In Your Dreams (16 page)

No trace of any things; just the TV, burbling quietly to itself, and the clock, reading 1.25 a.m. He'd fallen asleep in his chair. Had a bad dream. On the table next to his chair he saw the empty pizza plate and coffee mug. Caffeine and mozzarella cheese; just plain biochemistry, nothing more.

Yes, but. Paul thought for a moment, then got up and went to the bathroom. In the mirror, he could see the red claw-marks on his neck, plain as anything.

Bloody hell
, he thought.
If I show up at the office with marks on my neck, people are going to think . . .
And then he remembered. Explosion. What office?

Seven and a half sleepless hours later, Paul stood on the pavement opposite a hole where 70 St Mary Axe should have been. All in all, he thought, he was getting sick and tired of holes.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a hole. During the night they'd rigged up hoardings; in fact, this being London, the hoardings were already covered in red, yellow and green fly-posters. There was also a white-and-yellow police tape, a crowd of people staring, and a TV crew. A power-dressed female was talking earnestly to a camera, while a couple of kids tried to sneak behind her shoulder and wave.
Curious
, Paul thought;
last week, if someone had told me JWW was going to get blown sky-high, I'd have grinned like an ape.
No JWW, no employment contract, no more doing bizarre and scary things for fear of being tortured by Mr Tanner. Free. But now, standing looking at the scaffolding poles and plywood sheet, he felt a surge of anger, and a tiny voice inside his head saying,
Welcome to the war
.

War. And what fucking war would that be?

‘Mr Carpenter.' Paul spun round so fast that he nearly knocked Countess Judy over. ‘I tried to telephone, but I guess you'd already left.'

She looked exactly the same as when he'd last seen her, except for a very faint green glow right at the back of her eyes. He tried to think of some way of asking the obvious question.

‘Actually,' she said, ‘this is rather fortuitous. You may recall what we were talking about yesterday.'

Yesterday; he could just remember that far back, if he tried. ‘Effective magic,' he said; then looked round sharply, to see if anybody was listening. But none of the gawpers or media types was interested in them.

‘Quite so,' Countess Judy replied. ‘And here's an excellent example of it in action.'

Paul frowned. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘I don't follow.'

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Come with me,' she said. ‘Don't worry,' she added, ‘nobody'll see us.'

She walked straight in front of the TV camera, past the crowd, not over or under but
through
the yellow tape and into the hoarding.
Oh well
, Paul thought, and followed her. Sure enough, as he got close to them, they seemed to shift, like the end of a rainbow; and he was standing outside the front door of the office. As far as he could tell, it looked perfectly normal.

‘Effective magic,' the Countess explained, pushing the door open. ‘Simple glamour; they think they can see a hoarding and an incident line, and that satisfies their curiosity – they don't expect to see more. Well,' she added, ‘come on. It's perfectly safe.'

The door felt real enough; and inside, reception was just as it had been the day before. And there, behind the desk, was Melze, and she was smiling at him. ‘So really,' he said, ‘there wasn't a bomb?'

A cloud passed across the Countess's face. ‘Oh, there was a bomb,' she said, with unmistakable anger in her voice. ‘And the damage was quite extensive. Mr Suslowicz was here most of the night repairing it. But everything's back to normal now.' She paused, standing directly in front of the reception desk. ‘You're aware, I take it, that the bomb was placed in your filing cabinet.'

Paul nodded. ‘I—' How would he have known that, though? It hadn't been on the news; Mum the thing had told him. ‘Was it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh,' Paul said. ‘I mean, why? Why would anybody want to kill
me
?'

The Countess frowned. ‘You're assuming it was meant for you personally,' she said. ‘Do you have any grounds for that assumption?'

‘I—' Paul shrugged. ‘I suppose I just jumped to conclusions,' he said. ‘So you don't think—'

Her face was completely neutral. ‘It's too early to form a reasoned hypothesis,' she said. ‘However, you'll be relieved to hear that nothing was damaged.'

It took a moment for that to sink in. ‘
Nothing?
'

‘Nothing.'

