“I’ve never even heard of the Toast Marketing Board.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s new. What do you say?”
“What do you think I’m going to say?”
“Yes,” said Vole unhappily, “we thought you’d tell us to stick it in our ear. Here’s a check. If you cash it, we know you’re on board.”
I took the check and moved on. Oddly enough, as soon as Vole turned away, Jenny was back.
“What’s going on?” asked Square, who had suddenly reappeared. “It’s not like the BookWorld, where I can be five or six places at once.”
“Landen thinks I might actually be Thursday,” I said, “and if I can see Jenny, then he might be right.”
“Who’s Jenny? I don’t see anyone.”
“She’s one of the wraiths I’ve been seeing. And if I am Thursday, then I’m simply imagining you.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked the figment Jenny, which seemed a bit impertinent given her less-than-definite existence.
“Agent Square,” I said, “in Jurisfiction deep cover.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked Square.
I sighed. This was getting more and more complex, but in a way I was heartened that they couldn’t see or hear each other. If they were both in my head, they should be able to converse—unless I was more insane than I thought possible.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” I said as we crossed another road, walked through the graveyard of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster, took a right down the hill and then an immediate left, where we found a small apartment building. Jenny led us into the lobby, and we paused while she consulted the names on the mailboxes.
“Fifth floor.”
We took the stairs, as neither I nor Square wanted to get into the elevator, and arrived at the upstairs corridor, from which four apartments could be accessed. As I walked along the corridor, one of the doors opened and a nurse walked out, glanced at me and moved off towards the elevators. As the door closed on the apartment, I could see that other medics were in attendance, clustered around a bed.
“You brought me here to see a guy dying?”
“Sort of,” replied Jenny, “but not him in there—him out here.”
She pointed. At the far end of the corridor were five more of the wraithlike figures I had seen earlier. They all stood around looking solemn, trying to comfort one of their number, who flickered in and out like a badly tuned TV set. They all spoke in a low growl that I couldn’t really understand, and as I walked closer, I noticed that they were dressed rather oddly.
“You brought me here to see some spooks?”
“They’re not spooks,” said Jenny. “They’re like me and you, Thursday—made up. Figments, inventions. Created in the white-hot heat of a child’s imagination, they linger on even when redundancy renders them invisible to their creators. Sometimes people catch a glimpse of them, but for the most part they’re invisible. You can see them because you’re fictional. So can I. You, them, me—we’re all one and the same. A living fiction that needs no book.”
I looked closer at the figures. They were partially dressed as clowns, had bold, large features and spoke in a simple dialect of basic verbs and a limited number of nouns.
“They’re . . . imaginary childhood friends, aren’t they?”
Jenny smiled. “Bravo, Thursday—a chip off the old block. They follow their creators about, an echo of a vibrant childhood imagination.”
She indicated the one who was flickering.
“Pookles here is about to leave—they can have no independent existence without their creator.”
As we watched, the flickering imaginary friend started shaking hands with the others, hugging them and thanking them, and then, with a final bright burst, it vanished. Almost immediately we heard a cry of grief from the bedroom behind us, and one by one the ethereal figures took their leave, walking through us and along the corridor, leaning on one another for support and shaking their heads sadly.
“So where does Thursday come into all this?”
“This is how I know she’s still alive. I’m still here. Unlike you, who are the figment of a ghostwriter and are now carved into a textual matrix, a part of Thursday is all I am. If she were dead, I wouldn’t be around to be thought of. I’m bound to her, like a dog on a leash.”
“Right,” I said, “I get that. But it doesn’t tell us where she is. Any ideas? The Dark Reading Matter, for instance?”
“That was one of her interests, certainly, but the whole Racy Novel stuff had taken over her life. The last time we spoke, she said something about Lyell being boring.”
“Lyell? Boring?”
“Yes. I don’t know who Lyell was or why he should be boring, but boring he was—and Thursday didn’t like it. Not one little bit.” Jenny shook her head and took me by the hand. “I miss her, Thursday. It’s lonely not being directly imagined on a day-to-day basis.”
We walked back towards Landen’s house.
“I’m confused,” said Square. “What, precisely, is going on?”
“I’m not really sure. I feel like I’m following in Thursday’s footsteps, only several hundred yards behind, and—hello, that’s odd.”
I looked around. Jenny, who’d been with us just a second ago, was nowhere to be seen. I twisted this way and that to see where she’d gone, and as I was doing so, a black van screeched to a halt in front of me. Within a few moments, the sliding door had opened and I’d been bundled inside in a less-than-polite manner, a sack put over my head. With another screech of tires, the van set off, and to make matters worse, I was then immediately sat upon by someone who smelled strongly of Gorgonzola.
23.
