In Your Dreams (24 page)

‘Good afternoon.' Mr Dao was standing beside him. ‘Thank you,' he added, bowing gracefully. ‘A rare treat. We are most grateful.'

Paul stared at him in horror, as a drip of blood trickled down his chin and fell away. ‘I didn't mean—' he mumbled. ‘Accident. The rabbit—'

‘No doubt.' There was a flicker of amusement in Mr Dao's deep eyes. ‘There is a saying on your side of the Divide, I believe: never work with children and animals. You are obviously a brave man.' He licked his lips, like a cat. ‘To business,' he said. ‘The cheques to be paid in?'

‘Right.' Paul shivered, and reached behind him. Someone, presumably Melze, put a wad of papers into his hand, and he passed them over. Mr Dao took them from him and bowed again.

Mr Dao was looking past him. ‘Your assistant, presumably?' he said. ‘Perhaps you would care to introduce me?'

Cursing himself for his carelessness, Paul muttered, ‘Demelza Horrocks, she's standing in for Benny Shumway. I'm just, um, showing her how it's done.'

‘Delighted,' said Mr Dao. ‘You probably can't imagine how great a pleasure it is for us to see new faces here; especially,' he added with a dignified smile, ‘such a charming face as this. Would Miss Horrocks care for a cup of—?'

‘No,' Paul growled. ‘And I've told her, so—'

Mr Dao shrugged. ‘Naturally,' he said. ‘You must excuse the lapse. Now, unless there's any further business?'

Paul shook his head, and Mr Dao abruptly vanished, leaving no trace that he'd been there at all. Paul stood still for a moment; he very much wanted to throw up, but he reckoned that he'd been far too liberal with his bodily fluids already. He swallowed a couple of times, then slowly turned round. The feeling of nausea stayed with him until the last bolt had been fastened and the last key turned.

‘Sorry,' he said, finally daring to look and see if Melze was there. ‘It's not usually that bad. It was my fault, I—'

She was looking puzzled. ‘What was bad about that?' she said.

Paul opened his mouth, but no words came out.

‘All right,' she was saying, ‘it's a bit of a chore, but what the hell, it's out of the office. Why are you looking at me like that?'

‘But—' Paul narrowed his eyes. Melze was still looking at him as though there was something she'd missed. ‘What exactly did you see in there?' he asked.

The question clearly puzzled her. ‘Well,' she said, ‘we went through the door, and then we were in this long corridor, with carpet and doors on either side, fire extinguishers, the usual stuff. Then we crossed a courtyard and you knocked on a door, and this nice old Chinese bloke opened it. Then you gave him the cheques, and he asked if I'd like a cup of tea. You said no – which is fair enough, I mean, we've got things we need to be getting on with, we can't sit around drinking tea all day. And then we came back. That's it.'

‘Oh,' Paul said. ‘That's—' He didn't know what to say. ‘That's all right, then. Only, um, I get claustrophobic in long, narrow corridors. I thought you might, too.'

Melze shook her head. ‘It's sweet of you to be concerned,' she said, ‘but I'm all right like that. It's heights I can't be doing with, so I'm glad there weren't any stairs or anything.'

‘You didn't see—' As he heard himself say the words, he wished he hadn't spoken. ‘You didn't see any rabbits, anything like that?'

Her expression was a study in bewilderment. ‘Rabbits?'

He nodded. ‘White rabbits.'

‘Oh, I see.' She laughed, a little. ‘You mean, great big white ones in waistcoats with watches, saying,
Oh my ears and whiskers.
Yes, it was a bit like that, wasn't it? All those doors and stuff.'

Paul could probably have found an excuse to hang around the cashier's office for a bit; judging by Melze's expression when he excused himself and left, maybe she was expecting him to. But he wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

There was, he told himself as he clumped slowly down the stairs, an obvious explanation, if only he wasn't too stupid to figure it out. Clearly she hadn't seen the same things as he had. Perhaps it was a magic thing. Perhaps you only saw the nothingness and the blood and heard the dead relatives if you had the magical knack. Melze didn't, so maybe she saw some kind of interdimensional screen saver, put there so that the paranormally challenged wouldn't realise where they were and start panicking. That made sense, surely—

(Paul stopped; something had caught his eye. He looked round, but everything seemed to be as close to normal as it ever was. Paranoia, he told himself; a great excuse but a lousy lifestyle.)

