Wish You Were Here (6 page)

He stood for some ninety seconds, tracing by eye the path of his fall from the crest of the slope, where he'd encountered that goddamn female, down here to the very shore of the lake. Anywhere along that line his keys could have fallen out. It could take him hours - tens of thousands of dollars - to find them in all this scrub and undergrowth. On the other hand, it would take him at least nine thousand dollars to walk to the nearest town, another thousand or so to wait for a car or a helicopter to come out from the city and pick him up, not to mention all the pain and suffering involved in walking too far in boots as expensive as those he was wearing. It's an odd fact, but an undeniable one, that once you start paying four-figure sums for footwear you tend to end up with magnificently hand-stitched instruments of torture that reduce the backs of your heels to raw flesh if you do more than hobble from your car to the elevator; part of the price you have to pay for being rich, he'd always rationalised. As it happened, he had in the trunk of the car a pair of worn-out old sneakers, $4.99 from K-Mart, that were the nearest thing a mortal could ever experience to floating on a cloud. If he only had his keys, he could go back up there and put them on. If only . . .

OK. Forget the writ. Forget even the three fingers of single malt and the hot tub that had started to figure prominently in his subconscious thoughts. What I really want now, more than anything in the whole world, is to find my goddamn keys—

Just as the thought crossed his mind, he tripped over a briar-root, fell heavily, tumbled down a steep incline, hit a boulder and rolled off a rocky ledge into the still, calm waters of the lake.

A second or two later, an otter slid into the water and began swimming out towards him.

 

So Wesley looked. But there wasn't anything to see—

Except, in the far distance, a ship. No, the
reflection
of a ship, an upside-down mirror image of a dragon-prowed, clinker-built, square-sailed fifty-oar longship, a black pinewood killer swan with brightly painted round shields all along its sides in the manner of a Hawaiian flower wreath.

‘Bet you never knew,' the female was saying, ‘that the Vikings got this far. Well, they did. Two generations after Eric the Red reached Newfoundland, this lot—' she waved vaguely at the mirror-ship. ‘This lot, fifty fearless explorers led by Thorfinn Piglet and Einar Bluetooth, sailed down the coast until they blundered into the mouth of the St Lawrence river, which they rather liked the look of. So they pottered down that, past Quebec, into Lake Ontario, where they ran into a little problem known to you and me as the Niagara Falls. Now we both know that there's no way on earth to get a ship by there; but they didn't, so they took it to bits, plank by plank and nail by nail and little-widgetty-thing-that's-always-left-over-once-you've-put-everything-else-back by little-widgetty-thing-that's-always-left-over-once-you've-put-everything-else-back, and they carried it down into Lake Erie, where they put it together again and went on their way; past Cleveland and Toledo, except they weren't called that then, of course; past Detroit, across Lake St Clair and down the St Clair river into Lake Huron.' The girl paused. ‘Are you taking any of this in, by the way? I mean, you do know where all these places are?'

‘What? Oh, yes,' Wesley lied. ‘Course I do.'

‘That's all right, then. I'd hate the awesome scope of their achievement to be wasted on you just because you think Lake Erie's in Cumbria. Anyway, off they go across Lake Huron, all the way round the fair state of Michigan, passing through the Mackmac straits into another whopping great big lake which happens also to be called Michigan, either through coincidence or a stunning lack of imagination. So there they are, skirting Lake Michigan, and they see Green Bay. They're sick and tired of Lake Michigan by now, so they hang a right and toddle down the Bay, down the Fox river, sometimes carrying that damn boat more often than it carries them because of all the falls and rapids and so on; then they bear right again and get lost in lots of itty bitty rivers, the sort that make a country look like it's got varicose veins. Just as they're starting to feel depressed, they trip over the Wisconsin river and follow that; and when it merges with the Mississippi, they follow that; and when they're bored with the Mississippi, they branch off down our very own local-river-made-good, the North Squash; and one quick taking-to-bits-and-putting-back-together-again later - they're really good at that by now, by the way; they can take that boat to bits and put it back blindfold and wearing two pairs of gloves - here they are in Lake Chicopee, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and eager for whatever new nugget of happenstance Fate chooses to bestow on them.' The girl paused and gazed at the two-dimensional longship under the shadow of her palm, so that Wesley couldn't see her expression. ‘In about five minutes,' she continued, ‘they're due to hit the one submerged rock in the whole lake, sink and drown. Pity, really.'

