Lost in a Good Book

  The ChronoGuard agents looked at one another, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.

  'She's right, Mr Lavoisier, sir. I don't mind bullying and killing innocents, and I'll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but—'

  'But what?' asked Lavoisier angrily.

  '—but I am a loyal Timeguild member. I don't cross picket lines.'

  'Neither do I,' agreed the other agent, nodding to his friend. 'Likewise and truly.'

  Lavoisier smiled engagingly.

  'Listen here, guys, I'll personally pay—'

  'I'm sorry, Mr Lavoisier,' replied the operative, slightly indignantly, 'but we've been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.' And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What was once the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond 12 December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.

  'Saved by industrial action!' said Dad, laughing. 'Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!'

  'Bravo,' replied Lavoisier sardonically, 'bravo. I think we should just say au revoir, my friends – until we meet again.'

  'Do we have to make it au revoir?' I asked. 'What's wrong with goodbye?'

  He didn't have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood-plain and then snaked back, swept under our feet, and then undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas, and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation established itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell in seconds. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now by sea, now by rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

  'Well,' said my father, 'Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who'd have thought it?'

  'Dad,' I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder, 'how do we get back?'

  'We don't go back,' he replied. 'We can't go back. Once the present has happened, that's it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much bigger.'

  'How much bigger?'

  'A shitload. Quiet, now – we're nearly there!'

  And all of a sudden we weren't nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper.

  'Well, we tried, didn't we?' said my father.

  'Yes, Dad, we did. Thanks.'

  'Don't worry,' he said gently, 'even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualise from. There is always a way – we just have to find it; Sweetpea, we will get him back – I'm not having my grandchild without a father.'

  It did reassure me, and I thanked him.

  'Good!' he said, closing his newspaper. 'By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters' concert?'

  'I'm working on it.'

  'Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—'

  He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.

  I went into work but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs Hathaway34 demanding to know when we were going to arrest the 'unlick'd bear-whelp' who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet's line was 'this too too solid flesh' or 'this too too sullied flesh', or even perhaps 'these two-toed swordfish'. Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal Cardenio from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn't concern SpecOps 27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through Bunty during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their 'handy book-jumping tips' (page 28) but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort 'until I was more experienced'. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34), read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell-bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff's unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights (page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in Little Women (page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other Prose Resource Operatives in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). I was just learning about protocols relating to historical novels (page 122) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished Bowden good luck with his routine. He didn't seem in the least nervous, but then he rarely did.

  I got home to find my landlord on my doorstep. He looked around to make sure Miss Havisham was nowhere in sight, then said:

  'Time's up, Next'

  'You said Saturday,' I replied, unlocking the door.

  'I said Friday,' countered the man.

  'How about I give you the money on Monday when the banks open?'

  'How about if I take that dodo of yours and you live rent free for three months?'

  'How about you stick it in your ear?'

  'It doesn't pay to be impertinent to your landlord, Next. Do you have the money or not?'

  I thought quickly.

  'No – but you said Friday and it's not the end of Friday yet In fact, I've got over six hours to find the cash.'

  He looked at me, looked at Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door to see who it was, then at his watch.

  'Very well,' he said. 'But you'd better have the cash to me by midnight sharp or there'll be serious trouble.'

  And with a last withering look, he left me alone on the landing.

  I offered Pickwick a marshmallow in an attempt to get her to stand on one leg. She stared vacantly at me so after several more attempts I gave up, fed her and changed the paper in her basket before calling Spike at SO-17. It wasn't the perfect plan but it did have the benefit of being the only plan, so on that basis alone I reckoned it was worth a try. I was eventually patched through to him in his squad car. I related my problem and he told me that his freelance budget was overstuffed at present as no one ever wanted to be deputised, so we arranged a ludicrously high hourly rate and a time and place to meet. As I put the phone down I realised I had forgotten to say that I preferred not to do any vampire work. What the hell. I needed the money.

  23

  Fun with Spike

  * * *

  'Van Helsing's Gazette: "Did you do much SEB containment work?"

