Lost in a Good Book

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 surprise—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?’