“I am Linton,” announced a sickly looking child, coughing into a pocket handkerchief, “son of Heathcliff and Isabella. I hate and despise Heathcliff because he took away the only possible happiness I might have known and let me die a captive, a pawn in his struggle for ultimate revenge.”

  “Hear, hear,” murmured Catherine Linton.

  “I am Catherine Earnshaw,” said the last woman, who looked around at the small group disdainfully, “and I love Heathcliff more than life itself!”

  The group groaned audibly, several members shook their heads sadly and the younger Catherine did the “fingers down the throat” gesture.

  “None of you know him the way I do, and if you had treated him with kindness instead of hatred, none of this would have happened!”

  “Deceitful harlot!” yelled Hindley, leaping to his feet. “If you hadn’t decided to marry Edgar for power and position, Heathcliff might have been half-reasonable—no, you brought all this on yourself, you selfish little minx!”

  There was applause at this, despite Havisham’s attempts to keep order.

  “He is a real man,” continued Catherine, amidst a barracking from the group, “a Byronic hero who transcends moral and social law; my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks. Group, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being!”

  Isabella thumped the table and waved her finger angrily at Catherine. “A real man would love and cherish the one he married,” she shouted, “not use and abuse all those around him in a never-ending quest for ultimate revenge for some perceived slight of twenty years ago! So what if Hindley treated him badly? A good Christian man would forgive him and learn to live in peace!”

  “Ah!” said the young Catherine, also jumping up and yelling to be heard above the uproar of accusations and pent-up frustrations. “There we have the nub of the problem. Heathcliff is as far from Christian as one can be; a devil in human form who seeks to ruin all those about him!”

  “I agree with Catherine,” said Linton weakly. “The man is wicked and rotten to the core!”

  “Come outside and say that!” yelled the elder Catherine, brandishing a fist.

  “You would have him catch a chill and die, I suppose?” replied the younger Catherine defiantly, glaring at the mother who had died giving birth to her. “It was your haughty spoilt airs that got us into this whole stupid mess in the first place! If you loved him as much as you claim, why didn’t you just marry him and have done with it?”

  “Can we have some order please!” yelled Miss Havisham so loudly that the whole group jumped. They looked a bit sheepish and sat down, grumbling slightly.

  “Thank you. Now, all this yelling is not going to help, and if we are to do anything about the rage inside Wuthering Heights, we are going to have to act like civilized human beings and discuss our feelings sensibly.”

  “Hear, hear,” said a voice from the shadows. The group fell silent and turned in the direction of the newcomer, who stepped into the light accompanied by two minders and someone who looked like his agent. The newcomer was dark, swarthy and extremely handsome. Up until meeting him I had never comprehended why the characters in Wuthering Heights behaved in the sometimes irrational ways that they did; but after witnessing the glowering good looks, the piercing dark eyes, I understood. Heathcliff had an almost electrifying charisma; he could have charmed a cobra into a knot.

  “Heathcliff!” cried Catherine, leaping into his arms and hugging him tightly. “Oh, Heathcliff my darling, how much I’ve missed you!”

  “Bah!” cried Edgar, swishing his cane through the air in anger. “Put down my wife immediately or I’ll swear to God I shall—”

  “Shall what?” inquired Heathcliff. “You gutless popinjay! My dog has more valor in its pizzle than you possess in your entire body! And, Linton, you weakling, what did you say about me being ‘wicked and rotten’?”

  “Nothing,” said Linton quietly.

  “Mr. Heathcliff,” said Miss Havisham sternly, “it doesn’t pay to be late for these sessions, nor to aggravate your cocharacters.”

  “The devil take your sessions, Miss Havisham,” he said angrily. “Who is the star of this novel? Who do the readers expect to see when they pick up this book? Who has won the Most Troubled Romantic Lead at the BookWorld Awards seventy-seven times in a row? Me. All me. Without me, Heights is a tediously overlong, provincial potboiler of insignificant interest. I am the star of this book and I’ll do as I please, my lady, and you can take that to the Bellman, the Council, or all the way to the Great Panjandrum for all I care!”

