First Among Sequels Read online

  “Ah!” he said with a smile. “Thursday! Haven’t seen you for a while—all well?”

  “Yes,” I replied a bit uncertainly, “I think so.”

  “Splendid! I just had an idea for a cheap form of power: by bringing pasta and antipasta together, we could be looking at the utter annihilation of ravioli and the liberation of vast quantities of energy. I safely predict that an average-size cannelloni would be able to power Swindon for over a year. Mind you, I could be wrong.”

  “You’re not often wrong,” I said quietly.

  “I think I was wrong to start inventing in the first place,” he replied after a moment’s reflection. “Just because I can do it, it doesn’t follow that I should. If scientists stopped to think about their creations more, the world might be a better—”

  He broke off talking and looked at me in a quizzical manner.

  “You’re staring at me in a strange way,” he said, with uncharacteristic astuteness.

  “Well, yes,” I replied, trying to frame my words carefully. “You see…I think…that is to say…I’m very surprised to see you.”

  “Really?” he said, putting down the device he was working on. “Why?”

  “Well,” I replied with greater firmness, “I’m surprised to see you because…you died six years ago!”

  “I did?” inquired Mycroft with genuine concern. “Why does no one tell me these things?”

  I shrugged, as there was really no good answer to this.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, patting himself on the chest and stomach and then taking his pulse to try to convince himself I might be mistaken. “I know I’m a bit forgetful, but I’m certain I would have remembered that.”

  “Yes, quite sure,” I replied. “I was there.”

  “Well, goodness,” murmured Mycroft thoughtfully, “if what you say is correct and I am dead, it’s entirely possible that this isn’t me at all, but a variable-response holographic recording of some sort. Let’s have a look for a projector.”

  And so saying, he began to ferret through the piles of dusty machinery in his lab. And with nothing better to do and faintly curious, I joined in.

  We searched for a good five minutes, but after finding nothing even vaguely resembling a holographic projector, Mycroft and I sat down on a packing case and didn’t speak for some moments.

  “Dead,” muttered Mycroft with a resigned air. “Never been that before. Not even once. Are you quite sure?”

  “Quite sure,” I replied. “You were eighty-seven. It was expected.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, as though some dim memory were stirring. “And Polly?” he added, suddenly remembering his wife. “How is she?”

  “She’s very well,” I told him. “She and Mum are up to their old tricks.”

  “Annoying market researchers?”

  “Among other things. But she’s missing you dreadfully.”

  “And I her.” He looked nervous for a moment. “Has she got a boyfriend yet?”

  “At ninety-two?”

  “Damn good-looking woman—smart, too.”

  “Well, she hasn’t.”

  “Hmm. Well, If you see someone suitable, O favorite niece, push him her way, won’t you? I don’t want her to be lonely.”

  “I’ll do that, Uncle, I promise.”

  We sat in silence for a few seconds more, and I shivered.

  “Mycroft,” I said, suddenly thinking that perhaps there wasn’t a scientific explanation for his appearance after all, “I’m going to try something.”

  I put out my fingertips to touch him, but where they should have met the firm resistance of his shirtsleeve, there was none—my fingers just melted into him. He wasn’t there. Or if he was, he was something insubstantial—a phantom.

  “Ooooh!” he said as I withdrew my hand. “That felt odd.”

  “Mycroft…you’re a ghost.”

  “Nonsense! Scientifically proven to be completely impossible.” He paused for thought. “Why would I be one of those?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know—perhaps there’s something you hadn’t finished at your death and it’s been bothering you.”

  “Great Scott! You’re right. I never did finish the final chapter of Love Among the Begonias.”

  In retirement Mycroft had spent his time writing romantic novels, all of which sold surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that he had attracted the lasting enmity of Daphne Farquitt, the indisputable leader in the field. She fired off an accusatory letter accusing him of “wanton” plagiarism. A barrage of claims and counterclaims followed, which ended only when Mycroft died. It was so venomous, in fact, that conspiracy theorists claimed he was poisoned by crazed Farquitt fans. We had to publish his death certificate to quell the rumors.

  “Polly finished Love Among the Begonias for you,” I said.

  “Ah,” he replied, “maybe I’ve come back to haunt that loathsome cow Farquitt.”

  “If that were the case, you’d be over at her place doing the wooo-wooo thing and clanking chains.”

  “Hmm,” he said disdainfully, “that doesn’t sound very dignified.”

  “How about some last-minute inventing? Some idea you never got around to researching?”

  Mycroft thought long and hard, making several bizarre faces as he did so.

  “Fascinating!” he said at last, panting with the effort. “I can’t do original thought anymore. As soon as my brain stopped functioning, that was the end of Mycroft the inventor. You’re right: I must be dead. It’s most depressing.”

  “But no idea why you’re here?”

  “None,” he said despondently.

  “Well,” I said as I got up, “I’ll make a few inquiries. Do you want Polly to know you’ve reappeared in spirit form?”

  “I’ll leave it to your judgment,” he said. “But if you do tell her, you might mention something about how she was the finest partner any man could have. Two minds with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.”

