Handley laughed.
'You talk about him as if he were a real person!'
'She takes her work very seriously, Handley,' said Landen without the glimmer of a smile. 'I'd advise you to consider very seriously anything she happens to say. Wheels within wheels, Handley.'
But Handley was adamant.
'I'm going to kill him off so utterly and completely that no one will ever ask me for another Zhark novel again. Thanks for lending me the book, Land. I'll see myself out.'
'Is Handley in danger?' asked Landen as soon as he had gone.
'Quite possibly. I'm not sure the Zharkian death ray works in the real world, and I'd hate for Handley to be the one who finds out.'
'This is a BookWorld thing, isn't it? Let's just change the subject. What did your stalker want?'
I smiled.
'You know, Landen, things are beginning to look up. I must call Bowden.'
I quickly dialled his number.
'Bowd? It's Thursday. I've figured out how we're going to get across the border. Set everything up for tomorrow morning. We'll muster at Leigh Delamere at eight ... I can't tell you . . . Stig and Millon . . . see you there. 'Bye.'
I called Stig and told him the same, then kissed Landen and asked him whether he'd mind feeding Friday on his own. He didn't, of course, and I dashed off to speak to Mycroft.
I was back in time to help Landen scrub the food off Friday, read him a story and put him to bed. It wasn't late but we went to bed ourselves. Tonight there was no shyness or confusion and we undressed quickly. He pushed me back on to the bed and with his fingertips—
'Wait!' I cried out.
'What?'
'I can't concentrate with all those people—!'
Landen looked round the empty bedroom.
'What people?'
'Those people,' I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, 'the ones reading us.'
Landen stared at me and raised an eyebrow. I felt stupid, relaxed and gave out a nervous giggle.
'Sorry. I've been living inside fiction for too long; sometimes I get this weird feeling that you, me and everything else are just, well, characters in a book or something.'
'Plainly, that is ridiculous.'
'I know, I know. I'm sorry. Where were we?'
'Just here.'
32
'So, what's the plan?' asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were travelling in Bowden's Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the back seat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.
'Well,' I said, 'ever thought it odd that Parliament just roll over and do anything that Kaine asks?'
'I've given up even trying to understand Parliament,' said Bowden.
'They're all snivelling toadies,' put in Millon.
'If you even need a government,' added Stig, 'you are a life form flawed beyond redemption.'
'I was confused, too,' I continued. 'A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers."
'Now that's my kind of theory!' exclaimed Millon excitedly.
'I couldn't figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis I felt it myself. A sort of mind-numbing go-with-the-flow feeling when I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless, or wrong. I had seen its effect at the Evade the Question Time TV show, too — the front row were eating out of Kaine's hand, no matter what he said.'
'So what's the connection?'
'I felt it again in Mycroft's lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that I twigged. The ovinator. We all thought the "ovine" part of it was to do with eggs, but it's not. It's to do with sheep. The ovinator transmits sub-alpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instil sheep-like tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so they are unaffected; it's possible that Goliath may have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an anti-serum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can't remember. Goliath get hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine -bingo. Parliament do everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.'
There was silence in the car.
'What can we do about it?'
'Mycroft's working on an ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but we carry on with our plans as before. The Elan — and win the Superhoop.'
'Even I'm finding this hard to believe,' murmured Millon, 'and that's a first for me.'
'How does it get us out of England?' asked Bowden.
I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap.
'With the ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose.us.'
'I'm not sure that's morally acceptable,' said Bowden. 'I mean, doesn't that make us as bad as Kaine?'
'I think we should stop and talk this through,' added Millon.
'It's one thing making up stories about mind control experiments, but quite another actually using them.'
I opened the briefcase and switched the ovinator on.
'Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?'
'Well, all right, then,' conceded Bowden, 'I guess I'm with you on this.'
'Millon?'
'I'll do whatever Bowden does.'
'It really does work, doesn't it?' observed Stig, giving a short snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.
Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the ovinator in the briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.
'What are in those trucks?' asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.
'You don't need to look in the trucks,' I told him.
'We don't need to look in the trucks,' echoed the border guard.
'We can go through unimpeded.'
'You can go through unimpeded.'
'You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'
'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'
He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.
Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards, who only needed a short burst from the ovinator to isolate the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was not electrified and I pushed it open to let the car pass.
The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.
'Now can you tell me what we're doing here?' asked Millon, staring intently out of the window and taking frequent photographs.
'Two reasons,' I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies, 'first, because we think someone's been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.'
'So it's true you can't have children?'
Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.
'It is true,' he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.
'Take a left here, Bowd.'
He changed gear, pulled the wheel around and we drove on to a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We proceeded up a hill, took a left turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.
'Stay in the car, keep it running,' I said to Bowden. 'Millon, stay put. Stig — with me.'
Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a licence-built Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the seat leather hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground and it was full of water-related technical stuff, all now mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his 'chimeras running wild' stuff, but all of a sudden I felt nervous.
'Miss Next!'
It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather too quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.
'What's up?'
He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever was in this accident, one of them never left.
'Hear that?' asked Stig.
I listened.
'No.'
'Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.'
We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much more slowly, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them showed the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even more dark and deep and impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath bioengineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.
It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But compared to what we had been led to expect by Millon's hyper-active imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style then popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or had collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.
'What was that?' said Millon.
'What was what?'
'A sort of yummy noise.'
'Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.'
We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly, Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way among the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.
'Where are the main labs?' I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.
Millon unfolded a blueprint.
'Where do you get all this stuff?' asked Bowden incredulously.
'I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti's foot,' Millon replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. 'It's this way.'
We walked through the building, among more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings, towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where row upon row of abandoned glass amnio jars were lined up against the wall. In many of them the liquefied remnants of a potential life form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.
'What was this place?' I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.
'This was,' muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, 'the main sabre-tooth tiger manufacturing facility. The Neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.'
The door was locked and bolted but it was dry and rotten and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a half-hearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped in the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door but the amnio jars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence and I shivered. To me, the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing; umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully among the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room where the infant Neanderthals were taken out of their amnio jars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this was the nursery where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through. He stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.
'When we dream, it is of this,' he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.
After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amnio jars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.
A dozen or so paces farther on the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In an adjacent room we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.
'How many do you think went through here?' asked Bowden in a whisper.
'Hundreds and hundreds,' replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name 'Shaxpreke, W., 769' written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.
'What happened to them all?'
'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'
33
We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing in the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously and one eye was closed — but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy but it didn't matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616 but genetically speaking he was with us right now.
'William Shakespeare?'
'I am a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,' he corrected.
'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, 'my name is Thursday Next and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.'
He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and then back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.
'O, wonder!' he said at last. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!'
He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn't look as though he had seen anyone for a while.
'What happened to the others, Mr Shgakespeafe?'
