Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

‘Okay, what now?’ I asked as we walked along the platform.

‘Have a look at everyone. See if there is anyone you recognise.’

I stepped on to the shuttle and walked round the players in the fiasco, who were frozen like statues. The faces that were most distinct were the Neanderthal driver-operator, the well-heeled woman, the woman with Pixie Frou-Frou and the woman with the crossword. The rest were vague shapes, generic female human forms and little else—no mnemonic tags to make them unique. I pointed them out.

‘Good,’ said Landen, ‘but what about her?’

And there she was, the young woman sitting on the bench in the station, doing her face in a make-up mirror. We walked closer and I looked intently at the fuzzy, nondescript face that loomed murkily out of my memory.

‘I only glimpsed her for a moment, Land. Slightly built, mid-twenties, red shoes. So what?’

‘She was here when you arrived, she’s on the southbound platform, all trains go to all stops—yet she didn’t take the Skyrail. Suspicious?’

‘Not really.’

‘No,’ said Landen, slightly crestfallen. ‘Not exactly a smoking gun, is it? Unless’—he smiled—’unless you look at this.’

And in a trice we were at the Uffington White Horse on the day of the picnic. I looked up nervously. The large Hispano-Suiza automobile was hanging motionless in the air not fifty feet up.

‘Anything spring to mind?’ asked Landen.

I looked around carefully. It was another bizarre frozen vignette. Everyone and everything was there—Major Fairwelle, Sue Long, my old croquet captain, the mammoths, the gingham tablecloth—even the bootleg cheese. I looked at Landen.

‘Nothing, Land.’

‘Are you sure? Look again.’

I sighed and scanned their faces. Sue Long, an old schoolfriend whose boyfriend set his own trousers on fire for a bet, Sarah Nara, who lost her ear at Bilohirsk on a training accident and ended up marrying General Pearson, croquet pro Alf Widdershaine, who taught me how to ‘peg out’ all the way from the forty-yard line. Even the previously unknown Bonnie Voige was there, and—

‘Who’s this’’ I asked, pointing at a shimmering memory in front of me.

‘It’s the woman who called herself Violet De’ath,’ answered Landen. ‘Does she seem familiar?’

I looked at her blank features. I hadn’t given her a second thought at the time but something about her was familiar.

‘Sort of,’ I responded. ‘Have I seen her somewhere before?’

‘You tell me, Thursday.’ Landen shrugged. ‘It’s your memory—but if you want a clue, look at her shoes.’

And there they were. Bright red shoes that just might have been the same as those on the girl at the Skyrail platform.

‘There’s more than one pair of red shoes in Wessex, Land.’

‘You’re right,’ he observed. ‘I did say it was a long shot.’

I had an idea, and before Landen could say another word we were in the square at Osaka with all the Nextian-logoed Japanese, the fortune-teller frozen in mid-beckon, the crowd around us an untidy splash of visual noise which is the way crowds appear to the mind’s eye, the logos I remembered jutting out in sharp contrast to the unremembered faces. I peered through the crowd as I anxiously searched for anything that might resemble a young European woman.

‘See anything?’ asked Landen, hands on hips and surveying the strange scene.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Wait a minute. Let’s come in a bit earlier.’

I took myself back a minute and there she was, getting up from the fortune-teller’s chair the moment I first saw him. I walked closer and looked at the vague shape. I squinted at her feet. There, in the haziest corner of my mind, was the memory I was looking for. The shoes were definitely red.

‘It’s her, isn’t it?’ asked Landen

‘Yes,’ I murmured, staring at the wraith-like figure in front of me. ‘But it doesn’t help; none of these memories is strong enough for a positive ID.’

‘Perhaps not on their own ,’ observed Landen. ‘But since I’ve been in here I’ve figured out a few things about how your memory works. Try and superimpose the images.’

I thought of the woman on the platform, placed her across the vague form in the market and then added the spectre who had called herself De’ath. The three images shimmered for a bit before they locked together. It wasn’t great. I needed more. I pulled from my memory the half-shredded picture that Lamb and Slaughter had shown me. It fitted perfectly, and Landen and I stared at the result.

‘What do you think?’ asked Landen. ‘Twenty-five?’

‘Possibly a little older,’ I muttered, looking closer at the amalgam of my attacker, trying to fix it in my memory. She had plain features, a small amount of make-up and blonde hair cut in an asymmetric bob. She didn’t look like a killer. I ran through all the information I had—which didn’t take long. The failed SpecOps 5 investigations allowed me a few clues: the recurring name of Hades, the initials ‘A.H.’, the fact that she did resolve on pictures. Clearly it wasn’t Acheron in disguise but perhaps—

‘Oh, shit .’

‘What?’

‘It’s Hades.’

‘It can’t be. You killed him.’

‘I killed Acheron . He had a brother named Styx—why couldn’t he have a sister?’

We exchanged nervous looks and stared at the mnemonograph in front of us. Some of her features did seem to resemble those of Acheron now I stared at her. For a start, she was tall. And the way her lips were thin, and the eyes—they had a sort of brooding darkness to them.

‘No wonder she’s pissed off with you,’ murmured Landen ‘You killed her brother.’

‘Thanks for that, Landen,’ I said. ‘You always know how to relax a girl.’

‘Sorry. So we know the “H” in “A.H.” is Hades—what about the “A”?’

‘The Acheron was a tributary of the river Styx,’ I said quietly, ‘as were the Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe—and… Aornis.’

I’d never felt so depressed at having identified a suspect before. But something was niggling at me. There was something here that I couldn’t see, as if I were listening to a TV from another room, hearing dramatic music but having no idea what was going on.

‘Cheer up.’ Landen smiled, rubbing my shoulder. ‘She’s ballsed it up three times already—it might never happen!’

‘There’s something else , Landen.’

‘What?’

‘Something I’ve forgotten. Something I never remembered. Something about… I don’t know.’

‘It’s no good asking me,’ replied Landen. ‘I may seem real to you but I’m not—I can’t know any more than you do.’

Aornis had vanished and Landen was starting to fade.

‘You’ve got to go now,’ he said in a hollow-sounding voice. ‘Remember what I said about Jack Schitt.’

‘Don’t go!’ I yelled. ‘I want to stay here for a bit. It’s not much fun out here at the moment. I think it’s Miles’s baby, Aornis wants to kill me, and Goliath and Flanker—!’

But it was too late. I’d woken up I was still in bed, undressed, bedclothes rumpled. The clock told me it was a few minutes past nine. I stared at the ceiling in a forlorn mood, wondering how I could have got myself into such a mess, and then wondering whether there was anything I could have done to prevent it. I decided, on the face of it, probably not. This, to my fuddled way of thinking, I took to be a positive sign. So I slipped on a T-shirt and shuffled into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put some dried apricots in Pickwick’s bowl after trying and failing to get her to stand on one leg.