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“Well, pip pip, time waits for no man!”
He hugged me again, shook Landen’s hand and then disappeared into the crowd before we could ask him anything more.
“Don’t even try to figure it out,” I said to Landen, placing a finger to his lips. “This is one area of SpecOps that it’s really better not to think about.”
“But if!—”
“Landen!—” I said more severely. “No!—”
Bowden and Victor were at the party too. Bowden was happy for me and had come easily to the realization that I wouldn’t be joining him in Ohio, as either wife or assistant. He had been offered the job officially but had turned it down; he said there was too much fun to be had at the Swindon Litera Tecs and he would reconsider it in the spring; Finisterre had taken his place. But at present, something else was preying on his mind. Helping himself to a stiff drink, he approached Victor, who was talking animatedly to an elderly woman he had befriended.
“What ho, Cable!” Victor murmured, introducing his newfound friend before agreeing to have a quiet word with him.
“Good result, eh? Balls to the Brontë Federation; I’m with Thursday. I think the new ending is a wiz!” He paused and looked at Bowden. “You’ve got a face longer than a Dickens novel. What’s the problem? Worried about Felix8?”
“No, sir; I know they’ll find him eventually. It’s just that I accidentally mixed up the dust covers on the book that Jack Schitt went into.”
“You mean he’s not with his beloved rifles?”
“No, sir. I took the liberty of slipping this book into the dust cover of The Plasma Rifle in War.”
He handed over the book that had made its way into the Prose Portal. Victor looked at the spine and laughed. It was a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.
“Have a look at page twenty-six,” said Bowden. “There’s something funny going on in ‘The Raven.’ ”
Victor opened the book and scanned the page. He read the first verse out loud:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
o’er a plan to venge myself upon that cursed Thursday Next—
This Eyre affair, so surprising, gives my soul such loath despising,
Here I plot my temper rising, rising from my jail of text.
“Get me out!” I said, advising, “Pluck me from this jail of text—
or I swear I’ll wring your neck!”
Victor shut the book with a snap.
“The last line doesn’t rhyme very well, does it?”
“What do you expect?” replied Bowden. “He’s Goliath, not a poet.”
“But I read ‘The Raven’ only yesterday,” added Victor in a confused tone. “It wasn’t like this then!”
“No, no,” explained Bowden. “Jack Schitt is only in this copy—if we had put him in an original manuscript then who knows what he might have done.”
“Con-g’rat-ula’tions!” exclaimed Mycroft as he walked up to us. Polly was with him and looked radiant in a new hat.
“We’re Bo’th Very Hap-py For You!” added Polly.
“Have you been working on the bookworms again?” I asked.
“Doe’s It Sh’ow?” asked Mycroft. “Mu’st Dash!”
And they were off.