He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a broken window that overlooked what had once been a large exercise compound. In the middle were two grassy mounds. It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to guess what was underneath them.
'O heart, heavy heart, Why sigh'st thou without breaking?' murmured Shgakespeafe sorrowfully. 'After the slaughter of so many peers by falsehood and by treachery, when will our great regenitors be conquered?'
'I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,' I told him sadly, 'but in all honesty the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only offer yourself and any others who survived my protection.'
He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candour. I looked beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.
'Are there any other Shakespeares here?' asked Bowden.
'Only myself — yet the night echoes with the cries of my cousins,' replied Shgakespeafe. 'You will hear them anon.'
As if in answer there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.
'We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,' said Shgakespeafe, looking around nervously. 'Follow me and give me audience, friends.'
He led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of paper — the product of Shgakespeafe's outpourings. He led us across and gave us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all — merely scraps of existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters, their minds filled with the Bard's plays, and scientists moving among them trying to find one, just one, who had even one half the talent of the original.
Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there showed us mounds and mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in the future to peruse. I looked again at the mound of paperwork. There must have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, mouldy and unstable.
'It would take an age to sort through it for anything of potential brilliance,' mused Bowden, who had arrived by my side. Perhaps, ultimately, the experiment had succeeded. Perhaps there was an equal of Shakespeare buried in the mass grave outside, his work somewhere deep within the mountain of unintelligible prose facing us. It was unlikely we would ever know, and if we did it would teach us nothing new — except that it could be done and others might try. I hoped the mound of paperwork would just slowly rot. In the pursuit of great art Goliath had perpetrated a crime that far outstripped anything I had so far seen.
Millon took pictures, his flashgun illuminating the dim intenor of the scriptorium. I shivered and decided I needed to get away from the oppressiveness of the interior. Bowden and I walked to the front of the building and sat among the rubble on the front steps, just next to a fallen statue of Socrates that held a banner proclaiming the value of the pursuit of knowledge.
'Do you think we'll have trouble persuading Shgakespeafe to come with us?' he asked.
As if in answer, Shgakespeafe walked cautiously from the building. He earned a battered suitcase and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Without waiting to be asked he got in the back of the car and started to scribble in a notebook with a pencil stub.
'Does that answer your question?'
The sun dropped below the hill in front of us and the air suddenly felt colder. Every time there was a strange noise from the hills Shgakespeafe jumped and looked around nervously, then continued to scribble. I was just about to fetch Stig when he appeared from the building carrying three enormous leather-bound volumes.
'Did you find what you needed?'
He passed me the first book, which I opened at random. It was, I discovered, a Goliath biotech manual for building a Neanderthal. The page I had selected gave a detailed description of the Neanderthal hand.
'A complete manual,' he said slowly. 'With it we can make children.'
I handed back the volume and he placed it with the others in the boot of the car. There was another unearthly wail in the distance.
'A deadly groan,' muttered Shgakespeafe, sitting lower in his seat, 'like life and death's departing!'
'We had better get going,' I said. 'There is something out there and I've a feeling we should leave before it gets too inquisitive.'
'Chimera?' asked Bowden. 'To be honest we've seen the grand total of none from the moment we came in here.'
'We do not see them because they do not wish to be seen,' observed Stig. 'There are chimera here. Dangerous chimera.'
'Thanks, Stig,' said Millon, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, 'that's a real help.'
'It is the truth, Mr de Floss.'
'Well, keep the truth to yourself in future.'
I shut the rear door as soon as Stig had wedged himself in next to Shgakespeafe and climbed in the front passenger seat. Bowden drove off as rapidly as the car would allow.
'Millon, is there any other route out that doesn't take us through that heavily wooded area where we found the other cars?'
He consulted the map for a moment.
'No. Why?'
'Because it looked like a good place for an ambush.'
'This really gets better and better, doesn't it?'
'On the contrary,' replied Stig, who took all speech at face value, 'this is not good at all. We find the prospect of being eaten by chimeras extremely awkward.'
'Awkward?' echoed Millon. 'Being eaten is awkward?'
'Indeed,' said Stig, 'the Neanderthal instruction manuals are far more important than we.'
'That's your opinion,' retorted Millon. 'Right now there is nothing more important than me.'
'How very human,' replied Stig simply.
We sped up the road, drove back through the rock cutting and headed towards the wood.
'By the pricking of my thumbs,' remarked Shgakespeafe in an ominous tone of voice, 'something wicked this way comes!'
'There!' yelled Millon, pointing a quivering finger out of the window. I caught a glimpse of a large beast before it vanished behind a fallen oak, then another jumping from one tree to another. They weren't hiding themselves any more. We could all see them as we drove down the wooded road, past the abandoned cars. Lolloping beasts of a ragged shape flitted through the woods, experimental creations of an industry before regulation. We heard a thump as one leapt out of the woods, sprang upon the steel roof of the car and then disappeared with a whoop into the forest. I looked out of the rear window and saw something unspeakably nasty scrabble across the road behind us. I drew my automatic and Stig wound down the window, tranquilliser gun at the ready. We rounded the next corner and Bowden stamped on the brakes. A row of chimeras had placed themselves across the road. Bowden threw the car into reverse but a tree came crashing down behind us, cutting off our escape. We had driven into the trap, the trap was sprung — and all that remained was for the trapper to do with the trapped whatever they wished.
'How many?' 1 asked.
'Ten up front,' said Bowden.
'Two dozen behind,' answered Stig.
'Lots either side!' quivered Millon, who was more used to making up facts to fit his bizarre conspiracy theories than actually witnessing any first hand.
'What a sign it is of evil life,' murmured Shgakespeafe, 'Where death's approach is seen so terrible!'
'Okay,' I muttered, 'everyone stay calm and when I say, open fire.'
'We will not survive,' said Stig in a matter-of-fact tone. 'Too many of them, not enough of us. We suggest a different strategy.'
'And that is?'
Stig was momentarily lost for words.
'We do not know. Just different.'
The chimeras slavered and emitted low moans as they moved closer. Each one was a kaleidoscope of varying body parts, as though their creators had been indulging in some sort of perverse genetic mix-and-match one-upmanship.
'When I count to three rev up and drop the clutch,' I instructed Bowden. 'The rest of you open up with everything we've got.' I handed Bowden's gun to Floss. 'Know how to use one of these?'
He nodded and flipped off the safety.
'One . . . Two . . .'
I stopped counting because a cry from the woods had startled the chimeras. Those that had ears pricked them up, paused, then began to depart in fright. It wasn't an occasion for relief. Chimeras are bad but something that frightened chimeras could only be worse. We heard the cry again.
'It sounds human,' murmured Bowden.
'How human?' added Millon.
