Read Online In Your Dreams by Tom Holt, Tom Holt - Free Book Online Page B

through the open door he’d appeared from. Paul vaguely remembered it was the closed-file store.
    For some reason, he ran up the stairs instead of just walking. There was a white tin box in the second drawer on the left, though it felt empty. He grabbed it, and ran back.
    Paul had never been in the closed-file store before, and under other circumstances he’d have found the time to gawp. It was a huge room, so vast that it looked like it had mirrors on all four walls and the ceiling, and it was crammed with wooden shelves overflowing with identical large, fat buff manila envelopes. At the most conservative estimate it had to be about the size of Westminster Abbey; put another way, many times larger than the whole of 70 St Mary Axe.
    But there wasn’t time to think about that. Mr Shumway was sitting on the floor, his back against a rack of shelves, his head slumped forward on his chest until Paul came in; whereupon he looked up and whispered, ‘Got it?’
    â€˜Yes,’ Paul replied. ‘Look, are you—?’
    â€˜I’m fine,’ Mr Shumway snapped. ‘Fetch that box over here.’
    When the box was opened, there was nothing in it except some dried leaves, a tiny glass bottle with a few purple dregs at the bottom, and a small, thick, tatty book. It was the book that Mr Shumway wanted. He seized it, flipped to the index at the back and turned forward till he found the page he wanted. He read a few words aloud, following the text with one stubby, brown-stuff-caked finger. Then he dropped the book back into the box, leaned back and sighed.
    â€˜Takes a while,’ he said wearily. ‘Thanks,’ he added.
    â€˜That’s all right,’ Paul replied. ‘Look, what happened? Should I call a doctor or an ambulance or something?’
    Mr Shumway grinned. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘Let’s see. I’ve got second-degree burns to most of my face, two – no, sorry, I tell a lie, three cracked ribs, I’ve been inhaling hot sulphur fumes and God knows what else, I’ve grazed all the skin off both knees and I think I’ve pulled a muscle in my left shoulder. The last thing I need is to be mauled about by one of the butchers you people call doctors. Besides, I’m a dwarf. We’re impervious to X-rays, we’ve got rather more internal organs than you monkey-derivatives and we don’t keep ’em in the same places, and our kidneys are soluble in aspirin. When we get messed up, we fix ourselves.’ He held up the tatty book. ‘Like this.’
    Paul stared at the dog-eared cover. It looked just like an ordinary paperback, but the writing on it wasn’t in any alphabet he’d ever come across; the nearest he could get to describing it was an extremely violent hand-to-hand battle, drawn by L. S. Lowry. ‘Runes,’ Mr Shumway explained. ‘It just says First-Aid Manual . Bloody useful, though. Healing charms for all occasions.’
    â€˜Healing charms,’ Paul repeated, his tone of voice translating that as snake oil . But then he noticed that Mr Shumway’s face wasn’t looking nearly so scorched and raw, and his beard had grown back at least half an inch. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
    Mr Shumway smiled and shook his head. ‘Before you ask,’ he said, ‘no. Doesn’t work on your lot; and even if it did, it’s only good for a fairly limited range of injuries – broken bones, burnt skin, stuff like that. We can cure colds, though,’ he added smugly. ‘And we’ve got stone teeth, so toothache isn’t a major problem.’
    Paul nodded. This was degenerating into weirdness, to which he’d carefully taught himself to turn a blind eye. ‘But what happened?’ he asked. ‘Were you in a fight or something?’
    â€˜You could say that,’ Mr Shumway muttered; something was happening to him that apparently hurt. ‘No big deal, mind. Just a