Lost in a good book (22 page)

THURSDAY NEXT
,
The Jurisfiction Chronicles

A
VISITOR
!” exclaimed a voice behind me. “What a
delightful
surprise!”

I turned and was astonished to see a large and luxuriant tabby cat sitting precariously on the uppermost bookshelf. He was staring at me with a curious mixture of insanity and benevolence and remained quite still except for the tip of his tail, which twitched occasionally from side to side. I had never come across a talking cat before, but good manners, as my father used to say, cost nothing.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cat.”

The Cat’s eyes opened wide and the grin fell from his face. He looked up and down the corridor for a few moments and then inquired:

“Me?”

I stifled a laugh.

“I don’t see any others.”

“Ah!” replied the Cat, giving me another broad grin. “That’s because you have a temporary form of
cat blindness.
”

“I’m not sure I’ve heard of that.”

“It’s quite common,” he replied airily, licking a paw and stroking his whiskers. “I suppose you
have
heard of knight blindness, when you can’t see any knights?”

“It’s
night,
not knight,” I corrected him.

“It all sounds the same to
me.
”

“Suppose I
do
have cat blindness,” I ventured. “Then how is it I can see you?”

“Suppose we change the subject?” retorted the Cat, waving a paw at the surroundings. “What do you think of the library?”

“It’s pretty big,” I murmured, looking all around me.

“Two hundred miles in every direction,” said the Cat off-handedly and beginning to purr. “Twenty-six floors above ground, twenty-six below.”

“You must have a copy of every book that’s been written,” I observed.

“Every book that will
ever
be written,” corrected the Cat, “and a few others besides.”

“How many?”

“Well, I’ve never counted them myself, but certainly more than twelve.”

As the Cat grinned and blinked at me with his large green eyes I suddenly realized where I had seen him before.

“You’re the Cheshire Cat, aren’t you?” I asked.

“I
was
the Cheshire Cat,” he replied with a slightly aggrieved air. “But they moved the county boundaries, so technically speaking I’m now the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it. Oh, and welcome to Jurisfiction. You’ll like it here; everyone is
quite
mad.”

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” I replied indignantly.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

I snapped my fingers.

“Wait a moment!” I exclaimed. “This is the conversation you had in
Alice in Wonderland
, just after the baby turned into a pig!”

“Ah!” returned the Cat with an annoyed flick of his tail. “Fancy you can write your own dialogue, do you? I’ve seen people try; it’s never a pretty sight. But have it your own way. And what’s more, the baby turned into a fig, not a pig.”

“It was a pig, actually.”

“Fig,” said the Cat stubbornly. “Who was in the book, me or you?”

“It was a pig,” I insisted.

“Well!” exclaimed the Cat. “I’ll go and check.
Then
you’ll look pretty stupid, I can tell you!”

And so saying, he vanished.

I stood there for a moment or two wondering if things could get much odder. By the time I had thought that, no, they probably couldn’t, the Cat’s tail started to appear, then his body and finally his head and mouth.

“Well?” I asked.

“All right,” grumbled the Cat, “so it
was
a pig. My hearing is not so good; I think it’s all that pepper. By the by, I almost forgot. You’re apprenticed to Miss Havisham.”

“Miss Havisham?
Great Expectations’
Miss Havisham?”

“Is there any other? You’ll be fine—just don’t mention the wedding.”

“I’ll try not to. Wait a moment—apprenticed?”

“Of course. Getting here is only half the adventure. If you want to join us you’ll have to learn the ropes. Right now all you can do is journey. With a bit of practice on your own you
might
learn to be page-accurate when you jump. But if you want to delve deep into the backstory or take an excursion beyond the sleeve notes, you’re going to have to take instruction. Why, by the time Miss Havisham has finished with you, you’ll think nothing of being able to visit early drafts, deleted characters or long-discarded chapters that make little or no sense at all. Who knows, you may even glimpse the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.”

“You mean the spine?” I asked, not quite up to speed yet.

The Cat lashed its tail in exasperation.

