Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 (44 page)

“No, no,” I said hurriedly, “that’s chocolate cake. He didn’t master the fine art of cutlery until…well, he’s yet to figure it out, actually.”

“Can I temporown these?” asked Buñuel. “I’ll have them snoodled up to St. Tabularasa’s to see what they can do.”

“Be my guest.”

The book preproduction had been going on for about two weeks now, and as soon as Buñuel had constructed everything for
The Eyre Affair,
he could move on to the more complex build for
Lost in a
Good Book.

“Is there anything you’ll be able to salvage from the old series?” I asked, always thinking economically.

“Indeedly-so,” he answered. “Acheron Hades and all his heavisters can be brought across pretty much unaltered. Delamare, Hobbes, Felix7 and 8, Müller—a few different lines here and there and you’ll never know the difference.”

“You’re right,” I said slowly as an odd thought started to germinate in my mind.

“A few of the other iddybiddyparts we can scavenge,” added Buñuel, “but most of it will be a newbuild. The warmspect the Council of Genres holds for you is reflected in the high costcash.”

“What was that?” I asked. “I was miles away.”

“I was mouthsounding that the bud get for the new TN series—”

“I’m sorry,” I replied in a distracted manner, “would you excuse me for a moment?”

I walked to where Colin was waiting for me in his brand-new taxi. Under the TransGenre Taxis logo, they had added “
By Appointment to Thursday Next
” in an elegant cursive font. I didn’t ordinarily endorse anything, but they had told me I would always be ‘priority one’, so I figured it was worth it.

“Where to, Ms. Next?” he asked as I climbed in.

“Great Library, floor six.”

“Righto.”

He pulled off, braked abruptly as he nearly hit a shiny black Ford motorcar, yelled at the other driver, then accelerated rapidly toward the wall of the hangar that opened like a dark void in front of us.

“Thanks for the Hoppity Hop,” he said as the hole closed behind us and we motored slowly past the almost limitless quantity of books in the Great Library. “I’ll be dining out on that for months. Any chance you can get me a Lava Lite?”

“Not unless you save my life again.”

I noted the alphabetically listed books on the shelves of the library and saw that we were getting close.

“Just drop me past the next reading desk.”

“Visiting Tom Jones?”

“No.”

“
Bridget
Jones?”

“No. Just drop me about…
here
.”

He stopped next to the bookcase, and I got out, told him he didn’t need to wait and to put the fare on my account, and he vanished. I was in the Great Library standing opposite the original Thursday Next series, the one kept going by Alice-PON-24330, and I was here because of something Buñuel had said. Spike and I had never figured out how Felix8 had managed to escape, and since his skeletal remains were found up on the Savernake, Spike had suggested quite rightly that he had been not Felix8 but
Felix9
. But Spike could have been wrong. What if the Felix I had met was the
written
Felix8? It would explain how he had gotten out of the Weirdshitorium—he’d just melted back into his book. I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to go anywhere near the old TN series, but this begged further investigation. I picked up the first in the series and read myself inside. Within a few moments, the Great Library was no more and I was instead aboard an airship floating high over the home counties. But this wasn’t one of the small fifty-seaters that plied the skies these days; it was a “Hotel Class” leviathan, designed to roam the globe in style and opulence during the halcyon days of the airship. I was in what had once been the observation deck, but many of the Plexiglas windows had been lost, and the shabby craft rattled and creaked as its lumbering bulk pushed through the air. The icy slipstream blew into the belly of the craft where I stood and made me shiver, while the rush of air and incessant flap of loose fabric were a constant percussive accompaniment to the rhythmic growl of the eight engines. The aluminum latticework construction was apparent wherever I looked, and to my left a door gave access to a precipitous veranda where first-class passengers would once have had a unique bird’s-eye view of the docking and landing procedure. In the real world, these monsters had been melted down into scrap long ago, the job of repeater stations for TV and wireless signals now taken over by pilotless drones in the upper atmosphere. But it was kind of nostalgic to see one again, even in this illusory form. I wasn’t in the main action, the “better dead than read” adage as important to me as to anyone else. The narrative was actually next door in the main dining room, where Thursday, a.k.a. Alice-PON-24330, was attempting to outwit Acheron Hades. This wasn’t how it
really
happened, of course—Acheron’s hideout had actually been in Merthyr Tydfil’s abandoned Penderyn Hotel in the Socialist Republic of Wales. It was dramatic license—and fairly bold dramatic license at that. There was a burst of gunfire from next door, some shouting and then more shots. I positioned myself behind the door as Felix8 came running through the way he usually did, escaping from Bowden and myself once Acheron leaped into the pages of
Jane Eyre
. As soon as he was inside, he relaxed, since he was officially “out of the story.” I saw him grin to himself and click on the safety of his machine pistol.

