Wish You Were Here (22 page)

‘Well, quite,' Wesley said.

‘So,' the Indian persisted, ‘what's your plan? I'm telling you, I can't wait to hear.You know, ever since that day I've been turning it over in my mind, asking myself, what'd I do different if I had my time all over again, and all these hundreds of years I haven't been able to figure it out.'

‘You haven't?'

The Indian grinned self-deprecatingly. ‘Pretty dumb of me, I guess. So, you gonna tell me now or do you want it to be a surprise?'

‘Oh, a surprise,' Wesley said. ‘Definitely a surprise.'

 

Calvin Dieb landed.

For a moment or so he wobbled, rocking backwards and forwards on his talons like an expensive china ornament on a high mantelpiece; then it occurred to him that he'd probably do better just by holding still. It worked.

‘Help!' said a female voice.

He peered into the darkness of the cave behind him. His eagle eyes cut the gloom in a way that astounded him, and he made out a human shape huddled in a fissure of the rock. It was a girl, damnit -

- Well, a girl in a sense. A youngish, thirty-something woman, with big thick-lensed glasses, rather on the stocky side; maybe damsel would be pushing it. But in distress, definitely.

‘It's all right,' he said.

‘Huh?'

‘It's all right,' he repeated. ‘Just keep calm and everything'll be just fine.'

‘Help! Help!'

Dieb cringed. In the confined space of the cave, her yowling sounded horribly loud. Whoever or whatever it was that she was afraid of (with good reason, presumably) would have to be deaf as a post not to hear. He made a shushing noise and edged towards her.

‘You OK?' he whispered.

‘
Heeeelp!
'

‘Look.' He came closer; she shrank back. ‘What's going on?' he asked. ‘Who's keeping you here?'

The girl stopped caterwauling and stared at him. ‘You are,' she said.

Calvin must have swallowed his breath the wrong way or something. He choked. ‘What?' he spluttered.

‘You are, you disgusting bird,' the girl repeated. ‘You brought me here, damnit.'

‘Did I?'

‘Oh for fuck's sake. Yes, of course you did.'

‘But . . .'

‘
Heeeeeelp!
'

Calvin took a step backwards, and felt himself wobble again. He looked down and saw something under his savagely hooked claw. It was a human skull.

‘
Shit!
' He jumped about a foot in the air, nearly stunning himself on the roof of the cave. As he landed and regained his precarious balance, a thought struck him—

Eagle.

Cave.

Skull.

Oh Jesus
, he cursed inside his mind.
Of all the eagles in all the mountains in all the world, why did I have to change into this one?

‘Hey,' he said aloud. ‘Just a minute, pipe down. Did I really bring you here?'

‘Yes,' replied the girl, offended. ‘You tend to notice these things.'

‘Are you sure?' Dieb queried. ‘I mean, are you certain it wasn't some other eagle? Dunno about you, but I can't tell 'em apart.'

‘It was you,' the girl said unpleasantly. ‘White diamond on the breast, split claw on the left foot, slight upward twist to the hook of the upper jaw. It was definitely you.'

‘But it can't have been. No, really.You see, I'm not an eagle, I'm a lawyer.'

‘HEEEELP!'

Oh for Christ's sake, what's this thing people have about lawyers? ‘I'm a human being,' he said. ‘I don't know if you're caught up in this crazy weirdness too, but I'm a perfectly normal lawyer who's been turned into this goddamn eagle thing, and I'm not going to eat you. Or anybody. Trust me.'

The girl scowled at him. ‘You're just saying that,' she growled. ‘Trying to lull me into a false sense of security.'

Suddenly, Dieb felt annoyed. ‘Yeah, sure,' he replied. ‘Well-known hunting technique of the larger raptors. Soon as they see a jackrabbit or a woodchuck or whatever down there on the prairie floor, they swoop down, call out,
It's OK, really I'm just a lawyer
, and the moment the rabbit comes back out of his hole, they nail him. Look, what've I got to do to convince you, file a suit or something? '

‘You don't sound like a lawyer,' the girl said, after a pause.

