“Really? What was it like?”
“Wet—and I think I left my jacket behind.”
“The one I gave you for Christmas?”
“No; the other one. The blue one with large checks.”
“That’s the one I did give you for Christmas,” she scolded. “I wish you would be more careful. What was it you wanted me to do?”
“Just stand here. If all goes well, as soon as I press this large green button the worms will open a door to the daffodils that William Wordsworth knew and loved.”
“And if all doesn’t go well?” asked Polly slightly nervously. Owens’ demise inside a giant meringue never failed to impinge on her thoughts whenever she guinea-pigged one of her husband’s machines, but apart from some slight singeing while testing a one-man butane-powered pantomime horse, none of Mycroft’s devices had ever harmed her at all.
“Hmm,” said Mycroft thoughtfully, “it is possible although highly unlikely that I could start a chain reaction that will fuse matter and annihilate the known universe.”
“Really?”
“No, not really at all. My little joke. Are you ready?”
Polly smiled.
“Ready.”
Mycroft pressed the large green button and there was a low hum from the book. The streetlights flickered and dimmed outside as the machine drew a huge quantity of power to convert the bookworm’s binametric information. As they both watched, a thin shaft of light appeared in the workshop, as though a door had been opened from a winter’s day into summer. Dust glistened in the beam of light, which gradually grew broader until it was large enough to enter.
“All you have to do is step through!” yelled Mycroft above the noise of the machine. “To open the door requires a lot of power; you have to hurry!”
The high voltage was making the air heavy; metallic objects close by were starting to dance and crackle with static.
Polly stepped closer to the door and smiled nervously at her husband. The shimmering expanse of white light rippled as she put her hand up to touch it. She took a deep breath and stepped through the portal. There was a bright flash and a burst of heavy electrical discharge; two small balls of highly charged gas plasma formed spontaneously near the machine and barreled out in two directions; Mycroft had to duck as one sailed past him and burst harmlessly on the Rolls-Royce; the other exploded on the Olfactograph and started a small fire. Just as quickly the light and sound died away, the doorway closed and the streetlights outside flickered up to full brightness again.
Clouds! Jocund company! Sprightly dance! chattered the worms contentedly as the needles flicked and rocked on the cover of the book, the two-minute countdown to the reopening of the portal already in progress. Mycroft smiled happily and patted his pockets for his pipe until he realized with dismay that it too was inside Hesperus, so instead he sat down on the prototype of a sarcasm early-warning device and waited. Everything, so far, was working extremely well.
On the other side of the Prose Portal, Polly stood on the grassy bank of a large lake where the water gently lapped against the shore. The sun was shining brightly and small puffy clouds floated lazily across the azure sky. Along the edges of the bay she could see thousands upon thousands of vibrant yellow daffodils, all growing in the dappled shade of a birch grove. A breeze, carrying with it the fresh scent of spring, caused the flowers to flutter and dance. All about her a feeling of peace and tranquillity ruled. The world she stood in now was unsullied by man’s evil or malice. Here, indeed, was paradise.
“It’s beautiful!” she said at last, her thoughts finally giving birth to her words. “The flowers, the colors, the scent—it’s like breathing champagne!”
“You like it, madam?”
A man aged about eighty was facing her. He was dressed in a black cloak and wore a half-smile upon his weathered features. He gazed across at the flowers.
“I often come here,” he said. “Whenever the doldrums of depression fall heavy on my countenance.”
“You’re very lucky,” said Polly. “We have to rely on Name That Fruit!!”
“Name That Fruit?”
“It’s a quiz show. You know. On the telly.”
“Telly?”
“Yes, it’s like the movies but with commercials.”
He frowned at her without comprehension and looked at the lake again.
“I often come here,” he said again. “Whenever the doldrums of depression fall heavy on my countenance.”
“You said that already.”
The old man looked as though he were awakening from a deep sleep.
“What are you doing here?”
“My husband sent me. My name is Polly Next.”
“I come here when in vacant or pensive mood, you know.”
He waved a hand in the direction of the flowers.
“The daffodils, you understand.”
Polly looked across at the bright yellow flowers, which rustled back at her in the warm breeze.
“I wish my memory was this good,” she murmured.
The figure in black smiled at her.
“The inward eye is all I have left,” he said wistfully, the smile leaving his stern features. “Everything that I once was is now here; my life is contained in my works. A life in volumes of words; it is poetic.”
He sighed deeply and added:
“But solitude isn’t always blissful, you know.”
He stared into the middle distance, the sun sparkling on the waters of the lake.
“How long since I died?” he asked abruptly.
“Over a hundred and fifty years.”
“Really? Tell me, how did the revolution in France turn out?”
“It’s a little early to tell.”
Wordsworth frowned as the sun went in.
“Hello,” he muttered, “I don’t remember writing that—”
Polly looked. A large and very dark rain cloud had blotted out the sun.
