In Your Dreams Read online

  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.’

  Chapter Three

  Paul didn’t enjoy the next ten working days. In the morning, there was paperwork: all the admin and procedural stuff that every true hero gets some other poor bugger to do for him. There were applications in triplicate for Section Fifteen exemptions, incident reports, written notifications of intention to use restricted weapons in built-up areas, stores requisitions, expenses vouchers and mileage allowance chits (Mr Wurmtoter got ninety-five pence a mile for his winged horse; Benny Shumway got thirty-five pence a mile for his D-reg Suzuki jeep, but mostly seemed to take the Tube), time sheets and invoices and credit control printouts and a whole bunch of other stuff you won’t find mentioned in the Norse sagas or the Morte d’Arthur. But the mornings were better than the lunch hour, because between one and two he was either in Mr Shumway’s office being lectured or shouted at, or in the closed-file store, which doubled as an assault course, firing range and tournament lists. The experience helped Paul discover things about himself that he hadn’t appreciated before: that Semtex brought him out in a rash, for example, and firing antitank rockets from the shoulder gave him a headache, and his fear of needles also extended to hand-and-a-half katzenbalger broadswords. His cunning plan of deliberately doing so badly at everything that Mr Shumway would despair of him and get him transferred to another department turned out to be a non-starter; mostly because he didn’t need to pretend. Even when Mr Shumway yelled at him so ferociously that he gave it his very best shot out of sheer terror, he was still uniformly hopeless at everything. His fuses spluttered and died; he couldn’t hit a barn door at point-blank range with the .50 Barrett; he consistently failed to remember the right proportion of SlayMore to water; and the only way he’d ever hurt a dragon or a gryphon with a sword would be if the unfortunate creature was standing directly behind him when he lost his grip on the handle. This, unfortunately, was precisely what Mr Shumway seemed to expect of him. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he’d sigh, as Paul’s dummy hand-grenade bounced off the opposite wall and landed at his feet for the sixth time in a row. ‘It just takes practice, that’s all. Another couple of weeks and you’ll be just fine.�
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  Lunchtimes, then, were bad enough; but they were a week at the seaside compared to the afternoons. In the afternoon, Paul helped Mr Shumway with the banking.

  The first time had been the worst, because he’d had no idea. ‘Little job I’d like you to do for me,’ Mr Shumway had said, poking his head round the door of Paul’s office. ‘Won’t take a minute.’

  Of course Paul had said, ‘Yes, right, of course,’ like the fool he was, instead of ‘No way’, or ‘Over my dead body’ – though, in the event, the latter would’ve been a very silly thing to say, because—

  Just inside the door of Mr Shumway’s office was another, smaller door. It was decorated with six bolts, four deadlocks, two Yale locks and a chain you could’ve anchored an aircraft carrier from – curious in itself, because the door was just standard office chipboard, with an aluminium handle. Paul had noticed it the third or fourth time he’d been in Mr Shumway’s office, but compared with some of the other fixtures and fittings he’d come across at 70 St Mary Axe, it was prosaic to the point of brain damage, and he’d ignored it. This time, however, Mr Shumway was busy with a bunch of keys that must’ve weighed three pounds. ‘I’ll go first,’ he sang out cheerfully. ‘You follow on with that satchel on the desk there.’ He was referring to a shabby-looking leather case, the sort of thing Just William carried his schoolbooks in. Paul picked it up; it felt as though it was empty.

  ‘Um,’ he asked, as Mr Shumway shot back the fourth bolt, ‘what are we doing, exactly?’

  ‘Just nipping to the bank,’ Mr Shumway replied. ‘Paying in some cheques, drawing petty cash, handing in some TT forms. Usual stuff.’

  Paul nodded warily. He knew TT stood for ‘telegraphic transfer’, which was when you sent large sums of money by fax or Internet or something. Why usual stuff needed two of them, with Mr Shumway going first, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

  ‘Ready?’ Mr Shumway had finished with the bolts and all but one of the locks. ‘Okay, then, on three. One. Two. Three—’

  He turned the key in the last of the deadlocks, grabbed the door handle and pushed outwards. He hesitated on the threshold, not letting go of the handle, as if checking to make sure that it was safe. Then he took a step forward and disappeared.

  Seriously unnerving stuff. Paul could distinctly see Benny Shumway vanish – made no sense, but that was what he saw. First Mr Shumway’s left hand, then the rest of his left arm, his shoulder, then his head and torso, finally his back and right heel, and then he was gone. Bugger this, Paul thought, no way I’m —

  ‘Come on, then,’ called Mr Shumway’s disembodied voice. Paul shut his eyes, and followed.

  When he opened them again, everything had gone dark. Panic flooded through him and he shuffled backwards towards where he remembered the door being—

  ‘No.’ Mr Shumway again, calm but urgent. ‘Don’t do that, you’ve got no way of knowing where it’ll take you. It’s complicated,’ he added, ‘I’ll explain later. Just follow my voice, OK?’

  Paul tried to say something, but his words turned into a little trembly squeak. He stuck his left foot out; it was rather like trying to take the last step off an escalator with your eyes shut. Nothing bad happened, apparently. After that, it was very slightly easier.

  ‘Keep up,’ Mr Shumway called back at him. Paul did his best; but each time Mr Shumway spoke after that, his voice sounded further and further away. ‘And don’t look round, whatever you do,’ was another helpful piece of advice. ‘Come on, we’re nearly there. And don’t worry, all right? This is just something you have to get used to.’

  The lights came up gradually; first a faint grey gleam round the edges, then a glow that seeped into the darkness like ink soaking into blotting paper. Not that it helped much, because there was nothing to see; nothing to right or left, nothing up or (very worrying) down. Paul was a little animated cartoon figure walking across a blank grey screen—

  And there was someone walking beside him. He didn’t notice at first, so he had no idea how long he’d been there. It was only when he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye ...

