A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (9 page)

“Take no notice of the pup, ma'am! Officer Next, I'd like you to meet Mr. Meakle. Mr. Meakle, this is Officer Next.”

He was talking about the wolf. I stared at the wolf, which stared back at me with an intensity that I found disconcerting. The officer laughed like a drain and pulled away with a lurch and a squeal of tires. I had forgotten just how weird Swindon could be.

As we drove off, the Will-Speak machine came to an end, reciting the last part of its soliloquy to itself:

. . .
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, that I might see my shadow, as I pass.

There was a clicking and whirring and then the mannequin stopped abruptly, lifeless again until the next coin.

“Beautiful day,” I commented once we were under way.

“Every day is a beautiful day, Miss Next. The name's Stoker—”

He pulled out onto the Stratton bypass.

“—SpecOps-17: Vampire and Werewolf Disposal Operations. Suckers and biters, they call us. My friends call me Spike. You,” he added with a broad grin, “can call me Spike.”

By way of explanation he tapped a mallet and stake that were clipped to the mesh partition.

“What do they call you, Miss Next?”

“Thursday.”

“Pleased to meet you, Thursday.”

He proffered a huge hand that I shook gratefully. I liked him immediately. He leaned against the door pillar to get the best out of the cooling breeze and tapped a beat out on the steering wheel. A recent scratch on his neck oozed a small amount of blood.

“You're bleeding,” I observed.

Spike wiped it away with his hand.

“It's nothing. He gave me a bit of a struggle!—”

I looked in the back seat again. The wolf was sitting down, scratching its ear with a hind leg.

“—but I'm immunized against lycanthropy. Mr. Meakle just won't take his medication. Will you, Mr. Meakle?”

The wolf pricked up its ears as the last vestige of the human within him remembered his name. He started to pant in the heat. Spike went on:

“His neighbors called. All the cats in the neighborhood had gone missing; I found him rummaging in the bins behind SmileyBurger. He'll be in for treatment, morph back and be on the streets again by Friday. He has rights, they tell me. What's your posting?”

“I'm . . . ah . . . joining SpecOps-27.”

Spike laughed loudly again.

“A LiteraTec!? Always nice to meet someone as underfunded as I am. Some good faces in that office. Your chief is Victor Analogy. Don't be fooled by the gray hairs—he's as sharp as a knife. The others are all A-one Ops. A bit shiny-arsed and a mite too smart for me, but there you go. Where am I taking you?”

“The Finis Hotel.”

“First time in Swindon?”

“Sadly, no,” I replied. “It's my hometown. I was in the regular force here until '75. You?”

“Welsh Border guard for ten years. I got into some darkness at Oswestry in '79 and discovered I had a talent for this kind of shit. I trannied here from Oxford when the two depots merged. You're looking at the only Staker south of Leeds. I run my own office but it's mighty lonesome. If you know anyone handy with a mallet?—”

“I'm afraid I don't,” I replied, wondering why anyone would consciously wish to fight the supreme powers of darkness for a basic SpecOps salary, “but if I come across anyone, I'll let you know. What happened to Chesney? He ran the department when I was here last.”

A cloud crossed Spike's usually bright features and he sighed deeply.

“He was a good friend but he fell into shadows. Became a servant of the dark one. I had to hunt him down myself. The spike 'n' decap was the easy part. The tricky bit was having to tell his wife—she wasn't exactly overjoyed.”

“I guess I'd be a bit pissed off too.”

“Anyway,” continued Spike, cheering up almost immediately, “you don't have to tell me shit, but what is a good-looking SpecOps doing joining the Swindon Litera Tecs?”

“I had a spot of bother in London.”

“Ah,” replied Spike knowingly.

“I'm also looking for someone.”

“Who?”

I looked over at him and made an instant judgment call. If I could trust anyone, I could trust Spike.

“Hades.”

“Acheron? Flatline, sister. The man's toast. Crashed and burned at J-twelve on the four.”

“So we're led to believe. If you hear anything?—”

“No problem, Thursday.”

“And we can keep this between ourselves?”

He smiled.

“After staking, secrets is what I do best.”

“Hang on—”

I had caught sight of a brightly colored sports car in a second-hand car lot on the other side of the road. Spike slowed down.

“What's up?”

“I . . . er . . . need a car. Can you drop me over there?”

