In Your Dreams (48 page)

The third one had no place in an album that might fall into the hands of children or persons of a nervous disposition. The background was lush green grass sprinkled with fat white daisies, and presumably it was meant to be warm midsummer weather, since neither of them exhibited so much as a single goosepimple. That hadn't happened, either. Paul would have remembered if it had.

The fourth one was even more bizarre. In the background, a golden-thatched country cottage, doorway an impenetrable entanglement of climbing roses in full bloom. Sitting in deckchairs on the lawn on either side of a small rosewood tea-table, a handsome, well-preserved elderly couple watched their grandchildren playing tennis on the full-sized court next to the pony paddock. Paul had to look twice before he figured out that the principals were supposed to be Sophie and himself.

Then Paul realised that Countess Judy was looking at him, and had been doing so for some time. He snapped the album shut and mumbled an apology, but she waved it aside.

‘Would you like to keep it?' she said.

Paul shook his head. ‘Thanks,' he replied, ‘but it's not real. None of that stuff happened, or else it won't happen.' He sneezed. Fortunately, he had a dream handkerchief in his pocket. It even had his initials embroidered in one corner.

‘That could be changed,' the Countess said; and a young woman stepped forward out of the shadows behind Judy's chair: Sophie, but with a blank, empty look on her face. ‘I'm not saying you wouldn't notice the difference,' Judy said. ‘You'd be very conscious of it. This,' she went on, flicking a thumb in the direction of the girl at her side, ‘is the young woman in the photographs. She'll never criticise you, belittle you, make you feel stupid or awkward; she'll never cheat on you or get bored with you or make demands or stop you doing what you want to do with your life. She'll always be there for you, no whining or complaints or recriminations, no unfathomable mood swings; she won't expect you to be telepathic or tell you to do something and then yell at you because you did it; she'll appreciate you, admire you, love you till the day you die. She'll be the girl of your dreams, but her face and voice and mannerisms and everything you recognise the real thing by will be exactly the same.' Judy's voice was soft as water, soothing and gentle, the way a mother's voice should be but Paul's mother's never was. ‘I'm sorry I tried to fob you off with that cheap, tacky Demelza Horrocks; I underestimated you, assumed you were shallow, insensitive, immature; I thought that so long as you had a girl who was prepared to love you, you'd be happy. I was very stupid. But now I can make it up to you. I can give you perfection.'

Paul frowned. ‘No, thanks,' he said.

Judy laughed, and the fake Sophie vanished. ‘Of course,' she said. ‘It was worth a try, I suppose, but I knew you wouldn't settle for a walking, talking, living doll. Never mind.' She leaned forward slightly and folded her hands on the desk. ‘Here's the deal, Mr Carpenter. Give me ten minutes to set my affairs in order; I've found a replacement source, so all I have to do is vacate Ms Pettingell and move across. I trust there are no hard feelings.'

Paul wiped his dripping nose and looked at her. ‘I've won?'

She shrugged. ‘It's no big deal,' she said. ‘I've moved before, it'll mean a day or so to adjust but that's only a minor inconvenience, nothing more. Far more important to get matters settled before this ridiculous feud disrupts my schedule any further.'

‘But you tried to kill me,' Paul pointed out.

‘Yes, so I did.' Judy sighed. ‘But you're too much trouble to kill, Mr Carpenter. Trying to dispose of you has wasted my time and my energy, and I'm getting behind on the things I ought to be doing. My fault; when I had you posted to the heroism department, I foolishly failed to notice that you are indeed a hero; and heroes can't just be snuffed out as easily as palace guards in a swashbuckler. It's far more convenient and cost-effective for me to give in and admit defeat. Take back your girl, Mr Carpenter, and may you both live happily ever after. As a residence, she isn't worth the effort.'

Now there was a bed, the hospital type with little wheels, standing beside the desk; in it lay Sophie, the way she'd been in Judy's dormitory. As Paul watched, his eyes itching (but it was only the cold, he assured himself) she muttered something and turned restlessly in her sleep, the way she generally did just before she woke up. Very tentatively, he reached out and touched her, as if to check that she was real.

