The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [352]
DEAR, SWEET THURSDAY!” muttered a patronizing voice that was chillingly familiar.
I opened my eyes. I was on the roof of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s house in Jane Eyre. It was the time and place of my final showdown with Acheron Hades. The old house was on fire and I could feel the roof growing hot beneath my feet. I coughed in the smoke and felt my eyes begin to smart. Next to me was Edward Rochester, cradling a badly wounded hand. Acheron had already thrown Rochester’s poor wife, Bertha, over the parapet and was now preparing to finish us both off.
“Sweet madness, eh?” Acheron laughed. “Jane is with her cousins; the narrative is with her. And I have the manual!” He waved it at me, deposited it in his pocket and picked up his gun. “Who’s first?”
I ignored Hades and looked around. The patronizing “Dear, sweet Thursday!” voice had not been his—it had belonged to Aornis. She was wearing the same designer clothes as when I last saw her—she was only my memory of her, after all.
“Hey!” said Acheron. “I’m talking to you!”
I turned and dutifully fired, and Hades caught the approaching bullet—as he had when this had happened for real. He opened his fist; the slug was flattened into a small lead disk. He smiled and a shower of sparks flew up behind him.
But I wasn’t so interested in Acheron this time around.
“Aornis!” I shouted. “Show yourself, coward!”
“No coward, I!” said Aornis, stepping from behind a large chimney piece.
“What are you doing to me?” I demanded angrily, pointing my gun at her. She didn’t seem to be in the least put out—in fact, she seemed more concerned with preventing the dirt from the roof soiling her suede shoes.
“Welcome”—she laughed—“to the museum of your mind!”
The roof at Thornfield vanished and was replaced by the interior of the abandoned church where Spike and I were about to do battle with the Supreme Evil Being that was stuck in his head. It had happened for real a few weeks ago; the memories were still fresh—it was all chillingly lifelike.
“I am the curator in this museum,” said Aornis as we moved again, to the dining room at home when I was eight, a small girl with pigtails and as precocious as they come. My father—before his eradication, of course—was carving the roast and telling me that if I kept on being a nuisance, I would be made to go to my room.
“Familiar to you?” asked Aornis. “I can call on any exhibit I want. Do you remember this?”
And we were back on the banks of the Thames, during my father’s abortive attempt to rescue the two-year-old Landen. I felt the fear, the hopelessness, squeezing my chest so tight I could barely breathe. I sobbed.
“I can run it again if you want to. I can run it for you every night forever. Or I can delete it completely. How about this one?”
Night came on and we were in the area of Swindon that young couples go with their cars to get a bit of privacy. I had come here with Darren, a highly unlikely infatuation kindled in the furnace of parental disapproval. He loomed close to me in an amorous embrace in the back of his Morris 8. I was seventeen and impulsive—Darren was eighteen and repulsive. I could smell his beery breath and a postadolescent odor that was so strong you could have grabbed the air and wrung the stench from it with your bare hands. I could see Aornis outside the car, grinning at me, and through the labored panting of Darren, I screamed.
“But this isn’t the worst place we could go.” Aornis grinned through the window. “We can go back to the Crimea and unlock memories that have been too terrifying even for you. The suppressed memories, the ones you block out to let you carry on the day.”
“No, Aornis, not the charge—!”
But there we were, in the last place I wanted to be, driving my APC into the massed field artillery of the Russian army that August afternoon in 1973. Of the eighty-four APCs and light tanks that advanced into the Russian guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the 534 soldiers involved, 51 survived.
It was the moment before the barrage began. My CO, Major Phelps, was riding on the outside as