Spike executed an illegal U-turn, causing the following car to brake violently and slew across the road. The driver started to hurl abuse until he saw that it was a SpecOps black and white, then wisely kept quiet and drove on. I retrieved my bag.

“Thanks for the lift. I'll see you about.”

“Not if I see you first!” said Spike. “I'll see what I can dig up on your missing friend.”

“I'd appreciate it. Thanks.”

“Good-bye.”

“So long.”

“Cheerio,” said a timid-sounding voice from the back. We both turned and looked into the rear of the car. Mr. Meakle had changed back. A thin, rather pathetic-looking man was sitting in the back seat, completely naked and very muddy. His hands were clasped modestly over his genitals.

“Mr. Meakle! Welcome back!” said Spike, grinning broadly as he added in a scolding tone: “You didn't take your tablets, did you?”

Mr. Meakle shook his head miserably.

I thanked Spike again. As he drove off I could see Mr. Meakle waving to me a bit stupidly through the rear window. Spike did another U-turn, causing a second car to brake hard, and was gone.

I stared at the sports car on the front row of the lot under a banner marked
BARGAIN
. There could be no mistake. The car was definitely the one that had appeared before me in my hospital room.
And I had been driving it.
It was me who had told me to come to Swindon. It was me who had told me that Acheron wasn't dead. If I hadn't come to Swindon then I wouldn't have seen the car and wouldn't have been able to buy it. It didn't make a great deal of sense, but what little I did know was that I had to have it.

“Can I help you, madam?” asked an oily salesman who had appeared almost from nowhere, rubbing his hands nervously and sweating profusely in the heat.

“This car. How long have you had it?”

“The 356 Speedster? About six months.”

“Has it ever been up to London in that time?”

“London?” repeated the salesman, slightly puzzled. “Not at all. Why?”

“No reason. I'll take it.”

The salesman looked slightly shocked.

“Are you sure? Wouldn't you like something a little more practical? I have a good selection of Buicks which have just come in. Ex-Goliath but with low mileage, you know—”

“This one,” I said firmly.

The salesman smiled uneasily. The car was obviously at a giveaway price and they didn't stand to make a bean on it. He muttered something feeble and hurried off to get the keys.

I sat inside. The interior was spartan in the extreme. I had never thought myself very interested in cars, but this one was different. It was outrageously conspicuous with curious paintwork in red, blue and green, but I liked it immediately. The salesman returned with the keys and it started on the second turn. He did the necessary paperwork and half an hour later I drove out of the lot into the road. The car accelerated rapidly with a rasping note from the tailpipe. Within a couple of hundred yards the two of us were inseparable.

. . . I was born on a Thursday, hence the name. My brother was born on a Monday and they called him Anton—go figure. My mother was called Wednesday but was born on a Sunday—I don't know why—and my father had no name at all—his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard after he went rogue. To all intents and purposes he didn't exist at all. It didn't matter. He was always Dad to me . . .

THURSDAY NEXT
—
A Life in SpecOps

I
TOOK
my new car for a drive in the countryside with the top down; the rushing air was a cool respite from the summer heat. The familiar landscape had not changed much; it was still as beautiful as I remembered. Swindon, on the other hand, had changed a great deal. The town had spread outward and up. Light industry went outward, financial glassy towers in the center went up. The residential area had expanded accordingly; the countryside was just that much farther from the center of town.

It was evening when I pulled up in front of a plain semidetached house in a street that contained forty or fifty just like it. I flipped up the hood and locked the car. This was where I had grown up; my bedroom was the window above the front door.
The house had aged. The painted window frames had faded and the pebbledash facing seemed to be coming away from the wall in several areas. I pushed open the front gate with some difficulty as there was a good deal of resistance behind it, and then closed it again with a similar amount of heaving and sweating— a task made more difficult by the assortment of dodos who had gathered eagerly around to see who it was and then
plock
ed excitedly when they realized it was someone vaguely familiar.

“Hello, Mordacai!” I said to the oldest, who dipped and bobbed in greeting. They all wanted to be made a fuss of after that, so I stayed awhile and tickled them under their chins as they searched my pockets inquisitively for any sign of marshmallows, something that dodos find particularly irresistible.

My mother opened the door to see what the fuss was about and ran up the path to meet me. The dodos wisely scattered, as my mother can be dangerous at anything more than a fast walk. She gave me a long hug. I returned it gratefully.

“Thursday!—” she said, her eyes glistening. “Why didn't you tell us you were coming?”

