Thursday Next in First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

  “He’s over there.”

  I turned to see a slender and very jovial-looking gentleman sitting on a packing case on the other side of the shop. He was dressed in a suit of outrageously loud green and yellow checks and was resting his gloves on the top of a cane. He inclined his head in greeting when he saw us looking at him and smiled impishly.

  “Perfect. I get a full backstory as well, yes?”

  “It’s all here,” said Murray, placing on the counter a glass jar that seemed to be full of swirling colored mist.

  “Then it’s a deal.”

  We shook hands, and I gave him my BookWorld ChargeCard. I was just standing there in that blank sort of way you do while waiting for a shop keep er to complete a transaction, when the hair on the back of my neck suddenly rose. It was a sixth sense, if you like—something you acquire in the BookWorld, where jeopardy is sometimes never more than a line away. I surreptitiously slipped my hand into my bag and clasped the butt of my pistol. I looked cautiously from the corner of my eye at the customer to my left. It was a freelance imaginator buying powdered kabuki—no problem there. I looked to the right and perceived a tall figure dressed in a trench coat with a fedora pulled down to hide his face. I tensed as the faint odor of bovine reached my nostrils. It was the Minotaur, the half-man, half-bull son of Queen Pasiphaë of Crete. He’d killed one Jurisfiction agent and tried the same with me several times, so consequently he had an “erase on sight” order across sixteen genres—there were few these days who would dare harbor him. I stayed calm and turned toward Thursday5, who was looking at a pair of toucans that were a job lot from a scrapped bird-identification handbook. I caught her eye and showed her three fingers, which was a prearranged signal of imminent danger, then gave an almost imperceptible nod in the Minotaur’s direction. Thursday5 looked bewildered, I gave up and turned slowly back.

  “Soon be done!” muttered Murray, filling out the credit form. I stole a look toward the Minotaur again. I could have erased him there and then, but it was always possible that this wasn’t the Minotaur we were hunting. After all, there were thousands of Minotaurs dotted around the BookWorld, and they all looked pretty much alike. Admittedly, not many wore trench coats and fedoras, but I wasn’t going to dispatch anyone without being sure.

  “Would you like that frying pan wrapped, Mr. Johnson?” asked the lady serving the Minotaur. I required nothing more. He’d been using the “Mr. Johnson” pseudonym for many years—and the frying pan? Well, we’d darted him once with SlapStick as a tracking device, and it seemed to have crept into his modus operandi of assassination. Steamrollers, banana skins, falling pianos—he’d used them all. In the pantheon of SlapStick, the close-quarters hand weapon of choice was…a frying pan. Without waiting another second, I drew my pistol. The Minotaur, with a speed out of all proportion to his bulk, flipped the frying pan to his other hand and swiped it in my direction, catching the pistol and sending it clattering to the other side of the room. We paused and stared at each other. The frying pan had a two-foot handle, and he brandished it at me in a threatening manner. He removed his hat, and as the other customers realized who he was, there was a cry of fear and a mass exodus from the shop. He had the body of a man but the head of a bull, which had a kind of humanness about it that was truly disturbing. His yellow eyes gleamed at me with malevolence, and his horns, I noticed, had been sharpened to wickedly fine points.

  “We can talk about this,” I said in a quiet tone, wondering if Thursday5 had the wits to try to distract him.

  “No talk,” said the Minotaur in a basso profundo. “My job is to kill you, and yours…is to die.”

  I tried to stall him. “Let’s talk for a minute about job descriptions.”

  But the Minotaur wasn’t in the talking vein. He took a pace forward and made another swipe at me with the frying pan. I took a step backward but even so felt the breeze of the pan as it just missed my head. I grabbed the object nearest to hand, which was a golf club, and tried to hit him with it, but he was faster, and the wooden shaft of the club was reduced to splinters and sawdust with the ferocity of his blow. He gave out another deep, hearty laugh and took a further step toward me.

  “I say,” came a voice that sounded like crumpets and tea at four o’clock sharp. “You, sir—with the horns.”

