A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (111 page)

VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2004 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Jasper Fforde, 2004

All rights reserved

 

Frontispiece and text illustrations by Maggy and Stewart Roberts
Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights, and trademarks
in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.
Publisher's Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fforde, Jasper.
Thursday Next in Something rotten : a novel / Jasper Fforde.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-440-69596-4

For Maddy, Rosie,
Jordan and Alexander
With all my love
April 2004

Table of Contents

 

 

Author's Note

This book has been bundled with
Special Features,
including
The Making of
documentary, deleted scenes from all four books,
outtakes and much more.

 

To access all these free bonus features,
log on to
www.jasperfforde.com
/specialtn4.html
and enter the code word as directed.

Dramatis Personae

Thursday Next:
Ex-operative from Swindon's Literary Detective office of SpecOps-27 and currently head of Jurisfiction, the policing agency that operates within fiction to safeguard the stability of the written word.

Friday Next:
Thursday's son, age two.

Granny Next:
Resident of Goliath Twilight Homes, Swindon. Age 110 and cannot die until she has read the ten most boring classics.

Wednesday Next:
Thursday's mother. Resides in Swindon.

Landen Parke-Laine:
Thursday's husband, who hasn't existed since he was eradicated in 1947 by the Goliath Corporation, eager to blackmail Miss Next.

Mycroft Next:
Inventor uncle of Thursday and last heard of living in peaceful retirement within the backstory of the Sherlock Holmes series. Designer of Prose Portal and Sarcasm Early-Warning Device, amongst many other things. Husband to
Polly
.

Colonel Next:
A time-traveling knight errant, he was eradicated by the ChronoGuard, a sort of temporal policing agency. Despite this, he is still about and meets Thursday from time to time.

Cat formerly known as Cheshire:
The ex-Wonderland überlibrarian at the Great Library and Jurisfiction agent.

Pickwick:
A pet dodo of very little brain.

Bowden Cable:
Colleague of Thursday's at the Swindon Literary Detectives.

Victor Analogy:
Head of Swindon Literary Detectives.

Braxton Hicks:
Overall commander of the Swindon Special Operations Network.

Daphne Farquitt:
Romance writer whose talent is inversely proportional to her sales.

The Goliath Corporation:
Vast, unscrupulous multinational corporation keen on spiritual and global domination.

Commander Trafford Bradshaw:
Popular hero in 1920s ripping adventure stories for boys, now out of print, and notable Jurisfiction agent.

Melanie Bradshaw (Mrs.):
A gorilla, married to Commander Bradshaw.

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, Emperor Zhark, the Red Queen, Falstaff, Vernham Deane:
All Jurisfiction operatives, highly trained.

Yorrick Kaine:
Whig politician and publishing media tycoon. Also right-wing Chancellor of England, soon to be made dictator. Fictional, and sworn enemy of Thursday Next.

President George Formby:
Octogenarian President of England and deeply opposed to Yorrick Kaine and all that he stands for.

Wales:
A Socialist Republic.

Lady Emma Hamilton:
Consort of Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and lush. Upset when her husband inexplicably died at the beginning of the Battle of Trafalgar. Lives in Mrs. Next's spare room.

Hamlet:
A Danish prince with a propensity for prevarication.

SpecOps:
Short for Special Operations, the governmental departments that deal with anything too rigorous for the ordinary police to handle. Everything from time travel to good taste.

Bartholomew Stiggins:
Commonly known as “Stig.” Neanderthal reengineered from extinction, he heads SpecOps-13 (Swindon), the policing agency responsible for reengineered species such as mammoths, dodos, saber-toothed tigers and chimeras.

Chimera:
Any unlicensed “nonevolved life-form” created by a hobby genetic sequencer. Illegal and destroyed without mercy.

St. Zvlkx:
A thirteenth-century saint whose revealments have an uncanny knack of coming true.

SuperHoop:
The World Croquet League finals. Usually violent, always controversial.

Lola Vavoom:
An actress who does not feature in this novel but has to appear in the Dramatis Personae due to a contractual obligation.

Minotaur:
Half-man, half-bull son of Pasiphaë, the Queen of Crete. Escaped from custody and consequently a PageRunner. Whereabouts unknown.

 

 

 

 

 

T
he Minotaur had been causing trouble far in excess of his literary importance—first by escaping from the fantasy-genre prison erary importance—first by escaping from the fantasy-genre prison book
Sword of the Zenobians,
then by leading us on a merry chase across most of fiction and thwarting all attempts to recapture him. The mythological half-man, half-bull son of Queen Pasiphaë of Crete had been sighted within
Riders of the Purple Sage
only a month after his escape. We were still keen on taking him alive at this point, so we had darted him with a small dose of slapstick. Theoretically, we needed only to track outbreaks of custard-pie-in-the-face routines and walking-into-lamppost gags within fiction to lead us to the cannibalistic man-beast. It was an experimental idea and, sadly, also a dismal failure. Aside from Lafeu's celebrated mention of custard in
All's Well That Ends Well
and the ludicrous four-wheeled-chaise sequence in
Pickwick Papers,
little was noticed. The slapstick either hadn't been strong enough or had been diluted by the BookWorld's natural disinclination to visual jokes.

In any event we were still searching for him two years later in the western genre, amongst the cattle drives that the Minotaur found most relaxing. And it was for this reason that Commander Bradshaw and I arrived at the top of page 73 of an obscure pulp from the thirties entitled
Death at Double-X Ranch
.

“What do you think, old girl?” asked Bradshaw, whose pith helmet and safari suit were ideally suited to the hot Nebraskan summer. He was shorter than I by almost a head but led age-wise by four decades; his sun-dried skin and snowy white mustache were a legacy of his many years in colonial African fiction: He had been the lead character in the twenty-three “Commander Bradshaw” novels, last published in 1932 and last read in 1963. Many characters in fiction define themselves by their popularity, but not Commander Bradshaw. Having spent an adventurous and entirely fictional life defending British East Africa against a host of unlikely foes and killing almost every animal it was possible to kill, he now enjoyed his retirement and was much in demand at Jurisfiction, where his fearlessness under fire and knowledge of the BookWorld made him one of the agency's greatest assets.

He was pointing at a weathered board that told us the small township not more than half a mile ahead hailed by the optimistic name of Providence and had a population of 2,387.

I shielded my eyes against the sun and looked around. A carpet of sage stretched all the way to the mountains, less than five miles distant. The vegetation had a repetitive pattern that belied its fictional roots. The chaotic nature of the real world that gave us soft, undulating hills and random patterns of forest and hedges was replaced within fiction by a landscape that relied on ordered repetitions of the author's initial description. In the make-believe world where I had made my home, a forest has only eight different trees, a beach five different pebbles, a sky twelve different clouds. A hedgerow repeats itself every eight feet, a mountain range every sixth peak. It hadn't bothered me that much to begin with, but after two years living inside fiction, I had begun to yearn for a world where every tree and rock and hill and cloud has its own unique shape and identity. And the sunsets. I missed them most of all. Even the best-described ones couldn't hold a candle to a real one. I yearned to witness once again the delicate hues of the sky as the sun dipped below the horizon. From red to orange, to pink, to blue, to navy, to black.