It made sense, all right; it made sense of a whole lot of things. For the last few hours, he'd been trying hard not to think about the sudden and savage jolt of pain he'd felt when Melze had touched his hand; because there was a limit to how much bewilderment he could handle at any one time, and his instinct was to ignore the thing that disturbed him most. But suppose; suppose it was a condition of this magical stuff that people who had it were confined, where what the TV chat shows call interpersonal relationships are concerned, to their own kind. It wasn't the first time he'd touched a girl, after all; but Sophie had been One Of Us, and Melze wasn't. A great deal might be accounted for in those terms. Wouldn't it be interesting, and convenient, if he could dump the blame for his pathetic record in matters of true love on the sneaky little sorcery gene? If there was some sort of inbuilt defence mechanism in his genetic whatchamacallit to stop him forming attachments with people who couldn't do magic— And he could explain why the defences had lapsed long enough for Melze to get to the point of buying him lunch: she was spending all her time in a magic environment and as far as those pesky genetic watchdogs were concerned she probably smelt of the stuff enough to slip past the perimeter defences. How about that for a theory, huh?

As Paul developed and refined his shiny new hypothesis, it did occur to him that pretty well every such rationalisation he'd come up with since joining JWW had turned out to be hopelessly wrong. Even so; at some point, he was bound to figure something out right. Question was, did he want this to be that one time? If it transpired that he couldn't touch Melze without feeling as though he'd just put his fingers in a coffee grinder, was that a good thing or a bad thing?

Good question.

He'd reached the bottom of the central staircase and was about to turn left down the corridor that led to his office. Something was wrong.

That wasn't as unusual, or as scary, as all that. Paul knew, though he'd never actually done a scientific test, that the number of steps in the central staircase varied; some days there were more than others. That was fine. The geography of 70 St Mary Axe was beguilingly flexible. Rooms came and went, or moved, like sunflowers, to catch the daylight (with an attendant saving in electricity that no doubt delighted Mr Tanner). He'd heard it said that Humphrey Wells, the disgraced ex-partner now serving the firm in the capacity of Xerox machine, was in the habit of shortening corridors when he was running late for a meeting, sometimes forgetting to put them back again afterwards. Logically, if rooms appeared or vanished, the staircases would have to be edited accordingly, or else they'd overrun or fall short. Likewise, it was widely rumoured that when Countess Judy and the creative-and-media department held a meeting with their opposite numbers from another firm or organisation, the resulting build-up of superheated glamour had a nasty tendency to leak into the environment, changing the colours and textures of curtains, carpets, wallpaper and other glamour-sensitive fixtures and spontaneously creating Constable prints and trailing maidenhair ferns. All that sort of thing he'd learned to take in his stride or ignore, just as he no longer needed to remember to keep his hands and the end of his tie at least eighteen inches from the teeth of the shredder when it was switched on, if nobody had used it for a day or so. This thing he'd noticed, coming down the stairs and now at the foot of them, was something else. That was probably bad.

Then he saw it. Leaning against a wall, butter-wouldn'tmelt-in-its-saddlebags, was the bicycle that had accosted him in the closed-file store. Staring at it now, he began to remember seeing it about the place on other occasions, before it had spoken to him; but of course he'd assumed then that it was just somebody's bike, an ecologically friendly alternative to Tubes and taxis. He thought for a moment, then turned to face it.

‘Are you following me?' Paul said.

Silence.
Ridiculous
, he said to himself.
I'm talking to a bicycle.

‘Well?' he said.

‘Yes,' the bicycle replied.

He thought about that. It was old and battered, but it was a Raleigh: good, long-established British make, you ought to be able to take its word at face value. ‘Why?' he asked.

‘You've got to let her go, do you understand? You've got to. It's not right.'

Paul frowned. ‘That's what you told me the last time, right?'

‘Yes.'

‘Oh. Thanks for being consistent, anyway.'

‘Don't try being funny with us. Let her go, or we'll kill you. That's a promise.'

‘Oh, for pity's sake,' Paul sighed. ‘Just for once, can't somebody
explain
around here? Who have I got to let go? Just tell me. Please?'

‘You know,' the bike answered sullenly. ‘Don't pretend you don't – it won't save you.'