“It was a surprise, Mum. I've got a posting in town.”

She had visited me in hospital several times and bored me in a delightfully distracting manner with all the minutiae of Margot Vishler's hysterectomy and the Women's Federation gossip.

“How's the arm?”

“It can be a bit stiff sometimes and when I sleep on it, it goes completely numb. Garden's looking nice. Can I come in?”

My mother apologized and ushered me through the door, taking my jacket and hanging it up in the cloakroom. She looked awkwardly at the automatic in my shoulder holster so I stuffed it in my case. The house, I soon noticed, was
exactly
the same: the same mess, the same furniture, the same smell. I paused to look around, to take it all in and bathe in the security of fond memories. The last time I had been truly happy was in
Swindon, and this house had been the hub of my life for twenty years. A creeping doubt entered my mind about the wisdom of leaving the town in the first place.

We walked through to the lounge, still poorly decorated in browns and greens and looking like a museum of velour. The photo of my passing-out parade at the police training college was on the mantelpiece, along with another of Anton and myself in military fatigues smiling under the harsh sun of the Crimean summer. Sitting on the sofa were an aged couple who were busy watching TV.

“Polly!—Mycroft!—Look who it is!”

My aunt reacted favorably by rising to meet me, but Mycroft was more interested in watching
Name That Fruit!
on the television. He laughed a silly snorting laugh at a poor joke and waved a greeting in my direction without looking up.

“Hello, Thursday,
darling,
” said my aunt. “Careful, I'm all made up.”

We pointed cheeks at each other and made
mmuuah
noises. My aunt smelled strongly of lavender and had so much makeup on that even good Queen Bess would have been shocked.

“You well, Aunty?”

“Couldn't be better.” She kicked her husband painfully on the ankle. “Mycroft, it's your niece.”

“Hello, pet,” he said without looking up, rubbing his foot. Polly lowered her voice.

“It's such a worry. All he does is watch TV and tinker in his workshop. Sometimes I think there's no one at home at all.”

She glared hard at the back of his head before returning her attention to me.

“Staying for long?”

“She's been posted here,” put in my mother.

“Have you lost weight?”

“I work out.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I replied. They would ask me about Landen next.

“Have you called Landen?”

“No, I haven't. And I don't want you to either.”

“
Such
a nice lad.
The Toad
did a fantastic review of his last book:
Once Were Scoundrels.
Have you read it?”

I ignored her.

“Any news from Father?—” I asked.

“He didn't like the mauve paint in the bedroom,” said my mother. “I can't think why you suggested it!”

Aunt Polly beckoned me closer and hissed unsubtly and very loudly in my ear:

“You'll have to excuse your mother; she thinks your dad is mixed up with
another woman
!”

Mother excused herself on a lame pretext and hurriedly left the room.

I frowned.

“What kind of woman?”

“Someone he met at work—Lady Emma someone-or-other.”

I remembered the last conversation with Dad; the stuff about Nelson and the French revisionists.

“Emma
Hamilton
?”

My mother popped her head around the door from the kitchen.

“You know her?” she asked in an aggrieved tone.

“Not personally. I think she died in the mid-nineteenth century.”

My mother narrowed her eyes.

“That old ruse.”

She steeled herself and managed a bright smile.

“Will you stay for supper?”

I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil
all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft, the gameshow ended, shuffled into the kitchen wearing a gray zip-up cardigan and holding a copy of
New Splicer
magazine.

“What's for dinner?” he asked, getting in the way. Aunt Polly looked at him as you might a spoiled child.

“Mycroft, instead of wandering around wasting your time, why don't you waste Thursday's and show her what you've been up to in your workshop?”

Mycroft looked at us both with a vacant expression. He shrugged and beckoned me toward the back door, changing his slippers for a pair of gumboots and his cardigan for a truly dreadful plaid jacket.

“C'mon then, m'girl,” he muttered, shooing the dodos from around the back door where they had been mustering in hope of a snack, and strode toward his workshop.

“You might repair that garden gate, Uncle—it's worse than ever!”

“Not at all,” he replied with a wink. “Every time someone goes in or out they generate enough power to run the telly for an hour. I haven't seen you about recently. Have you been away?”

“Well, yes; ten years.”

He looked over his spectacles at me with some surprise.

“Really?”

“Yes. Is Owens still with you?”

Owens was Mycroft's assistant. He was an old boy who had been with Rutherford when he split the atom; Mycroft and he had been at school together.

