Wish You Were Here (11 page)

‘OK, lads,' he called back down the tunnel, ‘it's all right. Come on out, we're—'

He froze, and in consequence was butted in the rear by a procession of crawling, mole-like smugglers. He didn't seem to notice them.

‘—Right back where we started,' he concluded quietly. ‘Goddamnit, we've come round in a bloody circle.' He rubbed his eyes, opened them and looked again. ‘Hey,' he murmured, ‘that's crazy. Could've sworn we went in a straight line. Anyway, no sign of the frogs. Hurry up, people, we don't want to be standing out in the open like a lot of garden gnomes. Is that the lot? OK, let's move.'

They moved. Around them, the undergrowth popped and crackled, for all the world as if it was sniggering at them. They began to feel uncomfortable.

‘No,' said Hat at last, as they passed the same tree for the fifth time. ‘I refuse to believe we're lost.There's got to be some simple reason.' He peered through the branches of the trees at the lake, no more than a couple of hundred yards away as the crow, having fallen off its perch, slithers. Put him two hundred yards from Lake Chicopee and Hat would know where he was with his eyes shut, his ears stopped up, his nose and mouth blocked with clay and his hands and feet encased in concrete. All right, he'd be dead within a minute, but at least he'd know exactly where he was. He could easily picture himself losing his way on the back of his hand, but not here.

But . . .

‘North-west,' he muttered. ‘We haven't tried north-west yet. Come on, you lot.'

‘Chief.'

Hat closed his eyes again. Give me strength, he prayed; not very much of it, just as much as it takes to throttle Mr Snedge will do just splendidly. ‘Well, Snedge?' he said sweetly. ‘And what can I do for you?'

‘Isn't that them Vikings over there, Chief? You know, the ones whose boat keeps sinking?'

Hat followed the line indicated by Snedge's grubby finger, and saw eight or nine bedraggled figures squelching up out of the lake below them. He recognised them all, though he wasn't sure what they thought they were doing on land. It was a big day for surprises, evidently.

‘What I thought was, Chief, maybe we could ask them.'

Hat shook his head. ‘Don't think so,' he replied.

‘Oh. Why not?'

‘Don't think we're terribly popular with them, Snedge. Not since we nicked their lifeboat.'

‘Oh.'

Hat narrowed his eyes. ‘Mind you,' he said, ‘usually they drown. This time, apparently, they haven't.'

‘Well, then. Maybe they wouldn't mind us asking.'

‘They're still sopping wet, Snedge,' Hat replied thoughtfully. ‘I mean, they didn't row their way to shore all nice and dry. I expect that when the time came and they started abandoning ship and they went to find the lifeboat, they still went through that good old where-is-it-I-don't-know-who-saw-it-last? routine.' He looked up at an unfamiliar tree - he'd known all the trees round this lake since they were seeds, and this wasn't one of them - and sniffed. ‘Mind you,' he said, ‘they do seem to know where they're going.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Which is more than we do.'

‘Yup.'

‘OK.' Hat stood up. ‘Let's follow them,' he said.

 

‘Somewhere around here, I guess,' said Calvin Dieb, pointing at the rocky slope that fell away into the water. ‘I think. To be honest with you, this whole place looks the same to me.'

The Vikings nodded, and started to look. They turned over stones, they prised apart tangled knots of bramble, they combed grass. While they were at it, Dieb looked up into the branches of the tree above him, and saw a squirrel.

‘Bad move,' it said.

Dieb scowled. ‘Sez who, tree-rat?' he snarled. ‘Look, I saved these guys from drowning. They were all scheduled to die, and I saved them. Told them to get down the rounded end of the boat, and they did. Isn't that something? '

‘Bad move,' the squirrel repeated.

‘And,' Dieb went on, ‘to show their gratitude, they've agreed to help me find my keys. Mutually beneficial, I call it. So what's so bad about that?'

‘On the other paw,' sighed the squirrel, ‘it's exactly what you're supposed to have done. Don't worry about the arrows. Be seeing you.'

