“I will have to check,” she said, and started toward the rear.
“To Say Nothing of the Dog,” I called after her, and, as soon as she had rounded a bookcase, darted back to my corner.
I had been half-hoping the net would be open, or faintly shimmering in preparation, but there was nothing in the ceiling-to-floor rows of books to indicate it had ever been there. Or to give me a clue to what year I was in.
I began taking down books and opening them to the title page. 1904. 1930. 1921. 1756. That’s the trouble with books. They’re timeless. 1892. 1914. No date. I flipped the page over. Still no date. I flipped the page back again and read the title. No wonder. Herodotus’s History, which the Colonel and Professor Peddick had been reading only yesterday.
The bell over the door jangled. I peered carefully round the corner, hoping it was Verity. It was three middle-aged women in fur stoles and angle-brimmed hats.
They stopped just inside the door, brushing snow lovingly off their furs as if they were pets, and talking in high nasal tones.
“…and eloped with him!” the one on the right said. Her fur looked like a flattened version of Princess Arjumand. “So romantic!”
“But a farmer!” the middle one said. Her fur looked more like Cyril and was nearly as wide.
“I don’t care if he is a farmer,” the third one said. “I’m glad she married him.” She had the best fur of all, an entire string of foxes with their heads still on and bright little glass eyes. “If she hadn’t, she’d still be trapped in Oxford, serving on church committees and running jumble sales. Now, what was it I wanted to buy? I said to Harold this morning, I must remember to buy that when I go to Blackwell’s. Now, what could it have been?”
“I must get something for my godchild for her birthday,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said. “What should I get? Alice, I suppose, though I’ve never understood why children like it. Going from place to place with no rhyme or reason. Appearing and disappearing.”
“Oh, look!” the string of foxes said. She had picked up a book with a green dust jacket from a display table. Her fox-colored gloved hand was over the title, but I could see the author’s name: Agatha Christie.
“Have you read her latest?” she said to the others.
“No,” the one with Cyril on her shoulders said.
“Yes,” the Princess Arjumand said, “and it—”
“Stop,” the string of foxes said, raising her gloved hand in warning. “Don’t tell me the ending.” She turned back to Cyril. “Cora always ruins the ending. Do you remember The Murder of Roger Ackroyd?”
“That was different. You wanted to know what all the fuss in the papers was about, Miriam,” the Princess Arjumand said defensively. “I couldn’t explain it without telling who the murderer was. At any rate, this one isn’t anything like Roger Ackroyd. There’s this girl who someone is attempting to murder, or at least that’s what one’s supposed to think. Actually—”
“Don’t tell me the ending,” the Little Foxes said.
“I didn’t intend to,” the Princess Arjumand said with dignity. “I was simply going to say that what you think is the crime, isn’t, and things aren’t at all what they seem.”
“Like in The Fountain Pen Mystery,” the Cyril-draped one said. “What you think is the first crime turns out to be the second. The first one had happened years before. Nobody even knew the first crime had been committed, and the murderer—”
“Don’t tell me,” the Little Foxes said, clapping fox-gloved hands to her ears.
“The butler did it,” the Cyril said.
“I thought you hadn’t read it,” the Little Foxes said, taking her hands down from her ears.
“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s always the butler,” and the lights went out. But it was daytime, and even if something had happened to the electricity, there would still be enough light from Blackwell’s bow windows to see by.
I put my hand out to the bookshelf in front of me and felt it cautiously. It felt clammy and hard, like stone. I took a cautious step toward it. And nearly pitched forward into emptiness.
My foot was half over a void. I reeled back, staggered, and sat down hard on more stone. A staircase. I felt around, patting the rough stone wall, reaching down. A winding staircase, with narrow wedge-shaped steps, which meant I was in a tower. Or a dungeon.
The air had a cold, mildewy smell, which probably meant it wasn’t a dungeon. A dungeon would smell a good deal worse. But if it were a tower, light should be filtering in from a slit window somewhere above, and it wasn’t. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. A dungeon.
Or, I thought hopefully, the erratic bouncing had given me such a case of time-lag I’d gone completely blind.
I fumbled in my pockets for a match and struck it on the wall. No such luck. Rock walls, stone steps loomed up around me. Definitely a dungeon. Which meant I probably wasn’t in Oxford in 2018. Or 1933.
The Seventeenth Century had been big on dungeons. Ditto the Sixteenth through the Twelfth. Before that England had run mostly to pigsties and stick huts. Wonderful. Trapped in a Norman dungeon in the Middle Ages.
Or a corner of the Tower of London, in which case tourists would come trooping up the stairs in a few minutes. But somehow I didn’t think so. The steps, in the brief light of the match, had looked unworn, and when I felt along the wall, there weren’t any safety railings.
“Verity!” I shouted down into the blackness. My voice echoed off stone and silence.
I stood, bracing myself against the wall with both hands, and started carefully up, feeling for the edge of the narrow step with my foot. One step. Two. “Verity! Are you here?”
Nothing. I felt for the next step. “Verity!”
I put my foot on the step. It gave under my weight. I started to fall, flailing wildly, trying to catch myself and scraping my hand. I slid two steps and came down hard on one knee.
And if Verity was here, she had to have heard that. But I called again. “Verity!”
There was an explosion of sound, a violent flapping and whirring of wings that sounded like it was diving straight for me. Bats. Wonderful. I flung an arm I couldn’t see in front of my face.
The flapping intensified, but though my eyes strained through the darkness, I couldn’t see.
The flapping was coming straight at me. A wing brushed my arm. Wonderful. The bats couldn’t see either. I flailed at the darkness, and the flapping grew more frantic and then subsided, flying off above me, and I sat down very slowly and silently.
All right. Clearly the intelligent thing to do was sit here and wait for the net to open. And hope I wasn’t permanently stuck like Carruthers.
“And meanwhile Verity’s lost somewhere!” I shouted and was instantly sorry. The bats attacked again, and it was a good five minutes before they subsided.
I sat still and listened. Either this dungeon was completely soundproofed, or I wasn’t anywhere in the last three centuries. The world hasn’t been truly silent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Even the Victorian era had had trains and steam launches to contend with, and in the cities, the rattle and clop of traffic which would shortly become a roar. And both Twentieth and Twenty-First Century have an electronic hum that’s always present. Here, now that the bats had gone back to bed, there was no sound at all.
So what now? I’d probably kill myself if I tried any more exploration, and probably miss the net’s opening in the process. Assuming it was going to open.
I felt in my pocket for another match and my watch. Half past X. Warder had had a half-hour intermittent on the drop at Muchings End and I had only been in the lab twenty minutes, in Blackwell’s possibly fifteen. Which meant the net might open at anytime. Or not at all, I thought, remembering Carruthers.
And in the meantime, what? Sit here and stare at the darkness? Worry about Verity? Try to figure out what had happened to the bishop’s bird stump?