It wasn't there.
Anathema tried every method of search she could think of. There was the methodical quartering of the ground. There was the slapdash poking at the bracken by the roadside. There was the nonchalant sidling up to it and looking out of the side of her eye. She even tried the one which every romantic nerve in her body insisted should work, which consisted of theatrically giving up, sitting down, and letting her glance fall naturally on a patch of earth which, if she had been in any decent narrative, should have contained the book.
It didn't.
Which meant, as she had feared all along, that it was probably in the back of a car belonging to two consenting cycle repairmen.
She could feel generations of Agnes Nutter's descendants laughing at her.
Even if those two were honest enough to want to return it, they'd hardly go to all the trouble of finding a cottage they'd barely seen in the dark.
The only hope was that they wouldn't know what it was they'd got.
* * * * *
ziraphale, like many Soho merchants who specialized in hard.. to.. find books for the discerning connoisseur, had a back room, but what was in there was far more esoteric than anything normally found inside a shrink.. wrapped bag for the Customer Who Knows What He Wants.
He was particularly proud of his books of prophecy.
First editions, usually.
And every one was signed.
He'd got Robert Nixon, [A sixteenth.. century half.. wit, not related to any U.S. president.] and Martha the Gypsy, and Ignatius Sybilla, and Old Ottwell Binns. Nostradamus had signed, “To myne olde friend Azerafel, with Beste wishes”; Mother Shipton had spilled drink on his copy; and in a climate.. controlled cabinet in one corner was the original scroll in the shaky handwriting of St. John the Divine of Patmos, whose “Revelation” had been the all.. time best seller. Aziraphale had found him a nice chap, if a bit too fond of odd mushrooms.
What the collection did not have was a copy of The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, and Aziraphale walked into the room holding it as a keen philatelist might hold a Mauritius Blue that had just turned up on a postcard from his aunt.
He'd never even seen a copy before, but he'd heard about it. Everyone in the trade, which considering it was a highly specialized trade meant about a dozen people, had heard of it. Its existence was a sort of vacuum around which all sorts of strange stories had been orbiting for hundreds of years. Aziraphale realized he wasn't sure if you could orbit a vacuum, and didn't care; The Nice and Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.
His hands hardly shook at all as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshiped books.
The title page said:
The Nife and Accurate Prophefies of Agnes Nutter
In slightly smaller type:
Being a Certaine and Prefice Hiftory from
the Prefent Day Unto the Endinge of this World.
In slightly larger type:
Containing therein Many Diuerse Wonders and
precepts for the Wife
In a different type:
More complete than ever yet before publifhed
In smaller type but in capitals:
CONCERNING THE STRANGE TIMES AHEADE
In slightly desperate italics:
And events of a Wonderful Nature
In larger type once more:
'Reminifent of Noftradamus at hif beft'
.. Ursula Shipton
The prophecies were numbered, and there were more than four thousand of them.
“Steady, steady,” Aziraphale muttered to himself. He went into the little kitchenette and made himself some cocoa and took some deep breaths.
Then he came back and read a prophecy at random.
Forty minutes later, the cocoa was still untouched.
* * *
The red.. haired woman in the corner of the hotel bar was the most successful war correspondent in the world. She now had a passport in the name of Carmine Zuigiber; and she went where the wars were.
Well. More or less.
Actually she went where the wars weren't. She'd already been where the wars were.
She was not well known, except where it counted. Get half a dozen war correspondents together in an airport bar, and the conversation will, like a compass orienting to North, swing around to Murchison of The New York Times, to Van Home of Newsweek, to Anforth of I.T.N. News. The war correspondents' War Correspondents.
But when Murchison, and Van Home, and Anforth ran into each other in a burnt.. out tin shack in Beirut, or Afghanistan, or the Sudan, after they'd admired each other's scars and had downed a few, they would exchange awed anecdotes of “Red” Zuigiber, from the National World Weekly.
“That dumb rag,” Murchison would say, “it doesn't goddamn know what it's goddamn got.”
Actually the National World Weekly did know just what it had got: it had a War Correspondent. It just didn't know why, or what to do with one now it had her.
A typical National World Weekly would tell the world how Jesus' face was seen on a Big Mac bun bought by someone from Des Moines, with an artist's impression of the bun; how Elvis Presley was recently sighted working in a Burger Lord in Des Moines; how listening to Elvis records cured a Des Moines housewife's cancer; how the spate of werewolves infesting the Midwest are the offspring of noble pioneer women raped by Bigfoot; and that Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world. [Remarkably, one of these stories is indeed true.]
That was the National World Weekly. They sold four million copies a week, and they needed a War Correspondent like they needed an exclusive interview with the General Secretary of the United Nations. [The interview was done in 1983 and went as follows:
Q: You're the Secretary of the United Nations, then?
A: Si.
Q: Ever sighted Elvis?
So they paid Red Zuigiber a great deal of money to go and find wars, and ignored the bulging, badly typed envelopes she sent them occasionally from around the globe to justify her.. generally fairly reasonable.. expense claims.
They felt justified in this because, as they saw it, she really wasn't a very good war correspondent although she was undoubtedly the most attractive, which counted for a lot on the National World Weekly. Her war reports were always about a bunch of guys shooting at each other, with no real understanding of the wider political ramifications, and, more importantly, no Human Interest.
Occasionally they would hand one of her stories over to a rewrite man to fix up. (“Jesus appeared to nine.. year.. old Manuel Gonzalez during a pitched battle on the Rio Concorsa, and told him to go home because his mother worried about him. 'I knew it was Jesus,' said the brave little child, 'because he looked like he did when his picture miraculously appeared on my sandwich box.”')