First Among Sequels

12. Kids

I arrived at Tuesday’s school at ten to four and waited patiently outside the math room. She’d shown a peculiar flair for the subject all her life but had first achieved prominence when aged nine. She’d wandered into the sixth-form math room and found an equation written on the board, thinking it was homework. But it wasn’t. It was Fermat’s Last Theorem, and the math master had written it down to demonstrate how this simple equation could not be solved. The thing was, Tuesday had found a solution, thus rendering a proof of the unworkability of the equation both redundant and erroneous.

When the hunt was on for the person who had solved it, Tuesday thought they were angry with her for spoiling their fun, so she wasn’t revealed as the culprit for almost a week. Even then she had to be cajoled into explaining the answer. Professors of mathematics had tubed in from every corner of the globe to see how such a simple solution could have been staring them in the face without any of them noticing it.

At four on the button, Tuesday came out of the math class looking drained and a bit cross.

“Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “How was school?”

“S’okay,” she said with a shrug, handing me her Hello Kitty school bag, pink raincoat and half-empty Winnie-the-Pooh lunch box. “Do you have to pick me up in your Acme uniform? It’s, like, soooooo embarrassing.”

“I certainly do,” I replied, giving her a big smoochy kiss to embarrass her further, something that didn’t really work, as the pupils in her math class were all grown up and too obsessed with number sets and parameterized elliptic curves to be bothered by a daughter’s embarrassment over her mother.

“They’re all a bit slow,” she said as we walked to the van. “Some of them can barely count.”

“Sweetheart, they are the finest minds in mathematics today; you should be happy that they’re coming to you for tutoring. It must have been a bit of a shock to the mathematics fraternity when you revealed that there were sixteen more odd numbers then even ones.”

“Seventeen,” she corrected me. “I thought of another one on the bus this morning. The odd-even disparity is the easy bit,” she explained. “The hard part is trying to explain that there actually is a highest number, a fact that tends to throw all work regarding infinite sets into a flat spin.”

Clearly, the seriously smart genes that Mycroft had inherited from his father had bypassed my mother and me but appeared in Tuesday. It was odd to think that Mycroft’s two sons were known collectively as “the Stupids”-and it wasn’t an ironic title either.

Tuesday groaned again when she saw we were driving home in the Acme Carpets van but agreed to get in when I pointed out that a long walk home was the only alternative. She scrunched down in her seat so as not to be spotted.

We didn’t go straight home. I’d spoken to Spike before leaving work, and he mentioned that he had some news about Mycroft’s haunting and agreed to meet me at Mum’s. When I arrived, she and Polly were in the kitchen bickering about something pointless, such as the average size of an orange, so I left Tuesday with them: Mother to burn her a cake and Polly to discuss advanced Nextian Geometry.

“Hiya,” I said to Spike, who’d been waiting in his car.

“Yo. Thought about what to do with Felix8?”

“Not yet. I’ll interview him again later this evening.”

“As you wish. I made a few inquiries on the other side. Remember my dead partner, Chesney? He said Mycroft’s spooking was what we call a Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm.”

“You have them categorized?”

“Sure. The A-list contains Pointless Screamer, Crisis Warner, Murder Avenger and Recurrent Dreary. From there it’s all downhill: poltergeists, faceless orbs, quasi-religious visions and phantom smells-more usually associated with recently departed pet Labradors.”

We walked up the garden path to Mycroft’s workshop.

“I get the picture. So what does it all mean?” I asked.

“It means that Mycroft had something he wanted to say before he died-but didn’t manage to. It was obviously important enough for him to be given a license to come back, if only for a few hours. Turn off your cell phone.”

I reached into my pocket and did as he asked.

“Radio waves scramble their energy field,” he explained. “Spooking’s dropped big-time since the cell-phone network kicked in. I’m amazed there are any ghosts left at all. Ready?”

“Ready.”

