The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  “I didn’t know the Venerable Bede did comedy.”

  “He didn’t. What’s stranger is that this comedy does not seem eighth-century in taste or style. Not so much wenching, farting and jokes with dead animals, but more gentle and lyrical—more in keeping with the storytelling tradition known collectively as ‘Homer.’”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We’re not sure. We’ve called Bowden in to have a look, as he’s more into Homeric verse than we are, so we should know more then. He might recognize it, or at least give us an indication of what might be going on.”

  I told them to call me the instant they had something, then took a cab home, deep in thought about the week’s events and the possibilities that might face me on the following day. Friday had still to kill Gavin, but for no good reason that we could see, and his chance of avoiding going to prison was looking pretty faint. Tuesday still had to find the answer to Uc, something that would allow the smiting to make harmless impact on the Anti-smite Defense Shield. If she and Gavin couldn’t find the Unentanglement Constant in time, then twenty or so hardened felons were to get fried. Unless I could get a righteous man in place, in time—and then Joffy would get fried. I didn’t much care for any of my options.

  ***

  As soon as I got home, I went and changed my patch for another one of the smiley-faced illegal varieties that Geraldine had scored for me. It was working better than a Dizuperadol, but I reduced the dose to a third of a patch rather than a half, as I was still a bit giggly at inappropriate moments.

  “How are things?” asked Landen from the doorway of the bathroom.

  “Pretty crappy,” I told him, outlining what I had to do tomorrow.

  “You’d really fry Joffy?” he asked.

  “I’m not frying anyone,” I said, looking upward, “and I’m hoping it won’t come to that. Gavin looks like he knows what’s he’s talking about.”

  “Joffy has family to miss him,” said Landen quietly. “Billions look to him for guidance. He has good work still to do on the planet. Theological unification is just one step on a greater journey.”

  “That’s true,” I murmured, pulling up my trousers once the patch was on, “but the murderers have family that’ll miss them too, won’t they?”

  “No, actually, they won’t,” said Landen, following me down the upstairs corridor. “I checked, and they killed most of them. Some of them even killed other families that reminded them of their real families. What I’m saying is that Joffy is worth fifty of them.”

  “He wouldn’t agree with that sentiment.”

  “No, but if you were to ‘accidentally’ drive the righteous man to the wrong airfield or were delayed or took a wrong turning or something, no one would ever think bad of you for it.”

  “Don’t imagine I haven’t thought of it,” I said with a deep sigh as we walked into the kitchen, “but Miles made me promise. Maybe Joffy is the price we have to pay in order to find the answer as to the meaning and purpose of existence.”

  “It’ll be a waste of a good Joffy. I don’t think God has any more idea than you or I about what’s going on.”

  Landen had made this point before. He called it the “Nihilist Deity Viewpoint by Proxy” approach. We walked into the kitchen, and I filled the kettle.

  “Perhaps He is just a part of the riddle of existence. Perhaps we all are.”

  “Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea. Think of it this way: A single brain cell has no intelligence, but in company it can do extraordinary things. Perhaps the entirety of existence is the true, unifying intelligence that drives what occurs—for a reason that is quite beyond our understanding, or even to a higher plane where the concept of understanding is laughably redundant.”

  It was an interesting concept. Mycroft had often theorized that the whole of existence was so large and hideously complex that it must be sentient. And if this were so, then it must have a truly warped sense of humor and have an abiding love of math and hydrogen—and a deep loathing for order.

  We stood in the kitchen for a few minutes in silence.

  “Any word from Millon or Friday?” I asked.

  “On their way back. It didn’t sound as if they had much luck. Our math geniuses are hard at work. There was a panic earlier when Tuesday took Gavin to meet Jenny, then found she wasn’t there. I made up some story about her being off at a sleepover.”

  It was one of our standard excuses.

  “She does a lot of sleepovers.”

  “I know. Damn that Aornis.”

  I looked down at my tattoo, then noticed that I had a Band-Aid on the back of my hand—a new one, next to the tattoo. I frowned, then lifted up the corner of the Band-Aid, read part of the words beneath and stuck it down again. I looked at the clock. It was just past six.

  “Landen,” I said quietly, “we should have a family meeting, here in the kitchen at exactly eight o’clock—and bring the cordless drill and some screws.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “You can tell me.”

  “No, I can’t say because . . . I don’t know.”

  35.

  Thursday: Aornis

  The Hades family when I knew them comprised, in order of age: Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe and the only girl, Aornis. Once described by Vlad the Impaler as “unspeakably repellent,” the family drew strength from deviancy and committing every sort of horror that they could. Some with panache, some with halfhearted seriousness. In time I was to defeat three of them.

  Thursday Next, A Life in SpecOps

  Friday got back at seven, very tired and none the wiser. He had met the Manchild again, who had confirmed that there had been sixteen letters, but with no idea who the sixteenth might have been. He was simply told to dump them in a mailbox at the correct time, which he had done. The only thing he did mention was that two of the envelopes might have been opened and then resealed—but for what reason, again, he had no idea.

