Paint Your Dragon (18 page)

‘Yeah?'

‘Who
are
you?'

‘W
hat the fuck do you mean,' George screamed into the telephone, ‘not arrived?'

‘I mean,' replied the arrivals clerk at Hell Central, ‘it hasn't arrived yet. If it had arrived, it'd be on the manifest. And it isn't.'

‘You sure?'

It wasn't a stupendously good line - think what it had to go through to get there - but George could still hear the long intake of breath, the sound of someone who spends her working life with a phone in her ear, suffering fools.

‘Sir,' she said, ‘if we'd just taken delivery of a dragon, I think we'd have noticed. They are rather distinctive.'

George used his left hand to push his lower jaw, which had dropped somewhat, back into position. ‘Are you trying to tell me,' he demanded, ‘that the fucker's gone to the
other
place?'

‘I can check that for you if you'd like me to.'

‘What? Oh, yeah. Please.'

‘Hold the line.'

Chardonay, leaning over George's shoulder, mouthed the question;
What's wrong?

‘Some admin balls-up,' George replied, his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Nothing to worry about—Oh, hello. Well?'

‘Not there, sir. I'm sorry.'

George had gone ever such a funny colour. ‘You can't have checked properly, you stupid cow!'

‘I'm not a cow, sir,' replied the clerk, icily. ‘I am, in fact, half-human, half-goat, with the claws of an eagle and—'

‘All right. Thank you.' George let the receiver click back onto its cradle. A moment later, Father Kelly (who'd been listening in on the extension, stopwatch in hand, with a forlorn hope of claiming the cost of the call back on expenses; if Rome sold the Michaelangelos and a couple of the Raphaels, it'd sure make a hole in it ...) did the same, and then sat for thirty seconds or so as still as a gatepost.

He'd just been listening to
Hell ...

And they sounded just like
us
...

George, meanwhile, was making a frantic search of his mental card-index to find some way of breaking the news. ‘Boys,' he said, ‘it's like this.'

‘Yeah?' Prodsnap replied eagerly. ‘When do we go home?'

‘Er.Soon.'

‘Great. How soon?'

‘Just as soon...' No tactful way to say this. ‘As soon as we've killed that goddamn dragon.'

Let's just pause a while to nail a false, misleading anti-feminist maxim. It's not true that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Scorned women are Mother Theresa on her birthday compared to demons duped. Or thinking they've been duped.

‘Told you!' Slitgrind crowed triumphantly. ‘Told you no evil'd come of co-operating with the enemy. Crafty little angel got us to do his dirty work for him and then goes and welches on us. Typical!'

‘Now hang on a minute,' Chardonay started to say, leaning forward and giving George a stern look; but he never got the chance to finish his sentence, because a split second later, Snorkfrod whizzed past him, making a direct course for George's throat. Fortunately for George, she slipped on an empty Guinness bottle and ended up sitting in the coal scuttle, making the most ferocious noises. For his part, George took advantage of the brief lull to get a good, solid utility Chesterfield between himself and the scions of Hell.

‘All right,' he said, as soothingly as he could. ‘Just calm down a second while I explain.'

Snorkfrod, having extracted herself from the scuttle, tensed for another spring, but Chardonay's gesture restrained her. She remained crouched and ready to go, growling ominously.

‘We'd better hear what he's got to say,' Chardonay advised. ‘There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.'

George nodded like a frightened metronome. ‘There is,' he said. ‘Look, we blew the statue up, but obviously we didn't kill the dragon. God only knows how, but the little toe-rag somehow managed to clear off at the last minute.'

‘So?'

‘So,' George replied, ‘the original plan holds good. Kill the dragon and there's your passport home. It's just that it's not going to be quite so pathetically simple as we originally thought it would be.'

There were snarls and grumbles as the logic soaked in, creosote-fashion. Chardonay rubbed his chin.

‘All right,' he said. ‘But how do we find him? That's going to be the problem, isn't it?'

George allowed himself the luxury of a fresh lungful of air. ‘Shouldn't be too hard,' he said airily. ‘I mean, the sucker's an enormous green flying lizard. You can't keep something like that secret for very long. And besides,' he continued, ‘we have something he's bound to come back for. You know, irresistible bait.'

‘Yeah? What?'

George beamed. ‘Us.'

 

So they waited.

True, the last thing they wanted to do was make themselves harder than necessary to find; on the other hand, they had to be practical. The last thing any of them wanted was a nasty theological incident, such as might be caused by the discovery that a saint and five devils were wandering around loose in the twentieth century, where they had no business to be. A certain measure of discretion was called for if there wasn't going to be a massive row, severing of supernatural relations, tit-for-tat expulsions and a spate of films with names like
Demons VI
and
Return of the Saint
.

There was also one further practicality to be borne in mind, one whose importance grew steadily as the days passed.

‘I can't stick this sodding place a second longer,' Slitgrind growled, putting the problem neatly into words. ‘It's bad enough being cooped up here with that pillock Chardonay and that murderous tart of his without that frigging saint and his wet sock of a priest.'

‘I know,' Prodsnap replied quietly. In his case, he could hack Chardonay and Snorkfrod; with an effort and an advance on the next thousand years' self-control ration he could even put up with George and Father Kelly (who had taken to carrying a bell and a candle round with him and reading a book while he did the washing up). What he couldn't stand another day of was Slitgrind.

‘I quite like it here,' said Holdall. On the second day, he'd discovered televised snooker and was addicted. It wasn't that they didn't have it back home, it was just that it was reserved for a small group of very, very special customers.

