Game Boy awakened with a shuddery jolt and found his neck was sore. He’d been clenching his jaw in his sleep. His hands curled into fists involuntarily as he gasped for air, breathless in the wake of the not-quite-a-nightmare intensity of his dream. When he unfisted them he grabbed at the threadbare neck of his sleeping bag: “Waaaa-urgh,” he groaned, then worked his jaws and swallowed. Unlike his nightmares of the second type, where awakening brought relief, this one clamped down hard. He closed his eyes and focussed on deep, slow breathing, intent on thwarting an impending panic attack. What’s happening to me? he wondered. He didn’t have to ask what brought this on—that much was obvious.
“Yo, Boy?”
He triangulated on Doc’s voice. It came from the kitchen. He wormed his way out of the sleeping bag, aching and stiff. He’d gotten so stoned that he’d slept in his binder again: top surgery, already on his priority list, climbed another couple of notches. (Not that he could sign up for it before his eighteenth birthday without his parents’ consent, which would never be forthcoming.) He ran fingers across his scalp, checking: Is my hair getting long again? was part of his morning ritual.
“Doc?” he called.
“Need coffee?”
“Yeah.” It was a pointless question, little more than a network latency check, meaningless as an early morning how are you? Still, it served to warn Doc that he was inbound. He slouched out into the hallway, then through the kitchen door, and did a double-take as he saw Doc leaning against the fridge-freezer—which, to his infinite relief, looked nothing like the ones in his dream.
“We’re fresh out of cow juice,” Doc grumped. “Imp must have guzzled it all with his Weetabix.”
“Where is he?”
“Went out.”
“Move over—” Doc moved and Game Boy opened the freezer compartment. He pulled out a frozen cardboard carton of milk, its waxed sides bulging. “Lemme run this under the cold tap.”
“Ugly, Boy, ugly.”
Game Boy flashed him a grin from the sinkside: “It works, doesn’t it?” Soon there was a frozen carton of milk bobbing in a saucepan full of water, slowly thawing. Doc pulled out a mug as the filter machine coughed asthmatically and shut off. “Thanks,” Game Boy said, accepting his coffee.
“Plans?” Doc was monosyllabic in the morning.
“Brr,” Game Boy shivered, both because of the morning chill and the memory of a near-nightmare. “Gotta work out, you know? Drink this, then train.” Training meant three hours of straight Dota 2 in All Random mode with his teammates, practicing for flexibility.
“What about going upstairs?” Doc unerringly put his thumb on the pressure sore.
“What about it?”
Doc looked puzzled. “Yesterday you were shit hot to go exploring.…”
“Yeah, but that was yesterday.” Game Boy flapped his free hand irritably. Coffee slopped on the worn kitchen lino. “This morning it creeps me out. All that history hanging around up there.” He was gripped by an unaccountable fear of refrigerators in kitchens. “Maybe there’s something horrible just waiting for us to stumble into it.”
Doc gave Game Boy a disbelieving look. “Are. You. Chicken?”
“Am not!” Game Boy straightened and puffed his chest out, a bantam rooster defending his base. Then his eyes narrowed. “Hey, no fair. You cheat!”
“I cheat?” Doc raised an eyebrow.
“Stop pushing me!” His voice broke into an adolescent squeak. “I hate it when you do that!”
“Busted.”
“Fuck you!” Game Boy stormed out, gripping his mug as if he meant to throw it.
Doc’s “hee hee hee…” haunted Game Boy all the way back to the games room, like an irritating mosquito whine. Fuming, he drained the scalding coffee mug, then grabbed Imp’s dumbbells and worked out his anger through an overly abrupt warmup set.
Over the course of the morning, work took the edge off Game Boy’s irritation. Doc’s attempt to push some curiosity into his head had been so totally transparent it was almost pathetic. Doc was terrible at projecting positive and abstract emotions—he worked best with things like hatred, despair, and fatigue. So when Doc brought him lunch (a bowl of Szechuan noodles and two microwaved Greggs sausage rolls) he decided to accept the peace offering in return for conditional forgiveness. “You wanna go upstairs?” he demanded, slurping noisily with his mouth open because it totally annoyed Doc.
