The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [360]
“How does it work?”
“I’ll rephrase that—any questions I can possibly hope to answer?”
“Does this mean we’ll see Bradshaw without his pith helmet?”
“Ha-ha!” laughed Bradshaw, releasing the toggle from the brim. “I have the smaller Mk XII version—it could be fitted into a beret or a veil, if we so wished.”
I picked up the homburg from the table and put it on.
“What are you expecting?” I asked slightly nervously, adjusting the chin strap.
“We think the Minotaur has escaped,” Havisham answered gravely. “If it has and we meet it, just pull the cord as quick as you can—it always takes at least ten to twelve words to initiate a jump—you could be Minotaur appetizer by that time.”
I pulled out my automatic to check it, but Bradshaw shook his head. “Your Outlander lead will not be enough.” He held up the box of cartridges he had signed for. “Boojum-tipped,” he explained, tapping the large hunting rifle he was carrying, “for total annihilation. Back to text in under a second. We call them eraserheads. Snell? Are you ready?”
Snell had a fedora version of the Eject-O-Hat, which suited his trench coat a bit better. He grunted but didn’t look up. This assignment was personal. Perkins was his partner—not just at Jurisfiction but in the Perkins & Snell series of detective novels. If Perkins was hurt in some way, the future could be bleak. Generics could be trained to take over a vacated part, but it’s never the same.
“Okay,” said Havisham, adjusting her own homburg, “we’re out of here. Hold on to me, Next—if we are split up, we’ll meet at the gatehouse—no one enters the castle without Bradshaw, okay?”
Everyone agreed and Havisham mumbled to herself the code word and some of the text of The Sword of the Zenobians.
Pretty soon Norland Park had vanished and the bright sun of Zenobia greeted us. The grass was springy underfoot and herds of unicorns grazed peacefully beside the river. Grammasites wheeled in the blue skies, riding the thermals that rose from the warm grassland.
“Everyone here?” asked Havisham.
Bradshaw, Snell, and I nodded our heads. We walked in silence, past the bridge, up to the old gatehouse and across the drawbridge. A dark shadow leaped from a corner of the deserted guardroom, but before Bradshaw could fire, Havisham yelled, “Wait!” and he stopped. It was a Yahoo—but he hadn’t come to throw his shit about—he was running away in terror.
Bradshaw and Havisham exchanged nervous looks and we moved closer to where Perkins and Mathias had been doing their work. The door was broken and the hinges had vanished, replaced by two very light burn marks.
“Hold it!” said Bradshaw, pointing at the hinges. “Did Perkins hold any vyrus on the premises?”
For a moment I didn’t understand why Bradshaw was asking this question, but realization slowly dawned upon me. He meant the mispeling vyrus. The hinges had become singes.
“Yes,” I replied, “a small jar—well shielded by dictionaries.”
There was a strange and pregnant pause. The danger was real and clear, and even seasoned PROs like Bradshaw and Havisham were thinking twice about entering Perkins’s lab.
“What do you think?” asked Bradshaw.
“Vyrus and a Minotaur,” sighed Havisham. “We need more than the four of us.”
“I’m going in,” said Snell, pulling the MV mask from his TravelBook. The device was made of rubber and similar to the gas respirator I had worn in the Crimea—only with a dictionary on the side where the filter would have been. It wasn’t just one dictionary, either—the Lavinia-Webster had been taped back to back with the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Don’t forget your carrot,” said Havisham, pinning a vegetable to the front of his jacket.
“I’ll need the rifle,” said Snell.
“No,” replied Bradshaw, “I signed for it, so I’m keeping it.”
“This is not the time for sticking to the rules, Bradshaw, my partner’s in there!”
“This is exactly the time we should stick to the rules, Snell.”
They stared at one another.
“Then I’ll go alone,