“Hello, Felix8.”

He turned and stared at me. “Well, well,” he said after a pause. “Will the real Thursday Next please stand up?”

“Just drop the gun.”

“I’m not really violent,” he said. “It’s just the part I play. The real Felix8—now, that’s someone you should keep an eye on.”

“Drop the gun, Felix. I won’t ask you again.”

His eyes darted around the room, and I saw his hand tighten on the grip of his gun.

“Don’t even
think
about it,” I told him, pointing my pistol in his general direction. “This is loaded with eraserhead. Put the gun on the floor—but
really
slowly.”

Felix8, fully aware of the destructive power of an eraserhead, gently laid his weapon on the ground, and I told him to kick it to one side.

“How did you get into the real world?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You were in the
real
Swindon five weeks ago. Do you know the penalty for pagerunning?”

He said nothing.

“I’ll remind you. It’s erasure. And if you read the papers, you know that I’ll erase a whole book if required.”

“I’ve never been out of
The Eyre Affair,
” he replied. “I’m just a C-3 generic trying to do my best in a lousy book.”

“You’re lying.”

“That it’s a lousy book?”

“You know what I mean. Keep your hands in the air.”

I walked behind him and, jamming my pistol firmly against his back, searched his pockets. Given the obsession that members of the BookWorld held for the Outland, I reckoned it was impossible that he’d been all the way to Swindon and not returned with a few Outlandish mementos to sell or barter. And so it proved. In one pocket I found a joke rubber chicken and a digital watch, in the other a packet of Cup-a-Soup and a Mars bar. I chucked them on the floor in front of him.

“Where did you get these, then?”

He was silent, and I backed off a few yards before telling him to turn slowly around and face me.

“Now,” I said, “let’s have some answers: You’re too mediocre to have hatched this yourself, so you’re working for someone. Who is it?”

Felix8 gave no answer, and the airship banked slightly as it made a trifling correction to its course. The aluminum-framed door to the exterior promenade walkway swung open and then clattered shut again. It was dusk, and two miles below, the small orange jewels that were the streetlights had begun to wink on.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal: You tell me what you know and I’ll let you go. Play the hard man and it’s a one-way trip to the Text Sea. Understand?”

“I’ve only
eighteen
words and one scene,” he said at last. “One lousy scene! Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

“It’s the hand you were dealt,” I told him, “the job you do. You can’t change that. Again:
Who sent you
into the Outland to kill me?
”

He stared at me without emotion. “And I would have done it, too, if it wasn’t for that idiot stalker. Mind you, Johnson blew it as well, so I’m in good company.”

This was more worrying. “Mr. Johnson” was the pseudonym used by the Minotaur—and he’d referred to my murder as “a job,” so this looked to be better organized than I’d thought.

“Who ordered my death? And why me?”

Felix8 smiled. “You
do
flatter yourself, Ms. Next. You’re not the only one they want, you’re not the only one they’ll get. And now I shall take my leave of you.”

He moved toward the exterior door that clattered in the breeze, opened it and stepped out onto the exterior promenade. I ran forward and yelled “Hold it!”—but it was too late. With a swing of his leg, Felix8 slipped neatly over the rail and went tumbling off into space. I ran to the rail and looked down. Already he was a small figure spiraling slowly downward as the airship droned on. I felt a curious sickly feeling as he became nothing more than a small dot and then disappeared from view.

