In Your Dreams (7 page)

He turned the problem over in his mind as he dragged home on the bus. The answer came to him in a flash of pure white light while he was in the bath. It was blindingly obvious and brilliantly simple.

Take, for example, a kamikaze pilot. First, he has to do his basic training: this is how an aeroplane works, this is how to read a map, this is how you take off and land, this is how to make the aircraft go left or right, up or down. Months of classwork and one-to-one tuition later, he's ready. He's passed the written tests and the practicals, clocked up his thirty solo hours, attained the exacting standard required of a fighter pilot. He climbs into the cockpit, and never comes back. Meanwhile his slow-witted, cack-handed classmate who flunked navigation and turned his flying instructor's hair prematurely grey by bouncing down the runway like a rubber ball, survives the war and goes on to found a multinational electronics corporation. Moral: it doesn't always pay to do your very best.

With that comforting thought to snuggle up with, Paul fell asleep as soon as his briskly towelled head hit the pillow. He dreamed.

He dreamed that he was back in the wilds of rural Gloucestershire, in the dark and the rain; and here are the strange children, fixing his car. Here is Carrot-top, handing him the bill, as Monika purrs contentedly on the floodlit forecourt. Here is Paul, explaining that he didn't have that much cash on him, but—

‘Doesn't matter,' says Carrot-top, looking up at him with round, violet eyes. ‘On the house. Least we could do, seeing it's you.'

A moment, while the penny drops. ‘Me,' Paul repeats, suddenly wary. ‘What about me?'

Carrot-top smiles. ‘You're him,' she says.

‘Oh,' says Paul. ‘Am I?'

‘'Course you are,' interrupts another child, all golden hair and missing front teeth. ‘We knew it soon as we saw you. You're Paul Carpenter, aren't you? Him. The chosen one.'

Oink?
Paul thinks. ‘I'm not sure I quite—'

‘Hang on a sec,' says Carrot-top; and she darts back into the workshop, while all the other children – there's rather a lot of them, apparently – come out of the shadows and stand round him, all staring at him as though he is the answer that's been inadvertently written up on the blackboard instead of the question. Then Carrot-top comes back, lugging along with her a huge calf-bound book, as big as the office-procedures manual, if not bigger. ‘Here you are, look,' says Carrot-top, and she thrusts the book at him, open somewhere near the middle.

‘I don't actually—' he starts to say; but there on the page right under his nose is a picture of a good-looking, clean-cut youth, and underneath it the words—

PAUL CARPENTER

The Chosen One

‘Oh,' he says; and then, feeling a right prawn for not knowing, ‘Chosen for what?'

One of the other kids, a mop-headed brunette with glasses, clicks her tongue. ‘To lead your people to the chosen land, of course, silly. Here, look, it tells you all about yourself in the book. Pages 256 to 312 inclusive.'

‘Gosh,' Paul says. ‘Can I have a look at that, please?' So they hand him the book; and it's written in normal English letters, and he can see his name repeated over and over again, but the rest of it's in French, or Italian, or possibly Spanish, and although he can make out about one word in ten, that's not enough to give him the sense of it; and just as he comes to a bit in Turkish (which apparently he can understand) they take the book away from him and close it with a snap.

‘See?' they say. ‘That's you, that is.'

‘Yes,' he's forced to admit. ‘That's me. But what about me? What am I supposed to—?'

They're scowling at him. ‘You shouldn't make fun,' they're saying. ‘That's rude.'

So Paul turns to Monika, who's still quietly idling away behind them, and he asks her what they're talking about. And she says, it's obvious, it means that you're the
gepriesener Freiheitsbote
, even a
dummkopf
like you ought to know that – But he doesn't catch the rest of what she's saying, because the kids are grabbing hold of him and lifting him up off the ground, carrying him on their shoulders round and round the courtyard, shouting, waving their arms, setting off the fire alarm, cheering like crazy. This is ridiculous; they couldn't be more pleased with him if he was Lawrence of Arabia
and
he'd just scored the winning goal in the World Cup final, but at the same time they seem to know exactly who he is, so surely they ought to know he's just an immature waste of space who's just been dumped by the only girl—

Paul opened his eyes. Not the fire bell after all; just the persistent tweeping of his alarm clock. He'd always had the impression that it didn't think very much of him. This morning it sounded more than usually outspoken in its disapproval.
You, some kind of Messiah or something?
it seemed to be saying.
Yeah, right. In your dreams.