“No, stupid, the idea, the notion, the
spark.
Once you’ve laid your eyes on the raw concept of a book, everything you’ve ever seen or felt will seem about as interesting as a stair carpet. Try and imagine this: You are sitting on soft grass on a warm summer’s evening in front of a dazzling sunset; the air is full of truly inspiring music and you have in your hands a wonderful book. Are you there?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, now imagine a simply
vast
saucer of warm cream in front of you and consider lapping it
really
slowly until your whiskers are completely drenched.”

The Cheshire Cat shivered deliriously.

“If you do all of that and multiply it by a thousand, then perhaps, just
perhaps,
you will have some idea of what I’m talking about.”

“Can I pass on the cream?”

“Whatever you want. It’s your daydream, after all.”

And with a flick of his tail, the Cat vanished. I turned to explore my surroundings and was surprised to find that the Cheshire Cat was sitting on another shelf on the other side of the corridor.

“You seem a bit old to be an apprentice,” continued the Cat, folding its paws and staring at me with an unnerving intensity. “We’ve been expecting you for almost twenty years. Where on earth have you been?”

“I . . . I . . . didn’t know I could do this.”

“What you mean is that you
did
know that you
couldn’t
—it’s quite a different thing. The point is, do you think you have what it takes to help us here at Jurisfiction?”

“I really don’t know,” I replied, truthfully enough—although I hung to the hope that this was the only way I even had a
chance
to get Landen back. But since I didn’t see why he should ask all the questions, I asked: “What do
you
do?”

“I,” said the Cat proudly, “am the librarian.”

“You look after all these books?”

“Certainly. Ask me any question you want.”

“
Jane Eyre
,” I asked, intending only to ask its location but realizing when the Cat answered that a librarian
here
was far removed from the sort I knew at home.

“Ranked the 728th favorite fictional book ever written,” the Cat replied, parrot-fashion. “Total readings to date: 82,581,430. Current reading figure: 829,321—1,421 of whom are reading it as we speak. It’s a good figure; quite possibly because it has been in the news recently.”

“So what’s the most-read book?”

“Up until now or forever and all time?”

“For all time.”

The Cat thought for a moment.

“In fiction, the most-read book ever is
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Not just because it is a cracking good read for us, but because of all the Vertebrate überclassics it was the only one that really translated well into Arthropod. And if you can crack the Lobster market—if you’ll pardon the pun—a billion years from now, you’re really going to flog some copies. The Arthropod title is
tlkîltlílkîxlkilkïxlklï,
or, literally translated,
The Past Nonexistent State of the Angelfish.
Atticus Finch is a lobster called Tklîkï, and he defends a horseshoe crab named Klikïflik.”

“How does it compare?”

“Not too bad, although the scene with the prawns is a little harrowing. It’s the crustacean readership that makes Daphne Farquitt such a major player, too.”

“Daphne Farquitt?” I echoed with some surprise. “But her books are
frightful!
”

“Only to us. To the highly evolved Arthropods, Farquitt’s work is considered sacred and religious to the point of lunacy. Listen, I’m no fan of Farquitt’s, but her bodice-ripping potboiler
The Squire of High Potternews
sparked one of the biggest, bloodiest, shellbrokenist wars the planet has ever witnessed.”

I was getting off the point.

“So all these books are your responsibility?”

“Indeed,” replied the Cat airily.

“If I wanted to go into a book I could just pick it up and read it?”

“It’s not quite
that
easy,” replied the Cat. “You can only get into a book if someone has already found a way in and then exited through the library. Every book, you will observe, is bound in either red or green. Green for go, red for no-go. It’s quite easy, really—you’re not color-blind, are you?”

“No. So if I wanted to go into—oh, I don’t know, let’s pull a title out of the air—‘The Raven,’ then—”

But the Cat flinched as I said the title.

“There are some places you
should not go!
” he muttered in a reproachful tone, lashing his tail from side to side. “Edgar Allan Poe is one of them. His books are not fixed; there is a certain
otherness
that goes with them. Most of Macabre Gothic fiction tends to be like that—Sade is the same; also Webster, Wheatley and King. Go into those and you may
never
come out—they have a way of
weaving
you in the story, and before you know it you’re stuck there. Let me show you something.”