“Stop that, you’ll catch flies—” Doc shook his head. “I walked into that. Upstairs?”
“Yeah.” Game Boy kicked at the edge of his desk and his chair spun around lazily. “I was thinking we’ll need to hit a stationers for supplies first, though.”
Supplies were procured from a high street Ryman, where Doc made sure that the somnolent store detectives ignored the Dalek-like shrieks of rage from the automated checkout when Game Boy pretended to scan his loot. They made their way home uneventfully and unpacked the spoils of shoplifting: dry powder markers, spray paint, school stationery kits, a pad of graph paper, and a clipboard. Then they huffed their way to the top floor, shouldered their exploration kits, nodded at one another in a spirit of intrepid dungeon-crawling brotherhood, and said as one, “Let’s do this.”
And that they did, for the next hour and fifty-two minutes.
They quickly fell into a routine. Doc would open a door, give a terse description, then recite distances and bearings to the next portal. Boy would add lines and descriptions to the tube map, pausing only when it was time to start a new page. Like: “Terminus, bathroom”; “Corridor, two meters, doors left and right, four meters, door opposite”; “Full-size swimming pool, changing room door left, twenty-five meters, changing room door right, opposite emergency exit—what the hell, Game Boy?”
“At least it’s not Olympic size. Hey, do you suppose it’s heated?”
“Fuck if I want to find out, looks like nobody’s cleaned it since the First World War. Okay, let’s back up a room and try the first door on the right.”
One hour and fifty-three minutes—and five densely scribed sheets of A4 graph paper—into their mapping run, Game Boy cried uncle. “Listen, I gotta go bad.” (They had just opened a door onto a water closet. The splendid white ceramic throne perched beneath an overhead cistern bearing the monogram of Thos. Crapper. The walls were dusty painted brickwork, illuminated by a small glass skylight above the entrance. Vintage: late Victorian, servants, for the use of.)
“Okay, I guess.” Doc leaned against the wall while Game Boy went inside and pulled the door almost all the way shut, leaving a crack to allow for conversation.
“This is fucking crazytown,” Game Boy complained as he did his business. “We’ve done what, two hundred rooms?”
“One hundred and eighty-four rooms, thirty-nine corridors, twelve staircases, four swimming pools, nine garages, five coal cellars, three empty lift shafts, and the maze.”
“Yeah, the maze. What the fuck was up with that, Doc?”
“I have no idea what was up with that, Boy.” Game Boy frowned furiously as he pinched a loaf. Doc winced at the splash: “I did not need to hear that.”
“Sorry not sorry. Who builds a giant glassed-over conservatory on the roof of their house and puts a hedge maze in it? With memorial headstones? Then leaves the hedge to die?”
“Did you notice how old they were?”
“What, the hedge—”
“—The memorial stones: they were all for kids or teenagers…” Doc trailed off. “Are you going to be much longer? My feet hurt and I think we skipped lunch.”
“No, I’m nearly done here.” Too late, Game Boy saw to his dismay that the toilet paper was weird and shiny-surfaced stuff. “Oh yuck.”
Doc sighed. “Let’s head back, I think I’m done exploring for now.”
Game Boy finished up hastily, stood, and restored his attire to a semblance of order. When he pulled the chain the cistern groaned ominously, then vomited a torrent of red-brown water into the toilet bowl. It’s probably rust,
he consoled himself.
“I want to check one of the ground-level exits before we go home,” Game Boy mused. “They worry me. How do we know nothing can sneak in and find their way through the hedge maze and the library and murder us in our sleep if we don’t check that they’re locked? Also, where do they come out?”
Doc began to say something, then swallowed his tongue. He tried again. “Yeah, smart thinking. Let’s open the door to some place that shouldn’t exist in our universe and see if there’s something horrible on the other side.”
“Yes, let’s!” Game Boy snarked.
