A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (68 page)

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 realized 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 with a sudden ferocity, 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.

The mantel clock struck midnight in a slow and steady
rhythm as I gathered my thoughts and looked around. The furniture was of highly polished dark oak, the drapes a gloomy shade of purple, and the wall coverings, where not obscured by bookshelves or morbid mezzotints, were a dismal brown color. For light there was a solitary oil lamp that flickered and smoked from a poorly trimmed wick. The room was in a mess; the bust of Pallas lay shattered on the floor, and the books that had once graced the shelves were now scattered about the room with their spines broken and pages torn. Worse still, some books had been used to rekindle the fire; a choked profusion of blackened paper had fallen from the grate and now covered the hearth. But to all of this I paid only the merest attention. Before me was the poor narrator of “The Raven” himself, a young man in his mid-twenties seated in a large armchair, bound and gagged. He looked at me imploringly and mumbled something behind the gag as he struggled with his bonds. As I removed the gag the young man burst forth in speech as though his life depended upon it:

“'Tis some visitor,”
he said urgently and rapidly,
“tapping at my chamber door—only this and nothing more!”

And so saying, he disappeared from view into the room next door.

“Damn you, Sebastian!” said a chillingly familiar voice from the adjoining room. “I would pin you to your chair if this poetical coffin had seen so fit as to furnish me with hammer and nails—!”

But the speaker stopped abruptly as he entered the room and saw me. Jack Schitt was in a wretched condition. His previously neat crew cut had been replaced by straggly hair and his thin features were now covered with a scruffy beard; his eyes were wide and haunted and hung with dark circles from lack of sleep. His sharp suit was rumpled and torn, his diamond tiepin
lacking in luster. His arrogant and confident manner had given way to a lonely desperation, and as his eyes met mine I saw tears spring up and his lips tremble. It was, to a committed Schitt-hater like myself, a joyous spectacle.

“Thursday!” he croaked in a strangled cry. “Take me back! Don't let me stay one more second in this vile place! The endless clock striking midnight, the tap-tap-tapping, the raven— oh my good God, the
raven!
”

He fell to his knees and sobbed as the young man bounded happily back into the room and started to tidy up as he muttered:

“ 'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—!”

“I'd be more than happy to leave you here, Mr. Schitt, but I've cut a deal. C'mon, we're going home.”

I grasped the Goliath agent by the lapel and started to read the description of the vault back at Goliath R&D. I felt a tug on my body and another rush of wind, the tapping increased, and I just had time to hear the student say,
“Sir or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore . . .”
when we found ourselves back in the Goliath lab at Aldermaston. I was pleased with this, as I hadn't thought it would be that easy, but all my feelings of self-satisfaction vanished when, instead of being arrested, Jack was hugged warmly by his half brother.

“Jack—!” said Schitt-Hawse happily. “Welcome back!”

“Thank you, Brik—how's Mum?”

“She had to have her hip done.”

“Again—?”

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted. “How about
your
part of the deal?”

The two Schitts stopped chattering for a moment.

“All in good time, Miss Next,” murmured Schitt-Hawse with an unpleasant grin. “We need you to do one or two
other
small jobs before your husband is reactualized.”

“The hell I will,” I said angrily, taking a step forward as Chalk put a massive hand on my shoulder. “What happened to the riveted-iron Goliath Guarantee?”

“Goliath don't do promises,” replied Schitt-Hawse slowly as Jack stood blinking stupidly. “The profit margin is too low. I want you to remain our guest for a while—a woman with your talents is far too useful to lose. You may actually quite like it here.”

“Lavoisier!” I yelled, turning to the Frenchman. “
You
promised! The word of a commander in the ChronoGuard—!”

He stared at me coldly.

“After what you did to me,” he said tersely, “this is the most glorious revenge possible. I hope you rot in hell.”

“What did I ever do to you?”

“Oh, nothing
yet,
” he replied, readying himself to leave, “but you
will.
”

I stared at him coldly. I didn't know what I was going to do to him, but I hoped it was painful.

“Yes,” I replied in a quieter voice, “you can count on it.”

He walked from the room without looking back.

“Thank you, monsieur!” shouted Schitt-Hawse after him. “The wedding picture was a touch of genius!”

I leaped forward to grab Schitt-Hawse but was pinned down by Chalk and Cheese. I struggled long, hard—and hopelessly. My shoulders sagged and I stared at the ground. Landen had been right. I should have walked away.

“I want to wring her ghost upon the floor,” said Jack Schitt, staring in my direction, “to still this beating of my heart. Mr. Cheese, your weapon.”

