‘Something I’ve forgotten. Something I never remembered. Something about… I don’t know.’
‘It’s no good asking me,’ replied Landen. ‘I may seem real to you but I’m not—I can’t know any more than you do.’
Aornis had vanished and Landen was starting to fade.
‘You’ve got to go now,’ he said in a hollow-sounding voice. ‘Remember what I said about Jack Schitt.’
‘Don’t go!’ I yelled. ‘I want to stay here for a bit. It’s not much fun out here at the moment. I think it’s Miles’s baby, Aornis wants to kill me, and Goliath and Flanker—!’
But it was too late. I’d woken up I was still in bed, undressed, bedclothes rumpled. The clock told me it was a few minutes past nine. I stared at the ceiling in a forlorn mood, wondering how I could have got myself into such a mess, and then wondering whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. I decided, on the face of it, probably not. This, to my fuddled way of thinking, I took to be a positive sign. So I slipped on a T-shirt and shuffled into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put some dried apricots in Pickwick’s bowl after trying and failing to get her to stand on one leg.
I shook the entroposcope just in case, was thankful to find everything as normal, and was just checking the fridge for some fresh milk when the doorbell rang. I trotted out to the hall, picked up my automatic from the table and asked:
‘Who is it?’
‘Open the door, Doofus.’
I put the gun away and opened the door. Joffy smiled at me as he entered and raised his eyebrows at my dishevelled state.
‘Half-day today?’
‘I don’t feel like working now that Landen’s gone.’
‘Who?’
‘Never mind. Coffee?’
We walked into the kitchen. Joffy patted Pickwick on the head and I emptied the old grounds out of the coffee jug. He sat down at the table.
‘Seen Dad recently?’
‘Last week. He was fine. How much did you make on the art sale?’
‘Over two thousand pounds in commission. I thought of using the cash to repair the church roof but then figured what the hell—I’ll just blow it on drink, curry and prostitutes.’
I laughed.
‘Sure you will, Joff’
I rinsed some mugs and stared out of the window.
‘What can I do for you, Joff?’
‘I came round to pick Miles’s things up.’
I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him.
‘Say that again.’
‘I said I came—’
‘I know what you said, but… but—how do you know Miles?’
Joffy laughed, saw I was serious, frowned at me and then remarked:
‘He said you didn’t recognise him that night at Vole Towers. Is everything okay?’
I shrugged.
‘Not really, Joff—but tell me: how do you know him?’
‘We’re going out, Thurs—surely you can’t have forgotten?’
‘You and Miles?’
‘Sure! Why not?’
This was very good news indeed.
‘Then his clothes are in my apartment because—’
‘We borrow it every now and then.’
I tried to grasp the facts.
‘You borrow my apartment because it’s… secret?’
‘Right. You know how old fashioned SpecOps are when it comes to their staff fraternising with clerics.’
I laughed out loud and wiped away the tears that had sprung to my eyes.
‘Sis?’ said Joffy, getting up. ‘What’s the matter?’
I hugged him tightly.
‘Nothing’s the matter, Joff. Everything’s wonderful. I’m not carrying his baby!’
‘Miles?’ said Joff. ‘Wouldn’t know how. Wait a minute, sis—you’ve got a bun in the oven? Who’s the father?’
I smiled through my tears.
‘It’s Landen’s,’ I said with renewed confidence. ‘By God it’s Landen’s!’
And I jumped up and down with the sheer joy of the fact, and Joffy, who had nothing better to do, joined me in jumping up and down until Mrs Scroggins in the apartment below banged on the ceiling with a broom handle.
‘Sister dearest,’ said Joffy as soon as we had stopped, ‘who in St Zvlkx’s name is Landen?’
‘Landen Parke-Laine,’ I gabbled happily. ‘The ChronoGuard eradicated him but something other happened and I still have his child, so it’s all meant to come out right, don’t you see? And I have to get him back because if Aornis does get to me then he’ll never exist, ever, ever, ever—and neither will the baby and I can’t stand that idea and I’ve been farting around for too long so I’m going to go into The Raven no matter what—because if I don’t I’m going to go nuts!’
