Wish You Were Here (3 page)

With an ethnic rights angle to it, probably. Not to mention the cute little furry animals.

 

Ninety feet above the surface of the lake, the duck air-braked, banked sharply and turned.

Because a part of its mind, unused even after all this time to lightning-fast changes of body, was still being a tiresome old man with a corn-cob pipe, the duck made its way slowly down the sky, taking care not to pull a wing muscle or dislocate an arthritic joint. The rest of its mind used the response-time lag to assess the situation and demand to know, one last time, where the catch was. Too easy, it screamed. Nobody, not even a goddamn Brit, is this daffy. It's got to be a set-up or something.

Got to be.

But, the duck reflected as it lowered its undercarriage and aquaplaned a silvery gash through a reflected mountain, if there's a catch, buggered if I can see it. Not that I'm in any position to pontificate right now, what with being a duck and all. Stupider creatures than ducks are hard to find, if you leave out the sort of life-form you can comfortably fit on a microscope slide.

Having gathered its wings in tidily to its sides and preened them with its bill, it turned to face the shore and settled itself down to watch. Any minute now, there was going to be a loud splash.

Four. Three. Two. One.

Splash!

When the kid stopped flying through the air and touched down on the water, he fell through the reflection of a rocky outcrop on the south-western crest of the hills, smashing it into thousands of tiny shards of image. As he struggled to keep his head above water, each shard was further fragmented, making the surface of the lake a mosaic of tiny bits of hillside, each one perfectly mirrored but no longer making up a whole recognisable anything. When the kid finally realised that the swimming techniques he'd learned in the municipal swimming baths of the West Midlands didn't seem to work in the admittedly unusual waters of Lake Chicopee, the reflection healed up over his head with surprising speed. Four and a half seconds after the first splash, the ripples had stopped and the mirror was unbroken once more.

You get seven years for breaking conventional mirrors. That's a conditional discharge and an apology from the judge compared to the penalty for disturbing this one.

Glug. A last few air bubbles floated up and burst.

The duck put its head down, and dived.

Oh God
, Wesley Higgins said to himself as the water filled his lungs,
I'm drowning
.

Entirely against his will, he breathed in water through his nose. It felt -

Good. Odd, that. Hell, it felt
healthy
. Fresh, clean water and plenty of exercise. Just what the doctor ordered.

Surely not; but it felt like floating. Mind you, the water in his lungs felt like air, so who was he to judge? Every scrap of logic remaining in his oxygen-starved brain yelled at him that this was Death; if not the real thing, then an introductory free sample designed to encourage him to sign on for the full course of treatment.
No way he could still be alive.

And yet here he was. Floating on his back, like a damn Poohstick. And alive too, by every indication he could monitor. For a start, don't drowned people float face down, just a few inches under the surface? He'd read somewhere - at school, probably - that they do.

He opened his eyes and saw the sky, oval-encircled by a rampart of hills and a fuzzy ring of trees. All perfectly normal, except -

Except that they were all back to front, turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, mirror-fashion. For two pins, he could make himself believe that his body, the long, embarrassing thing he'd shuffled around in all these years, really was bobbing along upside down on the surface of the lake. And here he was, floating serenely on the underside and staring at the sky. And breathing the water.

Query: was the water safe to breathe in these parts, or should he have brought along an aqualung full of Perrier?

Did they even have Perrier in Heaven?

The voice seemed to come from inside his head. Maybe, he reflected, this was how it started for Joan of Arc. One day she'd been relaxing in a nice pine-scented bath, just like I'm doing now, and suddenly there were voices in there between her ears; quiet, whispering little voices just like this one, saying wasn't it a scandal, all those English people coming over here buying weekend cottages and second homes, forcing property prices up, writing books about how comical the locals are, it's high time somebody did something about it. And the next thing she knew, of course, there she was tied to this big hunk of wood and some grinning bastard was waving a burning torch at her and saying, Now then, this may hurt a little. With hindsight, she'd have done better to buy a Sony Walkman and drown the buggers out till they went away.

Arc. It's a place. In France.

‘She was a
saint
, damnit,' Wesley said aloud. ‘And who the hell are you, anyway?'

Something went
pfzzzz
! in his ear, and a moment later he caught sight of a round, beady black eye, on a level with his own. It seemed to be inset in a pointed, furry head with a sort of Disney-cuddly face and whiskers. He looked at it. It looked at him.

‘Hi,' it said. ‘I'm an otter.'

First voices in his head, now talking animals; spiffing. Dying and going to Heaven would have been nice. Dying and going to hell - decidedly lower down on his list of preferences, but still well within the scope of his expectations. Dying and going to
The Wind In The Willows
struck him as insult added to injury, with ice, lemon and a sprig of mint.

‘I expect you're wondering,' the otter said, ‘what's going on.'

Wesley would have nodded; but as far as he could tell he was playing fast and loose with the laws of physics just by being there, lying on top of water he'd drowned in not two minutes earlier. The slightest movement on his part might draw attention to the fact that by rights he should be under the surface, not on top of it.

‘Yes,' he said.

The otter dived, resurfaced, flipped over onto its back and drew alongside him, like a launch beside a tanker. ‘I'm not surprised,' it said. ‘This must all seem rather strange to you. In fact, you're probably thinking you must be dreaming or mad or something. All perfectly normal.'

If, half an hour earlier, someone had told Wesley that later on that day he'd find comfort and reassurance in something an otter had told him, he'd have been sceptical, hard to convince. Only goes to show what a difference thirty short minutes can make. ‘Normal?' he whispered. ‘What—?'

The otter waggled its wee forepaws. ‘This,' it said, ‘is Lake Chicopee. Remember? The place you've come all that way just to see?'