  He pulled a signed glossy photo of himself from his breast pocket and passed it to me with a wink. The odd thing was, I actually recognized him. He had been acting with great success in Hollywood under the name Buck Stallion, which probably explained where he got his money from; he could have bought Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights three times over on his salary.

  “The Council of Genres has decreed that you will attend the sessions, Heathcliff,” said Havisham coldly. “If this book is to survive, we have to control the emotions within it; as it is, the novel is three times more barbaric than when first penned—left to its own devices it won’t be long before murder and mayhem start to take over completely—remember what happened to that once gentle comedy of manners Titus Andronicus? It’s now the daftest, most cannibalistic blood fest in the whole of Shakespeare. Heights will go the same way unless you can all somehow contain your anger and resentment!”

  “I don’t want to be made into a pie!” moaned Linton.

  “Brave speech,” replied Heathcliff sardonically, “very brave.” He leaned closer to Miss Havisham, who stood her ground defiantly. “Let me ‘share’ something with your little group. Wuthering Heights and all who live within her may go to the devil for all I care. It has served its purpose as I honed the delicate art of treachery and revenge—but I’m now bigger than this book and bigger than all of you. There are better novels waiting for me out there, that know how to properly service a character of my depth!”

  The assembled characters gasped as this new intelligence sank in. Without Heathcliff there would be no book—and in consequence, none of them, either.

  “You wouldn’t make it into Spot’s Birthday without the Council’s permission,” growled Havisham. “Try and leave Heights and we’ll make make you wish you’d never been written!”

  Heathcliff laughed. “Nonsense! The Council has urgent need of characters such as I; leaving me stuck in the classics where I am only ever read by bored English students is a waste of one of the finest romantic leads ever written. Mark my words, the Council will do whatever it takes to attract a greater readership—a transfer will not be opposed by them or anyone else, I can assure you of that!”

  “What about us?” wailed Linton, coughing and on the verge of tears. “We’ll be reduced to text!”

  “Best thing for all of you!” growled Heathcliff. “And I’ll be there at the shoreline, ready to rejoice at your last strangled cry as you dip beneath the waves!”

  “And me?” asked Catherine.

  “You will come with me.” Heathcliff smiled, softening. “You and I will live again in a modern novel, without all these trappings of Victorian rectitude. I thought we could reside in a spy thriller somewhere, go shopping at Ikea and have a boxer puppy with one ear that goes down—”

  There was a loud detonation and the front door exploded inwards in a cloud of wood splinters and dust. Havisham pushed Heathcliff to the ground and laid herself across him, yelling, “Take cover!”

  She fired her small pistol at a masked man who jumped through the smoking doorway firing a machine gun. Havisham’s bullet struck home and the figure crumpled in a heap. One of Heathcliff’s two minders took rounds in the neck and chest from the first assailant, but the second minder pulled out his own submachine gun and pressed himself against the wall. Linton fainted on the spot, quickly followed by Isabella and Edgar. At least it stopped them screaming. I drew my gun and fired along with the minder and Havisham as another masked assassin came in the door; we got him, but one of his bullets caught the second bodyguard in the head, and he dropped lifeless to the flags.

  I crawled across to Havisham and heard Heathcliff whimper, “Help me! Don’t let them kill me! I don’t want to die!”

  “Shut up!” hissed Havisham, and Heathcliff was instantly quiet. I looked around. His agent was cowering under a briefcase, and the rest of the cast were hiding beneath the oak table. There was a pause.

  “What’s going on?” I hissed.

  “ProCath attack,” murmured Havisham, reloading her pistol in the sudden quiet, “support of the young Catherine and hatred of Heathcliff runs deep in the BookWorld; usually its only a lone gunman—I’ve never seen anything this well planned before. I’m going to jump out with Heathcliff; I’ll be back for you straightaway.”