  ‘And don’t talk to anybody,’ sighed a faint echo of Mr Shumway’s voice. ‘Not anybody, got it?’

  Just in time; because Paul had been on the verge of saying, ‘Is that you, Uncle Mike?’ He’d only hesitated because it was such a silly thing to say, given that Uncle Mike had died ten years ago.

  ’Course it’s me, you prat, said a memory of Uncle Mike’s voice inside his head. And look at me when I’m talking to you.

  (‘Don’t turn round,’ Mr Shumway had said.)

  What’s wrong, Paul? It’s me, Mike. Aren’t you glad to see me after all this time? (Paul wasn’t hearing the words, because there was no sound. Someone had hit the mute button, and he couldn’t hear his footsteps on the lack-of-floor, or his own breathing or anything. But he could distinctly remember Uncle Mike saying the words, at some unspecified point in the past.)

  He didn’t look round, because he’d been told not to; but Uncle Mike had gone, and there was someone else. Hello, Paul mate, he remembered, haven’t you grown? Here, what’s the matter? Haven’t you got anything to say to your old grandad?

  (Which was cruel; because Paul had so much to say, starting with, Sorry I missed your funeral. He’d pretended he’d had a migraine, but that had been a lie. He’d always hated funerals, anyhow.)

  This is daft, son, we never had a chance to say goodbye. Don’t just walk away, Paul. Please. (Wherever this was, Paul decided, he’d rather be somewhere else. ‘This way,’ Mr Shumway was calling, but Paul wasn’t sure whether he was hearing him or remembering, the dwarf was too far away. Don’t look round, he ordered himself, don’t say anything .)

  Then, quite suddenly, he could see Mr Shumway. He was kneeling down on the absence-of-ground, and he was reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a folded, tatty old baseball cap, opened it, reached in and pulled out ( Why am I not surprised? ) a white rabbit. In his other hand he was holding a knife. With a deft, quick movement—

  ( Don’t say anything, Paul commanded himself; because what he wanted to shout was ‘No!’, at the top of his voice)

  —Mr Shumway cut the rabbit’s throat, and its blood splashed on the empty space where the ground ought to have been, and disappeared, just as Mr Shumway had when he’d walked through the door. The rabbit stopped twitching in his hand; blood was still gushing out over his wrist, through his fingers. Now, however, where it stopped falling, there was ground; a flat, grey surface of dust, as though that was what the rabbit had had in its veins.

  ‘It’s life, see,’ Mr Shumway was muttering. ‘Where it lands—’ He hesitated. ‘You do know where you are, right? Don’t answer,’ he added quickly. ‘In case you haven’t figured, this is death.’

  Fine, Paul thought.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Mr Shumway went on. ‘It’s only a magic rabbit, it never really existed. But the blood’s real blood, so it does the job. Just about enough for what we’ve got to do.’ He dropped the carcass, which vanished. ‘Right, you can talk now. But only to me, and don’t look round. They’ll say anything to make you talk to them, and you really don’t want to do that. Trust me.’

  Implicitly, Paul thought. He had a nasty feeling that right behind him was a substantial crowd, all people he knew, relations mostly, all of whom he’d never expected to see or hear from again. He tried to concentrate on Mr Shumway, a tiny figure in a cheap suit standing on a minute patch of dust.

  ‘Greetings.’ The man appeared almost out of nowhere, but not quite. Actually, he shot up out of the dust, like one of those shorts they show on television occasionally when something’s broken down; a film of a plant growing from a seed, speeded up thousands of times. He was Chinese, about seventy years old, in a long blue silk gown with enormous sleeves. He had a wrinkled face and a lovely smile.

  ‘Afternoon,’ Mr Shumway replied casually. ‘How’s death treating you, then?’

  ‘Very dull,’ the Chinese gentleman
replied. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Can’t grumble. Paul,’ Mr Shumway added, ‘over here. This is Mr Dao, the chief cashier. This is Paul Carpenter.’ Short pause, significant. ‘He’s with me.’

  Mr Dao nodded politely. ‘Of course,’ he said.

  Then Mr Shumway turned round. His face was as white as paper. ‘It’s okay now,’ he said, ‘you’ll be all right now they know you. Give me the bag, and then we can get out of here.’ Paul handed him the satchel; he opened it. ‘These cheques to pay in,’ Mr Shumway said to Mr Dao, ‘and these TTs; if you can get them out today that’d be a great help.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Mr Dao, with a faint smile.

  ‘Thanks. Oh, and here’s the cash slips.’ Each time Mr Shumway handed something to Mr Dao, there was a moment between Mr Shumway letting go of it and Mr Dao taking it. The cheque or form or chit didn’t fall to the ground – obviously gravity was optional here. Equally obviously, if the two of them both touched something at the same time, something unpleasant would happen.

  Mr Shumway passed the bag back to Paul and nodded at the Chinese gentleman. ‘Seventeen thousand, four hundred and sixty-five pounds sterling,’ said Mr Dao. Paul, holding the satchel open, felt a very slight tug on his hands, as something he couldn’t see dropped into it. ‘Nine thousand and forty-one US dollars.’ Another tug. ‘Eighteen thousand, nine hundred and forty Swiss francs. Seventy-two thousand Tajikistani roubles. Nine hundred and sixty Bulgarian lev.’ And so on, through Moroccan dirhams and Haitian gourdes to Comoros francs and Korean won, wealth beyond the nightmares of avarice. The temptation to grab the satchel and run off with it was, however, no trouble at all to keep in check.

  ‘Right,’ Mr Shumway said at last, ‘that’s the lot, thanks. Same time tomorrow, then.’