“What about the other way?”
Victor looked at me sharply.
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard of anyone jumping in the other direction?”
Victor looked at the floor and rubbed his nose. “That’s pretty radical, Thursday.”
“But do you think it’s possible?”
“Keep this under your hat, Thursday, but I’m beginning to think that it is. The barriers between reality and fiction are softer than we think; a bit like a frozen lake. Hundreds of people can walk across it, but then one evening a thin spot develops and someone falls through; the hole is frozen over by the following morning. Have you read Dickens’s Dombey and Son?”
“Sure.”
“Remember Mr. Glubb?”
“The Brighton fisherman?”
“Correct. Dombey was finished in 1848 and was reviewed extensively with a list of characters in 1851. In that review Mr. Glubb was not mentioned.”
“An oversight?”
“Perhaps. In 1926 a collector of antiquarian books named Redmond Bulge vanished while reading Dombey and Son. The incident was widely reported in the press owing to the fact that his assistant had been convinced he saw Bulge ‘melt into smoke.’ ”
“And Bulge fits Glubb’s description?”
“Almost exactly. Bulge specialized in collecting stories about the sea and Glubb specializes in telling tales of precisely that. Even Bulge’s name spelled backward reads “ ‘Eglub,’ a close enough approximation to Glubb to make us think he made it up himself.” He sighed. “I suppose you think that’s incredible?”
“Not at all,” I replied, thinking of my own experiences with Rochester, “but are you absolutely sure he fell into Dombey and Son?”
“What do you mean?”
“He could have made the jump by choice. He might have preferred it—and stayed.”
Victor looked at me strangely. He hadn’t dared tell anyone about his theories for fear of being ostracized, but here was a respected London Litera Tec nearly half his age going farther than even he had imagined. A thought crossed his mind.
“You’ve done it, haven’t you?”
I looked him straight in the eye. For this we could both be pensioned off.
“Once,” I whispered. “When I was a very young girl. I don’t think I could do it again. For many years I thought even that was a hallucination.”
I was going to go farther and tell him about Rochester jumping back after the shooting at Styx’s apartment, but at that moment Bowden put his head into the corridor and asked us to come in.
Mr. Rumplunkett had finished his initial examination.
“One shot through the heart, very clean, very professional. Everything about the body otherwise normal except evidence of rickets in childhood. It’s quite rare these days so it shouldn’t be difficult to trace, unless of course he spent his youth in another country. Very poor dental work and lice. It’s probable he hasn’t had a bath for at least a month. There is not a lot I can tell you except his last meal was suet, mutton and ale. There’ll be more when the tissue samples come back from the lab.”
Victor and I exchanged looks. I was correct. The corpse had to be Mr. Quaverley’s. We all left hurriedly; I explained to Bowden who Quaverley was and where he came from.
“I don’t get it,” said Bowden as we walked toward the car. “How did Hades take Mr. Quaverley out of every copy of Chuzzlewit?”
“Because he went for the original manuscript,” I answered, “for the maximum disruption. All copies anywhere on the planet, in whatever form, originate from that first act of creation. When the original changes, all the others have to change too. If you could go back a hundred million years and change the genetic code of the first mammal, every one of us would be completely different. It amounts to the same thing.”
“Okay,” said Bowden slowly, “but why is Hades doing this? If it was extortion, why kill Quaverley?”
I shrugged.