“No, Jack,” said Schitt-Hawse. “Miss Next and her unique attributes could open up a large and
highly
profitable market to exploit.”

Schitt rounded on his half brother.

“Do you have any idea of the fantastic terrors I've just been through? Tapping—I mean
trapping
—me in ‘The Raven' is something Next is
not
going to live to regret. No, Brik, the bookslut
will
surcease my sorrow—!”

Schitt-Hawse held Jack by the shoulders and shook him.

“Snap out of that ‘Raven' talk, Jack. You're home now. Listen: The bookslut is potentially worth
billions.
”

Schitt stopped and gathered his thoughts.

“Of course,” he murmured finally. “A vast untapped resource of consumers. How much useless rubbish do you think we can offload on those ignorant masses in nineteenth-century literature?”

“Indeed,” replied Schitt-Hawse, “and our unreprocessed waste—
finally
an effective disposal location.
Untold
riches await the corporation. And listen—if it doesn't work out,
then
you can kill her.”

“When do we start?” asked Schitt, who seemed to be growing stronger by the second in the life-giving warmth of corporate avarice.

“It depends,” said Schitt-Hawse, looking at me, “on Miss Next.”

“I'd sooner die,” I told them. I meant it, too.

“Oh!” said Schitt-Hawse. “Hadn't you heard? As far as the outside world is concerned you're dead already! Did you think you could see all that was going on here and live to tell the tale?”

I tried to think of some sort of way to escape, but there was nothing to hand—no weapon, no book, nothing.

“I really haven't decided,” continued Schitt-Hawse in a patronizing tone, “whether you fell down a lift shaft or blundered into some machinery. Do you have any preferences?”

And he laughed a short and very cruel laugh. I said nothing. There didn't seem to be anything I
could
say.

“I'm afraid, my girl,” said Schitt-Hawse as they started to file out the vault door, taking my travelbook with them, “that you are a guest of the corporation for the rest of your natural life. But it won't all be bad. We
will
be willing to reactualize your husband. You won't actually meet him again, of course, but he will be alive—so long as you cooperate, and you will, you know.”

I glared at the two Schitts.

“I will never help you, as long as I have breath in my lungs.”

Schitt-Hawse's eyelid twitched.

“Oh, you'll help us, Next—if not for Landen, then for your child. Yes, we know about that. We'll leave you for now. And you needn't bother looking for any books in here to pull your vanishing trick—we made
quite
sure there were none!”

He smiled again and stepped out of the vault. The door slammed shut with a reverberating boom that shook me to the core. I sat down on one of the chairs, put my head in my hands and cried tears of frustration, anger—and loss.

Miss Havisham's extraction of Thursday from the Goliath vault is the stuff that legends are built on. The thing was, not only had no one ever done it before, no one had even
thought
of doing it before. It put them both on the map and earned Havisham her eighth cover on the Jurisfiction trade paper,
Movable Type,
and Thursday her first. It cemented the bond between them. In the annals of Jurisfiction there were notable partnerships such as Beowulf & Sneed, Falstaff & Tiggywinkle, Voltaire & Flark. That night Havisham & Next emerged as one of the greatest pairings Jurisfiction would ever see. . . .

UNITARY AUTHORITY OF WARRINGTON CAT
,
Jurisfiction Journals

T
HE MOST NOTICEABLE THING
about being locked in a vault twelve floors below ground at the Goliath R&D lab was not the isolation, but the
silence.
There was no hum of air-conditioning, no odd snatch of conversation heard through the door, nothing. I thought about Landen, about Miss Havisham, Joffy, Miles and then the baby. What, I wondered, did Schitt-Hawse have in store for him? I got up and paced around the vault, which was lit by harsh striplights. There was a large mirror on the wall that I had to assume was some kind of watching gallery. There was a
toilet and shower in a room behind, and a bedroll and a few toiletries in a locker that someone had left out for me.

I spent twenty minutes searching the few nooks and crannies of the room, hoping to find a discarded trashy novel or something that might effect me an escape. There was nothing— not so much as a pencil shaving, let alone a pencil. I sat on the only chair, closed my eyes and tried to visualize the library and remember the description in my travelbook, and I even recited aloud the opening passage to
A Tale of Two Cities
, something I had learned at school many years ago. My bookjumping skills were nonexistent without a text to read from, but there was nothing to lose, so I tried every quote, passage and poem I had ever committed to memory from Ovid to de la Mare. When I ran out of those I switched to limericks—and ended up telling Bowden's jokes out loud. Nothing. Not so much as a flicker.