Suddenly, Paul felt very tired. ‘Humour me,' he said. ‘Look, if you care enough about this person to kill me, surely it's not too much trouble just to say her name. Right?'

Silence. You can sometimes gauge the flavour of silences by how long they last. In this case, it tasted like embarrassment.

‘We can't,' said the bicycle.

‘Sorry. You can't what?'

‘Say names,' the bicycle replied awkwardly. ‘We just can't, that's all. But you know who we mean.'

‘No, I bloody
don't
,' Paul wailed. ‘Come on,' he went on, forcing himself to get a grip, ‘don't give up on me, give me a clue. How'd it be if I said some names and you answered yes or no?'

‘No names,' grunted the bicycle. Was it, just possibly, scared? ‘We don't hold with them. And besides, you—'

‘I know, right. Only I don't. Okay, how about descriptions? You know. Old, young, height, hair colour, glasses or no glasses—'

Now the bike sounded palpably uncomfortable. ‘That wouldn't help. We do not understand – appearances. We deal only in essentials. We cannot see,' it concluded painfully.

‘Oh,' Paul said. ‘I'm sorry.'
Hang on
, he thought,
it was threatening me. Where does it say in the rules that I've got to be an equal-opportunities victim?
‘Well, there must be something. I mean, you can recognise me, right? How do you do that?'

‘By essentials,' the bicycle told him, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘We would know you in any place, at any time, in any guise. And if you don't let her go, we will hunt you down—'

‘Yes, fine,' Paul snapped. ‘Let's try it your way, shall we? What are the, um, essentials of this person I've got to let go?'

Pause, as though the bike was marshalling its thoughts. ‘Waterfalls,' it said. ‘A suddenness. The urgency dwindles as the perception broadens, but gold is soft under the hammer. A Wednesday, at the end of a long alley of darkness. Her hair, like water lilies. The sharp edge is brittle. A thrice-used tissue, tucked into a sleeve, and then for ever.'

Paul counted to five and then said, ‘You what?'

‘You heard us,' the bicycle growled at him. ‘You must let her go immediately, or she will die and so will you. We will kill you, because you will not suffer yourself to live. You will
ask
us to kill you, and we will oblige.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes.'

‘Great.' Paul took a deep breath, then smiled. ‘Jones,' he said.

The bicycle wobbled slightly. ‘Do not attempt—'

‘Parkinson. Sinclair. Cohen. Ivanovitch. Rashid. Banerji.'

‘Traitor! We defy you!'

Paul sighed. ‘Lennon,' he said. ‘McCartney. Harrison. Starr.' He grinned. ‘Rumpelstiltskin.'

With a scream, the bicycle sprang away from the wall and reared up on its back wheel. For a split second Paul was convinced that it was about to charge him; then it crashed down onto two wheels, back-pedalled frantically, and shot away backwards down the passage that led, more often than not, to the stationery cupboard.

Paul was too weary to do anything more energetic than shrug. You had, he decided, to take the broad view in these matters; death threats from a blind push-bike that scarpered like buggery when you recited the names of the Beatles were probably the least of his problems.

Even so.
You must let her go immediately, or she will die.
He didn't really want to have to worry about that, but he had a feeling he was going to. All he'd managed to find out, he realised, was that this person he had to let go was female.

Let go.
But I can't let anybody go, I'm not holding anybody.

Am I?

He thought about that as he sat at his desk, waiting for it to be five-thirty.
Am I holding anybody?
he wondered.
Not in the way you'd normally understand it, but in some other way? Who am I connected to who's female?

Fortunately, the gender thing made it easier; for various reasons, Paul simply didn't know a lot of women.
Let's see
, he thought.
There's Melze; and Sophie, except she left me, does that count as letting her go? There's Mum, but she's in Florida. Countess Judy? Or what about Mr Tanner's mum? Or Monika – she's being held, sure enough, and where she is there's every chance she could die, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about that. Who else? Christine?
A thrice-used tissue, tucked into a sleeve, and then for ever.
Well, that could be any one of them, obviously
. Unless the thrice-used-tissue bit was some kind of subtle, riddling metaphor. He thought about that and decided he really didn't want it to be.
Yuck
, in fact. He remembered that he was supposed to be reading up on chimeras, and then it was twenty-five past five.