The Dream Thief Read online

  ‘Are you Tseiqin?’ asked Lyle breathlessly.

  The boy’s green eyes flashed. ‘What you know ’bout them?’

  ‘Green eyes, hypnotic gaze, allergy to iron, strange and mystic intentions?’

  ‘Borin’ people ain’t ’posed to know ’bout them.’

  ‘Just because my personality may be about as exciting as watching bromine diffuse, doesn’t mean I haven’t picked up some fascinating insights in my life. Are you Tseiqin?’ He put his head on one side, babbling fast. ‘You know what they are, you’ve clearly had some contact, there is something in what you do - playing with minds - that is similar to what they do, but then Tess said she saw you handle iron and—’

  Greybags stamped his foot and moaned, ‘They don’t understand me. Ain’t no one understands me.’

  ‘What are you? An . . . an adaption? Some sort of albino, some variety, as if that’s what the world needed now?’

  ‘They loved me when I were young.’

  ‘Who? The Tseiqin?’

  ‘They said I were beautiful when I were young. But I didn’t grow old like they did, I didn’t think like they did, I didn’t do like they did. They didn’t understand! I got so scared because I weren’t like them. They said I were a freak. Outcast.’

  ‘So you’re not quite Tseiqin, but an adaptation. I’m guessing you’re fine with iron, but can’t enchant like they can. You somehow feed on the thoughts of children, use them to keep you young. That’s why you’re outcast? Why the Tseiqin wouldn’t accept you? How old are you, Greybags?’

  For a moment, Greybags became absolutely still, eyes focused on something far away. ‘I remember . . . how angry the men in the big wigs were when the men in Boston refused to pay their taxes. I remember the red coats marchin’ off to fight Napoleon. I remember when the cities were small an’ the land were big, so big you could go for ever from village to village an’ all the little children would come and clap an’ their eyes were so wide an’ so big an’ it didn’t smell of smoke none, an’ I remember . . . I remember . . . when they opened the theatres again. I remember when they killed the king.’

  ‘That was centuries ago,’ breathed Lyle.

  ‘An’ it were borin’! Don’t wannit, don’t wannit. They said you gotta get old an’ get borin’ an’ serious an’ go an’ fight an’ bleed an’ die cos that’s what the grown-ups do. An’ you gotta protect, an’ do should an’ do ought an’ do care an’ do fear. So much fear. So much fear as how the children can’t understand, an’ I were so scared of the adult fear, of the should an’ the ought an’ the must an’ the fight so I decided to make it stop. I made it stop, Mister Lyle. Don’t you wish you were as clever as me?’

  ‘Right now, maybe,’ replied Lyle, eyeing up the glass in Greybags’ hand.

  ‘You ain’t gonna be scared no more, Mister Lyle,’ said Greybags. ‘If you was a child I’d eat your dreams; but you ain’t. You ain’t got no dreams good enough for me to eat. But you don’t ’ave to be scared. I’ll make you a child again, Mister Lyle. Then there won’t be no knowin’, no thinkin’, no dreamin’, no rememberin’. Just games an’ stories.’

  Lyle closed his mouth tightly, but the lion tamer, clearly wanting to contribute something to the conversation himself, stepped sharply round Greybags and grabbed Lyle by the hair and shook him. Lyle closed his eyes to stop them rattling out of his head, felt strange liquids slosh round somewhere just behind his eardrums and made a mental note to investigate that quality in more detail, in the unlikely event that he survived long enough or had enough brain left for scientific study.

  The lion tamer pushed him down towards the smelly glass. Lyle clamped his lips tight shut, and smelt something sharp, biting and foggy all at once, a smell that rammed straight to the back of his nose and then proceeded to feather-duster its way down into his lungs. He’d smelt it on Billy the Button’s breath, and something like it, something almost the same, on the breath of Sissy Smith, just after she fell at his feet. Greybags calmly reached out and pinched Lyle’s nose, like a mother controlling a mutinous child, and waited as Lyle’s face slowly turned red, then purple, then blue. Lyle kicked at where he hoped the lion tamer’s shins were with all the success of a flea against a cathedral, and heard the lion growl, felt the heat of its breath. Greybags said, ‘Ain’t no fun, not breathin’, Mister Lyle. Yor goin’ a silly colour an’ all!’

