A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (20 page)

“So that's why you returned to England?”

“That's why I returned to England.”

“You're wrong, you know,” I told him.

“About what?”

“About not having a serious bone in your body. Did you know Colonel Phelps was in town?”

“I did. What an arse. Someone should poison him. I'm speaking opposite him as ‘the voice of moderation.' Will you join me at the podium?”

“I don't know, Joff, really I don't.”

I stared at my tea and refused a chocolate biscuit that he offered me.

“Mum keeps the memorial well, doesn't she?” I said, desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, it's not her, Doofus. She couldn't bear to even walk past
the stone—even if she did slim down enough to get through the lich-gate.”

“Who, then?”

“Why,
Landen,
of course. Did he not tell you?”

I sat up.

“No. No, he didn't.”

“He might write crap books and be a bit of a dork, but he was a good friend to Anton.”

“But his testimony damned him forever!—”

Joffy put his tea down and leaned forward, lowered his voice to a whisper and placed his hand on mine.

“Sister dearest, I know this is an old cliché but it's true:
The first casualty of war is always truth.
Landen was trying to redress that. Don't think that he didn't agonize long and hard over it— it would have been easier to lie and clear Ant's name. But a small lie always breeds a bigger one. The military can ill afford more than it has already. Landen knew that and so too, I think, did our Anton.”

I looked up at him thoughtfully. I wasn't sure what I was going to say to Landen but I hoped I would think of something. He had asked me to marry him ten years ago, just before his evidence at the tribunal. I had accused him of attempting to gain my hand by stealth, knowing what my reaction would be following the hearing. I had left for London within the week.

“I think I'd better call him.”

Joffy smiled.

“Yes, perhaps you'd better—
Doofus.
”

. . . Several people have asked me where I find the large quantity of prepositions that I need to keep my Bookworms fit and well. The answer is, of course, that I use
omitted
prepositions, of which, when mixed with dropped definite articles, make a nourishing food. There are a superabundance of these in the English language.
Journey's end,
for instance, has one omitted preposition and two definite articles:
the
end
of the
journey.
There are many other examples, too, such as
bedside (
the
side
of the
bed)
and
streetcorner (
the
corner
of the
street),
and so forth. If I run short I head to my local newspapers, where omitted prepositions can be found in
The Toad
's headlines every day. As for the worm's waste products, these are chiefly composed of apostrophes—something that is becoming a problem—I saw a notice yesterday that read:
Cauliflower's, three shilling's each
 . . .

MYCROFT NEXT
,
writing in the “Any Questions?”
page of
New Splicer
magazine

B
OWDEN AND
Victor were out when I arrived at the office; I poured myself some coffee and sat down at my desk. I called Landen's number but it was engaged; I tried a few minutes later but without any luck. Sergeant Ross called from the front desk and said that he was sending someone up who wanted to see a
Litera Tec. I twiddled my thumbs for a bit, and had failed to reach Landen a third time when a small, academic-looking man with an overpowering aura of untidiness shambled into the office. He wore a small bowler hat and a herringbone-pattern shooting jacket pulled hastily over what looked like his pajama top. His briefcase had papers protruding from where he had caught them in the lid and the laces of both his shoes were tied in reef knots. He stared up at me. It was a two-minute walk from the front desk and he was still fumbling with his visitor's pass.

“Allow me,” I said.

The academic stood impassively as I clipped his pass on and then thanked me absently, looking around as he tried to determine where he was.

“You're looking for me and you're on the right floor,” I said, glad that I had had plenty of experience of academics in the past.

“I am?” he said with great surprise, as though he had long ago accepted that he would always end up in the wrong place.

“Special Operative Thursday Next,” I said, holding out a hand for him to shake. He shook it weakly and tried to raise his hat with the hand that was holding the briefcase. He gave up and tipped his head instead.

“Er . .. thank you, Miss Next. My name is Dr. Runcible Spoon, Professor of English Literature at Swindon University. I expect you've heard of me?”

“I'm sure it was only a matter of time, Dr. Spoon. Would you care to sit down?”

