Lost in a good book (21 page)

It was 351 non-bookjumper Nakajimas later that, tired and annoyed, I started telling myself that what I was doing was useless—if Mrs. Nakajima
had
retired to the distant backstory of
Jane Eyre
, was she really going to be anywhere near a telephone?

I sighed, stretched one of those groany-clicky stretches, drank the rest of my cold coffee and decided to go for a brief stroll to loosen up. I was staring at the photocopied pages as I strolled along, trying to think of something to narrow the search, when a young man’s jacket caught my eye.

As is popular in the Far East, many T-shirts and jackets have English writing upon them—some of them making sense, but others just collections of words that must appear as fashionable to the Japanese youth as kanji appear elegant to us. I had seen jackets with the strange legend
100% Chevrolet OK Fly-boy
and later one with
Pratt & Whitney squadron movie,
so I should have been ready for anything. But this one was different. It was a smart leather jacket with the following message embroidered on the back:

Follow me, Next Girl!

So I did. I followed the young man for two blocks before I noticed a
second
jacket much like the first. By the time I had crossed the canal I had seen another jacket with
SpecOps this way
emblazoned on the back, then
Jane Eyre forever!
followed quickly by
Bad Boy Goliath.
But that wasn’t all—like some bizarre homing call, all the people wearing these jackets, hats and T-shirts seemed to be heading
in the same direction.
Thoughts of falling Hispano-Suizas and ambushed Skyrails suddenly filled my head, so I dug the entroposcope from my bag, shook it and noticed a slight separation between the rice and lentils. Entropy was decreasing. I rapidly turned and started walking in the opposite direction. I took three paces and stopped as a daring notion filled my head. Of course—why not make the entropic failure do the work for me? I followed the logos to a nearby market square, where I noticed the rice and lentils in the entroposcope had settled—despite repeated shakings—into curved bands. Coincidence had increased to the point where everyone I saw was wearing something with a relevant logo.
MycroTech Developments
,
Charlotte Brontë, Hispano-Suiza, Goliath
and
Skyrail
were all sewn or stuck to hats, jackets, umbrellas, shirts, bags. I looked around, desperately trying to find the coincidental epicenter. Then I found it. In an inexplicably vacant gap within the busy market, an old man was seated in front of a small table. He was as brown as a nut and quite bald, and opposite him the other chair had just been vacated by a young woman. A piece of battered card leaning against his small valise declared, in eight languages, the fortune-teller’s trade and pledge. The English part of the sign read: “I have the answer you seek!” And I was in no doubt that whatever he said would be so—but, given the unlikely modes of death already meted out by my unseen assailant, probably, yet very
improbably
in its undertaking, would result in my demise. I took two paces closer to the fortune-teller and shook the entroposcope again. The patterns were more defined but not the clean half-and-half separation I needed. The little man had seen me dither and beckoned me closer.

“Please!” he said. “Please come. Tell you
everything!
”

I paused and looked around for any sign of jeopardy. There was nothing. I was in a perfectly peaceful square in a prosperous area of a large city in Japan. Whatever my anonymous foe had in store for me, it was something that I would least expect.

I stayed back, unsure of the wisdom of what I was doing. It was the appearance of a T-shirt that had
nothing
to do with me that clinched it. If I let this opportunity slide I would never find Mrs. Nakajima this side of a month. I took out my ballpoint, clicked it open and marched purposefully towards the small man, who grinned at me.

“You come!” he said in poor English. “You learn everything. Good buy, from me!”

But I didn’t stop. As I walked towards the fortune-teller I thrust my hand in my bag and pulled out a sheet of the Nakajima pages at random, then, just as I passed the little nut-brown man, I stabbed arbitrarily on the page with my pen and broke into a run. There was a horrified gasp from the onlookers as a bolt of lightning came to earth in the small square and struck the clearly not very talented fortune-teller with a bright flash. I didn’t stop until I was away from that place, back to plain polo shirts, ordinary designer labels and my entroposcope to random clumping. I sat on a bench to get my breath back, felt nauseous again and almost threw up in a nearby trash can, much to the consternation of a little old lady who was sitting next to me. I recovered slightly and looked at the Nakajima that the fall of my ballpoint had decreed. If coincidences were running as high as I had hoped, then this Nakajima
had
to be the one I sought. I turned to ask the little old lady next to me the way, but she had gone. I stopped a passerby and asked for directions. It seemed that a small amount of negative entropy still lingered—I was barely two minutes’ walk from my quarry.

The apartment block I was directed to was not in a very good state of repair. The plaster that was covering the cracks had cracks, and the grime on the peeling paint was itself starting to peel. Inside there was a small lobby where an elderly doorman was watching a dubbed version of
65 Walrus Street
. He directed me to the fourth floor, where I found Mrs. Nakajima’s apartment at the end of the corridor. The varnish on the door had lost its shine and the brass doorknob was tarnished, dusty and dull; no one had been in here for some time. I knocked despite this, and when silence was all that answered me, grasped the knob and turned it slowly. To my surprise it turned easily and the door creaked open. I paused to look about me, and, seeing no one, pushed open the door and stepped in.