I unrolled the bedroll, lay on the floor and closed my eyes, hoping to remember Landen again and discuss the problem with him. It wasn't to be. At that moment the ring that Miss Havisham had given me grew almost unbearably hot, there was a sort of
fworpish
noise, and a figure was standing next to me.

It was Miss Havisham, and she didn't look terribly pleased. Before I could tell her how relieved I was to see her she pointed a finger at me and said: “You, young lady, are in a
lot
of trouble!”

“Tell me about it.”

This wasn't the sort of careless remark she liked to hear from me, and she certainly expected me to jump to my feet when she arrived, so she rapped me painfully on the knee with her stick.

“Ow!” I said, getting the message and rising. “Where did you spring from?”

“Havishams come and go as they please,” she replied imperiously. “Why on earth didn't you tell me?”

“I—I didn't think you'd approve of me leaping into a book
on my own—especially not Poe,” I muttered sheepishly, expecting a tirade of abuse—Vesuvius, in fact. But it didn't happen. Miss Havisham's ire was from
quite
a different direction.

“I couldn't care less about
that,
” remarked Miss Havisham haughtily. “What you do in your own time to cheap reprints is no concern of mine!”

“Oh,” I said, contemplating her stern features and trying to figure out what I
had
done wrong.

“You should have said
something!
” she said, taking another pace towards me.

“About the baby?” I stammered.

“No, idiot—about
Cardenio
!”

“
Cardenio
?”

There was a faint clank from the door as someone fiddled with the lock. Havisham's arrival, it seemed, had been observed.

“It'll be Chalk and Cheese,” I told her. “You'd better jump out of here.”

“Absolutely not!” replied Havisham. “We go together. You might be a complete and utter imbecile, but you
are
my responsibility. Trouble is, fourteen feet of concrete is slightly daunting—I'm going to have to
read
us out. Quick, pass me your travelbook!”

“They took it from me.”

The door opened and Schitt-Hawse entered; he was grinning fit to burst.

“Well, well,” he said, “lock up a bookjumper and another soon joins her!”

He took one look at Havisham's old wedding dress and put two and two together.

“Goodness! Is that . . . Miss Havisham?”

As if in answer, Havisham whipped out her small pistol and fired it in his direction. Schitt-Hawse gave a yelp and leaped back out the door, which clanged shut.

“We need a book,” said Miss Havisham grimly. “Anything will do—even a pamphlet.”

“There's nothing in here, Miss Havisham.”

She looked around.

“Are you sure? There must be
something
!”

“I've looked—there's nothing!”

Miss Havisham raised an eyebrow and looked me up and down.

“Take off your trousers, girl—and don't say ‘what?' in that impudent manner. Do as you're told.”

So I did, and Havisham turned the garment over in her fingers as she searched for something.

“There!” she cried triumphantly as the door opened and a hissing gas canister was lobbed in. I followed her gaze but she had found only—
the washing label.
I must have looked incredulous, for she said in an offended manner: “It's enough for me!” and then repeated out loud:
“Wash inside out, wash and dry separately, wash inside out, wash and dry separately . . .”

 

We surfed in on the pungent smell of washing detergent and overheated iron. The landscape was dazzling white and was without depth; my feet were firmly planted on ground, yet I could see nothing but white surrounding my shoes when I looked down, the same as the view above me and to either side. Miss Havisham, whose dirty dress seemed even more shabby than usual in the white surroundings, was looking around the lone inhabitants of this strange and empty world: five bold icons the size of garden sheds that stood neatly in a row like standing stones. There was a crude tub with the number 60 on it, an iron shape, a tumble-dryer shape and a couple of others that I wasn't too sure about. I touched the first icon, which felt warm to the touch and very comforting; they all seemed to be made of compressed cotton.

“What were you saying about
Cardenio
?” I asked, still wondering why she was so angry.

“Yes, yes,
Cardenio,
” she replied crossly, examining the large washing icons with interest. “Just how likely was it for a pristine copy of a missing play to just pop up out of the blue like that?”

“You mean,” I said, the penny finally dropping, “it's a Great Library copy?”

“Of
course
it's a library copy. That fog-headed pantaloon Snell only just reported it, and we need your help to get it back—What are these big shape things?”

“Iconographic
representations
of washing instructions,” I told her as I put my trousers back on.

“Hmm,” responded Miss Havisham. “This could be tricky. We're inside a washing label, but there are none of those in the library—we need to jump into a book which
is.
I can do it without text, but I need a target book to head for. Is there a book written about washing labels?”

