The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [652]
I shivered. Mycroft was right—the temperature had dropped—and there he was, but a lot less solid than the previous time. I could easily see the other side of the workshop through him.
“Hello again, Thursday,” he said. “Good afternoon, Mr. Stoker.”
“Good afternoon, sir,” replied Spike. “Word in the Realm of the Dead says you’ve got something to tell us.”
“I have?” asked Mycroft, looking at me.
“Yes, Uncle,” I told him, “You’re a Nonrecurring…um—”
“Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm,” put in Spike helpfully. “An NIP, or what we call in the trade Speak Up and Shut Down.”
“It means, Uncle,” I said, “that you’ve got something really important to tell us.”
Mycroft looked thoughtful for so long that I almost nudged him before I realized it would be useless.
“Like what?” he said at last.
“I don’t know. Perhaps a…philosophy of life or something?”
Mycroft looked at me doubtfully and raised an eyebrow. “The only thing that springs to mind is, ‘You can never have too many chairs.’”
“That’s it? You returned from the dead to give me advice on furniture distribution?”
“I know it’s not much of a philosophy,” said Mycroft with a shrug, “but it can pay dividends if someone unexpectedly pops around for dinner.”
“Uncle, please try to remember what it is you have to tell us!”
“Was I murdered or anything?” he asked in a dreamy fashion. “Ghosts often come back if they’ve been killed or something—at least, Patrick Swayze did.”
“You definitely weren’t murdered,” I told him. “It was a long illness.”
“Then this is something of a puzzle,” murmured Mycroft, “but I suppose I’ve got the greater part of eternity to figure it out.”
That’s what I liked about my uncle—always optimistic. But that was it. In another moment he had gone.
“Thirty-three seconds,” said Spike, who had put a stopwatch on him, “and about fifty-five percent opacity.” He flicked through a small book of tables he had with him. “Hmm,” he said at last, “almost certainly a trivisitation. You’ve got him one more time. He’ll be down at fifteen to twenty percent opacity and will only be around for about fifteen seconds.”
“Then I could miss him?”
“No,” said Spike with a smile, “he appeared to you twice out of twice. The final appearance will be to you, too. Just have a proper question ready for him when you next come here—Mycroft’s memory being what it is, you can’t rely on him remembering what he came back for. It’s up to you.”
“Thanks, Spike,” I said as I closed the door of the workshop. “I owe you.”
Tuesday and I were home in a few minutes. The house felt warm and comfy, and there was the smell of cooking that embraced me like an old friend.
“Hi, darling!” I called out. Landen stopped his typing and came out of the office to give me a hug.
“How was work?” he asked.
I thought of what I’d been doing that day. Of firing and not firing my drippy alter ego, of a Superreader loose somewhere in the BookWorld, of Goliath’s unwelcome intrusion and of Mycroft as a ghost. Then there was the return of Felix8, the Minotaur, and my bag of Welsh cash. The time for truth was now. I had to tell him.
“I…I had to do a stair carpet over in Baydon. Hell on earth; the treads were all squiffy, none of the stair rods would fit, and Spike and I spent the whole afternoon on it—how’s the book going?”
He kissed me on the forehead and tousled Tuesday’s hair affectionately, then took me by the hand and led me into the kitchen, where there was a stew on the stove.
“Kind of okay, I guess,” he replied, stirring the dinner, “but nothing really spectacular.”
“No ideas?” I prompted. “An odd character, perhaps?”
“No—I was mostly working on pace and atmosphere.”
This was strange. I’d specifically told Scampton-Tappett to do his best. I had a sudden thought.
“What book are you working on, sweetheart?”
“The Mews of Doom.”
Aha.
“I thought you said you’d be rewriting Bananas for Edward?”
“I got bored with it. Why do you ask?”