A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (75 page)

BOOK: A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5
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I smiled. “I don't think so, Arnold—and I don't think you should ask me—I'm Jurisfiction.”

“Oh,” said Arnold, looking pale all of a sudden. He bit his lip and gave such an imploring look that I almost laughed.

“Don't sweat,” I told him, “I won't report it.”

He sighed a deep sigh of relief, muttered his thanks, remounted his motorbike and drove off in a jerky fashion, narrowly missing the mailboxes at the top of the track.

The interior of the flying boat was lighter and more airy than I had imagined, but it smelt a bit musty. Mary was mistaken; she had not been halfway through the craft's conversion—it was more like one-tenth. The walls were half-paneled with pine
tongue-and-groove, and rock-wool insulation stuck out untidily along with unused electrical cables. There was room for two floors within the boat's cavernous hull, the downstairs a large, open-plan living room with a couple of old sofas pointing towards a television set. I tried to switch it on but it was dead—there was no TV in the BookWorld unless called for in the narrative. Much of what I could see around me were merely props, necessary for the chapter in which Jack Spratt visits the Sunderland to discuss the case. On the mantelpiece above a small wood-burning stove were pictures of Mary from her days at the police training college, and another from when she was promoted to detective sergeant.

I opened a door that led into a small kitchenette. Attached to the fridge was the précis of
Caversham Heights
. I flicked through it. The sequence of events was pretty much as I remembered from my first reading in the Well, although it seemed that Mary had overstated her role in some of the puzzle-solving areas. I put the précis down, found a bowl and filled it with water for Pickwick, took her egg from my bag and laid it on the sofa, where she quickly set about turning it over and tapping it gently with her beak. I went forward and discovered a bedroom where the nose turret would have been and climbed a narrow aluminum ladder to the flight deck directly above. This was the best view in the house, the large greenhouselike Perspex windows affording a vista of the lake. The massive control wheels were set in front of two comfortable chairs, and facing them and ahead of a tangled mass of engine control levers was a complex panel of broken and faded instruments. To my right I could see the one remaining engine, looking forlorn, the propeller blades streaked with bird droppings.

Behind the pilots' seats, where the flight engineer would have sat, there was a desk with reading lamp, footnoterphone and typewriter. On the bookshelf were mainly magazines of a police nature and lots of forensic textbooks. I walked through a narrow doorway and found a pleasant bedroom. The headroom was not overgenerous, but it was cozy and dry and was paneled in pine with a porthole above the double bed. Behind the bedroom was a
storeroom, a hot-water boiler, stacks of wood and a spiral staircase. I was just about to go downstairs when I heard someone speak from the living room below.

“What do you think that is?”

The voice had an empty ring to it and was neuter in its inflection—I couldn't tell if it was male or female.

I stopped and instinctively pulled my automatic from my shoulder holster. Mary lived alone—or so it had said in the book. As I moved slowly downstairs, I heard another voice answer the first: “I think it's a bird of some sort.”

The second voice was no more distinctive than the first, and indeed, if the second voice had not been
answering
the first, I might have thought they belonged to the same person.

As I rounded the staircase, I saw two figures standing in the middle of the room staring at Pickwick, who stared back, courageously protecting her egg from behind a sofa.

“Hey!” I said, pointing my gun in their direction. “Hold it right there!”

The two figures looked up and stared at me without expression from features that were as insipid and muted as their voices. Because of their equal blandness it was impossible to tell them apart. Their arms hung limply by their sides, exhibiting no body language. They might have been angry or curious or worried or elated—but I couldn't tell.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We are nobody,” replied the one on the left.

“Everyone is
someone,
” I replied.

“Not altogether correct,” said the one on the right. “We have a code number but nothing more. I am TSI-1404912-A and this is TSI-1404912-C.”

“What happened to B?”

“Taken by a grammasite last Tuesday.”