Mrs. Nakajima’s apartment was ordinary in the extreme. Three bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. The walls and ceiling were plainly painted, the flooring a light-colored wood. It seemed as though she had moved out a few months ago and taken almost everything with her. The only notable exception to this was a small table near the window of the living room, upon which I found four slim leather-bound volumes lying next to a brass reading lamp. I picked up the uppermost book. It had
Jurisfiction
embossed on the cover, above a name I didn’t recognize. I tried to open the book, but the covers were stuck fast. I tried the second book with no better luck, but paused for a moment when I saw the third book. I gently touched the slim volume and ran my fingertips across the thin layer of dust that had accumulated on the spine. The hair bristled on my neck and I shivered. But it wasn’t a fearful feeling. It was the light tingle of apprehension; this book, I knew, would open.
The name on the cover was my own.
I had been expected. I opened the book. On the title page was a handwritten note from Mrs. Nakajima that was short and to the point:

For Thursday Next, in grateful anticipation of good work and fine times ahead with Jurisfiction. I jackanoried you into a book when you were nine but now you must do it for yourself—and you can, and you shall. I also suggest that you be quick; Mr. Schitt-Hawse is walking along the corridor outside as you read this and he isn’t out collecting for ChronoGuard orphans.

Mrs. Nakajima

I ran to the door and slid the bolt just as the door handle rattled. There was a pause and then a loud thump on the door.

“Next!” went Schitt-Hawse’s unmistakable voice. “I know you’re in there! Let me in and we can fetch Jack together!”

I had been followed, obviously. It suddenly struck me that perhaps Goliath were more interested in how to get into books than in Jack Schitt himself. There was a billion-pound hole in the budget for their advanced weapons division, and a Prose Portal,
any
Prose Portal, would be just the thing to fill it.

“Go to hell!” I shouted as I returned to my book. On the first page, under a large heading that read
READ ME FIRST!,
there was a description of a library somewhere. I needed no second bidding; the door flexed under a heavy blow and I saw the paint crack near the lock. If it were Chalk and Cheese they wouldn’t take long to gain entry.

I relaxed, took a deep breath, cleared my throat and read in a clear, strong and confident voice, expressive and expansive. I added pauses and inflections and raised the tone of my voice where the text required it. I read like I had never read before.

“I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor,” I began, “lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling—”

The sound of thumping increased, and as I spoke the doorframe splintered near the hinges and collapsed inwards with Chalk, who fell with a heavy thump onto the floor, closely followed by Cheese, who landed on top of him.

“The carpet was elegantly patterned with geometric designs and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics—”

“Next!” yelled Schitt-Hawse, putting his head round the door as Chalk and Cheese struggled to get up. “Coming to Osaka was
not
part of the deal! I told you to keep me informed. Nothing will happen to you—”

But something
was
happening. Something new, something
other.
My utter loathing of Goliath, the urge to get away, the knowledge that without entry to books I would never see Landen again—all of these things gave me the will to soften the barriers that had hardened since the day I first entered
Jane Eyre
in 1958.

“—High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry—”

I could see Schitt-Hawse move towards me, but he had started to become less tangible; although I could see his lips move, the sound arrived at my ears a full second later. I continued to read, and as I did so the room about me began to
fworp
from view.

“Next!” yelled Schitt-Hawse. “You’ll regret this, I swear—!”

I carried on reading.

“ ‘—reinforcing the serious mood of the library—’ ”

“Bitch!” I heard Schitt-Hawse cry. “Grab her—!”

But his words were as a zephyr; the room took on the appearance of morning mist and darkened. I felt a gentle tingling sensation on my skin—and in the next instant, I had gone.

I blinked twice, but Osaka was far behind. I closed the book, carefully placed it in my pocket and looked around. I was in a long, dark, wood-paneled corridor lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling. The carpet was elegantly patterned with geometric designs and the ceiling was decorated with sculpted reliefs that depicted scenes from the classics, each cornice supporting the marble bust of an author. High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry and reflected off the polished wood, reinforcing the serious mood of the library. Running down the center of the corridor was a long row of reading tables, each with a green-shaded brass lamp. The library appeared endless; in both directions the corridor vanished into darkness with no definable end. But this wasn’t important. Describing the library would be like going to see a Turner and commenting on the frame. On all of the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, were
books.
Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, uncorrected proofs, handwritten manuscripts,
everything.
I stepped closer and rested my fingertips lightly against the pristine volumes. They felt warm to the touch, so I leaned closer and pressed my ear to the spines. I could hear a distant hum, the rumble of machinery, people talking, traffic, seagulls, laughter, waves on rocks, wind in the winter branches of trees, distant thunder, heavy rain, children playing, a blacksmith’s hammer— a million sounds all happening together. And then, in a revelatory moment, the clouds slid back from my mind and a crystal-clear understanding of the very nature of books shone upon me. They weren’t just collections of words arranged neatly on a page to give the
impression
of reality—each of these volumes
was
reality. The similarity of these books to the copies I had read back home was no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject. These books
were alive!

I walked slowly down the corridor, running my fingers along the spines and listening to the comfortable pat-pat-pat sound they made, every now and then recognizing a familiar title. After a couple of hundred yards I came across a junction where a second corridor crossed the first. In the middle of the crossways was a large circular void with a wrought-iron rail and a spiral staircase bolted securely to one side. I peered cautiously down. Not more than thirty feet below me I could see another floor, exactly like this one. But in the middle of
that
floor was another circular void through which I could see another floor, and another and another and so on to the depths of the library. I looked up. It was the same above me, more circular light wells and the spiral staircase reaching up into the dizzy heights above. I leaned on the balcony and looked about me at the vast library once again.

“Well,” I said to no one in particular, “I don’t think I’m in Osaka anymore.”

16.
Interview with the Cat

The Cheshire Cat was the first character I met at Jurisfiction, and his sporadic appearances enlivened the time I spent there. He gave me much advice. Some was good, some was bad and some was so nonsensically nonsequitous that it confuses me even now to think about it. And yet, during all that time, I never learnt his age, where he came from or where he went when he vanished. It was one of Jurisfiction’s lesser mysteries.