‘I’m very happy for you,’ said Joffy. ‘You’ve completely lost your mind, but I’m very happy for you.’
I ran into the living room, rummaged on my desk until I found Schitt-Hawse’s calling card and rang the number. He answered in less than two rings.
‘Ah, Next,’ he said with a triumphant air. ‘Changed your mind?’
‘I’ll go into The Raven for you, Schitt-Hawse. Double-cross me and I’ll maroon both you and your half-brother in the worst Daphne Farquitt novel I can find. Believe me, I can do it—and will do it, if necessary.’
There was a pause.
‘I’ll send a car to pick you up.’
The phone went dead and I placed the receiver back on the cradle. I took a deep breath, shooed Joffy out of the door once he had collected Miles’s stuff, then had a shower and got dressed. My mind was set. I would get Landen back, no matter what the risks. I still didn’t have a coherent plan, but this didn’t bother me that much—I seldom did.
28. The Raven
‘The Raven was undoubtedly Edgar Allan Foe’s finest and most famous poem, and was his own personal favourite, being the one he most liked to recite at poetry readings. Published in 1845, the poem drew heavily on Elizabeth Barrett’s Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, something he acknowledged in the original dedication but had conveniently forgotten when explaining how he wrote The Raven in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”—the whole affair tending to make a nonsense of Poe’s attacks on Longfellow for being a plagiarist. A troubled genius, Poe also suffered the inverse cash/fame law—the more famous he became, the less money he had. “The Gold Bug”, one of his most popular short stories, sold over 300,000 copies but netted him only $100. With The Raven he fared even worse. The total earnings for one of the greatest poems in the English language were only $9.’
MILLON DE FLOSS. Who Put the Poe in Poem?
The doorbell rang as I was putting my shoes on. But it wasn’t Goliath. It was Agents Lamb and Slaughter. I was really quite glad to see that they were still alive; perhaps Aornis didn’t regard them as a threat. I wouldn’t.
‘Her name’s Aornis Hades,’ I told them as I hopped up and down, trying to pull the other shoe on, ‘sister of Acheron. Don’t even think of tackling her. You know you’re close when you stop breathing.’
‘Wow!’ exclaimed Lamb, patting his pockets for a pen. ‘Aornis Hades! How did you figure that out?’
‘I’ve glimpsed her several times over the past few weeks.’
‘You must have a good memory,’ observed Slaughter.
‘I have help.’
Lamb found a pen, discovered it didn’t work and borrowed a pencil from his partner. The point broke. I lent him mine.
‘What was her name again?’
I spelt it out for him and he wrote it down painfully slowly.
‘Good!’ I said once they had finished. ‘What are you guys doing here anyway?’
‘Flanker wants a word.’
This was interesting. He’d obviously not found the cause of tomorrow’s armageddon.
‘I’m busy.’
‘You’re not busy any more,’ replied Slaughter, looking very awkward and wringing her hands. ‘I’m sorry about this—but
you’re under arrest.’
‘What for now?’
‘Possession of an illegal substance.’
I didn’t have time for this.
‘Listen, guys, I’m not just busy, I’m really busy, and Flanker sending you along with some bullshit trumped-up charge is just wasting your time and mine.’
‘Cheese,’ said Slaughter, holding out an arrest warrant. ‘Illegal cheese. SO-1 found a block of flattened cheese under a Hispano-Suiza with your prints all over it. It was part of a cheese seizure, Thursday. It should have been consigned to the furnaces.’
I groaned. It was just what Flanker wanted. A simple internal charge which usually meant a reprimand—but could, if needed, result in a custodial sentence. A solid gold arm-twister, in other words. Before the two agents could even draw breath I had slammed the door in their faces and was heading out on to the fire escape. I heard them yell at me as I ran on to the road, just in time to be picked up by Schitt-Hawse. It was the first and last time I would ever be pleased to see him.
So there I was, unsure whether I had just got out of the frying pan and into the fire or out of the fire and into the frying pan. They had taken my automatic, keys and Jurisfiction travel book. Schitt-Hawse drove and I was sitting in the back seat—wedged tightly between Chalk and Cheese.