‘What arrows?' Dieb demanded, as two feet of straight, obsidian-tipped pine flicked past him and buried its nose in a tree. ‘Oh, those arrows. Hey,' he yelled up into the branches, ‘you didn't explain why I shouldn't worry about them. I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason, but . . .'

He didn't continue the sentence, because he'd seen something. Fifty yards or so away, the Vikings who'd been looking for his car-keys had suddenly fallen over. There were arrows sticking out of them. In fact, there were arrows everywhere, and sticking out of everybody except him. He dropped to his knees and put his hands over his head, whimpering. Something like a moustache brushed the little finger of his left hand. It was a moment or so before he realised it must have been the fletchings on an arrow-shaft, missing him by—

And then the trees echoed to a series of shrieks and whoops, as strange, savage buckskinned men poured out of every patch of cover large enough to hide a pheasant. They were after the Vikings; Dieb didn't look, but what he heard convinced him that they made a thorough job of it. There were shouts and screams, and from time to time heavy, dull bashing noises, the sort of sound an overweight lawyer with a morbid imagination might connect in his mind with a not-too-sharp flint axe mashing a man's skull. Distantly, in a remote part of his mind where he simply didn't care, he wondered whether it would hurt terribly much, and came to the conclusion that by the time it started hurting he'd be past feeling it.
But don't quote me on that
, added that remote part of his brain, remembering that it was part of a lawyer.
Hey
, it added, just before Dieb located it and yanked it off line,
why don't you call the cops?

And then there was silence, except for distant low-voiced conversation in a strange language. What, he wondered, were they saying to each other, as they collected up their arrows and wiped their axes on the grass? Although he couldn't make out the words, it sounded like any conversation between people who spend a lot of their time working together. Hey, looks like this weather's set in for the rest of the week. Saw your sister's boy the other day; he's grown, hasn't he? You think the Redskins gonna make it to the Superbowl this year?

And then he thought he could hear words he could understand—

That bloody squirrel again—

‘Yo, Talks.'

‘Much obliged.'

‘You're welcome, Talks.'

‘Where'd this lot come from, then? I thought you said . . .'

‘It's this clown I'm taking round. Not the English kid or the journalist or the droopy girl, the lawyer. Didn't do what he was told.'

‘Ah.'

‘I said to him, Don't try and warn them. So of course he did. Guessed he would. That sort always have to know best.'

Dieb cringed.
All his fault!
He recognised the feeling that flooded his body as if it was a leaky submarine; it was that oh-shit sensation he used to get as a young lawyer when he realised he'd failed to meet a time limit, missed out some procedural step, lost the deeds, whatever. Partly it was straightforward pain, as if his mind had been burnt and was still raw and seeping; mostly, though, it was a great gush of rage building up pressure inside him, searching for an outlet. When he'd been a young lawyer he'd hated everybody he could think of; his boss, for giving him work he wasn't fit to do; his secretary, for not reminding him; his colleagues, for not warning him; the client, for getting him into this mess in the first place. And God, of course. When he'd been a young lawyer, Calvin Dieb had sworn a lot at God. Now that he was a middle-aged lawyer, used to having the buck screeching to a halt at his feet every day of the week, he didn't hate anybody in particular (even now, he didn't hate the Vikings, or the Indians, or even the squirrel). He just hated. And, of course, he got even. Usually he got even first; if he had a philosophy of life, it was huddled round the concept of pre-emptive revenge.

It was very quiet now; either they'd gone away, or they were all standing round him in a circle, waiting for him to open his eyes. He opened them. As far as he could judge, he was on his own.

‘Hello?' he heard himself call out - Jesus, how stupid! No harm seemed to come of it, however. No more arrows, no more howling warriors, not even a chatty squirrel. It occurred to him that maybe he should go and see if any of the Vikings was still alive. If so, he could use the phone in his car to call for help, if only he could get into his car, which he couldn't, not without the keys. Unforceable locks, unsmashable glass, an alarm that boiled your eyes in your head at forty paces; it was one of the reasons he'd gone for that particular model, the security. If only, if only he could get back inside it and raise the windows and deadlock the doors and call the National Guard and the Air Force on the phone, then everything would be all right.

