First Among Sequels

37. The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco

I came to earth in Swindon. Or at least, the Fiasco touchy-feely version of Swindon, which was sunny and blue-skied and every garden an annoying splash of bright primary colors that gave me a headache. The houses were perfect, the cars clean, and everything was insanely neat and orderly. I pulled out my automatic, removed the clip to check it, replaced it and released the safety. There would be no escape for her this time. I knew she was unarmed, but somehow that didn’t fill me with such confidence; after all, she was almost infinitely resourceful. The thing was, so was I. After I’d killed her, I would just jump out and everything would be right-forever. I could reinstate the interactive book project before the readers had finished the first three chapters-then go to the Outland and savor the joys of Landen once more. Following that and after paying a small amount of lip ser vice to diplomacy, I could also deploy two legions of Mrs. Danvers into Racy Novel. Who knows? I might even lead the attack myself. That, I had discovered, was the best thing about being Thursday Next-you could do anything you damn well pleased and no one would, could or dared oppose you. I had only two problems to deal with right now: disposing of the real Thursday Next and trying to figure out Mrs. Bradshaw’s middle name, the code word to get out. I hadn’t a clue-I’d never even met her.

I pulled the glove off my hand and looked at where the mottled flesh still showed signs of the eraserhead. I rubbed the itchy skin, then moved to the side of the street and walked toward where this version of Thursday’s house was located. It was the same as the one that was burned down in the first chapter of my book, so I knew the way. But the strange thing was, the street was completely deserted. Nothing moved. Not a person, not a cat, squirrel-nothing. I stopped at a car that was abandoned in the street and looked in the open passenger door. The key was still in the ignition. Whoever had once populated this book had left-and in a hurry.

I carried on walking slowly down the road. That pompous fool Bradshaw had mentioned something about a chapter breaking away from the main book-perhaps that was where all the background characters were. But it didn’t matter. Thursday was here now, and she was the one I was after. I reached the garden gate of Landen5’s house and padded cautiously up the path, past the perfectly planted flowers and windows so clean and sparkly they almost weren’t there. Holding my gun outstretched, I stepped quietly inside the house.

Thursday5’s idea of home furnishing was different from mine and the real Thursday’s. For a start, the floor covering was seagrass, and the curtains were an odiously old-fashioned tie-dye. I also noticed to my disgust that there were Tibetan mandalas in frames upon the wall and dream catchers hanging from the ceiling. I stepped closer to the pictures on the mantelpiece and found one of Thursday5 and Landen5 at Glastonbury. They had their faces painted as flowers and were grinning stupidly and hugging each other, with Pickwick5 sitting between them. It was quite sickeningly twee, to be honest.

“I would have done the same.”

I turned. Thursday was leaning on the doorway that led through to the kitchen. It was an easy shot, but I didn’t take it. I wanted to relish the moment.

“What would you have done the same?” I asked.

“I would have spared you, too. I’ll admit it, your impersonation of me was about the most plausible I’ll ever see. I’m not sure there’s anyone out there who would have spotted it. But I didn’t think you could keep it up. The real you would soon bubble to the surface. Because, like it or not, you’re not enough of me to carry it off. To be me you need the seventeen years of Jurisfiction experience-the sort of experience that means I can take on people like you and come out victorious.”

I laughed at her presumption. “I think you overestimate your own abilities, Outlander. I’m the one holding the gun. Perhaps you’re a little bit right, but I can and will be you, given time. Everything you have, everything you are. Your job, your family, your husband. I can go back to the Outland and take over from where you left off-and probably have a lot more fun doing it, too.”

I pointed my gun at her and began to squeeze the trigger, then stopped. She didn’t seem particularly troubled, and that worried me.

“Can you hear that?” she asked.

“Hear what?”

She cupped a hand to her ear. “That.”

And now that she mentioned it, I could hear something. A soft thrumming noise that seemed to reverberate through the ground.

“What is it?” I asked, and was shocked to discover that my voice came out cracked and…afraid.

“Take a look for yourself,” she said, pointing outside.