‘But – not even the cabinet? What about the files and stuff inside? Surely they must've been . . .'

‘Nothing,' Countess Judy said again. ‘It's not this firm's policy to allow acts of petty vandalism to disrupt our work. Accordingly, we take precautions, as a matter of course. You will find that everything is precisely as you left it last night.'

Colour me impressed
, Paul thought. Backing up files was one thing, but an entire building and its contents— ‘Well, then,' he said feebly, ‘that's good. No harm done and nobody hurt, that's—' He stopped short. There had been a flicker in her face when he'd said
nobody hurt.
‘Nobody
was
hurt, were they?'

She didn't answer. Instead, she moved away from him and picked up some letters from the front desk. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘excellent. Your family history. Please wait in your office until I've had a chance to look at this. I'll send for you.' She walked out, leaving Paul standing.

‘What,' Melze said, ‘was all that about?'

He'd forgotten she was there. ‘Search me,' he replied. ‘Look, I'm not dreaming, am I? It was on the news last night, this place getting blown up?'

Melze shrugged. ‘Well, I thought so. And I was thinking, oh well, back to job-hunting again, and then Mr Tanner rang me at seven o'clock this morning. Just said be here as usual, and here I am.' She looked around, then added: ‘Doesn't look all that blown up to me. Like, for instance, everything's exactly where I left it on the desk last night – you'd have thought that
something
would've got moved. But what was all that about it being your office that the bomb was in?'

Paul hesitated before answering. ‘You heard what she said,' he replied.

‘Makes sense, I suppose,' she replied. ‘After all, your office is pretty much in the centre of the building.'

‘Is it?'

Melze looked at him. ‘Well, yes. And I don't know anything about demolition, but I suppose if you want to blow somewhere up, in the middle's probably the best place to plant your bomb.'

‘Right,' Paul said. That hadn't occurred to him, of course, mostly because he still had only a very sketchy idea of the geography of the place; he knew that if he went up such and such a staircase, turned right then left then left again, nine times out of ten he'd find himself outside his office door. For all that told him about the layout of the building, however, it might just as well have been transdimensional folds in hyperspace. Paul had long since faced up to the fact that when he died, he'd probably manage to get lost inside his own coffin. ‘Well,' he said, ‘that explains that, then.' He broke off. Melze was looking at him, her head slightly sideways. Her nose twitched.
Oh buggery
, he thought,
she's looking at my neck—
‘See you later,' he mumbled, and fled.

He stood in the corridor outside his office for maybe a full minute before he found the courage to go inside. If they'd been right, and the bomb had been set off when an over-inquisitive goblin started poking about inside his filing cabinet, then it stood to reason, surely, that at least one goblin must've died there last night, in a particularly flamboyant manner. Paul had never seen a dead body, or been in a room where someone had recently died; death was something that happened to superfluous relatives he hardly knew, in distant hospitals. He was aware that the partners were very clever at magical cleaning and tidying (or was it just effective magic, making the place
look
spick and span after the nightly revels of Mr Tanner's relations?) but he didn't relish the thought of spending time sitting in a chair that had recently been misted with a fine spray of vaporised goblin.

But there was nothing to see, no faint lingering smells, no tell-tale stickiness on the chair vinyl or the desktop. As Paul sat down, he reflected on how little he actually knew about goblins. Was it a safe assumption that getting blown up did actually kill them? Quite possibly not; in which case, he was curling his toes and puckering his guts for nothing. Mr Tanner's mum would probably tell him, if he happened to run into her at some point. Assuming, of course, that she'd survived the blast—

‘Mr Carpenter.' Countess Judy was standing in the doorway. He hadn't heard her approach. ‘Follow me, please.'

She led him along corridors and up and down staircases that he couldn't remember having seen before, to a small windowless room at the end of a long passageway. His sense of direction told him that they were down in some kind of basement. The room was bare-walled, uncarpeted, and empty apart from a plain pine table and two plastic stacking chairs.

‘I've only had time to glance at this,' she said, holding up the paper she'd shown him earlier, ‘but it would appear that you're qualified by birth to practise effective magic.'

