A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (67 page)

“I killed
Acheron.
He had a brother named Styx—why couldn't he have a sister?”

We exchanged nervous looks and stared at the mnemonograph in front of us. Some of her features
did
seem to resemble Acheron now that I stared at her. Like Hades, she was tall and her lips were thin. That alone would not have been enough; after all, many people are tall with thin lips, and few, if any, are evil geniuses. But her eyes were unmistakable—they had a sort of brooding
darkness
to them.

“No wonder she's pissed off with you,” murmured Landen. “You killed her brother.”

“Thanks for that, Landen,” I replied. “Always know how to relax a girl.”

“Sorry. So we know the H in A.H. is
Hades
—what about the A?”

“The Acheron was a tributary of the river Styx,” I said quietly. “As was the Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe—and
Aornis.
”

I'd never felt so depressed at having identified a suspect before. But something was niggling at me. There was something here that I
couldn't
see, like listening to a TV from another
room. You hear dramatic music but you have no idea what's going on.

“Cheer up,” smiled Landen, rubbing my shoulder, “she's ballsed it up three times already—it might never happen!”

“There's something
else,
Landen.”

“What?”

“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'm only here as your
memory
of me. 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 really have got myself into such a mess, and then wondering if 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 once again to get her to stand on one leg.

I shook the entroposcope just in case—was thankful to find everything 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 disheveled 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 £2,000 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 up Miles's things.”

I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him.

“Say that again.”

“I said I'd come—”

“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 recognize 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 fraternizing 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 a renewed confidence. “By God it's Landen's!”

And I jumped up and down overwhelmed by 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 more than happy for you,” said Joffy slowly. “You've
completely lost your tiny doofus-like mind, but I'm very happy for you, in spite of it.”

I ran into the living room, rummaged across 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 was still lacking a coherent plan, but this didn't bother me that much—I seldom did.

“The Raven” was undoubtedly Edgar Allan Poe's finest and most famous poem, and was his own personal favorite, 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 nonsense of Poe's attacks on Longfellow as 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. Poe's total earnings for one of the greatest poems in the English language were a paltry $9.

MILLON DE FLOSS
,
Who Put the Poe in Poem?

T
HE DOORBELL RANG
as I was putting my shoes on. But it wasn't Goliath. It was Agents Lamme and Slorter. 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 my other shoe on, “sister of Acheron.
Don't even
think
of tackling her. You know you're close when you stop breathing.”

“Wow!” exclaimed Lamme, patting his pockets for a pen. “
Aornis
Hades! How did you figure that out?”

“I glimpsed her several times over the past few weeks.”

“You must have a good memory,” observed Slorter.

“I have help.”

Lamme found a pen, discovered it didn't work and borrowed a pencil off his partner. The point broke. I lent him mine.

“What was her name again?”

I spelled it out for him and he wrote it down so slowly it was painful.

“Good!” I said once they had finished. “What are you guys doing here, anyway?”

“Flanker wants a word.”

“I'm busy.”

“You're not busy anymore,” replied Slorter, 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.”

This was an interesting development. He'd obviously not found the cause of tomorrow's Armageddon and was attempting a little framing to make me compliant. I had thought he would try something of the sort, but now wasn't the time. I had a appointment in “The Raven” I needed to keep.

“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.”

“It's
not
trumped up,” said Slorter, holding out an arrest warrant. “It's cheese.
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 that 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 the fire escape. I heard them yell at me as I ran out onto 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 if I had just got out of the frying pan and into the fire or out of the fire and into the frying pan. I had been frisked for weapons and a wire and they had taken my automatic, keys and Jurisfiction travelbook. Schitt-Hawse drove and I was sitting in the backseat—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.

 

An hour later we arrived at Goliath's Research & Development Facility at Aldermaston. Surrounded by triple fences of razor wire and armed guards patrolling with full-sized sabertooths, the complex was a labyrinth of aluminum-clad windowless buildings and concrete bunkers interspersed with electrical substations
and large ventilation ducts. We were waved through the gate and parked in a layby 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 honored, Next,” said Schitt-Hawse. “Few are blessed with seeing this far into the workings of our beloved corporation.”

“I feel more humbled by the second, Mr. Schitt-Hawse.”

We drove on to a low building with a domed concrete roof. This was of an 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 twelve, went through another security check and then along a shiny corridor past doors either side of us that 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 much higher degree of quality and had actually cost some money. 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 an atom of dust anywhere. It was chaos—but
refined
chaos. There were about a half-dozen technicians, all of whom seemed to have a certain pallid disposition as
though they spent most of their life indoors, and they looked at us curiously as we walked in—I don't suppose they saw many strange faces. 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 that led away to a large machine that hummed and clicked to itself. As we walked in, 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 purposes 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 CO
₂
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 synthesize 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. Further 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?”

I was in no mood for a show-and-tell; I was here to get Landen back, nothing more.

“Do you want me to get Jack Schitt out or not?”

He stared at me for a moment before dropping the subject and walking on 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 the copy of
The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
as we entered. He looked up.

“Monsieur Lavoisier, I understand you already know Miss Next?” asked Schitt-Hawse.

“We did some time together,” I replied slowly, staring at Lavoisier, who seemed a great deal older and distinctly ill at ease with the situation. I got the impression he didn't like Goliath any more than I did. He didn't say anything; he just nodded his head in greeting, shut the book and rose to his feet. We stood in silence for a moment.

“So go on,” said Schitt-Hawse finally, “do your booky stuff, and Lavoisier will reactualize your husband as though nothing had happened. No one will ever know he had gone—except you, of course.”

I bit my lip. This was one of the biggest chances I was ever likely to take. I would try and capitalize on Lavoisier's apparent dislike of Goliath—after all, the ChronoGuard had no interest in Landen or Jack Schitt—and there was more than one way to trap my father. I was going to have to risk it.

“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 reactualized as he was. Two: I want my
travelbook 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 positive 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 hard-back 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 the word of a commander in the ChronoGuard—if that's good enough.”

I looked at Lavoisier, then at Schitt-Hawse, then at the photo. It was the one that used to sit on the mantelpiece at my mother's house.

“Where did you get this?”

“In another time, another place,” replied Lavoisier. “And at considerable personal risk to myself, I assure you. Landen is nothing to us, Miss Next—I am only here to help Goliath. Once done I can leave them to their nefarious activities—and not before time.”

Schitt-Hawse shuffled slightly and glared at Lavoisier. It was clear they mistrusted each other deeply; it could only work to my advantage.

“Then let's do it,” I said finally. “But 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,
that's why.”

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 travelbook said that five hundred words was adequate for a solo jump, a thousand words if you were to bring anyone with you, so I wrote fifteen hundred just in case. Schitt-Hawse looked over my shoulder as I wrote, checking I wasn't writing another destination.

“I'll take that back, Next,” said Schitt-Hawse, 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!”