The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [46]
The police officer intervened and dragged him away. Grubb ducked a flying brick and then wound up his report.
“This is Henry Grubb, reporting for Toad News Network, live from Chichester.”
I turned off the television with a remote that was chained to the bedside table. I sat on the bed and pulled out my hair tie, let my hair down and rubbed my scalp. I sniffed dubiously at my hair and decided against a shower. I had been harder than I intended with Landen. Even with our differences we still had more than enough in common to be good friends.
11.
Polly Flashes Upon the Inward Eye
I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can’t be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you.
POLLY NEXT
—interviewed exclusively for The Owl on Sunday
AS I was dealing with Landen in my own clumsy way, my uncle and aunt were hard at work in Mycroft’s workshop. As I was to learn later, things seemed to be going quite well. To begin with, at any rate.
Mycroft was feeding his bookworms in the workshop when Polly entered; she had just completed some mathematical calculations of almost incomprehensible complexity for him.
“I have the answer you wanted, Crofty, my love,” she said, sucking the end of a well-worn pencil.
“And that is?” asked Mycroft, busily pouring prepositions onto the bookworms, who devoured the abstract food greedily.
“Nine.”
Mycroft mumbled something and jotted the figure down on a pad. He opened the large brass-reinforced book that I had not quite been introduced to the night before to reveal a cavity into which he placed a large-print copy of Wordsworth’s poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.” To this he added the bookworms, who busily got to work. They slithered over the text, their small bodies and unfathomable collective id unconsciously examining every sentence, word, vowel sound and syllable. They probed deeply into the historical, biographical and geographical allusions, then they explored the inner meanings hidden within the meter and rhythm and juggled ingeniously with subtext, content and inflection. After that they made up a few verses of their own and converted the result into binary.
Lakes! Daffodils! Solitude! Memory! whispered the worms excitedly as Mycroft carefully closed the book and locked it. He connected up the heavy mains feed to the back of the book and switched the power switch to “on”; he then started work on the myriad of knobs and dials that covered the front of the heavy volume. Despite the Prose Portal being essentially a bio-mechanism, there were still many delicate procedures that had to be set before the device would work; and since the portal was of an absurd complexity, Mycroft was forced to write up the precise sequence of start-up events and combinations in a small child’s exercise book of which—ever wary of foreign spies—he held the only copy. He studied the small book for several moments before twisting dials, setting switches and gently increasing the power, all the while muttering to himself and Polly:
“Binametrics, spherics, numerics. I’m—”
“On?”
“Off!” replied Mycroft sadly. “No, wait . . . There!”
He smiled happily as the last of the warning lights extinguished. He took his wife’s hand and squeezed it affectionately.
“Would you care to have the honor?” he asked. “The first human being to step inside a Wordsworth poem?”
Polly looked at him uneasily.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“As safe as houses,” he assured her. “I went into ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ an hour ago.”
“Really? What was it like?”
“Wet—and I think I left my jacket behind.”
“The one I gave you for Christmas?”
“No; the other one. The blue one with large checks.”
“That’s the one I did give you for Christmas,” she scolded. “I wish you would be more careful. What was it you wanted me to do?”
“Just stand here. If all goes well, as soon as I press this large green button the worms will open a door to the daffodils that William Wordsworth knew and loved.”