I lowered my gun. Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a
human canvas without paint—blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles—nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not
leading
characters. These parts usually—but not always—went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality. Huckleberry Finn, Tess and Anna Karenina were all A-grades, but then so were Mr. Hyde, Hannibal Lecter and Professor Moriarty. I looked at the ungraded Generics again. Murderers or heroes? It was impossible to tell how they would turn out. Still, at this stage of their development they would be harmless. I reholstered my automatic.

“You're Generics, right?”

“Indeed,” they said in unison.

“What are you doing here?”

“You remember the craze for minimalism?” asked the one on the right.

“Yes?” I replied, moving closer to stare at their blank faces curiously. There was a lot about the Well that I was going to have to get used to. They were harmless enough—but decidedly creepy. Pickwick was still hiding behind the sofa.

“It was caused by the 1982 character shortage,” said the one on the left. “Vikram Seth is planning a large book in the next few years and I don't think the Well wants to be caught out again—we're being manufactured and then sent to stay in unpublished novels until we are called into service.”

“Sort of stockpiled, you mean?”

“I'd prefer the word
billeted,
” replied the one on the left, the slight indignation indicating that it wouldn't be without a personality forever.

“How long have you been here?”

“Two months,” replied the one on the right. “We are awaiting placement at St. Tabularasa's Generic College for basic character training. I live in the spare bedroom in the tail.”

“So do I,” added the one on the left. “Likewise.”

I paused for a moment. “O-kay. Since we all have to live together, I had better give you names. You,” I said, pointing a finger at the one on the right, “are henceforth called
ibb
. You”—I pointed to the other—“are called
obb
.”

I pointed at them again in case they had missed it as neither made any sign of comprehending what I'd said—or even hearing it.


You
are ibb, and
you
are obb.”

I paused. Something didn't sound right about their names but I couldn't place it.

“ibb,” I said to myself, then: “obb. ibb. ibb-obb. Does that sound strange to you?”

“No capitals,” said obb. “We don't get capitalized until we start school—we didn't expect a name so soon, either. Can we keep it?”

“It's a gift from me,” I told them.

“I am ibb,” said ibb, as if to make the point.

“And I am obb,” said obb.

“And I'm Thursday,” I told them, offering my hand. They shook it in turn slowly and without emotion. I could see that this pair weren't going to be a huge bundle of fun.

“And that's Pickwick.”

They looked at Pickwick, who plocked quietly, came out from behind the sofa, settled herself on her egg and pretended to go to sleep.

“Well,” I announced, clapping my hands together, “does anyone know how to cook? I'm not very good at it and if you don't want to eat beans on toast for the next year, you had better start to learn. I'm standing in for Mary, and if you don't get in my way, I won't get in yours. I go to bed late and wake up early. I have a husband who doesn't exist and I'm going to have a baby later this year so I might get a little cranky—and overweight. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said the one on the left. “Which one of us is obb, did you say?”

I unpacked my few things in the small room behind the flight deck. I had sketched a picture of Landen from memory and I placed it on the bedside table, staring at it for a moment. I missed him dreadfully and wondered, for the umpteenth time, whether perhaps I shouldn't be here hiding, but out
there,
in my own world, trying to get him back. Trouble was, I'd tried that and made a complete pig's ear of it—if it hadn't have been for Miss Havisham's timely rescue, I would still be locked up in a Goliath vault somewhere. With our child growing within me I had decided that flight was not a coward's option but a sensible one—I would stay here until the baby was born. I could then plan my return, and following that, Landen's.

I went downstairs and explained to obb the rudiments of cooking, which were as alien to it as having a name. Fortunately I found an old copy of
Mrs. Beeton's Complete Housekeeper,
which I told obb to study, half-jokingly, as research. Three hours later it had roasted a perfect leg of lamb with all the trimmings. I had discovered one thing about Generics already: dull and uninteresting they may be—but they learn fast.

