The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“What kind of shit is this?” I said, taking two paces forward, still with the gun pointing at the woman. “Do anything? No matter how strange? You’re crazier than Aornis, you know that? And what if you are Phlegethon?”

“Just let go, Thursday.”

“Let go? Let go? I’ll show you how I can let go!”

And so saying, I fired four shots into the sofa without looking or aiming.

“Happy now?” I yelled, my face only inches from hers. “I’m sorry?” she said, “My ears are ringing.”

“What was that?” said Landen, bursting in the door. He looked at me, then at Tuesday, then at the newcomer.

“Are you the Cleaning Lady?” he said. “The one who called Thursday ten minutes ago?”

“I’m getting confused,” I said. “She called me when?”

“Gunshots in a small space are loud,” said the Cleaning Lady, waggling a finger in her ear. “Hello, Landen.”

“Do we know each other?”

“You helped me sew the cell phone into Thursday’s coat at Image Ink this morning. It’s been a rough week for all of us.”

“What were those shots?” said Friday, running into the room.

“Mum shot the sofa,” said Tuesday.

“Again?”

“It’s stopped,” I said suddenly. “The kidnapping that didn’t happen. It’s halted half remembered.”

We all stood there for a moment, attempting to figure out what was going on. My mind was no longer falling in on itself. It felt clear—confused, but clear.

“Aornis has gone,” I said, “or at least for the moment. Will she be coming back?”

“No,” said the Cleaning Lady as she looked across at the sofa. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

Landen cottoned on first and walked over to look behind the sofa.

“Straight through the eye,” he said. “Well done.”

“I didn’t mean to kill her,” I said. “Or I didn’t consciously mean to kill her.

“I better call SO-5,” said Landen. “They’ll be well pissed off that you got her before they did but pleased at least the job was done.”

I turned to look at the Cleaning Lady, who had sat herself in one of the armchairs.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She never told us her name. A brief search of the house revealed that Aornis had taken over the attic above the east wing and used it as the base of operations for a global network of criminal activities that ranged from securities fraud to counterfeiting, human trafficking and arms sales. SO-5 could hardly believe their eyes when they started delving into her filing cabinets, all of which contained a host of useful information— contacts, names, front companies, the lot. According to the records they found, she was worth in excess of 350 million pounds but didn’t seem to be spending very much, if anything. She was in it only for the misery. She was, after all, a Hades.

SO-5 took the body, cleaned up after themselves and were gone in a couple of hours with the advice that this “was so not worth worrying the cops over.”

We agreed wholeheartedly, and while Aornis’s death was certainly no reason to shed any tears, I felt unfulfilled over the whole episode for two reasons. Firstly that she didn’t stand trial and secondly that even though I now knew that Jenny wasn’t real, Aornis had left me in a transmemory moment where I would think of Jenny, then realize she wasn’t real, then muse upon the loss of a daughter and all that this entailed. I could tell that the others felt the same way, too. We invited the Cleaning Lady to supper, which, given all that she had done, was the least we could do. Without her guiding influence, Aornis would still be living undetected in the attic.

She was, of course, also a mnemonomorph, and she told us all the wide and varied adventures her sort had undertaken. From the first great erasure in the Middle Ages to the more recent retelling of recent history, some of which was still going on.

“Some things humans can’t and shouldn’t remember,” she said, having outlined one particular incident that was now only sporadically recalled, and then only by fringe groups whom no one believed anyway.

“Who decides what’s to be globally forgotten?” asked Tuesday. “There’s a six-person cabal,” she explained matter-of-factly. “We meet four times a year to discuss whether there is any thing pressing that would be better off forgotten, but we also spend a lot of time tidying up after our more criminally minded brethren.”