A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (39 page)

“He looks very young.”

“But look here, he was. Forty-three and eight days. Trampled to death by antelope.”

“In Africa?”

“No,” sighed Volescamper wistfully, “on the A30 near Chard one night in '34. He stopped the car because there was a stag with the most magnificent antlers lying in the road. Father got out to have a peek and, well look here, he didn't stand a chance. The herd came from nowhere.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Sort of ironic, really,” he rambled on as Bowden looked at his watch, “but do you know the
really
odd thing was, when the herd of antelope ran off, the magnificent stag had
also
gone.”

“It must have just been stunned,” suggested Bowden.

“Yes, yes, I suppose so,” replied Volescamper absently, “I suppose so. But look here, you don't want to know about Father. Come on!”

And so saying he strutted off down the corridor that led to the library. We had to trot to catch up with him and soon arrived at a pair of steel vault doors—clearly, Volescamper had no doubts as to the value of his collection. I touched the blued steel of the doors thoughtfully.

“Oh, yes,” said Volescamper, divining my thoughts, “look here, the old library is worth quite a few pennies—I like to take precautions; don't be fooled by the oak paneling inside—the library is essentially a vast steel safe.”

It wasn't unusual. The Bodleian these days was like Fort Knox—and Fort Knox itself had been converted to take the Library of Congress's more valuable works. We entered, and if I was prepared to see an immaculate collection, I was to be disappointed—the library looked more like a box room than a depository of knowledge; the books were piled up on tables, in boxes, arranged haphazardly and in many cases just stacked on the floor ten or twelve high.
But what books!
I picked up a volume at random which turned out to be a second-impression copy of
Gulliver's Travels.
I showed it to Bowden, who responded by holding up a signed first edition of
Decline and Fall.

“You didn't just buy
Cardenio
recently or something, then?” I asked, suddenly feeling that perhaps my early dismissal of the find might have been too hasty.

“Goodness me, no. Look here, we found it only the other
day when we were cataloguing part of my great-grandfather Bartholomew Volescamper's private library. Didn't even know I had it. Ah!—this is Mr. Swaike, my security consultant.”

A thickset man with a humorless look and jowls like bananas had entered the library. He eyed us suspiciously as Volescamper made the introductions, then laid a sheaf of roughly cut pages bound into a leather book on the table.

“What sort of security matters do you consult on, Mr. Swaike?” asked Bowden.

“Personal and insurance, Mr. Cable,” replied Swaike in a drab monotone. “This library is uncatalogued and uninsured; criminal gangs would regard it as a valuable target, despite the security arrangements.
Cardenio
is only one of a dozen books I am currently keeping in a secure safe
within
the locked library.”

“I can't fault you there, Mr. Swaike,” replied Bowden.

I looked at the manuscript. At first glance, things looked good, so I quickly donned a pair of cotton gloves, something I hadn't even considered with Mrs. Hathaway
₃₄
's
Cardenio.
I pulled up a chair and studied the first page. The handwriting was very similar to Shakespeare's with loops at the top of the L's and W's and spirited backward-facing extensions to the top of the D's; and the spelling was erratic, too—always a good sign. It all
looked
real, but I had seen some good copies in my time. There were a lot of scholars who were versed well enough in Shakespeare, Elizabethan history, grammar and spelling to
attempt
a forgery but none of them ever had the wit and charm of the Bard himself. Victor used to say that Shakespeare forgery was inherently impossible because the act of copying overrode the act of inspired creation—the heart being squeezed out by the mind, so to speak. But as I turned the first page and read the
dramatis personae,
butterflies stirred within me. I'd read fifty or sixty
Cardenio
s before, but—I turned the page and read Cardenio's opening soliloquy:

“Know'st thou, O love, the pangs which I sustain—”

“It's a sort of Spanish thirty-something
Romeo and Juliet
but with a few laughs and a happy ending,” explained Volescamper helpfully. “Look here, would you care for some tea?”

“What? Yes—thank you.”

Volescamper told us that he would lock us in for security reasons but we could press the bell if we needed anything.

The steel door clanged shut and we read with increased interest as the knight Cardenio told the audience of his lost love Lucinda and how he had fled to the mountains after her marriage to the deceitful Ferdinand and become a ragged, destitute wretch.

