Lost in a good book (38 page)

“The adjectivore feeds on the adjectives
describing
the noun,” explained Havisham, “but it generally leaves the noun intact. We have verminators who deal with them, but there are not enough grammasites in Dickens to cause any serious damage—yet.”

“How do they move from one book to the next?” I asked, wondering if Mycroft’s bookworms weren’t some sort of grammasite-in-reverse.

“They seep through the covers using a process called oozemosis. That’s why individual bookshelves are never more than six feet long in the library—you’d be well advised to follow the same procedure at home. I’ve seen grammasites strip a library to nothing but indigestible nouns and page numbers. Ever read Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy
?”

“Yes.”

“Grammasites.”

“I have a lot to learn,” I said softly.

“Agreed,” replied Havisham. “I’m trying to get the Cat to write an updated travelbook that includes a bestiary, but he has a lot to do in the library—and holding a pen is tricky with paws. Come on, let’s get out of this fog and see what this motor launch can do.”

As soon as we were clear of the prison ship, Havisham started the engines and slowly powered back the way we had come, once again keeping a careful eye on the compass but even so nearly running aground six times.

“How did you know Sergeant Wade?”

“As the Jurisfiction representative in
Great Expectations
it is my business to know everybody. If there are any problems, then they must be brought to my attention.”

“Do all books have a rep?”

“All the ones that have been brought within the controlling sphere of Jurisfiction.”

The fog didn’t lift. We spent the rest of that cold night steering in amongst the moored boats at the side of the river. Only when dawn broke did we see enough to manage a sedate ten knots.

We returned the boat to the jetty and Havisham insisted I jump us both back to her room at Satis House, which I managed to accomplish at the first attempt, something that helped me recover some lost confidence over the debacle with the frontispiece. I lit some candles and saw her to bed before returning alone to the stores, and Wemmick. I had the second half of the docket signed, filled out a form for a missing life vest and was about to return home when a very scratched and bruised Harris Tweed appeared from nowhere and approached the counter where I was standing. His clothes were tattered and he had lost one boot and most of his kit. It looked like
The Lost World
hadn’t really agreed with him. He caught my eye and pointed a finger at me.

“Don’t say a word. Not a
single
word!”

Pickwick was still awake when I got in even though it was nearly 6 a.m. There were two messages on the answer machine—one from Cordelia, and another from a
very annoyed
Cordelia.

27.
Landen and Joffy Again

George Formby was born George Hoy Booth in Wigan in 1904. He followed his father into the music hall business, adopted the ukulele as his trademark and by the time the war broke out was a star of variety, pantomime and film. During the first years of the war, he and his wife, Beryl, toured extensively for ENSA, entertaining the troops as well as making a series of highly successful movies. By 1942 he and Gracie Fields stood alone as the nation’s favorite entertainers. When invasion of England was inevitable, many influential dignitaries and celebrities were shipped out to Canada. George and Beryl elected to stay and fight, as George put it, “to the last bullet on the end of Wigan pier!” Moving underground with the English resistance and various stalwart regiments of the Local Defense Volunteers, Formby manned the outlawed “Wireless St. George” and broadcast songs, jokes and messages to secret receivers across the country. Always in hiding, always moving, the Formbys used their numerous contacts in the north to smuggle allied airmen to neutral Wales and form resistance cells that harried the Nazi invaders. Hitler’s order of 1944 to “have all ukuleles and banjos in England burnt” was a clear indication of how serious a threat he was considered to be. George’s famous comment after peace was declared, “ee, turned out nice again!,” became a national catchphrase. In postwar republican England he was made nonexecutive president for life, a post he held until his assassination.

JOHN WILLIAMS
,
The Extraordinary Career of George Formby

I
T WAS AFTER
two or three days of plain Litera Tec work and a dull weekend without Landen that I found myself lying awake and staring at the ceiling, listened to the clink-clink of milk bottles and the click-click of Pickwick’s feet on the linoleum as she meandered around the kitchen. Sleep patterns never came out quite right in reengineered species; no one knew why. There had been no
major
coincidences over the past few days, although on the night of Joffy’s exhibition the two SpecOps-5 agents who had been assigned to watch Slorter and Lamme died in their car as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. It seemed their car had a faulty exhaust. Lamme and Slorter had been following me around very indiscreetly for the past two days. I just let them get on with it; they weren’t bothering me—or my unseen assailant. If they had, they’d as likely as not be dead.