I wiped the sweat from my brow and backed out the door, still keeping my gun firmly trained on her. I ran down to the garden gate and looked up the street. The houses at the end of the road seemed to have lost definition and were being eaten away by a billowing cloud of sand.

“What the hell’s that?” I snapped.

“You’d know,” she replied quietly, “if only you’d gone to Jurisfiction classes instead of wasting your time on the shooting range.”

I looked at the mailbox on the corner of the street, and it seemed to crumble to fragments in front of my eyes and then was taken up into the cloud of dust and debris that was being sucked into a vortex high above us. I pulled out my footnoterphone and frantically dialed Bradshaw’s number.

“But you don’t know Melanie Bradshaw’s middle name,” observed Thursday, “do you?”

I lowered the phone and stared at her uselessly. It was a setup. Thursday must have spoken to Bradshaw, and together they’d tricked me into coming here.

“It’s Jenny,” she added. “I named my second daughter after her. But it won’t help you. I told Bradshaw not to lift the Textual Sieve on any account, password or not. As soon as you were inside and the generics were safely evacuated, he was instructed to begin…the erasure of the entire book.”

“How did you contact him?” I asked.

“He contacted me,” she replied. “Thursday5 suggested to Bradshaw that you might have pulled the same trick as she did. I couldn’t get out, but we could trick you in.”

She looked at her watch.

“And in another eight minutes, this book and everything in it-you included, will be gone.”

I looked around and saw to my horror that the erasure had crept up without my noticing and was less than ten feet away-we were standing on the only piece of remaining land, a rough circle a hundred feet across containing only Landen’s house and its neighbors. But they wouldn’t stay for long, and even as I watched, the roofs were turning to dust and being whirled away, consumed by the erasure. The dull roar was increasing, and I had to raise my voice to be heard.

“But this will erase you, too!” I shouted.

“Maybe not-it depends on you.”

She beckoned me back into the house as the garden gate turned to smoke and was carried away into the dust cloud. As soon as we were in the kitchen, she turned to me.

“You won’t need that,” she said, pointing at my gun. I fumbled the reholstering clumsily, and it fell to the floor with a clatter. I didn’t stoop to pick it up. I looked out the window into the back garden. The shed and the apple tree had both gone, and the erasure was slowly eating its way across the lawn. The ceiling was starting to look blotchy, and as I watched, the front door turned to dust and was blown away in the wind.

“Ballocks!” I said, as realization suddenly dawned. Not that I was going to be erased, no. It was the cold and sobering revelation that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was. I’d met a foe immeasurably superior to me, and I would suffer the consequences of my own arrogance. The question was, would I give her the pleasure of knowing it? But on reflection she didn’t want or need that sort of plea sure, and everything suddenly seemed that much more peaceful.

I said instead, “I’m truly flattered.”

“Flattered?” she inquired. “About what?”

The ceiling departed in a cloud of swirling dust, and the walls started to erode downward with the pictures, mantel and furniture rapidly crumbling away to a fine debris that was sucked up into the whirlwind directly above us.

“I’m flattered,” I repeated, “because you’d erase a whole book and give your own life just to be rid of me. I must have been a worthy adversary, right?”

She sensed my change of heart and gave me a faint smile.

“You almost defeated me,” said Thursday, “and you still might. But if I do survive this,” she added, “it is my gift to you.”

The walls had almost gone, and the seagrass flooring was crumbling under my feet. Thursday opened a door in the kitchen, beyond which a concrete flight of steps led downward. She beckoned me to follow, and we trotted down into a spacious subterranean vault shaped like the inside of a barrel. Upon a large plinth, there were two prongs across which a weak spark occasionally fired. The noise of the wind had subdued, but I knew it was only a matter of time before the erasure reached us.

“This is the core-containment room,” explained Thursday. “You’d know about that if you’d listened in class.”

“How,” I asked, “is your survival a gift to me?”

“That’s easily explained,” replied Thursday, removing some pieces of packing case from the wall to reveal a riveted iron hatch. “Behind there is the only method of escape-across the emptiness of the Nothing.”