“Good Lord,” murmured Bowden over my shoulder, a sentiment that I agreed with wholeheartedly. The play, forgery or not, was
excellent.
After the opening soliloquy we soon went into a flashback where Cardenio and Lucinda write a series of passionate love letters in an Elizabethan version of a Rock Hudson/Doris Day split screen, Lucinda on one side reacting to Cardenio writing them on the other and then vice versa. It was funny, too. We read on and learned of Cardenio's plans to marry Lucinda, then the Duke's demand for him to be a companion to his son Ferdinand, Ferdinand's hopeless infatuation for Dorothea, the trip to Lucinda's town, how Ferdinand's love transfers to Lucinda—

“What do you think?” I asked Bowden as we reached the end of the second act.

“Amazing! I've not seen anything like this,
ever.
”

“Real?”

“I think so—but mistakes have been made before. I'll copy out the passage where Cardenio finds he has been duped and Ferdinand is planning to wed Lucinda. We can run it through the Verse Meter Analyzer back at the office.”

We eagerly read on. The sentences, the meter, the style—it
was all pure Shakespeare.
Cardenio
had been missing for over four hundred years, but for it to surface now and quite out of the blue gave me mixed feelings. Yes, it would throw the literary world off kilter and send every single Shakespeare fan and scholar into paroxysms of litjoy, but on the other hand it worried me, too. My father always used to say that whenever something is too fantastic to be true, it generally is. I voiced my concerns to Bowden, who pointed out less pessimistically that the original manuscript of Marlowe's
Edward II
surfaced only in the thirties. So unearthing new plays wasn't unprecedented— but I still felt uneasy.

The tea was apparently forgotten, and while Bowden copied out the five-page scene for the VMA I looked around the library, wondering just what other treasures might be hidden here. The large safe-within-a-safe stood at the side of the room and contained, Swaike had said, another dozen or so rare books. I tried the safe door but it was locked, so I made a few notes for Victor in case he thought we should apply for a Compulsory Literary Disclosure Order. I then ambled round the old library, looking at books that caught my eye. I was thumbing through a collection of first-edition Evelyn Waugh novels when a key turned in the heavy steel door. I hurriedly replaced the volume as Lord Volescamper popped his head in and announced in an excited manner that due to “prior engagements” we would have to resume our work the following day. Swaike walked in to lock
Cardenio
back in the safe, and we followed Volescamper out through the shabby building to the entrance, just as a pair of large Bentley limousines rolled up. Volescamper bade us a hasty goodbye before striding forward to greet the passenger in the first car.

“Well well,” said Bowden. “Look who it is.”

A young man flanked by two large bodyguards got out and shook hands with the enthusiastic Volescamper. I recognized him from his numerous TV appearances. It was Yorrick Kaine,
the charismatic young leader of the marginal Whig party. He and Volescamper walked up the steps talking animatedly and then vanished inside Vole Towers.

 

We drove away from the moldering house with mixed feelings about the treasure we had been studying.

“What do you think?”

“Fishy,” said Bowden. “Very fishy. How could something like
Cardenio
turn up out of the blue?”

“How fishy on the fishiness scale?” I asked him. “Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark.”

“A whale isn't a fish, Thursday.”

“A whale shark is—sort of.”

“All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish.”

“A crayfish isn't a fish,” I told him.

“A starfish, then.”

“
Still
not a fish.”

“A silverfish?”

“Try again.”

“This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.”

“I'm pulling your leg, Bowden.”

“Oh I see,” he replied as the penny dropped. “Tomfoolery.”

Bowden's lack of humor wasn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, none of us
really
had much of a sense of humor in SpecOps. But he thought it socially desirable to have one, so I did what I could to help. The trouble was, he could read
Three Men in a Boat
without a single smirk and viewed P. G. Wodehouse as “ infantile,” so I had a suspicion the affliction was long-lasting and permanent.

“My tensionologist suggested I should try stand-up comedy,” said Bowden, watching me closely for my reaction.

“Well, ‘How do you find the Sportina? / Where I left it' was a good start,” I told him.

He stared at me blankly. It hadn't been a joke.

“I've booked myself in at the
Happy Squid
talent night on Monday. Do you want to hear my routine?”

