“I’m too old to fall for that one!” smiled Lavoisier.

  Soon after, two of his cronies reappeared as each one found us and matched the speed we were moving through time.

  “I knew you’d come,” said Lavoisier triumphantly, walking towards us slowly as the time flashed past, faster and faster. A new road was built where we were standing, then a bridge, houses, shops. “Give yourself up. You’ll have a fair trial, believe me.”

  The two other ChronoGuard operatives grabbed my father and held him tightly.

  “I’ll see you hang for this, Lavoisier! The Chamber would never sanction such an action. Give Landen back his life and I promise you I will say nothing.”

  “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” replied Lavoisier scornfully. “Who do you think they’re going to believe? You, with your record, or me, third in command at the ChronoGuard? Besides, your clumsy attempt to get Landen back has covered any tracks I might have made getting rid of him!”

  Lavoisier aimed his gun at my father. The two ChronoGuards held on to Dad tightly to stop him accelerating away, and we buffeted slightly as he tried. Things, to say the least, looked bad. From the makes of the cars on the road I could see we were approaching the early eighties. It wouldn’t be long before we arrived at 1985. I had a sudden thought. Wasn’t there ChronoGuard industrial action happening sometime soon?

  “Say,” I said, “do you guys cross picket lines?”

  The ChronoGuard agents looked at each other, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.

  “She’s right, Mr. Lavoisier, sir. I don’t mind bullying and killing innocents, and I’ll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but—”

  “But what?” asked Lavoisier angrily.

  “—but I am a loyal TimeGuild member. I don’t cross picket lines.”

  “Neither do I,” replied the other agent, nodding to his friend. “Likewise and truly.”

  Lavoisier smiled engagingly.

  “Listen here, guys, I’ll personally pay—”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Lavoisier,” replied the operative with a hint of indignation, “but we’ve been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.”

  And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What had once been the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond the 12th December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.

  “Saved by industrial action!” said Dad, laughing. “Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!”

  “Bravo,” replied Lavoisier wryly. He lowered his pistol. Without his cronies to hold on to Dad and stop him escaping, there was little he could do. “Bravo. I think we should just say au revoir, my friends—until we meet again.”

  “Do we have to make it au revoir?” I asked. “What’s wrong with goodbye?”

  He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched, the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood plain and then swept under our feet and undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation reestablished itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now in a sea, now inside rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

  “Well,” said my father as we traveled through time, “Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?”

  “Dad?” I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder. “How do we get back?”

  “We don’t go back,” he replied. “We can’t go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much, bigger.”

  “How much bigger?”

  “A lot.”

  “How much of a lot?” I persisted.

  “A lot of a lot. Quiet now—we’re nearly there!”

  And all of a sudden we weren’t nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper and me running out from my bedroom having just got dressed. I stopped in mid-stride and sat down at the table, feeling deflated.

  “Well, we tried, didn’t we?” said my father.

  “Yes Dad,” I replied, staring at the floor, “we did. Thanks.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said kindly. “Even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualize 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.”

  His determination 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 in to 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 this 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 a girls’ magazine during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their “handy bookjumping 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) and read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), who were 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 PROs in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). But there weren’t only pages of instructions. The last ten or so pages featured hollowed-out recesses which contained devices that were far too deep to have fitted in the book. One of the pages contained a device similar to a flare gun which had “Mk IV TextMarker” written on its side. Another page had a glass panel covering a handle like a fire alarm. A note painted on the glass read: IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY* BREAK GLASS. The asterisk, I noted somewhat chillingly, related to the footnote: *Please note: personal destruction does NOT count as an unprecedented emergency. I was just learning about writing brief descriptions of where you are by hand to enable you to get back (page 136) 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 a vain 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 his freelance budget was overstuffed at present as no one ever wanted to be deputized, so we arranged a ludicrously high hourly rate and a time and place to meet. As I put the phone down I realized 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 (ret.),

  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, by 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 vandalized, the pub, corner store, and village hall but empty shells. As I drove slowly into the dark village, rats scurried amongst 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, neighbors hailed neighbors with friendly greetings, lawn mowers 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 on 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 his 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?”

  “Still the same—but I’m working on it. What’s the score here?”

  Spike clapped his hands together and rubbed them.

  “Ah, yes! Thanks for coming. This is one job I can’t do on my own.”

