In Your Dreams (37 page)

Work
, Paul thought;
well, why not?
He opened the top envelope: a thick wad of forms, most of which he recognised – Form JX775, application for a special licence to cull banshees on a Site of Special Scientific Interest; Form JK981(B), application to remove a Tree Preservation Order from a rogue Ent; Form JG663, special dispensation to burn the corpse of an Undead in a smokeless-fuel zone. He sighed, reached for his pen, and yawned hugely.

So Ricky had lost the Portable Door. Pity; it had been an amusing toy, at least to begin with. Paul had been able to spend week-long lunch hours in exotic places and had still managed to catch up on his work before the front office opened again. At one point, he'd honestly believed that it had helped him attain True Love, in a confused, untidy sort of a way. Possibly it might have come in handy in his present ghastly dilemma; maybe he could've escaped from Countess Judy and the Fey through it, next time they came for him, but he doubted that. You had to be awake to use it, after all. On balance, it was no great loss. He'd learned before that the Door's principal and fatal drawback was always what you took with you every time you stepped through it: namely, yourself. Paul shrugged and added it to the list of magical goodies that had recently passed briefly through his hands, along with the Sea Scout badge, the wyvern's-brain stone, Uncle Ernie's stash of bizarre stuff that Mr Tanner's mum had whisked away from him on the pretext of making the world a safer place.
Yeah, right.
Come to think of it, he'd lost, given away or mislaid enough potentially devastating weapons to equip a small but very nasty army.

If he believed that it probably wasn't a coincidence, would that make him certifiably paranoid? On balance, probably not.

Paul finished one lot of forms, and found another lot in the next envelope ( JJ409, application to renew a helmet of invisibility licence; JF006, statutory notification of intent to destroy a Ring of Power in an environmentally sensitive area). Filling them in gradually lulled him into the Accountancy Zone, that dazed no man's land between sleep and waking in which nothing seems to matter except writing the answers to damn-fool questions into cramped little printed boxes. Even as his mind drifted away into the fog, he couldn't help wondering if the Fey could operate in this disputed border country, and at some level he was relieved and pleased when the phone rang and jerked him out of it.

The phone ringing was something of a novelty in itself. ‘Hello?' he mumbled.

‘Outside call for you.' Paul recognised Mr Tanner's mum's voice, wondered vaguely why she was filling in on reception and remembered that Melze was the cashier now, even though Benny was presumably free too . . . ‘Did anybody tell you that you're not supposed to take personal calls during office hours?'

‘What?' Paul said, but the phone clicked in his ear, and then someone said, ‘Hello, Paul?'

‘Hello?' He recognised the voice. Of course he recognised the bloody voice – he heard it nearly every day.

‘Paul, it's me, Demelza Horrocks. Melze.' Pause. ‘You don't remember me.'

Huh?
‘Of course I remember you, Melze. What's—?'

‘Oh, that's all right.' Giggle. ‘I know it's a bit strange, me ringing you out of the blue like this after all these years, but last week I ran into Jenny Wheeler, and she said Neville Connelly had told her you were working at this place in the City, which sounded really sort of grand and impressive, so I couldn't resist ringing you up and seeing how you were. How are you?'

‘Melze? Is that you?'

Pause. ‘Oh, very funny. Same old Paul. Anyhow, long time no see. Did you hear, I got married? That's right. Well, you remember Damien Turnbull; his sister was going out with this bloke Sean, and then they broke up and I happened to run into him at a party, and—'

Pointless trying to listen, absorb information and have the world blow up all around you, all at the same time. Paul tuned out. It sounded like Melze. Fact was, it sounded a hell of a lot more like Melze than Melze did, and it was dropping all the right names, the people they'd been at school with, the friends of the friends of their friends. But Melze was only a staircase and a few yards of corridor away, so what was she doing ringing him long distance from the deep past?

‘Melze,' he interrupted, ‘where are you living these days?'

‘Saffron Walden,' she replied promptly. ‘Well, just after Kevin was born we decided it was time we got out of London, and then Sean got a transfer—'

‘Saffron Walden,' Paul repeated. ‘Look, excuse me asking a very strange question, but what made you decide to call me? Right now, I mean.'

