Something rotten (4 page)

“What the hell do you think you’re playing at?!?”

“Oh!” said the Emperor, taken aback at my annoyance. “I thought you’d be pleased to see us!”

“The situation was bad, but not
irredeemable,
” I told him, sweeping my arm in the direction of the town. “Now look what you’ve done!”

He looked around. The confused townsfolk had started to emerge from the remains of the buildings. Nothing so odd as this had happened in a western since an alien brainsucker had escaped from SF and been caught inside
Wild Horse Mesa
.

“You do this to me every time! Have you no conception of stealth and subtlety?”

“Not really,” said the Emperor, looking at his hands nervously. “Sorry.”

His alien entourage, not wanting to hang around in case they
also
got an earful, walked, slimed or hovered back into Zhark’s ship.

“You sent a TextMarker—”

“So what if we did? Can’t you enter a book without destroying everything in sight?”

“Steady on, Thursday,” said Bradshaw, laying a calming hand on my arm. “We did ask for assistance, and if old Zharky here was the closest, you can’t blame him for wanting to help. After all, when you consider that he usually lays waste to entire galaxies, torching just the town of ProVIDence and not the whole of Nebraska was actually quite an achievement . . .” His voice trailed off before he added, “. . . for him.”

“AHHH!” I yelled in frustration, holding my head. “Sometimes I think I’m—”

I stopped. I lost my temper now and again, but rarely with my colleagues, and when that happens, things are getting bad. When I started this job, it was great fun, as it still was to Bradshaw. But just lately the enjoyment had waned. It was no good. I’d had enough. I needed to go
home.

“Thursday?” asked Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, concerned by my sudden silence. “Are you okay?”

She came too close and spined me with one of her quills. I yelped and rubbed my arm while she jumped back and hid a blush. Six-foot-high hedgehogs have their own brand of etiquette.

“I’m fine,” I replied, dusting myself down. “It’s just that things have a way of . . . well,
spiraling
out of control.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean?
What do I mean?
Well, this morning I was tracking a mythological beast using a trail of custard-pie incidents across the Old West, and this afternoon a battle cruiser from the twenty-sixth century lands in ProVIDence, Nebraska. Doesn’t that sound sort of crazy?”

“This is fiction,” replied Zhark in all innocence. “Odd things are
meant
to happen.”

“Not to me,” I said with finality. “I want to see some sort of semblance of . . . of
reality
in my life.”

“Reality?” echoed Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. “You mean a place where hedgehogs don’t talk or do washing?”

“But who’ll run Jurisfiction?” demanded the Emperor. “You were the best we ever had!”

I shook my head, threw up my hands and walked to where the ground was peppered with the A-7 gunman’s text. I picked up a
D
and turned it over in my hands.

“Please reconsider,” said Commander Bradshaw, who had followed me. “I think you’ll find, old girl, that reality is much overrated.”

“Not overrated
enough,
Bradshaw,” I replied with a shrug. “Sometimes the top job isn’t the easiest one.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” murmured Bradshaw, who probably understood me better than most. He and his wife were the best friends I had in the BookWorld; Mrs. Bradshaw and my son were almost inseparable.

“I knew you wouldn’t stay for good,” continued Bradshaw, lowering his voice so the others didn’t hear. “When will you go?”

I shrugged. “Soon as I can. Tomorrow.”

I looked around at the destruction that Zhark had wrought upon
Death at Double-X Ranch
. There would be a lot of clearing up, a mountain of paperwork—and there might be the possibility of disciplinary action if the Council of Genres got wind of what had happened.

“I suppose I should complete the paperwork on this debacle first,” I said slowly. “Let’s say three days.”

“You promised to stand in for Joan of Arc while she attended a martyrs’ refresher course,” added Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who had tiptoed closer.

I’d forgotten about that. “A week, then. I’ll be off in a week.” We all stood in silence, I pondering my return to Swindon and all of them considering the consequences of my departure—except Emperor Zhark, who was probably thinking about invading the planet Thraal, for fun.

