The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“I’ll go,” said Landen, and he walked off toward the stairs before I could argue.

“Any progress today?” I asked.

“Not much,” replied the Wingco. “I’ve interviewed two dozen ICFs since I’ve been here, three of which have subsequently vanished. None of them have ever managed to transmit anything back to me—it’s like the Dark Reading Matter is a heavy black curtain that allows movement only one way.”

The Wingco’s research work involved finding some evidence of the disputed Dark Reading Matter. Theoretical storyologists had calculated that the readable BookWorld makes up for only 22 percent of visible reading matter—the remainder is thought to be the unobservable remnants of long-lost books, forgotten oral tradition and ideas locked in writers’ heads when they died. A way to enter the Dark Reading Matter was keenly sought, as it might offer a vast amount of new ideas, plots and characters as well as a better understanding of the very nature of human imagination, why story exists at all.

Naturally, wagging tongues insisted that the real reason the Council of Genres was interested in the Dark Reading Matter was for the potential yield of raw metaphor—something that was in dwindling supply in the BookWorld, and often the cause of disputes. But the bottom line was this: Every single explorer had vanished without a trace, and the DRM remained stubbornly theoretical.

“So no headway at all?” I asked.

“None, but it’s still early days. Research into ICFs offers the strongest thread I’ve encountered so far.”

An ICF was an Imaginary Childhood Friend, those pretend friends one sometimes has when a child. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t go away when no longer required; they simply wander the earth until their host dies. They share common DNA with fictional people like the Wingco in that they are constructs of the human mind—living stories, if you like. Because of this they are quite visible to fictional people and, on occasion, to us as something normally dismissed as “ghosts” or a “trick of the light,” an area in which the Wingco was at present directing his efforts. And when he wasn’t doing that or looking after us, he liked to tinker on a small bomber he was building—purely for sentimental purposes.

“I say,” said the wingco, “I hate to mention something as vulgar as money, but could I ask Tuesday to lend me a few quid? A bargain’s come up.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing much— just a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine. A pair, actually.”

“Everyone needs a hobby,” I said with a shrug. “I have no objection.”

Tuesday was the one with the money in the household, as the licensing rights from her many inventions brought in a considerable income. She was the reason we could afford the move to a huge Georgian house with extensive grounds and outbuildings to match. She used the old library as a laboratory, and that was where I headed next. There was a cross-sounding “What?” as I knocked on the door, but I walked in anyway.

The room was large and, airy, and it boasted an ornate plaster ceiling. The floor space was covered by workbenches piled high with interesting devices in various stages of completion. In one corner there were an experimental Anti-Smite Field Generator and an Inverse Teleport device that would only take you to places you didn’t want to go. Tuesday had recently turned her attentions to domestic appliances and had developed a Nuclear Aga that ran off a nonradioactive isotope of Nextrium. To increase the heat, all one did was remove a graphite rod from the middle of the circular pellet of 253NX underneath each hotplate. The stove had not yet made it to the marketplace because a test model broke a graphite rod on demonstration, and the suits from Aga then had to watch in dismay as the cooker melted in front of their eyes.

There was a large blackboard in the middle of the room where Tuesday often jotted down ideas, and scribbled on the board today was an ingenious way in which jellyfish could be dramatically improved, as well as some early conceptual work on an attempt to understand the Reality Distortion Field. On a worktop nearby lay a machine that could assemble itself into a machine that would be able to dissemble itself, the practical applications of which were somewhat obscure. The room looked like Uncle Mycroft’s laboratory, in short, and it was from my father’s side of the family that Tuesday had gotten her intellect. Sadly for Mycroft and Polly—who were both geniuses—their sons, Orville and Wilbur, had turned out to have something resembling low-quality putty between their ears.

“Oh, it’s you,” muttered Tuesday grumpily, looking momentarily up from her workbench. “How’s the leg?”

“Still painful. Back from school early?”

“Mr. Davies said the school was grateful for my valuable insights but there were only so many exciting concepts they could cope with in a day. So he gave me the rest of the day off—after I’d done the school accounts and figured out a way to heat the school for free. So I did. And here I am.”

I put on my stern look. “Your father and I don’t insist you go to school for the education,” I pronounced, and Tuesday set down her soldering iron and removed some papers from a chair so I could sit.

“I know that,” she said in a huffy manner, “but having to mix with dimwits is hideously boring. Great-Uncle Mycroft put it best when he said that for a genius this planet is excruciatingly dull, only made briefly more illuminating when another genius happens along.”

“Maybe so,” I replied, “but if you’re to have even the hope of achieving a meaningful human relationship or learn to discourse usefully with us—the dimwits—you’re going to have to suffer the slings and agonies, bruises, defeats, betrayals and compromises that all the other sixteen-year-olds have to suffer. I’m serious about this.”

“I am taking it seriously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Before I left school this morning, I stole Linda Blott’s eraser, teased Mary Jones about her dad being in prison, got caught writing ‘Mrs. Henderson has a fat arse’ on the loo door, was given double detention, then showed my boobs to Gavin Watkins for fifty p behind the bike sheds.”

“Tuesday!”

“Oh, puh-lease,” she muttered sarcastically, “are you really going to tell me you never showed your boobs to anyone at school for cash?”

“I might have,” I replied, “but that was completely different.”

“How was it completely different?”

“Mostly because Flossie Buxton dared me to. She was more into that sort of thing. Still is, actually. And . . .”

“And what?”

“I charged a pound.”

“Holy strumpets,” said Tuesday, making a quick mental calculation. “That’s the equivalent of—let’s see—over twenty-two pounds seventy-five pence in today’s money. Did you ever consider a career as a stripper? It was going pretty well for you.”