But there was more than just SO-5 to worry about. In three days the world would be reduced to a sticky mass of sugar and proteins—or so my father said. I had seen the pink and gooey world for myself, too, but then I had
also
seen myself shot at Cricklade Skyrail station, so the future wasn’t
exactly
immutable—thank goodness. There had been no advance on the forensic report; the pink slime matched to no known chemical compound. Coincidentally, next Thursday was also the day of the general election, and Yorrick Kaine looked set to make some serious political gain thanks to his “generous” sharing of
Cardenio.
Mind you, he was still taking no chances—the first public unveiling of the text was not until the day
after
the election. The thing was, if the pink gunge got a hold, Yorrick Kaine could have the shortest career as a prime minister ever. Indeed, next Thursday could be the last Thursday for all of us.

I closed my eyes and thought of Landen. He was there as I best remembered him: seated in his study with his back to me, oblivious to everything, writing. The sunlight streamed in through the window and the familiar clacketty-clack of his old Underwood typewriter sounded like a fond melody to my ears. He stopped occasionally to look at what he had written, make a correction with the pencil clenched between his teeth, or just pause for pause’s sake. I leaned on the doorframe for a while and smiled to myself. He mumbled a line he had written, chuckled to himself and typed faster for a moment, hitting the carriage return with a flourish. He typed quite animatedly in this fashion for about five minutes until he stopped, took out the pencil and slowly turned to face me.

“Hey, Thursday.”

“Hey, Landen. I didn’t want to disturb you; shall I—?”

“No, no,” he said hurriedly, “this can wait. I’m just pleased to see you. How’s it going out there?”

“Boring,” I told him despondently. “After Jurisfiction, SpecOps work seems as dull as ditchwater. Flanker at SO-1 is still on my back, I can feel Goliath breathing down my neck, and this Lavoisier character is using me to get to Dad.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

So I sat on his lap and he massaged the back of my neck. It was heaven.

“How’s Junior?”

“Junior is smaller than a broadbean—little more to the left—but making himself known. The Lucozade keeps the nausea at bay most of the time; I must have drunk a swimming pool of it by now.”

There was a pause.

“Is it mine?” he asked.

I held him tightly but said nothing. He understood and patted my shoulder.

“Let’s talk about something else. How are you getting along at Jurisfiction?”

“Well,” I said, blowing my nose loudly, “I’m not a natural at this bookjumping lark. I want you back, Land, but I’m only going to get one shot at ‘The Raven,’ and I need to get it right. I’ve not heard from Havisham for nearly three days—I don’t know when the next assignment will be.”

Landen shook his head slowly.

“Sweetness, I don’t want you to go into ‘The Raven.’ ”

I looked up at him.

“You heard me. Leave Jack Schitt where he is. How many people would have died for him to make a packet out of that plasma rifle scam? One thousand? Ten thousand? Listen, your memory may grow fuzzy, but I’ll still be here, the good times—”

“But I don’t want just the good times, Land. I want
all
the times. The shitty ones, the arguments, that annoying habit you had of always trying to make the next filling station and running out of petrol. Picking your nose, farting in bed. But more than that, I want the times that haven’t happened yet—the future.
Our
future! I
am
getting Schitt out, Land—make no mistake about that.”

“Let’s talk about something else
again,
” said Landen. “Listen— I’m a bit worried about someone trying to kill you with coincidences.”

“I can look after myself.”

He looked at me solemnly.

“I don’t doubt it for one moment. But I’m only alive in your memories—and some mewling and puking ones of my mum’s I suppose—and without you I’m nothing at all,
ever
—so if whoever is juggling with entropy gets lucky next time, you and I are both for the high jump—but at least you get a memorial and a SpecOps regulation headstone.”