  Lyle’s eyes were half closed, his arms sagged at his sides as his strength faded against the burning heat of suffocation in his blood. And, because there was no point in fighting, and because the human body was too clever not to breathe, even when to breathe was to die, he opened his mouth, just for one breath, just one.

  And Greybags tipped in the potion.

  Her name was Mystic Mai.

  Actually, her name wasn’t Mystic Mai, but that was what the punters called her, and frankly, they couldn’t pronounce that right.

  She knew things were bad.

  They’d been bad since she’d had to haul the unconscious Lyle out of his own smoke-filled house without so much as a ‘thank you’ for her pains and a chaste peck on the cheek. It had got worse when Lyle and his funny little pets had come blundering into the circus without a clue as to what trouble they were getting into.

  Now she was going to have to set things right.

  She slipped a few spare knives into the sheaths in her sleeves. They were thin and bronze. She sighed. ‘Now, children,’ she said, ‘when Mister Lyle said exothermic, did he mention a blast radius?’

  CHAPTER 15

  Mystics

  Horatio Lyle hit the floor, the floor hit him, and the floor came out the winner. It was times like these, he told himself, when Newton’s Second Law really made its point.

  On the floor in front of him there stood a pair of feet.

  The feet shuffled back to allow an upside-down head to rotate into view and a smiling voice to proclaim, ‘Taste good, Mister Lyle?’

  Lyle coughed, turned his head to one side, and spat, tasting all the smells of the bottle increased to maximum dosage. A hot, sticky, burning ache ran down the length of his throat and into his belly. Worse, much worse, there was a fog in his mind, a squelching inside his skull, a mixture of so many sensations, sharp and dull, all at once trying to crawl across his senses, like the final burst of adrenaline before sleep after a day far, far too long.

  Poison. Lyle could name a thousand poisons, and most of their effects. But he could name a very small number indeed which had a cure. He crawled onto his hands and knees and every part of him ached, just wanted to sleep, just sleep, go to sleep, just . . .

  Poison poison poison poison poison oh god oh god oh god not poison not poison please please not poison slow too slow too young haven’t seen anything oh please not not not so scared don’t wanna don’t wanna don’t wanna please Tess . . .

  Lyle understood death. Not fluffy, angelic-washed death, not the death that led to heaven or hell or to long-lost loves. He understood death as being a very decisive full stop.

  Please please please please . . .

  Greybags giggled as Lyle tried to stand but slumped straight back onto his belly. ‘Ain’t no good, Mister Lyle! You go to sleep an’ it’ll be alllll better in the mornin’.’

  ‘What was in that drink?’ hissed Lyle.

  ‘You won’t never understand, Mister Lyle. It ain’t the sorta thing what children like you an’ me oughta know.’

  ‘I’m not a child!’

  ‘You’re gonna be, Mister Lyle. Just like a child, ’cept a little bit older. Won’t that be nice?’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘It’s a gift, this what I give you. I could’ve killed you, picked you apart limb by limb. But the grown-up lady wanted me to be kind, an’ I thought I’d make her proud. So just go to sleep, an’ everythin’ will be all right.’

  Lyle grabbed Greybags by the ankle and held on. It was the only part of Greybags he could reach from the floor; getting up seemed an impossibility.

 
; The face of a youth stared at Lyle in surprise from out of an adult’s clothes. ‘Aren’t you asleep yet?’ he demanded.

  Lyle blinked back gum and heat from across his eyes. Black and white spots were swimming across his vision like bathers in a heaving sea, taking their time as they drifted down his vision and back up, propelled there by each agonising blink.

