'Vyrus and a minotaur,' Havisham sighed. 'We need more than the four of us.'
'I'm going in,' said Snell, pulling a respirator from his TravelBook. The mask was made of rubber and similar to the ones at home – only with a dictionary where the filter would have been. It wasn't just one dictionary, either – the Lavina-Webster had been taped back to back with the Oxford English Dictionary.
'Don't forget your carrot,' said Havisham, pinning a vegetable to the front of his jacket.
'I'll need the rifle,' said Snell.
No,' replied Bradshaw, 'I signed for it, so I'm keeping it.'
'This is not the time for sticking to the rules, Bradshaw – my partner's in there!'
'This is exactly the time we should stick to the rules, Snell.'
They stared at one another.
'Then I'll go alone,' replied Snell with finality, pulling the mask down over his face and releasing the safety catch on his automatic. Havisham caught his elbow as she rummaged in her TravelBook for her own mask. 'We go together or not at all, Akrid.'
I found the correct page for the mask, pulled it out of its slot and put it on under the Eject-O-Hat. Miss Havisham pinned a carrot to my jacket, too.
'A carrot is the best litmus test for the mispeling vyrus,' she said, helping Bradshaw on with his mask. 'As soon as the carrot comes into contact with the vyrus, it will start to mispel into parrot. You need to be out before it can talk. We have a saying: "When you can hear Polly, use the brolly." '
She tapped the toggle of the Eject-O-Hat.
'Understand?'
I nodded.
'Good. Bradshaw, lead the way!'
We stepped carefully across the door with its mispeled hinges and into the lab, which was in a state of chaotic disorder. Mispeling was merely an annoyance to readers in the real world – but inside fiction it was a menace. The mispeling was the effect of sense distortion, not the cause – once the internal meaning of a word started to break down then the mispeling arose as a consequence of this. Unmispeling the word at TGC might work if the vyrus hadn't taken a strong hold but usually it was pointless; like making the beds in a burning house.
The interior of the laboratory was heavily disrupted. On the far wall the shelves were filled with a noisy company of feather-bound rooks; we stepped forward on to the fattened tarpit only to see that the imposing table in the centre of the room was now an enormous label. The glass apparatus had become grass asparagus, and worst of all, Mathias the talking horse was simply a large model house — like a doll's house but much more detailed. Miss Havisham looked at me and pointed to her carrot. Already it was starting to change colour – I could see tinges of red, yellow and blue.
'Careful,' said Snell, 'look!'
On the floor next to more shards of broken grass was a small layer of the same purple mist I had seen the last time I was here. The area of the floor touched by the vyrus was constantly changing meaning, texture, colour and appearance.
'Where was the minotaur kept?' asked Havisham, her carrot beginning to sprout a small beak.
I pointed the way and Bradshaw took the lead. I pulled out my gun, despite Bradshaw's assurances that it was a waste of time, and he gently pushed open the door to the vault beneath the old hall. Snell snapped on a torch and flicked the beam into the chamber. The door to the minotaur's cage was open but of the beast there was no sign. I wish I could have said the same for Perkins. He – or what was left of him – was lying on the stone floor. The minotaur had devoured him up to his chest. His spine had been picked clean and the lower part of a leg had been thrown to one side. I choked at the sight and felt a knot rise in my throat. Bradshaw cursed and turned to cover the doorway. Snell dropped to his knees to close Perkins' eyes, which were staring off into space, a look of fear still etched upon his features. Miss Havisham laid a hand on Snell's shoulder.
'I'm so sorry, Akrid. Perkins was a good man.'
'I can't believe he would have been so stupid,' muttered Snell angrily.
'We should be leaving,' said Bradshaw. 'Now we know there is definitely a minotaur loose, we must come back better armed and with more agents!'
Snell got up. Behind his MV mask I could see tears in his eyes. Miss Havisham looked at me and pointed to her carrot, which had started to sprout feathers. A proper clean-up gang would be needed. Snell placed his jacket over Perkins and joined us as Bradshaw led the way out.
'Back to Norland, yes?'
'I've hunted minotaur before,' said Bradshaw, his instincts alerted. 'Tsaritsyn, 1944. They never stray far from the kill.'