‘Look,' Prodsnap said, ‘basically it's very simple. We've got to get out of here before we all start climbing the walls. On the other hand, we can't go very far, or the bloody dragon won't know where to look for us.'

‘That's your idea of simple, is it?' Slitgrind jeered. ‘What d'you do for an intellectual challenge, bend spoons?'

‘Basically,' Prodsnap repeated coldly, ‘very simple. What we need,' he went on confidently, ‘is a miracle.'

For the record, he'd got the technical term nearly but not quite right. What he meant was a Miracle Play, one of those rambling medieval verse dramas that have somehow eluded five hundred years of supposed good taste, and which get put on from time to time by over-enthusiastic amateurs, itinerant Volkswagen-camper-propelled bands of actors who aren't so much the fringe as the frayed hem, and the National Theatre. Stood up on a stage in a Scout hut or church hall somewhere, Saint George, five demons and a priest in a cotton-wool beard calling himself God wouldn't look too badly out of place; or at least no more than is usual under the circumstances.

‘The point being,' Prodsnap explained to his fellow sufferers, ‘we can bumble round in a van or something and nobody's going to take a blind bit of notice. But if Chummy really is out there looking for us, then a load of posters with SAINT GEORGE AND THE DRAGON all over them ought at least to catch the bugger's attention.'

It went to the vote - five in favour, two (guess which) against. Carried. That, Chardonay explained naively, was democracy in action. He was puzzled slightly by the response he got to that, each side claiming that they knew all about democracy, and that it was a dirty trick developed by the Opposition which they had taken over and skilfully converted to peaceful, beneficial uses. In any event, the ultimate consensus ran, we've made a decision now; let's do something. That, however, is as far as the consensus went.

Proximity, however, is as great a negotiator as time is a healer. Forty-eight hours of each others' company in a relatively small house managed to achieve what a thousand diplomats, with translators, fax machines and a warehouseful of heat'n'serve Embassy function canapes would have taken six months to obfuscate. Father Kelly got a book of miracle plays out of the library and spent a busy afternoon in the Diocesan office playing with the photocopier while the girls' backs were turned. George hotwired an old Bedford van.

The show hit the road.

 

‘Who are you?' David repeated.

Being number one on the Italian police's Most Wanted list isn't as much hassle as it sounds if they're looking for a twelve-foot-high nude statue, and you're actually six foot one and wearing jeans, a standard tourist issue aertex shirt and trainers. To be on the safe side, however, David was also wearing sunglasses, and it had cost his companion dearly in both time and eloquence to dissuade him from buying a false beard.

‘Me? Oh, that's not important.'

Context, not to mention the manner in which the words were spoken, belied this remark to such an extent that David risked raising his voice - he'd been talking in what he fondly believed was a conspiratorial whisper ever since they'd broken out of the museum, and kindly old ladies kept offering him cough sweets - as he insisted on a straight answer. His companion shrugged.

‘My name's Kurt,' he said. ‘I used to be a soldier of fortune. What's that word you guys got?
Condottiere.
That was me.'

‘Used to be? Was?'

‘Yeah.' Kurt nodded. ‘I'm dead. Or I was. Jeez, this is confusing. Okay, I used to be alive, then I was dead for a while, only not properly dead. There were reasons at the time.'

David wrinkled his classically perfect brow. ‘You didn't die thoroughly enough?' he hazarded. ‘Skimped on the actual expiry?'

‘Something like that. A steam engine dropped on me. But that,' he added, fending off any request for amplification with an eloquent waft of a finger, ‘doesn't really matter. Before I died, or did whatever I did, I used to be a bounty hunter. And a mercenary,' he added with pride, ‘and a contract killer, and all that sort of stuff. Man, I was the best.' He frowned. ‘Maybe I still am, I dunno. I mean, am I still me, bearing in mind that this ain't actually
my
body? In fact, I don't have a clue whose body this is.' He cranked the frown over into a scowl and finished his coffee. ‘The hell with it, anyway. The relevant parts are, I used to be a
condottiere,
then I was dead, then I think I was some kinda statue for a short while, and now I'm—' He glanced down at his arms, his expression implying that they weren't quite a good fit ‘—whoever the hell this is.' He glowered accusingly at David. ‘Man, this is your fault, you started this crazy subject.'

‘Sorry.'

Kurt waved his apology aside. ‘No worries,' he said, and considered for a moment. ‘I think what happened to me was—'

In actual fact, Kurt's version was so completely wide of the mark as to be at right angles to it, and will therefore be suppressed in the interests of clarity. The truth is that, during his lifetime, an acute merchandising concern cashed in on his extreme notoriety by marketing the Kurt Lundqvist All Action Doll - $15.99 for the basic doll, uniforms and accessories extra, for complete list write Jotapian Industries, PO Box 666, Kansas City. Some time after his death, an unknown hand had smuggled one of these loathsome plastic objects into the Florence Academy and left it in a dark corner, ignoring the risk that a speck of stray dust from far-distant Birmingham might float in through an open window one sunny day and land on it.

‘I see,' David lied. ‘How fascinating. So,' he went on, sipping his glass of water. ‘What happens now?'

Kurt shrugged. ‘I got a job to do,' he replied. ‘You can tag along, I guess, or you can split. Up to you.'

‘Split?' David looked down to check he was still in one piece. ‘You mean these body things-tear easily, or something? That's another thing. How did we stop being statues and start being, um, people?'

‘Search me.' Kurt shook his head. ‘It just kinda happens, I guess. You can either stay in your statue, or you can bug out and wander around in the skin suit. Who cares how it works so long as it works?'