“Your mind is made up?” asked Bradshaw. I nodded slowly. There were other reasons for me to return to the real world, more pressing than Zhark’s gung ho lunacy. I had a husband who didn’t exist and a son who couldn’t spend his life cocooned inside books. I had retreated into the old Thursday, the one who preferred the black-and-white certainties of policing fiction to the ambiguous midtone grays of emotion.

“Yes, my mind’s made up,” I said, smiling. I looked at Bradshaw, the Emperor and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. For all their faults, I’d enjoyed working with them. It hadn’t been
all
bad. Whilst at Jurisfiction I had seen and done things I wouldn’t have believed. I’d watched grammasites in flight over the pleasure domes of Xanadu, felt the strangeness of listeners glittering on the dark stair. I had cantered bareback on unicorns through the leafy forests of Zenobia and played chess with Ozymandias, the King of Kings. I had flown with Biggles on the Western Front, locked cutlasses with Long John Silver and explored the path not taken to walk upon England’s mountains green. But despite all these moments of wonder and delight, my heart belonged back home in Swindon and to a man named Landen Parke-Laine. He was my husband, the father of my son; he didn’t exist, and I loved him.

2.

No Place Like Home

Swindon, Wessex, England,
was the place I was born and where I lived until I left to join the Literary Detectives in London. I returned ten years later and married my former boyfriend, Landen Parke-Laine. He was subsequently murdered at the age of two by the Goliath Corporation, who had decided to blackmail me. It worked, I helped them—but I didn’t get my husband back. Oddly, I kept his son, my son, Friday—it was one of those quirky, paradoxical time-travel things that my father understands but I don’t. Two years further on, Landen was still dead, and unless I did something about it soon, he might remain that way forever.

Thursday Next,
Thursday Next: A Life in SpecOps

I
t was a bright and clear morning in mid-July two weeks later that I found myself on the corner of Broome Manor Lane in Swindon, on the opposite side of the road to my mother’s house with a toddler in a stroller, two dodos, the Prince of Denmark, an apprehensive heart and hair cut way too short. The Council of Genres hadn’t taken the news of my resignation very well. In fact, they’d refused to accept it at all and given me instead unlimited leave, in the somewhat deluded hope that I might return if actualizing my husband “didn’t work out.” They also suggested I might like to deal with escaped fictionaut Yorrick Kaine, someone with whom I had crossed swords twice in the past.

Hamlet had been a late addition to my plans. Increasingly concerned over reports that he was being misrepresented as something of a “ditherer” in the Outland, he had requested leave to see for himself. This was unusual in that fictional characters are rarely troubled by public perception, but Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about, and since he was the indisputable star of the Shakespeare canon and had lost the Most Troubled Romantic Lead to Heathcliff once again at this year’s BookWorld awards, the Council of Genres thought they should do something to appease him. Besides, Jurisfiction had been trying to persuade him to police Elizabethan drama since Sir John Falstaff had retired on grounds of “good health,” and a trip to the Outland, it was thought, might persuade him.

“ ’Tis very strange!” he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. “It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice of all that I witness!”

“You’re going to have to speak English out here.”

“All this,” explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, “would take millions of words to describe correctly!”

“You’re right. It would. That’s the magic of the book imagino-transference technology,” I told him. “A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.”

“The reader? What’s it got to do with him?”

“Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to each of those who read it because they clothe the author’s description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they’ve met, read or seen before—far more real than it can ever be just from the text on the page. Because every reader’s experiences are different, each book is unique for each reader.”

“So,” replied the Dane, thinking hard, “what you’re saying is that the more complex and apparently contradictory the character, the greater the possible interpretations?”

“Yes. In fact, I’d argue that every time a book is read by the same person it is different again—because the reader’s experiences have changed, or he is in a different frame of mind.”

