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Most of the flotsam was wood, barrels, ropes and the odd personal artifact. We came across a drowned sailor, but he wasn’t someone from the Rover. Colin became emotional over the loss of life and lamented how the sailor had been “sorely taken from the bosom of his family” and “given his soul to the storm” before I told him to pull himself together. We reached some rocks and chanced across a fisherman, staring with a numbed expression at a section of mast that gently rose and fell in the sheltered water of an inlet. Lashed to the mast was a body. Her long brown hair was floating like seaweed, and the intense cold had frozen her features in the expression she’d last worn in life—of abject terror. She was wearing a heavy seaman’s coat, which hadn’t done much good, and I waded into the icy water to look closer. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have, but something was wrong. This should have been the body of a young girl—the skipper’s daughter. But it wasn’t. It was a middle-aged woman. It was Wirthlass-Schitt. Her eyelashes were encrusted with frozen salt, and she stared blankly out at the world, her face suffused with fear.
“She saved me.”
It was a little girl’s voice, and I turned. She was aged no more than nine and was wrapped in a Goliath-issue down jacket. She looked confused, as well she might; she hadn’t survived the storm for over 163 years. Wirthlass-Schitt had underestimated the power not only of the BookWorld, the raw energy of Poetry…but also herself. Despite her primary goal of corporate duty, she couldn’t leave a child to drown. She’d done what she thought was right and suffered the consequences. It was what I was trying to warn her about. The thing you discover in Poetry…is your true personality. The annoying thing was, she’d done it all for nothing. A cleanup gang from Jurisfiction would be down later, putting everything chillingly to rights. It was why I didn’t like to do “the rhyming stuff.”
Colin, overcome by the heavy emotions that pervaded the air like fog, had begun to cry. “O wearisome world!” he sobbed.
I checked Anne’s collar and found a small necklace on her cold flesh. I pulled it off and then stopped. If she’d been on the Hesperus, perhaps she had picked up his jacket?
The seaman’s coat was like cardboard, and I eased it open at the collar to look beneath. My heart
fell. She wasn’t wearing the jacket, and after checking her pockets I found that she wasn’t carrying the recipe either. I took a deep breath, and my emotions, enhanced by the poem, suddenly fell to rock bottom. Wirthlass-Schitt must have given the jacket to her crewmates—and if it was back at Goliath, I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to it. Friday had entrusted me with the protection of the Long Now, and I had failed him. I waded back to shore and started sniffing as large, salty tears ran down my face.
“Oh, please dry up,” I said to Colin, who was sobbing into his hankie next to me. “You’ve got me started now.”
“But the sadness drapes heavily on my countenance!” he whimpered.
We sat on the foreshore next to the fisherman, who was still looking aghast, and sobbed quietly as though our hearts would break. The young girl came and sat down next to me. She patted my hand reassuringly.
“I didn’t want to be rescued anyway,” she announced. “If I survive, the whole point of the poem is lost—Henry will be furious.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll all be repaired.”
“And everyone keeps on giving me their jackets,” she continued in a huffy tone. “Honestly, it gets harder and harder to freeze to death these days. There’s this one that Anne gave me,” she added, thumbing the thick pile on the blue Goliath jacket, “and the one the old man gave me seventeen years ago.”
“Really, I’m not interested in—”
I stopped sobbing as a bright shaft of sunlight cut through the storm clouds of my melancholia.
“Do…you still have it?”
“Of course!”
And she unzipped the Goliath jacket to reveal—a man’s blue jacket in large checks. Never had I been happier to see a more tasteless garment. I quickly rummaged through the pockets and found a yo-yo string, a very old bag of jelly beans, a domino, a screwdriver, an invention for cooking the perfect hard-boiled egg and…wrapped in a plastic freezer bag, a paper napkin with a simple equation written upon it. I gave the young girl a hug, my feeling of elation quadrupled by the magnifying effect of Poetry. I breathed a sigh of relief. Found! Without wasting a moment, I tore the recipe into small pieces and ate them.
“Riublf,” I said to Colin with my mouth full, “leb’s get goinf.”
“I don’t think we’re going anywhere, Ms. Next.”
I looked up and saw what he meant. Occupying every square inch of space—on the sea beach, the foreshore, the dunes and even standing in the sea—were hundreds upon hundreds of identical black-clad Mrs. Danvers, staring at me malevolently. We’d killed five of their number recently, so I guessed they wouldn’t be that pleased. Mind you, they were always pretty miserable, so it might have had nothing to do with it. I instinctively grasped the butt of my pistol, but it was pointless—like using a peashooter against a T-54 battle tank.
“Well,” I said, swallowing the last piece of the recipe and addressing the nearest Danverclone, “you’d better take me to your leader.”
35.
The Bees, the Bees
The Danverclones had advanced a good deal since their accidental creation from the original Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. At first, they had simply been creepy, fifty-something house keepers with bad attitude, but now they had weapons training as well. A standard Danverclone was a fearless yet generally vapid drone who would willingly die to follow orders. But just recently an elite force of Danverclones had arisen, with not only weaponry but a sound working knowledge of the BookWorld. Even I would think twice before tackling this bunch. We called them the SWOT team.
T he Danverclones moved in silently. With bewildering speed and a tentacle-like movement of their bony limbs, four of them grasped my arms while another took my shoulder bag and a sixth removed my pistol. A seventh, who appeared to be the platoon commander, spoke briefly into a mobilefootnoterphone:
“Target Number One located and in custody.”
She then snapped the phone shut and used a brief series of hand signals to the other Mrs. Danvers, who began to jump out of the poem, beginning with the ones right at the back. I looked across at Colin, who was also being held tightly. A Danverclone had pulled his taxi license from his wallet and held it up in front of him before tearing it in two and tossing the halves in the air. He glanced at me and looked severely annoyed, but not with me—more with the Danverclones and the circumstances. I was just wondering where they would take me when there was a faint crackle in the air and my recently appointed least-favorite person was standing right in front of me. She was dressed in all her black leather finery, twin automatics on her hips and a long black greatcoat that fell to the ground. She leered at me as she appeared, and I thought about spitting in her eye but decided against it—she was too far away, and if I’d missed, I would just have looked even more enfeebled.
“Well, well,” said Thursday1–4, “the great Thursday Next finally brought to book.”
“Wow!” I replied. “Black is surely the color of choice today.”
