In Your Dreams (44 page)

Ernest Carpenter

Wouldn't it be wonderful
, Paul thought,
wouldn't it be absolutely fucking grand if Life somehow contrived to let five minutes go by without dumping some new and incrementally horrible load of shit on my head from a great height?
He snapped the album shut; then, on a sort of guilty whim, opened it again at random. In the corner of the first snap that caught his eye, a moody study of a small, fat child eating an ice cream on a park bench, he saw a crumpled-up newspaper poking out of a litter bin. At once, the zoom business started up, and a moment or so later he was reading an article on the sports page, which said;

PS: In case I forget to remind you before I die or you read this: don't play with the watch, and REMEMBER TO BURN THE CHALKS. Regards, EJC

Paul sighed; all right, already, he'd burn the stupid chalks. Only, how would you go about doing a thing like that? Soak them in petrol? Blowtorch? Or would putting them under the grill and pretending they were sausages get the job done just as effectively? Of course, if he still had his Portable Door, he could simply take a sideways journey to the slopes of Etna or Mount Washington and pitch them over the edge. But he'd lent the wretched thing to Ricky Wurmtoter, who'd lost it to the Fey. Suddenly he remembered the times he'd fallen asleep while wading through the incredibly loathsome Mortensen printouts at Countess Judy's command; how each time he'd nodded off he'd dreamed about a portal in the wall through which platoons of evil kiddies had crept into the world. It all made perfect sense: Judy had the Door, and she'd given him the most boring job in the whole world so that he'd fall asleep right here in the office and dream across her advance guard of hand-picked storm troopers.

All at once, a sort of cold, brittle fury filled Paul. It wasn't so much the disgusting, parasitic way she'd used him, like a fly laying its eggs in an open wound; it wasn't even the manipulation, or the chilling thought of all those hundreds of maliciously grinning children, now safely across the line and poised to begin the task of wiping out the human race. No; what really,
really
ticked him off was that he'd been forced to sort and collate thousands and thousands and thousands of revolting Mortensen printouts, all through the weekend,
in what should've been his free time
, simply as camouflage, a diversion, a ruse. If ever there was a case of a tablespoon of insult with every teaspoon of injury, this had to be it—

Right
, he thought.
Fine. If I was born into this stupid bloody war, so be it; but the hell with Uncle Ernie and saving the world and someone having to do the dirty, rotten job, I'm going to make Countess Judy pay through the nose and all other relevant orifices for making me do all that work for nothing.
Silently, he swore a solemn and dreadful oath to himself that he'd get her for that, if (as seemed entirely possible) it was the last thing he did.

So, what'd he got? Go after the Source, Uncle Ernie had said. Find out who's dreaming Countess Judy and her fellow infiltrators, and where they were being stashed. Then wake them up. Simple as that.

Paul pocketed the stone before he lost it, in the process finding the stub end of a roll of Polo mints that he hadn't remembered being there before (but it's well known that stubs of Polo rolls breed in warm, dark, linty places), stood up and threw the photo albums back on the shelf.
Oh
, he thought,
for a Portable Door right now.
All he'd have to do would be to slap it on the wall, tell it to take him to wherever Judy stored her livestock, and that'd be that. But he didn't have the Door any more, thanks to Ricky bloody Wurmtoter—

Ricky.
A nasty thought stuck in Paul's mind like a fish-bone. Hadn't Uncle Ernie said something about a traitor inside JWW itself? At the time he hadn't thought about it; he'd vaguely assumed that he'd meant Countess Judy, but that didn't make sense. A traitor was a hidden enemy, not someone who paraded up and down in the corridors wearing a fluorescent sweatshirt with ENEMY written on both sides. But Ricky – Ricky had borrowed Paul's Portable Door, the secret weapon that'd make it possible for Judy to bring across her storm troopers by the hundred, not one by one over a long period as she'd been doing previously. If Ricky was . . . There was a kind of grisly logic to it. As far as Paul knew, the Door had somehow been lost or hidden until he'd stumbled across it three months or so back; maybe Uncle Ernie or someone like that had deliberately hidden it away – that's right, hidden it until the predestined saviour of mankind
(me, fuck it)
turned up to claim it. As soon as that happens, the traitor nips in and makes some excuse to get his paws on it, then vanishes. That would explain a lot of things: why Ricky hadn't been in the cell with Paul and Monika; why he'd been put in Ricky's department, apprenticed to him; why Ricky had always been so nice to him, bought him lunch on his first day and everything.
Ricky
was the traitor; and all that stuff about pretending to help Paul and save him, that night when Ricky had burst in through the window – that was just play-acting, intended to trick Paul into trusting him.
The bastard. Never should've trusted a man with wavy blond hair in the first place. They're all scum, those wavy blonds.