  I snapped my fingers. That’s how I wanted to describe Landen and me. “That was good—can I use it?”

  “Of course. Have you any idea how much I miss Polly?”

  I thought of the two years Landen had been eradicated. “I do. And she misses you, Uncle, every second of every day.”

  He looked up at me, and I saw his eyes glisten.

  I tried to put my hand on his arm, but it went through his phantom limb and instead landed on the hard surface of the workbench.

  “I’ll have a think about why I might be here,” said Mycroft in a quiet voice. “Will you look in on me from time to time?” He smiled to himself and began to tinker with the device on the workbench again.

  “Of course. Good-bye, Uncle.”

  “Good-bye, Thursday.”

  And he slowly began to fade. I noticed as he did so that the room grew warmer again, and within a few more seconds he had vanished entirely. I retrieved the bag of Welsh cash and walked thoughtfully to the door, turning to have one last look. The workshop was empty, dusty and forgotten. Abandoned as it was when Mycroft died, six years before.

  3.

  Acme Carpets

  The Special Operations Network was instituted in 1928 to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. Amongst the stranger departments were those that dealt with vampires (SO-17), time travel (SO-12), literary crime (SO-27) and the Cheese Enforcement Agency (SO-31). Notoriously secretive and with increased accusations of unaccountability and heavy-handedness, 90 percent of the service was disbanded during the winter of 1991–92. Of the thirty-two departments, only five were retained. My department, the Literary Detectives, was not among them.

  T he name Acme Carpets was a misnomer, to be honest. We didn’t just do carpets—we did tiles, linoleum and wooden flooring, too. Competitive, fast and reliable, we had been trading in Swindon for ten years, ever since the SpecOps divisions were disbanded in ’92. In 1996 we moved to bigger premises on the Oxford Road trading es
tate. If you needed any sort of floor covering in the Swindon area, you could come to us for the most competitive quote.

  I pushed open the front doors and was surprised that there was no one around. Not that there was a lack of customers, as Mondays before ten were generally pretty light, but that there was no staff—not even in the office or skulking next to the spotlessly clean complimentary-tea area. I walked to the back of the store, past quality rolls of carpet and a varied selection of samples piled high on the light and spacious showroom floor. I opened the heavy swinging doors that led to the storerooms and froze. Standing next to a pile of last year’s sample books was a flightless bird about four feet high and with an unfeasibly large and rather nastily serrated beak. It stared at me suspiciously with two small black eyes. I looked around. The stockroom staff were all dutifully standing still, and behind the Dyatrima was a stocky figure in an Acme Carpets uniform, a man with a large, brow-ridged head and deeply sunken brown eyes. He had a lot in common with the Paleocene anomaly that faced me—he, too, had once been extinct and was here not by the meanderings of natural selection but from the inconsiderate meddling of a scientist who never stopped to ask whether if a thing could be done, that it should. His name was Stig, and he was a reengineered neanderthal, ex–SO-13 and a valued colleague from the old days of SpecOps. He’d saved my butt on several occasions, and I’d helped him and his fellow extinctees to species self-determination.

  “Don’t move,” said Stig in a low rumble. “We don’t want to hurt it.”

  He never did. Stig saw any renegade unextinctees as something akin to family and always caught them alive, if possible. On the other hand, chimeras, a hodgepodge of the hobby sequencer’s art, were another matter—he dispatched them without mercy, and without pain.

  The Diatryma made a vicious jab toward me; I jumped to my left as the beak snapped shut with the sound of oversize castanets. Quick as a flash, Stig leaped forward and covered the creature’s head with an old flour sack, which seemed to subdue it enough for him to wrestle it to the floor. I joined in, as did the entire storeroom staff, and within a few moments we had wrapped some duct tape securely around its massive beak, rendering it harmless.

  “Thanks,” said Stig, securing a leash around the bird’s neck.

  “Salisbury?” I asked as we walked past the rolls of Wilton shag and cushioned linoleum in a wide choice of colors.

  “Devizes,” replied the neanderthal. “We had to run for eight miles across open farmland to catch it.”

  “Did anyone see you?” I asked, mindful of any rumors getting out.

  “Who’d believe them if they did?” he replied. “But there’re more Diatrymas—we’ll be out again tonight.”

  Acme Carpets, as you might have gathered, was just the cover story. In truth it was the old SpecOps under another name. The service hadn’t really been disbanded in the early nineties—it just went underground, and freelance. All strictly unofficial, of course. Luckily, the Swindon chief of police was Braxton Hicks, my old divisional boss at SpecOps. Although he suspected what we got up to, he told me he would feign ignorance unless “someone gets eaten or something.” Besides, if we didn’t mop up all the bizarrer elements of modern living, his regular officers would have to, and Braxton might then have a demand of bonus payments for “actions beyond the call of duty.” And Hicks loved his budget almost as much as he loved his golf. So the cops didn’t bother us and we didn’t bother them.

  “We have a question,” said Stig. “Do we have to mention the possibility of being trampled by mammoths on our Health and Safety Risk-Assessment Form?”