‘Given your attitude, I'll take that as a compliment. Hey, you think I'm threatening, maybe you should see my partner. Man, if I was a rabbit I'd far rather take my chances with the eagle.'

At least the girl had stopped screaming and quivering. ‘All right,' she said, ‘so really you're a lawyer. Still doesn't explain why you grabbed me and brought me here.'

‘I didn't. No, please, just listen up, will you? Maybe it was an eagle grabbed you, and maybe, God help me, I'm that eagle now; but I wasn't that eagle
then
.'

‘No?'

‘Nah. That was the eagle. The
real
eagle,' he added quickly, as the girl started yowling again. ‘The eagle whose fucking horrible body I've somehow gotten myself into. Look . . .'

‘It's OK,' the girl said. ‘I believe you. It's OK.'

‘You do?'

‘Yes. It's what you said. Anybody who can come out with all that bullshit and really expect anybody to believe it has got to be a—'

‘Yeah,' Dieb snarled, shutting his eyes, ‘right. The point is, I'm not gonna hurt you, I'm just as confused as you are, and the sooner it cuts it out and we can get back to real life, the happier I'll be. So if we can both stop acting crazy and just think for a minute . . .'

The girl nodded. ‘I guess so,' she said. ‘What happened to you, then?' She stopped, and stared at him, as coinage tinkled on impact in her mind. ‘Just a second, though,' she went on. ‘You haven't fallen in love with me, right?'

‘Look,' Dieb said, recovering rather faster than he'd imagined he would, ‘don't get me wrong, but . . .'

‘Everybody I meet,' said the girl defiantly, ‘falls in love with me. Vikings. Priests. Goblins . . .'

‘Did you say Vikings? And goblins?'

The girl nodded. ‘And just don't make any remarks, OK? Because really, this isn't the time.'

‘I've had Vikings,' Dieb said excitedly. ‘And goblins too, I guess. How about bears?'

The girl shook her head. ‘No bears. How about you? Any priests?'

‘No. But don't let's get sidetracked. We both had the Vikings and the goblins, right? So whatever this garbage is, it's happening to both of us.'

‘Maybe. Did you fall in the lake? I did. That's when everything started to go weird.' She scowled. ‘Like, men started falling in love with me.'

‘Ah.'

‘Except you.'

‘Um.'

‘Which is great,' the girl went on, ‘really. And I've been thinking; you know, about the weirdness. You see, all my life I've had this stupid notion about how nice it'd be to be one of those girls who have it really easy because they're attractive, and men just fall over backwards and jump through hoops the moment they see them.'

‘You mean, like a bimbo?'

‘That's the word I was looking for, yes. All I wanted to be was a genuine, twenty-two-carat peroxide bimbo. Well, that's what's happening to me, almost like someone's teaching me a lesson.' She paused for breath. ‘Is that what's happening to you? Not being a bimbo,' she added quickly. ‘Punishment by wish-fulfilment, or whatever.'

Dieb shook his head. ‘Can't say it is,' he replied. ‘I keep meeting these chatty birds and animals who try and psychoanalyse me, but all I really want to do is find my car keys.'

‘Car keys?'

‘Yeah, my keys. I dropped them. If I could only get into my car . . .'

The girl rummaged in her windcheater pocket, and produced a small, glittering bundle of metal. ‘These keys?' she asked. ‘I picked them up beside the—'

‘
My keys!
' Calvin stared for a fraction of a second, roughly the amount of time it takes for light to travel a quarter of an inch, and then extended a taloned foot and grabbed.

But before he could touch them—

 

‘Sssh!'

‘Oh, shut up,' Wesley hissed back over his shoulder. ‘It's all right for you, you're a ghost. You don't weigh anything, and if you fall off it won't actually matter. In my case—'

‘Look!'

Wesley craned his neck over the lip of the ledge, and peered as far as he could into the cave. ‘Oh,
shit
,' he whispered.

‘You found him!'

‘Yes,' replied Wesley, thoughtfully. ‘So I have.'

‘And he's about to eat the girl.'

‘Could be. Could be. However, let's not jump to—'

The ghost hopped up onto the ledge, drew his bow and shot three arrows in the time it takes to blow one's nose. ‘Look at that grouping,' he sighed. ‘You could cover all three with a quarter. Pity.'