Dr. Spoon thanked me and followed me across to my desk, pausing every now and then as a rare book caught his eye. I had to stop and wait a number of times before I had him safely ensconced in Bowden's chair. I fetched him a cup of coffee.

“So, how can I be of assistance, Dr. Spoon?”

“Perhaps I should show you, Miss Next.”

Spoon rummaged through his case for a minute, taking out
some unmarked students' work and a paisley-patterned sock before finally finding and handing me a heavy blue-bound volume.

“
Martin Chuzzlewit,
” explained Dr. Spoon, pushing all the papers back into his case and wondering why they had expanded since he took them out.

“Chapter nine, page one eighty-seven. It is marked.”

I turned to where Spoon had left his bus pass and scanned the page.

“See what I mean?”

“I'm sorry, Dr. Spoon. I haven't read
Chuzzlewit
since I was in my teens. You're going to have to enlighten me.”

Spoon looked at me suspiciously, wondering if I was, perhaps, an impostor.

“A student pointed it out to me early this morning. I came out as quickly as I could. On the bottom of page one eighty-seven there was a short paragraph outlining one of the curious characters who frequent Todger's, the boarding house. A certain Mr. Quaverley by name. He is an amusing character who only converses on subjects that he knows nothing about. If you scan the lines I think you will agree with me that he has vanished.”

I read the page with growing consternation. The name of Quaverley did ring a bell, but of his short paragraph there appeared to be no sign.

“He doesn't appear later?”

“No, Officer. My student and I have been through it several times. There is no doubt about it. Mr. Quaverley has inexplicably been excised from the book. It is as if he had never been written.”

“Could it be a printing error?” I asked with a growing sense of unease.

“On the contrary. I have checked seven different copies and they all read exactly the same.
Mr. Quaverley is no longer with us.
”

“It doesn't seem possible,” I murmured.

“I agree.”

I felt uneasy about the whole thing, and several links between Hades, Jack Schitt and the
Chuzzlewit
manuscript started to form in unpleasant ways in my mind.

The phone rang. It was Victor. He was at the morgue and requested me to come over straight away; they had discovered a body.

“What's this to do with me?” I asked him.

As Victor spoke I looked over at Dr. Spoon, who was staring at a food stain he had discovered on his tie.

“No, on the contrary,” I replied slowly, “considering what has just happened here I don't think that sounds odd at all.”

The morgue was an old Victorian building that was badly in need of refurbishment. The interior was musty and smelled of formaldehyde and damp. The employees looked unhealthy and shuffled around the confines of the small building in a funereal manner. The standard joke about Swindon's morgue was that the corpses were the ones with all the charisma. This rule was especially correct when it came to Mr. Rumplunkett, the head pathologist. He was a lugubrious-looking man with heavy jowls and eyebrows like thatch. I found him and Victor in the pathology lab.

Mr. Rumplunkett didn't acknowledge my entrance, but just continued to speak into a microphone hanging from the ceiling, his monotonous voice sounding like a low hum in the tiled room. He had been known to send his transcribers to sleep on quite a few occasions; he even had difficulty staying awake himself when practicing speeches to the forensic pathologists' annual dinner dance.

“I have in front of me a male European aged about forty with gray hair and poor dentition. He is approximately five foot
eight inches tall and dressed in an outfit that I would describe as Victorian . . .”

As well as Bowden and Victor there were two homicide detectives present, the ones who had interviewed us the night before. They looked surly and bored and glared at the LiteraTec contingent suspiciously.

“Morning, Thursday,” said Victor cheerfully. “Remember the Studebaker belonging to Archer's killer?”

I nodded.

“Well, our friends in Homicide found this body in the trunk.”

“Do we have an ID?”

“Not so far. Have a look at this.”

He pointed to a stainless-steel tray containing the corpse's possessions. I sorted through the small collection. There was half a pencil, an unpaid bill for starching collars and a letter from his mother dated June 5, 1843.

“Can we speak in private?” I said.

Victor led me into the corridor.

“It's Mr. Quaverley,” I explained.

