Part 1 (2/2)

'The name's Next. Thursday Next. Character Exchange Programme.'

'Oh, blast!' he muttered. 'Blast and double blast! I suppose that means I've missed her?'

I nodded and he stared up the road, shaking his head sadly.

'Did she leave a message for me?'

'Y-es,' I said uncertainly, 'she said she would um see you when she gets back.'

'She did?' replied Arnold, brightening up. 'That's a good sign. Normally she calls me a loser and tells me to go rot in h.e.l.l.'

'She probably won't be back for a while,' I added, trying to make up for not pa.s.sing on Mary's message properly, 'maybe a year maybe more.'

'I see,' he murmured, sighing deeply and staring off across the lake. He caught sight of Pickwick, who was attempting to out-stare a strange aquatic bird with a rounded bill.

'What's that?' he asked suddenly.

'I think it's a duck although I can't be sure we don't have any where I come from.'

'No, the other thing.'

'A dodo.' 1 'What's the matter?' asked Arnold.

I was getting a footnoterphone signal; in the BookWorld people generally communicated like this.

'A footnoterphone call,' I replied, 'but it's not a message it's like the wireless back home.' 2 Arnold stared at me.

'You're not from around here, are you?'

'I'm from what you call the Outland.' 3 He opened his eyes wide.

'You mean ... you're real real?'

'I'm afraid so,' I replied, slightly bemused.

'Goodness! Is it true that Outlanders can't say ”Red-Buick-Blue-Buick” many times quickly?'

'It's true. We call it a tongue-twister.'

'Fascinating!' he replied. 'There's nothing like that here here, you know. I can say: ”The sixth sheikh's sixth sheep's sick” over and over as many times as I want!'

And he did, three times.

'Now you try.'

I took a deep breath.

'The sixth spleeps sics sleeks sick.'

Arnold laughed like a drain. I don't think he'd come across anything quite so funny in his life. I smiled.

'Do it again!' he urged.

'No thanks. 4 How do I stop this footnoterphone blabbering inside my skull?'

'Just think ” off off” very strongly.'

I did, and the footnoterphone stopped.

'Better?'

I nodded.

'You'll get the hang of it.'

He thought for a minute, looked up and down the lake in an overtly innocent manner, and then said: 'Do you want to buy some verbs? Not any of your rubbish, either. Good, strong, healthy regulars straight from the Text Sea I have a friend on a scrawltrawler.'

I smiled.

'I don't think so, Arnold and I don't think you should ask me I'm Jurisfiction.'

'Oh,' said Arnold, looking pale all of a sudden. He bit his lip and gave such an imploring look that I almost laughed.

'Don't sweat,' I told him, 'I won't report it.'

He sighed a deep sigh of relief, muttered his thanks, remounted his motorbike and drove off in a jerky fas.h.i.+on, narrowly missing the mail boxes at the top of the track.

The interior of the flying boat was lighter and more airy than I had imagined but it smelt a bit musty.

Mary was mistaken; she had not been halfway through the craft's conversion it was more like one tenth.

The walls were half panelled with pine tongue-and-groove, and rock wool insulation stuck out untidily along with unused electrical cables. There was room for two floors within the boat's cavernous hull, the downstairs a large open-plan living room with a couple of old sofas pointing towards a television set. I tried to switch it on but it was dead there was no TV in the BookWorld unless called for in the narrative. Much of what I could see around me was merely props, necessary for the chapter in which Jack Spratt visits the Sunderland to discuss the case. On the mantelpiece above a small wood-burning stove were pictures of Mary from her days at the police training college, and another from when she was promoted to detective sergeant.

I opened a door that led into a small kitchenette. Attached to the fridge was the precis of Caversham Caversham Heights Heights. I flicked through it. The sequence of events was pretty much as I remembered from my first reading in the Well, although it seemed that Mary had overstated her role in some of the puzzle-solving areas. I put the precis down, found a bowl and filled it with water for Pickwick, took her egg from my bag and laid it on the sofa, where she quickly set about turning it over and tapping it gently with her beak. I went forward and discovered a bedroom where the nose turret would have been, and climbed a narrow aluminium ladder to the flight deck directly above. This was the best view in the house, the large greenhouse-like perspex windows affording a good view of the lake. The ma.s.sive control wheels were set in front of two comfortable chairs, and facing them and ahead of a tangled ma.s.s of engine control levers was a complex panel of broken and faded instruments. To my right I could see the one remaining engine looking forlorn, the propeller blades streaked with bird droppings.

Behind the pilots' seats, where the flight engineer would have sat, there was a desk with reading lamp, footnoterphone and typewriter. On the bookshelf were mainly magazines of a police nature and lots of forensic textbooks. I walked through a narrow doorway and found a pleasant bedroom. The headroom was not over-generous but it was cosy and dry and was panelled in pine with a porthole above the double bed. Behind the bedroom was a storeroom, a hot-water boiler, stacks of wood and a spiral staircase. I was just about to go downstairs when I heard someone speak from the living room below.

'What do you think that is?'

The voice had an empty ring to it and was neuter in its inflection I couldn't tell whether it was male or female.

I stopped and instinctively pulled my automatic from my shoulder holster. Mary lived alone or so it had said in the book. As I moved slowly downstairs I heard another voice answer the first: 'I think it's a bird of some sort.'

The second voice was no more distinctive than the first; indeed, if the second voice had not been answering answering the first, I might have thought they belonged to the same person. the first, I might have thought they belonged to the same person.

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