On Paul's desk was a memo:

To: PAC

From: BS

Re: Supplies

Your first job for the department. We're running low on basic supplies. Check the enclosed stockbook against the inventory and make out purchase requisitions for anything we need.

BS

He read the note twice, just to be sure.
Could be worse
, he thought;
if I can spin this out for long enough, maybe I won't have to die today.
He opened the file that came with the memo. It was all pretty straightforward.

Four hours later Paul had discovered that they were almost out of sulphur candles, yellow 12-volt detonators, .50-calibre Browning machine-gun ammunition and cyanide gas, and they could probably do with topping up on spare bear-trap springs, chainsaw oil, two-way radio-battery charger packs and SlayMore dragon pellets. He checked the unit prices in the suppliers' list, remembering to deduct the 5 per cent trade discount, and filled out two copies of the blue requisition forms and the yellow cashier's slip. It occurred to him that maybe heroism wasn't quite so bad after all. Lunchtime already, and not a drop of blood spilt or shed.

Lunchtime—

There hadn't been anybody on the reception desk when he'd arrived that morning, but he'd been on the doorstep at one minute to nine, so it was reasonable to assume that she'd got in a little bit later than him, and . . . He caught himself at it. Somehow, in the last thirty-six hours,
she
had stopped meaning Sophie, and now meant Melze.
Here we go again. One small step for a lemming, yet another giant leap for lemmingkind.

Nevertheless. Paul jumped up, grabbed his coat, and raced for the front office like a Pamplona bull who hasn't realised it was that time already. He very nearly made it; but Benny Shumway suddenly stepped out in front of him and called, ‘Hey, you.'

Paul knew it was Mr Shumway by his voice and by the thickness of his spectacle lenses; otherwise, he'd have had trouble recognising him. His face was bright red, his beard had shrivelled down to charred wisps, and his suit was covered in white dust. His hands were red, too; not quite red, more of a sort of terracotta brown. He didn't look at all well.

‘First-aid kit,' he said. ‘In my office, left side of the desk, second drawer down. I'll be in here,' he added, and stepped back through the open door he'd appeared from. Paul vaguely remembered it was the closed-file store.

For some reason, he ran up the stairs instead of just walking. There was a white tin box in the second drawer on the left, though it felt empty. He grabbed it, and ran back.

Paul had never been in the closed-file store before, and under other circumstances he'd have found the time to gawp. It was a huge room, so vast that it looked like it had mirrors on all four walls and the ceiling, and it was crammed with wooden shelves overflowing with identical large, fat buff manila envelopes. At the most conservative estimate it had to be about the size of Westminster Abbey; put another way, many times larger than the whole of 70 St Mary Axe.

But there wasn't time to think about that. Mr Shumway was sitting on the floor, his back against a rack of shelves, his head slumped forward on his chest until Paul came in; whereupon he looked up and whispered, ‘Got it?'

‘Yes,' Paul replied. ‘Look, are you—?'

‘I'm fine,' Mr Shumway snapped. ‘Fetch that box over here.'

When the box was opened, there was nothing in it except some dried leaves, a tiny glass bottle with a few purple dregs at the bottom, and a small, thick, tatty book. It was the book that Mr Shumway wanted. He seized it, flipped to the index at the back and turned forward till he found the page he wanted. He read a few words aloud, following the text with one stubby, brown-stuff-caked finger. Then he dropped the book back into the box, leaned back and sighed.

‘Takes a while,' he said wearily. ‘Thanks,' he added.

‘That's all right,' Paul replied. ‘Look, what happened? Should I call a doctor or an ambulance or something?'

Mr Shumway grinned. ‘No need,' he said. ‘Let's see. I've got second-degree burns to most of my face, two – no, sorry, I tell a lie,
three
cracked ribs, I've been inhaling hot sulphur fumes and God knows what else, I've grazed all the skin off both knees and I think I've pulled a muscle in my left shoulder. The last thing I need is to be mauled about by one of the butchers you people call doctors. Besides, I'm a dwarf. We're impervious to X-rays, we've got rather more internal organs than you monkey-derivatives and we don't keep 'em in the same places, and our kidneys are soluble in aspirin. When we get messed up, we fix ourselves.' He held up the tatty book. ‘Like this.'

