Sentence the Fivehundredandeighth

Which is, of course how Peter Boo WS found himself huddled in a corner of a basement room, whispering urgently to the young woman he'd woken up to find there, while secretly - he hoped - admiring her veritable cleavage; "what's your name?" he asked, feeling that she looked so familiar

that he ought to know: "Roxy Davidova," she said and as she did so, he realised that she was the Leader of the Unionist Party at Holyrood and therefore, of the Opposition in the Scottish Parliament," and when she looked at him quizzically, he remembered his manners and said "Boo!" at which she stared harder at him: "Boo Hoo?" she asked, "if that's meant to be a joke I'm not amused," and he explained, "no, I'm Peter Boo, I'm a Solicitor in Edinburgh; where on Earth are we?" and Roxy sighed: "I hoped you had come to rescue me - that man is Peter Lorre, the actor, and I think we are in a set for that film he was in - M! he has the letter scrawled on his back, I don't know if he realises it," and Boo spoke: "but that was back in the 1930s wasn't it? and isn't he dead anyway, Peter Lorre?" and Roxy shrugged, "nothing makes any sense nowadays - so many people have disappeared and others appeared, I've given up trying work out what's going on!" she told him how she had been lowered into the Cavern and fainted when a strange man appeared, then woke up in this room, and Boo told her of his near-miraculous escape from Albany Palace and his nocturnal mishap; "gosh!" she said, "what an exciting life you have!" which caused him to blush to his roots; "look, he's gone, shall we explore?" and, cautiously, they opened the door and found themselves in a short passageway, with a locked door at each end and six doors along the walls, three on each side; of these, four each opened

into a room identical to the one they had been sitting in: the rooms were all furnished identically, with a table, two chairs, a sideboard with a wash-bowl, and a single bed; the last door was a w/c but there

was no bath or shower; they checked the contents of the sideboards: in one, there was a Gideon Bible; another had a copy of Meine Kampf, a third contained Das Kapital and in the fourth they came across a First Folio of Shakespeare's Plays which Boo guessed must be a facsimile as there were only 234 copies known to exist and their locations were documented; in the drawer of the room they had started from, there was a long manuscript roll, handwritten in a hurried, crabbed French which Boo recognised as 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade; this was the find which, Roxy observed, excited him the most and she wondered if it was for the abstract sense of amazement in discovering it here, or from his real interest in the contents! "we may be Babes im the Wood," she observed drily, "but this is no sylvan glade in which we find ourselves," and Boo looked up from his reading, "alas, no," he replied, "but if I may say, Ms Davidova, in this small universe, you are the lucida," and Roxy grinned mischievously, "if reading De Sade turns an Edinburgh Solicitor poetic, I'll maybe introduce a Bill to make it compulsory in the curriculum of Law Students in Scotland," at which Boo looked just as stricken as Roxy had indeed hoped!