  She mumbled a few words but nothing happened. She tried them again but still nothing.

  “The devil take them!” she muttered, pulling her mobilefootnoterphone from the folds of her wedding dress. “They must be using a textual sieve.”

  “What’s a textual sieve?”

  “I don’t know—it’s never fully explained.”

  She looked at the mobilefootnoterphone and tossed it aside. “Blast! No signal. Where’s the nearest footnoterphone?”

  “In the kitchen,” replied Nelly Dean, “next to the breadbasket.”

  “We have to get word to the Bellman. Thursday, I want you to go to the kitchen—”

  But she never got to finish her sentence because a barrage of machine-gun fire struck the house, decimating the windows and shutters. The curtains danced as they were shredded, the plaster erupting off the wall as the shots slammed into it. We kept our heads down as Catherine screamed, Linton woke up only to faint again, Hindley took a swig from a hip flask and Heathcliff convulsed with fear beneath us. After about five minutes the firing stopped. Dust hung lazily in the air and we were covered with plaster, shards of glass and wood chips.

  “Havisham!” came a subdued voice on a bullhorn from outside. “We wish you no harm! Just surrender Heathcliff and we’ll leave you alone!”

  “No!” cried the older Catherine, who had crawled across to us and was trying to clasp Heathcliff’s head in her hands. “Heathcliff, don’t leave me!”

  “I have no intention of doing any such thing,” he said in a muffled voice, nose pressed hard into the flags by Havisham’s weight. “Havisham, I hope you remember your orders.”

  “Send out Heathcliff and we will spare you and your apprentice!” yelled the bullhorn again. “Stand in our way and you’ll both be terminated!”

  “Do they mean it?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” replied Havisham grimly. “A group of ProCaths attempted to hijack Madame Bovary last year to force the Council to relinquish Heathcliff.”

  “What happened?”

  “The ones who survived were reduced to text, but it hasn’t stopped the ProCath movement. Do you think you can get to the footnoterphone?”

  “Sure—I mean, yes, Miss Havisham.”

  I crawled off towards the kitchen.

  “We’ll give you two minutes,” said the voice into the bullhorn again. “After that, we’re coming in.”

  “I have a better deal,” yelled Havisham.

  There was a pause.

  “And that is?” came the voice on the bullhorn.

  “Leave now and I will be merciful when I find you.”

  “I think,” replied the voice on the bullhorn, “that we’ll stick to my plan. You have one minute forty-five seconds.”

  I reached the doorway of the kitchen, which had been as devastated as the living room. Flour and beans from broken storage jars were strewn across the floor, and a flurry of snowflakes was blowing in through the windows. I found the footnoterphone; it had been riddled with machine-gun fire. I cursed and went to look out the pantry window. I could see two of them, sitting in the snow, weapons ready. I dashed back to Havisham.

  “Well?”

  “Footnoterphone destroyed, and two ProCaths at the back that I could see.”

  “And at least three at the front,” she added, snapping her pistol shut. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “How about giving them Heathcliff?” came a chorus of voices.

  “Other than that?”

  “I can try and get behind them,” I muttered, “if you give me covering fire—”

  I was interrupted by an unearthly cry of terror from outside, followed by a sort of crunching noise, then another cry and sporadic machine-gun fire. There was a large thump and another shot, then a shout, then the ProCaths at the back started to open fire. But not at the house—at some unseen menace. We heard two more cries of terror, a few more gunshots, a slow tearing noise, then silence.

  I got up and peered cautiously from the door. There was nothing outside except the soft snow, disturbed occasionally by dinner-plate-sized footprints.

  We found only one complete body, tossed onto the roof of the pigsty.

  “Look at this,” said Miss Havisham from where she was standing at the corner of the barn. It looked as though one of the ProCaths had been stationed there by the large quantity of spent cartridges, but what Havisham was actually pointing out were the four freshly dug grooves in the masonry, spaced about six inches apart.