Retreating through the manifold was faster than breaking new ground, although they had a couple of nasty moments when Game Boy screwed up his left and right turns. “I’m really getting a workout,” Doc wheezed as they finally made it back onto the first sheet of graph paper.
“You should get out more.” Game Boy paused to consult the map. “If we take the next left, then the second right, go down the gallery to the end, through the kitchen, and take the next left onto the landing, there’s a servants’ staircase. It’s not far off our route. Wanna do it?”
“Yes. Let me just catch my breath first? I’m not cut out for this Lara Croft shit.”
“Come on, it’s not far! We’ve only walked—” Game Boy chunked average room sizes in his head—“about three kilometers!” He giggled, a high, silly chime of pure delight. “And we haven’t met any wandering monsters yet! Not even a gelatinous cube!”
They entered the servants’ staircase via a doorway from an old-fashioned kitchen that was, thankfully, refrigerator-free. It was severe and narrow, its walls plain, the stone treads of the steep steps worn from use. They descended five floors, until Doc was sweating and complaining. Game Boy hastily pencilled in the landings and doors. Finally they bottomed out on another landing with three doors. One of them clearly opened outside.
“If we go out—” Doc hesitated—“we need to wedge it firmly. There’s no telling … just a quick look?”
“Yes, yes! A quick look!” Despite his hunger, Game Boy bounced up and down on his toes. “I just want to know!”
“How does this open—” Doc peered at the door. There was an old-fashioned keyhole below the doorknob, and very sturdy cast-iron bolts at top and bottom. He slid back the bolts, then reached an impasse. “How do we unlock it?”
“With one of these?” Game Boy excitedly flourished a bunch of slightly rusty keys bound with garden twine. They’d been hanging on a nail hammered into the side of the stairs, where Doc had missed it.
“Okay, let’s do this.” Doc reached for the keys.
“No! Mine!” Game Boy darted in and shoved the biggest key at the hole. By luck or something else, it turned. “Leeeroy—”
“Hush.” Doc twisted the doorknob and pulled, then froze, blocking the doorway. An odd noise came from beyond him: a distant ululation, rising and falling like the mating call of zeppelins.
“What’s that noise—”
“Fuck!” Doc stepped back, sending Game Boy stumbling against the stairs as he slammed the door. “Sorry.” He took a deep breath. “I only ever heard them in old movies, should have recognized them sooner.”
“Not cool, dude! What the fuck got in you?”
“Those were air raid sirens,” said Doc. He stared at Game Boy in silence. “Do you still want to go out?” he asked.
Game Boy shook his head sullenly. “Want lunch.”
“I think … that would be for the best.”
* * *
Wendy had a bunch of paperwork to go over, but Gibson agreed to shelve it, and instead sent her packing with an admonition to get to work, and the promise of an advance against her wages by the end of the day. One piece of administrivia that he did impose on her: HiveCo thief-takers were expected to dress like professional detectives, rather than minimum wage security drones. Luckily for her, Wendy had hung onto her old work clobber—wishful thinking in case she ever landed an office job. So when she hit the streets after lunch, she was wearing sensible shoes and a sturdy suit that was less than half a decade out of fashion. Despite the faint smell of mothballs, it felt like coming home.
By three o’clock coming home was getting old. She had a crick in her neck, a sore back, and a much lower opinion of office jobs—especially if they came with chairs like the orthopedic disaster she’d ended up with in the Hamleys camera room.
“Walk me through it again,” she said, leaning subtly away from Jeanine from HR, who occupied the middle seat, and who in turn was discreetly avoiding Sydney from Security’s mouse-elbow.
Sydney expectorated glutinously, then croaked: “Yerss, mam.” With a degree of dainty fingertip precision that belied every other aspect of his appearance, he scrubbed the mouse cursor back along the camera feed timeline. “’Ere’s where our perps walked in.”