“I'm all ears.”

He cleared his throat.

“There are these three anteaters, see, and they go into a—”

There was a sharp crack, the car swerved, and we heard a fast flapping noise. I tensed as we fishtailed for a moment before Bowden brought the car under control.

“Damn!” he muttered. “Blowout.”

There was another concussion like the first, but we weren't going so fast by now and Bowden eased the car in towards the car park at the South Cerney stop of the Skyrail.

“
Two
blowouts?” muttered Bowden as we got out. We looked at the remnants of the car tire still on the rim, then at each other—and then at the busy road to see if anyone else was having problems. They weren't. The traffic zoomed up and down the road quite happily.

“How is it possible for
both
tires to go within ten seconds of each other?”

I shrugged. I didn't have an answer for this. It was a new car, after all, and I'd been driving all my life and never had a single blowout, much less two. With only one spare wheel we were stuck here for a while. I suggested he call SpecOps and get them to send a tow truck.

“Wireless seems to be dead,” he announced, keying the mike and turning the knob. “That's odd.”

Something, I felt, wasn't quite right.

“No more odd than a double blowout,” I told him, walking a few paces to a handy phone booth. I lifted the receiver and said: “Do you have any change—”

I stopped because I'd just noticed a ticket on top of the
phone. As I picked it up a Skyrail shuttle approached high up on the steel tracks, as if on cue.

“What have you found?” asked Bowden.

“A Skyrail day pass,” I replied slowly, replacing the receiver. Broken images of something half forgotten or not yet remembered started to form in my head. It was confusing, but I knew what I had to do. “I'm going to take the Skyrail and see what happens.”

“Why?”

“There's a neanderthal in trouble.”

“How do you know?”

I frowned, trying to make sense of what I was feeling.

“I'm not sure. What's the opposite of
déjà vu,
when you see something that hasn't happened yet?”

“I don't know—
avant verrais?
”

“That's it. Something's going to happen—and I'm part of it.”

“I'll come with you.”

“No, Bowden; if you were meant to come I would have found
two
tickets.”

I left my partner looking confused and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform fifty feet above ground. I was alone apart from a young woman sitting by herself on a bench, checking her makeup in a mirror. She looked up at me for a moment before the doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, wondering what events were about to unfold.

The neanderthal experiment
was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled “medical test vessels,” living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually
being
human within the context of the law. Using cells reengineered from DNA discovered in a
Homo Llysternef
forearm preserved in a peat bog near Llysternef in Wales, the experiment was an unparalleled success. Sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of neanderthals were trained instead as “expendable combat units,” a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the neanderthal was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labor and became a celebrated tax write-off. Infertile males and an expected life span of fifty years meant they would soon be relegated to the reengineerment industries' ever-growing list of “failures.”

GERHARD VON SQUID
,
Neanderthals: Back After a Short Absence

C
OINCIDENCES ARE
strange things. I like the one about Sir Edmund Godfrey, who was found murdered in 1678 and left in a ditch on Greenberry Hill in London. Three men were arrested and hanged for the crime—Mr.
Green,
Mr.
Berry
and Mr.
Hill.
My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored: They were merely the chance discovery of one
pertinent fact from a million or so possible daily interconnections. “Stop a stranger in the street,” he would say, “and delve into each other's past. Pretty soon an
astounding-too-amazing-to-be-chance
coincidence will appear.”

I suppose he's right, but that didn't explain how a twin puncture outside the station, a broken wireless which led
directly
to the discovery of a valid Skyrail ticket and the Skyrail itself approaching at that precise moment can all happen out of the blue. Some things happen for a reason, and I was inclined to think that this was one of those times.

I stepped into the single Skyrail car, which was the same as every other I had been in. It was clean, had about forty seats and room for standing if required. I took a seat at the front as the doors sighed shut and, accompanied by the hum of electric motors, we were soon gliding effortlessly above the Cerney lakes. Since I was here for a purpose, I looked around carefully to see what that might be. The Skyrail operator was neanderthal; he had his hand on the throttle and gazed absently at the view. His eyebrows twitched and he sniffed the air occasionally. The car was almost empty; seven people, all of them women and no one familiar.