  “No—that’s the part of Acme we don’t want anyone to know about. The safety stuff only relates to carpet laying.”

  “We understand,” said Stig. “What about being shredded by a chimera?”

  “Just carpets, Stig.”

  “Okay. By the way,” he added, “have you told Landen about all your SpecOps work yet? You said you were going to.”

  “I’m…building up to it.”

  “You should tell him, Thursday.”

  “I know.”

  “And have a good anniversary of your mother giving birth to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I bade Stig good day and then walked to the store offices, which were situated in a raised position halfway between the storeroom and the showroom floor. From there you could see pretty much everything that went on in the building.

  As I walked in, a man looked up from where he was crouched under the desk.

  “Have you captured it?” he asked in a quavering voice.

  “Yes.”

  He looked relieved and clambered out from his hiding place. He was in his early forties, and his features were just beginning to show the shades of middle age. Around his eyes were fine lines, his dark hair now flecked with gray. Even though he was management, he also wore an Acme Carpets uniform. Only his looked a lot better on him than mine did on me. In fact, he looked a lot better in his than anyone in the establishment, leading us to accuse him of having his professionally tailored, something he strenuously denied but, given his fastidious nature, not outside the bounds of possibility. Bowden Cable had been my partner at the Swindon branch of the Literary Detectives, and it seemed only natural that he would have the top admin job at Acme Carpets when we were all laid off from SpecOps.

  “Are we busy today?” I asked, pouring myself a cup of coffee.

  Bowden pointed to the newspaper. “Have you read this?”

  “The stupidity surplus?”

  “Part of it, I guess,” he replied despondently. “Incredibly enough, reality TV has just gotten worse.”

  “Is that possible?” I asked. “Wasn’t Celebrity Trainee Pathologist the pits?” I thought for a moment. “Actually, Whose Life Support Do We Switch Off? was worse. Or maybe Sell Your Granny. Wow, the choice these days makes it all so tricky to decide.”

  Bowden laughed.

  “I’ll agree that Granny lowered the bar for distasteful program makers everywhere, but RTA-TV, never one to shrink from a challenge, has devised Samaritan Kidney Swap. Ten renal-failure patients take turns trying to convince a tissue-typed donor—and the voting viewers—which one should have his spare kidney.”

  I groaned. Reality TV was to me the worst form of entertainment—the modern equivalent of paying sixpence to watch lunatics howling at the walls down at the local mad house. I shook my head sadly.

  “What’s wrong with a good book?” I asked.

  Bowden shrugged. In these days of junk TV, short attention spans and easy-to-digest sound bites, it seemed that the book, the noble device to which both Bowden and I had devoted much of our lives, was being marginalized into just another human storytelling experience also-ran, along with the epic poem, Greek theater, Jackanory, Beta and Tarzanagrams.

  “How’s the family?” asked Bowden, trying to elevate the mood.

  “They’re all good,” I replied. “Except Friday, who is still incapable of any human activity other than torpidity.”

  “And Pickwick? Feathers growing back?”

  “No—listen, can you knit?”

  “No…. Why?”

  “No reason. What’s on the books for us today?”

  Bowden picked up a clipboard and thumbed through the pages. “Spike’s got a brace of undead to deal with and a possible pack of howlers in the Savenake. Stig’s still on the path of those Diatrymas. The Taste Division has got an outbreak of stonecladding to deal with in Cirencester, and the Pampas Squad will be busy on a slash ’n’ burn in Bristol. Oh, yes—and we’ve an outbreak of doppelgängers in Chippenham.”

  “Any literary stuff?” I asked hopefully.

  “Only Mrs. Mattock and her stolen first editions—again. Face it, Thurs, books just don’t light anyone’s candle these days. It’s as good that they don’t—add the sixteen or so carpets to be laid and the twenty-eight quotes needed yesterday, and we’re kind of stretched. Do we pull Spike off zombies to do stair runners?”

&nb
sp; “Can’t we just drag in some freelance installers?”

  “And pay them with what? An illegal Diatryma each?”

  “It’s that bad, is it?”

  “Thursday, it’s always that bad. We’re nuzzling up to the overdraft limit again.”

  “No problem. I’ve got a seriously good cheese deal going down this evening.”

  “I don’t want to know about it. When you’re arrested, I need deniability—and besides, if you actually sold carpets instead of gallivanting around like a lunatic, you wouldn’t need to buy and sell on the volatile cheese market.”

  “That reminds me,” I said with a smile. “I’ll be out of my office today, so don’t put any calls through.”

  “Thursday!” he said in an exasperated tone. “Please don’t vanish today of all days. I really need you to quote for the new lobby carpet in the Finis, I’ve got the Wilton rep popping in at four-thirty to show us their new line, and the Health and Safety Inspectorate is coming in to make sure we’re up to speed.”

  “On safety procedures?”

  “Good Lord no! On how to fill the forms in properly.”

  “Listen,” I said, “I’ve got to take Friday to the ChronoGuard career night at five-thirty, so I’ll try to get back a couple of hours before then and do some quotes. Have a list ready for me.”