  Agent Stoker: "Oh, yes. The capture of Supreme Evil Beings, or SEBs, as we call them, is the main bread-and-butter work for SO-17. Quite how there can be more than one Supreme Evil Being I have no idea. Every SEB I ever captured considered itself not only the worst personification of unadulterated evil that ever stalked the earth, but also the only personification of unadulterated evil that ever stalked the earth. It must have been quite a surpris
e – and not a little galling – to be locked away with several thousand other SEBs, all pretty much the same, in row upon row of plain glass jars at the Loathsome Id Containment Facility. I don't know where they came from. I think they leak in from elsewhere, the same way as a leaky tap drips water. (laughs) They should replace the washer." '

  Agent 'Spike' Stoker, SO-17 (rtd), interviewed for

  Van Helsing’s Gazette, 1996

  The incidents I am about to relate took place in the winter of the year 1985, at a place whose name even now, for reasons of propriety, it seems safer not to divulge. Suffice to say that the small village I visited that night was deserted, and had been for some time. The houses stood empty and vandalised, the pub, corner store and village hall but empty shells. As I drove slowly into the dark village, rats scurried among the detritus and small pockets of mist appeared briefly in my headlights. I reached the old oak at the crossroads, stopped, switched off the lights, and surveyed the morbid surroundings. I could hear nothing. Not a breath of wind gave life to the trees about me; no distant sound of humanity raised my spirits. It had not always been so. Once children played here, neighbours hailed neighbours with friendly greetings, lawnmowers buzzed on a Sunday afternoon, and the congenial crack of leather on willow drifted up from the village green. But no more. All lost one late winter's night not five years earlier, when the forces of evil rose and claimed the village and all that lived within. I looked about, my breath showing in the still night. By the manner in which the blackened timbers of the empty houses pierced the sky it seemed as though the memory of that night was still etched upon the fabric of the ruins. Parked close by was another car, and leaning against the door was the man who had brought me to this place. He was tall and muscular and had faced horrors that I, thankfully, would never have to face. He did this with heart filled with courage and duty in equal measure, and, as I approached, a smile rose on his features, and he spoke.

  'Quite a shithole, eh, Thurs?'

  'You're not kidding,' I replied, glad to be with company. 'All kinds of creepy weirdness was running through my head just now.'

  'How have you been? Hubby still with an existence problem?'

  'Still the same – but I'm working on it. What's the score here?'

  Spike clapped his hands together and rubbed them.

  'Ah, yes! Thanks for coming. This is one job I can't do on my own.'

  I followed his gaze towards the derelict church and surrounding graveyard. It was a dismal place even by SpecOps 17 standards, which tended to regard anything merely dreary as a good venue for a party. It was surrounded by two rows of high wire fences, and no one had come or gone since the 'troubles' five years previously. The restless spirits of the condemned souls trapped within the churchyard had killed all plant life not only within the confines of the Dark Place but for a short distance all around it – I could see the grass withering and dying not two yards from the inner fence, the leafless trees standing lifeless in the moonlight. In truth, the wire fences were to keep the curious or just plain stupid out as much as to keep the undead in; a ring of burnt yew wood just within the outer wire was the last line of undead defence across which they could never move, but it didn't stop them trying. Occasionally a member of the Dark One's Legion of Lost Souls made it across the inner fence. Here they lumbered into the motion sensors affixed at ten-foot intervals. The undead might be quite good servants of the Dark One but they were certainly crap when it came to electronics. They usually blundered around in the area between the fences until the early morning sun or an SO-17 flame-thrower reduced their lifeless husk to a cinder, and released the tormented soul to make its way through eternity in peace.

  I looked at the derelict church and the scattered tombs of the desecrated graveyard and shivered.

  'What are we doing? Torching the lifeless walking husks of the undead?'

  'Well, no,' replied Spike uneasily, moving to the rear of his car. 'I wish it were as simple as that.'

  He opened the boot and passed me a clip of silver bullets. I reloaded my gun and frowned at him.

  'What, then?'

  'Dark forces are afoot, Thursday. Another Supreme Evil Being is pacing the earth.'

  'Another? What happened? Did he escape?'

  Spike sighed.

  'There have been a few cuts in recent years, and SEB transportation is now done by a private contractor. Three months ago they mixed up the consignment and instead of delivering him straight to the Loathsome Id Containment Facility, they left him at the St Merryweather's home for retired gentlefolk.'

  'TNN said it was Legionnaire's disease.'

  'That's the usual cover story. Anyhow, some idiot opened the jar and all hell broke loose. I managed to corner it but getting the SEB transferred back to his jar is going to be tricky – and that's where you come in.'

  'Does this plan involve going in there?'

  I gestured at the church. As if to make a point, two barn owls flew noiselessly from the belfry and soared close by our heads.

