CHRIS WAS VERY glad to be back in his lab. He threw his satchel down on a bench and just stood breathing calmly for a moment, reassured by his spectrograph, his carbon-dating machine, his X-ray machine, and even his Bunsen burner. He looked the longest at his neat, almost bare bookshelf. These were all things he could understand.
He looked out of the window into the little garden which the laboratories surrounded. The sunshine was fading now and it was starting to feel a lot more like October. A solitary magpie hopped about on the lawn. Chris gulped and then reminded himself that he was a rational, scientific person surrounded by rational scientific things.
Whenever he felt irrational and unscientific like this, Chris reminded himself of the pure, simple and almost inexpressible beauty of Euler’s Identity: eiπ + 1 = 0. You just couldn’t argue with Euler, however many mad professors and police boxes you’d bumped into.
He checked his watch. It was just after two, so Clare had probably had lunch and was back in her rooms. Operation Keightley, aka The Chris Parsons Project, could now swing into phase two.
He flipped open his satchel and took out the books. He was irritated to discover that among the relevant ones was that other one, the strange one, the one he’d picked off the wrong shelf, the one with the odd not-quite-Celtic scrolly symbol on the front. He was about to put it down when –
He was back at home again, the cricket and buzzing bees and mum’s voice coming from the kitchen –
Chris blinked – and put down the book. Odd.
He picked it up again –
He was back at home again, the cricket and buzzing bees and mum’s voice coming from the kitchen –
– and then he blinked, and was back in the lab. That had been very strange. This book seemed to have the irritating habit of making you imagine things very vividly, things that weren’t actually happening.
He shook himself. Of course it didn’t. Books didn’t do that sort of thing. Well they could, but not that vividly and you tended to have to be reading them. You didn’t expect to feel the terror of Jane Eyre locked in the red room just by touching the spine of the Penguin paperback.
No, it was quite ridiculous. Books sat on shelves and waited to be read, that was all they did, the same way that solitary magpies signified nothing but an almost total lack of magpies.
He looked down at the book again, and again he saw the rows and rows of arcane symbols scrawled across its pages. But this time there was something else, and that something else was the most ridiculous something of all.
He could swear that as he looked at the book, the book was somehow looking back at him.