We had arrived at my uncle’s workshop, and Spike grasped the handle and gently pushed the door open. If we were hoping to find Mycroft standing there in all his spectral glory, we were disappointed. The room was empty.

“He was just over there.”

Spike closed his eyes, sniffed the air and touched the workbench. “Yeah,” he said, “I can feel him.”

“Can you?”

“No, not really. Where was he again?”

“At the worktop. Spike, what exactly is a ghost?”

“A phantom,” said my uncle Mycroft, who had just materialized, “is essentially a heteromorphic wave pattern that gains solidity when the apparition converts thermal energy from the surroundings to visible light. It’s a fascinating process, and I’m amazed no one has thought of harnessing it-a holographic TV that could operate from the heat given off by an average-size guinea pig.”

I shivered. Mycroft was right-the temperature had dropped-and there he was, but a lot less solid than the previous time. I could easily see the other side of the workshop through him.

“Hello again, Thursday,” he said. “Good afternoon, Mr. Stoker.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” replied Spike. “Word in the Realm of the Dead says you’ve got something to tell us.”

“I have?” asked Mycroft, looking at me.

“Yes, Uncle,” I told him, “You’re a Nonrecurring…um-”

“Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm,” put in Spike helpfully. “An NIP, or what we call in the trade Speak Up and Shut Down.”

“It means, Uncle,” I said, “that you’ve got something really important to tell us.”

Mycroft looked thoughtful for so long that I almost nudged him before I realized it would be useless.

“Like what?” he said at last.

“I don’t know. Perhaps a…philosophy of life or something?”

Mycroft looked at me doubtfully and raised an eyebrow. “The only thing that springs to mind is, ‘You can never have too many chairs.’”

“That’s it? You returned from the dead to give me advice on furniture distribution?”

“I know it’s not much of a philosophy,” said Mycroft with a shrug, “but it can pay dividends if someone unexpectedly pops around for dinner.”

“Uncle, please try to remember what it is you have to tell us!”

“Was I murdered or anything?” he asked in a dreamy fashion. “Ghosts often come back if they’ve been killed or something-at least, Patrick Swayze did.”

“You definitely weren’t murdered,” I told him. “It was a long illness.”

“Then this is something of a puzzle,” murmured Mycroft, “but I suppose I’ve got the greater part of eternity to figure it out.”

That’s what I liked about my uncle-always optimistic. But that was it. In another moment he had gone.

“Thirty-three seconds,” said Spike, who had put a stopwatch on him, “and about fifty-five percent opacity.” He flicked through a small book of tables he had with him. “Hmm,” he said at last, “almost certainly a trivisitation. You’ve got him one more time. He’ll be down at fifteen to twenty percent opacity and will only be around for about fifteen seconds.”

“Then I could miss him?”

“No,” said Spike with a smile, “he appeared to you twice out of twice. The final appearance will be to you, too. Just have a proper question ready for him when you next come here-Mycroft’s memory being what it is, you can’t rely on him remembering what he came back for. It’s up to you.”

“Thanks, Spike,” I said as I closed the door of the workshop. “I owe you.”

Tuesday and I were home in a few minutes. The house felt warm and comfy, and there was the smell of cooking that embraced me like an old friend.

“Hi, darling!” I called out. Landen stopped his typing and came out of the office to give me a hug.

“How was work?” he asked.

I thought of what I’d been doing that day. Of firing and not firing my drippy alter ego, of a Superreader loose somewhere in the BookWorld, of Goliath’s unwelcome intrusion and of Mycroft as a ghost. Then there was the return of Felix8, the Minotaur, and my bag of Welsh cash. The time for truth was now. I had to tell him.

“I…I had to do a stair carpet over in Baydon. Hell on earth; the treads were all squiffy, none of the stair rods would fit, and Spike and I spent the whole afternoon on it-how’s the book going?”

He kissed me on the forehead and tousled Tuesday’s hair affectionately, then took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen, where there was a stew on the stove.