“Probably,” I replied, “but I've no idea what it might be called.” I had an idea. “Does it have to be a book about washing labels?”

Havisham raised an eyebrow, so I carried on.

“Washing machine instructions
always
carry these icons, explaining what they mean.”

“Hmm,” said Miss Havisham thoughtfully. “Do
you
have a washing machine?”

Fortunately, I did—and more fortunately still, it was one of the things that had survived the sideslip. I nodded excitedly.

“Good. Now, more important, do you know the make and model?”

“Hoover Electron 1000—no!
800
Deluxe—I think.”

“Think? You
think?
You'd better be sure, girl, or you and I will be nothing more than carved names on the Boojumorial! Now. Are you
sure?”

“Yes,” I said confidently. “Hoover Electron 800 Deluxe.”

She nodded, placed her hands on the tub icon and concentrated hard, teeth clenched and her face red with the effort. I took hold of her arm, and after a moment or two in which I could feel Miss Havisham shake with exertion, we had jumped out of the washing label and into the Hoover instructions.

 

“Don't
allow the drain hose to kink as this could stop the machine from emptying,”
said a small man in a blue Hoover boiler suit standing next to a brand-new washing machine. We were standing in a sparkling clean washroom that was barely ten feet square. It had neither windows nor door—just a belfast sink, tiled floor, hot and cold inlet taps and a single plug on the wall. For furniture a bed was pushed against the corner, and next to it was a chair, table and cupboard.

“Do
remember that to start a program you must pull out the program control knob.
Sorry,” he said, “I'm being read at the moment. I'll be with you in a sec.
If you have selected white nylon, minimum iron, delicate or . . .”

“Thursday—!” said Miss Havisham, who suddenly seemed weak at the knees and whose face had turned the same color as her wedding dress. “That took quite some—”

I just managed to catch her as she collapsed; I gently laid her down on the small truckle bed.

“Miss Havisham? Are you okay?”

She patted my arm encouragingly, smiled and closed her eyes. I could see she was pleased with herself—even if the jump had worn her out.

I pulled the single blanket over her, sat on the edge of the low bed, pulled my hair tie out and rubbed my scalp. My trust in Havisham was implicit, but it was still a bit unnerving to be stuck in Hoover instructions.

“
. . . until the drum starts to rotate. Your machine will empty
and spin to complete the program. . . .
Hello!” said the man in the boiler suit. “The name's Cullards—I don't often get visitors!”

“Thursday Next,” I told him, shaking his hand. “This is Miss Havisham of Jurisfiction.”

“Goodness!” said Mr. Cullards, scratching his shiny bald head and smiling impishly. “Jurisfiction, eh? You
are
off the beaten track. The only visitor I've had was—excuse me—
Control setting D: Whites economy, lightly soiled cotton or linen articles which are color-fast to boiling
—was the time we had a new supplement regarding woolens—but that would have been six or seven months ago. Where
does
the time go?”

He seemed a cheerful enough chap. He thought for a moment and then said: “Would you like a cup of tea?”

I thanked him and he put the kettle on.

“So what's the news?” asked Mr. Cullards, rinsing out his one and only cup. “Any idea when the new washing machines are due out?”

“I'm sorry,” I said, “I have no idea—”

“I'm about ready to move on to something a bit more modern. I started on vacuum cleaner instructions but was promoted to Hoovermatic T5004, then transferred to the Electron 800 after twin-tub obsolescence. They asked me to take care of the 1100 Deluxe, but I told them I'd sooner wait until the Logic 1300 came out.”

I looked around at the small room.

“Don't you ever get bored?”

“Not at all!” said Cullards, pouring the hot water into the teapot. “Once I've put in my ten years I'm eligible to apply for work in
all
domestic appliance instructions: food mixers, liquidizers, microwaves—who knows, if I work
really
hard I could make it into television or wireless.
That's
the future for an ambitious manual worker. Milk and sugar?”

“Please.”

He leaned closer.

“Management have this idea that only young 'uns should do Sound & Vision instructions, but they're wrong. Most of the kids in VCR manuals barely do six months in Walkmans before they're transferred. It's little wonder no one can understand them.”

“I never thought of that before,” I confessed.

We chatted for the next half hour. He told me he had begun French and German classes so he could apply for work in multilingual instructions, then confided in me his fondest feelings for Tabitha Doehooke, who worked for Kenwood Mixers. We were just talking about the sociological implications of labor-saving devices within the kitchen and how they related to the women's movement when Miss Havisham stirred.