  The Minotaur looked to where the voice had come from but still kept me within his vision. The interloper, of course, was the eccentric relative I’d just purchased for Landen’s book. He had left his packing case and stood facing the beast armed with nothing more than his walking stick.

  “Now, run along, there’s a good chap,” he said, as though he were talking to a child.

  The Minotaur curled a lip and breathed a threatening, “Begone!”

  “Look here,” replied the character in the green and yellow checks. “I’m not sure I care for the tone of your voice.”

  The Minotaur was suddenly a whirling mass of demonic destruction. He swung the frying pan toward the gentleman in an arc that could never have missed. But he did miss. There was a flash of silver, a blur of green and yellow, and the frying pan clattered to the floor—with the Minotaur’s hand still clutching it. The Minotaur looked at the frying pan, at the severed hand, then at his stump. He grimaced, gave out a deafening yell that shattered the windows of the shop and then evaporated into nothing as he jumped off and away.

  “By gad, what a to-do,” exclaimed the gentleman as he calmly cleaned his sword-stick and returned it to his sheath. “Anyone know who he was?”

  “The Minotaur.”

  “Was he, by George?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Would have expected a better fight than that. Are you quite well?”

  “Yes,” I answered, “thanks to you. That was a nifty piece of sword-work.”

  “My dear girl, think nothing of it,” he replied with the ghost of a smile. “I was captain of the fencing team at Rugby.”

  He was a handsome man in his mid-forties, and everything he did and said was liberally iced with a heavy coating of stiff British reserve. I couldn’t imagine what book he had come from or even why he’d been offered up as salvage.

  “Thursday Next,” I said, putting out my hand.

  “The plea sure is all mine, Ms. Next,” he replied. “Wing Commander Cornelius Scampton-Tappett at your ser vice.”

  The customers were slowly coming back to peer into the store, but Murray was already placing Closed signs on the doors.

  “So,” said Scampton-Tappett, “now that you’ve bought me, what would you have me do?”

  “Oh…yes…right.”

  I dug a calling card from my pocket, wrote down the title of Landen’s latest novel—Bananas for Edward—and handed it to him.

  “Do what you can, would you? And if you need anything, you can contact me over at Jurisfiction.”

  Scampton-Tappett raised an eyebrow, told me he would do the very best he could, tucked the jar containing his backstory under his arm and vanished.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and glanced around. Thursday5 was regarding me with such a sense of abject loss and failure on her face that I thought at first she’d been hurt.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded and looked down. I followed her gaze. Lying at her feet was my pistol.

  “Is that where it ended up after it was knocked from my grasp?”

  She nodded miserably, her eyes brimming with tears of self-anger.

  I sighed. She and I both knew that this was the end of the road when it came to her cadetship. If Scampton-Tappett hadn’t intervened, I might well be dead—and she’d done nothing to prevent it.

  “You don’t have to say it,” she said. “I’m manifestly not cut out for this work and never shall be. I’d try to apologize, but I can’t think of words that could adequately express my shame.”

  She took a deep breath, pulled the bow out of her hair, put it in her mouth and then gathered up her hair in a ponytail again before retying it. It was just the way I did it, and I suddenly fe
lt a pang of guilt. After all, she only acted in her morbidly peaceable way because that’s how she was written, as an antidote to the rest of the Thursday series. The thing was, the sex-and-violence nature of the first four books had been my fault, too. I’d sold the character rights in order to fund Acme Carpets.

  “I’d best be getting back to my book now,” she said, and turned to go.

  “Did I say you could leave?” I asked in my stoniest voice.

  “Well, that is to say…no.”

  “Then until I say you can go, you stay with me. I’m still undecided as to your fate, and until that happens—Lord help me—you’ll stay as my cadet.”

  We returned to Jurisfiction, and Thursday5 went and did some Pilates in the corner, much to the consternation of Mrs. Dashwood, who happened to be passing. I reported the Minotaur’s appearance and the state of the Austen refit to Bradshaw, who told me to have the Minotaur’s details and current whereabouts texted to all agents.