“What do you—?” she began, but when she looked around Wordsworth had gone. The sky grew darker and thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. A strong wind sprang up and the lake seemed to freeze over and lose all depth as the daffodils stopped moving and became a solid mass of yellow and green. She cried out in fear as the sky and the lake met; the daffodils, trees and clouds returning to their place in the poem, individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our own imagination can clothe them. She let out one last terrified scream as the darkness swept on and the poem closed on top of her.
12.
SpecOps-27: The Literary Detectives
. . . This morning Thursday Next joined the Litera Tec office in place of Crometty. I cannot help thinking that she is particularly unsuited to this area of work and I have my doubts as to whether she is as sane as she thinks she is. She has many demons, old and new, and I wonder whether Swindon is quite the right place to try and exorcise them . . .
From Bowden Cable’s diary
THE SWINDON SpecOps headquarters were shared with the local police; the typically brusque and no-nonsense Germanic design had been built during the Occupation as a law court. It was big too, which was just as well. The way into the building was protected by metal detectors, and once I had shown my ID I walked into the large entrance hall. Officers and civilians with identity tags walked briskly amid the loud hubbub of the station. I was jostled once or twice in the throng and made a few greetings to old faces before fighting my way to the front desk. When I got there, I found a man in a white baggy shirt and breeches remonstrating with the sergeant. The officer just stared at him. He’d heard it all before.
“Name?” asked the desk sergeant wearily.
“John Milton.”
“Which John Milton?”
John Milton sighed.
“Four hundred and ninety-six.”
The sergeant made a note in his book.
“How much did they take?”
“Two hundred in cash and all my credit cards.”
“Have you notified your bank?”
“Of course.”
“And you think your assailant was a Percy Shelley?”
“Yes,” replied the Milton. “He handed me this pamphlet on rejecting current religious dogma before he ran off.”
“Hello, Ross,” I said.
The sergeant looked at me, paused for a moment and then broke into a huge grin.
“Thursday! They told me you’d be coming back! Told me you made it all the way to SO-5 too.”
I returned his smile. Ross had been the desk sergeant when I had first joined the Swindon police.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Starting up a regional office? SO-9 or something? Add a touch of spice to tired old Swindon?”
“Not exactly. I’ve transferred into the Litera Tec office.”
A look of doubt crossed Ross’s face but he quickly hid it.
“Great!” he enthused, slightly uneasily. “Drink later?”
I agreed happily, and after getting directions to the Litera Tec office, left Ross arguing with Milton 496.
I took the winding stair to the upper floor and then followed directions to the far end of the building. The entire west wing was filled with SpecOps or their regional departments. The Environmental SpecOps had an office here, as did Art Theft and the ChronoGuard. Even Spike had an office up here, although he was rarely seen in it; he preferred a dark and rather fetid lockup in the basement car park. The corridor was packed with bookcases and filing cabinets; the old carpet had almost worn through in the center. It was a far cry from the LiteraTec office in London, where we had enjoyed the most up-to-date information retrieval systems. At length I reached the correct door and knocked. I didn’t receive an answer so I walked straight in.
The room was like a library from a country home somewhere. It was two stories high, with shelves crammed full of books covering every square inch of wall space. A spiral staircase led to a catwalk which ran around the wall, enabling access to the upper shelves. The middle of the room was open plan with desks laid out much like a library’s reading room. Every possible surface and all the floor space were piled high with more books and papers, and I wondered how they managed to get anything done at all. About five officers were at work, but they didn’t seem to notice me come in. A phone rang and a young man picked it up.
“Litera Tec office,” he said in a polite voice. He winced as a tirade came down the phone line to him.
“I’m very sorry if you didn’t like Titus Andronicus, madam,” he said at last, “but I’m afraid it’s got nothing to do with us— perhaps you should stick to the comedies in future.”
I could see Victor Analogy looking through a file with another officer. I walked to where he could see me and waited for him to finish.
“Ah, Next! Welcome to the office. Give me a moment, will you?”
I nodded and Victor carried on.
“. . . I think Keats would have used less flowery prose than this and the third stanza is slightly clumsy in its construction. My feeling is that it’s a clever fake, but check it against the Verse Meter Analyzer.”
The officer nodded and walked off. Victor smiled at me and shook my hand.
“That was Finisterre. He looks after poetry forgery of the nineteenth century. Let me show you around.”
He waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.
“Words are like leaves, Thursday. Like people really, fond of their own society.”
He smiled.
“We have over a billion words here. Reference mainly. A good collection of major works and some minor ones that you won’t even find in the Bodleian. We’ve got a storage facility in the basement. That’s full as well. We need new premises but the Litera Tecs are a bit underfunded, to say the least.”
He led me around one of the desks to where Bowden was sitting bolt upright, his jacket carefully folded across the back of his chair and his desk so neat as to be positively obscene.
“Bowden you’ve met. Fine fellow. He’s been with us for twelve years and concentrates on nineteenth-century prose. He’ll be showing you the ropes. That’s your desk over there.”
