Dialogues of the Dead

percy: This hardly counts as life, does it? So there! dick: But what ... oh yes. It was the OED. All twenty volumes. What a crash they made! And it was this that... ? sergius: Yes. Rye didn't see an accident. She saw all the words in the language come flying off the shelves to send the great and the good of Mid-Yorkshire into undignified flight. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The path to communion with me must, she felt, lead through all these words, but how? So many, so very many .. . how to traverse such vast distances . .. she needed a chart to show her the path ... and then it came to her .. . what if the OED was her chart. .. what if the limits of each volume were signposts... ? A to Bazouki... BBC to Chalypsography ... but how? And now she told herself, or imagined she heard me telling her, that messages to and from the dead require messengers, and for these messengers to be efficient, they must leave her living and come to me dead. These ideas were all swirling madly in her mind, and might still have come to nothing had she not driven out that fatal morning, and broken down, and saw you come bowling merrily along the road, Mr Ainstable. andrew: This is all beyond me. Is my van on the other side then, mate? sergius: Of course it is. Everything any of you need is over there. After your death, Mr Ainstable, which she merely observed, she was

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almost convinced. After Mr Pitman's, which she contributed to but not necessarily fatally - he might after all have kept control of his bike and continued on his way home, cursing lady drivers - she felt sure that this was the path 1 had mapped out for her. And when you, dear lady, went on television, and practically invited her to prepare another Dialogue, everything seemed clear. jax; What a story! You say everything we need is on the other side. Computer terminals? Fax machines? Mobiles? That's great! Come on,' let's not waste any more time. Let's go! s t u f f e r ; Hold your horses. 1 want to know what she mean by scraping away at my poor old head. I mean, killing me were bad enough, that were adding insult to injury! '; sergius: Oh yes. That was quite amusing really. She had to mark. you to get the sense of steel engraving across. But the police experts''' interpreted it as an attempt to inscribe RIP, in Cyrillic script. Thef were right about the script - a macabre little joke on my sister's part - but in fact all she was writing was her initials, R. P., as an artist. might inscribe a work of art. This was part of her desire for confirmation^ of my protection, for assurance of her invulnerability. Tell the world ft was her; even as in your case, my lord, lead the police to the body. ti^ didn 't matter what she did, she felt couldn 't be caught, no matter what clues she left. sam: And that makes it all right, does it? So what clues did the cow leave after she did for me? sergius; Well, she left the book open at that poem about the loved,, long lost boy. That was me, of course. And then there was the chocolate, bar ... .

sam: What chocolate bar, for God's sake? w, sergius: The Yorkie bar. Yorkies have the letters of its name printed1, on them, one on each segment. She broke it up and rearranged it on'f the mantel shelf above the fire. If anyone had found your body before't the chocolate melted, they'd have read her message. ; sam: Message? What message? Some reference to The Chocolate Soldier? Very subtle! : s e rg i u s: Oh no. Much clearer than that. The letters read I RYE OK. Surely even Mid-Yorkshire's Thickest would have got that? Perhaps not. I mean, none of them spotted that the illuminated P at the beginning of the first Dialogue represented a tree and there were apples among the pile of letters lying alongside the roots. Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees, remember? From the start she was telling you who she was. Later you even gave a little lecture to that young constable on why man in combinations like chairman need not be gender specific, and neither of you transferred it to wordman. But why should we be surprised? Even when the police more or less caught her in the act of slaying you, Mr Dee, she still got away with it. Of course, love is blind, and when that poor young constable rushed in, what he saw was you assaulting his beloved. Happily for Rye, when befell backwards in pulling you off her, he hit his head so hard, he was rendered almost senseless, a condition she maintained by breaking a bottle over his skull and blinding him with wine. It was easy then for her to make sure his hand found the knife which he proceeded to stick into you with such great enthusiasm. Not that it was necessary. You were going to die from Rye's first blow to the stomach anyway. dick; But why? Why did she do it? We were going to make love. She felt the same way as I did, I'm sure.