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I pointed to the copper-bound doorway in the middle of the room. It had started to smoke and the technicians were now trying to put it out with CO2 extinguishers.
'Is that thing meant to be a Prose Portal?'
'Sadly, yes,' admitted Schitt-Hawse. 'As you may or may not know, all we managed to synthesise was a form of curdled stodgy gunge from Volumes One to Eight of The World of Cheese.'
'Jack Schitt said it was Cheddar.'
'Jack always tended to exaggerate a little, Miss Next. This way.'
We walked past a large h
ydraulic press which was rigged in an attempt to open one of the books that I had seen at Mrs Nakajima's apartment. The steel press groaned and strained but the book remained firmly shut. Farther on, a technician was valiantly attempting to burn a hole in another book with similar poor results, and after that another technician was looking at an X-ray photograph of the book. He was having a little trouble as two or three thousand pages of text and numerous other 'enclosures' all sandwiched together didn't lend themselves to easy examination.
'What do these books do, Next?'
'Do you want me to get Jack Schitt out or not?'
In reply, Schitt-Hawse walked past several other experiments, down a short corridor and through a large steel door to another room that contained a table, chair – and Lavoisier. He was reading a copy of The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe as we entered, and looked up.
'Monsieur Lavoisier, I understand you already know Miss Next?' said Schitt-Hawse.
Lavoisier smiled and nodded his head in greeting, shut the book, laid it on the table and got up. We stood in silence for a moment.
'So go on,' said Schitt-Hawse, 'do your booky stuff and Lavoisier will reactualise your husband as though nothing had happened. No one will ever know he had gone – except you, of course.'
'I need more than just your promise, Schitt-Hawse.'
'It's not my promise, Next, it's a Goliath guarantee – believe me, it's riveted iron.'
'So was the Titanic,' I replied. 'In my experience a Goliath guarantee guarantees nothing.'
He stared at me and I stared back.
'Then what do you want'' he asked.
'One: I want Landen reactualised as he was. Two: I want my travel book back and safe conduct from here. Three: I want a signed confession admitting that you employed Lavoisier to eradicate Landen.'
I gazed at him steadily, hoping my audacity would strike a nerve.
'One: agreed. Two: you get the book back afterwards. You used it to vanish in Osaka and I'm not having that again. Three I can't do.'
'Why not?' I asked. 'Bring Landen back and the confession is irrelevant because it never happened – but I can use it if you ever try anything like this again.'
'Perhaps,' put in Lavoisier, 'you would accept this as a token of my intent.'
He handed me a brown hardback envelope I opened it and pulled out a picture of Landen and me at our wedding.
'I have nothing to gain from your husband's eradication and everything to lose, Miss Next. Your father … well, I'll get to him eventually. But you have my word – if that's good enough.'
I looked at Lavoisier, then at Schitt-Hawse, then at the photo.
'I need a sheet of paper.'
'Why?' asked Schitt-Hawse
'Because I have to write a detailed description of this charming dungeon to be able to get back.'
Schitt-Hawse nodded to Chalk, who gave me a pen and paper, and I sat down and wrote the most detailed description that I could. The travel book said that five hundred words was adequate for a solo jump, a thousand words if you were intending to bring anyone with you, so I wrote fifteen hundred just in case. Schitt-Hawse looked over my shoulder as I wrote, checking I wasn't describing another destination.
