Yesterday's Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  The lightning batters at the books. Balls of the stuff smash into them, force them together. Tighter, tighter. A ragged cylinder of crackling paper.

  Clyde chokes again. More lightning balls. Faster.

  The mass of books changes shape. Is refined. Gains defined edges. Then the realization hits me. This isn’t just Clyde blowing off steam in a fit of adolescent arcanum. The lightning is molding the books. This is magical sculpture.

  Hardbacks stack into legs. Papers and encyclopedias jostle to form a chest. Paperbacks and dictionaries become two roughly hewn arms. At their ends, books clack open and shut like lobster claws. A head starts to appear. A book on its side for a mouth. Children’s books with finger puppets for eyes.

  A jagged silhouette of a man, limned in crackling white.

  Clyde collapses, the spell done. I pull the clamps off the battery, blinking away the shapes that have bleached my retinas.

  The book man lets out a racking cough. “Oh fuck me sideways,” he says. “That stings like a bitch.”

  Oh God. I wonder if becoming incorporeal might have seriously damaged Clyde’s judgment.

  “Seconded,” Clyde coughs.

  The book-man takes a stumbling step forward, catches himself, takes a second, more confident stride. “Arthur?” he says. He has a thick cockney accent. “Is that you, mate?”

  Winston. Clyde’s book golem. His inside man at the Bodleian library. Scanning for thaum… thaw… thaumer… spell books. Living in the stacks. Owner of a filthy mouth.

  “Hello, Winston,” I say.

  Pages ripple in Winston’s face. I think he’s smiling. “Well bugger me,” he says. “Looks like we’re getting the band back together.”

  THIRTEEN

  Clyde pilots his Mini out of Oxford. Winston sits in the back seat. “So,” he says to Clyde, “the kiddie murderer look is big right now, I take it?”

  “Sensitive,” I say.

  “Honesty, mate,” Winston says in very serious tones, “is a valuable commodity in this day and age.”

  “I probably should have thrown in an etiquette manual this time, shouldn’t I?” Clyde says.

  Winston, as it has been explained to me, derives some of his personality from the books that constitute his physical form. Too much Dickens and Irving Welsh, I seem to remember Clyde commenting. Why he failed to revise the mix this time, I have no idea.

  “Harsh, man,” Winston says. “Fucking harsh.”

  I look from Winston’s paperback face to Clyde’s wooden one. I feel like the odd one out. “Why did we summon him again?”

  “Charming fucking company this is,” Winston grumps. “Like bloody tea with the Queen it is.”

  I shake my head. “Not what I meant.” I suspect it’s all bluster with Winston, but Clyde’s right, he is good with books and I’d rather not piss him off. “Just, weren’t you summoned already?”

  “Oh, well.” Clyde shrugs. “There was a small break in the spell binding Winston to this reality. Spell interruptus, so to speak. Breach of magical contract on my part. So old Winston toddled off to his natural plane of existence. Just a blip, really.”

  “Nice to see the old country,” Winston assures us.

  “What sort of blip?” I ask. Magic and blips seem to be a combination that ought to be avoided.

  “Oh.” Clyde shrugs as if wrestling out of an uncomfortable jacket. “The whole dying thing.”

  There is a long and very uncomfortable silence in the car.

  Winston breaks it by clearing his throat. “Tabitha any good in the sack?” he asks.

  Silence, mercifully, returns as Clyde drives on.

  London

  The British Museum appears around a corner, and I say, “Bollocks.”

  “No need to brag about them, mate.” Winston gives me a papery smile.

  “No,” I shake my head, “I just… I didn’t know you were coming to the library, so I didn’t… There’s no plan. How do we get you in? Can’t just walk up to the front desk with an animated pile of books, and ask for the way to the reading room.”

  “Books?” Winston says. “Is that all I am to you, Arthur? All surface with you isn’t it?”

  I flap a shushing hand in his direction. He harrumphs.

  “Well, I’ve got a handcart in the trunk,” Clyde says. “Should be fine.”

  I puzzle over this one. “Are we going to use the handcart to bash in the brains of anyone who asks us about Winston?” is about as good as I can get.

