Lost in a Good Book

28. The Raven

The doorbell rang as I was putting my shoes on. But it wasn’t Goliath. It was Agents Lamb and Slaughter. I was really quite glad to see that they were still alive; perhaps Aornis didn’t regard them as a threat. I wouldn’t.

‘Her name’s Aornis Hades,’ I told them as I hopped up and down, trying to pull the other shoe on, ‘sister of Acheron. Don’t even think of tackling her. You know you’re close when you stop breathing.’

‘Wow!’ exclaimed Lamb, patting his pockets for a pen. ‘Aornis Hades! How did you figure that out?’

‘I’ve glimpsed her several times over the past few weeks.’

‘You must have a good memory,’ observed Slaughter.

‘I have help.’

Lamb found a pen, discovered it didn’t work and borrowed a pencil from his partner. The point broke. I lent him mine.

‘What was her name again?’

I spelt it out for him and he wrote it down painfully slowly.

‘Good!’ I said once they had finished. ‘What are you guys doing here anyway?’

‘Flanker wants a word.’

This was interesting. He’d obviously not found the cause of tomorrow’s armageddon.

‘I’m busy.’

‘You’re not busy any more,’ replied Slaughter, looking very awkward and wringing her hands. ‘I’m sorry about this—but you’re under arrest.’

‘What for now?’

‘Possession of an illegal substance.’

I didn’t have time for this.

‘Listen, guys, I’m not just busy, I’m really busy, and Flanker sending you along with some bullshit trumped-up charge is just wasting your time and mine.’

‘Cheese,’ said Slaughter, holding out an arrest warrant. ‘Illegal cheese. SO-1 found a block of flattened cheese under a Hispano-Suiza with your prints all over it. It was part of a cheese seizure, Thursday. It should have been consigned to the furnaces.’

I groaned. It was just what Flanker wanted. A simple internal charge which usually meant a reprimand—but could, if needed, result in a custodial sentence. A solid gold arm-twister, in other words. Before the two agents could even draw breath I had slammed the door in their faces and was heading out on to the fire escape. I heard them yell at me as I ran on to the road, just in time to be picked up by Schitt-Hawse. It was the first and last time I would ever be pleased to see him.

So there I was, unsure whether I had just got out of the frying pan and into the fire or out of the fire and into the frying pan. They had taken my automatic, keys and Jurisfiction travel book. Schitt-Hawse drove and I was sitting in the back seat—wedged tightly between Chalk and Cheese.

‘I’m kind of glad to see you, in a funny sort of way.’

There was no answer so I waited ten minutes and then asked:

‘Where are we going?’

This didn’t elicit a response either so I patted Chalk and Cheese on the knees and said:

‘You guys been on holiday this year?’

Chalk looked at me for a moment, then looked at Cheese and answered: ‘We went to Majorca,’ before he lapsed back into silence.

The Goliath establishment we arrived at an hour later was their Research & Development Facility at Aldermaston. Surrounded by triple fences of razor wire and armed guards patrolling with full-sized sabre-tooths, the complex was a labyrinth of aluminium-clad windowless buildings and concrete bunkers interspersed with electrical substations and large ventilation ducts. We were waved through the gate and parked in a lay-by next to a large marble Goliath logo where Chalk, Cheese and Schitt-Hawse offered up a short prayer of contrition and unfailing devotion to the Corporation. That done, we were on our way again past thousands of yards of pipework, buildings, parked military vehicles, trucks and all manner of junk.

‘Be honoured, Next,’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Few are blessed with seeing this far into the workings of our beloved Corporation.’

‘I can feel myself more humbled by the second, Mr Schitt-Hawse.’

We drove on to a low building with a domed concrete roof. This had even higher security than the main entrance, and Chalk, Cheese and Schitt-Hawse had to have their half-Windsor tie knots scanned for verification. The guard on duty opened a heavy blast door that led to a brightly lit corridor which in turn contained a row of elevators. We descended to Lower Ground 12, went through another security check, and then along a shiny corridor past doors either side of us which had brass placards screwed to the polished wood explaining what went on inside. We walked past Electronic Computing Engines, Tachyon Communications, Square Peg in a Round Hole and stopped at The Book Project. Schitt-Hawse opened the door and we entered.