‘Ah, right,' Paul said. Apparently he'd passed, then. What joy.

‘However,' Countess Judy went on, ‘an emergency has arisen requiring urgent input from a member of the pest-control division. Right now,' she added mournfully, ‘you're the only representative of the division on the premises.'

‘Am I?' Paul said, startled. ‘But, what about Benny? I mean Mr—'

‘Mr Shumway,' the Countess said grimly, ‘is currently indisposed.' She hesitated, then added, ‘And that, in fact, is the emergency. Mr Shumway has been abducted and is being held hostage; most probably by the same terrorist group that planted the bomb.'

Fuck
, Paul thought. It was a good, flexible, one-size-fitsall reaction covering a variety of issues, including genuine horror at Benny's plight, and even more genuine terror at the thought that Paul himself was now, by implication, duty hero. ‘That's awful,' he said.

‘Indeed. But not,' she went on, ‘entirely unexpected. I sent Mr Shumway to find Mr Wurmtoter.'

‘Ah,' Paul said.

‘Mr Wurmtoter,' the Countess said, ‘should have returned from his assignment three days ago. I suspected that something might be amiss, and last night I asked Mr Shumway to investigate. This morning, just before six o'clock, I found this outside my door.' She produced – Paul didn't happen to see from where – a long, narrow grey cardboard box. Inside was something that looked vaguely like the stuffing out of an old-fashioned sofa. ‘Mr Shumway's beard,' the Countess explained. ‘I fear there can only be one explanation. Mr Shumway has fallen into the hands of an enemy.'

More fuck
, Paul thought;
fuck with double buggery, a cherry and a little red-and-white-striped umbrella
. ‘I see,' he said. ‘But what—?'

‘So it's fortuitous,' the Countess went on, ‘that you've completed your vocational training in pest control and are equipped to deal with this situation. Feel free, of course, to make use of whatever resources you need. Mr Shumway's safe return is, needless to say, our top priority.'

Yes, but
— ‘Countess,' Paul said nervously, ‘that's absolutely fine, but really, I haven't got any experience or anything like that, all I've done so far is a load of paperwork and sitting on one small dragon. Couldn't someone else go instead? I mean, what about Mr Suslowicz, or Professor van Spee? They're – well, proper wizards. I'm just a clerk.'

She looked at him for a very long time, and he came to realise that there are worse things in the world than chasing off after dangerous lunatics; high on the list of such things was being stared at by Countess Judy. When at last she spoke, her voice was as cold and hard as a VAT inspector's heart. ‘We have no definite leads,' she said, ‘only suspicions. However, in the light of the current situation, it's hard to see this as a coincidence.'

What situation?
Then Paul remembered; something about a war, us and them, dreams and nightmares. ‘You mean the war?' he hazarded.

‘Precisely.'

He nodded, then asked: ‘Excuse me, but what war?'

She raised both eyebrows at him, a truly alarming sight. ‘The war, Mr Carpenter. The armed conflict among the Fey. Don't you
ever
read memos?'

There's a time for lying and saving face. ‘No,' he said. ‘At least, I thought I did, but apparently not. Will you please tell me: what war?'

A tiny little sigh; then the Countess said: ‘It's not so much a war as a rebellion. A dissident separatist faction among my people has seen fit to make a unilateral declaration of secession. It's this faction that we believe is behind the bombing attempt and Mr Shumway's abduction. It'd take too long to brief you on the issues involved. You'll just have to take it from me that the separatists are callous, ruthless criminals who will stop at nothing to further their cause. Hence the need to retrieve Mr Shumway as quickly as possible.'

Paul slumped a little. If Benny really was in danger, and if Paul was genuinely the only person who was qualified to go and rescue him, there was no point trying to wriggle out of it; and if Benny's captors were these dissident Fey, they were by definition the enemy, and to hell with any issues. ‘It's all right,' he said, ‘I'll go.' He stopped, then added: ‘Um, go where?'

Quite unexpectedly, Countess Judy laughed. ‘Now you're actually beginning to sound like a hero, Mr Carpenter. Most encouraging. I was sure my faith in you wasn't misplaced.'