2.
Inside
Caversham Heights

Book/YGIO/1204961/:
Title:
Caversham Heights
. UK, 1976, 90,000 words.
Genre:
Detective fiction.
Book Operating System:
BOOK V7.2.
Grammasite Infestation:
1 (one) nesting pair of Parenthiums (protected).
Plot:
Routine detective thriller with stereotypical detective Jack Spratt. Set in Reading (England), the plot (such as it is) revolves around a drug czar hoping to muscle in on Reading's seedy underworld. Routine and unremarkable,
Caversham Heights
represents all the worst aspects of amateur writing. Flat characters, unconvincing police work and a pace so slow that snails pass it in the night.
Recommendation:
Unpublishable. Suggest book to be broken up for salvage at soonest available opportunity.
Current Status:
Awaiting Council of Genres Book Inspectorate's report before ordering demolition.

Library Subbasement Gazetteer,
1982, volume CLXI

I
DISCUSSED THE RUDIMENTS
of breakfast with ibb and obb the following morning. I told them that cereal traditionally came
before
the bacon and eggs, but that toast and coffee had no fixed place within the meal; they had problems with the fact that marmalade was almost exclusively the preserve of breakfast, and I was just trying to explain the technical possibilities of dippy egg fingers when a copy of
The Toad
dropped on the mat. The only news story was about some sort of drug-related gang warfare in Reading. It was part of the plot in
Caversham Heights
and reminded me that sooner or later—and quite possibly sooner—I
would be expected to take on the mantle of Mary as part of the Character Exchange Program. I had another careful read of the précis, which gave me a good idea of the plot chapter by chapter, but no precise dialogue or indication as to what I should be doing, or when. I didn't have to wonder very long as a knock at the door revealed an untidy man wearing a hat named Wyatt.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, apologizing for the misrelated grammatical construction almost immediately, “Wyatt is
my
name, not the hat's.”

“I kind of figured that,” I replied.

Wooden and worn with use, he was holding a clipboard.

“Oh, bother!” he said in the manner of someone who had just referred to George Eliot as “he” in a room full of English professors. “I've done it again!”

“Really, I don't mind,” I repeated. “What can I do for you?”

“You're very kind. As a Character Exchange Program member, I would like to ask you to get yourself into Reading.” He stopped and his shoulders sagged. “No, I'm
not
the Character Exchange Program member—you are. And
you
need to get into Reading.”

“Sure. Do you have an address for me?”

Dog-eared and grubby, he handed me a note from his clipboard.

“Don't worry,” I said before he could apologize again, “I understand.”

His condition was almost certainly permanent, and since I didn't seem to care that much, he regained some confidence.

“Despite the ten-year demolition order hanging over us,” he continued, “you should try and give it your best. The last Character Exchanger didn't take it seriously at all. Had to send him dusty and covered in asphalt on the road out of here.”

He raised an eyebrow quizzically.

“I won't let you down,” I assured him.

He thanked me, and small, brown and furry, the man with the hat named Wyatt raised it and vanished.

I took Mary's car and drove into Reading across the M4, which seemed as busy as it was back home; I used the same road myself when traveling between Swindon and London. Only when I was approaching the junction at the top of Burghfield road did I realize there were, at most, only a half dozen or so different vehicles on the roads. The vehicle that first drew my attention to this strange phenomenon was a large, white truck with
Dr. Spongg Footcare Products
painted on the side. I saw three in under a minute, all with an identical driver dressed in a blue boilersuit and flat cap. The next most obvious vehicle was a red VW Beetle driven by a young lady, then a battered blue Morris Marina with an elderly man at the wheel. By the time I had drawn up outside the scene of
Caversham Heights
' first murder, I had counted forty-three white trucks, twenty-two red Beetles and sixteen identically battered Morris Marinas, not to mention several green Ford Escorts and a brace of white Chevrolets. It was obviously a limitation within the text and nothing more, so I hurriedly parked, read Mary's notes again to make sure I knew what I had to do, took a deep breath and walked across to the area that had been taped off. A few uniformed police officers were milling around. I showed my pass and ducked under the
Police: Do Not Cross
tape.