‘I’m kind of glad to see you, in a funny sort of way.’
There was no answer so I waited ten minutes and then asked:
‘Where are we going?’
This didn’t elicit a response either so I patted Chalk and Cheese on the knees and said:
‘You guys been on holiday this year?’
Chalk looked at me for a moment, then looked at Cheese and answered: ‘We went to Majorca,’ before he lapsed back into silence.
The Goliath establishment we arrived at an hour later was their Research & Development Facility at Aldermaston. Surrounded by triple fences of razor wire and armed guards patrolling with full-sized sabre-tooths, the complex was a labyrinth of aluminium-clad windowless buildings and concrete bunkers interspersed with electrical substations and large ventilation ducts. We were waved through the gate and parked in a lay-by next to a large marble Goliath logo where Chalk, Cheese and Schitt-Hawse offered up a short prayer of contrition and unfailing devotion to the Corporation. That done, we were on our way again past thousands of yards of pipework, buildings, parked military vehicles, trucks and all manner of junk.
‘Be honoured, Next,’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Few are blessed with seeing this far into the workings of our beloved Corporation.’
‘I can feel myself more humbled by the second, Mr Schitt-Hawse.’
We drove on to a low building with a domed concrete roof. This had even higher security than the main entrance, and Chalk, Cheese and Schitt-Hawse had to have their half-Windsor tie knots scanned for verification. The guard on duty opened a heavy blast door that led to a brightly lit corridor which in turn contained a row of elevators. We descended to Lower Ground 12, went through another security check, and then along a shiny corridor past doors either side of us which had brass placards screwed to the polished wood explaining what went on inside. We walked past Electronic Computing Engines, Tachyon Communications, Square Peg in a Round Hole and stopped at The Book Project. Schitt-Hawse opened the door and we entered.
The room was quite like Mycroft’s laboratory apart from the fact that the devices seemed to have been built to a higher benchmark of quality. Where my uncle’s machines were held together with baler twine, cardboard and rubber-solution glue, the machines in here had all been crafted from high-quality alloys. All the testing apparatus looked brand new and there was not a single atom of dust anywhere. There were about a half-dozen technicians, all of whom seemed to have a certain pallid disposition, and they looked at me curiously as we walked in. In the middle of the room was a doorway a little like a walk-through metal detector; it was tightly wrapped with thousands of yards of fine copper wire. The wire ended in a tight bunch the width of a man’s arm which led to a large machine that hummed and clicked to itself. A technician pulled a switch, there was a crackle and a puff of smoke, and everything went dead. It was a Prose Portal, but more relevant to the purpose of this narrative, it didn’t work.
I pointed to the copper-bound doorway in the middle of the room. It had started to smoke and the technicians were now trying to put it out with CO2 extinguishers.
‘Is that thing meant to be a Prose Portal?’
‘Sadly, yes,’ admitted Schitt-Hawse. ‘As you may or may not know, all we managed to synthesise was a form of curdled stodgy gunge from Volumes One to Eight of The World of Cheese.’
‘Jack Schitt said it was Cheddar.’
‘Jack always tended to exaggerate a little, Miss Next. This way.’
We walked past a large hydraulic press which was rigged in an attempt to open one of the books that I had seen at Mrs Nakajima’s apartment. The steel press groaned and strained but the book remained firmly shut. Farther on, a technician was valiantly attempting to burn a hole in another book with similar poor results, and after that another technician was looking at an X-ray photograph of the book. He was having a little trouble as two or three thousand pages of text and numerous other ‘enclosures’ all sandwiched together didn’t lend themselves to easy examination.
‘What do these books do, Next?’
‘Do you want me to get Jack Schitt out or not?’
In reply, Schitt-Hawse walked past several other experiments, down a short corridor and through a large steel door to another room that contained a table, chair—and Lavoisier. He was reading a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe as we entered, and looked up.
‘Monsieur Lavoisier, I understand you already know Miss Next?’ said Schitt-Hawse.
Lavoisier smiled and nodded his head in greeting, shut the book, laid it on the table and got up. We stood in silence for a moment.