  Winston cackles. “Nah, mate. Same way we got me into the Bodleian. I stand to attention and we use old Tabitha’s bogus paper trail to sneak me in as a donation of books. Subterfuge. Like a bleedin’ ninja.”

  “Tabitha’s false paper trail?” This is the first I’ve heard about it.

  “Oh,” Clyde says. It’s no longer possible to catch his eye, but he still turns his head so I can only see the edge of his mask. “About that. Yes. Well I was sort of thinking, by which I mean, I was very precisely thinking that perhaps, I, by which I mean… well, myself. No one else I could mean really. But I was thinking I, me, might be the one to create the paper trail. Perhaps. Maybe. Except, well… sort of connected to their system and doing it right now.” He shrugs. “Wireless and all that. Terrible security if I can break it.”

  “Wait,” I say. “You’re connected to the internet right now?”

  “Well,” Clyde shrugs, “come back from the dead with computer superpowers, seems a shame not to use them.”

  And of course, Clyde violates the laws of the universe on a daily basis. That’s basically his job description. And I work with him. I watch, and I nod, and I smile while he does it. So really, connecting your brain directly to the internet shouldn’t be a big deal. But somehow Clyde has blown my mind again.

  “Didn’t accessing the internet almost give you a seizure yesterday?” It’s probably not the most important question to ask, but it’s the one that’s easiest for my mind to form.

  “Well, yes.” Clyde nods. “But practice and its correlation to perfection and all that. And, I concede, Tabitha did advise against the practice. Bit of a sticking point. That and my first attempts lost her a lot of her files. Total accident, of course. But, in hindsight, I probably should have waited until the caffeine sank in this morning before mentioning it to her. But she took it pretty well, I think. Could have gone a lot worse, and we also happened, along the way, to learn certain lessons about the durability of the mask. So, you know, in overall terms, a positive experience.” He shrugs. “But yes, sort of stayed up all night working on it.” He taps the mask, and, again, there’s something odd about the way he does it. As if the feel of it makes him uncomfortable. “Might as well make myself useful, I figured. I want to be useful.”

  There’s something off about the way he’s saying that word, but without an expression to go off I can’t quite work out what the problem is.

  And I was so totally planning to use this time to be weirded out about him just being a mask now… I’m going to have to make time in my busy freaking-out schedule to gibber about this too now.

  “It’s amazing,” Clyde is saying, “how many people use 1-2-3-4 as their computer password. Tabby told me about it, but I didn’t imagine they’d all be such silly buggers.”

  Looks like I’m going to have to revise my computer security plans then…

  Clyde twists his head sharply to one side, looks up, then back at me. “There we go.” He gives a satisfied nod.

  “You sure you’re alright?” I ask him. I seem to be asking that too much recently.

  “Of course.” Clyde pops the car door, bounces out. “Now let’s get Winston loaded up. We have a delivery to make.”

  FOURTEEN

  That definitely should have been harder. The security guard at the service entrance barely looked at us. I mean, admittedly, it’s not like we’re breaking into Fort Knox, we’re pretending we’re returning books to a library, but still… well maybe it shouldn’t have been harder.

  Cly
de is wearing his hoody again, head bowed to hide everything in its shadows. I trail after him with the handcart. He stops suddenly and I almost rear-end him with Winston. “Oh wow,” he says.

  “What is it?” I spin round, trying to work out what he’s looking at. It’s tricky when the gaze you’re following doesn’t actually originate from eyes.

  “Oh. Sorry.” Clyde pulls his head down between his shoulders. “Rude of me. It’s just… Well, I was still on the servers for the British Museum. And, well, there’s some first-rate scans of some really rare Dickens on there. Obviously a terrible time for it. Realize that now. Like reading at the table. Terrible habit. My mother was always on at me about that. Definition of rudeness she called it. There again, she never had an alien take over her body and lay its eggs in her mind, so her frame of reference might have been smaller than mine. But definitely up there with the ruder things one can do.”

  I close my eyes. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Why should a wireless internet connection be more upsetting than violating reality at its most fundamental levels?