The yard was shaped as an oblong, fifteen feet wide and about twenty feet long, surrounded by a high redbrick wall with crumbling mortar. A large, white SOCO tent was over the scene, and a forensic pathologist, dictating notes into a tape recorder, was kneeling next to a well-described corpse.

“Hullo!” said a jovial voice close by. I turned to see a large man in a mackintosh grinning at me.

“Detective Sergeant Mary,” I told him obediently. “Transferred here from Basingstoke.”

“You don't have to worry about all that
yet
.” He smiled. “The story is with Jack at the moment—he's meeting Officer Tibbit on the street outside. My name's DCI Briggs and I'm your friendly yet long-suffering boss in this little caper. Crusty and prone to
outbursts of temper yet secretly supportive, I will have to suspend Jack at least once before the story is over.”

“How do you do?” I spluttered.

“Excellent!” said Briggs, shaking my hand gratefully. “Mary told me you're with Jurisfiction. Is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Any news about when the Council of Genres Book Inspectorate will be in?” asked Briggs. “It would be a help to know. You've heard about the demolition order, I take it?”

“Council of Genres?” I echoed, trying not to make my ignorance show. “I'm sorry. I've not spent that much time in the BookWorld.”

“An Outlander?” replied Briggs, eyes wide in wonderment. “Here, in
Caversham Heights
?”

“Yes, I'm—”

“Tell me, what do waves look like when they crash on the shore?”

“Who's an Outlander?” echoed the pathologist, a middle-aged Indian woman who suddenly leapt to her feet and stared at me intently. “You?”

“Y-es,” I admitted.

“I'm Dr. Singh,” explained the pathologist, shaking my hand vigorously. “I'm matter-of-fact, apparently without humor, like cats and people who like cats, don't suffer fools, yet on occasion I do exhibit a certain warmth. Tell me, do you think I'm anything like a
real
pathologist?”

“Of course,” I answered, trying to think of her brief appearances in the book.

“You see,” she went on with a slightly melancholic air, “I've never seen a
real
pathologist and I'm really not sure what I'm meant to do.”

“You're doing fine,” I assured her.

“What about me?” asked Briggs. “Do you think I need to develop more as a character? Am I like all those
real
people you rub shoulders with, or am I a bit one-dimensional?”

“Well—”

“I knew it!” he cried unhappily. “It's the hair, isn't it? Do you think it should be shorter? Longer? What about having a bizarre character trait? I've been learning the trombone—that would be unusual, yes?”

“Someone said there was an Outlander in the book!” interrupted a uniformed officer, one of a pair who had just walked into the yard. “I'm Unnamed Police Officer No. 1; this is my colleague, Unnamed Police Officer No. 2. Can I ask a question about the Outland?”

“Sure.”

“What's the point of alphabet soup?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you sure you're from the Outland?” he asked suspiciously. “Then tell me this: Why is there no singular for
scampi
?”

“I'm not sure.”

“You're
not
from the Outland,” said Unnamed Police Officer No. 1 sadly. “You should be ashamed of yourself, lying and raising our hopes like that!”

“Very well,” I replied, covering my eyes, “I'll prove it to you. Speak to me in turn but leave off your speech designators.”

“Okay,” said Unnamed Police Officer No. 1. “Who is this talking?”

“And who is this?” added Dr. Singh.

“I said leave
off
your speech designators. Try again.”

“It's harder than you think,” sighed Unnamed Police Officer No. 1. “Okay, here goes.”

There was a pause.

“Which one of us is talking now?”

“And who am I?”

“Mrs. Singh first, Unnamed Police Officer No. 1 second. Was I correct?”

“Amazing!” murmured Mrs. Singh. “How do you do that?”

“I can recognize your voices. I have a sense of smell, too.”

“No kidding? Do you know anyone in publishing?”

“None who would help. My husband is, or was, an author,
but his contacts wouldn't know me from Eve at present. I'm a SpecOps officer; I don't have much to do with contemporary fiction.”

“SpecOps?” queried UPO No. 2. “What's that?”