  ‘You feed on children,’ he hissed. ‘You bastard, you feed on children.’

  Greybags tried to tug his ankle free, but Lyle’s fingers were locked in place. He stamped, he kicked, he caught Lyle in the shoulder, but the older man just grinned, his body so lost to the potion running through his veins that the pain barely registered. ‘You bastard, you bastard!’ He didn’t seem to be talking to Greybags any more. His eyes were unfocused, and all that mattered were his fingers round that thin, boy’s ankle in its adult’s trousers, to which he clung like an obstinate child to its teddy bear.

  No no no no nonononono please no . . .

  There was a sound from outside the tent.

  It sounded like someone politely clearing their throat.

  ‘I have a pint of nitro-glycerin you . . .’

  There was a hurried murmur. Lyle half raised his head through a fog of bewilderment and pain, and saw, just below the flap of the tent, a pair of ridiculously bright and absurdly sparkling gold and purple slippers. The voice seemed familiar, but it was already far, far away.

  The murmuring stopped.

  The voice cleared its throat again and announced in a slightly irritated voice: ‘Very well. I have a pint of nitro-glycerin derivative . . .’

  Murmur murmur . . .

  ‘Fine! I have two pints of chemicals that, when put together, mimic the effects of a pint of nitro-glycerin in a highly effective way and, more to the point, they’re here for you.’

  Somewhere, in a land far, far away, Lyle felt the lion tense at his side. The curtain was swept back across the front of the tent, the lion flexed its muscles, it had a lot of muscles to flex, and leapt. Somewhere halfway between ground and target, something happened to it. Its every muscle locked, its head seemed to snap into place, the roar that had been escaping from between its teeth turned into a strange sort of mewl and, as if gravity had suddenly decided to catch up, having been caught by surprise, it flopped, belly-first, onto the ground at the stranger’s feet.

  Lyle was half aware of a pair of bright green eyes, but now, right now, he just wanted to sleep.

  ‘Hello, Greybags,’ said a soft voice, like the brush of silk in wind. ‘Your species—’

  ‘Genus,’ corrected a little voice helpfully.

  ‘Thomas, has Mister Lyle ever informed you that you hinder a certain charismatic atmosphere? Your genus, Mr Greybags, wants a word with you.’

  There was a whimper from Greybags as he slunk into a corner. ‘You ain’t ’posed to be here,’ he whined. ‘Not you, not one of you.’ He grabbed the lion tamer by the hem of his spotted loincloth and shrieked, ‘Kill her!’

  In the door, flanked by the rather uncertain-looking shapes of Tess, Tate and Thomas, Mystic Mai drew herself up to her full, rather petite height. In either hand she held thin bottles, each one carefully corked and labelled. The children at her sides seemed intensely focused on these, with more than a little apprehension in their eyes.

  The lion tamer hesitated. ‘But she is a lady, an’ it ain’t nice to—’

  ‘I don’t care! Kill her, kill her, kill her now!’

  He gave an uneasy shrug and lumbered towards the woman in the door. ‘Sorry, miss,’ he grumbled, drawing back a fist the size of Mai’s little, dainty head.

  Mystic Mai sighed. ‘What would your mama say?’

  The lion tamer found himself looking into Mai’s deep, green eyes.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he ’d . . . remembered . . . anything. But for a second, as he looked into her eyes, he was a child playing in an autumn forest of thick-limbed trees. She eased his fist down to his side, smiled and said, ‘Now tell me, Eric . . .’

  . . . and once upon a time, there had been a young man with the name of Eric, who had eaten the cake the old grey man gave him as the circus travelled east, and then Eric had been gone.

  ‘. . . why don’t you go to your room?’

  The lion tamer hesitated, locked in her gaze, then giggled and said, ‘Sorry, miss. I’ll be in my room, miss,’ turned, and lumbered off.