Wesley stared at her. ‘Why?' he demanded.

The girl shrugged. ‘They felt like it. Not the sinking part, of course, the rest of it; they felt like going for a run out, and one of them had this boat, so why not? I think the captain muttered something about wanting to travel courageously where nobody had been yet. Some people are like that.'

‘Yes, all right,' Wesley interrupted. ‘I can understand that. But what I mean is, after that really incredible journey, why've they got to go and get drowned
here
, of all places? I mean, it's so flat. I mean calm,' he added, before the girl had a chance to point out that lakes are usually flat, which is what stops them falling off the edges of hills and turning into rivers. ‘I mean, how the hell could anybody drown in
that
?'

‘You nearly managed it,' the girl pointed out.

‘Yes, but I'm not - I mean,
I
couldn't have sailed all the way up those rivers and down those lakes.' He stared at the reflection as it slid, noiselessly majestic, over the upside-down mountains. ‘Isn't there something we can do to warn them?' he asked. ‘Or are they, like, sort of
ghosts
. . .' He shivered a little as a pair of landing ducks splashed straight through the ship, sending bits of it rippling in all directions. ‘I mean, is that why we can only see the reflection and not the actual boat?'

The girl watched the reflection slowly take shape again and shook her head. ‘Not quite,' she replied. ‘In about four minutes they'll hit the rock and come on down this side. Then we'll be able to see them.'

‘But they'll be
dead
.'

The girl shrugged. ‘You some sort of bigot?' she asked. ‘I'll have you know, some of my best friends are dead. Wouldn't want my daughter to marry one,' she admitted, ‘but that's not prejudice. It's just, think of all the problems their kids'd face, at school and so on.'

A light-bulb, no more than forty watts but still bright enough to see by, lit up in Wesley's brain. ‘Just a moment,' he said. ‘When they fall in the lake, you grant them their heart's desire, yes?'

The girl beamed. ‘So you
have
been listening!' she cried, clapping her hands together. ‘Oh, that's so encouraging. Yes, I certainly do.'

‘By drowning them in a lake?'

‘Yes.'The girl shrugged again. ‘It's like I told you.They get their heart's desire, but it's up to me exactly what form it takes. Now, what these clowns really wanted was to go on an awfully big adventure. Ah,' she added, as the sound of wood splintering on rock echoed around the amphitheatre of mountains and lake. ‘Party time!'

The reflection dissipated into another clutch of ripples, out of the centre of which a longship rose, submarine-fashion. Apart from a few wisps of pondweed draped round the top of the mast and a very upset-looking trout thrashing about on the deck, it seemed none the worse for its recent misfortune. The girl stood up and waved.

‘Over here!' she shouted.

The ship changed course, until the dragon's head was facing them square-on. The oars started to move, keeping metronome time and sending out great sunbursts of ripples each time the blades hit the water. Wesley could hear wood groaning and rope creaking; he could feel the enormous amount of physical effort it took to propel the great heavy thing just a few yards across the water. It must be, he felt, like pushing a lorry that's run out of petrol.

All the way from Newfoundland, up rivers and down lakes, oarstroke by oarstroke. He felt sick, and his back started to hurt.

‘Excuse me.' The voice was coming from the ship. ‘Excuse me, please, young lady, but on the right way for Duluth are we being?'

‘Duluth?' The girl shook her head. ‘No, sorry, you're well out of your way here. About seven hundred miles, give or take a bit.'

‘Bother!'

‘To get to Duluth,' the girl went on, ‘you want to head back to the Mississippi, right back up the way you came as far as Lake Huron; then stick to the north coast round into Lake Superior, carry on hugging the north coast and head west till you come to the pointy bit, you can't miss it. You took the wrong turning.'

‘Silly old us,' the Viking shouted back, shaking his helmeted head. ‘Joshing us the fellows will be when we are to home returning. Nevertheless the funny side visible is. Thank.'