The shock was painful, like brushing against an electric fence. It was the same sensation he'd felt when the fake Melze had tried to hold his hand. ‘No, thanks,' he repeated. ‘I think I'll stick with the real real Sophie, if it's all the same to you.'

Quite unexpectedly, Countess Judy laughed, even clapped her hands. ‘Well done, Mr Carpenter,' she said cheerfully. ‘You know, just occasionally, now and then, I can see a little tiny bit of your great-uncle in you. I have to say,' she added, as the bed and the most recent fake Sophie vanished, ‘that one would've fooled most people in the trade. So, I think we understand each other now, don't we?'

Oink
, Paul thought. ‘Do we?'

‘I believe so.' Countess Judy leaned back in her chair and rested her chin on her fingertips.
Molto elegante
, like a middle-period Sophia Loren without that slightly bovine quality around the jawline. ‘You're in possession right now, but dear Benny won't let you wake her up; more to the point, you may have her, but I have you, since you haven't got the stamina to stay awake.' As she said it, Paul felt steel clamps snap shut around his arms, pinning him to the chair. ‘Sorry about that,' Judy said. ‘A bit too James Bond for my taste and scarcely original, but I can't make the effort to be subtle right now.'

But Paul only shook his head. ‘There's some reason why you can't kill me, isn't there?' he said. ‘Otherwise you'd have done it already, as soon as I dozed off. And you can't lock me up in your stupid dungeon, either. And these gadgets—' He raised his arms, which passed through the clamps as though they weren't there, which of course they weren't. ‘Seems to me that your effective magic's a bit of a contradiction in terms. Doesn't work on me any more, does it?'

Judy clapped her hands again, but this time slowly, and she wasn't smiling. ‘Only certain very elementary procedures; the ones that don't hurt, mostly. We can try the ones that
do
hurt if you like, and see if they're still working.'

At once, Paul felt as though all his teeth were being drilled at the same time, without anaesthetic. ‘Pain, you see,' Judy was saying, ‘is effective magic in its purest form. There is no such thing as pain, it's always all in the mind, that's how it's supposed to be. A few drops of liquid or a whiff of gas puts it out of action completely. But without the drops or the gas, you can know as surely as anything that it's just electrical impulses in your nerves, and it'll still hurt enough to stop your heart or burst a blood vessel in your brain.' She shook her head. ‘If ever I have the time, I'm going to write a book about beauty and pain. They're so alike in so many ways: neither of them really exist, but both of them are strong enough to override the strongest human mind and turn the wisest and bravest of us all into clowns. Someone who can command beauty
and
pain – well, they'd have all the bases covered, as we say where I come from. Don't you agree?'

There was only a tiny bit of Paul's mind still sticking up above the flood of pain, like Mount Ararat in the Bible. ‘No,' he whispered. ‘It's bullshit. And you can't kill me or put me in your bloody coal cellar, so fuck you.'

Whereupon the pain stopped, and Judy jerked back in her chair as though she'd been slapped. ‘How dare you talk to me like that?' she said; and Paul thought that if she had a heart, it wouldn't have been in it.

‘What were you planning on doing?' he asked sweetly. ‘Going to fire me?' He laughed. ‘I think I'll wake up now, if you don't mind. And when I do, I'm going to wake up Sophie as well. And then you'll be finished. For ever. So if anybody's getting the sack—'

This time, the pain was in Paul's chest and left arm, presumably intended to simulate a heart attack. There was an awful lot of it, but it didn't actually hurt; it was a back projection of pain, as phoney as the polystyrene rocks in the old
Star Trek
. ‘Don't bother,' he said. ‘You're wasting time, and you haven't got a lot of it left. You know,' he added thoughtfully, ‘apart from that little dragon thing – and I sat on it by accident, so it doesn't really count – you'll be the first living creature I've more or less intentionally killed. I won't feel good about it, but it could be a whole lot worse. Like, I could've trodden on an ant or something.'

‘You idiot.' Anger and fear, and some contempt in there too. ‘He can't always be in there to protect you, and if you kill me, my people will hunt you down and you'll die in your sleep, and then we'll see. We're always there, as soon as the light goes out, as soon as your eyelids start to itch. Just think about that, will you? You think you're tired now, you just wait, when you're dying of exhaustion because it's better than what'll happen if you shut your eyes just for a second. And when you do—'

‘Oh, piss off,' Paul said wearily, and opened his eyes.

