Landen raised an eyebrow. “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “They use it a lot in the Well of Lost Plots.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a place where all fiction is—”

  “Enough!” said Landen, clapping his hands together. “We can’t have you telling ridiculous stories here on the front step. Come on in and tell me them inside.”

  I shook my head and stared at him.

  “What?”

  “My mother said Daisy Mutlar was back in town.”

  “She has a job here, apparently.”

  “Really?” I asked suspiciously. “How do you know?”

  “She works for my publisher.”

  “And you haven’t been seeing her?”

  “Definitely not!”

  “Cross your heart, hope to die?”

  He held up his hand.

  “Scout’s honor.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “I believe you.” I tapped my lips. “I don’t come inside until I get one right here.”

  He smiled and took me in his arms. We kissed very tenderly, and I shivered.

  “Consequat est laborum,” said Friday, joining in with the hug.

  We walked into the house, and I put Friday on the floor. His sharp eyes scanned the house for anything he could pull on top of himself.

  “Thursday?”

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s just say for reasons of convenience that I was eradicated.”

  “Yuh?”

  “Then everything that happened since the last time we parted outside the SpecOps Building didn’t really happen?”

  I hugged him tightly.

  “It did happen, Land. It shouldn’t have had, but it did.”

  “Then the pain I felt was real?”

  “Yes. I felt it, too.”

  “Then I missed you getting bulgy—got any pictures, by the way?”

  “I don’t think so. But play your cards right and I may show you the stretch marks.”

  “I can hardly wait.” He kissed me again and stared at Friday while an inane grin spread across his face.

  “Thursday?”

  “What?”

  “I have a son!”

  I decided to correct him.

  “No—we have a son!”

  “Right. Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I suppose you better have some supper. Do you still like fish pie?”

  There was a crash as Friday found a vase in the living room to knock over. So I mopped it up while apologizing, and Landen said it was okay but shut the doors of his office anyway. He made us both supper, and I caught up with what he was doing whilst he wasn’t eradicated—if that makes any sense at all—and I told him about Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, WordStorms, Melanie and all the rest of it.

  “So a grammasite is a parasitic life-form that lives inside books?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And if you don’t find a cloned Shakespeare, then we lose Hamlet?”

  “Yup.”

  “And the SuperHoop is inextricably linked to the avoidance of a thermonuclear war?”

  “It is. Can I move back in?”

  “I kept the sock drawer just how you liked it.”

  I smiled. “Alphabetically, left to right?”

  “No, rainbow. Violet to the right—or was that how Daisy liked—Ah! Just kidding! You have no sense of—Ah! Stop it! Get off! No! Ow!”

  But it was too late. I had pinned him to the floor and was attempting to tickle him. Friday sucked his fingers and looked on, disgusted, while Landen managed to get out of my hands, roll around and tickle me, which I didn’t like at all. After a while we just collapsed into a silly, giggling mess.

  “So, Thursday,” he said as he helped me off the floor, “are you going to spend the night?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m moving in and staying forever.”

  We put Friday to bed in the spare room after making up a sort of cot for him. He was quite happy sleeping almost anywhere as long as he had his polar bear with him. He’d stayed over at Melanie’s house and once at Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s, which was warm and snug and smelt of moss, sticks and washing powder. He had even slept on Treasure Island during a visit there I made last year to sort out the Ben Gunn goat problem—Long John had talked him to sleep, something he was very good at.

  “Now, then,” said Landen as we went across to our room, “a man’s needs are many—”

  “Let me guess! You want me to rub your back?”

  “Please. Right there in the small where you used to do it so well. I’ve really missed that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, nothing. Why, did you have something in mind?”

  I giggled as he pulled me closer. I breathed in his scent. I could remember pretty well what he looked like and how he sounded, but not his smell. That was something that was instantly recognizable as soon as I pressed my face into the folds of his shirt, and it brought back memories of courting, and picnics, and passion.

  “I like your short hair,” said Landen.

  “Well, I don’t,” I replied, “and if you ruffle it once more like that, I may feel inclined to poke you in the eye.”

  We lay back on the bed, and he pulled my sweatshirt very slowly over the top of my head. It caught on my watch, and there was an awkward moment as he tugged gently, trying to keep the romance of the moment. I couldn’t help it and started giggling.

  “Oh, do please be serious, Thursday!” he said, still pulling at the sweatshirt. I giggled some more, and he joined in, then asked if I had any scissors and finally removed the offending garment. I started to undo the buttons of his shirt, and he nuzzled my neck, something that gave me a pleasant tingly sensation. I tried to flip off my shoes, but they were lace-ups, and when one finally came off, it shot across the room and hit the mirror on the far wall, which fell off and smashed.

  “Bollocks!” I said. “Seven years’ bad luck.”

  “That was only a two-year mirror,” explained Landen. “You don’t get the full seven-year jobs from the pound shop.”

  I tried to get the other shoe off and slipped, striking Landen’s shin—which wasn’t a problem, as he had lost a leg in the Crimea and I’d done it several times before. But there wasn’t a hollow bong sound as usual.