There followed several more cries from more than one individual, and as the last of the terrified chimeras vanished into the undergrowth I breathed a sigh of relief. A group of men appeared out of the brush to our right. They were all extremely short and wore the faded and tattered uniform of what appeared to be the French army. Some wore shabby cockaded hats, others had no jackets at all and some only a dirty white linen shirt. My relief was short-lived. They stood at the edge of the forest and regarded us suspiciously, heavy cudgels in their hands.
'Qu'est-ce que c'est?' said one, pointing at us.
'Anglais?' said another.
'Les rosbifs? Ici, en France?' said a third in a shocked tone.
'Non, ce n'est pas possible!'
It didn't take a genius to figure out who they were.
'A gang of Napoleons,' hissed Bowden. 'Looks like Goliath weren't just trying to eternalise the Bard. The military potential of cloning a Napoleon in his prime would be considerable.'
The Napoleons stared at us for a moment and then talked among themselves in low tones, had an argument, gesticulated wildly, raised their voices and generally disagreed with one another.
'Let's go,' I whispered to Bowden.
But as soon as the car clunked into gear the Napoleons leaped into action with cries of: 'Au secours! Les rosbifs's'échappent! N'oubliez pas Agincourt! Vite! Vite!' and then rushed the car. Stig got off a shot and managed to tranq a particularly vicious-looking Napoleon in the thigh. They smashed their cudgels against the car, broke the windows and sent a cascade of broken glass all over us. I thumped the central door-locking mechanism with my elbow as a Napoleon grappled with my door handle. I was just about to fire at point-blank range into the face of another Napoleon when there was a tremendous explosion thirty yards in front of us. The car was rocked by the blast and enveloped momentarily in a drifting cloud of smoke.
'Sacrebleu!' shrieked Napoleon, breaking off the attack. 'Le Grand Nez! Avancez, mes amis, mart aux ennemis de la République!'
'Go!' I shouted at Bowden, who, despite having been struck a glancing blow by Napoleon, was still just about conscious. The car juddered away and I grabbed the steering wheel to avoid a band of twenty or so Wellingtons of varying degrees of shabbiness who were streaming past the car in their haste to dispose of Napoleon.
'Up, guards, and at them!' I heard Wellington shout as we gathered speed down the road, past a smoking artillery piece and the abandoned cars we had seen on the way in. Within a few minutes we were clear of the wood and the battling factions, and Bowden slowed down.
'Everyone okay?'
They all answered in the affirmative, although they were not unscathed. Millon was still ashen and I took Bowden's gun off him just in case. Stig had a bruise coming up on his cheek and I had several cuts on my face from the glass.
'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I asked, 'are you okay?'
'Look about you,' he said grimly, 'security gives way to conspiracy.'
We drove to the gates, out of Area 21 and through the darkening evening sky to the Welsh border, and home.
34
I awoke and gazed at Landen in the early morning light that had started to creep around the bedroom. He was snoring ever so quietly and I gave him a long hug before I got up, wrapped myself in a dressing gown and tiptoed past Friday's room on my way downstairs to make some coffee. I walked into Landen's study as I waited for the kettle to boil, sat down at the piano and played a very quiet chord. The sun crept above the roof of the house opposite at that precise moment and cast a finger of orange light across the room. I heard the kettle click off and returned to the kitchen to make the coffee. As I poured the hot water on the grounds there was a small wail from upstairs. I paused to see whether another 'would follow it. A single wail might only be a stirring and he could be left alone. Two wails or more would be Hungry Boy, eager for a gallon or two of porridge. There was a second wail ten seconds later and I was just about to go and get him when I heard a thump and a scraping as Landen pulled on his leg and then walked along the corridor to Friday's room. There were more footsteps as he returned to his room, then silence. I relaxed, took a sip of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, deep in thought.
The Superhoop was tomorrow and I had my team — the question was, would it make a difference? There was a chance we might find a copy of At Long Last Lust, too — but I wasn't counting on this, either. Of equal chance and equal risk of failure was Shgakespeafe being able to unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and Mycroft coming up with an ovi-negator at short notice. But none of these pressing matters was foremost in my mind: most important to me was that at eleven o'clock this morning Cindy would try to kill me for the third and final time. She would fail, and she would die. I thought of Spike and Betty and picked up the phone. I figured he'd be a heavy sleeper and was right — Cindy answered the phone.
'It's Thursday.'
'This is professionally very unethical,' said Cindy in a sleepy voice. 'What's the time?'
'Half six. Listen, I rang to suggest that it'd be a good idea if you stayed at home today and didn't go to work.'
There was a pause.
'I can't do that,' she said at last. 'I've arranged childcare and everything. But there's nothing to stop you getting out of town and never returning.'
'This is my town too, Cindy.'
'Leave now or the Next family crypt will be up for a dusting.'
'I won't do that.'
'Then,' replied Cindy with a sigh, 'we've got nothing else to discuss. I'll see you later — although I doubt you'll see me.'
The line went dead and I gently replaced the receiver. I felt sick. The wife of a good friend would die today and it didn't feel good.
'What's the matter?' said a voice close at hand. 'You seem upset.'
It was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
'No,' I replied, 'everything's just as it should be. Thanks for dropping round; I've found us a William Shakespeare. He's not the original, but close enough for our purposes. He's in this cupboard.'
I opened the cupboard door and a very startled Shgakespeafe looked up from where he had been scribbling by the light of a candle end he had stuck upon his head. The wax had begun to run down his face, but he didn't seem to mind.
'Mr Shgakespeafe, this is the hedgehog I was telling you about.'
He shut his notebook and stared at Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. He wasn't the slightest bit afraid or surprised — after the abominations he'd dodged on an almost daily basis in Area 21, I suspect a six-foot-tall hedgehog was something of a relief. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle curtsyed gracefully.
'Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Shgakespeafe,' she said politely. 'Will you come with me, please?'
'Who was that?' Landen called out as he walked downstairs a little later.
'It was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle picking up a William Shakespeare clone in order to save Hamlet from permanent destruction.'
'You can't ever be serious, can you?' He laughed as he gave me a hug. I had smuggled Shgakespeafe into the house without Landen seeing. I know you're meant to be honest and truthful to your spouse but I thought there might be a limit, and if there was I didn't want to reach it too soon.
Friday came down to breakfast ten minutes later. He looked tousled, sleepy and a bit grumpy.
'Quis nostrud laboris,' he moaned. 'Nisi ut aliquip ex consequat.'
I gave him some toast and rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs for my bullet-proof vest. All my stuff was now back at Landen's house as if I had never moved out. Sideslips are confusing, but you can get used to almost anything.
'Why are you wearing a bullet-proof vest?'
It was Landen. Drat. I should have put it on at the station.
'What bullet-proof vest?'
'The one you're trying to put on.'
'Oh, that one. No reason. Listen, if Friday gets hungry you can always give him a snack. He likes bananas — you may have to buy some more, and if a gorilla calls, it's only that Mrs Bradshaw I was telling you about.'
'Don't change the subject. How can you go to work wearing a vest for "no reason"?'