Right. He'd see about that. If Ricky was the traitor, did that mean he still had the Door? Unlikely; Judy'd have taken possession of it for herself. No matter; he had the rest of Uncle Ernie's magic set, objects so powerful that they'd made Mr Tanner's mum turn pale. True, what Paul really wanted right now was some kind of very powerful but simple and easy-to-use weapon, and none of Ernie's bits and bobs really seemed to fit that description – well, maybe the Sea Scout badge, but he'd contrived to lose that right at the start. But he had the rest of the stuff; screwdriver, watch, chalks (
memo to self: must burn chalks. But
how?). As far as weapons went, he could pick up a tyre lever or a length of lead pipe along the way. Simplicity was the way to go where the fundamentals were concerned. He was, God help him, a hero, whether he liked it or not; he'd been born and trained to it, and in the opinion of JWW he'd passed his indentures and qualified. Fine. If they wanted a hero, they'd just got one, and the best possible sort: a thoroughly bad-tempered, pissed-off, grudge-laden hero. Their look-out.

Paul patted the jacket pocket containing the watch, the chalks and the screwdriver, ate a slightly dilapidated Polo mint for luck, and reached for the door handle. On the point of leaving the room he stopped, dithered, then pulled down the photo album he'd just been looking at. It fell open at the picture of the fat kid with the ice cream. He looked at it again, both with and without the wyvern stone. There had been something about it, but he couldn't quite figure out what.

It was a pretty bad picture – a bit dark, slightly blurred, the kid looked fatally constipated, with a strained expression and bulging eyes turned red by the glare of the flash; and the photographer, an adherent of the Boadicea school of composition, had cut him off at the ankles. Paul wondered who the brat was, and at once the wyvern stone provided him with handy subtitles:
Derek Carpenter, age ten, Richmond Park.
He ransacked his memories of endless dreary teatimes-with-visitors and dredged up an Uncle Derek who wasn't really an uncle at all, just some species of cousin. He considered the data and concluded that whatever the big deal was, he hadn't figured it out yet. The hell with it; he threw the album back on the shelf and went to war.

All very well saying that. But, as Paul emerged into the corridor, he was painfully aware that he had no idea what to do next. His only fragment of a plan of campaign was to find the Fey dormitory and wake up the dreamers; but that was like putting
Bring about world peace
on the top of his Things-to-do list fixed by a small magnet to the fridge door – fine in principle but a tad vague as far as the practical aspects were concerned.

All right: step one, burn the chalks. Even that was something of an ask, slap bang in the middle of the City of London, not exactly known for its plethora of unguarded open fires. Finally, with great reluctance, he decided that if anybody might know where a fire was, it'd be Mr Tanner's mum. He set his course for reception.

‘Fire,' Mr Tanner's mum repeated, frowning. ‘What d'you want a fire for?'

‘To burn something,' Paul replied.

‘No kidding.' Mr Tanner's mum narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, there's a couple of whatsits, Bunsen burners in the lab. They might do the trick, depending on what you want to torch.'

Paul looked at her. ‘There's a lab in the building?'

‘They call it that,' replied Mr Tanner's mum. ‘But really it's just a converted bathroom, up on the third floor. It's where Theo van Spee and a few of the others go to play about with chemicals when they're brewing the love philtre and stuff like that. They used to have one of those really big propane furnaces,' she remembered, ‘so they could melt down Rings of Power without having to leave the office, but they had to throw it out. Fire regulations, or something.'