  Except, violating reality seems at its core a human skill. The mind and the words intersecting with power. A wi-fi connection is so much more… mechanical. Inhuman.

  I think I’m going to have to find a better word than that.

  Clyde looks around. “You know, I’ve no idea where we should be going. Do you?”

  “Again my original plan had been to go in the front door,” I say. A bit catty of me, but I’m never at my best when people are rearranging my view of reality.

  “Ooh!” Clyde’s hand shivers and he cocks his head. “Blueprints.”

  Post-human?

  Superhuman?

  Somehow, no name for it makes me feel even slightly more comfortable.

  The Reading Room

  The sense of history is palpable in the room. It seems to bow heads over books, to color the light that slants in from the high windows. Gandhi studied here. Mark Twain. Karl Marx. H. G. Wells.

  “Lovely librarian ladies,” Winston mutters to himself. “Glasses and skirts nom nom.” A copy of Lady Chatterly’s Lover has worked its way loose from his pile of books and is waggling lewdly.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “That’s what all the ladies say.”

  I am sorely tempted to slap Winston, but there’s a slim chance that might look odd in public.

  “OK.” Clyde nods at a balding man behind a counter polishing his glasses on a maroon vest. “That guy should have a backdated email from George Coleman with the request for the papers.”

  “And reason why it’s him?”

  “Oh,” Clyde digs deeper into his hoodie. “Slim chance that perhaps, I found someone on the email server talking about their cat a lot. And then, you know, hypothetically the cat’s name was that person’s password. So, again, it would be within the realm of possibility that it was easy enough to get into his account.”

  Again there’s that creeping sense of wrongness. “So, basically,” I say, “you’re saying it’s within the realm of possibility that you broke a bunch of privacy laws.”

  “Just,” Clyde hesitates, “trying to be useful.” He shrugs with a certain amount of violence.

  That word “useful” again…

  “Greasing wheels is all,” Clyde continues. He is, at least, reassuringly bad at being succinct. “But totally see your point. Like reading at the table.”

  Like reading someone else’s book that you stole at the table. But I don’t say that. Instead I go to the desk, ask for the material, reference the email, and the man says he’s sorry he missed it, and he’ll have stuff pulled right away.

  Again, easy. Even if Clyde does look like he’s trying to work out where the metal concert is, and Winston is singing Hot Chocolate’s “You Sexy Thing” under his breath.

  And then someone catches my arm and says, “Well fancy seeing you here.”

  My hand immediately goes for my gun. It’s a slightly frightening instinct to have developed. There again, my left side still stings from being electrocuted.

  But the voice doesn’t belong to a cyborg Russian schoolmarm. Instead it’s a pretty, smiling Weekender from the Natural History Museum. “Aiko?” I say.

  She nods. “Nice to see you again, Agent Arthur.”

  I let go of the gun, but not before her eyes travel to its momentarily exposed butt.

  “Paranoid moment?” she asks. “Totally understand. Happens to me in the classroom all the time.”

  I smile at that. Clyde stands a few yards away, shaking his head. Winston is waggling Lady Chatterly again.

  I ignore both of them. If I’m the lead field agent, and I believe I am, I’m not going to lead with rudeness. “So,” I say “what brings you here?”

  “Oh,” Aiko grins, “Chernobyl. Same thing as you, I imagine.”

  Clyde starts shaking his head more violently. I can almost hear Felicity enunciating, “Official Secrets Act.”

  “No,” I say, jumping for the nearest denial. “Totally different reasons. Totally.” I’m not completely convinced the academy is going to give me the Oscar for that one.

  “Yeah,” Aiko gives me the look a first grade teacher gives to the innocent-eyed child with the crayon and the wall covered by a Jackson Pollock interpretation.

  Clyde steps forward at that. “Different reason,” he says. He sounds nothing like himself. Harsh and sharp.

  It is not a mechanical glitch, I tell myself. It’s just the Weekenders. They just did something that got them enormously deep underneath everyone’s skin.

  But what the hell was it?

  Aiko just gives Clyde the same indulgent look. “So,” she says, “just trying to pump me for information, Agent Arthur? Shame on you.”