'Bradshaw—!' urged Miss Havisham, but the commander wasn't the sort to take orders from another, not even someone as forthright as Havisham.
'I don't get it,' murmured Snell, stopping for a moment and staring at the chaos within the laboratory and the small glob of purple mist on the floor. 'There just isn't enough vyrus here to cause the problems we've seen.'
'What are you saying?' I asked.
Bradshaw looked carefully out of the open door, indicated all was clear and beckoned for us to leave.
'There might be some more vyrus around,' continued Snell. 'What's in this cupboard?'
He strode towards a small wooden cabinet that had telephone directory pages pasted all over it.
'Wait!' said Bradshaw, striding from the other side of the room. 'Let me.'
He grasped the handle as a thought struck me. They weren't telephone directory pages, they were from a dictionary. The door was shielded.
I shouted but it was too late. Bradshaw opened the cupboard and was bathed in a faint purple light. The cabinet contained two dozen or so broken jars, all of which leaked the pestilential vyrus.
'Ahh!' he cried, staggering backwards and dropping his gum as the carrot transformed into a very loud parrot. Bradshaw, his actions instinctive after years of training, pulled the cord on his Eject-O-Hat and vanished with a loud bang.
The room mutated as the mispelmg got a hold. The floor buckled and softened into flour, the walls changed into balls. I looked across at Havisham. Her carrot was a parrot, too – it had hopped to her other shoulder and was looking at me with its head cocked to one side.
'GO, GO!' she yelled at me, pulling the cord on her hat and vanishing like Bradshaw before her. I grasped the handle on mine and pulled – but it came off in my hand. I threw it to the ground where it became a candle.
'Hear,' said Snell, removing his own Eject-O-Hat, 'use myne.'
'Bat the vyruz!'
'Hange the vyruz, Neckts – jist go!'
He did not look at me again. He just walked towards the cupboard with the broken jars and slowly closed the door, his hands melting into glands as he touched the raw power of the vyrus. I ran outside, casting off the now useless hat and attempting to clip on the chin strap of Snell's. It wasn't easy. I caught my foot on a piece of half-buried masonry and fell headlong – to land within three paces of two large cloven hoofs.
I looked up. The minotaur was semi-crouched on his muscular haunches, ready to jump. His bull's head was large and sat heavily on his body – what neck he had was hidden beneath taut muscle. Within his mouth two rows of fine pointed teeth were shiny with saliva, and his sharpened horns pointed forward, ready to attack. Five years eating nothing but yogurt. You might as well feed a tiger on custard creams.
'Nice minotaur,' I said soothingly, slowly reaching for my automatic which had fallen on the grass beside me, 'good minotaur.'
He took a step closer, his hoofs making deep impressions in the grass. He stared at me and breathed out heavily through his nostrils, blowing tendrils of mucus into the air. He took another step, his deep-set yellow eyes staring into mine with an expression of loathing. My hand closed around the butt of my automatic as the minotaur bent closer and put out a large clawed hand. I moved the gun slowly back towards me as the minotaur reached down and … picked up Snell's hat. He turned it over in his claws and licked the brim with a tongue the size of my forearm. I had seen enough. I levelled my automatic
and pulled the trigger at the same time as the minotaur's hand caught in the toggle and activated the Eject-O-Hat. The mythological man-beast vanished with a loud detonation as my gun went off, the shot whistling harmlessly through the air.
I breathed a sigh of relief but quickly rolled aside because, with a loud whooshing noise, a packing case fell from the heavens and landed with a crash right where I had lain. The case had 'Property of Jurisfiction' stencilled on it and had split open to reveal … dictionaries.
Another case landed close by, then a third and a fourth. Before I had time to even begin to figure out what was happening, Bradshaw had reappeared.
'Why didn't you jump, you little fool?'
'My hat failed!'
'And Snell?'
'Inside.'
Bradshaw pulled on his MV mask and rushed off into the building as I took refuge from the packing cases of dictionaries which were falling with increased rapidity. Harris Tweed appeared and barked orders at the small army of Mrs Danvers that had materialised with him. They were all wearing identical black dresses high-buttoned to the collar, which only served to make their pale skin seem even whiter, their hollow eyes more sinister. They moved slowly, but purposefully, and began to stack, one by one, the dictionaries against the castle keep.