‘How d'you know that?'

‘You told me. And you recall what happens when you jump in Lake Chicopee when the water's still?'

‘You drown.'

‘Oh no you don't,' the otter contradicted cheerfully. ‘If you were drowning you'd be saying things like
glblblblblbbbbb
right now, take it from me.When you jump in Lake Chicopee, your heart's deepest wish comes true.' The otter made a face which, on a human physiognomy, would be a smirk. ‘And so it has.'

It crossed Wesley's mind that if his subconscious deepest wish was to be floating on a lake talking to an otter, maybe drowning was too good for him, but he decided not to say it out loud on diplomatic grounds. ‘It has?' he said.

‘You bet.Your deepest wish,' the otter continued, ‘is to find release from this mundane, commonplace world by bursting into some wild, fantastic adventure in a magical realm where anything is possible. Am I right or am I right?'

Wesley considered for a moment. ‘Well . . .'

‘Oh come on,' the otter said briskly. ‘I was in your mind, remember. I can see the interior of your home. A bedsit over a chemist's shop, right?'

‘Well,' Wesley replied dubiously, ‘yes, I suppose—'

‘We open the door,' the otter went on. ‘Directly in front of us on the wall is a map of Middle-Earth, framed. You know your way round it better than you know the centre of Birmingham.'

‘Actually, that's not difficult. They haven't got a one-way system in Middle-Earth.'

‘To our left,' the otter continued, ‘is the bookshelf, covering the whole wall. And what do we find? Tolkien. C.S. Lewis. The complete works of Anne McCaffrey. Yards of the stuff, enough dreams to float the Graf Zeppelin. To our right, ignoring the unmade bed and the rather disgusting mound of used laundry, we have the mantelpiece, which is covered in skilfully painted lead figurines representing elves, dwarves, orcs, wizards, heroes, disturbed-looking young women with big swords and hormone imbalances, trolls, giants, self-propelled trees, dragons - they come in three sections, and the wings can be displayed in the open or folded position - and God only knows what else. Melt that lot down and you could re-roof the Vatican.'

‘No! I mean, you lay off my collection. Taken me years . . .'

‘Ever since you were twelve,' the otter agreed. ‘Have I proved my point, or shall we take a peek inside your wardrobe?'

‘All right,' Wesley snapped. ‘You can make fun all you like. I still don't see what that's got to do with lying on my back in a bloody lake talking to an otter.'

‘You don't?' Amusement permeated the otter's voice like the writing in a stick of rock. ‘Then you're being deliberately dim, friend. Oh, I didn't mention the life-size handcrafted Franklin Mint replica of Excalibur, on which you still owe nine instalments. Late at night you draw the curtains, take it down off the wall and do feints and little slashes with it. There's a great big hole in the wardrobe door you're hoping the landlord won't notice, though from what I saw of him while I was inside your head, he's not the sort of guy who's going to be fooled by chewing gum and shoe polish.'

Wesley thought hard. Excalibur. ‘You're the Lady of the Lake?' he hazarded. ‘But I thought—'

‘This is a lake,' the otter replied. ‘The rest's just a matter of morphology and capital letters. Principle's the same, I guess. What it all boils down to is, you're a very sad kid who's never grown out of fairy stories. Yes?'

Despite the various disadvantages he was obviously under, Wesley couldn't let that pass without rebuttal. ‘No I'm not,' he replied. ‘There's nothing wrong with me. I've got a car. I've got a responsible job in a building society.' He remembered something which struck him as being of great evidential value. ‘I've got a personal pension plan,' he added triumphantly. ‘With the Norwich Union.'

The otter looked at him. ‘Bully for you,' it said. ‘Do you want your heart's desire or not? Because if you'd rather go back to your bedsit and your spavined Metro and your screen in Mortgage Processing, you've only to say the word. And you'll prove my point, while you're at it.'

‘Yes, please,' said Wesley ‘It may not be much, but it's what I am. And I'm not a loony, like you're trying to make out I am. And,' he added savagely, ‘I don't talk to otters. Let me out of here.'

The otter looked at him gravely with deep black eyes.

‘No,' it said.

Before he could argue further, the otter grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and started to tow him towards the shore. He struggled and tried to kick, but the water around him was thick and unbelievably heavy, like mercury, and he found that he wasn't strong enough to move it out of the way. Another thing; there were no ripples on this water as he moved through it, unwillingly and backwards. He simply slid through reflected mountains and trees, as if he was the image and they were real. He felt as if the lake was the screen and he was a movie being projected onto it. It wasn't the happiest of sensations.

‘All right,' he said. ‘Will you slow down, please?'

The otter, which had been cracking on at a fair rate, decelerated. ‘Is that better?' it asked. ‘If you're going to be sick, please don't throw up on the mountains, they stain as soon as look at them. We're nearly there, anyway.'

‘Are we?'

‘Nearly.'

 

Calvin Dieb parked his car at the side of the road under a tall fir tree, pulled his binoculars out of the glove box, and turned to look at the lake.

Lake Chicopee, Iowa; several thousand acres of the most enchanting, mouth-wateringly promising real estate he'd seen in the course of a long and vigorous legal career. It seemed to call to him; in the sighing of the trees, the soft plashing of the waters, the sound-kaleidoscope of birdsong. ‘Develop me!' it was saying. ‘Make me pay!'

Right opposite where he was standing, they'd have the shopping mall; and next to that, the drive-ins. On this slope, where he was standing, the first phase of residential, with its unrivalled view of the health complex below, phase two on the left, phase three on the right, and a big fluorescent plastic M dead ahead. If they decided to keep the water, the M would reflect nicely, especially at night.