  There’s an edge to the question I can’t quite read.

  “You know I can’t tell you why we’re here,” I say. While I refuse to be openly rude, I should probably tow the party line.

  “Fine then.” Aiko rolls her eyes. “We’ll do our time magic research, you do yours.”

  “Time magic?” That one genuinely is new to me. And I totally get that I’m not supposed to like these people, but they do seem all kinds of helpful.

  “Sure.” Aiko nods, though I get the impression she still thinks I’m playing the fool. “Zombie dinosaur regrowing its skin,” she says. “Russian magician. Chernobyl is the biggest space-time experiment of them all. We may not make a living doing this, Agent Arthur, but we know what we’re doing.”

  I’m about to explain that I’m genuinely confused, but a new voice interrupts.

  “Oh, totally,” says someone behind me. “Totally just hit on guys and let me do all the work. Because you know how much I just love analogue research. Urban ninjas in the library. Totally where it’s—”

  I turn round and see Jasmine, the blond, pigtailed girl from the Natural History Museum. She’s still got headphones on, these ones pink and emblazoned with a stylized skull. She’s added a pair of reading glasses and a Hello Kitty T-shirt. Malcolm, the large black man, stands behind her looking like he’s been listening to this monologue since approximately the dawn of time.

  Then the girl sees my face.

  “Oh. My. God!”

  I wince a little as the girl hits the high note at the end. People look up from their books.

  “You guys! I love you guys!” She rushes Clyde and clasps him in a sudden hug. He stands startled, hands trapped down at his sides by the embrace. Some onlookers start to glare. Clyde tries to bury his head deeper into his hood.

  “Jasmine,” the black man behind the girl finally rumbles. “Let him be.”

  “Has your therapist talked to you about repression, Malcolm?”

  The big man shuffles his feet. “I don’t… Not the therapist. Not to strangers.” He sounds embarrassed, avoids our eyes.

  “They’re not strangers!” Jasmine squeaks. “They’re,” she looks around warily then lowers her voice, “MI37.” The word sounds hallowed in her voice
.

  The big man looks back and forth from me to Clyde then back to me. He holds out a hand. “Good to see you,” he says. My hand disappears into his, but he shakes gently.

  “So,” Aiko says, “if we’re being all friendly, is there anything you can tell us?” She has a sweet, hopeful smile.

  “Official Secrets Act,” Clyde intones.

  I shrug.

  “Fine then.” She waves a dismissive hand. “We’ll try not to get in your way.”

  I seem to have ended up being rude without meaning to. And I still feel like these people, these Weekenders, could be useful allies.

  “It’s not like that,” I say.

  “Is it like something you can tell us?” She cocks her head to one side.

  “You know I can’t tell you anything.” I try out a smile on her. Try to get the tone right. “It’s the law, and it’s my job.”

  “So we should piss off and leave you alone.” Aiko smiles with her mouth but her eyes have gone cold. “I get it.”

  “No,” I say. Why is it so hard to get myself understood some days?

  “No?” Aiko’s eyebrows are doing the yo-yo thing I feel mine do.

  “No?” Clyde echoes Aiko, only he doesn’t sound so pleased.

  “All I’m saying is I can’t help. Everyone else is telling you to piss off. I figure that’s more than enough people without me needing to chip in.” And God knows if that’s the smartest thing to say, but it’s the most honest. I feel she deserves that at least.

  Aiko seems to weigh that for a while. Then, “All right,” she says. “All right, Agent Arthur. You get a pass this time.”

  “You seem like a nice person,” I say. “All of you.” I nod at Jasmine and Malcolm. “I honestly think you can help with this. I just can’t help you. My hands are tied.”

  “Nice?” The edge I don’t quite understand is back in her voice. “You think I’m nice?”

  I shrug. “Am I wrong?”

  She smiles at that, then reaches into a pocket and pulls out a notepad and pen. She scribbles something and hands a page to me. “My number, if you ever want to play with other kids.” The edge to her voice is still there. She smiles. “Good luck finding whatever it could possibly be that you’re looking for.”