own now.'

‘You mean Benny Shumway?'

‘Don't play dumb with me,' she growled, just a trifle out of breath. ‘I know everything that goes on around here, remember?'

‘Ricky Wurmtoter, then.'

‘Keep still.' Somehow, Paul didn't feel inclined to comply. Judy was trying to force him into a corner, but a neat little sideways shuffle solved that. ‘If you don't tell me, guess I'll just have to tear the joint apart brick by brick. It'd take me about ten minutes.'

‘Fine by me,' Paul replied, taking two steps back and one step left. ‘Mr Tanner and Professor van Spee and Mr Suslowicz might get a bit uptight, mind.'

‘Screw them.' Now she was definitely out of breath, and her face looked strange: out of focus, almost, as though she was being filmed through a smeared lens. ‘Why do you care, anyhow? She dumped you, remember? Threw you out.'

‘No, she didn't,' Paul said calmly. ‘Would you like to stop and have a rest for a bit? You don't want to go overdoing it at your age.'

Judy shrieked and lunged at him; and when he sidestepped, her momentum carried her forward straight into the corner of the desk. She yowled as the sharp edge stabbed into her knee.

‘You're getting weak,' Paul observed. ‘Maybe she's starting to come round; you know, just dozing rather than the full REM stuff. I'm guessing that drip thing that was stuck in her arm was some kind of sedative, which is beginning to wear off. Am I warm?'

Suddenly, Judy stopped crouching and staggered back, until she was leaning against the filing cabinet. ‘Is this what you want?' she said. ‘Does it make you feel good, watching me die like this? Yes, you're absolutely right. That skinny little bitch is starting to wake up, and I haven't got enough strength to open a Coke can. Unless I can get to her in the next five minutes and put her deep under, I'm dead.' She was perfectly still now, like a statue or a painting; her eyes were huge and round, her hair floated like mist and her skin was soft and glowing. ‘Do you think I'm so evil that I deserve to die, Paul Carpenter? Do I look like someone who's so dangerous that they've got to be put down like a savage animal? Look at me.'

‘I'm looking,' Paul said. ‘And, since you ask, yes.'

Judy's lips parted, making Paul catch his breath. ‘I'm begging you,' she said. ‘Please don't kill me. You can have anything you want, just ask and it's yours. When we make a promise, we have to keep it, if we break our word we die. Just say what you want, and I promise you'll have it. Three wishes? Three wishes granted to you by the Queen of the Fey herself. Isn't that the best offer you'll ever get?'

Suddenly and unbidden, Paul's mind filled with a bewildering profusion of images, a vast, bustling, jostling multimedia 4-D Argos catalogue of the synthesis of human desires and aspirations. It occurred to him that with three wishes from the greatest power on Earth, a good man could change the world, could wipe out hunger, war and disease, could do all the things that humans so desperately need and can't seem to do for themselves. Surely, beyond any question, that was what Sophie would want him to do. Indeed, if he turned away this miraculous opportunity, how could she possibly love him or bear to be anywhere near him? And if he really loved her, he'd make the sacrifice, because you can't truly love someone and not love the whole world. Paul understood this clearly, it made the best possible sense, it was amazing he'd been stupid enough not to realise it from the very start—

‘Anything I want?'

She nodded eagerly. ‘Anything.'

‘And you'd promise? On your word?'

‘On my life.'

‘The three things I want most in the whole world?'

‘Yes.'

‘Right,' Paul said. ‘One, I want Sophie to wake up. Two, I want you to piss off to your side of the line and never ever come back. Three I'm not sure about; I'm torn between world peace and a roast beef sandwich with extra horseradish.'

Countess Judy screamed, and before Paul could move her hands were around his neck, her nails digging into his skin just above the collar of his shirt. ‘Tell me,' she rasped in his ear, ‘where you've got her hidden, or I'm going to kill you. Do you understand?'

She was crushing his throat – he couldn't breathe. Any moment now, she'd damage him beyond repair, and he really didn't want to see the expression on Mr Dao's face, not a third time. Maybe if he hadn't been there he could've been brave and noble, hoping for Valhalla or the simple switching-off of all the lights. But he'd been there and seen what it was like, and he had no wish to go back.

‘In the closed-file store,' he whispered. ‘The weapons locker. I don't have the key.'

Judy let go, and as Paul collapsed to the ground, he knew that he'd made the right choice, because still being alive was too wonderful, and nothing is worth dying for. ‘Who's got it, then?' Judy said, gasping for air like a fish out of water. ‘Benny? Wurmtoter?'

‘They've each got keys,' Paul muttered. ‘But you haven't got time to find them. It takes twenty minutes minimum to find somebody in this place. And just suppose you did get to them in time, you'd have all this performance to go through, threats and pleading and casting spells and shit. You've got, what, two minutes left? Less, probably, with all the energy you just used up.'

She tried to kick his head, but her knees gave way and she toppled over, crashing into the edge of the desk. The expression on her face was sheer disbelief; she'd never imagined, in her wildest dreams, that it'd end like this. Paul watched her form the intention to stand up, then realise that she didn't have the strength.

‘It's too late, isn't it?' he said quietly. ‘We'd never get there in time to put her back to sleep, not even if I carried you and ran. For what it's worth, I'm sorry. If there was another way, like Benny thought, and I'd known about it, I would have tried. But this was all I could think of, and I was taking a huge risk as it was.'

‘Fuck you,' Judy whispered, and her eyes closed. She was falling asleep. She realised what was happening to her with a spasm of pure terror, because she knew better than anybody what can happen to people who die in their sleep, and just how much her people despised waste. But she couldn't help it; her eyes were shut, her breathing was gradually getting slow and even, her muscles were relaxing.
Sweet dreams,
Paul thought – but who was he kidding?

