The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [269]
I glared at the two Schitts.
“I will never help you, as long as I have breath in my lungs.”
Schitt-Hawse’s eyelid twitched.
“Oh, you’ll help us, Next—if not for Landen, then for your child. Yes, we know about that. We’ll leave you for now. And you needn’t bother looking for any books in here to pull your vanishing trick—we made quite sure there were none!”
He smiled again and stepped out of the vault. The door slammed shut with a reverberating boom that shook me to the core. I sat down on one of the chairs, put my head in my hands and cried tears of frustration, anger—and loss.
29.
Rescued
Miss Havisham’s extraction of Thursday from the Goliath vault is the stuff that legends are built on. The thing was, not only had no one ever done it before, no one had even thought of doing it before. It put them both on the map and earned Havisham her eighth cover on the Jurisfiction trade paper, Movable Type, and Thursday her first. It cemented the bond between them. In the annals of Jurisfiction there were notable partnerships such as Beowulf & Sneed, Falstaff & Tiggywinkle, Voltaire & Flark. That night Havisham & Next emerged as one of the greatest pairings Jurisfiction would ever see. . . .
UNITARY AUTHORITY OF WARRINGTON CAT,
Jurisfiction Journals
THE MOST NOTICEABLE THING about being locked in a vault twelve floors below ground at the Goliath R&D lab was not the isolation, but the silence. There was no hum of air-conditioning, no odd snatch of conversation heard through the door, nothing. I thought about Landen, about Miss Havisham, Joffy, Miles and then the baby. What, I wondered, did Schitt-Hawse have in store for him? I got up and paced around the vault, which was lit by harsh striplights. There was a large mirror on the wall that I had to assume was some kind of watching gallery. There was a toilet and shower in a room behind, and a bedroll and a few toiletries in a locker that someone had left out for me.
I spent twenty minutes searching the few nooks and crannies of the room, hoping to find a discarded trashy novel or something that might effect me an escape. There was nothing— not so much as a pencil shaving, let alone a pencil. I sat on the only chair, closed my eyes and tried to visualize the library and remember the description in my travelbook, and I even recited aloud the opening passage to A Tale of Two Cities, something I had learned at school many years ago. My bookjumping skills were nonexistent without a text to read from, but there was nothing to lose, so I tried every quote, passage and poem I had ever committed to memory from Ovid to de la Mare. When I ran out of those I switched to limericks—and ended up telling Bowden’s jokes out loud. Nothing. Not so much as a flicker.
I unrolled the bedroll, lay on the floor and closed my eyes, hoping to remember Landen again and discuss the problem with him. It wasn’t to be. At that moment the ring that Miss Havisham had given me grew almost unbearably hot, there was a sort of fworpish noise, and a figure was standing next to me.
It was Miss Havisham, and she didn’t look terribly pleased. Before I could tell her how relieved I was to see her she pointed a finger at me and said: “You, young lady, are in a lot of trouble!”
“Tell me about it.”
This wasn’t the sort of careless remark she liked to hear from me, and she certainly expected me to jump to my feet when she arrived, so she rapped me painfully on the knee with her stick.
“Ow!” I said, getting the message and rising. “Where did you spring from?”
“Havishams come and go as they please,” she replied imperiously. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”
“I—I didn’t think you’d approve of me leaping into a book on my own—especially not Poe,” I muttered sheepishly, expecting a tirade of abuse—Vesuvius, in fact. But it didn’t happen. Miss Havisham’s ire was from quite a different direction.
“I couldn’t care less about that,” remarked Miss Havisham