He was in the helicopter. He was awake, and in the real world, flying through a storm in total darkness over the icy-cold Atlantic Ocean, with a treacherous dwarf at the controls and the only girl he'd ever really love lying in a coma beside him. So that was all right. ‘Benny?' he called out.

‘What?'

‘How much further?'

‘Search me. I'm lost.'

Paul grinned. Lost, in a storm in total darkness over the ice-cold Atlantic Ocean. ‘No worries,' he said cheerfully. ‘Wake me up when we get there – I'm going to have forty winks.'

Which he proceeded to do; and dreamed about being back at school and being called up to recite a poem he hadn't learned in front of the whole class, with everybody sniggering at him. Just that: no girls, no dungeons, no grey shapes, no death threats, just humiliation, inadequacy and ordinary stuff like that. It felt like coming home again after the War.

When Paul woke up again, feeling cheerful and refreshed (bizarre enough in itself; usually when he woke up he felt like he'd just crawled out of a sporadically cleaned toilet), they were still flying, but it was bright daylight, and through the window he could see an endless blue-grey carpet with white frilly bits. ‘Benny?'

‘It's all right, I know where we are,' Benny called back. ‘It's not where we're supposed to be, but what the hell. If nobody ever got lost, they'd never have discovered America.'

‘I'm not bothered,' Paul sang back; then he sneezed. He still had the cold, apparently, but it wasn't interfering significantly with his general euphoria. ‘It's not like I had much on for today, anyhow. No, I wanted to ask you: What're we going to do? About Judy, I mean.'

Silence. Then Benny sighed. ‘I've been thinking about that all night,' he said. ‘And you're right, we can't leave your bit of stuff asleep for the rest of her life – we're going to have to wake her up. But first, we're going to try something. You still got that watch?'

Watch? Oh yes, watch.
‘You know about that?'

‘'Course I do, you think I'm stupid or something? Anyway, the idea is, use the watch to make one second that'll last for ever, and then stick Judy in it. It'll be boring as hell for her and she won't like it, but it's got to be better than killing the bitch.'

Paul thought that over for a moment. ‘You can do that?'

‘No idea,' Benny replied. ‘It's never been done before, and I wouldn't have a clue how to go about it. But Theo van Spee might, or Mr Wells senior, John Wellington; but God only knows where he's buggered off to. Someone'll know how to go about it. Agreed?'

Paul nodded. ‘Whatever,' he said. ‘So long as there's no risk to Sophie, you can do what you like.'

‘You sound cheerful,' Benny growled. ‘What's got into you?'

‘A good night's sleep,' Paul replied. ‘Does wonders for you. You should try it some time.'

‘Very funny.' Benny didn't sound all that amused. ‘I haven't been to sleep since nineteen – when was the year when Eddie the Eagle was in the Winter Olympics? Whenever that was.'

Paul laughed, assuming it was supposed to be a joke. In mid-snigger, he realised that it wasn't. ‘But that's impossible,' he said. ‘No human being can—'

‘Not a human being, am I? Thank God,' Benny added fervently. ‘Our lot may be on the compact side, y-axis-wise, but we can teach you tall bastards a thing or two about staying awake. No, that year – early 1980s, wasn't it? – that was the year Judy dumped me, and I got the distinct impression that the Land of Nod was off limits to me for the duration. I could be wrong, but it's not an area where trial and error seems the wise approach.'

‘But Benny,' Paul said quietly. ‘If I wake Sophie up, it'll be over, won't it? You can finally get some sleep. Wouldn't that be worth it?'

Benny thought for a moment. ‘No,' he said. ‘To continue the Olympic theme, another thing we dwarves can do pretty well for ever is carry a torch. We'll try it my way, or not at all. Got that?'

‘Got it,' Paul said, and sprayed the back of Benny's chair with a fine dew of nasal residue. ‘Don't blame me,' he added, reaching into his pocket and finding that the hanky had just been a dream. ‘It's
your
rotten cold I've got.'

‘Dwarves don't get colds,' Benny said airily. ‘Now shut up while I try and land this thing.'

‘Oh, right. What's the matter, turbulence or something?'