‘Didn't I just tell you that? About running into Jenny Wheeler, who told me Neville Connelly had—'

‘Right now,' Paul repeated firmly. ‘As opposed to last Friday, or tomorrow week. Did you . . .' Battle-hardened and soul-callused as he'd become, he still cringed as he said it. ‘Did you have a dream about me?'

Pause. ‘You know, that's absolutely amazing; yes, I did. Not a strange dream or one of
those
dreams, you just happened to be there in it, and it made me think, I wonder whatever happened to Paul Carpenter; and then I bumped into Jenny Wheeler in Superdrug, and she said Neville Connelly—'

‘That's great, Melze,' Paul said, ‘I'll call you back. Bye.'

He sagged back in his chair and dropped the phone onto its cradle; then he glanced at his watch. Quarter past three – he'd worked through lunch, apparently. At that moment, Melze – must get out of that habit – the
fake
Melze would be at the Bank, paying in the cheques.
Good
, he thought,
I should just about have time.

As Paul stood up, he felt strangely energised.
Well
, he thought,
at least I've figured out what's been going on around here. The fact that there's nothing I can do about it is another matter entirely.

It was cold and slightly damp in the strongroom, just as it had been when Paul and Sophie had catalogued the contents, somewhere between three months and a thousand years ago. Much of the register was written in her spiky, difficult, little-girl handwriting, and Paul found that enormously distracting; bad, since he really did have to concentrate.

As he'd assumed, Countess Judy hadn't written register entries for the wyvern's third-eye stone she'd taken from him; nor had she simply shoved it onto the shelves where the catalogued items ended up. On the other hand, he was morally certain that she must've stashed it in here somewhere. Why he was so sure, he had no idea. Logically, she could just as easily have hidden it in her own room somewhere under an invisibility glamour, or logged it somewhere in the post-relativistic vastness of the closed-file store, or in any of the countless hiding places with which 70 St Mary Axe was undoubtedly riddled; or she could've gone for absolute maximum security and stuffed it down the front of her blouse, like a madam in a Western. Logic, though, hadn't exactly been on his side ever since he first walked through the door of this hell-hole. Could a Vulcan survive on the premises for more than a fifth of a second, Paul wondered, before his green brain boiled out through his pointy ears? Almost certainly not. The thing was in here somewhere, he knew it. But where?

When searching for proverbial needles in proverbial haystacks, there's always the robust approach: set fire to the hay, then sift through the ashes with a metal detector. Such an approach wasn't likely to endear Paul to his employers terribly much, but he wasn't really too fussed about that. If they chose to fire him for it, yippee; but they weren't going to, because that would mean kissing goodbye to four hundred and twenty-five thousand bucks. In any event, he placed a slightly higher value on his life than on his job, and pissing off Mr Tanner would be
fun
. He closed the strongroom door behind him, and went to reception.

‘Sorry to bother you,' he told the ice-blue-eyed Swedish blonde bombshell behind the front desk, ‘but I need a favour.'

Mr Tanner's mum scowled at him. ‘You've got a nerve,' she said.

‘Several. Well?'

She shrugged. ‘What can I do for you?' she said.

‘I need to borrow some of your friends and relations for a few minutes.'

‘Don't be bloody stupid,' Mr Tanner's mum replied, and she was about to remind Paul of the fundamental deal whereby the goblins stayed strictly out of sight during office hours in return for the run (scamper, slither, crawl, waddle) of the place once everybody had gone home, when he shushed her. ‘It's an emergency,' he pointed out. ‘I need at least two dozen goblins for maybe ten minutes. Is that such a big deal?'

If she hesitated, it was probably only for show. ‘What for?' she said warily.

‘Research,' Paul replied.

‘Fair enough. Where do you want them?'

Ten minutes proved to be a wild overestimate; Mr Tanner's mum's sisters, cousins and aunts were through the strongroom in four, leaving behind a snowstorm of floating papers, shredded envelopes and viciously abused index cards. Sorting and clearing up was going to be the sort of job that'd have all the king's horses and all the king's men sulking in their barracks screaming for their shop stewards;
not
, Paul thought smugly as he cradled his matchbox in his arms,
my problem.

‘Is that the lot?' asked the boss goblin.