'It's a precaution.'
'Insurance is a precaution. A vest means you're taking unnecessary risks.'
'I'd be taking a bigger one without it.'
'What's going on, Thursday?'
I waved a hand vaguely in the air and tried to make light of it.
'Just an assassin. A small one. Barely worth thinking about.'
'Which one?'
'I can't remember. Window . . . something.'
'The Windowmaker? A contract with her and you stick to reading short stories? Sixty-seven known victims?'
'Sixty-eight if she did Samuel Pring.'
'That's not important. Why didn't you tell me?'
'I ... I ... didn't want you to worry.'
He rubbed his face with his hands and stared at me for a moment, then sighed deeply.
'This is the Thursday Next I married, isn't it?'
I nodded my head.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly.
'Will you be careful?' he whispered in my ear.
'I'm always careful.'
'No, really careful. The sort of careful that you should be when you have a husband and son who'd be surpremely pissed off if they were to lose you?'
'Ah,' I whispered back, 'that sort of careful. Yes, I will.'
We kissed and I Velcroed up the vest, put my shirt over the top of it and my shoulder holster on top of this. I kissed Friday and told him to be good, then kissed Landen again.
'I'll see you this evening,' I told him, 'and that's a promise.'
I drove to Wanborough to find Joffy. He was officiating at a GSD civil union ceremony and I had to wait in the back of the temple ' until he had finished. I had some time before I had to deal with Cindy, and looking more closely into St Zvlkx seemed like a good way to fill it. Millon's idea that Zvlkx wasn't a seer but a rogue member of the ChronoGuard involved in some sort of timecrime seemed, on the face of it, unlikely. You couldn't hide from the ChronoGuard. They would always find you. Perhaps not here and now, but then and there — when you least expected it. Long before you even thought about doing something wrong. The ChronoGuard left no trace, either. With the perpetrator gone, then the timecrime never happened either. Very neat, very clever. But with the historical record so closely scrutinised and the ChronoGuard themselves giving Zvlkx the seal of approval, how on earth did Zvlkx — if he was a fake — get around the system?
'Hello, Doofus!' said Joffy as the happy couple kissed outside the church in a shower of confetti. 'What brings you here?'
'St Zvlkx — where is he?'
'He got the bus into Swindon this morning. Why?'
I outlined my suspicions.
'Zvlkx a rogue member of the ChronoGuard? But why? What's he up to? Why risk permanent eradication for dubious fame as a thirteenth-century seer?'
'How much did he get from the Toast Marketing Board?'
'Twenty-five grand.'
'Hardly a fortune. Can we look in his room?'
'Outrageous!' replied Joffy. 'I would be guilty of a shameful breach of trust if I were to allow a room search in his absence. I have a spare key here.'
Zvlkx's room was much as you would suppose a monk's cell to be — spartan in the extreme. He slept on a mattress stuffed with straw and had only a table and chair as furniture. On the table was a Bible. It was only after we started searching that we found a CD Walkman under the mattress along with a few copies of Big & Bouncy and Fast Horse.
'A betting man?' I asked.
'Drinking, betting, smoking, wenching — he did it all.'
'The magazines show he can read English, too. What are you looking for, Joff?'
Joffy had been rummaging under the pillow.
'His Book of Revealtments. He usually hides it here.'
'So! You've searched his room before. Suspicious?'
Joffy looked sheepish.
'I'm afraid so. His behaviour is less like that of a saint and more like that of, well, a cheap vulgarian — when I translate I have to make certain . . . adjustments.'
I pulled out his desk drawer and turned it over. Stuck to the bottom was an envelope.
'Bingo!'
It contained a single one-way Gravitube ticket to Bali. Joffy raised his eyebrows and we exchanged nervous glances. Zvlkx was definitely up to something.
Joffy accompanied me into Swindon and we drove up and down the streets trying to find the wayward saint. We visited the site of his old cathedral at Tesco's but couldn't find him, so went on a circuit that took in the law courts, the SpecOps building and the theatre before driving past the university and down Commercial Road. Joffy spotted him outside Pete & Dave's, lumbering up the street.
'There!'
'I see him.'
We abandoned the car and trotted to keep up with the scruffy figure dressed in only a blanket. It was just bad luck that he glanced furtively behind and spotted us. He darted across the street. I don't know whether his lank and uncut hair had got in his eyes, or he had forgotten about traffic during his stay in the Dark Ages, but he didn't look where he was going and ran straight in front of a bus. His head cracked the windscreen and his bony body was thrown sideways on to the pavement with a thump. Joffy and I were first on the scene. A younger man might have survived relatively unscathed, but Zvlkx, his body weakened through poor diet and disease, didn't stand much of a chance. He was coughing and crawling with all the strength he could muster towards the entrance of the nearest shop.
'Easy, Your Grace,' murmured Joffy, laying a hand on his shoulder and stopping him moving. 'You're going to be all right.'
'Bollocks,' said Zvlkx in a state of exasperation, 'bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. :Survived the plague to get hit by a sodding number twenty-three bus. Bollocks.'
'What did he say?'
'He's annoyed.'
'Who are you?' I said. 'Are you ChronoGuard?'
His eyes flicked across to mine and he groaned. Not only dying, but dying and rumbled.
He made another attempt to reach the doorway and collapsed.
'Someone call for an ambulance!' yelled out Joffy
'It's too late for that,' Zvlkx muttered. 'Too late for me, too late for all of us. This wasn't how it toas meant to turn out; time is out of joint — anb it wan't be for me to set it right. Joffy, take this and use it wisely as I would not have done. Bury me in the grounds of my cathedral — and don't tell them who I was. I lived a sinner but I'd like to die a saint, Oh, and if a fat slapper named Shirley tells you I promised her a thousand quid, she's a bloody liar.'
'You talk about him as if he were a real person!'
'She takes her work very seriously, Handley,' said Landen without the glimmer of a smile. 'I'd advise you to consider very seriously anything she happens to say. Wheels within wheels, Handley.'
But Handley was adamant.
'I'm going to kill him off so utterly and completely that no one will ever ask me for another Zhark novel again. Thanks for lending me the book, Land. I'll see myself out.'
'Is Handley in danger?' asked Landen as soon as he had gone.
'Quite possibly. I'm not sure the Zharkian death ray works in the real world, and I'd hate for Handley to be the one who finds out.'
'This is a BookWorld thing, isn't it? Let's just change the subject. What did your stalker want?'
I smiled.
'You know, Landen, things are beginning to look up. I must call Bowden.'
I quickly dialled his number.
'Bowd? It's Thursday. I've figured out how we're going to get across the border. Set everything up for tomorrow morning. We'll muster at Leigh Delamere at eight ... I can't tell you . . . Stig and Millon . . . see you there. 'Bye.'