‘So go on,’ said Schitt-Hawse, ‘do your booky stuff and Lavoisier will reactualise your husband as though nothing had happened. No one will ever know he had gone—except you, of course.’
‘I need more than just your promise, Schitt-Hawse.’
‘It’s not my promise, Next, it’s a Goliath guarantee—believe me, it’s riveted iron.’
‘So was the Titanic,’ I replied. ‘In my experience a Goliath guarantee guarantees nothing.’
He stared at me and I stared back.
‘Then what do you want’’ he asked.
‘One: I want Landen reactualised as he was. Two: I want my travel book back and safe conduct from here. Three: I want a signed confession admitting that you employed Lavoisier to eradicate Landen.’
I gazed at him steadily, hoping my audacity would strike a nerve.
‘One: agreed. Two: you get the book back afterwards. You used it to vanish in Osaka and I’m not having that again. Three I can’t do.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Bring Landen back and the confession is irrelevant because it never happened—but I can use it if you ever try anything like this again.’
‘Perhaps,’ put in Lavoisier, ‘you would accept this as a token of my intent.’
He handed me a brown hardback envelope I opened it and pulled out a picture of Landen and me at our wedding.
‘I have nothing to gain from your husband’s eradication and everything to lose, Miss Next. Your father… well, I’ll get to him eventually. But you have my word—if that’s good enough.’
I looked at Lavoisier, then at Schitt-Hawse, then at the photo.
‘I need a sheet of paper.’
‘Why?’ asked Schitt-Hawse
‘Because I have to write a detailed description of this charming dungeon to be able to get back.’
Schitt-Hawse nodded to Chalk, who gave me a pen and paper, and I sat down and wrote the most detailed description that I could. The travel book said that five hundred words was adequate for a solo jump, a thousand words if you were intending to bring anyone with you, so I wrote fifteen hundred just in case. Schitt-Haw
se looked over my shoulder as I wrote, checking I wasn’t describing another destination.
‘I’ll take that back, Next,’ he said, retrieving the pen as soon as I had finished. ‘Not that I don’t trust you or anything.’
I took a deep breath, opened the copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and read the first verse to myself
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
O’er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next—
This Eyre affair, so surprising, gives my soul such loath despising,
Here I plot my temper rising, rising from my jail of text.
‘Get me out!’ I said, advising, ‘pluck me from this jail of text—
or I swear I’ll wring your neck!’
He was still pissed off, make no mistake about that. I read on:
Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in my bleak September
When that loathsome SpecOps member tricked me through ‘The Raven’s’ door
Eagerly I wished the morrow would release me from this sorrow,
Then a weapon I will borrow, sorrow her turn to explore—
I declare that obnoxious maiden who is little but a whore—
Darkness hers—for evermore!
‘Still the same old Jack Schitt,’ I murmured.
‘I won’t let him lay a finger on you, Miss Next,’ assured Schitt-Hawse. ‘He’ll be arrested before you can say ketchup.’
So, gathering my thoughts, I offered my apologies to Miss Havisham for being an impetuous student, cleared my mind and throat and then read the words out loud, large as life and clear as a bell.
There was a distant rumble of thunder and the flutter of wings close to my face. An inky blackness fell and a wind sprang up and whistled about me, tugging at my clothes and flicking my hair into my eyes. A flash of lightning briefly illuminated the sky about me, and I realised with a start that I was high above the ground, hemmed in by clouds filled with the ugly passion of a tempest in full spate. The rain struck my face like a heavy damp cloak and I saw in the feeble moonlight that I was being swept along close to a large storm cloud, illuminated from within by bolts of lightning. Just when I thought that perhaps I had made a very big mistake by attempting this feat without proper instruction, I noticed a small dot of yellow light through the swirling rain. I watched as the dot grew bigger until it wasn’t a dot but an oblong, and presently this oblong became a window, with frames, and glass, and curtains beyond. I flew closer and faster, and just when I thought I must collide with the rain-splashed glass I was inside, wet to the skin and quite breathless.
Lost in a Good Book tn-2 Page 29