And all of a sudden we were in a large and hollow-sounding vestibule where huge Doric columns rose to support a high vaulted ceiling. The floor and walls were all dark red marble and reminded me of the entrance lobby of an old hotel—only about forty times as big. You could have parked an airship in here and
still
had room to hold an air race. There was a red carpet leading up from the high front doors, and all the brasswork shone like gold.

“This is where we honor the Boojummed,” said the Cat in a quiet voice. He waved a paw in the direction of a large granite memorial about the size of two upended cars. The edifice was shaped like a large book, open in the center and splayed wide with the depiction of a person walking into the left-hand page, the person’s form covered by text as he entered. On the opposite page were row upon row of names. A mason was delicately working on a new name with a mallet and chisel. He tipped his hat respectfully and resumed his work.

“Prose Resource Operatives deleted or lost in the line of duty,” explained the Cat from where he was perched on top of the statue. “We call it the Boojumorial.”

I pointed to a name on the memorial.

“Ambrose Bierce was a Jurisfiction agent?”

“One of the best. Dear, sweet Ambrose! A master of prose, but
quite
impetuous. He went—alone—into ‘The Literary Life of Thingum Bob’—a Poe short story that one would’ve thought held no terrors.”

The Cat sighed before continuing.

“He was trying to find a back door into Poe’s poems. We know you can get from ‘Thingum Bob’ into ‘The Black Cat’ by way of an unstable verb in the third paragraph, and from ‘Black Cat’ into ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ by the simple expedient of hiring a horse from the Nicaean stables; from there he was hoping to use the poem within ‘Usher,’ ‘The Haunted Palace,’ to springboard him into the rest of the Poe poetical canon.”

“What happened?”

“Never heard from him again. Two fellow booksplorers went in after him. One lost his breath, and the other, well, poor Ahab went completely bonkers—thought he was being chased by a white whale. We suspect that Ambrose was either walled up with a cask of Amontillado or buried alive or suffered some other unspeakable fate. It was decided that Poe was out of bounds.”

“So Antoine de St. Exupéry, he disappeared on assignment too?”

“Not at all; he crashed on a reconnaissance sortie.”

“It was tragic.”

“It certainly was,” replied the Cat. “He owed me forty francs
and
had promised to teach me to play Debussy on the piano using only oranges.”

“Oranges?”

“Oranges. Well, I’m off now. Miss Havisham will explain everything. Go through those doors into the library, take the elevator to the fourth floor, first right, and the books are about a hundred yards on your left.
Great Expectations
is green-bound, so you should have no trouble.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the Cat, and with a wave of his paw he started to fade, very slowly, from the tip of his tail. He just had time to ask me to get some tuna-flavored Moggilicious for him the next time I was home before he vanished completely and I was alone in front of the granite Boojumorial, the quiet tapping of the mason’s hammer echoing around the lofty heights of the library vestibule.

I took the marble stairs into the library and ascended by one of the wrought-iron lifts, walked down the corridor until I came across several shelves of Dickens novels. There were, I noted, twenty-nine different editions of
Great Expectations
from early draft to the last of Dickens’s own revised editions. I picked up the newest tome, opened it at the first chapter and heard the gentle sound of wind in the trees. I flipped through the pages, the sounds changing as I moved from scene to scene, page to page. I located the first mention of Miss Havisham, found a good place to start and then read loudly to myself,
willing
the words to live. And live they did.

17.
Miss Havisham

Great Expectations
was written in 1860–61 to reverse flagging sales of
All the Year Round
, the weekly periodical founded by Dickens himself. The novel was regarded as a great success. The tale of Pip the blacksmith’s apprentice and his rise to the position of young gentleman through an anonymous benefactor introduced readers to many new and varied characters: Joe Gargery, the simple and honorable blacksmith; Abel Magwitch, the convict Pip helps in the first chapter; Jaggers, the lawyer; Herbert Pocket, who befriends him and teaches him how to behave in London society. But it is Miss Havisham, abandoned at the altar and living her life in dreary isolation dressed in her tattered wedding robes, that steals the show. She remains one of the book’s most memorable fixtures.