A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (87 page)

“What about us?” wailed Linton, coughing and on the verge of tears. “We'll be reduced to text!”

“Best thing for all of you!” growled Heathcliff. “And I'll be there at the shoreline, ready to rejoice at your last strangled cry as you dip beneath the waves!”

“And me?” asked Catherine.

“You will come with me.” Heathcliff smiled, softening. “You and I will live again in a modern novel, without all these trappings of Victorian rectitude. I thought we could reside in a spy thriller somewhere, go shopping at Ikea and have a boxer puppy with one ear that goes down—”

There was a loud detonation and the front door exploded inwards in a cloud of wood splinters and dust. Havisham pushed Heathcliff to the ground and laid herself across him, yelling, “Take cover!”

She fired her small pistol at a masked man who jumped through the smoking doorway firing a machine gun. Havisham's bullet struck home and the figure crumpled in a heap. One of Heathcliff's two minders took rounds in the neck and chest from the first assailant, but the second minder pulled out his own submachine gun and pressed himself against the wall. Linton fainted on the spot, quickly followed by Isabella and Edgar. At least it stopped them screaming. I drew my gun and fired along with the minder and Havisham as another masked assassin came in the door; we got him, but one of his bullets caught the second bodyguard in the head, and he dropped lifeless to the flags.

I crawled across to Havisham and heard Heathcliff whimper, “Help me! Don't let them kill me! I don't want to die!”

“Shut up!” hissed Havisham, and Heathcliff was instantly quiet. I looked around. His agent was cowering under a briefcase, and the rest of the cast were hiding beneath the oak table. There was a pause.

“What's going on?” I hissed.

“ProCath attack,” murmured Havisham, reloading her pistol in the sudden quiet, “support of the young Catherine and hatred of Heathcliff runs deep in the BookWorld; usually its only a lone gunman—I've never seen anything this well planned before. I'm going to jump out with Heathcliff; I'll be back for you straightaway.”

She mumbled a few words but nothing happened. She tried them again but still nothing.

“The devil take them!” she muttered, pulling her mobilefootnoterphone from the folds of her wedding dress. “They must be using a textual sieve.”

“What's a textual sieve?”

“I don't know—it's never fully explained.”

She looked at the mobilefootnoterphone and tossed it aside. “Blast! No signal. Where's the nearest footnoterphone?”

“In the kitchen,” replied Nelly Dean, “next to the breadbasket.”

“We have to get word to the Bellman. Thursday, I want you to go to the kitchen—”

But she never got to finish her sentence because a barrage of machine-gun fire struck the house, decimating the windows and shutters. The curtains danced as they were shredded, the plaster erupting off the wall as the shots slammed into it. We kept our heads down as Catherine screamed, Linton woke up only to faint again, Hindley took a swig from a hip flask and Heathcliff convulsed with fear beneath us. After about five minutes the firing stopped. Dust hung lazily in the air and we were covered with plaster, shards of glass and wood chips.

“Havisham!” came a subdued voice on a bullhorn from outside. “We wish you no harm! Just surrender Heathcliff and we'll leave you alone!”

“No!” cried the older Catherine, who had crawled across to us and was trying to clasp Heathcliff's head in her hands. “Heathcliff, don't leave me!”

“I have no intention of doing any such thing,” he said in a
muffled voice, nose pressed hard into the flags by Havisham's weight. “Havisham, I hope you remember your orders.”

“Send out Heathcliff and we will spare you and your apprentice!” yelled the bullhorn again. “Stand in our way and you'll both be terminated!”

“Do they mean it?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” replied Havisham grimly. “A group of ProCaths attempted to hijack
Madame Bovary
last year to force the Council to relinquish Heathcliff.”

“What happened?”

“The ones who survived were reduced to text, but it hasn't stopped the ProCath movement. Do you think you can get to the footnoterphone?”

“Sure—I mean, yes, Miss Havisham.”

I crawled off towards the kitchen.

“We'll give you two minutes,” said the voice into the bullhorn again. “After that, we're coming in.”