The room was quite like Mycroft’s laboratory apart from the fact that the devices seemed to have been built to a higher benchmark of quality. Where my uncle’s machines were held together with baler twine, cardboard and rubber-solution glue, the machines in here had all been crafted from high-quality alloys. All the testing apparatus looked brand new and there was not a single atom of dust anywhere. There were about a half-dozen technicians, all of whom seemed to have a certain pallid disposition, and they looked at me curiously as we walked in. In the middle of the room was a doorway a little like a walk-through metal detector; it was tightly wrapped with thousands of yards of fine copper wire. The wire ended in a tight bunch the width of a man’s arm which led to a large machine that hummed and clicked to itself. A technician pulled a switch, there was a crackle and a puff of smoke, and everything went dead. It was a Prose Portal, but more relevant to the purpose of this narrative, it didn’t work.

I pointed to the copper-bound doorway in the middle of the room. It had started to smoke and the technicians were now trying to put it out with CO2 extinguishers.

‘Is that thing meant to be a Prose Portal?’

‘Sadly, yes,’ admitted Schitt-Hawse. ‘As you may or may not know, all we managed to synthesise was a form of curdled stodgy gunge from Volumes One to Eight of The World of Cheese.’

‘Jack Schitt said it was Cheddar.’

‘Jack always tended to exaggerate a little, Miss Next. This way.’

We walked past a large hydraulic press which was rigged in an attempt to open one of the books that I had seen at Mrs Nakajima’s apartment. The steel press groaned and strained but the book remained firmly shut. Farther on, a technician was valiantly attempting to burn a hole in another book with similar poor results, and after that another technician was looking at an X-ray photograph of the book. He was having a little trouble as two or three thousand pages of text and numerous other ‘enclosures’ all sandwiched together didn’t lend themselves to easy examination.

‘What do these books do, Next?’

‘Do you want me to get Jack Schitt out or not?’

In reply, Schitt-Hawse walked past several other experiments, down a short corridor and through a large steel door to another room that contained a table, chair—and Lavoisier. He was reading a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe as we entered, and looked up.

‘Monsieur Lavoisier, I understand you already know Miss Next?’ said Schitt-Hawse.

Lavoisier smiled and nodded his head in greeting, shut the book, laid it on the table and got up. We stood in silence for a moment.

‘So go on,’ said Schitt-Hawse, ‘do your booky stuff and Lavoisier will reactualise your husband as though nothing had happened. No one will ever know he had gone—except you, of course.’

‘I need more than just your promise, Schitt-Hawse.’

‘It’s not my promise, Next, it’s a Goliath guarantee—believe me, it’s riveted iron.’

‘So was the Titanic,’ I replied. ‘In my experience a Goliath guarantee guarantees nothing.’

He stared at me and I stared back.

‘Then what do you want’’ he asked.

‘One: I want Landen reactualised as he was. Two: I want my travel book back and safe conduct from here. Three: I want a signed confession admitting that you employed Lavoisier to eradicate Landen.’

I gazed at him steadily, hoping my audacity would strike a nerve.

‘One: agreed. Two: you get the book back afterwards. You used it to vanish in Osaka and I’m not having that again. Three I can’t do.’

‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Bring Landen back and the confession is irrelevant because it never happened—but I can use it if you ever try anything like this again.’

‘Perhaps,’ put in Lavoisier, ‘you would accept this as a token of my intent.’

He handed me a brown hardback envelope I opened it and pulled out a picture of Landen and me at our wedding.

‘I have nothing to gain from your husband’s eradication and everything to lose, Miss Next. Your father… well, I’ll get to him eventually. But you have my word—if that’s good enough.’

I looked at Lavoisier, then at Schitt-Hawse, then at the photo.

‘I need a sheet of paper.’

‘Why?’ asked Schitt-Hawse

‘Because I have to write a detailed description of this charming dungeon to be able to get back.’

