Jasper Fforde - Lost in a Good Book

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 CO 2extinguishers.

‘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