The inference wasn’t lost on me. The Nothing didn’t support textual life-I’d be stripped away to letters in an instant if I tried to escape across it. But Thursday wasn’t text: She was flesh and blood and could survive.

“I can’t get out of here on my own,” she added, “so I need your help.”

I didn’t understand to begin with. I frowned, and then it hit me. She wasn’t offering me forgiveness, a second chance or rescue-I was far too bitter and twisted for that. No, she was offering me the one thing that I would never, could never have. She was offering me redemption. After all I’d done to her, all the things I’d planned to do, she was willing to risk her life to give me one small chance to atone. And what’s more, she knew I would take it. She was right. We were more alike than I thought.

The roof fell away in patches as the erasure started to pull the containment room apart.

“What do I do?”

She indicated the twin latching mechanisms that were positioned eight feet apart. I held the handle and pulled it down on the count of three. The hatch sprung open, revealing an empty, black void.

“Thank you,” she said as the erasure crept inexorably across the room. The sum total of the book was now a disk less than eight feet across, and we were in the middle of what looked like a swirling cloud of dirt and detritus, while all about us the wind nibbled away at the remaining fabric of the book, reducing it to undescriptive textdust.

“What will it be like?” I asked as Thursday peered out into the inky blackness.

“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “No one knows what happens after erasure.”

I offered her my hand to shake. “If you ever turn this into one of your adventures,” I asked, “will you make me at least vaguely sympathetic? I’d like to think there was a small amount of your humanity in me.”

She took my hand and shook it. It was warmer than I’d imagined.

“I’m sorry about sleeping with your husband,” I added as I felt the floor grow soft beneath my feet. “And I think this is yours.”

And I gave her the locket that had come off when we fought.

As soon as Thursday1-4 returned my locket, I knew that she had finally learned something about me and, by reflection, her. She was lost and she knew it, so helping me open the hatch and handing over the locket could only be altruism-the first time she had acted thus and the last time she acted at all. I climbed partially out of the hatch into the Nothing. There was barely anything left of the book at all, just the vaguest crackle of its spark growing weaker and weaker. I was still holding Thursday1-4’s hand as I saw her body start to break up, like sandstone eroded by wind. Her hair was being whipped by the currents of air, but she looked peaceful.

She smiled and said, “I just got it.”

“Got what?”

“Something Thursday5 said about hot baths and a martini.”

Her face started to break down, and I felt her hand crumble within mine like crusty, sun-baked sand. There was almost nothing left of Fiasco at all, and it was time to go.

She smiled again, and her face fell away into dust, her hand turned to sand in mine, and the spark crackled and went out. I let go and was-

The textual world that I had become so accustomed to returned with a strange wobbling sensation. I found myself in another core-containment room pretty much identical to the first-aside from the spark, which crackled twenty times more brightly as readers made their way through the book. I picked myself up, shut and secured the hatch and made my way up the steps and toward the exit, fastening the locket around my neck as I did so.

I couldn’t really say I was saddened by Thursday1-4’s loss, as she would almost certainly have killed me and done untold damage if she’d lived. But I couldn’t help feeling a sense of guilt that I might have done more for her. After all, it wasn’t strictly her fault-she’d been written that way. I sighed. She had found a little bit of me in her, but I knew there was some of her in me, too.

I cautiously opened the containment room door and peered out. I was in a collection of farm buildings constructed of red brick and in such a dilapidated state of disrepair it looked as if they were held together only by the moss in the brickwork and the lichen on the roof. I spotted Adam Lambsbreath through the kitchen window, where he was scraping ineffectually at the washing-up with a twig. I made the sign for a telephone through the window at him, and he pointed toward the woodshed across the yard. I ran across and pushed open the door.

There was something nasty sitting in the corner making odd slavering noises to itself, but I paid it no heed other than to reflect that Ada Doom had been right after all, and found the public footnoterphone that I needed. I dialed Bradshaw’s number and waited impatiently for him to answer.

“It’s me,” I said. “Your plan worked: She’s dust. I’m in Cold Comfort Farm, page sixty-eight. Can you bring a cab to pick me up? This is going to be one serious mother of a debrief.”