“I have a better deal,” yelled Havisham.

There was a pause.

“And that is?” came the voice on the bullhorn.

“Leave now and I will be merciful when I find you.”

“I think,” replied the voice on the bullhorn, “that we'll stick to
my
plan. You have one minute forty-five seconds.”

I reached the doorway of the kitchen, which had been as devastated as the living room. Flour and beans from broken storage jars were strewn across the floor, and a flurry of snowflakes was blowing in through the windows. I found the footnoterphone; it had been riddled with machine-gun fire. I cursed and went to look out the pantry window. I could see two of them, sitting in the snow, weapons ready. I dashed back to Havisham.

“Well?”

“Footnoterphone destroyed, and two ProCaths at the back that I could see.”

“And at least three at the front,” she added, snapping her pistol shut. “I'm open to suggestions.”

“How about giving them Heathcliff?” came a chorus of voices.

“
Other
than that?”

“I can try and get behind them,” I muttered, “if you give me covering fire—”

I was interrupted by an unearthly cry of terror from outside, followed by a sort of crunching noise, then another cry and sporadic machine-gun fire. There was a large thump and another shot, then a shout, then the ProCaths at the back started to open fire. But not at the house—at some unseen menace. We heard two more cries of terror, a few more gunshots, a slow tearing noise, then silence.

I got up and peered cautiously from the door. There was nothing outside except the soft snow, disturbed occasionally by dinner-plate-sized footprints.

We found only one complete body, tossed onto the roof of the pigsty.

“Look at this,” said Miss Havisham from where she was standing at the corner of the barn. It looked as though one of the ProCaths had been stationed there by the large quantity of spent cartridges, but what Havisham was actually pointing out were the four freshly dug grooves in the masonry, spaced about six inches apart.

“It looks like . . .
claw marks,
” I murmured.

“Must have caught the corner of the barn midswipe,” replied Miss Havisham thoughtfully, peering closer at the damaged stonework.

“It was Big Martin,” I said with a shiver. “Some of his friends had me pegged for dinner down on the twenty-second floor yesterday.”

“Then we should be glad Big Martin got to this bunch first. Mind you, I've heard rumors that the Big M was into classics—he might have been doing us a favor.”

We turned and walked through the snow back to the house.

“Who is Big Martin?” I asked.

“Less of a
who
and more of a
what,
” replied Miss Havisham, tramping her feet on the doorstep to get rid of the snow. “Even the Glatisant is nervous of Big Martin. He's a law unto himself. I'd watch your back and eat plenty of cashews.”

“Cashews?”

“Big Martin
loathes
them. Unusually for a Book Fiend he has a sense of smell—one whiff and he's off.”

“I'll remember that.”

We returned to where the cast of
Wuthering Heights
were dusting themselves down. Joseph was muttering incomprehensibly to himself and trying to block the windows up with blankets.

“Well,” said Miss Havisham, clapping her hands together, “that was an exciting session, wasn't it?”

“I am still leaving this appalling book,” retorted Heathcliff, who was back on full obnoxious form again.

“No you're
not,
” replied Havisham.

“You just try and stop—”

Havisham, who was fed up with pussyfooting around and hated men like Heathcliff with a vengeance, grasped him by the collar and pinned his head to the table with her pistol pressed painfully into his neck.

“Listen here,” she said, her voice quavering with anger, “to me, you are worthless scum. Thank your lucky stars I am loyal to Jurisfiction. Many others in my place would have handed you over. I could kill you now and no one would be any the wiser.”

Heathcliff looked at me imploringly.

“I was outside when I heard the shot,” I told him.

“So were we!” exclaimed the rest of the cast eagerly, excepting Catherine Earnshaw, who simply scowled.

“Perhaps I
should
do it!” growled Havisham again. “Perhaps it would be a mercy. I could make it look like an accident!”

“No!” cried Heathcliff in a contrite tone. “I've changed my mind. I'm going to stay right here and just be plain old Mr. Heathcliff for ever and ever.”