“I see your point, however muddled you might make it. Did you see how I manipulated coincidences in the last entropic lapse to find Mrs. Nakajima? Clever, eh?”

“Inspired. Now, can you think of
any
linking factor—except the intended victim—that connects the three attacks?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I’ve thought it through a thousand times. Nothing.”

Landen thought for a moment, tapped a finger on his temple and smiled.

“Don’t be so sure. I’ve been having a little peek myself, and, well, I want to show you something.”

And there we were, on the platform of the Skyrail station at South Cerney. But it wasn’t a moving memory, like the other ones I had enjoyed with Landen, it was frozen like a stilled video image—and like a stilled video image, it wasn’t very good; all blurry and a bit jumpy.

“Okay, what now?” I asked as we walked along the platform.

“Have a look at everyone. See if there is anyone you recognize.”

I stepped onto the shuttle and walked round the players in the fiasco, who were frozen like statues. The faces that were most distinct were the neanderthal driver-operator, the well-heeled woman, the woman with Pixie Frou-Frou and the woman with the crossword. The rest were vague shapes, generic female human forms and little else—no mnemonic tags to make them unique. I pointed them out.

“Good,” said Landen, “but what about her?”

And there she was, the young woman sitting on the bench in the station, doing her face in a makeup mirror. We walked closer and I looked intently at the nondescript face that loomed dimly out of my memory.

“I only glimpsed her for a moment, Land. Slightly built, mid-twenties, red shoes. So what?”

“She was here when you arrived, she’s on the southbound platform, all trains go to all stops—yet she
didn’t
get the Skyrail. Suspicious?”

“Not really.”

“No,” said Landen, sounding crestfallen, “not exactly a smoking gun, is it? Unless,” he smiled, “unless you look at this.”

The Skyrail station folded back to be replaced by the area near the Uffington white horse on the day of the picnic. I looked up nervously. The large Hispano-Suiza automobile was hanging motionless in the air not fifty feet up.

“Anything spring to mind?” asked Landen.

I looked around carefully. It was another bizarre frozen vignette. Everyone and everything was there—Major Fairwelle, Sue Long, my old croquet captain, the mammoths, the gingham tablecloth, even the bootleg cheese. I looked at Landen.

“Nothing, Land.”

“Are you sure? Look again.”

I sighed and scanned their faces. Sue Long, an old school friend whose boyfriend set his own trousers on fire for a bet; Sarah Nara, who lost her ear at Bilohirsk on a training accident and ended up marrying General Spottiswode; croquet pro Alf Widdershaine, who taught me how to “peg out” all the way from the forty-yard line. Even the previously unknown Bonnie Voige was there, and—

“Who’s this?” I asked, pointing at a shimmering memory in front of me.

“It’s the woman who called herself Violet De’ath,” answered Landen. “Does she seem familiar?”

I looked at her blank features. I hadn’t given her a second thought at the time, but something about her
was
familiar.

“Sort of,” I responded. “Have I seen her somewhere before?”

“You tell me, Thursday,” Landen said, shrugging. “It’s
your
memory. But if you want a clue, look at her shoes.”

And there they were. Bright red shoes that just
might
have been the same ones on the girl at the Skyrail platform.

“There’s more than one pair of red shoes in Wessex, Land.”

“You’re right,” he observed. “I did say it was a long shot.”

I had an idea, and before Landen could say another word we were in the square at Osaka with all the Nextian-logoed Japanese, the fortune-teller frozen in mid-beckon, the crowd around us an untidy splash of visual noise that is the way crowds appear to the mind’s eye, the logos I remembered jutting out in sharp contrast to the unremembered faces. I peered through the crowd as I anxiously searched for anything that might resemble a young European woman.

“See anything?” asked Landen, hands on hips and surveying the strange scene.

“No,” I replied. “Wait a minute, let’s come in a bit earlier.”

I took myself back a minute and there she was, getting up from the fortune-teller’s chair the moment I first saw him. I walked closer and looked at the vague shape. I squinted at her feet. There, in the haziest corner of my mind, was the memory I was looking for. The shoes were
definitely
red.