  “It looks like . . . claw marks,” I murmured.

  “Must have caught the corner of the barn midswipe,” replied Miss Havisham thoughtfully, peering closer at the damaged stonework.

  “It was Big Martin,” I said with a shiver. “Some of his friends had me pegged for dinner down on the twenty-second floor yesterday.”

  “Then we should be glad Big Martin got to this bunch first. Mind you, I’ve heard rumors that the Big M was into classics—he might have been doing us a favor.”

  We turned and walked through the snow back to the house.

  “Who is Big Martin?” I asked.

  “Less of a who and more of a what,” replied Miss Havisham, tramping her feet on the doorstep to get rid of the snow. “Even the Glatisant is nervous of Big Martin. He’s a law unto himself. I’d watch your back and eat plenty of cashews.”

  “Cashews?”

  “Big Martin loathes them. Unusually for a Book Fiend he has a sense of smell—one whiff and he’s off.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  We returned to where the cast of Wuthering Heights were dusting themselves down. Joseph was muttering incomprehensibly to himself and trying to block the windows up with blankets.

  “Well,” said Miss Havisham, clapping her hands together, “that was an exciting session, wasn’t it?”

  “I am still leaving this appalling book,” retorted Heathcliff, who was back on full obnoxious form again.

  “No you’re not,” replied Havisham.

  “You just try and stop—”

  Havisham, who was fed up with pussyfooting around and hated men like Heathcliff with a vengeance, grasped him by the collar and pinned his head to the table with her pistol pressed painfully into his neck.

  “Listen here,” she said, her voice quavering with anger, “to me, you are worthless scum. Thank your lucky stars I am loyal to Jurisfiction. Many others in my place would have handed you over. I could kill you now and no one would be any the wiser.”

  Heathcliff looked at me imploringly.

  “I was outside when I heard the shot,” I told him.

  “So were we!” exclaimed the rest of the cast eagerly, excepting Catherine Earnshaw, who simply scowled.

  “Perhaps I should do it!” growled Havisham again. “Perhaps it would be a mercy. I could make it look like an accident!”

  “No!” cried Heathcliff in a contrite tone. “I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to stay right here and just be plain old Mr. Heathcliff for ever and ever.”

  Havisham slowly released her grasp. “Right,” she said, switching her pistol to safe and regaining her breath, “I think that pretty much concludes this session of Jurisfiction rage counseling. What did we learn?”

  The cocharacters all stared at her, dumbstruck.

  “Good. Same time next week, everyone?”

  14.

  Educating the Generics

  Generics are the chameleons of the Well. In general they were trained to do specific jobs but could be upgraded if the need arose. Occasionally a Generic would jump up spontaneously within the grade, but to jump from one grade to another without external help, they said, was impossible. From what I would learn, impossible was a word that should not be bandied about the Well without due thought—imagination being what it is, anything could happen—and generally did.

  THURSDAY NEXT,

  The Jurisfiction Chronicles

  BIG MARTIN HAD made a mess of the ProCath fanatics who had attacked us. The leader was identified by his dental records—why he had them on him, no one was quite sure. He had been a D-3 crew member in On the Beach and was replaced within twenty-four hours. Wuthering Heights was repaired within a few lines, and because Havisham had been holding the rage-counseling session between chapters, no one reading the book noticed anything. In fact, the only evidence of the attack now to be seen in the book was Hareton’s shotgun, which exploded accidentally in chapter 32, most likely as a result of a ricocheting bullet damaging the latching mechanism.

  “How was your day today?” asked Gran as I walked back on board the Sunderland.

  “Very . . . expositional to begin with,” I said, falling into a sofa and tickling Pickwick, who had come over all serious and matronly, “but it ended quite dramatically.”

  “Did you have to be rescued again?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “The first few days in a new job are always a bit shaky,” said Gran. “Why do you have to work for Jurisfiction anyway?”

  “It was part of the Exchange Program deal.”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied. “Would you like me to make you an omelette?”