Something rotten (18 page)

“Thursday was helping me with the washing, Spikey,” said Cindy, her hard-as-nails professionalism replaced with a silly sort of girlie ditziness. “I’ll put the kettle on—two sugars, Thursday?”

“One.”

She skipped into the house.

“What do you think?” asked Spike in a low tone. “Isn’t she just the cutest thing ever?”

He was like a fifteen-year-old in love for the first time.

“She’s lovely, Spike. You’re a lucky man.”

“This is Betty,” said Spike, waving the tiny arm of the infant with his huge hand. “One year old. You were right about being honest with Cindy—she didn’t mind me doing all that vampire sh—I mean
stuff.
In fact, I think she’s kinda proud.”

“You’re a lucky man,” I repeated, wondering just how I was going to avoid making him a widower and the gurgling child motherless.

We walked back into the house, where Cindy was busying herself in the kitchen.

“Where have you been?” asked Spike, depositing Betty next to Friday, where they looked at one another suspiciously. “Prison?”

“No. Somewhere weird. Somewhere
other.
”

“Will you be returning there?” asked Cindy innocently.

“She’s only just got back!” exclaimed Spike. “We don’t want to be shot of her quite yet.”

“Shot of her—of course not,” replied Cindy, placing a mug of tea on the table. “Have a seat. There are Hobnobs in that novelty dodo biscuit tin over there.”

“Thank you.”

“So,” I continued, “how’s the vampire business?”

“So-so. Been quiet recently. Werewolves the same. I dealt with a few zombies in the city center the other night, but Supreme Evil Being containment work has almost completely dried up. There has been a report of a few ghouls, bogeys and phantoms in Winchester, but it’s not really my area of expertise. There is talk of disbanding the division and then taking me on freelance when they need something done.”

“Is that bad?”

“Not really. I can charge what I want with vampires on the prowl—but in slack times I’d be a bit stuffed. Wouldn’t want to send Cindy out to work full-time, now, would I?”

He laughed, and Cindy laughed with him, handing a rusk to Betty, who gave it an almighty toothless bite and then looked puzzled when there was no effect. Friday took it off her and showed how it was done.

“So what are you up to at present?” asked Spike.

“Not much. I was just dropping in before I went off up to Goliathopolis—my husband still isn’t back.”

“Did you hear about Zvlkx’s revealment?”

“I was there.”

“Then Goliath will want all the forgiveness they can get—you won’t find a better time for forcing them to bring him back.”

We chatted for ten minutes or more until it was time for me to leave. I didn’t manage to speak to Cindy on her own again, but I had said what I wanted to say—I just hoped she would take notice, but somehow I doubted it.

“If I ever have any freelance jobs to do, will you join me?” asked Spike as he was seeing me out the door, Friday having nearly eaten all the rusks.

I thought of my overdraft. “Please.”

“Good,” replied Spike, “I’ll be in touch.”

I drove down the M4 to Saknussum International, where I had to run to catch the Gravitube to the James Tarbuck Graviport in Liverpool. Friday and I had a brief lunch before hopping on the shuttle to Goliathopolis. Goliath took my husband from me, and they could bring him back. And when you have a grievance with a company, you go straight to the top.

14.

The Goliath Apologarium

Danish Car a “Deathtrap,” Claims Kainian Minister

Robert Edsel, the Kainian minister of road safety, hit out at Danish car manufacturer Volvo yesterday, claiming the boxy and unsightly vehicle previously considered one of the safest cars on the market to be the complete reverse—a death trap for anyone stupid enough to buy one. “The Volvo fared very poorly in the rocket-propelled grenade test,” claimed Mr. Edsel in a press release yesterday, “and owners and their children risk permanent spinal injury when dropped in the car from heights as low as sixty feet.” Mr. Edsel continued to pour scorn on the pride of the Danish motoring industry by revealing that the Volvo’s air filters offered “scant protection” against pyroclastic flows, poisonous fumes and other forms of common volcanic phenomena. “I would very much recommend that anyone thinking of buying this poor Danish product should think again,” said Mr. Edsel. When the Danish foreign minister pointed out that Volvos were, in fact, Swedish, Mr. Edsel accused the Danes of once again attempting to blame their neighbors for their own manufacturing weaknesses.

