Lost in a Good Book (Thursday Next 2)

'Over my dead body.'

As if in reply there was a gentle pok sound and a single bullet hole appeared in the windshield of the shuttle. Someone had decided they could take Kaylieu out anyway. My temper flared and I tried to yell out in anger but no sound came from my lips. My legs felt weak and I fell to the floor in a heap, the world turning grey about me. I couldn't even feel my legs. I heard someone yell 'Medic!' and the last thing I saw before the darkness overtook me was Kaylieu's broad face looking down at me. He had tears in his eyes and was mouthing the words 'We're so sorry. So very, very sorry.'

5

Vanishing hitch-hikers

* * *

'Urban legends are older than congress gaiters but far more interesting. I'd heard most of them, from the dog in the microwave to ball lightning chasing a housewife in Preston, to the fried dodo leg found in a SmileyFriedChicken, to the carnivorous Diatryma supposedly re-engineered and now living in the New Forest. I'd read all about the alien spaceship that crash-landed near Lambourn in 1952, the story that Charles Dickens was a woman and that the president of the Goliath Corporation was actually a 142-year-old man kept alive by medical science in a bottle. Stories about SpecOps abound, the favourite at present relating to "something odd" dug up in the Quantock Hills. Yes, I'd heard them all. Never believed any of them. Then one day, I was one …'

THURSDAY NEXT – A Life in SpecOps

I opened one eye, then the other. It was a warm summer's day on the Marlborough downs. A light zephyr brought with it the delicate scent of honeysuckle and wild thyme. The air was warm and small puffy clouds were starting to tinge red from the setting sun. I was standing by the side of a road in open country. In one direction I could see a lone cyclist; in the other the road wound away into the distance past fields in which sheep grazed peacefully. If this was life after death then a lot of people had not much to worry about and the Church had delivered the goods after all.

'Psssst!' hissed a voice close at hand. I turned to see a figure crouched behind a large Goliath Corporation billboard advertising buy-two-get-one-free grand pianos.

'Dad—?'

He pulled me behind the hoarding with him.

'Standing there like a tourist, Thursday!' he snapped crossly. 'Anyone would think you wanted to be seen!'

I regarded my father as a sort of time-travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his 'historical and moral' differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The downside of this was that he didn't really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents' front door. But despite all this Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been born. 'Things,' Dad used to say, 'are a whole lot weirder than we can know.'

He glanced nervously up and down the road.

'How are you, by the way?' he asked.

'I think I was just accidentally shot dead by a SpecOps marksman.'

He laughed for a while, then suddenly stopped when he saw I was serious.

'Goodness!' he said. 'You do live an exciting life. But never fear. You can't die until you've lived, and you've barely started that at all. What's the news from home?'

'A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash wanting to know where you were.'

'Lavoisier?'

'Yes; do you know him?'

'I should think so.' My father sighed. 'We were partners for nearly seven centuries.'

r /> 'He said you were very dangerous.'

'No more dangerous than anyone else who dares speak the truth. How's your mother?'

'She's fine, although you might try and clear up that misunderstanding about Emma Hamilton.'

'Emma and I … I mean Lady Hamilton and I are simply "good friends". There's nothing to it, I swear.'

'Tell her that.'

'I try, but you know what a temper she has. I only have to mention I've been anywhere near the turn of the nineteenth century and she gets in a frightful strop. What else is happening?'

'We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.'

'Thirty-three?' echoed my father. 'That's odd. When I took the entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to distribute there were only eighteen.'