The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [319]
“We never run from grammasites.”
It was a scolding tone of voice that I knew only too well. Miss Havisham. Dressed in her rotting wedding dress and veil, she stared at me with despair. I think I was one of the worst apprentices she had ever trained—or that was the way she made me feel, at any rate.
“We have nothing to fear except fear itself,” she intoned, whipping out her pocket derringer and dispatching two grammasites who made a rush at the elevator’s open door. “I seem to spend my waking hours extricating you from the soup, my girl!”
The grammasites were slowly advancing on us; they were now at least three hundred strong and others were joining them. We were heavily outnumbered.
“I’m sorry,” I replied quickly, curtsying just in case as I loosed off another shot, “but don’t you think we should be departing?”
“I fear only the Questing Beast,” announced Havisham imperiously. “The Questing Beast, Big Martin . . . and semolina.”
She shot another grammasite with a particularly fruity waistcoat and carried on talking. “If you had troubled to do some homework, you would know that these are Verbisoids and probably the easiest grammasite to vanquish of them all.”
And almost without pausing for breath, Miss Havisham launched into a croaky and out-of-tune rendition of William Blake’s “Jerusalem.” The grammasites stopped abruptly and stared at one another. By the time I had joined her at the “holy Lamb of God” line, they had begun to back away in fright. We sang louder, Miss Havisham and I, and by “dark Satanic mills” they had started to take flight; by the time we had got to “Bring me my chariot of fire,” they had departed completely.
“Quick!” said Miss Havisham. “Grab the waistcoats—there’s a bounty on each one.”
We stripped the waistcoats from the fallen grammasites; it was not a pleasant job—the corpses smelt so strongly of ink that it made me cough. The carcasses would be taken away by a verminator, who would boil down the bodies and distill off any verbs he could. In the Well, nothing is wasted.
“What were the smaller ones?”
“I forget,” replied Havisham, gathering up the waistcoats. “Here, you’re going to need this. Study it well if you want to pass your exams.”
She handed me my TravelBook, the one that Goliath had taken. Within its pages were almost all the tips and equipment I needed for travel within the BookWorld.
“How did you manage that?”
Miss Havisham didn’t answer. She was a bit like a strict parent, your worst teacher and a newly appointed South American dictator all rolled into one—which wasn’t to say I didn’t like her or respect her. It was just that I felt I was still nine whenever she spoke to me.
“Why do grammasites wear stripy socks?” I ventured, tying up the waistcoats with some string that Havisham had given me.
“Probably because spotted ones are out of fashion,” she replied with a shrug, reloading her pistol. “What’s in the bag?”
“Oh, some, er, shopping of Snell’s.”
I tried to change the subject. I didn’t suppose carrying around unlicensed plot devices was something Havisham would approve of—even if they were Snell’s.
“So why did we, um, sing ‘Jerusalem’ to get rid of them?”
“As I said, those grammasites were Verbisoids,” she replied without looking up, “and a Verbisoid, in common with many language students, hates and fears irregular verbs—they far prefer consuming regular verbs with the ed word ending. Strong irregulars such as to sing with their internal vowel changes—we will sing—we sang—we have sung—tend to scramble their tiny minds.”
“Any irregular verb frightens them off?” I asked with interest.
“Pretty much; but some irregulars are more easy to demonstrate than others—we could cut, I suppose, or even be, but then the proceedings change into something akin to a desperate game of charades—far easier to just sing and have done with it.”