“Three down,” exclaimed a squat woman who was staring at a folded-up newspaper, half to herself and half to the rest of us. “
Well decorated for prying, perhaps?
Ten letters.”

No one answered as we sailed past Cricklade Station without stopping, much to the annoyance of a large, expensively dressed lady who huffed loudly and pointed at the operator with her umbrella.

“You there!” she boomed like a captain before the storm. “What are you doing? I wanted to get off at Cricklade, damn you!”

The operator seemed unperturbed at the insult and muttered an apology. This obviously wasn't good enough for the loud and objectionable woman, who jabbed the small neanderthal
violently in the ribs with her umbrella. He didn't yell out in pain, he just flinched, pulled the driver's door closed behind him and locked it. I stood up and snatched the umbrella from the woman.

“What the—!” she said indignantly.

“Don't do that,” I told her. “It's not nice.”

“Poppycock!” she guffawed loudly. “Why, he's only neanderthal!”

“Meddlesome,”
said one of the other passengers sitting near the back with an air of finality, staring at an advert for the Gravitube.

The objectionable lady and I stared at her, wondering who she was referring to. She looked at us both, flushed, and said:

“No, no. Ten letters, three down.
Well decorated for prying. Meddlesome.
”

“Very good,” muttered the lady with the crossword as she scribbled in the answer.

I handed the umbrella back to the well-heeled woman, who eyed me malevolently; we were barely two feet apart but she wasn't going to sit down first, and neither was I.

“Jab the neanderthal again and I'll arrest you for assault,” I told her.

“I happen to know,” announced the woman tartly, “that neanderthals are legally classed as
animals.
You cannot assault a neanderthal any more than you can a mouse!”

My temper began to rise—always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.

“Perhaps,” I replied, “but I
can
arrest you for cruelty, bruising the calm and anything else I can think of.”

But the woman wasn't the least bit intimidated.

“My husband is a justice of the peace,” she announced like a hidden trump. “I can make things
very
tricky for you. What is your name?”

“Next,” I told her without hesitation. “Thursday Next. SO-27.”

Her eyelids flickered slightly and she stopped rummaging in her bag for a pencil and paper.

“The
Jane Eyre
Thursday Next?” she asked, her mood changing abruptly.

“I saw you on the telly,” chirped the woman with the crossword. “You seem a bit obsessed with your dodo, I must say. Why couldn't you talk about
Jane Eyre
, Goliath, or ending the Crimean War?”

“Believe me, I tried.”

The well-heeled woman decided that this was a good moment to withdraw, so she sat back in her seat two rows behind me and stared out of the window as the Skyrail swept on past Broad Blunsdon Station; the passengers variously sighed, made tut-tut noises and shrugged to one another.

“I am going to complain to the Skyrail management about
this,
” said a heavyset woman with makeup like builder's plaster. She carried a disgruntled-looking Pekinese. “A good cure for insubordination is—”

Her speech came to an abrupt end as the neanderthal suddenly increased the speed of the car.

I knocked on the acrylic door and said: “What's going on, pal?”

The neanderthal had taken about as much umbrella jabbing as he could that day, or any day, come to that.

“We are going home now,” he said simply, staring straight ahead.

“We?” echoed the woman with the umbrella. “No, we're not. I live at Cricklade—”

“He means
I,
” I told her. “Neanderthals don't use the personal pronoun.”

“Damn stupid!” she replied. I glared at her and she got the
message and lapsed into sulky silence. I leaned closer to the driver.

“What's your name?”

“Kaylieu,” he replied.

“Good. Now Kaylieu, I want you to tell me what the problem is.”

He paused for a moment as the Swindon Airship stop came and went. I saw another shuttle that had been diverted to a siding and several Skyrail officials waving at us, so it was only a matter of time before the authorities knew what was going on.

“We want to be
real.
”

“Day's hurt?”
murmured the squat woman at the back, sucking the end of her pencil and staring at the crossword.

“What did you say?” I said.

“Day's hurt?”
she repeated, oblivious to the situation. “Nine down; eight letters—I think it's an anagram.”