“Damn!” I shouted, and slapped the parapet with my palm. I took a deep breath, went inside out of the chill wind, pulled out my mobilefootnoterphone and pressed the speed-dial connection to the Cheshire Cat, who had assumed command of Text Grand Central. 1

“Chesh, it’s Thursday.” 2

“I’ve lost a C-3 generic Felix8 from page two hundred and seventy-eight of
The Eyre Affair,
ISBN

0-14-200180-5. I’m going to need an emergency replacement ASAP.” 3

“No.” 4

“Blast,” I muttered. “Can you find out who’s been dicking around with the Textual Sieves and get it lifted? I’ve no urge to hang around a cold airship for any longer than I have to.” 5

I told him that I’d be fine if he’d just call me back when the sieve was lifted, then snapped the phone shut. I pulled my jacket up around my neck and stamped my feet to keep warm. I leaned against an aluminum girder and stared out at the mauve twilight, where even now I could see stars begin to appear. Felix8 would have hit the ground so hard his text would have fused with the surrounding description; when we found him, we’d have to cut him from the earth. Either way he’d not be doing any talking. I started thinking of people who might want me to kill me but stopped counting when I reached sixty-seven. This would be harder than I thought. But…what did Felix8 say: that I shouldn’t flatter myself…
it wasn’t just me?
The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed, until suddenly, with a flash of realization, I knew what was going on. Sherlock Holmes, Temperance Brennan, the Good Soldier Svejk and myself—kill us and you kill not
just
the individual, but the
series
. It seemed too bizarre to comprehend, but it had to be the truth—
there was a serial killer loose in the BookWorld.
I looked around the airship, and my heart fell. They’d tried to kill me twice already, and who was to say they wouldn’t try again? And here I was, trapped ten thousand feet in the air by a Textual Sieve that no one had ordered, hanging beneath 20 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. I pulled out my cell phone and hurriedly redialed the cat. 6

“No questions, Chesh—I need a parachute and I need it
now.
”

As if in answer, there was a bright flare from the rear of the airship as a small charge exploded in one of the gas cells. Within a second this had ignited the cell next to it, and I could see the bright flare arc out into the dusk; the airship quivered gently and started to drop at the stern as it lost lift.

“I need that parachute!” I yelled into my phone as a third gas cell erupted, vaporizing the fabric covering and sending a shower of sparks out either side of the craft. The tail-down attitude increased as the fourth gas cell erupted, followed quickly by the fifth and sixth, and I grabbed a handrail to steady myself.

“Goddamn it!” I yelled to no one in par tic ular. “How hard can it be to get a parachute around here?!”

The airship trembled again as another explosion ripped through the envelope, and with an unpleasant feeling of lightness I felt the craft very slowly begin to fall. As I looked down to see where we were heading and how fast, twelve parachutes of varying styles, colors and vintage appeared in front of me. I grabbed the most modern-looking, stepped into the leg straps and quickly pulled it onto my back as the ship was again rocked by a series of explosions. I clicked the catch on the front of the webbing and without even pausing for breath, leaped over the rail and out into the cold evening air. There was a sudden sense of rapid acceleration, and I tumbled for a while, eventually coming to rest on my back, the air rushing past me, flapping my clothes and tugging at my hair. Far above me the airship was now a chrysanthemum of fire that looked destructively elegant, and from even this distance I could feel the heat on my face. As the airship grew smaller, I snapped out of my reverie and looked for a toggle or something to deploy the chute. I found it across my chest and pulled as hard as I could. Nothing happened for a moment, and I was just thinking that the chute had failed when there was a
whap
and a jerk as it opened. But before I had even
begun
to sigh with relief, there was a thump as I landed on the ground, bounced twice and ended up inside the lines and the canopy, which billowed around me. I scrambled clear, released the harness, pulled out my phone and pressed the speed dial for Bradshaw, running as fast as I could across the empty and undescribed land as the flaming hulk of the airship fell slowly and gracefully in the evening sky, the blackened skeleton of the stricken ship silhouetted dark against the orange fireball above it, an angry flaming mass that even now was beginning to spread to the fabric of the book, as the clouds and sky started to glow with the green iridescence of text before it spontaneously combusts.