‘The Bunsen burners sound like they'll do just fine,' Paul told her. ‘Where on the third floor did you say it was?'

He found it eventually. It looked more like a kitchen than a laboratory: worktop along two walls, a third lined with what looked like MFI's most basic range of pine-effect melamine cupboards, a fridge and a stainless steel sink. But there was no cooker, and two Bunsens sat in the corner next to the sink, partly hidden behind a stack of perspex dishes with a dog-eared box of Swan Vestas perched on top. There was also a bolt on the inside of the door, which pleased him; privacy, he felt, was likely of the essence.

In the event, the chalks burned quite easily once Paul had fiddled with the collars to get the Bunsens up to maximum heat. He had a feeling that real chalk didn't flare up like that, suggesting that Uncle Ernie had modified them somehow to serve a more demanding role than writing on blackboards or keeping score in darts tournaments. Once the last one had resolved itself into smoke and residue, however, he was back where he'd been just a short while ago: planless, clueless and alone. For want of anything better to do, he perched on a lab stool and turned the empty chalk packet over in his hands. Go find Countess Judy's source. Easy-peasy.

Well, it had to be somewhere, didn't it? Unfortunately, the world is made up of billions of contiguous somewheres, and any single one of them could be anywhere at all. Indeed, given the tricky nature of the Fey, it could just as easily be in Montana or Burkina Faso as in England, which would make getting there as much of a challenge as finding it. Unless, of course, he had a Portable Door, or something very similar.

Yeah, right,
Paul told himself.
In your dreams.

In my
—

When he was a kid, there used to be a poster, with a picture of some suntanned female sitting on a golden beach, and a caption:
In your dreams, you've been to Tunisia
. Weird thing to remember after all these years, but the point was a valid one. In a dream, you can go anywhere. Unfortunately, as a mode of transport, dreams share one regrettable common feature with Ryanair and South-West Trains: you have no control over where you're likely to end up, or what state you'll be in when you get there. Hitherto, Paul had always assumed that was because dreams are just mental indigestion, stray thoughts from the waking day glopping up into the unconscious mind like gas in a swamp. Now, of course, he knew better. If he had a dream about Blackpool, it was because some freeloading Fey wanted to go there. Trying to use dreams to get where he wanted to go was about as likely to work as disguising yourself as an airliner and sitting on a runway, hoping someone would come along and fly you to your chosen destination.

Unless—

Well, it was worth a try, given that he had no alternative whatsoever; and if it went wrong, the worst that could happen – no, bad line of argument, the worst that could happen would be dying in his sleep, harvested by Countess Judy and her terrifying associates. Better to dwell on the no-alternative-whatsoever aspect, with a healthy wodge of semi-hysterical prayer to fall back on as a contingency plan.

Paul sat down in the corner of the room, head resting against a cupboard door, and tried to picture her as she'd been, that time he'd seen her. It was hard: her face slipped through the meshes of his mind like whitebait in a cod-fishing net, morphing into other faces, more immediate but less helpful. Finally, once he'd got what he reckoned was the best fix he was likely to get, he opened the cupboard door next to him and looked inside for something suitable. In the end he had to settle for a big, chunky, old-fashioned brass microscope: rather heavier than he'd have liked, but the only artefact he'd come across that looked capable of doing the job. He took a sheet of plain white copier paper from a pile by the sink and laid it on the worktop, with one edge projecting slightly. Then he put the microscope on the paper, and sat down on the floor directly underneath.

Here goes nothing
, Paul said to himself, and tugged the paper as hard as he could.

The paper slid out, jarring the microscope over; it toppled and dropped off the worktop directly onto Paul's head.
Ouch
, he remembered thinking just for a split second; and then he was sprawled on the floor, bleeding freely from a long but superficial scalp wound, fast asleep.

Once he knew he was asleep, he looked round frantically.
Hello?
he called wordlessly.
Are you there?

A very long and distressing pause; and then, quite suddenly, there she was. As before, pale golden light glowed all around her, fuzzy and hazy as the fur on furry pink slippers. 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— Paul pulled himself together. No time for any of that stuff now.