Schitt-Hawse nodded to Chalk, who gave me a pen and paper, and I sat down and wrote the most detailed description that I could. The travel book said that five hundred words was adequate for a solo jump, a thousand words if you were intending to bring anyone with you, so I wrote fifteen hundred just in case. Schitt-Hawse looked over my shoulder as I wrote, checking I wasn’t describing another destination.

‘I’ll take that back, Next,’ he said, retrieving the pen as soon as I had finished. ‘Not that I don’t trust you or anything.’

I took a deep breath, opened the copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe and read the first verse to myself

He was still pissed off, make no mistake about that. I read on:

‘Still the same old Jack Schitt,’ I murmured.

‘I won’t let him lay a finger on you, Miss Next,’ assured Schitt-Hawse. ‘He’ll be arrested before you can say ketchup.’

So, gathering my thoughts, I offered my apologies to Miss Havisham for being an impetuous student, cleared my mind and throat and then read the words out loud, large as life and clear as a bell.

There was a distant rumble of thunder and the flutter of wings close to my face. An inky blackness fell and a wind sprang up and whistled about me, tugging at my clothes and flicking my hair into my eyes. A flash of lightning briefly illuminated the sky about me, and I realised with a start that I was high above the ground, hemmed in by clouds filled with the ugly passion of a tempest in full spate. The rain struck my face like a heavy damp cloak and I saw in the feeble moonlight that I was being swept along close to a large storm cloud, illuminated from within by bolts of lightning. Just when I thought that perhaps I had made a very big mistake by attempting this feat without proper instruction, I noticed a small dot of yellow light through the swirling rain. I watched as the dot grew bigger until it wasn’t a dot but an oblong, and presently this oblong became a window, with frames, and glass, and curtains beyond. I flew closer and faster, and just when I thought I must collide with the rain-splashed glass I was inside, wet to the skin and quite breathless.

The mantel clock struck midnight in a slow and steady rhythm as I gathered my thoughts and looked around. The furniture was of highly polished dark oak, the drapes a gloomy shade of purple, and the wall coverings, where not obscured by bookshelves or morbid mezzotints, were a dismal brown colour. For light there was a solitary oil lamp that flickered and smoked from a poorly trimmed wick. The room was in a mess; a bust of Pallas lay shattered on the floor and the books that had once graced the shelves were now scattered about the room with their spines broken and pages torn. Worse still, some books had been used to rekindle the fire, a choked profusion of blackened paper had fallen from the grate and now covered the hearth. But to all of this I paid only the merest attention. Before me was the poor narrator of The Raven himself, a young man in his mid-twenties seated in a large armchair, bound and gagged. He looked at me imploringly and mumbled something behind the gag as he struggled with his bonds. As I removed the gag the young man burst forth in speech as though his life depended upon it.

‘ ‘Tis some visitor,’ he spoke urgently and rapidly, ‘tapping at my chamber door—only this and nothing more!’

And so saying, he disappeared from view into the room next door.

‘Damn you, Sebastian!’ said a chillingly familiar voice from the adjoining room. ‘I would pin you to your chair if this poetical coffin had seen so fit as to furnish me with hammer and nails!’

But the speaker stopped abruptly as he entered the room and saw me. Jack Schitt was in a wretched condition. His previously neat crew cut had been replaced by straggly hair and his thin features were now covered with a scruffy beard; his eyes were wide and haunted and hung with dark circles from lack of sleep. His sharp suit was rumpled and torn, his diamond tiepin lacking in lustre. His arrogant and confident manner had given way to a lonely desperation, and as his eyes met mine I saw tears spring up and his lips tremble. It was, to a committed Schitt-hater like myself, a joyous spectacle.

‘Thursday!’ he croaked in a strangled cry. ‘Take me back! Don’t let me stay one more second in this vile place! The endless clock staking midnight, the tap-tap-tapping, the raven—oh my good God, the raven!’

He fell to his knees and sobbed as the young man bounded happily back into the room and started to tidy up as he muttered:

‘ ‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door!’

‘I’d be more than happy to leave you here, Mr Schitt, but I’ve cut a deal. C’mon, we’re going home.’