Havisham slowly released her grasp. “Right,” she said,
switching her pistol to
safe
and regaining her breath, “I think that pretty much concludes this session of Jurisfiction rage counseling. What did we learn?”

The cocharacters all stared at her, dumbstruck.

“Good. Same time next week, everyone?”

Generics are the chameleons of the Well. In general they were trained to do specific jobs but could be upgraded if the need arose. Occasionally a Generic would jump up spontaneously within the grade, but to jump from one grade to another without external help, they said, was impossible. From what I would learn,
impossible
was a word that should not be bandied about the Well without due thought—imagination being what it is, anything could happen—and generally did.

THURSDAY NEXT
,
The Jurisfiction Chronicles

B
IG MARTIN HAD
made a mess of the ProCath fanatics who had attacked us. The leader was identified by his dental records—why he had them on him, no one was quite sure. He had been a D-3 crew member in
On the Beach
and was replaced within twenty-four hours.
Wuthering Heights
was repaired within a few lines, and because Havisham had been holding the rage-counseling session
between
chapters, no one reading the book noticed anything. In fact, the only evidence of the attack now to be seen in the book was Hareton's shotgun, which exploded accidentally in chapter 32, most likely as a result of a ricocheting bullet damaging the latching mechanism.

“How was your day today?” asked Gran as I walked back on board the Sunderland.

“Very . . .
expositional
to begin with,” I said, falling into a sofa
and tickling Pickwick, who had come over all serious and matronly, “but it ended quite dramatically.”

“Did you have to be rescued again?”

“Yes and no.”

“The first few days in a new job are always a bit shaky,” said Gran. “Why do you have to work for Jurisfiction anyway?”

“It was part of the Exchange Program deal.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “Would you like me to make you an omelette?”

“Anything.”

“Right. I'll need you to crack the eggs and mix them and get me down the saucepan and . . .”

I heaved myself up and went through to the small galley, where the fridge was full of food, as always.

“Where's ibb and obb?” I asked.

“Out, I think,” replied Gran. “Would you make us both a cup of tea while you're up?”

“Sure. I still can't remember Landen's second name, Gran—I've been trying all day.”

Gran came into the galley and sat on a kitchen stool, which happened to be right in the way of everything. She smelt of sherry, but for the life of me I didn't know where she hid it.

“But you remember what he looks like?”

I stopped what I was doing and stared out of the kitchen porthole.

“Yes,” I replied slowly, “every line, every mole, every expression—but I still remember him dying in the Crimea.”

“That
never
happened, my dear. But the fact—I should use a bigger bowl if I were you—you can remember his features proves he's not gone any more than yesterday. I should use butter and not oil; and if you have any mushrooms, you could chop them up with a bit of onion and bacon—do you have any bacon?”

“Probably. You still didn't tell me how you managed to find your way here, Gran.”

“That's easily explained. Tell me, did you manage to get a list of the dullest books you could find?”

Granny Next was 108 years old and was convinced that she couldn't die until she had read the ten most boring classics. On an earlier occasion I had suggested
Fairie Queene
,
Paradise Lost
,
Ivanhoe
,
Moby-Dick
,
A la recherche du temps perdu
,
Pamela
and
A Pilgrim's Progress
. She had read them all and many others but was still with us. Trouble is, “boring” is about as hard to quantify as “pretty,” so I really had to think of the ten books that
she
would find most boring.

“What about
Silas Marner
?”

“Only boring in parts—like
Hard Times
. You're going to have to do a little better than that—and if I were you, I'd use a bigger pan—but on a lower heat.”

“Right,” I said, beginning to get annoyed, “perhaps you'd like to cook? You've done most of the work so far.”

“No, no,” replied Gran, completely unfazed, “you're doing fine.”

There was a commotion at the door and Ibb came in, followed closely by Obb.

“Congratulations!” I called out.

“What for?” asked Ibb, who no longer looked identical to Obb. For a start, Obb was at least four inches taller and its hair was darker than Ibb's, which was beginning to go blond.