  Millon had gone down to his hermitage to practice thinking deep thoughts and cram for his upcoming hermiting exam, and Gavin had nipped out, to the Swindon Best Deals for Used Cars at Fish Brothers University to speak to a professor of mathematics, who, while an “oaf with so little knowledge it saddens me,” could nonetheless offer a few pointers regarding knot theory, which might open a potentially exciting new line of inquiry to the Uc.

  At a quarter to eight, I had just finished a call from Phoebe when Landen walked into the kitchen with the cordless drill and some screws, and I told him what she had said: that Bowden had been up to the library and identified the mystery palimpsest as being a lost work of Homer’s entitled Margites and that it was probably translated by the Venerable Bede, which was not only one coup but two. Phoebe was working under the theory that this lost epic poem of Homer’s had accidentally found its way into St. Zvlkx’s recycling pile along with mostly eleventh-to thirteenth-century dross and that the book had then been spread around Zvlkx’s mass-copied publications—and Jack Schitt had been going around hunting them down to be destroyed.

  “Why destroy them?” asked Landen.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps to give another copy greater value, a little like the plot of Goldfinger. But given the risk involved, it hardly seems worth it. Besides, Jack Schitt is a highlevel operative with a top One Hundred Laddernumber—why would he waste his time on a lost work of Homer’s?”

  “And why didn’t he want the defenestrator’s copy when he’d found that it had already been cataloged?”

  There was no good answer to this either. But at that moment, Tuesday walked in, and the matter was quickly dropped in lieu of something that I think was more pressing but still didn’t know what it was.

  “Okay,” said Landen, “we’re all here, and it’s almost eight o’clock. What’s this all about, hon?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  Landen raised an eyebrow. “Aornis?”

  I said nothing and, after handing the cor
dless drill to Friday, told him to secure the three doors that led into the kitchen.

  “Through the doorframe?” he asked, since the doors were all Regency period doors and had architraves.

  “Do it now.”

  So he did, and the screws bit deep, splintering the wood and looking shockingly untidy. I could only hope that we weren’t due a visit by English Heritage’s militant wing anytime soon.

  “What now?”

  I told them all to sit down and explained to Tuesday that Jenny didn’t exist—never had, in fact, that she was just a mindworm created by Aornis Hades in order to mess with our heads.

  “That’s crazy,” said Tuesday. “She came into my lab to say hello to Gavin not half an hour ago.”

  “No, you only remember seeing her. Like all the other memories you have of her.”

  “So I didn’t rescue her when she got into trouble swimming on that holiday on Rùm?”

  “None of it happened. Jenny is an implanted memory. A mindworm.”

  Tuesday thought for a moment. “Okay, let’s just say that’s real. I can see that. But now that I know she’s a mindworm, I can deal with it.”

  “You can’t, because you’ll forget that you have a mindworm. That’s part of the mindworm. In many ways it’s a burden on us, not you. Here,” I said, “write it on the back of your hand.”

  I passed across a pen, and she wrote “Jenny is a mindworm” on the back of her hand.

  I passed a sheet of paper to Friday. “You’re taking minutes. A rough idea of what’s happened, with the time. All pertinent points listed.”

  “Okay,” he said. “So where does screwing the doors closed come into this?”

  “I don’t know. But something doesn’t add up, which began with the obvious question I asked myself: Why Tuesday? Wouldn’t the mindworm be more effective on me or Landen? I then got to thinking that maybe it once was— which would explain why I have a tattoo on the back of my hand and no one else does.”

  I showed them the tattoo.

  “I had this done two weeks ago, and the only plausible explanation is that I was then the one with the mindworm. And if Aornis is still in Swindon, then it’s entirely possible she might be living under our very noses. In the house, perhaps.”

  They were all silent and looked at one another.

  “You have evidence for that?” asked Friday.

  “None—but there is quite often stuff left out, fridges left open, doors closed when they should be opened, and the booze levels fall a bit quicker than they should. It’s the obvious place to hide. Where better than in plain sight?”

  “But what can we do about it?” asked Tuesday. “I mean, if she’s in the house and can change our memories retrospectively, who’s to say we will even remember this?”

  “There’s been a development,” I said. “For the past few days, I’ve been meaning to go into Image Ink and find out why I had this tattoo put on my hand. I forgot every time.”

  “Senior moments,” opined Landen.

  “Maybe not,” I said. “What if I did go in all those times and every time I did, I was met by an exasperated tattooist who told me the same thing all week? And how annoyed do you think I would be once I knew I’d know nothing about it after leaving the tattooist’s?”

  “I’d imagine you’d be pretty annoyed.”

  “Me, too. So annoyed, in fact, that I’d try to do something about it. In fact, I probably have been doing something about it all week. I woke up with a black eye and skinned knuckles on Tuesday.”

  “One of my motorbikes had mud all over the wheels this morning,” said Friday, who was still writing the minutes furiously. “Someone was chasing me all over the estate on it on Wednesday night. The thing is, no one knows how to start that bike but me.”

  “Then you were the one riding it. Chasing Aornis, I presume. You may even have caught her. But then she got to you. You forget you captured her, and she slinks away.”

