The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [236]
I got home to find my landlord on my doorstep. He looked around to make sure Miss Havisham was nowhere in sight, then said: “Time’s up, Next.”
“You said Saturday,” I replied, unlocking the door.
“I said Friday,” countered the man.
“How about I give you the money on Monday when the banks open?”
“How about if I take that dodo of yours and you live rent-free for three months?”
“How about you stick it in your ear?”
“It doesn’t pay to be impertinent to your landlord, Next. Do you have the money or not?”
I thought quickly.
“No—but you said Friday, and it’s not the end of Friday yet. In fact, I’ve got over six hours to find the cash.”
He looked at me, looked at Pickwick, who had popped her head round the door to see who it was, then at his watch.
“Very well,” he said. “But you’d better have the cash to me by midnight sharp or there’ll be serious trouble.”
And with a last withering look, he left me alone on the landing.
I offered Pickwick a marshmallow in a vain attempt to get her to stand on one leg. She stared vacantly at me, so after several more attempts I gave up, fed her and changed the paper in her basket before calling Spike at SO-17. It wasn’t the perfect plan, but it did have the benefit of being the only plan, so on that basis alone I reckoned it was worth a try. I was eventually patched through to him in his squad car. I related my problem, and he told me his freelance budget was overstuffed at present as no one ever wanted to be deputized, so we arranged a ludicrously high hourly rate and a time and place to meet. As I put the phone down I realized I had forgotten to say that I preferred not to do any vampire work. What the hell. I needed the money.
23.
Fun with Spike
VAN HELSING’S GAZETTE: “Did you do much SEB containment work?”
AGENT STOKER: “Oh yes. The capture of Supreme Evil Beings, or SEBs, as we call them, is the main bread-and-butter work for SO-17. Quite how there can be more than one Supreme Evil Being I have no idea. Every SEB I ever captured considered itself not only the worst personification of unadulterated evil that ever stalked the earth, but also the only personification of unadulterated evil that ever stalked the earth. It must have been quite a surprise—and not a little galling—to be locked away with several thousand other SEBs, all pretty much the same, in row upon row of plain glass jars at the Loathsome Id Containment Facility. I don’t know where they came from. I think they leak in from elsewhere, the same way as a leaky tap drips water. [laughs] They should replace the washer.”
AGENT “SPIKE” STOKER, SO-17 (ret.),
interviewed for Van Helsing’s Gazette, 1996
THE INCIDENTS I am about to relate took place in the winter of the year 1985, at a place whose name even now, by reasons of propriety, it seems safer not to divulge. Suffice to say that the small village I visited that night was deserted, and had been for some time. The houses stood empty and vandalized, the pub, corner store, and village hall but empty shells. As I drove slowly into the dark village, rats scurried amongst the detritus and small pockets of mist appeared briefly in my headlights. I reached the old oak at the crossroads, stopped, switched off the lights and surveyed the morbid surroundings. I could hear nothing. Not a breath of wind gave life to the trees about me, no distant sound of humanity raised my spirits. It had not always been so. Once children played here, neighbors hailed neighbors with friendly greetings, lawn mowers buzzed on a Sunday afternoon, and the congenial crack of leather on willow drifted up from the village green. But no more. All lost one late winter’s night not five years earlier, when the forces of evil rose and claimed the village and all that lived within. I looked about, my breath showing on the still night. By the manner in which the blackened timbers of the empty houses pierced the sky it seemed as though the memory of that night was still etched upon the fabric of the