It was a deal. Acme was on a trading estate with about twenty or so outlets, but, unusually, it was the only carpet showroom-we always suspected that Spike might have a hand in scaring off the competition, but we never saw him do it. Between us and Booktastic! there were three sporting-goods outlets all selling exactly the same goods at exactly the same price and, since they were three branches of the same store, with the same sales staff, too. The two discount electrical shops actually were competitors but still spookily managed to sell the same goods at the same price, although “sell” in this context actually meant “serve as brief custodian between outlet and landfill.”
“Hmm,” I said as we stood inside the entrance of Booktastic! and stared at the floor display units liberally stacked with CDs, DVDs, computer games, peripherals and special-interest magazines. “I’m sure there was a book in here last time I came in. Excuse me?”
A shop assistant stopped and stared at us in a vacant sort of way.
“I was wondering if you had any books.”
“Any what?”
“Books. Y’know-about so big and full of words arranged in a specific order to give the effect of reality?”
“You mean DVDs?”
“No, I mean books. They’re kind of old-fashioned.”
“Ah!” she said. “What you mean are videotapes.”
“No, what I mean are books.”
We’d exhausted the sum total of her knowledge, so she went into default mode. “You’ll have to see the manager. She’s in the coffee shop.”
“Which one?” I asked, looking around. There appeared to be three-and this wasn’t Booktastic!’s biggest outlet either.
“That one.”
We thanked her and walked past boxed sets of obscure sixties TV series that were better-and safer-within the rose-tinted glow of memory.
“This is all so wrong,” I said, beginning to think I might lose the bet. “Less than five years ago, this place was all books and nothing else. What the hell’s going on?”
We arrived at the coffee shop and couldn’t see the manager, until we noticed that they had opened a smaller branch of the coffee shop actually inside the existing one, and named it “X-press” or “On-the-Go” or “More Profit” or something.
“Thursday Next,” I said to the manager, whose name we discovered was Dawn.
“A great plea sure,” she replied. “I did so love your books-especially the ones with all the killing and gratuitous sex.”
“I’m not really like that in real life,” I replied. “My friend Bowden and I wondered if you’d sold many books recently or, failing that, if you have any or know what one is?”
“I’m sure there are a few somewhere,” she said, and with a “woman on a mission” stride led us around most of the outlet. We walked past computer peripherals, stationery, chocolate, illuminated world globes and pretty gift boxes to put things in until we found a single rack of long-forgotten paperbacks on a shelf below the boxed set of Hale& Pace Outtakes Volumes 1-8 and The Very Best of Little and Large, which Bowden said was an oxymoron.
“Here we are!” she said, wiping away the cobwebs and dust. “I suppose we must have the full collection of every book ever written!”
“Very nearly,” I replied. “Thanks for your help.”
And that was how I found myself in an Acme van with Spike, who had been coerced by Bowden to do an honest day’s carpeting in exchange for a week’s washing for him and Betty. I hadn’t been out on the road with Spike for a number of years, either for the weird shit we used to do from time to time or for any carpet-related work, so he was particularly talkative. As we drove to our first installation, he told me about a recent assignment.
“…so I says to him, ‘Yo, Dracula! Have you come to watch the eclipse with us?’ You should have seen his face. He was back in his coffin quicker than shit from a goose, and then when he heard us laughing, he came back out and said with his arms folded, ‘I suppose you think that’s funny?’ and I said that I thought it was perhaps the funniest thing I’d seen for years, especially since he’d tripped and fallen headfirst into his coffin, and then he got all shitty and tried to bite me, so I rammed a sharpened stake through his heart and struck his head from his body.”
He laughed and shook his head. “Oh, man, did that crease us up.”
“My amusement might have ended with the sharpened-stake thing,” I confessed, “but I like the idea of Dracula falling flat on his face.”
“He did that a lot. Clumsy as hell. That biting-the-neck thing? He was going for the breast and missed. Now he pretends that’s what he was aiming for all along. Jerk. Is this number eight?”
It was. We parked, got out and knocked at the door.
“Major Pickles?” said Spike as a very elderly man with a pleasant expression answered the door. He was small and slender and in good health. His snow white hair was immaculately combed, a pencil mustache graced his upper lip, and he was wearing a blazer with a regimental badge sewn on the breast.
“Yes?”
“Good morning. We’re from Acme Carpets.”
“Jolly good!” said Major Pickles, who hobbled into the house and ushered us to a room that was devoid of any sort of floor covering. “It’s to go down there,” he said, pointing at the floor.
“Right,” said Spike, who I could tell was in a mischievous mood. “My associate here will begin carpeting operations while I view the selection of tea and cookies on offer. Thursday-the carpet.”
I sighed and surveyed the room, which was decorated with stripy green wallpaper and framed pictures of Major Pickles’s notable war time achievements-it looked as if he’d been quite a formidable soldier. It seemed a shame that he was in a rather miserable house in one of the more rundown areas of Swindon. On the plus side, at least he was getting a new carpet. I went to the van and brought in the toolbox, vacuum cleaner, grippers and a nail gun. I was just putting on my knee pads when Spike and Pickles came back into the room.
“Jaffa cakes!” exclaimed Major Pickles, placing a tray on the windowsill. “Mr. Stoker here said that you were allergic to anything without chocolate on it.”
“You’re very kind to indulge my partner’s bizarre and somewhat disrespectful sense of humor,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Well,” he said in a kindly manner, “I’ll leave you to get along, then.”
And he tottered out the door. As soon as he had gone, Spike leaned close to me and said, “Did you see that!?!”
“See what?”
He opened the door a crack and pointed at Pickles, who was limping down the corridor to the kitchen. “His feet.”
I looked, and the hair on the back of my neck rose. There was a reason Major Pickles was hobbling-just visible beneath the hems of his trouser legs were hooves.
“Right,” said Spike as I looked up at him. “The cloven one.”
“Major Pickles is the devil?”
“Nah!” said Spike, sniggering as if I were a simpleton. “If that was Mephistopheles, you’d really know about it. Firstly, the air would be thick with the choking stench of brimstone and decay, and we’d be knee-deep in the departed souls of the damned, writhing in perpetual agony as their bodies were repeatedly pierced with the barbed spears of the tormentors. And secondly, we’d never have got Jaffa cakes. Probably rich tea or graham crackers.”
“Yeah, I hate them, too. But listen, if not Satan, then who?”