“Well, that explains why no one can figure me out. After four hundred years nobody’s quite decided what,
exactly,
my inner motivations are.” He paused for a moment and sighed mournfully. “Including me. You’d have thought I was religious, wouldn’t you, with all that not wanting to kill Uncle Claudius when at prayer and suchlike?”

“Of course.”

“I thought so, too. So why do I use the atheistic line:
there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so?
What’s that all about?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Listen, I’m as confused as anyone.”

I stared at Hamlet and he shrugged. I had been hoping to get some answers out of him regarding the inconsistencies within his play, but now I wasn’t so sure.

“Perhaps,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s why we like it. To each our own Hamlet.”

“Well,” snorted the Dane unhappily, “it’s a mystery to me. Do you think therapy would help?”

“I’m not sure. Listen, we’re almost home. Remember: to anyone but family you’re—who are you?”

“Cousin Eddie.”

“Good. Come on.”

Mum’s house was a detached property of good proportions in the south of the town, but of no great charm other than that which my long association had bred upon it. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up here, and everything about the old house was familiar. From the tree I had fallen out of and cracked a collarbone to the garden path where I had learned to ride my bicycle. I hadn’t really noticed it before, but empathy for the familiar grows stronger with age. The old house felt warmer to me now than it ever had before.

I took a deep breath, picked up my suitcase and trundled the stroller across the road. My pet dodo, Pickwick, followed with her unruly son, Alan, padding grumpily after her.

I rang Mum’s doorbell, and after about a minute, a slightly overweight vicar with short brown hair and spectacles answered the door.

“Is that Doofus . . . ?” he said when he saw me, suddenly breaking into a broad grin. “By the GSD, it
is
Doofus!”

“Hi, Joffy. Long time no see.”

Joffy was my brother. He was a minister in the Global Standard Deity religion, and although we had had differences in the past, they were long forgotten. I was pleased to see him, and he I.

“Whoa!” he said. “What’s that?”

“That’s Friday,” I explained. “Your nephew.”

“Wow!” replied Joffy, undoing Friday’s harness and lifting him out. “Does his hair always stick up like that?”

“Probably leftovers from breakfast.”

Friday stared at Joffy for a moment, took his fingers out of his mouth, rubbed them on his face, put them in again and offered Joffy his polar bear, Poley.

“Kind of cute, isn’t he?” said Joffy, jiggling Friday up and down and letting him tug at his nose. “But a bit . . . well,
sticky.
Does he talk?”

“Not a lot. Thinks a great deal, though.”

“Like Mycroft. What happened to your head?”

“You mean my haircut?”

“So that’s what it was!” murmured Joffy. “I thought you’d had your ears lowered or something. Bit . . . er . . . bit
extreme,
isn’t it?”

“I had to stand in for Joan of Arc. It’s always tricky to find a replacement.”

“I can see why,” exclaimed Joffy, still staring incredulously at my pudding-bowl haircut. “Why don’t you just have the whole lot off and start again?”

“This is Hamlet,” I said, introducing the Prince before he began to feel awkward, “but he’s here incognito so I’m telling everyone he’s my cousin Eddie.”

“Joffy,” said Joffy, “brother of Thursday.”

“Hamlet,” said Hamlet, “Prince of Denmark.”

“Danish?” said Joffy with a start. “I shouldn’t spread that around if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Darling!” said my mother, appearing behind Joffy. “You’re back! Goodness! Your hair!”

“It’s a Joan of Arc thing,” explained Joffy, “very fashionable right now. Martyrs are big on the catwalk, y’know—remember the Edith Cavell / Tolpuddle look in last month’s
FeMole
?”

“He’s talking rubbish again, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Joffy and I in unison.

“Hello, Mum,” I said, giving her a hug. “Remember your grandson?”

She picked him up and remarked how much he had grown. It was unlikely in the extreme that he had
shrunk,
but I smiled dutifully nonetheless. I tried to visit the real world as often as I could but hadn’t been able to manage it for at least six months. When she had nearly fainted by hyperventilating with ooohs and aaaahs and Friday had stopped looking at her dubiously, she invited us indoors.