The Stiltonista
The most cost-effective way to tour the BookWorld is by bus. A BookWorld Rover is the preferred method, giving you unlimited travel for a month. Delays might be expected at the borders between islands, but for the discerning tourist eager to see the BookWorld at a leisurely pace, the Rover ticket is ideal. Next page: working your passage on a scrawl trawler. Not for the fainthearted.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (5th edition)
Any attempt to describe the journey would have been futile, as the varying degrees of gravitational flux that I encountered during the trip were unpleasantly distracting. Suffice it to say that all the lurches, bumps, swerves and twists made me feel quite peculiar, and I wondered how anyone could undertake journeys on a regular basis and not only become ambivalent but actually enjoy them. Fortunately, this journey ended after not too long, and once the van came to a stop and I was rather impolitely hauled from the back and placed on a chair, the sack was pulled off.
I was in a deserted warehouse. There were puddles of water on the floor and holes in the ceiling—which probably accounted for the puddles on the floor. The windows were broken, and green streaks of algae had formed on the walls. In several places brambles had started to grow, and the odd pile of rubble and twisted metal sat in heaps. I wasn’t alone. Aside from the four men who had brought me in the van, there was a Rolls-Royce motorcar and three other men. Two of them seemed to be bodyguards, and the third was undoubtedly the leader. He was dressed in a mohair suit and greatcoat, and his features were drawn and sunken—he looked like a skull that someone had thrown some skin at.
“I am Keitel Potblack,” he said in the tone of someone who felt I should know who he was and not fail to be impressed, “head of the Wiltshire Stiltonista. Your failure to remain properly dead is becoming something of an inconvenience.”
I laughed at the ridiculousness of the situation. This guy dealt in cheese, and he was acting as though he were a Bond villain.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“I don’t kid,” said Mr. Potblack.
“Oh,” I said, “right.”
I looked at him, then at the men standing next to him, one of whom was carrying a spade. “Going gardening?”
They exchanged glances, as though this were the sort of comment they expected.
>
“It’s up to you. Now, are you the real Thursday or just another copy?”
“I’m not her,” I said, “so if you can take me home, I’d be really grateful.”
“If you’re not her,” said Potblack, “I have no further need of you.”
“Good. If you could tell your driver to go easy a bit on the way back, that would be—”
“Mr. Blue? Would you do the honors?”
The man with the spade walked towards me, and all of a sudden I realized that if he was digging anything over today, it would be me.
“You want to talk?” I said, the ease with which I stayed calm surprising even me. “Then let’s talk.”
“So you are Thursday?”
“Yes,” I replied, which was no lie—I was a Thursday.
The man with the spade walked back to his position to the left of his boss. I noticed as he did that one edge of the spade had been sharpened.
“Okay,” said Potblack, who seemed annoyed that I wasn’t more frightened than I was. Perhaps if I’d known who he was, I would have been. But this was Thursday’s life, not mine.
“In the past,” began Potblack in a slow, deliberate speech, “we may have had an ‘understanding’ over who deals what cheese where. Perhaps you think I was being too harsh when I started dealing in really strong cheeses, but I am a businessman. The stronger the cheese, the more people will pay. Business is good, and we want to keep it that way. If the government lifts the cheese ban as threatened, then it could be very bad business for all of us. The last thing we want is legal cheese.”
I vaguely knew what he was talking about, but not the details. I’d heard that cheese in the Outland was subject to a swingingly large amount of duty, but it seemed the government, in an attempt to control the burgeoning illegal-cheese market, had tried cheese prohibition. Judging from Potblack’s jewelry, car and ability to supply, the ban didn’t seem to be working.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked. “It’s not like I have the ear of the president, now, is it?”
The Stiltonista looked at his henchman with the spade, who picked it up again. I was wrong—I did have the ear of the president. Landen had said so earlier.
“Anymore. I don’t have his ear anymore. But I’m sure I could give him a call and advise him to keep the prohibition in place.”
Potblack stared at me and narrowed his eyes. “You’re being uncharacteristically compliant.”
“But characteristically realistic,” I said cheerfully. “You’re the one with the sharpened spade.”
“Hmm,” said the Stiltonista, “very well. But I want to offer an incentive to make sure that once released you don’t ‘forget’ your part of the bargain.”
“Bargain?” I echoed. “You mean I get something from this?”
“You do. You get to keep your life, your husband gets to keep his, and your children get to keep their fingers.”
The man with the spade tapped it on the ground as if to emphasize the point, and the steel rang out with a threatening ting-ting-ting-ting sound. I stared at the Stiltonista for a moment, and when I spoke, I tried to convey as much menace as I could—surprisingly easy, for I was angry—and it wasn’t the sort of anger I get when I fluff my lines or my father misses a cue and comes in late. Or even the sort of anger I felt when Horace the goblin nicked all my stuff or Carmine went AWOL. This was real anger. The sort of “don’t shit with me” stuff that mothers feel when you threaten their children.
“Dear, oh, dear,” I said, sadly shaking my head, “and we were getting on so well. I said I’d help you out, and you respond by threatening my kids. That’s not only insulting, it’s impolite. There’s a new deal: You let me go right now and promise never to even look at my husband or children, and I will let you live to see tomorrow’s dawn.”
The Stiltonista bit his lip ever so subtly. It was clear that I had a reputation, and it moved in front of me like a bulldozer. Despite the fact that I was outnumbered six to one, the Stiltonista obviously considered that at the very least I should not be underrated. Thursday, it seemed, was a formidable foe—and highly dangerous if you got on the wrong side of her.