‘You're welcome.'

The ship swung round - Wesley could hear the cracking of joints as arms wrenched in their sockets with the effort - and headed back up the lake, the way it had come. Then it hit the rock again and sank.

‘Why Duluth?' Wesley asked, after a long silence.

‘Hadn't ever been there, I guess,' the girl replied. ‘That's explorers for you. Marvellous people, Heaven only knows where the world would be without them. Actually, it was a cousin of Thorfinn Piglet who was the first man ever to set foot on the North Pole.'

‘Gosh!'

The girl nodded. ‘Bjorn the Stupid, his name was,' she said. ‘He had to walk the last three hundred miles, all on his own. Hell of a journey.'

‘He died too, presumably.'

‘Oh no.' The girl shook her head. ‘Lost quite a few fingers and toes and things through frostbite, but he made it home alive to the Viking colony at Brattahlid. Not all in one piece, but the majority of him.'

For some reason, that made Wesley feel a whole lot better. ‘Well, then,' he said. ‘So why do the books say it was Scott, or Amundsen, or whoever? I'd have thought—'

‘Oh, he never
told
anybody,' the girl replied. ‘Too embarrassed. You see, he was supposed to be heading in the other direction. But he got lost, went north instead of east. He'd only set out to deliver a load of timber a few miles up the coast. When they asked him why it'd taken him so long and what'd happened to his appendages, he made up some story about being set upon by polar bears. Nobody believed him, of course. They all assumed he'd got plastered and fallen off his boat into the ice-cold water.'

Wesley didn't say anything for a very long time. He didn't like this dream very much, he decided; it was too depressing, and unlike all his other horrible dreams, which usually involved him standing up in front of a crowded Wembley Stadium with no trousers on, it was just close enough to reality to be thoroughly unpleasant. He sent a memo to his inner brain saying,
Wake up now, please
, but nothing happened.

‘There's a point to all this, isn't there?' he said at last. ‘I mean, there's a moral or motto or whatever you call it.'

‘Correct.' Without taking her eyes off the lake, the girl nodded. ‘I suppose you could call it the vanity of human wishes, except that's a bit trite. Anyway, that's a sort of introductory session. Passive learning. All the rest of it's a bit more hands-on, or do I mean interactive? What I'm trying to say is, instead of just sitting there on your bottom and listening, you actually get to do things and have adventures. Isn't that fun?'

Wesley thought about it for a moment. ‘No,' he said.

‘You don't mean No,' the girl replied cheerfully. ‘What you really mean, though you probably don't realise it, is Yes. Trust me, I know about these things.'

Wesley allowed his slump to melt into a crouch. ‘Does interactive mean you're going to drown me too?' he asked. ‘Or will you let me off with just losing all my fingers and toes?'

The girl smiled. Whether it was a nice smile or not, Wesley couldn't tell. ‘Whether you get to keep your fingers,' she said, ‘depends rather a lot on whether you pull them out. Come on.'

 

On the far western shore of the lake, under the shade of a tall pine tree, sat a border guard, waiting for her eggs to hatch.

Throughout the history of conflict, ever since the first primitive humanoid picked up a ploughshare and realised that, with the help of a forge and a big hammer, he could turn it into a moderately efficient sword, every army ever raised has sooner or later taken on the basic diamond-shape form of organisation. At the apex, the uppermost point, you have the top one per cent who make up your élite forces; the guys who swing through windows on ropes and hold off vastly superior numbers while swigging vodka martinis. In the middle come the squaddies, foot-sloggers and cannon-fodder; people of all shapes, sizes and qualities who complain a lot, do as they're told, make of it the best they can and die from time to time, even when the cameras are looking the other way. And, at the reverse apex, the whole thing dwindles away to the bottom one per cent; the incurably hopeless, incompetent and disaffected, neither useful nor ornamental. It's this section of the military community that gets ordered to stand in front of things and guard them.Wherever there's a mountain or tall building that might get stolen, or a lake or river that might burn down, there you'll find a little wooden kennel with a pointy roof, and in it a nerk with a gun, called a sentry.