Paul stared at the dog-eared cover. It looked just like an ordinary paperback, but the writing on it wasn't in any alphabet he'd ever come across; the nearest he could get to describing it was an extremely violent hand-to-hand battle, drawn by L. S. Lowry. ‘Runes,' Mr Shumway explained. ‘It just says
First-Aid Manual
. Bloody useful, though. Healing charms for all occasions.'

‘Healing charms,' Paul repeated, his tone of voice translating that as
snake oil
. But then he noticed that Mr Shumway's face wasn't looking nearly so scorched and raw, and his beard had grown back at least half an inch. ‘Bloody hell,' he said.

Mr Shumway smiled and shook his head. ‘Before you ask,' he said, ‘no. Doesn't work on your lot; and even if it did, it's only good for a fairly limited range of injuries – broken bones, burnt skin, stuff like that. We can cure colds, though,' he added smugly. ‘And we've got stone teeth, so toothache isn't a major problem.'

Paul nodded. This was degenerating into weirdness, to which he'd carefully taught himself to turn a blind eye. ‘But what happened?' he asked. ‘Were you in a fight or something?'

‘You could say that,' Mr Shumway muttered; something was happening to him that apparently hurt. ‘No big deal, mind. Just a dragon.'

‘Just a dragon,' Paul parroted.

Mr Shumway nodded. ‘Twelve-year-old doe, seven and a half feet, about three hundred pounds. Damn thing'd got itself nicely dug in down in the stacks of the V&A. Cunning little bitch, I'll give her that. Got hold of a sack of cement from somewhere and rolled in it, then went and stood in a corner, nice and still. It'd been there six months before they realised it wasn't just another statue, and then they only found out because it sneezed.' He sighed. ‘I tried smoking it out, but they didn't like that, reckoned it'd damage the paintings and stuff. Couldn't use explosives, obviously, or the fifty-calibre; and they wanted rid of it PDQ, so poison was out. Meant I had to get rid of it manually, what Corporal Jones would've called the old cold steel.' He stretched his back and winced. ‘I'm getting too old for all that,' he sighed. ‘'Course, young Ricky, he loves all that shit. But he's not here, is he?' Mr Shumway growled. ‘Off prancing around with Gren— with this special project,' he amended abruptly. ‘And you aren't fit to be out on your own yet, which just leaves me. Just as well I got this book, because I've got bank reconciliations to do this afternoon, I can't afford a week off flat on my back having skin grafts.'

Paul didn't say anything. He had no idea what colour he'd turned – white, or green – but he hoped it wasn't too obvious.

‘Anyway.' Mr Shumway's beard was back to its usual length, and he was wriggling his shoulder to see if it was working properly again. ‘Thanks,' he said. ‘Didn't feel like dragging up three flights of stairs. Where were you off to in such a hurry, anyhow?'

Paul squirmed a little. ‘Oh, just lunch,' he said.

‘Lunch.' Mr Shumway grinned. ‘You mean, you wanted to get down to reception before that new bird had a chance to get away. Quick off the mark, I'll give you that. But you'll just have to tie a knot in it for today. We've got training to do, remember?'

‘Training,' Paul said.

Mr Shumway nodded. ‘Which means,' he said, ‘you missing lunch for a week or so. Which is cruel and harsh and a bloody fucking tragedy of epic proportions, but never mind. I'll be missing lunch too, and you won't see me crying my eyes out over it.'

‘Oh, that's fine,' Paul said, bright and brittle. ‘Doesn't bother me. Um, thanks for giving up your lunch hour, it's—'

‘Don't crawl,' said Mr Shumway. ‘If the Good Lord had intended us to crawl, he'd have given us a hundred legs and an exoskeleton.' He stood up. Apart from the white dust on his clothes and the (let's not kid ourselves) bloodstains on his hands, he looked perfectly normal. ‘My office,' he said, putting the tatty book back in the box, ‘five minutes. You have, of course, read all that stuff I told you to read?'

‘What? Oh, sure.'

‘Very sensible.' Mr Shumway grinned at him. ‘Because if you hadn't, it would've been unpleasant, I'm telling you. That old survival instinct'll pull you through every time.'