Then he sneezed.

Hell of a time to sneeze, when your mortal enemy is dying in agony right in front of you; disrespectful and inappropriate, and you can't help feeling very foolish. An apology was on its way past Paul's teeth when he realised that he hadn't just sneezed, he'd sneezed
something
.

Yuck.

A big something; big, and growing bigger every second, sprouting arms and legs and a head, and a distinctly old-fashioned slate-grey pinstripe suit, and Oxford brogues, and a tie and little round glasses, and a small Arthur Lowe moustache and a shiny bald head, and
I know who that is, it's old Mr Wells, the senior partner, and what in God's name is going on?

Even Judy seemed to have noticed; her eyelids fluttered open weakly like poisoned butterflies, and she tried to say something. Mr Wells, meanwhile, was picking himself up off the ground, dabbing at his face with a large red spotted handkerchief (quite possibly the only one still extant outside a textiles museum), smoothing down the sparse fringe of hair that lingered on the slopes of his head like a village under the crater of an active volcano.

‘
Gesundheit
,' Mr Wells muttered. Then he turned to Judy, nodded once and clicked his fingers.

He looked like the man behind the counter in the Post Office whose queue you really don't want to be in, because it's very long and glaciers whizz past it like speedboats; but when he clicked his fingers, the room filled with light, and Judy sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open. ‘Stay,' Mr Wells commanded, as he reached into Paul's jacket pocket and took out Uncle Ernie's broken watch, which he set and then buckled round Judy's motionless wrist. Then from his own inside pocket he took out a very familiar object, a rolled-up sheet of plastic the size of a large place mat, that grew as he spread it against the wall until it had changed into a door. Not the scruffy cavity-hardboard door that Paul had to make do with when he used the thing, but a fine Georgian-style panelled door, with an ornate brass handle and finely carved mouldings. It swung open of its own accord as Mr Wells lifted his hand and Judy drifted slowly towards him, her feet not moving, an inch off the carpet. Her face was still and strangely grave, no longer beautiful or scary or anything much, and with a certain degree of shock Paul realised that it was her own face, what she actually looked like. The door opened wide and she carried on through it; and if she said anything before it closed behind her, then turned back into a sheet of plastic and fell off the wall onto the floor, Paul didn't hear.

‘Mr Carpenter,' said old Mr Wells. ‘This, I believe, belongs to you.'

He slid the Portable Door into the cardboard tube it lived in and held it out. ‘Come along,' he said briskly, ‘it won't bite. Or don't you want it any more?'

That, of course, was a very good question. ‘I – I don't know,' Paul said. ‘I mean, it's not really mine, I just found it in a drawer. Actually, I thought it belonged to someone else – you know, in the office.'

Mr Wells raised an eyebrow. ‘But you kept it anyway,' he said. Paul hung his head. ‘Fortuitously,' Mr Wells went on, ‘it does in fact belong to you. It was your great-uncle's; he lent it to me many years ago, and I'm ashamed to say that I lost it.'

‘Easily done,' Paul mumbled. ‘I'm always losing things.'

‘In a game of canasta,' Mr Wells added, ‘with Mr Tanner's mother and some of her friends. I suspect the game wasn't entirely honest. At any rate, shortly afterwards I was forcibly transformed into a stapler, as you will recall, and could take no steps to reclaim it or return it to your uncle. That it somehow found its way into your keeping suggests that you were intended to have it, and I see no reason to interfere. Keep it, by all means; and next time, perhaps you should be careful to whom you lend it.' He shook his head. ‘Dietrich Wurmtoter is a very capable young man, quite brilliant in his own way, but in other respects somewhat
in
capable. Had I been at liberty at the time, I would have advised you not to let him have it. It's caused a great deal of trouble since it fell into the hands of the Fey.' A great deal of trouble; you could put it like that, Paul supposed. He nodded; then he took a deep breath. ‘Mr Wells,' he said, as politely as he could, ‘what were you doing up my nose?'

Mr Wells's face twitched; it was almost, but not quite, a smile. ‘For the last few weeks,' he said, ‘ever since this most regrettable crisis started, I have been – to use the modern expression – undercover. Given the delicacy of my position with regard to the complex web of conflicting loyalties in which I found myself, I thought it would be advisable if I put myself entirely out of reach of all the parties involved, while remaining close to the centre of events. Accordingly,' he said, ‘I disguised myself as a cold.'

There's ambient weird – everyday weird, stuff you can get used to, like tables that reflect shapeshifters as they really are, rooms that move through ninety degrees each month, toilets that flush directly into the interdimensional void, cheques that have
Bank of the Dead
on them in very small writing just above the sort code, cars that turn out to be the boss's sister and goblins that turn out to be the boss's mother, dragons in cash machines and doors you can fold up and store in a toilet-roll tube; and then there's can'thave-heard-that-right weird, when two pages of
The Book of Life
have got stuck together, and the sugar you just spooned into your tea proves to be salt. ‘Sorry?' Paul said. ‘As a what?'

Mr Wells frowned a little. ‘A cold,' he repeated. ‘Rather a good idea, though I say so myself. You've probably noticed that a cold goes round an office; everybody catches it and passes it on to everybody else. A unique opportunity, in fact, to keep the protagonists in the affair under the keenest scrutiny; unseen, unnoticed, one's presence not even suspected because the disguise is so commonplace. Somewhat taxing, I will admit; there are over fifteen billion germs in the average head cold, Mr Carpenter, and being all of them at once requires effort and concentration. But worthwhile, I think, in the event.'