'Where's the minotaur?' asked Havisham, who suddenly appeared close by.
I told her he had ejected with Snell's fedora and she vanished without another word.
Bradshaw reappeared from the keep, dragging Snell behind him. The rubber on Akrid's MV mask had turned to blubber, his suit to soot. Bradshaw removed him from Sword of the Zenobians to the Jurisfiction sickbay just as Miss Havisham returned. We watched together as the stacked dictionaries rose around the remains of Perkins' laboratory, twenty foot thick at the base, rising to a dome like a sugarloaf over the castle keep. It might have taken a long time but there were many Mrs Danvers, they were highly organised, and they had an inexhaustible supply of dictionaries.
'Find the minotaur?' I asked Havisham.
'Long gone,' she replied. 'There will be hell to pay about this, I assure you!'
When our carrots had returned to being crunchy vegetables, and the last vestiges of parrotness had been removed, Havisham and I pulled off our vyrus masks and tossed them in a heap – the dictionary filters were almost worn out.
'What happens now?' I asked.
'It is torched,' replied Tweed, who was close by. 'It is the only way to destroy the vyrus.'
'What about the evidence?' I asked.
'Evidence?' echoed Tweed. 'Evidence of what?'
'Perkins,' I replied. 'We don't know the full details of his death.'
'I think we can safely say he was killed and eaten by the minotaur,' said Tweed pointedly. 'It's too dangerous to go back in, even if we wanted to. I'd rather torch this now than risk spreading the vyrus and having to demolish the whole book and everything in it – do you know how many creatures live in here?'
He lit a flare.
'You'd better stand clear.'
The DanverClones were leaving now, vanishing with a faint pop, back to wherever they had been pulled from. Bradshaw and I withdrew as Tweed threw the flare on the pile of dictionaries. They burst into flames and were soon so hot that we had to withdraw to the gatehouse, the black smoke that billowed into the sky taking with it the remnants of the vyrus – and the evidence of Perkins' murder. Because I was sure it was murder. When we walked into the vault I had noticed that the key was missing from its hook. Someone had let the minotaur out.
18
Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane
* * *
'I didn't notice it straight away but Vernham, Nelly and Lucy all had the same surname: Deane. They weren't related. In the Outland this happens all the time but in fiction it is rare; the problem is aggressively attacked by the Echolocators (q.v.), who insist that no two people in the same book have the same name. I learned years later that Hemingway once wrote a book that was demolished because he insisted that every single one of the eight characters was named Geoff.'
THURSDAY NEXT – The Jurisfiction Chronicles
The minotaur had given Havisham the slip and was last seen heading towards the works of Zane Grey; the semi-bovine wasn't stupid – he knew we'd have trouble finding him amongst a cattle drive. Snell lasted another three hours. He was kept in an isolation tent made of fine plastic sheeting that had been over-printed with pages from the Oxford English Dictionary. We were in the sickbay of the Anti-mispeling Fast Response Group. At the first sign of any deviant mispeling, thousands of these volumes were shipped to the infected book and set up as barrages either side of the chapter. The barrage was then moved in, paragraph by paragraph, until the vyrus was forced into a single sentence, then a word, then smothered completely. Fire was not an option in a published work; they had tried it once in Samuel Pepys' Diary and burnt down half of London.
'Does he have any family?' I asked.
'Snell was a loner detective, Miss Next,' explained the doctor. 'Perkins was his only family.'
'Is it safe to go up to him?'
'Yes – but be prepared for some mispelings.'
I sat by his bed while Havisham stood and spoke quietly with the doctor. Snell lay on his back and was breathing with small shallow gasps, the pulse on his neck racing – it wouldn't be long before the vyrus took him away and he knew it. I leaned closer and held his hand through the sheeting. His complexion was pail, his breething laboured, his skein covered in painful and unsightly green pastilles. As I wotched, his dry slips tried to foam worlds but all he could torque was ninsense.
'Thirsty!' he squeeked. 'Wode – Cone, udder whirled – doughnut Trieste—!'