  “New leg?”

  “Yeah! Do you want to see?”

  He removed his trousers to reveal an elegant prosthesis that looked as though it had come from an Italian design studio—all curves, shiny metal and rubber absorption joints. A thing of beauty. A leg amongst legs.

  “Wow!”

  “Your uncle Mycroft made it for me. Impressed?”

  “You bet. Did you keep the old one?”

  “In the garden. It has a hibiscus in it.”

  “What color?”

  “Blue.”

  “Light blue or dark blue?”

  “Light.”

  “Have you redecorated this room?”

  “Yes. I got one of those wallpaper books and couldn’t make up my mind which one to use, so I just took the samples out of the book and used them instead. Interesting effect, don’t you think?”

  “I’m not sure that the Regency Flock matches Bonzo the Wonder Hound.”

  “Perhaps,” he conceded, “but it was very economical.”

  I was nervous as hell, and so was he. We were talking about everything but what we really wanted to talk about.

  “Shh!”

  “What?”

  “Was that Friday?”

  “I didn’t hear anything.”

  “A mother’s hearing is finely attuned. I can hear a half-second wail across ten shopping aisles.”

  I got up and went to have a look, but he was fast asleep, of course. The window was open, and a cooling breeze moved the muslin curtains ever so slightly, causing shadows of the streetlights to move across his face. How much I loved him, and how small and vulnerable he was. I relaxed and once more regained control of myself. Apart from a stupid drunken escapade that luckily went nowhere, my romantic involvement with anyone had been the sum total of zip over the past two and a half years. I had been waiting for this moment for ages. And now I was acting like a lovesick sixteen-year-old. I took a deep breath and turned to go back to our bedroom, taking off my T-shirt, trousers, remaining shoe and socks as I walked, half hobbled and hopped down the corridor. I stopped just outside the bedroom door. The light was off, and there was silence. This made things easier. I stepped naked into the bedroom, padded silently across the carpet, slipped into bed and snuggled up to Landen. He was wearing pajamas and smelt different. The light switched on, and there was a startled scream from the man lying next to me. It wasn’t Landen but Landen’s father—and next to him, his wife, Houson. They looked at me, I looked back, stammered “Sorry, wrong bedroom,” and ran out of the room, grabbing my clothes from the heap outside the bedroom door. But I wasn’t in the wrong room, and the lack of a wedding ring confirmed what I feared. Landen had been returned to me—only to be taken away again. Something had gone wrong. The uneradication hadn’t held.

  “Don’t I recognize you?” said Houson, who came out of the bedroom and stared at me as I retrieved Friday from the spare bedroom, where he was tucked up next to Landen’s aunt Ethel.

  “No,” I replied, “I’ve just walked into the wrong house. Happens all the time.”

  I left my shoes and trotted downstairs with Friday tucked under my arm, picked up my jacket from where it was hanging on the back of a different chair in a differently furnished front room and ran into the night, tears streaming down my face.

  26.

  Breakfast with Mycroft

  Feathered Friend Found Tarred

  Swindon’s mysterious seabird asphalt-smotherer has struck again, this time a stormy petrel found in an alleyway off Commercial Road. The unnamed bird was discovered yesterday covered in a thick glutinous coating that forensic scientists later confirmed as crude oil. This is the seventh such attack in less than a week and the Swindon police are beginning to take notice. “This has been the seventh attack in less than a week,” declared a Swindon policeman this morning, “and we are beginning to take notice.” The inexplicable seabird tarrer has so far not been seen, but an expert from the NSPB told the police yesterday that the suspect would probably have a displacement of 280,000 tons, be covered in rust and be floundering on a nearby rock. Despite numerous searches by police in the area, a suspect of this description has not yet been found.

  Article in the Swindon Daily Eyestrain, July 18, 1988

  It was the following morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table staring at my ring finger and the complete absence of a wedding band. Mum walked in wrapped in a dressing gown and with her hair in curlers, fed DH-82, let Alan out of the broom cupboard, where we had to keep him these days, and pushed the delinquent dodo outside with a mop. He made an angry plinking noise, then attacked the bootscraper.

  “What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

  “It’s Landen.”

  “Who?”

  “My husband. He was reactualized last night, but only for about two hours.”

  “My poor darling! That must be very awkward.”

  “Awkward. Extremely. I climbed naked into bed with Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine.”

  My mother went ashen and dropped a saucer. “Did they recognize you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Thank the GSD for that!” she gasped, greatly relieved. Being embarrassed in public was something she cared to avoid more than anything else, and having a daughter climbing into bed with patrons of the Swindon Toast League was probably the biggest faux pas she could think of.

  “Good morning, pet,” said Mycroft, shuffling into the kitchen and sitting down at the breakfast table. He was my extraordinarily brilliant inventor uncle and apparently had just returned from the 1988 Mad Scientists’ Conference, or MadCon-88, as it was known.

  “Uncle,” I said, probably with less enthusiasm than I should, “how good to see you again!”