“Who?”

I repeated what Dr. Spoon had told me. Victor did not seem surprised in the least.

“I thought he looked like a book person,” he said at length.

“You mean this has happened before?”

“Did you ever read
The Taming of the Shrew?
”

“Of course.”

“Well, you know the drunken tinker in the introduction who is made to think he is a lord, and whom they put the play on for?”

“Sure,” I replied. “His name was Christopher Sly. He has a few lines at the end of act one and that is the last we hear of him . . .”

My voice trailed off.

“Exactly,” said Victor. “Six years ago an uneducated drunk who spoke only Elizabethan English was found wandering in a confused state just outside Warwick. He said that his name was Christopher Sly, demanded a drink and was very keen to see how the play turned out. I managed to question him for half an hour, and in that time he convinced me that he was the genuine article—yet he never came to the realization that he was no longer in his own play.”

“Where is he now?”

“Nobody knows. He was taken for questioning by two unspecified SpecOps agents soon after I spoke to him. I tried to find out what happened but you know how secretive SpecOps can be.”

I thought about my time up at Haworth when I was a small girl.

“What about the other way?”

Victor looked at me sharply.

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of anyone jumping in the other direction?”

Victor looked at the floor and rubbed his nose. “That's pretty radical, Thursday.”

“But do you think it's possible?”

“Keep this under your hat, Thursday, but I'm beginning to think that it is. The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. Have you read Dickens's
Dombey and Son?
”

“Sure.”

“Remember Mr. Glubb?”

“The Brighton fisherman?”

“Correct.
Dombey
was finished in 1848 and was reviewed extensively with a list of characters in 1851. In that review Mr. Glubb was
not
mentioned.”

“An oversight?”

“Perhaps. In 1926 a collector of antiquarian books named Redmond Bulge vanished while reading
Dombey and Son
. The incident was widely reported in the press owing to the fact that his assistant had been convinced he saw Bulge ‘melt into smoke.' ”

“And Bulge fits Glubb's description?”

“Almost exactly. Bulge specialized in collecting stories about the sea and Glubb specializes in telling tales of precisely that. Even Bulge's name spelled backward reads “ ‘Eglub,' a close enough approximation to Glubb to make us think he made it up himself.” He sighed. “I suppose you think that's incredible?”

“Not at all,” I replied, thinking of my own experiences with Rochester, “but are you absolutely sure he
fell
into
Dombey and Son
?”

“What do you mean?”

“He could have made the jump by choice. He might have preferred it—and stayed.”

Victor looked at me strangely. He hadn't dared tell anyone about his theories for fear of being ostracized, but here was a respected London Litera Tec nearly half his age going farther than even he had imagined. A thought crossed his mind.

“You've done it, haven't you?”

I looked him straight in the eye. For this we could both be pensioned off.

“Once,” I whispered. “When I was a very young girl. I don't think I could do it again. For many years I thought even that was a hallucination.”

I was going to go farther and tell him about Rochester jumping back after the shooting at Styx's apartment, but at that
moment Bowden put his head into the corridor and asked us to come in.

Mr. Rumplunkett had finished his initial examination.

“One shot through the heart, very clean, very professional. Everything about the body otherwise normal except evidence of rickets in childhood. It's quite rare these days so it shouldn't be difficult to trace, unless of course he spent his youth in another country. Very poor dental work and lice. It's probable he hasn't had a bath for at least a month. There is not a lot I can tell you except his last meal was suet, mutton and ale. There'll be more when the tissue samples come back from the lab.”

Victor and I exchanged looks. I was correct. The corpse had to be Mr. Quaverley's. We all left hurriedly; I explained to Bowden who Quaverley was and where he came from.

“I don't get it,” said Bowden as we walked toward the car. “How did Hades take Mr. Quaverley out of
every
copy of
Chuzzlewit?
”

“Because he went for the original manuscript,” I answered, “for the maximum disruption. All copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to change too. If you could go back a hundred million years and change the genetic code of the first mammal, every one of us would be completely different. It amounts to the same thing.”