If only he could find . . .

Survivors. There had to be survivors. With every muscle, tendon and nerve in his body clenched - except for victim photographs usable in evidence, he couldn't stand the sight of blood - he tiptoed down towards the lakeside—

(Oh God, what if they've scalped them? He didn't actually know what scalping really involved, but he was prepared to wager relevant money that it was truly horrible.)

And found it empty. Not a corpse. Not an arrow, or a tomahawk, or a splatter of blood. The whole scene was cleaner and tidier than a Swiss operating theatre.

A wave of relief and a surge of panic raced simultaneously through his mind, turning it into a jacuzzi of conflicting emotions. Maybe it hadn't happened, and nobody had been killed; in which case, he'd hallucinated it all, and he was going mad, and they'd lock him up in the funny farm and debar him from practising as a lawyer, and then the bank would foreclose on the house and his wife would be put out on the street—

Hang on, he remembered, I haven't got a wife. And the house is paid for, at least the town house is, and the apartment in Des Moines. The farm and the ski lodge weren't, but as far as he was concerned they could have those and welcome, what with interest rates and negative equity and all. Shit, he muttered to himself, I'm having an anxiety attack here and it's not even my anxiety. Get a
grip
, for Chrissakes.

All I have to do is find my keys, and I'm out of here.

‘Try looking under that rock,' suggested a beaver, poking its dear little head up out of the water. ‘No, not that one, the flat one to your left. I expect you're quite comfortable with the undersides of flat stones, in your line of work.'

Dieb winced, as if someone had carelessly stubbed out a cigarette in his eye. ‘It's you again, isn't it? Goddamnit, why can't you just leave me alone?'

‘Be like that. Only trying to help.'

‘I am not lifting up that rock.'

‘Don't, then.'

‘Ah, shit.' He bent over, got his fingers under the edge of the rock and heaved.

‘Hi.'

He stared, for maybe a fifteenth of a second; then he let go of the rock, but too late.

Peering up at him, his hair tousled, his glasses misted, his beard full of earwigs, was his partner, Hernan Piranha.

 

The biggest bear, a mountain of fur and muscle with a claw salad and teeth garnish, turned its head and stared at him.

‘Er,' said Wesley, and dropped the tomahawk on his foot.

‘'Scuse me,' said the bear.

A sharp blow on the toe can be excruciatingly painful, and the agony deprived Wesley of the power of speech; no great loss, in the circumstances, since there was absolutely nothing he could think of to say to a huge bear in any case. He refrained from screaming, and as far as he was concerned that was his lot.

‘'Scuse me,' repeated the bear, in a deep, reverberating growl, ‘but could we possibly borrow your axe thing?'

‘M?'

‘You see,' the bear continued, ‘we forgot the tin opener. At least,' it added, turning its head just far enough to be able to give the bear to its right a vicious look, ‘one of us forgot the tin opener, the same way she'd forget her own head if it wasn't tied to her shoulders with her neck, though that's an arrangement that might well be subject to review.'

‘M?'

‘Ignore him,' said the female bear. ‘Have you got it? I asked, just before we left. Yes of course, he said, d'you think I'm thick or something. And then when we get here it's I thought you had it. Well—'

‘I bloody never!'

‘That's right, shout. That's your answer to everything, shouting.'

‘Tin opener?' Wesley enquired.

The male bear nodded. ‘For the picnic things. The corned beef and the potted shrimps and the crab paste. And some pillock,' he added, looking left this time, ‘managed to snap off the little rings on forty-seven cans of beer, though God only knows how he managed it. I mean, forty-seven!'

‘Picnic things?'

‘That's right. And if you could possibly hurry it up, that'd be really great, because the rest of them are due along any minute now.'

‘Every bear that ever there was,' confirmed the female bear.

‘And if there's nothing for them to eat except bread and butter and orange squash, life might get a bit hectic, if you see what I mean.'

‘'S all your fault,' the female bear sniffed. ‘This'd never have happened if we'd gone to Weymouth like I said.'