  Greybags whimpered as the woman advanced towards him, and he sidled into a corner. ‘This circus is mine,’ he hissed. ‘I made it! I fed it! They ate my cake, they drink my drink, this is my circus! My game, my story, my playhouse! Mine! It was given me!’

  ‘And now I’m going to take it back,’ she replied, ‘because you’ve gone too far. You’ve hurt all those children. You’ve hurt Lyle and, strangely enough, I like the socially inept little man. He did the right thing by us Tseiqin when he had no reason to, and that is novel in any species - genus - whichever - on this earth.’

  ‘My circus! Mine! I found it an’ made it good! Mine!’

  ‘Now now,’ she said patiently. ‘I really think you’re being very childish about all this. I really hate to say something so tedious to a man of your extreme years, but the time has come to grow up and move on.’

  In reply to which, and knowing no better, Greybags raised his head and screamed like a child.

  ‘Lady-demon’ was perhaps an unfair title to be so liberally applied to Mystic Mai, although she would be the first to point out that it did have a certain cultural irony. After all, her native land habitually described anyone from outside its borders as a ‘foreign demon’. It was entirely fair that here, on the other side of the world, the natives should do likewise. Not that this counted as abuse, on Tess’s part. ‘Demon’ was admittedly a nickname got from dealings with others of Mystic Mai’s uniquely green-eyed, iron-allergic, generally maniacal tribe. In her case, though, it was little other than a biological descriptor, acknowledging that while she could, yes, hypnotise a human at the merest touch of her emerald eyes, in this rare case that wouldn’t cause a dilemma.

  Thus Mystic Mai had earned Tess’s lifelong grudging respect for two reasons: 1. she had never, unlike most of her kin, attempted to kill anyone who didn’t deserve it, and 2. she really did make excellent chow mein. Whatever that was.

  Her real name, for anyone who bothered to ask, was Lin Zi.

  And she’d always thought that Lyle had lovely eyes.

  The lion, which up to this point had seemed too bewildered to do anything other than try and swat its own nose with one leaden paw, looked up at the sound of Greybags’s scream. Its tail twitched. Its lips drew back. Tess tugged at Lyle’s sleeve. ‘Mister Lyle,’ she began in her best, low voice.

  The reply was somewhere between a grunt and a gurgle. Fingers closed over Tess’s own and through a pair of watering red eyes some semblance of sanity peeked from Mister Lyle’s face. ‘Poison,’ he whispered. ‘Tess! Poison!’

  Lin was saying, ‘We could settle this like adults, you know.’

  ‘ ’Bout the lion,’ added Tess helpfully.

  Muscles stretched and drew across the creature’s back like tectonic plates drifting at very high speed. A tongue the size of the lower part of Tess’s arm rolled across its teeth. Lin didn’t seem to notice or care.

  ‘Miss!’ wailed Tess. ‘The huge bloody lion thing . . .’

  Lin half turned. Greybags ran. The lion leapt. Beaming like a lighthouse, if lighthouses were painted purple, had a pair of curled slippers to wear and had a certain unnatural greenish something to their light, Lin Zi shrugged off Thomas’s tactful scientific complaints, and threw the bottles straight at the lion’s paws.

  And, in accordance with all expectation, the bottles smashed, the chemicals within mixed, and science happened.

  This is the ward where the children go.

  Not dead, not asleep.

  Not exactly alive either.

  They sit upright in their beds in Marylebone, while the nurses slip mulc
hed-up food between their lips. They do not move, and do not speak, and do not do anything that might make them human. Except, perhaps in the quietest part of the night, when the moon is lost behind the fog and the sounds of the trains are muffled in the nearby cutting . . . perhaps then the children lying in their beds, finally, truly sleep. And when they do, perhaps they dream.

  And if they dream, what they dream is this:

  Once upon a time . . .

  On the floor of Horatio Lyle’s house, a page billowed in an unregarded book.

  Words flickered as the pages turned.

  . . . to raise children . . .