“A bit tragic, Thursday. We were developing a machine that used egg white, heat and sugar to synthesize methanol when a power surge caused an implosion. Owens was meringued. By
the time we chipped him out the poor chap had expired. Polly helps me now.”

We had arrived at his workshop. A log with an ax stuck in it was all that was keeping the door shut. Mycroft fumbled for the switch and the striplights flickered on, filling the workshop with a harsh fluorescent glow. The laboratory looked similar to the last time I had seen it in terms of untidiness and the general bric-à-brac, but the contraptions were different. I had learned from my mother's many letters that Mycroft had invented a method for sending pizzas by fax and a 2B pencil with a built-in spell-checker, but what he was currently working on, I had no idea.

“Did the memory erasure device work, Uncle?”

“The what?”

“The memory erasure device. You were testing it when I last saw you.”

“Don't know what you're talking about, dear girl. What do you make of this?”

A large white Rolls-Royce was sitting in the center of the room. I walked over to the vehicle as Mycroft tapped a fluorescent tube to stop it flickering.

“New car, Uncle?”

“No, no,” said Mycroft hurriedly. “I don't drive. A friend of mine who hires these out was lamenting about the cost of keeping two, one black for funerals and the other white for weddings—so I came up with this.”

He reached in and turned a large knob on the dashboard. There was a low hum and the car turned slowly off-white, gray, dark gray and then finally to black.

“That's very impressive, Uncle.”

“Do you think so? It uses liquid crystal technology. But I took the idea one step farther. Watch.”

He turned the dial several more notches to the right and the car changed to blue, then mauve, and finally green with yellow dots.

“One-color cars a thing of the past! But that's not all. If I switch on the car's Pigmentizer like
so,
the car should . . . yes, yes, look at that!”

I watched with growing astonishment as the car started to fade in front of my eyes; the liquid crystal coating was emulating the background grays and browns of Mycroft's workshop. Within a few seconds the car had blended itself perfectly into the background. I thought of the fun you could have with traffic wardens.

“I call it the ChameleoCar; quite fun, don't you think?”

“Very.”

I put out my hand and touched the warm surface of the camouflaged Rolls-Royce. I was going to ask Mycroft if I could have the cloaking device fitted to my Speedster but I was too late; enthused by my interest he had trotted off to a large rolltop bureau and was beckoning me over excitedly.

“Translating carbon paper,” he announced breathlessly, pointing to several piles of brightly colored metallic film. “I call it Rosettionery. Allow me to demonstrate. We'll start with a plain piece of paper, then put in a Spanish carbon, a second slip of paper—must get them the right way up!—then a Polish carbon, more paper, German and another sheet and finally French and the last sheet . . .
there.
”

He shuffled the bundle and laid it on the desk as I pulled up a chair.

“Write something on the first sheet. Anything you want.”

“Anything?”

Mycroft nodded so I wrote:
Have you seen my dodo?

“Now what?”

Mycroft looked triumphant.

“Have a look, dear girl.”

I lifted off the top carbon and there, written in my own handwriting, were the words: ¿
Ha visto mi dodo?

“But that's amazing!”

“Thank you,” replied my Uncle. “Have a look at the next!”

I did. Beneath the Polish carbon was written:
Gdzie jest moje dodo?

“I'm working on hieroglyphics and demotic,” Mycroft explained as I peeled off the German translation to read:
Haben Sie mein Dodo gesehen?
“The Mayan Codex version was trickier but I can't manage Esperanto at all. Can't think why.”

“This will have
dozens
of applications!” I exclaimed as I pulled off the last sheet to read, slightly disappointingly:
Mon aardvark n'a pas de nez.

“Wait a moment, Uncle.
My aardvark has no nose?
”

Mycroft looked over my shoulder and grunted.

“You probably weren't pressing hard enough. You're police, aren't you?”

“SpecOps, really.”

“Then this
might
interest you,” he announced, leading me off past more wondrous gadgets, the use of which I could only guess at. “I'm demonstrating this particular machine to the police technical advancement committee on Wednesday.”

He stopped next to a device that had a huge horn on it like an old gramophone. He cleared his throat.

“I call it my Olfactograph. It's very simple. Since any bloodhound worth its salt will tell you that each person's smell is unique like a thumbprint, then it follows that a machine that can recognize a felon's individual smell must be of use where other forms of identification fail. A thief may wear gloves and a mask, but he can't hide his scent.”