“Kind of okay, I guess,” he replied, stirring the dinner, “but nothing really spectacular.”

“No ideas?” I prompted. “An odd character, perhaps?”

“No-I was mostly working on pace and atmosphere.”

This was strange. I’d specifically told Scampton-Tappett to do his best. I had a sudden thought.

“What book are you working on, sweetheart?”

“The Mews of Doom.”

Aha.

“I thought you said you’d be rewriting Bananas for Edward?”

“I got bored with it. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. Where’s Friday?”

“In his room. I made him have a shower, so he’s in a bit of a snot.”

“Plock.”

“A clean snot is better than a dirty snot I suppose. And Jenny?”

“Watching TV.”

I called out, “Hey, Jenny!” but there was no answer.

“Plock.”

“She’s upstairs in her room.”

I looked at the hall clock. We still had a half hour until we had to go to the ChronoGuard’s career-advisory pre sen ta tion.

“PLOCK!”

“Yes, yes, hello, Pickwick-how’s this?”

I showed her the finished blue-and-white sweater, and before she could even think of complaining, I had slipped it over her featherless body. Landen and I stared at her this way and that, trying to figure out if it was for the better or the worse.

“It makes her look like something out of the Cornish Blue pottery cata log,” said Landen at last.

“Or a very large licorice allsort,” I added.

Pickwick glared at us sullenly, then realized she was a good deal warmer and hopped off the kitchen table and trotted down the corridor to try to look in the mirror, which was unfortunately just too high, so she spent the next half hour jumping up and down trying to catch a glimpse of herself.

“Hi, Mum,” said Friday, looking vaguely presentable as he walked down the stairs.

“Hello, Sweetpea,” I said, passing him the CD Polly had given me. “I got this for you. It’s an early release of Hosing the Dolly. Check out the guitar riff on the second track.”

“Cool,” replied Friday, visibly impressed in a “nothing impresses me” sort of way. “How did you get hold of it?”

“Oh, you know,” I said offhandedly. “I have friends in the recording industry. I wasn’t always just a boring mum, you know.”

“Polly gave it to you, didn’t she?”

I sighed. “Yes. Ready to go?”

Landen joined us, and he and I moved toward the door. Friday stood where he was.

“Do I have to?”

“You promised. And there isn’t another ChronoGuard career-advisory meeting in Swindon for another six months.”

“I don’t want to work in the time industry.”

“Listen,” I said, my voice rising as I finally lost patience, “get your lazy butt out the door-okay?”

He knew better than to argue with angry-determined Mum. Landen knocked on the partition wall, and a minute later our neighbor Mrs. Berko-Boyler was on the doorstep wearing a pink quilted dressing gown, her hair in curlers.

“Good evening, Mrs. Berko-Boyler,” I said.

“Is it?” she said with a snarl. “Is it really?”

“We’ll be about an hour,” explained Landen, who was more skilled at dealing with our volatile yet oddly helpful neighbor.

“Do you know the last time Mr. Berko-Boyler took me out anywhere?” she asked, scowling at all three of us.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Saturday.”

“Well, that’s not that long ago-”

“Saturday, October the sixth, 1983,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, and shuffled past us into the living room. “Nineteen years ago. Makes me sick, I tell you. Hello, Tuesday,” she said in a kindlier tone. “Where’s your sister?”

We walked down to the tram stop in silence. Friday’s lack of interest in the ChronoGuard was a matter not only of annoyance but surprise. The Standard History Eventline had him joining the industry three years ago on their Junior Time Scout program, something that he had failed to do despite our efforts and those of the ChronoGuard, which was as concerned as we were. But we couldn’t force him either-time was the glue of the cosmos and had to be eased apart-push destiny too hard and it had an annoying habit of pushing back. He had to join the ChronoGuard, but it had to be his decision. Every way you looked at it, time was out of joint.