‘ ‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door!’

‘I’d be more than happy to leave you here, Mr Schitt, but I’ve cut a deal. C’mon, we’re going home.’

I grasped the Goliath agent by the lapel and started to read the description of the vault back at Goliath R&D. I felt a tug on my body and another rush of wind, the tapping increased and I just had time to hear the student say: ‘Sir or madam truly, your forgiveness I implore…’ when we found ourselves back in the Goliath lab at Aldermaston. I was pleased with this, as I hadn’t thought it would be that easy, but all my feelings of self-satisfaction vanished when, instead of being arrested, Jack was hugged warmly by his half-brother.

‘Jack!’ said Schitt-Hawse happily. ‘Welcome back!’

‘Thank you, Brik—how’s Mum?’

‘The trouble with you, Miss Next,’ said Schitt-Hawse, ‘is that you are far too trusting. Did you really think for one moment that we were going to give up on such an important man as Jack?’

‘You promised!’ I said somewhat uselessly.

‘Goliath doesn’t keep promises,’ replied Schitt-Hawse. ‘The profit margin is too low.’

‘Lavoisier!’ I yelled. ‘You promised!’

Lavoisier walked from the room without looking back.

‘Thank you, Monsieur!’ shouted Schitt-Hawse after him. ‘The wedding picture was a touch of genius!’

I leaped forward to grab Schitt-Hawse but was pinned down by Chalk and Cheese. I struggled long, hard—and hopelessly. My shoulders sagged and I stared at the ground. How could I have been so stupid as to think they would keep to their part of the deal? Delusive hope, so often the partner of strong love, had blinded me. Landen had been right. I should have walked away.

‘I want to wring her ghost upon the floor,’ said Jack Schitt, staring in my direction, ‘to still this beating of my heart. Mr Cheese, your weapon.’

‘No, Jack,’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Miss Next and her unique attributes could open up a large and highly profitable market to exploit.’

Schitt rounded on his half-brother.

‘Do you have any idea of the fantastic terrors I’ve just been through? Tapping… I mean trapping me in The Raven is something Next is not going to live to regret. No, Brik, the book slut will surcease my sorrow!’

Schitt-Hawse held Jack by the shoulders and shook him.

‘Snap out of that Raven talk, Jack. You’re home now. Listen: the book slut is potentially worth billions.’

Schitt stopped and gathered his thoughts.

‘Of course,’ he murmured finally, ‘a vast untapped resource of consumers. How much useless rubbish do you think we can offload on those ignorant masses in nineteenth-century literature?’

‘Indeed,’ replied Schitt-Hawse, ‘and our unreprocessed waste—finally an effective disposal location. Untold riches await the Corporation. And listen—if it doesn’t work out, then you can kill her.’

‘When do we start?’ asked Schitt, who seemed to be growing stronger by the second.

‘It depends,’ said Schitt-Hawse, looking at me, ‘on Miss Next.’

‘I would sooner die than be a party to your foul plans,’ I said angrily.

‘Oh!’ said Schitt-Hawse. ‘Hadn’t you heard? As far as the outside world is concerned you’re dead already! Did you think you could see all that was going on here and live to tell the tale?’

I tried to think of some way to escape but there was nothing to hand—no weapon, no book, nothing.

‘I really haven’t decided,’ continued Schitt-Hawse in a patronising tone, ‘whether you fell down a lift shaft or blundered into some machinery. Do you have any preferences?’

And he laughed a short and very cruel laugh. I said nothing. There didn’t seem to be anything I could say.

‘I’m afraid, my girl,’ said Schitt-Hawse as they started to file out through the vault door, taking my travel book with them, ‘that you are a guest of the Corporation for the rest of your natural life. But it won’t all be bad. We will be willing to reactualise your husband. You won’t actually meet him again, of course, but he will be alive—so long as you co-operate, and you will, you know.’

I glared at the two Schitts.

‘I will never help you, as long as I have breath in my lungs.’

Schitt-Hawse’s eyelid twitched.

‘Oh, you’ll help us, Next—if not for Landen then for your child. Yes, we know about that. We’ll leave you for now. And you needn’t bother looking for any books in here to pull your vanishing trick—we made quite sure there were none!’

He smiled again and stepped out of the vault. The door slammed shut with a reverberating boom that shook me to the core. I sat down on one of the chairs, put my head in my hands and cried tears of frustration, anger and loss.

The first thing I noticed about being locked in a vault twelve floors below ground at the Goliath R&D lab was not the isolation, but the silence. There was no hum of air-conditioning, no odd snatch of conversation heard through the door, nothing. I thought about Landen, about Miss Havisham, Joffy, Miles and then the baby. What, I wondered, did Schitt-Hawse have in store for him? I sighed, got up and walked around the vault. It was lit by harsh striplights and had a large mirror on the wall which I had to assume was some kind of watching gallery. There was a toilet and shower in a room behind, and a bedroll and a few toiletries that someone had left out for me. I spent twenty minutes searching in all the nooks and crannies of the room, hoping to find a discarded trashy novel or something that might effect me an escape. There was nothing. Not so much as a pencil shaving, let alone a pencil. I sat down, closed my eyes and tried to visualise the library, to remember the description in my travel book, and even recited aloud the opening passage of A Tale of Two Cities, something I had learned at school many years ago. I then tried every quote I could think of, every passage, every poem I had ever committed to memory from Ovid to De La Mare. When I ran out of those I switched to limericks—and ended up telling Bowden’s jokes out loud. Nothing.

Not so much as a flicker.

I unravelled the bedroll, lay on the floor and closed my eyes, hoping to remember Landen again and discuss the problem with him. It wasn’t to be. At that moment the ring that Miss Havisham had given me grew almost unbearably hot, there was a sort of fworpish noise and a figure was standing next to me. It was Miss Havisham, and she didn’t look terribly pleased.

‘You, young lady, are in a lot of trouble!’

‘Tell me about it.’

This wasn’t the sort of careless remark she liked to hear from me, and she certainly expected me to jump to my feet when she arrived, so she rapped me painfully on the knee with her stick.

‘Ow!’ I said, getting the message and rising. ‘Where did you spring from?’

‘Havishams come and go as they please,’ she replied imperiously. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t think you’d approve of me leaping into a book on my own—especially not Poe.’