I called Stig and told him the same, then kissed Landen and asked him whether he'd mind feeding Friday on his own. He didn't, of course, and I dashed off to speak to Mycroft.
I was back in time to help Landen scrub the food off Friday, read him a story and put him to bed. It wasn't late but we went to bed ourselves. Tonight there was no shyness or confusion and we undressed quickly. He pushed me back on to the bed and with his fingertips—
'Wait!' I cried out.
'What?'
'I can't concentrate with all those people—!'
Landen looked round the empty bedroom.
'What people?'
'Those people,' I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, 'the ones reading us.'
Landen stared at me and raised an eyebrow. I felt stupid, relaxed and gave out a nervous giggle.
'Sorry. I've been living inside fiction for too long; sometimes I get this weird feeling that you, me and everything else are just, well, characters in a book or something.'
'Plainly, that is ridiculous.'
'I know, I know. I'm sorry. Where were we?'
'Just here.'
32
Area 21: The Elan
FREEDOM OF |||||||| ACT
A STEP CLOSER, ANNOUNCES MR ||||||||
Open government came one step closer yesterday with the announcement that Mr |||||| would lend his weight to the Freedom of ||||||| Act. The act, which aims to bring once top-||||| information from ||||||||||||| into hands of the
|||||||, was halted as a 'great leap forward' by Mr ||||||||||||, the Departmnt of |||||||||||||||'s senior ||||||||||||. The chief opponent to the draft bill, Mr |||||||||||, gave his assurance that 'as long as my name is |||||||||||| I won't allow this ||||||||||| to be passed'.
Article in The |||||||||| newspaper, |||||||||||||||| July 19|||||
'So, what's the plan?' asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were travelling in Bowden's Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the back seat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.
'Well,' I said, 'ever thought it odd that Parliament just roll over and do anything that Kaine asks?'
'I've given up even trying to understand Parliament,' said Bowden.
'They're all snivelling toadies,' put in Millon.
'If you even need a government,' added Stig, 'you are a life form flawed beyond redemption.'
'I was confused, too,' I continued. 'A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers."
'Now that's my kind of theory!' exclaimed Millon excitedly.
'I couldn't figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis I felt it myself. A sort of mind-numbing go-with-the-flow feeling when I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless, or wrong. I had seen its effect at the Evade the Question Time TV show, too — the front row were eating out of Kaine's hand, no matter what he said.'
'So what's the connection?'
'I felt it again in Mycroft's lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that I twigged. The ovinator. We all thought the "ovine" part of it was to do with eggs, but it's not. It's to do with sheep. The ovinator transmits sub-alpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instil sheep-like tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so they are unaffected; it's possible that Goliath may have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an anti-serum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can't remember. Goliath get hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine -bingo. Parliament do everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.'
There was silence in the car.
'What can we do about it?'
'Mycroft's working on an ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but we carry on with our plans as before. The Elan — and win the Superhoop.'
'Even I'm finding this hard to believe,' murmured Millon, 'and that's a first for me.'
'How does it get us out of England?' asked Bowden.
I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap.
'With the ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose.us.'
'I'm not sure that's morally acceptable,' said Bowden. 'I mean, doesn't that make us as bad as Kaine?'
'I think we should stop and talk this through,' added Millon.
'It's one thing making up stories about mind control experiments, but quite another actually using them.'
I opened the briefcase and switched the ovinator on.
'Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?'
'Well, all right, then,' conceded Bowden, 'I guess I'm with you on this.'
'Millon?'
'I'll do whatever Bowden does.'
'It really does work, doesn't it?' observed Stig, giving a short snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.
Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the ovinator in the briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.
'What are in those trucks?' asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.
'You don't need to look in the trucks,' I told him.
'We don't need to look in the trucks,' echoed the border guard.
'We can go through unimpeded.'
'You can go through unimpeded.'
'You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'
'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'
He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.
Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards, who only needed a short burst from the ovinator to isolate the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was not electrified and I pushed it open to let the car pass.
The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.
'Now can you tell me what we're doing here?' asked Millon, staring intently out of the window and taking frequent photographs.
'Two reasons,' I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies, 'first, because we think someone's been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.'
'So it's true you can't have children?'
Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.
'It is true,' he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.
'Take a left here, Bowd.'
He changed gear, pulled the wheel around and we drove on to a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We proceeded up a hill, took a left turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.
'Stay in the car, keep it running,' I said to Bowden. 'Millon, stay put. Stig — with me.'
Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a licence-built Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the seat leather hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground and it was full of water-related technical stuff, all now mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his 'chimeras running wild' stuff, but all of a sudden I felt nervous.
'Miss Next!'
It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather too quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.
'What's up?'
He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever was in this accident, one of them never left.
'Hear that?' asked Stig.
I listened.
'No.'
'Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.'
We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much more slowly, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them showed the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even more dark and deep and impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath bioengineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.
It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But compared to what we had been led to expect by Millon's hyper-active imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style then popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or had collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.
'What was that?' said Millon.
'What was what?'
'A sort of yummy noise.'
'Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.'
We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly, Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way among the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.
'Where are the main labs?' I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.
Millon unfolded a blueprint.
'Where do you get all this stuff?' asked Bowden incredulously.
'I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti's foot,' Millon replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. 'It's this way.'
We walked through the building, among more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings, towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where row upon row of abandoned glass amnio jars were lined up against the wall. In many of them the liquefied remnants of a potential life form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.
'What was this place?' I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.
'This was,' muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, 'the main sabre-tooth tiger manufacturing facility. The Neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.'
The door was locked and bolted but it was dry and rotten and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a half-hearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped in the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door but the amnio jars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence and I shivered. To me, the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing; umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully among the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room where the infant Neanderthals were taken out of their amnio jars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this was the nursery where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through. He stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.
'When we dream, it is of this,' he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.
After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amnio jars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.
A dozen or so paces farther on the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In an adjacent room we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.
'How many do you think went through here?' asked Bowden in a whisper.
'Hundreds and hundreds,' replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name 'Shaxpreke, W., 769' written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.
'What happened to them all?'
'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'
33
Shgakespeafe
'ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE', CLAIMS PLAYWRIGHT
That was the analogy of life offered by Mr William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring that 'All the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one nun in his time plays many parts.' Mr Shakespeare's latest offering, a comedy entitled As You Like It, opened to mixed reviews with the Southwark Gazette declaring it 'a rollicking comedy of the highest order' while the Westminster Evening News described it as 'tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse'. Mr Shakespeare declined to comment as he is already penning a follow-up.
Article in Blackfriar New, September 1589
We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing in the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously and one eye was closed — but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy but it didn't matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616 but genetically speaking he was with us right now.
'William Shakespeare?'
'I am a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,' he corrected.
'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, 'my name is Thursday Next and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.'
He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and then back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.
'O, wonder!' he said at last. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!'
He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn't look as though he had seen anyone for a while.