He paused for a moment, staring at the cleared desk. I was not supernumerary. One of their number had died recently and I was replacing him. Filling a dead man’s shoes, sitting in a dead man’s chair. Beyond the desk sat another officer, who was looking at me curiously.
“That’s Fisher. He’ll help you out with anything you want to know about legal copyright and contemporary fiction.”
Fisher was a stocky man with an odd squint who appeared to be wider than he was tall. He looked up at me and grinned, revealing something left over from breakfast stuck between his teeth.
Victor carried on walking to the next desk.
“Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose and poetry are looked after by Helmut Bight, kindly lent to us by our opposite number across the water. He came here to sort out a problem with some poorly translated Goethe and became embroiled with a neo-Nazi movement attempting to set Friedrich Nietzsche up as a fascist saint.”
Herr Bight was about fifty and looked at me suspiciously. He wore a suit but had removed his tie in the heat.
“SO-5, eh?” asked Herr Bight, as though it were a form of venereal disease.
“I’m SO-27 just like you,” I replied quite truthfully. “Eight years in the London office under Boswell.”
Bight picked up an ancient-looking volume in a faded pigskin binding and passed it across to me.
“What do you make of this?”
I took the dusty tome in my hand and looked at the spine.
“The Vanity of Human Wishes,” I read. “Written by Samuel Johnson and published in 1749, the first work to appear in his own name.”
I opened the book and flicked through the yellowed pages. “First edition. It would be very valuable, if—”
“If?—” repeated Bight.
I sniffed the paper and ran a finger across the page and then tasted it. I looked along the spine and tapped the cover, finally dropping the heavy volume on the desk with a thump.
“—if it were real.”
“I’m impressed, Miss Next,” admitted Herr Bight. “You and I must discuss Johnson some time.”
“It wasn’t as difficult as it looked,” I had to admit. “Back in London we’ve got two pallet-loads of forged Johnsonia like this with a street value of over three hundred thousand pounds.”
“London too?” exclaimed Bight in surprise. “We’ve been after this gang for six months; we thought they were local.”
“Call Boswell at the London office; he’ll help in any way he can. Just mention my name.”
Herr Bight picked up the phone and asked the operator for a number. Victor guided me over to one of the many frosted-glass doors leading off the main chamber into side offices. He opened the door a crack to reveal two officers in shirtsleeves who were interviewing a man dressed in tights and an embroidered jacket.
“Malin and Sole look after all crimes regarding Shakespeare.”
He shut the door.
“They keep an eye on forgery, illegal dealing and overtly free thespian interpretations. The actor in with them was Graham Huxtable. He was putting on a felonious one-man performance of Twelfth Night. Persistent offender. He’ll be fined and bound over. His Malvolio is truly frightful.”
He opened the door to another side office. A pair of identical twins were operating a large computing engine. The room was uncomfortably hot from the thousands of valves, and the clicking of relays was almost deafening. This was the only piece of modern technology that I had seen so far in the office.
“These are the Forty brothers, Jeff and Geoff. The Fortys operate the Verse Meter Analyzer. It breaks down any prose or poem into its components—words, punctuation, grammar and so forth—then compares that literary signature with a specimen of the target writer in its own memory. Eighty-nine percent accuracy. Very useful for spotting forgeries. We had what purported to be a pa
ge of an early draft of Antony and Cleopatra. It was rejected on the grounds that it had too many verbs per unit paragraph.”
He closed the door.
“That’s all of us. The man in overall charge of Swindon SpecOps is Commander Braxton Hicks. He’s answerable to the Regional Commander based in Salisbury. He leaves us alone most of the time, which is the way we like it. He also likes to see any new operatives the morning they arrive, so I suggest you go and have a word. He’s in room twenty-eight down the corridor.”
We retraced our steps back to my desk. Victor wished me well again and then disappeared to consult with Helmut about some pirate copies of Doctor Faustus that had appeared on the market with the endings rewritten to be happy.
I sat down in my chair and opened the desk drawer. There was nothing in it; not so much as a pencil shaving. Bowden was watching me.
“Victor emptied it the morning after Crometty’s murder.”
“James Crometty,” I murmured. “Suppose you tell me about him?”
Bowden picked up a pencil and tried to balance it on its sharp end.
“Crometty worked mainly in nineteenth-century prose and poetry. He was an excellent officer but excitable. He had little time for procedure. He vanished one evening when he said he had a tip-off about a rare manuscript. We found him a week later in the abandoned Raven public house on Morgue Road. They had shot him six times in the face.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I’ve lost friends before,” said Bowden, his voice never wavering from the measured pace of speech he used, “but he was a close friend and colleague and I would gladly have taken his place.”
He rubbed his nose slightly; it was the only sign of outward emotion that he had shown.
“I consider myself a spiritual man, Miss Next, although I am not religious. By spiritual I merely mean that I feel I have good in my soul and am inclined to follow the correct course of action given a prescribed set of circumstances. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“Having said that, I would still be very keen to end the life of the person who did this foul deed. I have been practicing on the range and now carry a pistol full time; look—”