  “And you, my dear,” he said kindly. “Back for good?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, thinking about Landen. “Aunt Polly well?”

  “The very best of health. We’ve been to MadCon—I was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for something, but for the life of me I can’t think what, or why.”

  It was a typically Mycroft statement. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he never thought he was doing anything particularly clever or useful—he just liked to tinker with ideas. It was his Prose Portal invention that got me inside books in the first place. He had set up home in the Sherlock Holmes canon to escape Goliath but had remained stuck there until I rescued him about a year ago.

  “Did Goliath ever bother you again?” I asked. “After you came back, I mean?”

  “They tried,” he replied softly, “but they didn’t get anything from me.”

  “You wouldn’t tell them anything?”

  “No. It was better than that. I couldn’t. You see, I can’t remember a single thing about any of the inventions they wanted me to talk about.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Well,” replied Mycroft, taking a sip of tea, “I’m not sure, but, logically speaking, I must have invented a memory-erasure device or something and used it selectively on myself and Polly—what we call the Big Blank. It’s the only possible explanation.”

  “So you can’t remember how the Prose Portal actually works?”

  “The what?”

  “The Prose Portal. A device for entering fiction.”

  “They were asking me about something like that, now you mention it. It’s very intriguing to try to redevelop it, but Polly says I shouldn’t. My lab is full of devices, the purpose of which I haven’t the foggiest notion about. An Ovinator, for example—it’s clearly something to do with eggs—but what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, perhaps it’s all for the best. These days I only work for peaceful means. Intellect is worthless if it isn’t for the betterment of us all.”

  “I’ll agree with you on that one. What work were you presenting to MadCon-88?”

  “Theoretical Nextian Mathematics, mostly,” replied Mycroft, warming to the subject dearest to his heart—his work. “I told you all about Nextian Geometry, didn’t I?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, Nextian Number Theory is very closely related to that, and in its simplest form allows me to work backwards to discover the original sum from which the product is derived.”

  “Eh?”

  “Well, say you have the numbers 12 and 16. You multiply them together and get 192, yes? Well, in conventional maths, if you were given the number 192, you would not know how that number was arrived at. It might just as easily have been 3 times 64 or 6 times 32 or even 194 minus 2. But you couldn’t tell just from looking at the number alone, now, could you?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “You suppose wrong,” said Mycroft with a smile. “Nextian Number Theory works in an inverse fashion from ordinary maths—it allows you to discover the precise question from a stated answer.”

  “And the practical applications of this?”

  “Hundreds.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and passed it over. I unfolded it and found a simple equation written upon it: 2216,091 minus 1, or 2 raised to the power of 216,091, minus 1.

  “It looks like a big number.”

  “It’s a medium-size number,” he corrected.

  “And?”

  “Well, if I were to give you a short story of ten thousand words, instructed you to give a value for each letter and punctuation mark and then wrote them down, you’d get a number with sixty-five thousand or so digits. All you need to do then is to find a simpler way of expressing it. Using a branch of Nextian Maths that I call FactorZip, we can reduce any size number to a short, notated style.”

  I looked at the equation in my hand again. “So this is . . . ?”

  “A FactorZipped Sleepy Hollow. I’m working on reducing all the books ever written to an equation less than fifty digits long. Makes you think, eh? Instead of buying a newspaper every day, you’d simply jot down today’s equation and pop it in your Nexpanding Calculator to read it.”

  “Ingenious!” I breathed.

  “It’s still early days, but I hope one day to be able to predict a cause simply by looking at the event. And after that, trying to construct unknown questions from known answers.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, the answer ‘Good Lord no, quite the reverse.’ I’ve always wanted to know the question to that.”

  “Right,” I replied, still trying to figure out how you’d know by looking at the number nine that it had got there by being three squared or the square root of eighty-one.

  “Isn’t it just?” he said with a smile, thanking my mother for the bacon and eggs she had just put down in front of him.

  Lady Hamilton’s departure at eight-thirty was really sad only for Hamlet. He went into a glowering mood and made up a long soliloquy about his heart that was aching fit to break and how cruel a fate life’s hand had dealt him. He said that Emma was his one true love and her departure made his life bereft; a life that had little meaning and would be better ended—and so on and so forth until eventually Emma had to interrupt him and thank him but she really must go or else she’d be late for something she couldn’t specify. So he then screamed abuse at her for five minutes, told her she was a whore and marched out, muttering something about being a chameleon. With him gone we could all get on with our good-byes.

  “Good-bye, Thursday,” said Emma, holding my hand. “You’ve always been very kind to me. I hope you get your husband back. Would you permit me to afford you a small observation that I think might be of help?”

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t let Smudger dominate the forward hoop positions. He works best in defense, especially if backed up by Biffo—and play offensively if you want to win.”

  “Thank you,” I said slowly, “you’re very kind.”

  I gave her a hug, and my mother did, too—a tad awkwardly, as she had never fully divested herself of the suspicion that Emma had been carrying on with Dad. Then, a moment later, Emma vanished—which must be what it was like when Father arrives and stops the clock for other people.