He grisped my arm with his fungers, made one last stringled cry before feeling bakwards, his life force deported from his pathotic misspelled boddy.
'He was a fine operative,' said Havisham as the doctor pulled the sheep over his head.
'What will happen to the Perkins & Snell series?'
'I'm not sure,' she replied softly. 'Demolished, saved with new Generics – I don't know.'
'What ho!' exclaimed Bradshaw, appearing from nowhere. 'Is he—?'
'I'm afraid so,' replied Havisham.
'Snell was one of the best,' murmured Bradshaw sadly. 'Did he say anything before he died?'
'Nothing coherent.'
'Hmm. The Bellman wanted a report on his death as soon as possible. What do you think?'
He handed Havisham a sheet of paper and she read:
'Minotaur escapes, finds captor, eats captor, captor dies. Horse mispeled in struggle. Colleague dies attempting rescue. Minotaur escapes.'
She turned over the piece of paper but it was blank on the other side.
'That's it?'
'I didn't want it to get boring,' replied Bradshaw, 'and the Bellman wanted it as simple as possible. I think he's got Libris breathing down his neck. The investigation of a Jurisfiction agent so close to the launch of UltraWord™ will make the Council of Genres jittery as hell.'
Miss Havisham handed the report back to Bradshaw.
'Perhaps, Commander, you should lose that report in the pending tray.'
'This sort of stuff happens in fiction all the time,' he replied. 'Do you have any evidence that it was not accidental?'
'The key to the padlock wasn't on its hook,' I murmured.
'Well spotted,' replied Miss Havisham.
'Skulduggery?' Bradshaw hissed excitedly.
'I fervently hope not,' she returned. 'Just delay the findings for a few days – we should see if Miss Next's observational skills hold up to scrutiny.'
'Righty-oh!' replied Bradshaw. 'I'll see what I can do!'
And he vanished. We were left alone in the corridor, the bunk beds of the DanverClones stretching off to the distance in both directions.
'It might be nothing, Miss Havisham, but—'
She put her fingers to her lips. Havisham's eyes, usually resolute and fixed, had, for a brief moment, seemed troub
led. I said nothing but inwardly I felt worried. Up until now I had thought Havisham feared nothing.
She looked at her watch.
'Go to the bun shop in Little Dorrit, would you? I'll have a doughnut and a coffee. Put it on my tab and get something for yourself.'
'Thank you. Where shall we meet?'
'Mill on the Floss, page five twenty-three, in twenty minutes.'
'Assignment?'
'Yes,' she replied, deep in thought. 'Some damn meddling fool told Lucy Deane that Stephen and not Philip will be boating with Maggie – she may try to stop them. Twenty minutes, and not the jam doughnuts, the ones with the pink icing, yes?'
Thirty-two minutes later I was inside Mill on the Floss, on the banks of a river next to Miss Havisham, who was observing a couple in a boat. The woman was dark skinned with a jet-black coronet of hair, was lying on a cloak with a parasol above her as a man rowed her gently downriver. He was perhaps five and twenty years old, quite striking, and with short dark hair that stood erect, not unlike a crop of corn. They were talking earnestly to one another. I passed Miss Havisham a cup of coffee and a paper bag full of doughnuts.
'Stephen and Maggie?' I asked, indicating the couple as we walked along the path by the river.
'Yes,' she replied. 'As you know, Lucy and Stephen are a hair's breadth from engagement. Stephen and Maggie's indiscretion in this boat causes Lucy Deane no end of distress. I told you to get the ones with pink icing.'
She had been looking in the bag.
'They'd run out.'
'Ah.'
We kept a wary eye on the couple in the boat as I tried to remember what actually happened in Mill on the Floss.
'They agree to elope, don't they?'
'Agree to – but don't. Stephen is being an idiot and Maggie should know better. Lucy is meant to be shopping in Lindum with her father and Aunt Tulliver but she gave them the slip an hour ago.'
We walked on for a few more minutes. The story seemed to be following the correct path with no intervention of Lucy's we could see. Although we couldn't make out the words, the sound of Maggie and Stephen's voices carried across the water.