I grasped the Goliath agent by the lapel and started to read the description of the vault back at Goliath R&D. I felt a tug on my body and another rush of wind, the tapping increased and I just had time to hear the student say: ‘Sir or madam truly, your forgiveness I implore…’ when we found ourselves back in the Goliath lab at Aldermaston. I was pleased with this, as I hadn’t thought it would be that easy, but all my feelings of self-satisfaction vanished when, instead of being arrested, Jack was hugged warmly by his half-brother.

‘Jack!’ said Schitt-Hawse happily. ‘Welcome back!’

‘Thank you, Brik—how’s Mum?’

‘The trouble with you, Miss Next,’ said Schitt-Hawse, ‘is that you are far too trusting. Did you really think for one moment that we were going to give up on such an important man as Jack?’

‘You promised!’ I said somewhat uselessly.

‘Goliath doesn’t keep promises,’ replied Schitt-Hawse. ‘The profit margin is too low.’

‘Lavoisier!’ I yelled. ‘You promised!’

Lavoisier walked from the room without looking back.

‘Thank you, Monsieur!’ shouted Schitt-Hawse after him. ‘The wedding picture was a touch of genius!’

I leaped forward to grab Schitt-Hawse but was pinned down by Chalk and Cheese. I struggled long, hard—and hopelessly. My shoulders sagged and I stared at the ground. How could I have been so stupid as to think they would keep to their part of the deal? Delusive hope, so often the partner of strong love, had blinded me. Landen had been right. I should have walked away.

‘I want to wring her ghost upon the floor,’ said Jack Schitt, staring in my direction, ‘to still this beating of my heart. Mr Cheese, your weapon.’

‘No, Jack,’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Miss Next and her unique attributes could open up a large and highly profitable market to exploit.’

Schitt rounded on his half-brother.

‘Do you have any idea of the fantastic terrors I’ve just been through? Tapping… I mean trapping me in The Raven is something Next is not going to live to regret. No, Brik, the book slut will surcease my sorrow!’

Schitt-Hawse held Jack by the shoulders and shook him.

‘Snap out of that Raven talk, Jack. You’re home now. Listen: the book slut is potentially worth billions.’

Schitt stopped and gathered his thoughts.

‘Of course,’ he murmured finally, ‘a vast untapped resource of consumers. How much useless rubbish do you think we can offload on those ignorant masses in nineteenth-century literature?’

‘Indeed,’ replied Schitt-Hawse, ‘and our unreprocessed waste—finally an effective disposal location. Untold riches await the Corporation. And listen—if it doesn’t work out, then you can kill her.’

‘When do we start?’ asked Schitt, who seemed to be growing stronger by the second.

‘It depends,’ said Schitt-Hawse, looking at me, ‘on Miss Next.’

‘I would sooner die than be a party to your foul plans,’ I said angrily.

‘Oh!’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Hadn’t you heard? As far as the outside world is concerned you’re dead already! Did you think you could see all that was going on here and live to tell the tale?’

I tried to think of some way to escape but there was nothing to hand—no weapon, no book, nothing.

‘I really haven’t decided,’ continued Schitt-Hawse in a patronising tone, ‘whether you fell down a lift shaft or blundered into some machinery. Do you have any preferences?’

And he laughed a short and very cruel laugh. I said nothing. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say.

‘I’m afraid, my girl,’ said Schitt-Hawse as they started to file out through the vault door, taking my travel book with them, ‘that you are a guest of the Corporation for the rest of your natural life. But it won’t all be bad. We will be willing to reactualise your husband. You won’t actually meet him again, of course, but he will be alive—so long as you co-operate, and you will, you know.’

I glared at the two Schitts.

‘I will never help you, as long as I have breath in my lungs.’

Schitt-Hawse’s eyelid twitched.

‘Oh, you’ll help us, Next—if not for Landen then for your child. Yes, we know about that. We’ll leave you for now. And you needn’t bother looking for any books in here to pull your vanishing trick—we made quite sure there were none!’

He smiled again and stepped out of the vault. The door slammed shut with a reverberating boom that shook me to the core. I sat down on one of the chairs, put my head in my hands and cried tears of frustration, anger and loss.