  “I had a bruise above my eye and skinned knuckles when I woke up this morning,” said Landen.

  “I think we’ve all been battling Aornis all week—but just have no memory of it. We may even have had meetings like this. All attempts to capture her have failed. We may even have made the same mistakes again and again, because without any recall we can never learn.”

  “Okay,” said Tuesday, “that sounds totally whacked, but yes, I sometimes get the feeling I’m being watched, and the clothes in my cupboard get moved and smell of Organza when I don’t use scent. The thing is, how do we capture someone like that?”

  “Back at Image Ink, I probably asked myself the same question. I may even have been making preparations. I found this an hour ago.”

  I held up my hand and peeled off the Band-Aid. There, in small letters was tattooed:

  Secure family in kitchen for 7:00 P.M.

  “You had that written?”

  “I think so. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but what I do know is this: What is happening right now is not a memory. The only reliable course of action is one that we take instantly. We have to act compulsively, and without mercy.”

  “Can we be sure that Aornis isn’t in here now?” asked Tuesday. “I mean, what if she’s making us forget her almost the same instant that we see her?”

  There was no simple answer to this, and we all looked around nervously. Landen even opened the broom cupboard.

  “If that is the case,” he added unhelpfully, “anything we said at the beginning of this conversation might not actually be what we said at all.”

  “The minutes reflect pretty much my memory of what’s happened,” said Friday, scanning the handwritten sheet carefully.

  “We’re safe in here,” I said. “At least for the time being.”

  Tuesday picked up the cordless drill and stood.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Letting Jenny in.”

  We exchanged glances.

  “There is no Jenny, Tuesday.”

  “Bullshit. She’s been crying outside the door to be let in for the past ten minutes, and you’ve been telling her to piss off for as long.”

  “Is she talking now?”

  “No.”

  “How long since she stopped?”

  “Ten seconds. What’s the problem?”

  “Look at your hand, Tuesday.”

  She did, and there was “Jenny is a mindworm” written in her own handwriting.

  “Now look at the minutes Friday has been jotting down.”

  She did, and there was nothing about Jenny listed at all. She sat back in her chair, thoroughly confused.

  I beckoned everyone closer and lowered my voice.

  “The reason you can’t hear her now is that she’s only in your memory. Jenny’s not outside—Aornis is.”

  “But what this tells us,” said Landen, “is that her power through a closed door is limited to the person with the mindworm. If she could get to us all at once, we would have opened the door by now, Friday’s minutes would have been destroyed and all of this forgotten.”

  “Right,” said Friday, “and ten seconds must be about the limit of her manipulative horizon.”

  We heard the boards creak outside, and we exchanged nervous glances.

  “Aornis?” I called out, my voice sounding less confident than I might have wished. “We know what you’re up to.”

  “You have no idea what I’m up to,” came a familiar voice from just outside the door. It was Aornis. “You’ve figured me out sixteen times already in the two years I’ve been living here, but I always win. Whoever controls the past controls the present, Thursday. Screwed the doors shut, eh? Good move. The last time you locked the doors, but the keys are all missing now, aren’t they?”

  “We’ll defeat you,” I called out.

  “From inside a locked room? No. I’ll get to you all eventually. Pretty soon you’ll all start remembering the holiday on Rùm, the one where Tuesday rescued Jenny from drowning. The only reason you’ve noticed my presence this
time is that I’ve been moving the worm around before cementing it permanently in all of you. After that, my power over the whole family will be complete, and we can enter a new, joyous era of me as your unpaying guest and you all as my compliant servants.”

  “Not this time, Aornis,” I said.

  “I’m getting memories of Jenny,” said Landen, “small and giggly and on that holiday.”

  “Me, too,” said Friday, logging the occurrence on the sheet of paper in front of him. I, too, was getting them, now—not just holiday memories but old ones, of a painful birth. It seemed real, though I knew it wasn’t—but it would doubtless become so.

  “I’m getting the birth now,” said Landen. “You?”

  I nodded, and a phone started ringing. It wasn’t our phone, it was a cell phone somewhere, and I glanced at the clock—it was eight o’clock precisely.

  “Not mine,” said Friday, patting his pockets.

  “Yours,” said Landen, and I searched through the pockets of my jacket where it was hanging on the back of the door. I found nothing, but the ringing was definitely from there, so I searched the jacket until I found it—a vibrating lump sewn into the lining.

  I slit the lining open, and a phone dropped out. I quickly pressed the answer button and put the instrument to my ear.

  “Hello, Thursday,” came a voice I didn’t recognize. “Do you know who is speaking right now?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “She’s more powerful than I imagined,” said the voice. “We’ve spoken six times in the past week. I’m the Cleaning Lady. Does that ring a bell?”

  “No.”

  “Listen carefully. I’m outside the main gates. You have to let me in and then keep Aornis occupied in any way you can. She can delete on a ten-second horizon, so you cannot let her out of your sight for that long or she’ll be gone for good. Even if you’ve forgotten the plans we made earlier, you will still be able to access those erased memories by acting on impulse. Let your instincts take over.”