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Newt waved the bit of paper.
“But what’s it got to do with this?” he said.
“She wrote it. Well, the original. It’s No. 3819 of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, first published 1655.”
Newt stared at the prophecy again. His mouth opened and shut.
“She knew I’d crash my car?” he said.
“Yes. No. Probably not. It’s hard to say. You see, Agnes was the worst prophet that’s ever existed. Because she was always right. That’s why the book never sold.”
MOST PSYCHIC ABILITIES are caused by a simple lack of temporal focus, and the mind of Agnes Nutter was so far adrift in Time that she was considered pretty mad even by the standards of seventeenth-century Lancashire, where mad prophetesses were a growth industry.
But she was a treat to listen to, everyone agreed.
She used to go on about curing illnesses by using a sort of mold, and the importance of washing your hands so that the tiny little animals who caused diseases would be washed away, when every sensible person knew that a good stink was the only defense against the demons of ill health. She advocated running at a sort of gentle bouncing trot as an aid to living longer, which was extremely suspicious and first put the Witchfinders onto her, and stressed the importance of fiber in diet, although here she was clearly ahead of her time since most people were less bothered about the fiber in their diet than the gravel. And she wouldn’t cure warts.
“Itt is alle in youre Minde,” she’d say, “fogett about Itte, ane it wille goe Away.”
It was obvious that Agnes had a line to the Future, but it was an unusually narrow and specific line. In other words, almost totally useless.
“How do you mean?” said Newt.
“She managed to come up with the kind of predictions that you can only understand after the thing has happened,” said Anathema. “Like ‘Do Notte Buye Betamacks.’ That was a prediction for 1972.”
“You mean she predicted videotape recorders?”
“No! She just picked up one little fragment of information,” said Anathema. “That’s the point. Most of the time she comes up with such an oblique reference that you can’t work it out until it’s gone past, and then it all slots into place. And she didn’t know what was going to be important or not, so it’s all a bit hit and miss. Her prediction for November 22, 1963, was about a house falling down in King’s Lynn.”
“Oh?” Newt looked politely blank.
“President Kennedy was assassinated,” said Anathema helpfully. “But Dallas didn’t exist then, you see. Whereas King’s Lynn was quite important.”
“Oh.”
“She was generally very good if her descendants were involved.”
“Oh?”
“And she wouldn’t know anything about the internal combustion engine. To her they were just funny chariots. Even my mother thought it referred to an Emperor’s carriage overturning. You see, it’s not enough to know what the future is. You have to know what it means. Agnes was like someone looking at a huge picture down a tiny little tube. She wrote down what seemed like good advice based on what she understood of the tiny little glimpses.
“Sometimes you can be lucky,” Anathema went on. “My great-grandfather worked out about the stock market crash of 1929, for example, two days before it actually happened. Made a fortune. You could say we’re professional descendants.”
She looked sharply at Newt. “You see, what no one ever realized until about two hundred years ago is that The Nice and Accurate Prophecies was Agnes’s idea of a family heirloom. Many of the prophecies relate to her descendants and their well-being. She was sort of trying to look after us after she’d gone. That’s the reason for the King’s Lynn prophecy, we think. My father was visiting there at the time, so from Agnes’s point of view, while he was unlikely to be struck by stray rounds from Dallas, there was a good chance he might be hit by a brick.”
“What a nice person,” said Newt. “You could almost overlook her blowing up an entire village.”
Anathema ignored this. “Anyway, that’s about it,” she said. “Ever since then we’ve made it our job to interpret them. After all, it averages out at about one prophecy a month—more now, in fact, as we get closer to the end of the world.”
“And when is that going to be?” said Newt.
Anathema looked meaningfully at the clock.
He gave a horrible little laugh that he hoped sounded suave and worldly. After the events so far today, he wasn’t feeling very sane. And he could smell Anathema’s perfume, which made him uncomfortable.
“Think yourself lucky I don’t need a stopwatch,” said Anathema. “We’ve got, oh, about five or six hours.”
Newt turned this over in his mind. Thus far in his life he’d never had the urge to drink alcohol, but something told him there had to be a first time.