‘Yes, thanks.'

‘Oh. Pity. We could do upstairs for you, no worries. Five minutes—'

Paul shook his head. ‘That'll be fine,' he said.

‘Or there's the closed-file store,' the goblin persisted hopefully. ‘We aren't allowed in there unless one of you Tall Bastards lets us in. You sure you haven't accidentally lost something in there? A paper clip or a two-pee piece or something?'

‘No, really,' Paul said firmly. ‘But thanks ever so much for offering.'

The goblin muttered something under its breath, then whistled to its chums. They all glowed electric blue for a split second, then vanished. Paul allowed himself a moment or so to gaze at the majesty of the spectacle before him. According to his parents, his bedroom had been, beyond all possibility of comparison, the untidiest place on the planet. Not any longer. For a connoisseur of the Shambles Beautiful, it was an awesome sight. A small part of him hoped that the clearing-up spell the partners used every morning to straighten up the aftermath of the previous night's goblin frolics would suffice to deal with this mess. The rest of him couldn't care less.

Back in his office, Paul carefully opened the matchbox. There was the stone, still looking uncannily like one of the bits of coloured glass that you get in a flame-effect electric fire. He closed his hand around it, then hesitated and opened his desk drawer. Sellotaped to the side was a list of in-house extension numbers. He found the cashier's office and dialled. No reply. Not-Melze was still at the Bank.
Fine.

On his way to the cashier's room Paul stopped off at the closed-file store and headed for the shelves where Benny stored the heavy-duty pest-control gear. Since he was on a roll with wanton destruction, he was tempted by the comprehensive selection of explosive devices and accessories, but in the end he decided to keep it simple and discreet, and helped himself to a crowbar, a hammer, a couple of offcuts of two-by-four and a bag of nails. Plenty enough to carry up two flights of stairs (three if there was an R in the month; offhand he couldn't remember), and not so noisy as to risk attracting unwanted attention. It did cross his mind to see if Ricky Wurmtoter was in his room, but he decided against it. Paul still wasn't sure about Ricky. True, he seemed to be mostly all right, but he was still Management. Paul reckoned he'd be better off on his own.

The first part of his plan wasn't too hard, although woodwork had never been his strong suit, and he caught himself a nasty blow on the thumb with the hammer. That gave him the time he was going to need for the tricky bit, the first part of which was breaking into the filing cabinet.

Tricky was about right. When the crowbar snapped in half like a stick of celery, Paul seriously considered going down to reception and asking for a loan of another six dozen goblins. He dismissed the notion; the partners were bound to have specifically goblin-proofed every bit of office furniture in the place, so even the relentless energy and imagination of Mr Tanner's off-relations wasn't likely to do him any good. There were always the explosives, but by now he had a nasty feeling that the rest of the building was likely to give way long before the filing-cabinet lock. Hitting it with the hammer would achieve nothing beyond a temporary alleviation of his frustrations. Apparently he was screwed after all.

Unless—

Surely not. But what the hell, it was worth a try. Paul opened the top drawer of the desk and looked inside. Sure enough, along with the statutory broken pencils, twisted mess of tangled rubber bands, spilt miscellany of paper clips and whorls of discarded Extra Strong Mint wrappers was a little chrome-plated key. Just for kicks, he tried it in the filing-cabinet lock. It turned, something went
click
, and the drawer slid open as smoothly as a politician lying.

Fine
, Paul thought, as he took a deep breath.
Now for the
really
tricky bit.

Muscles stiffened, teeth clenched, he peered inside.

His first reaction was:
Shit – no wonder the bloody thing was so heavy to shift around.

A spiral stone staircase, such as you'd expect to see in a church tower or the keep of a medieval castle, led down from the lip of the drawer into a huge, gloomy hall, dimly lit with rush lamps set in wall sconces. Paul hesitated for maybe five seconds; then, brushing aside a file divider marked A-C, he scrambled into the drawer and started to descend. He had the key in his pocket, just in case it'd do him any good if someone came in and slammed the drawer shut; he'd also brought the hammer and half the broken crowbar. If he got trapped down here, would anybody think to look for him? Just possibly, yes. After all, his name did begin with C, and all offices everywhere are founded four-square on the principle of alphabetical order.