'What happened to the others, Mr Shgakespeafe?'
He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a broken window that overlooked what had once been a large exercise compound. In the middle were two grassy mounds. It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to guess what was underneath them.
'O heart, heavy heart, Why sigh'st thou without breaking?' murmured Shgakespeafe sorrowfully. 'After the slaughter of so many peers by falsehood and by treachery, when will our great regenitors be conquered?'
'I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,' I told him sadly, 'but in all honesty the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only offer yourself and any others who survived my protection.'
He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candour. I looked beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.
'Are there any other Shakespeares here?' asked Bowden.
'Only myself — yet the night echoes with the cries of my cousins,' replied Shgakespeafe. 'You will hear them anon.'
As if in answer there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.
'We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,' said Shgakespeafe, looking around nervously. 'Follow me and give me audience, friends.'
He led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of paper — the product of Shgakespeafe's outpourings. He led us across and gave us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all — merely scraps of existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters, their minds filled with the Bard's plays, and scientists moving among them trying to find one, just one, who had even one half the talent of the original.
Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there showed us mounds and mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in the future to peruse. I looked again at the mound of paperwork. There must have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, mouldy and unstable.
'It would take an age to sort through it for anything of potential brilliance,' mused Bowden, who had arrived by my side. Perhaps, ultimately, the experiment had succeeded. Perhaps there was an equal of Shakespeare buried in the mass grave outside, his work somewhere deep within the mountain of unintelligible prose facing us. It was unlikely we would ever know, and if we did it would teach us nothing new — except that it could be done and others might try. I hoped the mound of paperwork would just slowly rot. In the pursuit of great art Goliath had perpetrated a crime that far outstripped anything I had so far seen.
Millon took pictures, his flashgun illuminating the dim intenor of the scriptorium. I shivered and decided I needed to get away from the oppressiveness of the interior. Bowden and I walked to the front of the building and sat among the rubble on the front steps, just next to a fallen statue of Socrates that held a banner proclaiming the value of the pursuit of knowledge.
'Do you think we'll have trouble persuading Shgakespeafe to come with us?' he asked.
As if in answer, Shgakespeafe walked cautiously from the building. He earned a battered suitcase and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Without waiting to be asked he got in the back of the car and started to scribble in a notebook with a pencil stub.
'Does that answer your question?'
The sun dropped below the hill in front of us and the air suddenly felt colder. Every time there was a strange noise from the hills Shgakespeafe jumped and looked around nervously, then continued to scribble. I was just about to fetch Stig when he appeared from the building carrying three enormous leather-bound volumes.
'Did you find what you needed?'
He passed me the first book, which I opened at random. It was, I discovered, a Goliath biotech manual for building a Neanderthal. The page I had selected gave a detailed description of the Neanderthal hand.
'A complete manual,' he said slowly. 'With it we can make children.'
I handed back the volume and he placed it with the others in the boot of the car. There was another unearthly wail in the distance.
'A deadly groan,' muttered Shgakespeafe, sitting lower in his seat, 'like life and death's departing!'
'We had better get going,' I said. 'There is something out there and I've a feeling we should leave before it gets too inquisitive.'
'Chimera?' asked Bowden. 'To be honest we've seen the grand total of none from the moment we came in here.'
'We do not see them because they do not wish to be seen,' observed Stig. 'There are chimera here. Dangerous chimera.'
'Thanks, Stig,' said Millon, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, 'that's a real help.'
'It is the truth, Mr de Floss.'
'Well, keep the truth to yourself in future.'
I shut the rear door as soon as Stig had wedged himself in next to Shgakespeafe and climbed in the front passenger seat. Bowden drove off as rapidly as the car would allow.
'Millon, is there any other route out that doesn't take us through that heavily wooded area where we found the other cars?'
He consulted the map for a moment.
'No. Why?'
'Because it looked like a good place for an ambush.'
'This really gets better and better, doesn't it?'
'On the contrary,' replied Stig, who took all speech at face value, 'this is not good at all. We find the prospect of being eaten by chimeras extremely awkward.'
'Awkward?' echoed Millon. 'Being eaten is awkward?'
'Indeed,' said Stig, 'the Neanderthal instruction manuals are far more important than we.'
'That's your opinion,' retorted Millon. 'Right now there is nothing more important than me.'
'How very human,' replied Stig simply.
We sped up the road, drove back through the rock cutting and headed towards the wood.
'By the pricking of my thumbs,' remarked Shgakespeafe in an ominous tone of voice, 'something wicked this way comes!'
'There!' yelled Millon, pointing a quivering finger out of the window. I caught a glimpse of a large beast before it vanished behind a fallen oak, then another jumping from one tree to another. They weren't hiding themselves any more. We could all see them as we drove down the wooded road, past the abandoned cars. Lolloping beasts of a ragged shape flitted through the woods, experimental creations of an industry before regulation. We heard a thump as one leapt out of the woods, sprang upon the steel roof of the car and then disappeared with a whoop into the forest. I looked out of the rear window and saw something unspeakably nasty scrabble across the road behind us. I drew my automatic and Stig wound down the window, tranquilliser gun at the ready. We rounded the next corner and Bowden stamped on the brakes. A row of chimeras had placed themselves across the road. Bowden threw the car into reverse but a tree came crashing down behind us, cutting off our escape. We had driven into the trap, the trap was sprung — and all that remained was for the trapper to do with the trapped whatever they wished.
'How many?' 1 asked.
'Ten up front,' said Bowden.
'Two dozen behind,' answered Stig.
'Lots either side!' quivered Millon, who was more used to making up facts to fit his bizarre conspiracy theories than actually witnessing any first hand.
'What a sign it is of evil life,' murmured Shgakespeafe, 'Where death's approach is seen so terrible!'
'Okay,' I muttered, 'everyone stay calm and when I say, open fire.'
'We will not survive,' said Stig in a matter-of-fact tone. 'Too many of them, not enough of us. We suggest a different strategy.'
'And that is?'
Stig was momentarily lost for words.
'We do not know. Just different.'
The chimeras slavered and emitted low moans as they moved closer. Each one was a kaleidoscope of varying body parts, as though their creators had been indulging in some sort of perverse genetic mix-and-match one-upmanship.
'When I count to three rev up and drop the clutch,' I instructed Bowden. 'The rest of you open up with everything we've got.' I handed Bowden's gun to Floss. 'Know how to use one of these?'
He nodded and flipped off the safety.
'One . . . Two . . .'
I stopped counting because a cry from the woods had startled the chimeras. Those that had ears pricked them up, paused, then began to depart in fright. It wasn't an occasion for relief. Chimeras are bad but something that frightened chimeras could only be worse. We heard the cry again.
'It sounds human,' murmured Bowden.
'How human?' added Millon.
