In Your Dreams (33 page)

The rest of the week was almost disturbingly calm. A string of trivial pest-control enquiries filtered through from other departments; Cas Suslowicz sent Paul a memo asking him to find out how to evict a bad-luck dragon from the site of a multibillion-dollar mall development in Singapore (the answer was, surprisingly, surrounding the perimeter with ordinary garden twine soaked in creosote, the smell of which bad-luck dragons can't abide); Mr Tanner sent Christine down with a client's file and instructions to research cost-effective methods of dealing with an infestation of water nymphs in the swimming pool of a holiday camp on the north Lincolnshire coast (Paul spent three hours vainly searching for water-nymph references in the office-procedures manual; finally, in frustration, he scribbled
Sharks?
in pencil on the cover of the file, and went out to lunch; when he got back, the file had gone and in its place was a handwritten note from Mr Tanner saying,
Good idea, thanks
); Professor van Spee himself, no less, summoned Paul to his office and asked him to draft a letter to a client advising on which varieties of garlic were most suitable for repelling which categories of vampire. Fortunately, Paul recalled having seen a Suttons seed catalogue in Benny Shumway's desk drawer, with Post-It notes sticking out of the pages; he waited till Melze was out of the room (for some reason), then sneaked in and got it. As he'd hoped, Benny had scribbled copious notes in the margins, and he was therefore able to advise the professor's client that Fleur de Lys and White Pearl were both equally good against ordinary night-stalking vampires, but Mersley White or Sultop were preferred in areas known to be infested with the rarer daywalking variety.

‘Excellent,' the professor said, when Paul took him the draft. ‘You seem to have mastered a notoriously difficult discipline in a short time, which suggests a natural aptitude. You might consider specialising in pest control once you've completed your trial periods in the other departments.'

The unexpected praise had hit Paul harder than Mr Tanner's mum's elbow, and all he could do was grin feebly and shake his head. ‘I don't think I'd like that,' he mumbled. ‘Thanks all the same. Too much – well, killing and stuff. And I don't think I'd really cope with the mortal peril terribly well, either.'

‘You think so?' The professor seemed almost amused. ‘It seems to me that you've been handling it admirably over the past few weeks.'

It took a moment for that one to sink in, by which time Paul had already started to say, ‘Well, it's the killing that really bothers me, so—' He stopped short and his mouth flopped open, like the tailgate of the lorry off the back of which good things fall. ‘'Scuse me,' he said.

The professor raised an eyebrow. ‘Come now, Mr Carpenter,' he said. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean. And,' he added, lifting his glasses and rubbing his eyelids, ‘I have to admit that I'm not sure if I'd have been able to display such fortitude had I been in your position. You may have doubts about your courage, but I don't. Good afternoon.'

Somehow, staying in the professor's room once you'd been dismissed was simply impossible, like defying gravity. Paul stumbled back to his office in a daze, and spent the rest of the afternoon staring at the door, trying very hard not to think about what he'd been told.

Of course
, he reflected bitterly,
it would have to be bloody Friday today; now I'll have the whole weekend to skulk timidly in, won't that be fun? At least while I'm here I've got work and stuff to keep me occupied, and maybe just possibly someone would come and help me if I was attacked and started screaming the place down. At home, though
—

Quickly, Paul applied his mental handbrake.
Don't be silly,
he told himself,
it's all taken care of
– thanks to dear, good, brave, wise, thoughtful Uncle Ernie, who'd gone out of his way to make sure that Paul inherited that spectacularly useful Sea Scout badge. If something nasty did come for him in the middle of the night, all he'd have to do would be to wave it under their noses (assuming they had noses, of course) and they'd be off like rats up conduits. To think: he'd been worrying himself to a frazzle, and all the time the answer to his problems was right there, in his pocket.

Or rather, it wasn't.

Brief panic break, followed by detailed search of pockets, floor, desk drawers, pockets again. He was feeling his jacket lining just in case it had slipped through a small hole when he remembered the last time he'd seen the badge; he'd put it on top of a pile of Mortensen printouts, to keep the goblins off them until they were collected. That was a week ago, and he hadn't seen or even thought about the badge since.