‘Yes,' Wesley agreed. ‘Quite.'

The Indian flattened himself against the rock. ‘OK,' he said, ‘your turn. All you've gotta do is sneak up behind him with that chunk of rock and flatten him.'

‘That's all, huh?'

‘Sure. Ain't life just full of anticlimaxes?'

Wesley reached out and wrapped his hand around the chunk of rock indicated. ‘I'm not sure about this,' he muttered, ‘ecologically speaking, I mean. I'm sure I read somewhere that eagles are protected.'

‘Not this kind. I refer you to the Protection of Birds Act 1977, section 42, subsection 4(b). Go get the fucker.'

‘Right,' sighed Wesley. ‘Here goes.'

Rock in hand, he crawled forward.

 

‘My keys
aaaagh
!'

The eagle slumped forward, and its beak hit the ground with a chunky crack, like a coconut falling on a rock.

‘Hey!'

Wesley, who had shut his eyes a moment before swinging the rock, opened them again, and saw what he had done. He stood rooted to the spot, while many different reactions and emotions coursed through his mind like cars in an overcrowded multi-storey car park.

‘What the hell did you do that for?' demanded the girl.

Wesley looked up, and saw, and said nothing. Instead he goggled.

‘And who the hell are you, anyway?' the girl continued.

Despite the sleeting blizzard of pink hearts and fat cabbage roses swirling in front of his eyes and obscuring his vision, he could see that this wasn't the gorgeous female he'd been trudging round after all this time. This was a different creature entirely; squatter, more compactly built, probably much better suited to life on a planet with much higher gravity, with a face that reminded him curiously of a warthog in spectacles. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a thousand violins began to play.

‘Er,' he said.

‘What?'

It was, insisted the skeleton staff still on duty inside his head, time to explain. ‘I . . .' he said.

‘You what?'

‘Um.'

The girl looked at him, and her glance struck him like a napalm attack on a tribe of snowmen. He stepped back, walking clean through Talks With Squirrels as he did so. The Indian, who had been only one arrow away from ten consecutive hits in the girl's forehead before Wesley jogged his arm, instinctively tried to reach out and catch him; but his fingers passed through Wesley's wrist, a fraction of a second before he stepped backwards over the lip of the cave and into thin air.

‘Aaaaaagh!' he observed.

As the cry dopplered away, the girl scurried forward, yelling, ‘Hey, wait!' - the sort of damn silly thing girls do say, under such circumstances. Talks To Squirrels sighed, looked down at the drop separating the cave mouth from the ground, sank his tomahawk into the back of the girl's neck and sat down in a corner, sulking.

‘Hell!' said Janice.

For want of anything better to do, she tried to find the car keys, which she distinctly remembered dropping just after the funny man had nutted the eagle. Needless to say, they were nowhere to be seen.

 

Captain Hat, scampering down the mountainside with his latest trophy, was surprised and a little bit put out when a falling human body hit him on the head, squashing him flat. Quite apart from the inconvenience of having every bone in his body broken by the force of the impact, he dropped the car keys he'd just made away with; and, being pinned down under a human body, could only watch helplessly as they rolled down the hill, bounced off a projecting rock and went
plop!
into the lake.

‘Urgh,' groaned the human body.

‘Excuse me.'

Hat peered up from under the body's armpit. There was a Big peering down at him ‘You again,' he said.

‘What? Oh, yes. Hi.' Linda Lachuk crouched down on her knees and moved aside the body's arm. ‘We've met already, haven't we?'

Hat nodded. ‘You're the submarine spotter,' he said. ‘Find any yet?'

‘One,' Linda replied. ‘But it sank. Hey, I found out they're smuggling the stuff out in rocks.'

‘Is that so?'

Linda nodded. ‘I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier, it's so obvious,' she said.

Hat shrugged. ‘Often it's the obvious things that never occur to you,' he said. ‘Ain't that the way, huh?'

‘You're right. Anyway, I thought it might be a good idea to get up high, so I can see everything that's going on. Is that a cave up there?'