There followed several more cries from more than one individual, and as the last of the terrified chimeras vanished into the undergrowth I breathed a sigh of relief. A group of men appeared out of the brush to our right. They were all extremely short and wore the faded and tattered uniform of what appeared to be the French army. Some wore shabby cockaded hats, others had no jackets at all and some only a dirty white linen shirt. My relief was short-lived. They stood at the edge of the forest and regarded us suspiciously, heavy cudgels in their hands.
'Qu'est-ce que c'est?' said one, pointing at us.
'Anglais?' said another.
'Les rosbifs? Ici, en France?' said a third in a shocked tone.
'Non, ce n'est pas possible!'
It didn't take a genius to figure out who they were.
'A gang of Napoleons,' hissed Bowden. 'Looks like Goliath weren't just trying to eternalise the Bard. The military potential of cloning a Napoleon in his prime would be considerable.'
The Napoleons stared at us for a moment and then talked among themselves in low tones, had an argument, gesticulated wildly, raised their voices and generally disagreed with one another.
'Let's go,' I whispered to Bowden.
But as soon as the car clunked into gear the Napoleons leaped into action with cries of: 'Au secours! Les rosbifs's'échappent! N'oubliez pas Agincourt! Vite! Vite!' and then rushed the car. Stig got off a shot and managed to tranq a particularly vicious-looking Napoleon in the thigh. They smashed their cudgels against the car, broke the windows and sent a cascade of broken glass all over us. I thumped the central door-locking mechanism with my elbow as a Napoleon grappled with my door handle. I was just about to fire at point-blank range into the face of another Napoleon when there was a tremendous explosion thirty yards in front of us. The car was rocked by the blast and enveloped momentarily in a drifting cloud of smoke.
'Sacrebleu!' shrieked Napoleon, breaking off the attack. 'Le Grand Nez! Avancez, mes amis, mart aux ennemis de la République!'
'Go!' I shouted at Bowden, who, despite having been struck a glancing blow by Napoleon, was still just about conscious. The car juddered away and I grabbed the steering wheel to avoid a band of twenty or so Wellingtons of varying degrees of shabbiness who were streaming past the car in their haste to dispose of Napoleon.
'Up, guards, and at them!' I heard Wellington shout as we gathered speed down the road, past a smoking artillery piece and the abandoned cars we had seen on the way in. Within a few minutes we were clear of the wood and the battling factions, and Bowden slowed down.
'Everyone okay?'
They all answered in the affirmative, although they were not unscathed. Millon was still ashen and I took Bowden's gun off him just in case. Stig had a bruise coming up on his cheek and I had several cuts on my face from the glass.
'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I asked, 'are you okay?'
'Look about you,' he said grimly, 'security gives way to conspiracy.'
We drove to the gates, out of Area 21 and through the darkening evening sky to the Welsh border, and home.
34
St Zvlkx and Cindy
KAINE 'FICTIONAL' CLAIMS BOURNEMOUTH MAN
Retired gas-fitter Mr Martin Piffco made the ludicrous comment yesterday, claiming that the beloved leader of the nation was simply a fictional character 'come to life'. Speaking from the Bournemouth Home for the Exceedingly Odd where he has been committed 'for his own protection', Mr Piffco was more specific and likened Mr Yorrick Kaine to a minor character with an over-inflated opinion of himself in a Daphne Farquitt book entitled At Long Last Lust. The Chancellor's office dubbed the report 'a coincidence", but ordered that the Farquitt book be confiscated nonetheless. Mr Piffco, who faces unspecified charges, made news last year when he made a similar outrageous claim regarding Kaine and Goliath investing in 'mind-controlling experiments'.
Article in the Bournemouth Bugle, 15 March 1987
I awoke and gazed at Landen in the early morning light that had started to creep around the bedroom. He was snoring ever so quietly and I gave him a long hug before I got up, wrapped myself in a dressing gown and tiptoed past Friday's room on my way downstairs to make some coffee. I walked into Landen's study as I waited for the kettle to boil, sat down at the piano and played a very quiet chord. The sun crept above the roof of the house opposite at that precise moment and cast a finger of orange light across the room. I heard the kettle click off and returned to the kitchen to make the coffee. As I poured the hot water on the grounds there was a small wail from upstairs. I paused to see whether another 'would follow it. A single wail might only be a stirring and he could be left alone. Two wails or more would be Hungry Boy, eager for a gallon or two of porridge. There was a second wail ten seconds later and I was just about to go and get him when I heard a thump and a scraping as Landen pulled on his leg and then walked along the corridor to Friday's room. There were more footsteps as he returned to his room, then silence. I relaxed, took a sip of coffee and sat at the kitchen table, deep in thought.
The Superhoop was tomorrow and I had my team — the question was, would it make a difference? There was a chance we might find a copy of At Long Last Lust, too — but I wasn't counting on this, either. Of equal chance and equal risk of failure was Shgakespeafe being able to unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and Mycroft coming up with an ovi-negator at short notice. But none of these pressing matters was foremost in my mind: most important to me was that at eleven o'clock this morning Cindy would try to kill me for the third and final time. She would fail, and she would die. I thought of Spike and Betty and picked up the phone. I figured he'd be a heavy sleeper and was right — Cindy answered the phone.
'It's Thursday.'
'This is professionally very unethical,' said Cindy in a sleepy voice. 'What's the time?'
'Half six. Listen, I rang to suggest that it'd be a good idea if you stayed at home today and didn't go to work.'
There was a pause.
'I can't do that,' she said at last. 'I've arranged childcare and everything. But there's nothing to stop you getting out of town and never returning.'
'This is my town too, Cindy.'
'Leave now or the Next family crypt will be up for a dusting.'
'I won't do that.'
'Then,' replied Cindy with a sigh, 'we've got nothing else to discuss. I'll see you later — although I doubt you'll see me.'
The line went dead and I gently replaced the receiver. I felt sick. The wife of a good friend would die today and it didn't feel good.
'What's the matter?' said a voice close at hand. 'You seem upset.'
It was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
'No,' I replied, 'everything's just as it should be. Thanks for dropping round; I've found us a William Shakespeare. He's not the original, but close enough for our purposes. He's in this cupboard.'
I opened the cupboard door and a very startled Shgakespeafe looked up from where he had been scribbling by the light of a candle end he had stuck upon his head. The wax had begun to run down his face, but he didn't seem to mind.
'Mr Shgakespeafe, this is the hedgehog I was telling you about.'
He shut his notebook and stared at Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. He wasn't the slightest bit afraid or surprised — after the abominations he'd dodged on an almost daily basis in Area 21, I suspect a six-foot-tall hedgehog was something of a relief. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle curtsyed gracefully.
'Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Shgakespeafe,' she said politely. 'Will you come with me, please?'
'Who was that?' Landen called out as he walked downstairs a little later.
'It was Mrs Tiggy-Winkle picking up a William Shakespeare clone in order to save Hamlet from permanent destruction.'