  After returning to my desk, dealing with some paperwork and being consulted on a number of matters, I drew out Thursday5’s assessment form, filled it in and then checked the “Failed” box on the last page before I signed it. I folded it twice, slid it into the envelope and wavered for a moment before eventually placing it in the top drawer of my desk.

  I looked at my watch. It was time to go home. I walked over to Thursday5, who had her eyes closed and was standing on one leg. “Same time tomorrow?”

  She opened her eyes and stared into mine. I got the same feeling when staring into the mirror at home. The touchy-feely New Age stuff was all immaterial. She was me, but me as I might have been if I’d never joined the police, army, SpecOps or Jurisfiction. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been any happier if I’d connected with the side of me that was her, but I’d be a lot more relaxed and a good deal healthier.

  “Do you mean it?” she asked.

  “Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t. But remember one thing: It’s coffee and a bacon roll.”

  She smiled. “Right. Coffee and bacon roll it is.” She handed me a paper bag. “This is for you.”

  I peered inside. It contained Pickwick’s blue-and-white knitted cozy—finished.

  “Good job,” I murmured, looking at the delicate knitting enviously. “Thank—”

  But she’d gone. I walked to the corridor outside and dug out my TravelBook, turned to the description of my office at Acme Carpets and read. After a few lines, the air turned suddenly colder, there was the sound of crackling cellophane, and I was back in my small office with a dry mouth and a thirst so strong I thought I would faint. I kept a pitcher of water close by for just these moments, and thus I spent the next ten minutes drinking water and breathing deeply.

  12.

  Kids

  Landen and I had often talked about it, but we never had a fourth. When Jenny came along, I was forty-two, and that, I figured, was it. On the occasion of our last attempt to induct Friday into the ChronoGuard’s Academy of Time, he was the eldest at sixteen, Tuesday was twelve, and Jenny, the youngest, was ten. I resisted naming Jenny after a day of the week; I thought at least one of us should have the semblance of normality.

  I arrived at Tuesday’s school at ten to four and waited patiently outside the math room. She’d shown a peculiar flair for the subject all her life but had first achieved prominence when aged nine. She’d wandered into the sixth-form math room and found an equation written on the board, thinking it was homework. But it wasn’t. It was Fermat’s Last Theorem, and the math master had written it down to demonstrate how this simple equation could not be solved. The thing was, Tuesday had found a solution, thus rendering a proof of the unworkability of the equation both redundant and erroneous.

  When the hunt was on for the person who had solved it, Tuesday thought they were angry with her for spoiling their fun, so she wasn’t revealed as the culprit for almost a week. Even then she had to be cajoled into explaining the answer. Professors of mathematics had tubed in from every corner of the globe to see how such a simple solution could have been staring them in the face without any of them noticing it.

  At four on the button, Tuesday came out of the math class looking drained and a bit cross.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “How was school?”

  “S’okay,” she said with a shrug, handing me her Hello Kitty school bag, pink raincoat and half-empty Winnie-the-Pooh lunch box. “Do you have to pick me up in your Acme uniform? It’s, like, soooooo embarrassing.”

  “I certainly do,” I replied, giving her a big smoochy kiss to embarrass her further, something that didn’t really work, as the pupils in her math class were all grown up and too obsessed with number sets and parameterized elliptic curves to be bothered by a daughter’s embarrassment over her mother.

  “They’re all a bit slow,” she said as we walked to the van. “Some of them can barely count.”

  “Sweetheart, they are the finest minds in mathematics today; you should be happy that they’re coming to you for tutoring. It must have been a bit of a shock to the mathematics fraternity when you revealed that there were sixteen more odd numbers then even ones.”

  “Seventeen,” she corrected me. “I thought of another one on the bus this morning. The odd-even disparity is the easy bit,” she explained. “The hard part is trying to explain that there actually is a highest number, a fact that tends to throw all work regarding infinite sets into a flat spin.”

