The Woman Who Died a Lot

I could see Sister Henrietta tense, expecting another attack. There wasn’t one, however, and we moved on through a wide stone arch to the large building that I had seen attached to the tower. It was, as previously stated, enormous—perhaps more than seven hundred feet long and one hundred twenty feet to the roof. But what I hadn’t expected was that the interior was pretty much hollow and made of a delicate latticework of wood and steel that seemed to have an air of temporariness about it. Around the periphery of the chamber were workshops, rooms, scaffolding and the evidence of recently abandoned industry. Tools lay about, and large blocks of stone were lying on trolleys half finished. The focus of the centuries-old toil lay in the center of the room.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Finisterre.

The sculpture was about the size and shape of a carrier-class airship, but more flattened and clearly designed for longevity, not flight. At one end the sculpture had only just been begun, with the inner foundations constructed of blocks of limestone, while up near the finished end the limestone had been clad with delicately carved Portland stone, each piece set into position so finely it was difficult to see where the individual blocks lay. The surface was mottled, lumpy, and it was hard not to see what it was—the claw of an enormous rock-hewn lobster.

“Tremble before the might and majesty of the Great Lobster,” breathed Mother Daisy. “We had planned to build the entire Lobster. It would have been over a mile in length and made the pyramids at Cairo look like the work of uninspired amateurs.”

“How long did this take?” asked Finisterre.

“Five centuries. As soon as we were done with the claw, we were going to move the building shed to begin on the antennae and feeding mandibles. We estimated the whole thing might have been finished in as little as five thousand years.”

“It seems a shame,” I said, “after five centuries of toil.”

“Yes,” replied Daisy stoically, “we’ll grind it up and sell it as motorway hardcore. Shame, but . . . well, there you go. This way.”

We arrived at a large, steel-belted door. There was a bunch of keys on the rope tied around Daisy’s waist, and she paused, waited until Sister Henrietta wasn’t watching, then threw a punch in my direction.

I was more wary of her now and expertly sidestepped the blow, although it was so close I felt the air move on my face. She shrugged, cursed at me below her breath, then placed a key in the lock. It turned easily, and she pushed it open to reveal a long staircase that led upward into the gloom. Blast. Stairs.

I think there might have been at least a hundred of them, and they wound slowly up for what seemed like an age, while my leg and back throbbed and shouted at me. I told them to move on ahead and was helped eventually by Henrietta, who wasn’t Henrietta at all but an ex-physicist from Manchester named Henry who was trying to find meaning in an otherwise empty existence by pretending to be a nun.

We reached the top of the stone steps in due course and entered the lowest tier of the libraries. There were books here in abundance, and Finisterre was already looking through the dusty tomes. I pulled one out at random and found an obscure treatise on accountancy dating from the tenth century. Of interest to those obsessed with the history of finance, but not much of anyone else.

“There is an index here,” said Daisy, pointing to a younger book. “The older stuff is on the top floor.”

“Aeschylus’s The Spirit of Pharos,” murmured Finisterre, peering through the gazetteer, “which is argued to be the first ghost story. Have you read it?”

“Sister Georgia translated it for us,” said Daisy. “It’s not totally rubbish. The ghosts turn out to be the lighthouse keepers in disguise, to prevent people from discovering their illegal trade in stolen amphorae.”

“So that’s where the Scooby-Doo ending originated,” I murmured. “Scholars have been hunting for the primary source of that for years.”

“It’s one of only two known copies anywhere in the world,” said Finisterre, “although the other copy is fragmentary. But you’re right about primary sources: When we discovered the second volume of Aristotle’s Poetics, it ended a lot of academic contention on who devised the format for Columbo.”

“There’s little new in literature,” I added. “For many years William Shatner’s depiction of Kirk in Star Trek was considered unique, until it was discovered that an identical character pops up in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 2: Fat Foreigners Are Funny all the time.”

“Horace wrote truly filthy limericks,” added Mother Daisy. “We recite them on special occasions. There was a very good one about a young man from Australia who painted his arse like a dahlia. Do you want to hear it?”

“No thanks.”