There was a remote chance it had fallen on the floor and got kicked under the desk, but Paul disposed of that hope fairly quickly. The obvious conclusion, therefore, was that someone had taken it – either casual kleptomania, or because they wanted it, or because they didn't want him to have it. No prizes for guessing which hypothesis he inclined towards.

The journey home that night was little short of terrifying. People kept coming up behind him; not that unusual for London in the rush hour, but Paul had no way of knowing whether any of the scurrying lemmings squashing past him on the pavement or crushing against him on the bus was a disguised goblin or a shapeshifting Fey assassin or even an unusually tall dwarf. To cap it all, the light bulb on the stairs had blown, and he had to creep up to his flat through shadows thicker and more menacing than anything he'd had to face on any of his trips to deposit the takings at the Bank of the Dead. When at last he was able to close his front door on the outside world and he'd conducted an inch-by-inch search of the flat, torch in one hand, his most lethal weapon (which happened to be a cheese knife left over when his parents moved to Florida) gripped in the other, he locked, chained and bolted the door and flumped bonelessly onto the sofa.

Ten minutes later he'd stopped shaking, and was starting to feel just a little foolish. It hadn't occurred to Paul before that maybe Professor van Spee had simply been winding him up. True, the professor didn't look like he had a sense of humour, just as lions don't appear to have pink wings; but wasn't that a much likelier explanation than that someone was prepared to go to all the trouble of killing him? Who'd want to do that? Why murder someone who'd never really mattered in his entire life, a mere Mortensen-collator and part-time filing-cabinet-shifter's assistant? Exactly. No motive. Getting into a state over a joke that had fallen flat and his own pathetic cowardice. Stumbling wearily into the kitchen, Paul traded the cheese knife (ought to give it a suitable name, now that he'd adopted it as his personal sidearm; Edam-cleaver, maybe, or Cheddar's-bane) for a can opener, and fixed himself a rather indifferent dose of beans on toast. Then he sat down to watch the news.

Just ordinary, everyday stuff: mundane scandals, normal crimes, the reassuringly familiar lies of politicians. Nothing about a civil war among the Fey, or werewolves in Surrey, or the release of hostages from the dungeons of Grendel's Aunt. No big deal—

The sitting-room window exploded in a snowstorm of broken glass. Something large and heavy tumbled through; it was alive, caught up in the curtain like an arena victim in a gladiator's net. The curtain rail and pelmet came away from the wall, and the writhing bundle crashed down on Paul's relatively new Ikea coffee table, crumbling it into dust and fragments. Paul was on his feet before he knew it, stumbling backwards until he couldn't go any further because of the goddamned interfering wall. The thing was bouncing up and down on the floor like an incompetent escapologist, fighting with the curtain and only succeeding in tangling itself further; then it stopped moving for a whole second and a half – enough time to run away in, provided your legs work, which Paul's didn't. Then a tearing, slitting noise, and a bright steel tongue poked through the white curtain lining, like the beak of a baby chicken pecking through the eggshell. Paul stared in horrified fascination as the blade sawed its way along the length of the bundle. He'd seen a score of sci-fi movies where the alien monster fights its way out of its glistening cocoon before springing up, alert, gigantic and ready for instant mayhem. He hadn't realised that they were really nature documentaries.

But the thing that crawled painfully out of the cloth chrysalis wasn't a multiple-eyed black-carapaced nightmare. It was Ricky Wurmtoter, dressed in faultless evening dress but no shoes or socks, and holding a sword. He struggled to his knees, looked up, saw Paul and grinned.

‘Thank goodness for that,' he panted. ‘I couldn't remember if your flat's 36 or 38.' Then he closed his eyes and slowly toppled over, taking out the footstool as he went.

‘Mr Wurmtoter?' Paul whispered.

‘Ricky, please.' He reached out with his left hand, groping for the sword, which he'd dropped. ‘How's things? Haven't seen you in a—'

‘Are you all right?'

Ricky Wurmtoter took a moment to answer. ‘Actually,' he murmured, ‘no. Bump on the head, probably two busted ribs, couple of extra holes in places where there shouldn't be any, and there seem to be three of you, going round and round like a windmill. Other than that, bloody awful. How's yourself?'

