The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

I saw the odd-looking person flit past us, and one of the cars vanished, only to be replaced by another. I rubbed the board clean and wrote:

Can we talk about stuff?

In an instant the whiteboard had been wiped and replaced by another message:

I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.

And we saw the figure dash off again.

“He’s running about four times faster than we are,” said Friday, “so about five minutes.”

“How did you figure that?” I asked. “Comparing clocks or an extrapolation of the dilation gradient?”

“Neither,” he replied. “He just looks like the VCR at home running at the ‘4X’ fast-forward feature.”

“Very technical.”

But Friday was right. In a little over four minutes, the Manchild appeared again, but this time he had brought a chair and sat patiently still so we could get a good look at him. He was indeed a manchild—the left side of him was a boy of no more than ten, while the right side of him was a man approaching middle age. The two flowed into each other like hot wax, and his features were stretched sideways across his face, with one shoulder considerably lower than the other. To enable him to walk, his younger leg had an extension on the base of his shoe, which gave him a lilting gait.

“I was working here before we shut down the engines,” he explained in a voice that sounded like a speed-faulty tape player, “as part of SO-12’s legal team. I was down here to view the new C-90 engines when I tore my suit and suffered what’s termed a Progressive Negative Bilateral Aggregation. I was going to have a hard time explaining this, even with a new career history, so I decided to stay.”

“Will you be all right once the left side catches up?” asked Friday.

“You’re going to have to speak quicker,” he said. “I can’t understand you.”

So Friday repeated himself as fast as he could, and the Manchild gave an odd sideways smile and chuckled.

“No,” he said, touching the child side of his head with his older hand. “This side is getting younger. The left side of my mind is gradually reverting to that of a child.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shrugged. “Accidents happen. I’m just glad I didn’t have to undergo what happened to Sarah Wade—and besides, being able to laugh in an uninhibited manner about poo and wee is really very liberating.”

“You sound vaguely normal,” said Friday, again as fast as he could, “yet we’re running four times slower than you.”

“I’m speaking very slowly for your benefit,” he said with a faint smile. “I don’t get many visitors. What do you think of our little enterprise?” He made a jerky gesture in the direction of the hundreds of pieces of furniture.

“The craze for shabby chic,” he replied, “people like stuff that looks old, but they don’t have the time to wait, and ‘distressed’ stuff looks such shit, don’t you think? I have a business called Age-Fast that specializes in making things old. It’s the same with those sports cars. All those idiots who restored their cars to factory condition now realize that they’ve stolen the cars’ very soul—but down here I can put sixty years back on them in a little under a week. Nice patina, although I do have to keep them rotated to avoid overaging one side. We have more than a million of bottles of whiskey, too—twelve years in only three weeks. Vintage Château Latour in six months? No problem. Wine, whiskey, counterfeit Vermeers—we do the lot down here. I’ve seen the future, and it’s old.”

“So the core really is running close to D=.82?” I asked.

“Two minutes in there is almost four months,” he said, “and the gradient is getting steeper by the second. In thirty-seven years, it should be about ready to pop.” And he gave a soft, knowing chuckle.

“Who are you anyway?” he asked.

“Thursday Next,” I said, “and this is my son, Friday.”

“Ah,” he said, “you must have come about the Letters of Destiny.”

Friday and I exchanged looks, and he asked the Manchild what he knew about them. It was, it transpired, just one of several jobs he had been asked to do after he’d stayed on, but he didn’t know why. All he had was a timescale to stick to and instructions to pass them on if he became old, incapacitated or dead.

“There must be something you can tell us,” said Friday. “I’m going to kill someone for no reason on Friday morning, and I need to know why.”

The Manchild blinked his mismatched eyes at Friday and thought for a few seconds.

“I saw you drawing an elephant earlier,” he said. “Your mother was demonstrating a simple cause-and-effect reversal, yes?”

“Yes?”