  'I'm afraid so. We should be fine. There'll be a full moon tonight and they don't generally perambulate on the lightest of nights – it'll be as easy as falling off a log.'

  'So what do I do?' I asked uneasily.

  'I can't tell you for fear that he will hear my plan, but keep close and do precisely what I tell you. Do you understand? No matter what it is, you must do precisely what I tell you.'

  'Okay.'

  'Promise?'

  'I promise.'

  'No, I mean you have to really promise.'

  'All right – I really promise.'

  'Good. I officially deputise you into SpecOps 17. Let's pray for a moment.'

  Spike dropped to his knees and muttered a short prayer under his breath – something about delivering us both from evil and how he hoped his mother would get to the top of the hip replacement waiting list, and that Cindy wouldn't drop him like a hot potato when she found out what he did. As for myself, I said pretty much what I usually said, but added that if Landen were watching, could he please, please, please keep an eye out for me.

  Spike got up.

  'Ready?'

  'Ready.'

  'Then let's make some light out of this darkness!'

  He pulled a green holdall and a pump-action shotgun from the back of the car. We walked towards the rusty gates, and I felt a chill on my neck.

  'Feel that?' asked Spike

  'Yes.'

  'He's close. We'll meet him tonight, I promise you.'

  Spike unlocked the gates and they swung open with a squeak of long-unoiled hinges. Operatives generally used their flame-throwers through the wire; no one would trouble coming in here unless there was serious work to be done. He relocked the gates behind us and we walked through the undead no-go zone.

  'What about the motion sensors?'

  A beeper went off from his car.

  'I'm pretty much the only recipient. Helsing knows what I'm doing; if we fail he'll be along tomorrow morning to clean up the mess.'

  'Thanks for the reassurance.'

  'Don't worry,' replied Spike with a grin, 'we won't fail!'

  We arrived at the second gate. The musty smell of long-departed corpses reached my nostrils. It had been softened by age to the odour of rotted leaves, but it was still unmistakable. Once inside the inner gates we made our way swiftly to the lichgate and walked through the crumbling structure. The churchyard was a mess. The graves had all been dug up and the remains of those too far gone to be resurrected had been flung around the graveyard. They had been the fortunate ones. Those that were freshly dead had been press-ganged into a second career as servants of the Dark One – not something you would want to put on your CV, if you still had one.

  'Untidy bunch, aren't they,' I whispered as we picked our way across the scattered human bones to the heavy oak door.

  'I wrote Cindy some poetry,' said Spike softly, rummaging in his pocket. 'If anything happens, will you give it to her?'

  'Give it to her yourself. N
othing's going to happen – you said so yourself. And don't say things like that. It gives me the wobblies.'

  'Right,' said Spike, putting the poem back in his pocket. 'Sorry.'

  He took a deep breath and grasped the handle, turned it and pushed open the door. The interior was not as pitch black as I had supposed; the moonlight streamed in through the remains of the large stained-glass windows and the holes in the roof. Although it was gloomy we could still see. The church was in no better state than the graveyard. The pews had been thrown around and broken into matchwood. The lectern was lying in an untidy heap and all sorts of vandalism of a chilling nature had taken place.

  'Home away from home for His Supreme Evilness, wouldn't you say?' said Spike with a cheery laugh. He moved behind me and shut the heavy door, turning the large iron key in the lock and handing it to me for safe-keeping.

  I looked around but could see no one in the church. The door to the vestry was firmly locked, and I looked across at Spike.

  'He doesn't appear to be here.'

  'Oh, he's here all right – we just have to flush him out. Darkness can hide in all sorts of corners. We just need the right sort of fox-terrier to worry it out of the rabbit-hole – metaphorically speaking, of course.'

  'Of course. And where might this metaphorical rabbit-hole be?

  Spike looked at me sternly and pointed to his temple.

  'He's up here. He thought he could dominate me from within but I've trapped him somewhere in the frontal lobes. I have some uncomfortable memories and those help to screen him – trouble is, I can't seem to get him out again.'

  'I have someone like that,' I replied, thinking of Hades barging into the tea-room memory with Landen.

  'Oh? Well, forcing him out is going to be a bit tricky. I thought his home ground might make him emerge spontaneously but it seems not. Hang on, let me have a go.'

  Spike leaned against the remains of a pew and grunted and strained for a few minutes, making some of the oddest faces as he tried to expel the spirit of the Evil One. It looked as if he were trying to shit a bowling ball out of his left nostril. After a few minutes of exertions he stopped.