  Clearly, the seriously smart genes that Mycroft had inherited from his father had bypassed my mother and me but appeared in Tuesday. It was odd to think that Mycroft’s two sons were known collectively as “the Stupids”—and it wasn’t an ironic title either.

  Tuesday groaned again when she saw we were driving home in the Acme Carpets van but agreed to get in when I pointed out that a long walk home was the only alternative. She scrunched down in her seat so as not to be spotted.

  We didn’t go straight home. I’d spoken to Spike before leaving work, and he mentioned that he had some news about Mycroft’s haunting and agreed to meet me at Mum’s. When I arrived, she and Polly were in the kitchen bickering about something pointless, such as the average size of an orange, so I left Tuesday with them: Mother to burn her a cake and Polly to discuss advanced Nextian Geometry.

  “Hiya,” I said to Spike, who’d been waiting in his car.

  “Yo. Thought about what to do with Felix8?”

  “Not yet. I’ll interview him again later this evening.”

  “As you wish. I made a few inquiries on the other side. Remember my dead partner, Chesney? He said Mycroft’s spooking was what we call a Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm.”

  “You have them categorized?”

  “Sure. The A-list contains Pointless Screamer, Crisis Warner, Murder Avenger and Recurrent Dreary. From there it’s all downhill: poltergeists, faceless orbs, quasi-religious visions and phantom smells—more usually associated with recently departed pet Labradors.”

  We walked up the garden path to Mycroft’s workshop.

  “I get the picture. So what does it all mean?” I asked.

  “It means that Mycroft had something he wanted to say before he died—but didn’t manage to. It was obviously important enough for him to be given a license to come back, if only for a few hours. Turn off your cell phone.”

  I reached into my pocket and did as he asked.

  “Radio waves scramble their energy field,” he explained. “Spooking’s dropped big-time since the cell-phone network kicked in. I’m amazed there are any ghosts left at all. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  We had arrived at my uncle’s workshop, and Spike grasped the handle and gently pushed the door open. If we were hoping to find Mycroft standing there in all his spectral glory, we were disappointed. The room was empty.

  “He was just over there.”

  Spike closed his eyes, sniffed the air and touched the workbench. “Yeah,” he said, “I can feel him.”

  “Can you?”

  “No, not
really. Where was he again?”

  “At the worktop. Spike, what exactly is a ghost?”

  “A phantom,” said my uncle Mycroft, who had just materialized, “is essentially a heteromorphic wave pattern that gains solidity when the apparition converts thermal energy from the surroundings to visible light. It’s a fascinating process, and I’m amazed no one has thought of harnessing it—a holographic TV that could operate from the heat given off by an average-size guinea pig.”

  I shivered. Mycroft was right—the temperature had dropped—and there he was, but a lot less solid than the previous time. I could easily see the other side of the workshop through him.

  “Hello again, Thursday,” he said. “Good afternoon, Mr. Stoker.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” replied Spike. “Word in the Realm of the Dead says you’ve got something to tell us.”

  “I have?” asked Mycroft, looking at me.

  “Yes, Uncle,” I told him, “You’re a Nonrecurring…um—”

  “Nonrecurring Informative Phantasm,” put in Spike helpfully. “An NIP, or what we call in the trade Speak Up and Shut Down.”

  “It means, Uncle,” I said, “that you’ve got something really important to tell us.”

  Mycroft looked thoughtful for so long that I almost nudged him before I realized it would be useless.

  “Like what?” he said at last.

  “I don’t know. Perhaps a…philosophy of life or something?”

  Mycroft looked at me doubtfully and raised an eyebrow. “The only thing that springs to mind is, ‘You can never have too many chairs.’”

  “That’s it? You returned from the dead to give me advice on furniture distribution?”

  “I know it’s not much of a philosophy,” said Mycroft with a shrug, “but it can pay dividends if someone unexpectedly pops around for dinner.”

  “Uncle, please try to remember what it is you have to tell us!”

  “Was I murdered or anything?” he asked in a dreamy fashion. “Ghosts often come back if they’ve been killed or something—at least, Patrick Swayze did.”