“We're going to be scrapped, you know,” interrupted Briggs, “unless we can get a publisher.”

“We could be broken down into
words,
” added UPO No. 1 in a hushed tone, “cast into the Text Sea; and I have a wife and two kids—or at least, in my backstory I do.”

“I can't help you,” I told them, “I'm not even—”

“Places, please!” yelled Briggs so suddenly I jumped.

The pathologist and the two unnamed officers both hurried back to their places and awaited Jack, whom I could hear talking to someone in the house.

“Good luck,” murmured Briggs from the side of his mouth as he motioned me to sit on a low wall. “I'll prompt you if you dry.”

“Thanks.”

DCI Briggs was sitting on a low wall with a plainclothes policewoman who busied herself taking notes and did not look up. Briggs stood as Jack entered and looked at his watch in an unsubtle way. Jack answered the unasked question in the defensive, which he soon realized was a mistake.

“I'm sorry, sir, I came here as quick as I could.”

Briggs grunted and waved a hand in the direction of the corpse.

“It looks like he died from gunshot wounds,” he said grimly. “Discovered dead at eight forty-seven this morning.”

“Anything else I need to know?” asked Spratt.

“A couple of points. First, the deceased is the nephew of crime boss Angel DeFablio, so I wanted someone good with the press in case the media decide to have a bonanza. Second, I'm giving you this job as a favor. You're not exactly first seed with the seventh floor at the moment. There are some people who want to see you take a fall—and I don't want that to happen.”

“Is there a third point?”

“No one else is available.”

“I preferred it when there were only two.”

“Listen, Jack,” Briggs went on. “You're a good officer, if a little sprung-loaded at times, and I want you on my team without any mishaps.”

“Is this where I say thank you?”

“You do. Mop it up nice and neat and give me an initial report as soon as you can. Okay?”

Briggs nodded in the direction of the young lady who had been waiting patiently.

“Jack, I want you to meet Thurs—I mean, DS Mary Jones.”

“Hello,” said Jack.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” said the young woman.

“And you. Who are you working with?”

“Next—I mean
Jones
is your new detective sergeant,” said Briggs, beginning to sweat for some inexplicable reason. “Transferred with an A-one record from Swindon.”

“Basingstoke,” corrected Mary.

“Sorry.
Basingstoke
.”

“No offense to DS Jones, sir, but I was hoping for Butcher, Spooner or—”

“Not possible, Jack,” said Briggs in the tone of voice that made arguing useless. “Well, I'm off. I'll leave you here with, er—”

“Jones.”

“Yes, Jones, so you can get acquainted. Remember, I need that report as soon as possible. Got it?”

Jack did indeed get it and Briggs departed.

He shivered in the cold and looked at the young DS again.

“Mary Jones, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What have you found out so far?”

She dug in her pocket for a notebook, couldn't find it, so counted the points off on her fingers instead.

“Deceased's name is Sonny DeFablio.”

There was a pause. Jack didn't say anything, so Jones, now slightly startled, continued as though he had.

“Time of death? Too early to tell. Probably three
A
.
M
. last night, give or take an hour. We'll know more when we get the corpse. Gun? We'll know when . . .”

“. . . Jack, are you okay?”

He had sat down wearily and was staring at the ground, head in hands.

I looked around, but both Dr. Singh, her assistants and the unnamed officers were busily getting on with their parts, unwilling, it seemed, to get embroiled—or perhaps they were just embarrassed.

“I can't do this anymore,” muttered Jack.

“Sir,” I persisted, trying to ad-lib, “do you want to see the body or can we remove it?”

“What's the use?” sobbed the crushed protagonist. “No one is reading us; it doesn't matter.”

I placed my hand on his shoulder.

“I've
tried
to make it more interesting,” he sobbed, “but nothing seems to work. My wife won't speak to me, my job's on the line, drugs are flooding into Reading and if I don't make the narrative even remotely readable, then we all get demolished and there's nothing left at all except an empty hole on the bookshelf and the memory of a might-have-been in the head of the author.”

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