Article in
The Toad on Sunday,
July 16, 1988

T
he Isle of Man had been an independent corporate state within England since it was appropriated for the greater fiscal good in 1963. The surrounding Irish Sea was heavily mined to deter unwanted visitors and the skies above protected by the most technologically advanced antiaircraft system known to man. It had hospitals and schools, a university, its own fusion reactor and also, leading from Douglas to the Kennedy Graviport in New York, the world’s only privately run Gravitube. The Isle of Man was home to almost two hundred thousand people who did nothing but support, or support the support, of the one enterprise that dominated the small island: the Goliath Corporation.

The old Manx town of Laxey was renamed Goliathopolis and was now the Hong Kong of the British archipelago, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside towards Snaefell. The largest of these skyscrapers rose higher even than the mountain peak behind and could be seen glinting in the sunlight all the way from Blackpool, weather permitting. In this building was housed the inner sanctum of the whole vast multinational, the cream of Goliath’s corporate engineers. An employee could spend a lifetime on the island and never even get past the front desk. And it was on the ground floor of this building, right at the heart of the corporation, that I found the Goliath Apologarium.

I joined a small queue in front of a modern glass-topped table where two happy, smiling Goliath employees were giving out questionnaires and numbered tickets.

“Hello!” said the clerk, a youngish girl with a lopsided smile. “Welcome to the Goliath Corporation’s Apology Emporium. Sorry you had to wait. How can we help you?”

“The Goliath Corporation murdered my husband.”

“How simply dreadful!” she responded in a lame and insincere display of sympathy. “I’m
so
sorry to hear that. Goliath, as part of our move to a faith-based corporate-management system, is committed to reversing all the unpleasant matters we might have previously been engaged in. You need to fill in this form, and this form—and Section D of this one—and then take a seat. We’ll get one of our highly trained apologists to see you just as soon as they can.”

She handed me several long forms and a numbered ticket, then indicated a door to one side. I opened the door of the Apologarium and walked in. It was a large hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a serene view of the Irish Sea. On one side was a row of perhaps twenty cubicles containing suited apologists, all listening intently to what they were being told with the same sad and contrite expression. On the other side were rows upon rows of wooden seating that held eager and once bullied citizens, anxiously clasping their numbered tickets and patiently waiting their turn. I looked at my ticket. It was number 6,174. I glanced up at the board, which told me that number 836 was now being interviewed.

“Dear, sweet people!” said a voice through a tannoy. “Goliath is deeply sorry for all the harm it might inadvertently have caused you in the past. Here at the Goliath Apologarium we are only too happy to assist in your problem, no matter how small—”

“You!” I said to a man who was hobbling past me towards the exit. “Has Goliath repented to your satisfaction?”

“Well, they didn’t really need to,” he replied blandly. “It was I who was at fault—in fact,
I
apologized for wasting their valuable time!”

“What did they do?”

“They bathed my neighborhood with ionizing radiation, then denied it for seventeen years, even after people’s teeth fell out and I grew a third foot.”

“And you forgave them?”

“Of course. I can see now that it was a genuine accident and the public has to accept equal risks if we are to have abundant clean energy, limitless food and household electrodefragmentizers.”

He was carrying a sheaf of papers, not the application form that I had to fill out but leaflets on how to join New Goliath. Not as a consumer but as a
worshipper.
I had always been deeply distrustful of Goliath, but this whole “repentance” thing smelt worse than anything I had so far witnessed. I turned, tore up my numbered ticket and headed for the exit.

“Miss Next!” called out a familiar voice. “I say, Miss Next!”

A short man with pinched features and a rounded head covered with the fuzz of an aggresively short crew cut was facing me. He was wearing a dark suit and heavy gold jewelry and was arguably the person I liked least—this was Jack Schitt, once Goliath’s top advanced-weapons guru and ex-convict of “The Raven.” This was the man who had tried to prolong the Crimean War so he could make a fortune out of Goliath’s latest superweapon, the Plasma Rifle.