“For becoming capitalized.”

“Oh, yes,” enthused Ibb, “it's amazing what a day at St. Tabularasa's will do for one. Tomorrow we'll finish our gender training, and by the end of the week we'll be streamed into character groups.”

“I want to be a male mentor figure,” said Obb. “Our tutor said that sometimes we can have a choice of what we do and where we go. Are you making supper?”

“No,” I replied, testing their sarcasm response, “I'm giving my pet egg heat therapy.”

Ibb laughed—which was a good sign, I thought—and went
off with Obb to practice whimsical retorts in case either of them was given a posting as a humorous sidekick.

“Teenagers,” said Granny Next. “Tch. I better make it a bigger omelette. Take over, would you? I'm going to have a rest.”

We all sat down to eat twenty minutes later. Obb had brushed its hair into a parting and Ibb was wearing one of Gran's gingham dresses.

“Hoping to be female?” I asked, passing Ibb a plate.

“Yes,” replied Ibb, “but not one like you. I'd like to be more feminine and a bit hopeless—the sort that screams a lot when they get into trouble and has to be rescued.”

“Really?” I asked, handing Gran the salad. “Why?”

Ibb shrugged. “I don't know. I just like the idea of being rescued a lot, that's all—being carried off in big, strong arms sort of . . .
appeals
. I thought I could have the plot explained to me a lot, too—but I should have a few good lines of my own, be quite vulnerable, yet end up saving the day due to a sudden flash of idiot savant brilliance.”

“I think you'll have no trouble getting a placement,” I sighed, “but you seem quite specific—have you used someone in particular as a model?”

“Her!” exclaimed Ibb, drawing out a much thumbed Outland copy of
Silverscreen
from beneath the table. On the cover was none other than Lola Vavoom, being interviewed for the umpteenth time about her husbands, her denial of any cosmetic surgery and her latest film—usually in that order.

“Gran!” I said sternly. “Did you give Ibb that magazine?”

“Well—!”

“You
know
how impressionable Generics can be! Why didn't you give her a magazine with Jenny Gudgeon in it? She plays proper women—and can act, too.”

“Have you seen Ms. Vavoom in
My Sister Kept Geese
?” replied Gran indignantly. “I think you'd be surprised—she shows considerable range.”

I thought about Cordelia Flakk and her producer friend Harry Flex wanting Lola to play me in a film. The idea was too awful to contemplate.

“You were going to tell us about subtext,” said Obb, helping itself to more salad.

“Oh, yes,” I replied, a distraction from Vavoom a welcome break. “Subtext is the implied action behind the written word. Text tells the reader what the characters
say and do
but subtext tells us what they
mean and feel
. The wonderful thing about subtext is that it is common grammar, written in human experience—you can't understand it without a good working knowledge of people and how they interact. Got it?”

Ibb and Obb looked at one another. “No.”

“Okay, let me give you a simple example. At a party, a man gives a woman a drink and she takes it without answering. What's going on?”

“She isn't very polite?” suggested Ibb.

“Perhaps,” I replied, “but I was really looking for some sort of clue as to their relationship.”

Obb scratched its head and said, “She can't speak because, er, she lost her tongue in an industrial accident due to his negligence?”

“You're trying too hard. For what reason would someone not
necessarily
say ‘thank you' for something?”

“Because,” said Ibb slowly, “they know one another?”

“Good. Being handed a drink at a party by your wife, husband, girlfriend or partner, you would as likely as not just take it; if it was from a host to a guest, then you would thank them. Here's another: there is a couple walking down the road—and she is walking eight paces behind him.”

“He has longer legs?” suggested Ibb.

“No.”

“They've broken down?”

“They've had an argument,” said Obb excitedly, “and they live nearby or they would be taking their car.”

“Could be,” I responded. “Subtext tells you lots of things. Ibb, did you take the last piece of chocolate from the fridge?”

There was a pause. “No.”

“Well, because you paused, I know pretty confidently that you did.”

“Oh!” said Ibb. “I'll remember
that
.”