  I followed his gaze towards the derelict church and surrounding graveyard. It was a dismal place even by SpecOps-17 standards, which tended to regard anything that is merely dreary as a good venue for a party. It was surrounded by two rows of high wire fences; no one had come or gone since the “troubles” ten years previously. The restless spirits of the condemned souls trapped within the churchyard had killed all plant life not only within the confines of the Dark Place but for a short distance all around it—I could see the grass wither and die not two yards from the inner fence, the trees standing lifeless in the moonlight. In truth, the wire fences were to keep the curious or just plain stupid out as much as to keep the undead in; a ring of burnt yew wood just within the outer wire was the last line of undead defense across which they could never move, but it didn’t stop them trying. Occasionally a member of the Dark One’s Legion of Lost Souls made it across the inner fence. Here they lumbered into the motion sensors affixed at ten-foot intervals. The undead might be quite good servants of the Dark One, but they were certainly crap when it came to electronics. They usually blundered around in the area between the fences until the early-morning sun or an SO-17 flamethrower reduced their lifeless husk to a cinder, and released the tormented soul to make its way through eternity in peace.

  I looked at the derelict church and the scattered tombs of the desecrated graveyard and shivered.

  “What are we doing? Torching the lifeless walking husks of the undead?”

  “Well, no,” replied Spike uneasily, moving to the rear of his car. “I wish it were as simple as that.”

  He opened the boot of his car and passed me a clip of silver bullets. I reloaded my gun and frowned at him.

  “What then?”

  “Dark forces are afoot, Thursday. Another Supreme Evil Being is pacing the earth.”

  “Another? What happened? Did he escape?”

  Spike sighed.

  “There have been a few cuts in recent years, and SEB transportation is now done by a private contractor. Three months ago they mixed up the consignment and instead of delivering him straight to the Loathsome Id Containment Facility, they left him at the St. Merryweather’s Home for Retired Gentlefolk.”

  “TNN said it was Legionnaire’s disease.”

  “That’s the usual cover story. Anyhow, some idiot opened the jar and all hell broke loose. I managed to corner it, but getting the SEB transferred back to his jar is going to be tricky— and that’s where you come in.”

  “Does this plan involve going in there?”

  I pointed to the church. As if to make a point, two barn owls flew noiselessly from the belfry and soared close by our heads.

  “I’m afraid so. We should be fine. There will be a full moon tonight, and they don’t generally perambulate on the lightest of nights—it’ll be easy as falling off a log.”

  “So what do I do?” I asked uneasily.

  “I can’t tell you for fear that he will hear my plan, but keep close and do precisely what I tell you. Do you understand? No matter what it is, you must do precisely what I tell you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “No, I mean you have to really promise.”

  “All right—I really promise.”

  “Good. I officially deputize you into SpecOps-17. Let’s pray for a moment.”

  Spike dropped to his knees and muttered a short prayer under his breath—something about delivering us both from evil and how he hoped his mother would get to the top of the hip replacement waiting list, and that Cindy wouldn’t drop him like a hot potato when she found out what he did. As for myself, I said pretty much what I usually said but added that if Landen was watching, could he please please please keep an eye out for me.

  Spike got up.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Then let’s make some light out of this darkness.”

  He pulled a green holdall from the back of the car and a pump-action shotgun. We walked towards the rusty gates and I felt a chill on my neck.

  “Feel that?” asked Spike.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s close. We’ll meet him tonight, I promise you.”

  Spike unlocked the gates, and they swung open with a squeak of long-unoiled hinges. Operatives generally used their flamethrowers through the wire; no one would trouble coming in here unless there was serious work to be done. He relocked the gates behind us and we walked through the undead no-go zone.

  “What about the motion sensors?”

  A beeper went off from his car.

  “I’m pretty much the only recipient. Helsing knows what I’m doing; if we fail he’ll be along tomorrow morning to clean up the mess.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance.”

  “Don’t worry,” replied Spike with a grin, “we won’t fail!”

  We arrived at the second gate. The musty smell of long-departed corpses reached my nostrils. It had been softened to the odor of rotted leaves by age, but it was still unmistakable. Once inside the inner gates we made our way swiftly to the lych-gate and walked through the crumbling structure. The churchyard was a mess. The graves had all been dug up, and the remains of those too far gone to be resurrected had been flung around the graveyard. They had been the fortunate ones. Those that were freshly dead had been press-ganged into a second career as servants of the Dark One—not something you would want to put on your CV, if you still had one.