“I have no idea,” I replied before returning my attention to Kaylieu. “What do you mean,
real?
”

“We are
not
animals,” announced the once extinct cousin of mankind. “We want to be a protected species—like dodo, mammoth—and
you.
We want to speak to head man at Goliath
and
someone from Toad News.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

I walked to the back of the shuttle and picked up the emergency phone.

“Hello?” I said to the operator. “This is Thursday Next, SO-27. We have a situation in shuttle number—ah—6174.”

When I told the operator what was going on she took a sharp intake of breath and asked how many people were with me and whether anyone was hurt.

“Seven females, myself and the driver; we are all fine.”

“Don't forget Pixie Frou-Frou,” said the large woman with the overdone makeup.

“And one Pekinese.”

The operator told me they were clearing all the tracks ahead, we would have to keep calm and she would call back. I tried to tell her that it wasn't a
bad
situation, but she had rung off.

I sat down close to the neanderthal again. Jaw fixed, he was staring intently ahead, knuckles white on the throttle lever. We approached the Wanborough junction, crossed the M4 and were diverted west. The passenger directly behind me, a shy-looking girl in her late teens and dressed in a De La Mare label sweatshirt, caught my eye; she looked frightened.

I smiled to try to put her at ease.

“What's your name?” I asked her.

“Irma,” she replied in a small voice. “Irma Cohen.”

“Poppycock!” said the umbrella woman. “
I'm
Irma Cohen!”

“So am I,” said the woman with the Peke.

“And me!” exclaimed the thin woman at the back. It seemed after a short period of frenzied cries of “Ooh fancy that!” and “Well I never!” that
everyone
in the Skyrail except me and Kaylieu and Pixie Frou-Frou was called Irma Cohen. Some of them were even vaguely related. It was an unnerving coincidence—for today, the best yet.

“Thursday,”
announced the squat woman.

“Yes?”

But she wasn't talking to me; she was writing in the answer:
Day's hurt—Thursday
—it
was
an anagram.

The emergency phone rang.

“This is Diana Thuntress, trained negotiator for SpecOps-9,” said a businesslike voice. “Who is this?”

“Di, it's me, Thursday.”

There was a pause.

“Hello Thursday. Saw you on the telly last night. Trouble seems to follow you around, doesn't it? What's it like in there?”

I looked at the small and unconcerned crowd of commuters
who were showing each other pictures of their children. Pixie Frou-Frou had fallen asleep and the Irma Cohen with the crossword had announced the clue for six across:
“The parting bargain?”

“They're fine. A little bored, but not hurt.”

“What does the perp want?”

“He wants to talk to someone at Goliath about species self-ownership.”

“Wait—he's
neanderthal?
”

“Yes.”

“It's not possible! A neanderthal being violent?”

“There's no violence up here, Di—just desperation.”

“Shit,”
muttered Thuntress. “What do I know about dealing with thals? We'll have to get one of the SpecOps neanderthals in.”

“He also wants to see a reporter from Toad News.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

“Di?”

“Yes?”

“What can I tell Kaylieu?”

“Tell him that—er—Toad News are supplying a car to take him to the Goliath Genetic Labs in the Preselli Mountains where Goliath's governor, chief geneticist and a team of lawyers will be waiting to agree to terms.”

As lies go, it was a real corker.

“But is that right?” I asked.

“There is no ‘right,' Thursday,” snapped Diana, “not since he took control of the Skyrail. There are eight lives in there. It doesn't take the winner of
Name That Fruit!
to figure out what we have to do. Pacifist neanderthal or not, there is a chance he
could
harm the passengers.”

“Don't be ridiculous! No neanderthal has ever harmed anyone. What is this,” I added, outraged by the crude approach, “staff training day for the trigger-happy clots at SO-14?”

“It's not unusual for hostages to start to empathize with their captors, Thursday. Let us handle this.”

“Di,” I said in a clear voice, “listen to me:
No one is either threatened or in danger!
”

“Yet, Thursday.
Yet.
Listen, we're not going to take that risk. This is how it's going to be: We're going to divert you back up along the Cirencester line. We'll have SO-14 agents in position at Cricklade. As soon as he stops I'm afraid we will have no alternative but to take him out. I want you to make sure the passengers are all in the back of the car.”

“Diana, that's crazy! You'd kill him because he took a few lamebrained commuters for a merry trip round the Swindon loop?”