There was a knock at the door.

I opened it to reveal Mary's ex-beau Arnold looking very dapper in a suit and holding a small bunch of flowers. Before he had time to open his mouth, I had closed the door again.

“Ah!” I said, turning to Ibb and Obb. “This is a good opportunity to study subtext. See if you can figure out what is going on
behind
our words—and Ibb,
please
don't feed Pickwick at the table.”

I opened the door again, and Arnold, who had started to slink off, came running back.

“Oh!” he said with mock surprise. “Mary not back yet?”

“No. In fact, she probably won't be back for some time. Can I take a message?”

And I closed the door on his face again.

“Okay,” I said to Ibb and Obb, “what do you think is going on?”

“He's looking for Mary?” suggested Ibb.

“But he
knows
she's gone away,” said Obb. “He must be coming to speak to
you,
Thursday.”

“Why?”

“For a date?”

“Good. What am I saying to him?”

Ibb and Obb thought hard. “If you didn't want to see him, you'd have told him to go away, so you might be the tiniest bit interested.”

“Excellent!” I told them. “Let's see what happens next.”

I opened the door again to a confused-looking Arnold, who broke into a wide smile.

“Well,” he said, “no message for Mary—it's just—we had planned to see Willow Lodge and the Limes this evening . . .”

I turned to Ibb and Obb, who shook their heads. They didn't believe it, either.

“Well,” said Arnold slowly, “. . . perhaps
you
might like to come with me to the concert?”

I shut the door again.

“He
pretended
to have the idea about going to see Willow Lodge tonight,” said Ibb slowly and more confidently, “when in fact I think he had it planned all along that way. I think he fancies you big time.”

I opened the door again.

“I'm sorry, no,” I told him hastily, “happily married.”

“It's not a date,” exclaimed Arnold quickly, “just a lift to a concert. Here, take the ticket anyway. I've no one else to give it to; if you don't want to go, just bin it.”

I shut the door again.

“Ibb's wrong,” said Obb, “he
really
fancies you—but he's blown it by being
too
desperate—it would be hard for you to respect someone who would almost start begging.”

“Not bad,” I replied, “let's see how it turns out.”

I opened the door again and stared into Arnold's earnest eyes.

“You miss her, don't you?”

“Miss who?” asked Arnold, seemingly nonchalant.

“Denial of love!” yelled Ibb and Obb from behind me. “He doesn't really fancy you at all—he's in love with Mary and wants a date on the rebound!”

Arnold looked suspicious. “What's going on?”

“Subtext classes,” I explained, “sorry for being rude. Do you want to come in for a coffee?”

“Well, I should be going really—”

“Playing hard to get!” hooted Ibb, and Obb added quickly, “The balance of power has tipped in his favor because you've been rude to him with all that door nonsense, and now you're going to have to
insist
that he come in for coffee, even if that means being nicer to him than you originally intended!”

“Are they always like this?” inquired Arnold, stepping inside.

“They learn quick,” I observed. “That's Ibb and that's Obb. Ibb and Obb, this is Arnold.”

“Hullo!” said Arnold, thinking for a moment. “Do you Generics want to go and see Willow Lodge and the Limes?”

They looked at one another for a moment, realized they were sitting just that little bit too close and moved apart.

“Do you?” said Ibb.

“Well, only if you want to—”

“I'm easy—it's your decision.”

“Well y-es, I'd really like to.”

“Then let's go—unless you've made other plans—?”

“No, no, I haven't.”

They got up, took the tickets from Arnold and were out the door in a flash.

I laughed and went though to the galley.

“Who's the elderly woman?” asked Arnold.

“It's my Gran,” I replied, switching on the kettle and getting out the coffee.

“Is she—you know?”

“Goodness me, no! She's only asleep. She's one hundred and eight.”

“Really? Why is she dressed in this dreadful blue gingham?”

“Has been for as long as I can remember. She came here to make sure I didn't forget my husband. Sorry. That makes me sound as though I'm laboring the point, doesn't it?”