“I’ll be fine,” I said, and the pair of them wished me well and vanished, like Bradshaw, into thin air.
26. Thursday Next
I was only vaguely consulted when the first four of the Thursday Next books were constructed. I was asked about my car, my house, and I even lent them a photo album (which I never got back). I was also introduced to the bland and faceless generic who would eventually become Thursday1-4. The rest was created from newspaper reports and just plucked from the air. If I’d cared more about how it all was going to turn out, perhaps I would have given them more time.
After another fruitless argument with the dispatcher at TransGenre Taxis, who told me they had two drivers off sick and it wasn’t their fault but they would “see what could be done,” I took the elevator down to the sixth floor of the Great Library and walked to the section of shelving that carried all five of the Thursday books, from The Eyre Affair all the way through to The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. There was every edition, too-from publisher’s proof to hardback, large print and mass-market paperback. I picked up a copy of The Eyre Affair and looked carefully for a way in. I knew that the book was first-person narrative, and having a second me clearly visible to readers would be wildly confusing-if the book wasn’t confusing enough already. I soon found what I was looking for: a time lapse of six weeks after Landen’s death near the beginning of the book. I scanned the page for the correct place, and, using an oblique, nonappearing-entry method taught to me by Miss Havisham, I slipped unseen into the end of chapter one.
I arrived in the written Swindon just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, and I was standing opposite our house in the Old Town. Or at least it was the remains of our house. The fire had just been put out, and the building was now a blackened ruin, the still-hot timbers steaming as they were doused with water. Through the twinkling of blue and red emergency lights, I could see a small figure sitting in the back of an ambulance, a blanket draped across her shoulders. The legal necessity of removing Landen from the series was actually a blessing in disguise for the publishers. It freed up their Thursday romantically and also gave a reason for her psychotic personality. Boy, was this book ever crap.
I waited in the crowd for a moment until I could sense that the chapter was over, then approached Thursday1-4, who had her back to me and was talking to a badly realized version of Bowden, who in this book was known by the legally unactionable “Crowden Babel.”
“Good evening,” I said, and Thursday jumped as though stuck with a cattle prod.
“What are you doing here?” she asked without turning around.
“Text Grand Central saw a few wrinkles in the narrative, and you’re too unpleasant for anyone other than me to come and have a look.”
“It’s okay,” she said, “everything’s fine. It’s probably a Storycode Engine on the fritz. A buildup of irony on the dialogue injectors or something.”
She seemed jittery but still didn’t want to turn and look at me straight on.
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure-do you think I don’t know my own book? I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got to run through some lines with the replacement Hades.”
“Wait,” I said, and grabbed her arm. I pulled her around to face…someone else entirely. It wasn’t Thursday1-4. It was a woman with the same coloring and build, clothes and general appearance, but it wasn’t her.
“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.
She sighed heavily and shrugged. “I’m…I’m…a character understudy.”
“I can see that. Do you have a name?”
“Alice-PON-24330,” she replied resignedly.
“This series isn’t up for maintenance for years. What are you doing here?”
She bit her lip, looked away and shifted her weight uneasily. “If she finds I’ve talked…well, she has a temper.”
“And I don’t?”
She said nothing. I turned to Crowden Babel. “Where is she?”
He rubbed his face but said nothing. It seemed I was the only person not frightened by Thursday1-4.
“Listen,” I said to Babel, pointing at Alice-PON-24330, “she’s just an understudy and is like a phone number-replaceable. You’re in every book and have a lot more to lose. Now, either you talk to me right this minute and it goes no further or we turn you over to Jurisfiction and thirty tons of prime-quality shit is going to descend on you from a very great height.”
Babel scratched the back of his head. “She does this every now and then. She thinks the series is too small for her.”
Babel and the ersatz Thursday glanced nervous ly at each other. There was something else going on. This wasn’t just a simple substitution so Thursday1-4 could have a break.
“Somebody better start talking, or you’ll discover where she gets her temper from. Now, where has she gone?”
Babel looked nervously around. “She came back furious. Said you’d fired her on false pretenses and she wanted to get some…serious payback.”
“What sort of payback?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you’re lying to me!”
“I swear on the life of the Great Panjan-”
“I know where she is,” said the ersatz Thursday in a quiet voice. “What the hell. When she discovers I’ve talked to you, I’ll be dead anyway. She’s out…in the real world!”
This was serious. Substitution and illegal pagerunning were one thing, but crossing over to the real world was quite another. I could legally erase her on sight, and the way I felt right now, I-
My thoughts were interrupted because both Crowden and the understudy had looked anxiously toward the burned-out shell of the house. I suddenly had a very nasty thought, and my insides changed to lead. I could barely say the word, but I did:
“Landen?”
“Yes,” said the understudy in a soft voice. “She wanted to know what it was…to love.”
I felt anger well up inside me. I pulled out my TravelBook and read as I walked toward the house. As I did so, the evening light brightened, the emergency vehicles faded back into fiction, and the house, which burned to a husk in The Eyre Affair, was suddenly perfect again as I moved back into the real world. My mouth felt dry after the jump, and I could feel a headache coming on. I broke into a panicky sweat and dumped my jacket and bag in the front garden but kept my pistol and slipped a spare eraserhead into my back pocket. I very quietly stepped up to the front door and silently slipped the key into the lock.
The house was silent aside from the thumping of my heart, which in my heightened state of anxiety was almost deafening. I had planned to lie in wait for her, but a glance down at the hall table made me reappraise the situation. My house keys and distinctive grammasite key ring were already lying where I left them-but I still had mine in my hand. I felt powerfully thirsty, too, and was badly dehydrated-the most annoying side effect of my return to the Outland. I looked through to the kitchen and could see a pitcher of half-finished juice on the kitchen drainer. If I didn’t drink something soon, I’d pass out. On the other hand, Thursday1-4 was somewhere in the house, waiting for Landen or rummaging in our sock drawer or something. I silently crept along the downstairs hallway, checked the front room, then went through to the dining room beyond and from there to the kitchen. The only thing I noticed out of place was a book of family holiday snapshots open on the coffee table. I moved into the kitchen and was about to take a swig of juice straight from the pitcher when I heard a noise that turned my blood to ice. I dropped the pitcher, which shattered on the kitchen floor with a concussion that echoed around the house.