Anger rose quickly within me. I turned Friday in the other direction so as not to give his young mind any wrong ideas about the use of violence and then grasped Schitt by the throat. He took a step back, stumbled and collapsed beneath me with a yelp. Sensing I had been in this position before, I released him and placed my hand on the butt of my automatic, expecting to be attacked by a host of Jack’s minders. But there was nothing. Just sad citizens looking on sorrowfully.

“There is no one here to help me,” said Jack Schitt, slowly getting to his feet. “I have been assaulted eight times today—I count myself fortunate. Yesterday it was twenty-three.”

I looked at him and noticed, for the first time, that he had a black eye and a cut on his lip.

“No minders?” I echoed. “Why?”

“It is my absolution to face those I have bullied and harangued in the past, Miss Next. When we last met, I was head of Goliath’s Advanced Weapons Division and corporate laddernumber 329.” He sighed. “Now, thanks to your well-publicized denouncement of the failings of our Plasma Rifle, the corporation decided to demote me. I am an Apology Facilitation Operative Second Class, laddernumber 12,398,219. The mighty has fallen, Miss Next.”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “you have merely been moved to a level more fitting for your competence. It’s a shame. You deserved much worse than this.”

His eyes twitched as he grew angry. The old Jack, the homicidal one, returned for a moment. But the feelings were short-lived, and his shoulders fell as he realized that without the Goliath Security Service to back him up, his power over me was minimal.

“Maybe you are right,” he said simply. “You will not have to wait your turn, Miss Next. I will deal with your case personally. Is this your son?” He bent down to look closer. “Cute fellow, isn’t he?”

“Eiusmod tempor incididunt adipisicing elit,” said Friday, glaring at Jack suspiciously.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘If you touch me, my mum will break your nose.’ ”

Jack stood up quickly. “I see. Goliath and myself offer a full, frank and unreserved apology.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. Have it on account. Would you care to come to my office?”

He beckoned me out the door, and we crossed a courtyard with a large fountain in the middle, past a few suited Goliath officials chattering in a corner, then through another doorway and down a wide corridor full of clerks moving backwards and forwards with folders tucked under their arms.

Jack opened a door, ushered me in, offered me a chair and then sat himself. It was a miserable little office, devoid of any decoration except a shabby Lola Vavoom calendar on the wall and a dead plant in a pot. The only window looked out onto a wall. He arranged some papers on his desk and spoke into the intercom.

“Mr. Higgs, would you bring the Thursday Next file in, please?”

He looked at me earnestly and set his head at a slight angle, as though trying to affect some sort of apologetic demeanor.

“None of us quite realized,” he began in the sort of soft voice that undertakers use when attempting to persuade you to buy the deluxe coffin, “just how appalling we had been until we started asking people if they were at all unhappy with our conduct.”

“Why don’t we cut the cr—” I looked at Friday, who looked back at me. “Cut the . . . cut the . . .
nonsense
and go straight to the place where you atone for your crimes.”

He sighed and stared at me for a moment, then said, “Very well. What did we do wrong again?”

“You can’t remember?”

“I do lots of wrong things, Miss Next. You’ll excuse me if I can’t remember details.”

“You eradicated my husband,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Of course! And what was the name of the eradicatee?”

“Landen,” I replied coldly. “Landen Parke-Laine.”

At that moment a clerk arrived with a pile of papers and laid them on his desk. Jack opened the file, which was marked “Most Secret,” and leafed through them.

“The record shows that at the time you say your husband was eradicated, your case officer was operative Schitt-Hawse. It says here that he pressured you to release operative Schitt—that’s me—from within the pages of ‘The Raven’ by utilizing an unnamed ChronoGuard operative who
volunteered
his services. It says that you complied but our promise was revoked due to an unforeseen and commercially necessary overriding blackmail-continuance situation.”

“You mean corporate greed, don’t you?”

“Don’t underestimate greed, Miss Next—it’s commerce’s greatest motivating force. In this context it was probably due to our plans to use the BookWorld to dump nuclear waste and sell our extremely high-quality goods and services to characters in fiction. You were then imprisoned in our most inaccessible vault, from where you escaped, methodology unknown.”