The cameras in Hamleys’ lobby area recorded in full-color HD plus infrared. They were a far cry from the usual grainy corner-shop crap Wendy was used to. Nevertheless, she had a hard job identifying the figures Sydney was intent on tracking—there was just too much foot traffic. Finally she got a handle on them when Sydney paused and moused over their faces.
“Huh. Give me a second.” She jotted down notes. Perp 1: tall white male, lightly built, clean-shaven, gray or check coat, dark trousers, white open-necked shirt, hair covered by a narrow-brimmed hat. Perp 2: average height white male, average build, dark hair and eyes, clean-shaven, wearing a suit so deplorable it might have been in its owner’s family since his grandfather was demobbed from national service in the fifties. “Hm, not exactly your average toy shoppers.” Perp 3: Black female in fleece windbreaker, exercise leggings or … “Cycling kit?” She had her hair tied back in dreadlocks, and wore no jewelry (or at least nothing visible on video). Perp 4: shorter-than-average East Asian or Chinese male, black hoodie with hood raised, jeans, trainers—the only one who carried an obvious shoplifter vibe, which meant he was a decoy, except—“There’s something off about this one.” She tapped the screen. “Something about the way he walks.”
“I dun’t see’t,” Sydney grumped.
“The hips.” Jeanine from HR said suddenly. “He swaggers. He’s putting too much effort into it. Like he’s…”
“Tryin’ ter ’tract attention,” Sydney agglutinated.
Wendy winced, hoping he couldn’t see her. “He swaggers like he doesn’t care where he’s going, but he doesn’t bump into anything,” she said. “Or anyone.”
The perps took the escalator up to the first floor. Wendy watched as Short Hoodie bounced up to Hat Guy and exchanged words in Model Railways. Hands pressed up against a gleaming display cabinet, beseeching. “Did you dust that for prints?”
“Too late,” Jeanine said apologetically. “The front of store display cases get polished every time there’s a lull in business. Nobody linked it with the robbery until the police ran the tapes a couple of hours later.”
A couple of hours? Wendy stifled a groan. Either somebody senior had lost the plot, or the cuts to Metropolitan Police funding were worse than she’d realized—armed/transhuman robbery of a cash room ought to rate an emergency response. “Did you get anything?”
“Mebbe.” Sydney scrubbed forward. The cameras jerked and jumped, following the foursome through Party Costumes and as far as the changing room. “Look.” He froze the stream, then stepped frame by frame through an altercation: Black Biker Babe shoving a bishoujo maid’s frock at Short Hoodie, who reacted as if it were kryptonite, recoiling and falling back against a rail of costumes. “Maybe we’ll lift some prints there.” He zoomed the image in closer. There being no CSI-style enhance button in the real world, all this gave her was an eyeful of blurry block pixels. But she got to see Black Biker Babe’s hand wrap around a chromed rail as she leaned close to her homie.
“Did you check that?” Wendy demanded.
“No, no we didn’t!” Jeanine sat up. “And they don’t polish the clothes rails anything like often enough! Good catch, Sid!�
��
The video stream played on. Wendy watched as Hat Guy, who was apparently the ringleader or instigator, thrust superhero costumes at his posse. They changed, picked up their zombified store detective escort, and headed into the back.
“The store detective—what happened to him?” she asked.
“Oh, we fired his sorry ass.”
Wendy resisted the urge to grind her teeth. “I mean, what did they do to him? Was he an inside man, or—”
“Oh no, the raiders messed with everybody’s head! The bloke with the hat, you know, the Joker? He has some kind of mind control power. Ralph barely remembered anything from the moment he intercepted them until after they left.”
So why did you bloody sack him? Wendy kept her trap shut. Ours not to wonder why. Mistakes were made, management needed a scapegoat, same old story. “Next.”
She watched in silence as the heist went down in the strong room. Then she watched it again in slo-mo, slack-jawed, as Chinese Hoodie Dude—now dressed as Robin—executed the most amazingly slick slapstick routine she’d ever seen carried out in a single shoot, without a stunt double in sight. “Now that’s something else.” She peered at the screen. “What happened to the guards?”
Dead Lies Dreaming Page 12