‘Fine, thanks,' Paul answered automatically. ‘Look, should I call a doctor? I mean, no, sorry. Stay still, I'll phone for a—'

Ricky shook his head. ‘Please don't,' he said. ‘Don't like hospitals.' He lifted his head, and Paul could see five ragged parallel lines of caked blood across his cheek. ‘Afraid of needles, actually,' he said. ‘I'll be fine if only I can get to a repair kit. You wouldn't happen to have one lying about, would you?'

‘Sorry,' Paul said. ‘All I've got is aspirin and plasters. There used to be some cough mixture in the bathroom cabinet, but I think it must've been Sophie's, because she took it with her when she walked out on me. Oh bugger, I'm talking drivel again.'

Ricky laughed as he picked small needles of glass out of his hands. ‘Doesn't matter,' he said, with a slightly hysterical edge to his voice that Paul found rather frightening. ‘What I really need is about a gallon of really strong black coffee.' He paused, and a look of genuine terror filled his eyes. ‘You have got coffee, haven't you?'

‘I think so,' Paul said.

‘Real coffee, not decaff?'

‘Um,' Paul said. He'd met coffee snobs before, the sort who looked at you like you were a cowpat or something just because you didn't have Lavazza Double Espresso or Jamaican Red Mountain grown on the southern slope of the hill facing the sea. ‘It's only instant,' he said. ‘Nescafé,' he admitted, in a very small voice.

‘Perfect,' said Mr Wurmtoter, visibly sagging with relief. ‘Tell you what, you just lead the way and I'll make it myself.'

Ricky's idea of the proper way to make decent coffee turned out to be filling the cup half full with coffee powder and adding just enough cold water to turn it into syrup. ‘Thanks,' he sighed after his third dose. ‘I ought to be all right now.'

‘Pleasure,' Paul said. ‘Um, it's nice to see you again.'

Ricky leant against the kitchen worktop, then slid slowly down onto the floor. ‘Do me a favour,' he said. ‘Just nip and fetch my sword, would you? Only, I don't really feel like getting up, just for a moment.'

Rational explanation
, Paul said to himself as he picked the sword up, using forefinger and thumb, as though retrieving a cigarette butt from a pint of milk. A bloke smashes in through the window in evening dress, cuts himself to ribbons but appears impervious to pain, falls over and demands very strong black coffee. Sherlock and Hercule and the boys wouldn't have had to work very hard to figure that one out: Mr Wurmtoter has been out celebrating his release with the aid of intoxicating liquor, and is not feeling well. But Paul had seen enough happy drunks to fill a Students' Union, and Ricky wasn't drunk. He glanced at the sword, and shuddered. It was a remarkably sword-shaped sword: plain steel, smeared all over with some kind of reddish-black gunge, with several large chunks bitten out of the cutting edge. He held it away from himself at arm's length as he returned to the kitchen.

‘You're probably wondering,' Ricky mumbled, ‘why the evening dress.'

Actually, Paul had been wondering just that. ‘You were on your way somewhere?' he said.

Ricky nodded. ‘Couple of weeks ago? Can't remember how long. You lose track of time, understandably. I was going to some bloody stupid awards ceremony – hell of a lot of them in the hero business, as you'd expect, always some pest in a tux chasing after you with the
Which Armour?
Lifetime Achievement Award for Manticore Management or some such garbage. Anyhow, I was just getting out of the limo, smiling for the cameras and all, and I suddenly felt terribly sleepy. Shit, I thought, here we go again; and when I came round, there I was, in the dark, rats shuffling, water dripping, that whole scene.' He laughed shrilly. ‘I hate that, it makes you feel such an idiot, you know? Anyhow, I thought about it, had plenty of time for thinking, came to the conclusion that someone must've slipped a Mickey in my tea back at the office. The thing is, though, who? There's only two people it could've been, and I can't see either of them . . .' He frowned, shook his head as if to clear it. ‘But on balance,' he went on, ‘out of two really, really unlikely candidates, you're just about the more believable, by a tiny margin.' Moving so fast that Paul couldn't follow how he did it, Ricky sprang to his feet and flipped the point of the sword up under Paul's chin. It pricked. ‘Was it you?' Ricky said.

What Paul actually said was ‘Squeak,' rather than
Of course not, don't be bloody ridiculous.
He hoped very much that Mr Wurmtoter was fluent in inarticulate noises.