'You can't ever be serious, can you?' He laughed as he gave me a hug. I had smuggled Shgakespeafe into the house without Landen seeing. I know you're meant to be honest and truthful to your spouse but I thought there might be a limit, and if there was I didn't want to reach it too soon.
Friday came down to breakfast ten minutes later. He looked tousled, sleepy and a bit grumpy.
'Quis nostrud laboris,' he moaned. 'Nisi ut aliquip ex consequat.'
I gave him some toast and rummaged in the cupboard under the stairs for my bullet-proof vest. All my stuff was now back at Landen's house as if I had never moved out. Sideslips are confusing, but you can get used to almost anything.
'Why are you wearing a bullet-proof vest?'
It was Landen. Drat. I should have put it on at the station.
'What bullet-proof vest?'
'The one you're trying to put on.'
'Oh, that one. No reason. Listen, if Friday gets hungry you can always give him a snack. He likes bananas — you may have to buy some more, and if a gorilla calls, it's only that Mrs Bradshaw I was telling you about.'
'Don't change the subject. How can you go to work wearing a vest for "no reason"?'
'It's a precaution.'
'Insurance is a precaution. A vest means you're taking unnecessary risks.'
'I'd be taking a bigger one without it.'
'What's going on, Thursday?'
I waved a hand vaguely in the air and tried to make light of it.
'Just an assassin. A small one. Barely worth thinking about.'
'Which one?'
'I can't remember. Window . . . something.'
'The Windowmaker? A contract with her and you stick to reading short stories? Sixty-seven known victims?'
'Sixty-eight if she did Samuel Pring.'
'That's not important. Why didn't you tell me?'
'I ... I ... didn't want you to worry.'
He rubbed his face with his hands and stared at me for a moment, then sighed deeply.
'This is the Thursday Next I married, isn't it?'
I nodded my head.
He wrapped his arms around me and held me tightly.
'Will you be careful?' he whispered in my ear.
'I'm always careful.'
'No, really careful. The sort of careful that you should be when you have a husband and son who'd be surpremely pissed off if they were to lose you?'
'Ah,' I whispered back, 'that sort of careful. Yes, I will.'
We kissed and I Velcroed up the vest, put my shirt over the top of it and my shoulder holster on top of this. I kissed Friday and told him to be good, then kissed Landen again.
'I'll see you this evening,' I told him, 'and that's a promise.'
I drove to Wanborough to find Joffy. He was officiating at a GSD civil union ceremony and I had to wait in the back of the temple ' until he had finished. I had some time before I had to deal with Cindy, and looking more closely into St Zvlkx seemed like a good way to fill it. Millon's idea that Zvlkx wasn't a seer but a rogue member of the ChronoGuard involved in some sort of timecrime seemed, on the face of it, unlikely. You couldn't hide from the ChronoGuard. They would always find you. Perhaps not here and now, but then and there — when you least expected it. Long before you even thought about doing something wrong. The ChronoGuard left no trace, either. With the perpetrator gone, then the timecrime never happened either. Very neat, very clever. But with the historical record so closely scrutinised and the ChronoGuard themselves giving Zvlkx the seal of approval, how on earth did Zvlkx — if he was a fake — get around the system?
'Hello, Doofus!' said Joffy as the happy couple kissed outside the church in a shower of confetti. 'What brings you here?'
'St Zvlkx — where is he?'
'He got the bus into Swindon this morning. Why?'
I outlined my suspicions.
'Zvlkx a rogue member of the ChronoGuard? But why? What's he up to? Why risk permanent eradication for dubious fame as a thirteenth-century seer?'
'How much did he get from the Toast Marketing Board?'
'Twenty-five grand.'
'Hardly a fortune. Can we look in his room?'
'Outrageous!' replied Joffy. 'I would be guilty of a shameful breach of trust if I were to allow a room search in his absence. I have a spare key here.'
Zvlkx's room was much as you would suppose a monk's cell to be — spartan in the extreme. He slept on a mattress stuffed with straw and had only a table and chair as furniture. On the table was a Bible. It was only after we started searching that we found a CD Walkman under the mattress along with a few copies of Big & Bouncy and Fast Horse.
'A betting man?' I asked.
'Drinking, betting, smoking, wenching — he did it all.'
'The magazines show he can read English, too. What are you looking for, Joff?'
Joffy had been rummaging under the pillow.
'His Book of Revealtments. He usually hides it here.'
'So! You've searched his room before. Suspicious?'
Joffy looked sheepish.
'I'm afraid so. His behaviour is less like that of a saint and more like that of, well, a cheap vulgarian — when I translate I have to make certain . . . adjustments.'
I pulled out his desk drawer and turned it over. Stuck to the bottom was an envelope.
'Bingo!'
It contained a single one-way Gravitube ticket to Bali. Joffy raised his eyebrows and we exchanged nervous glances. Zvlkx was definitely up to something.
Joffy accompanied me into Swindon and we drove up and down the streets trying to find the wayward saint. We visited the site of his old cathedral at Tesco's but couldn't find him, so went on a circuit that took in the law courts, the SpecOps building and the theatre before driving past the university and down Commercial Road. Joffy spotted him outside Pete & Dave's, lumbering up the street.
'There!'
'I see him.'
We abandoned the car and trotted to keep up with the scruffy figure dressed in only a blanket. It was just bad luck that he glanced furtively behind and spotted us. He darted across the street. I don't know whether his lank and uncut hair had got in his eyes, or he had forgotten about traffic during his stay in the Dark Ages, but he didn't look where he was going and ran straight in front of a bus. His head cracked the windscreen and his bony body was thrown sideways on to the pavement with a thump. Joffy and I were first on the scene. A younger man might have survived relatively unscathed, but Zvlkx, his body weakened through poor diet and disease, didn't stand much of a chance. He was coughing and crawling with all the strength he could muster towards the entrance of the nearest shop.
'Easy, Your Grace,' murmured Joffy, laying a hand on his shoulder and stopping him moving. 'You're going to be all right.'
'Bollocks,' said Zvlkx in a state of exasperation, 'bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. :Survived the plague to get hit by a sodding number twenty-three bus. Bollocks.'
'What did he say?'
'He's annoyed.'
'Who are you?' I said. 'Are you ChronoGuard?'
His eyes flicked across to mine and he groaned. Not only dying, but dying and rumbled.
He made another attempt to reach the doorway and collapsed.
'Someone call for an ambulance!' yelled out Joffy
'It's too late for that,' Zvlkx muttered. 'Too late for me, too late for all of us. This wasn't how it toas meant to turn out; time is out of joint — anb it wan't be for me to set it right. Joffy, take this and use it wisely as I would not have done. Bury me in the grounds of my cathedral — and don't tell them who I was. I lived a sinner but I'd like to die a saint, Oh, and if a fat slapper named Shirley tells you I promised her a thousand quid, she's a bloody liar.'