“You’re not in any position to be doing deals.”
“I don’t want anyone to think me unfair,” I said. “I’ll give you until the count of three. One.”
There was the sound of safety catches being released from the men behind me. They were quite obviously armed and, from the sound of it, heavily.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t do any sort of deal, Miss Next,” said Potblack with renewed confidence. “Perhaps you would like to reconsider. My men will finish you before you get to three, and you’ll end up with all the others—six feet under the Savernake Forest, a feast for the worms. I apologize if I have been impolite, but as you understand, a lot rides on a lifted prohibition, and I speak not only for myself but for many cheese suppliers up and down the country. We can make this work to the best advantage for all of us, I’m sure—and perhaps even offer up some sort of compensatory payment.”
“Two.”
“You really don’t understand, do you?” said the Stiltonista in a voice that now carried an echo of uncertainty. “It doesn’t have to end for you like this.”
I didn’t have a plan of action, but that didn’t seem to be a problem, for the plan of action had me, and before I knew what had happened, I had the barrel of my pistol pressed hard against the Stiltonista’s throat and the man with the spade was flat on his back unconscious. The goon next to me had managed to get his hand to the butt of his automatic, but no farther. The rest were just blinking stupidly. Oddly, I didn’t feel nervous in the least. It felt like I was someone else. Someone else inside me.
“You see what happens when you’re impolite?” I said. “And don’t struggle. This an armor piercer. Once it’s gone through, only Exxon will be able to retrieve it—or you.”
He stopped struggling.
“Tell them to drop their weapons.”
He did, and they did.
“Right,” I said, unsure what to do next. “This is the plan. . . . ”
If there was a plan, I never found out what it was, for a voice rang out from one corner of the warehouse.
“Armed police! You are surrounded. Do exactly as we tell you. Carefully and slowly, put your hands behind your heads.”
The Stiltonista’s goons did as the voice asked and seemed to know the drill, as they also lay flat on their faces without being asked.
“And you, Next.”
I set my pistol on the floor, kicked it away and then obediently placed my hands on the back of my head and lay on the ground quite close to where Potblack now lay.
“I’ll get you for this if it’s the last thing I do, Next.”
He said it without looking at me, his voice a low growl.
“Really?” I replied evenly. “Try to get me or my family and I’ll happily ensure that it is.”
He grumbled and faced the other way.
I heard the patter of feet, and within a few seconds I felt my arms pulled behind me and bound with a plastic tie. They weren’t rough, though—they were almost gentle.
“Got a weapon here,” said a voice, quickly followed by, “Got several weapons here.”
“Thursday, Thursday,” came the voice that had been behind the bullhorn. It was deep and earthy and was exactly how I expected Spike to sound. He was one of Thursday’s SpecOps pals—someone who had been more than happy to feature in the series. It was the only recognition he’d ever got.
“Spike?”
“Hello, old friend,” he said. “What have you got for us?”
“Keitel Potblack, head of the Swindon Stiltonistas,” I said,
“threatened to kill me, wanted to bribe me to block the repeal of prohibition and is also guilty of putting three of Goliath’s synthetic Thursdays under the Savernake Forest.”
“You’ve nothing to connect me with the Stiltonistas,” said Mr. Potblack. “I happened to be here pursuing a pote
ntial property development when I was set upon by this madwoman.”
“We’ve got a trunkful of Gorgonzola here,” said one of the armed officers. “At least fifty kilos.”
“For personal use,” said Potblack in an unconvincing tone of voice.
“And your armed associates?”
“I employed them as decorators this morning. I am shocked, shocked to discover they are armed.”
Spike helped me to my feet and walked me across to the front of the Rolls-Royce.
“It’s good to see you again, Thursday. The Cheese Squad will have a field day with this lot. How in heaven’s name did you nail Potblack of all people? We’ve been after him for years.”
“Let’s just say I have a magnetic personality.”
Spike laughed. “Still the same. Tell me, do you want to do some moonlighting? The undead are about to be culled again, and there aren’t many with Class IV zombie hunters’ licenses about—or at least none who don’t drool a lot and mumble.”
I thought carefully. “If I’m around tomorrow, I’m totally up for it.”
It was quite fun being her. I had a sudden thought.
“Spike, if you weren’t here to arrest Potblack, what were you here for?”
“We’ve been trailing you for the past hour, Thursday.”
“Why?”
“Because if we know you’re here, so will they.”
“‘They’ being . . . ?”
“Who else? Goliath.”
“I can handle them.”
“I don’t think so,” said Spike. “You’ve been gone a month, right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Three weeks ago SpecOps announced it had been privatized. The Goliath Corporation now runs not only SpecOps but the police as well. Almost the first thing Goliath did was charge you with crimes against humanity, murder, theft, illegal possession of a firearm, the discharge of a weapon in a public place, murder, impersonating a SpecOps officer, cheese smuggling, assorted motoring offenses and murder. It’s quite a list. They must really hate you to dream up so many spurious charges.”