“Oh, yes,” replied Jenny with a chuckle. “Doesn’t it all seem so obvious now?”
Two days ago I might have believed her.
“No,” I replied. “You see, I spoke to Landen, and he told me I vanished from the RealWorld as a good bookperson might do, so don’t give me any of your Psychological Thriller bullshit.”
“O-o-o-kay,” said Jenny, thinking quickly, “how about this: You’re actually just witnessing—”
“Don’t even think to try Owlcreeking me. And while we’re at it, you’re not Jenny.”
“Is she giving you any trouble?” said another voice I recognized.
“A little,” said Jenny, and Sprockett—or a reasonable facsimile of him—appeared from out of the shadows. I sighed. My mother would be appearing next, and then probably myself. It was all becoming a little tedious.
“Did you try her on the You really are Thursday twist ending?” asked Sprockett.
“She didn’t buy it. I tried the It’s all in your last moment before dying gambit, too.”
Ersatz Sprockett thought for a moment. “What about the You’re actually a patient in a mental hospital and we’ve been enacting all this to try to find out if you killed Thursday? That usually works.”
“Goodness,” said Faux Jenny, “I’d clean forgotten about that one.”
“And now that you’ve told me,” I said, “I’m hardly likely to go for it, am I?”
“Well done, Einstein,” said Faux Jenny to her partner in a sarcastic tone. “Any other bright ideas?”
Ersatz Sprockett looked at me, then at Faux Jenny, then tried to telegraph an idea across to her in a very lame portrayal of someone being in a shower.
“Oh!” said Faux Jenny as she twigged to what he was talking about. “Good idea.”
But I had figured it out, too.
“You wouldn’t be thinking about pulling a Bobby Ewing on me, would you?”
And they both swore under their breath.
“Well,” grumbled Ersatz Sprockett with a shrug, “that’s me, clean out of ideas.”
And as I watched, they reverted to the strangely misshapen shape-changers who skulked around Psychological Thriller, hoping to trap unwary travelers into thinking they had once been homicidal maniacs but now had amnesia and all their previous visions depicted in horrific nightmares were actually recovered memories. In a word, they were a pair of utter nuisances.
“Thank heavens for that,” I said. “Let’s get down to business. Where is Thursday, and why didn’t you report her presence here to Jurisfiction?”
“We send so many conflicting and utterly bizarre plot lines out of the genre that everyone ignores us,” said Shifter Once Jenny sadly. “I think Jurisfiction set our messages to ‘auto-ignore.’”
“For good reason,” I replied. “You’re only marginally less troublesome than Conspiracy.”
“That’s why Thursday asked us to transmit all those ambiguities direct to you. We were hoping you’d get here sooner than this. We peppered you with as much confusion as we could, but you didn’t pick it up.”
If I’d been Thursday, I would have. Being confused over identity had been a mainstay of Psychological Thriller for years. I had a lot to learn.
“I’m new to this.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
“I hope not. Where is she?”
“In that antechamber.”
I turned and followed a short corridor to where there was a small room off the main mausoleum. It was obviously where the shape-changers usually lived, as there were posters of Faceache on the wall. They had given over the one bed to Thursday, who was lying on her back. The room was lit by a gas lantern, and by its flickering jet I could see that she was in a bad state. There was an ugly bruise on her face, and one eye was red with blood. She moved her head to look at me, and I saw her eyes glisten.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” said Thursday in a weak voice.
I placed my hand on her forehead. It was hot.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
She gave a faint smile and shrugged, but she winced when she did it.
“Landen?” she whispered.
“He’s fine. Kids, too.”
“Tell them—”
“Tell them yourself.”
I stood up. I had to get her to Gray’s Anatomy as soon as possible. There was an umbrella in a stand at the door, and I picked it up.
“Thursday? I’m going to fetch someone who can carry you out of here. My butler. I’ll be ten minutes.”
“You have a butler?” she managed.
“Yes,” I replied in a chirpy voice in order to hide my concern. “ Everyone needs a butler.”
41.
The End of the Book
About the author: Commander Bradshaw has been one of the stalwarts of Jurisfiction for over fifty years and has been the Bellman an unprecedented eight times. Hailing from a long-unread branch of British imperialist fiction, he now divides his time between Jurisfiction duties, his lovely wife, Melanie, and continually updating the BookWorld Companion, which remains the definitive work on the BookWorld and everything in it.
I flew the Hovermatic home from Gray’s Anatomy two hours later, but Sprockett and I said nothing on the trip. I was quiet because I was thinking about Thursday, and what a close call it had been. She had a fractured skull, a broken femur and eight breaks to her left arm and hand. There were multiple lacerations, a loss of blood, fever and a concussion. Henry Gray himself took charge and whisked her into surgery almost the moment I arrived. Within ten minutes the waiting room was full of concerned well-wishers, Bradshaw and Zhark amongst them. I knew she was in good hands, so I’d quietly slipped away as soon as I heard she was out of danger.
I was quiet also because I had averted a war and saved many lives today, and that’s a peculiar feeling that’s difficult to describe. Sprockett was quiet, too—but only because I had inadvertently allowed his spring to run down, and he had shut off all functions except thought, and he was thinking mildly erotic thoughts about bevel gears and how nice it might be to have a flywheel fitted in order to give him a little more oomph in the mornings.
The first thing I saw when I got back to my house was Bowden, dressed up as me.
“This isn’t how it appears,” he said in the same tone of voice he’d used when I found him looking through my underwear drawer the year before. He told me then that he’d “heard a mouse,” but I didn’t believe him.
“How should it appear if you’re dressed up in my clothes?”
“Carmine’s goblin ran off with a goblinette, and she locked herself in the bathroom again. I’m standing in for her. You. I’ve just done a scene with myself. It was most odd.”
“How many readers we got?” I asked.
“Six.”
“You can handle it.”
“Oh!” said Bowden, in the manner of one who is pretending to be disappointed but is actually delighted. “If I must. But who will play me?”
“I will,” came a voice from the door. I turned to find Whitby Jett standing there.
“Whitby?”
“How’s my little Thursday?”
“She’s good. But . . . what about the nuns?”
“A misunderstanding,” he said. “I hadn’t set fire to any of them, as it turned out.”
I stepped forward and touched his chest. I could feel that the guilt had lifted. He’d managed to move the damaging backstory on.
“I’m going to mix some cocktails,” announced Sprockett, and he buzzed from the room.
“Make mine a Sidcup Sling, Sprocky old boy,” said Jett. “Bowden—where are my lines?”
“Here!” said Bowden, passing him a well-thumbed script.
“Whitby?”
“Yes, muffin?”
“Are you busy right now?”
“Only selling useless rubbish for EZ-Read. Why?”