'How did you achieve that?'
'Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal — no problem.'
'So . . . I can send Hamlet back?'
'Not quite yet,' replied Zhark, trying to hide his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. 'You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet's infidelities — someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?'
'No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don't even know anyone called Henna Appleton Why?'
'I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we've got her straightened out. But while we were doing this there was a hostile takeover.'
I cursed aloud and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers such as Much Ado about Verona and A Midsummer Night's Shrew were denied at the planning stage and hadn't taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if indeed it was possible at all. King Lear resisted unravelling so strongly we just let it stand.
'So what merged with Hamlet?'
'Well, it's now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fames and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line sub-plot where he is convinced Dr Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.'
I groaned.
'What's it like?'
'It takes a long time to get funny and when it does everyone dies.'
'Okay,' I conceded, 'I'll try and keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?'
Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the way heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler.
'Well, that's the problem, Thursday. I'm not sure that we can do it all. If this had happened anywhere but the original we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don't see that we're going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'
I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.
'How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?' I asked without looking up.
'About five days, six at the outside,' replied Zhark quietly. 'After that the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks' time the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.'
'There must be something we can do.'
'We've tried pretty much everything. We're stuffed — unless you've got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.'
I sat up.
'What?'
'We're stuffed?'
'After that.'
'A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?'
'Yes. How will that help?'
'Well,' said Zhark thoughtfully, 'since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript — and we can use those to reboot the storycode engines from scratch. It's quite simple, really.'
I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment.
'Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!'
I stood up and patted him on the arm.
'You get back to the office and make sure things don't get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out which book Yorrick Kaine is from?'
'We've got all available resources working on it,' replied Zhark, still a bit confused, 'but there are a lot of novels to go through. Can you give us any pointers?'
'Well, he's not very multi-dimensional so I shouldn't go looking into anything too literary. I'd start at Political Thrillers and work your way towards Spy.'
Zhark made a note.
'Good. Any other problems?'
'Yes,' replied the emperor, 'Simpkin is being a bit of a pest in The Tailor of Gloucester. Apparently the tailor let all his mice escape and now Simpkin won't let him have the cherry-coloured twist. If the mayor's coat isn't ready for Christmas there'll be hell to pay.'
'Get the mice to make the waistcoat. They're not doing anything.'
He sighed. 'Okay, I'll give it a whirl.' He looked at his watch. 'Well, better be off. I've got to annihilate the planet Thraal at four and I'm already late. Do you think I should use my trusty Zharkian Death Ray and fry them alive in a millisecond or nudge an asteroid into their orbit, thus unleashing at least six chapters of drama as they try to find an ingenious solution to defeat me?'
'The asteroid sounds a good bet.'
'I thought so too. Well, see you later.'
I waved goodbye as he and his two guards were beamed out of my world and back into theirs, which was certainly the best place for them. We had quite enough tyrants in the real world as it was.
I was just wondering what The Merry Wives of Elsinore might be like when there was another buzzing noise and the kitchen was filled with light once more. There, imperious stare, high collar, etc., etc., was Emperor Zhark.
18
Emperor Zhark Again
PRESIDENT GEORGE FORMBY OPENS MOTORCYCLE FACTORY
The President opened the new Brough-Vincent-Norton motorcycle factory yesterday in Liverpool, bringing much-welcomed jobs to the area. The highly modernised factory, which aims to produce up to A thousand quality touring and racing machines every week, was described by the President as 'cracking stuff!' The President, a long-time advocate of motorcycling, rode one of the company's new Vincent 'Super Shadow' racers around the test track, reportedly hitting over 120 mph, much to his retinue's obvious concern for the octogenarian Presidents health. Our George then gave a cheerful rendering of 'Riding in the TT Races', reminding his. audience of the time he won the Manx Tourist Trophy on a prototype Rainbow motorcycle.
'Forget something?' I asked.
'Yes. What was that cake of your mother's?'
'It's called Battenberg.'
He got a pen and made a note on his cuff.
'Right. Well, that's it, then.'
'Good.'
'Right.'
'Is there something else?'
'Yes.'
'And—?'
'It's . . . it's . . .'
'What?'
Emperor Zhark bit his lip, looked around nervously and drew closer. Although I had had good reason for reprimanding him in the past — and had even suspended his Jurisfiction badge for 'gross incompetence' on two occasions — I actually liked him a great deal. Within the amnesty of his own books he was a sadistic monster who murdered millions with staggering ruthlessness, but out here he had his own fair share of worries, demons and peculiar habits — many of which seemed to have stemmed from the strict upbringing undertaken by his mother, the Empress Zharkeena.
'Well,' he said, unsure of quite how to put it, 'you know the sixth in the Emperor Zhark series is being written as we speak?'
'Zhark: End of Empire? Yes, I'd heard that. What's the problem?'
'I've just read the advanced plotline and it seems that I'm going to be vanquished by the Galactic Freedom Alliance.'