Something Rotten

  'Sheriff?'

  No answer.

  'SHERIFF!'

  He awoke with a start, began to get up, overbalanced and tipped over backward. He crashed heavily to the floor and knocked against the bureau, which just happened to have a jug of water resting upon it. The jug tipped over and its contents drenched the sheriff, who roared with shock. The noise upset the cat, which awoke with a cry and leapt up the curtains, which collapsed with a crash on to the cast-iron stove, spilling the coffee and setting fire to the tinder-dry linen drapes. I ran to put it out and knocked against the desk, dislodging the lawman's loaded revolver, which fell to the floor, discharging a single shot which cut the cord of a hanging stuffed moose's head which fell upon Bradshaw. So there were the three of us; me trying to put out the fire, the sheriff covered in water and Bradshaw walking into furniture as he tried to get the moose's head off. It was precisely what we were looking for: an outbreak of unconstrained and wholly inappropriate Slapstick.

  'Sheriff, I'm so sorry about this,' I muttered apologetically, having doused the fire, de-moosed Bradshaw and helped a very damp lawman to his feet. He was over six foot tall, had a weather-beaten face and deep blue eyes. I produced my badge. 'Thursday Next, head of Jurisfiction. This is my partner, Commander Bradshaw.'

  The sheriff relaxed and even managed a thin smile. 'Thought you was more of them Baxters,' he said, brushing himself down and drying his hair with a 'Cathouses of Dawson City' tea cloth. 'I'm mighty glad you're not. Jurisfiction, hey? Ain’t seen none of yous around these parts for longer than I care to remember – quit it, Howell.'

  The drunk, Howell, had awoken and was demanding a tipple 'to set him straight'.

  'We're looking for the Minotaur,' I explained, showing the sheriff the photograph.

  He rubbed his stubble thoughtfully and shook his head.

  'Don't recall ever seeing this critter, Missy Next.'

  'We have reason to believe he passed through your office not long ago – he's been marked with Slapstick.'

  'Ah!' said the sheriff. 'I was a-wonderin’ ’bout all that. Me and Howell here have been trippin' and a-stumblin' for a whiles now – ain’t we, Howell?'

  'You're darn tootin’,' said the drunk.

  'He could be in disguise and operating under an alias,' I ventured. 'Does the name Norman Johnson mean anything to you?'

  'Can't say it does, Missy. We have twenty-six Johnsons here but all are C-7s – not 'portant 'nuff to have fust names.'

  I sketched a Stetson on to the photograph of the Minotaur, then a duster, vest and gunbelt.

  'Oh!' said the sheriff with a sudden look of recognition. 'That Mr Johnson.'

  'You know where he is?'

  'Sure do. Had him in the cells only last week on charges of eatin’ a cattle rustler.'

  'What happened?'

  'Paid his bail and wuz released. Ain’t nothing in the statutes of Nebraska that says you can't eat rustlers. One moment.'

  There had been a shot outside followed by several yells from startled townsfolk. The sheriff checked his Colt, opened the door and walked out. Alone on the street and facing him was a young man with an earnest expression, hand quivering around his gun, the elegantly tooled holster of which I noticed had been tied down – a sure sign of yet another potential gunfight.

  'Go home, Abe!' the sheriff called out. 'Today's not a good day for dyin’.'

  'You killed my pappy,' said the youth, 'and my pappy's pappy. And his pappy's pappy. And my brothers Jethro, Hank, Hoss, Red, Peregrine, Marsh, Junior, Dizzy, Luke, Peregrine, George an' all the others. I'm callin’ you out, lawman.'

  'You said Peregrine twice.'

  'He wuz special.'

  'Abel Baxter,' whispered the sheriff out of the corner of his mouth, 'one of them Baxter boys. They turn up regular as clockwork, and I kill ’em same ways as regular.'

  'How many have you killed?' I whispered back.

  'Last count, 'bout sixty. Go home, Abe, I won't tell yer again!'

  The youth caught sight of Bradshaw and me and said:

  'New deputies, Sheriff? Yer gonna need ’em!'

  And it was then that we saw that Abel Baxter wasn't alone. Stepping out from the stables opposite were four disreputable-looking characters. I frowned. They seemed somehow out of place in Death at Double-X Ranch. For a start, none of them wore black, nor did they have tooled-leather double gunbelts with nickel-plated revolvers. Their spurs didn't clink as they walked and their holsters were plain and worn high on the hip – the weapon these men had chosen was the Winchester rifle. I noticed with a shudder that one of the men had a button missing on his frayed vest and the sole on the toe of his boot had come adrift. Flies buzzed around their unwashed and grimy faces and the sweat marks on their hats had stained halfway to the crown. These weren't C-2 generic gunfighters from pulp, but well-described A-ys from a novel of high descriptive quality – and if they could shoot as well as they had been realised by the author, we were in trouble.

  The sheriff sensed it too.

  'Where yo' friends from, Abe?'

  One of the men hooked his Winchester into the crook of his arm and answered in a low Southern drawl:

  'Mr Johnson sent us.'

  And they opened fire. No waiting, no drama, no narrative pace. Bradshaw and I had already begun to move – squaring up in front of a gunman with a rifle might seem terribly macho but for survival purposes it was a non-starter. Sadly, the sheriff didn't realise this until it was too late. If he had survived until page 164, as he was meant to, he would have taken a slug, rolled twice in the dust after a two-page build-up and lived long enough to say a pithy final goodbye to his sweetheart who would have cradled him in his bloodless dying moments. Not to be. Realistic violent death was to make an unwelcome entry into Death at Double-X. The heavy lead shot entered the sheriff's chest and came out the other side, leaving an exit wound the size of a saucer. He collapsed inelegantly on to his face and lay perfectly still, one arm sprawled outward in a manner unattainable in life and the other hooked beneath him. He didn't collapse flat, either. He ended up bent over on his knees with his backside in the air.

  The gunmen stopped firing as soon as there was no target – but Bradshaw, his hunting instincts alerted, had already drawn a bead on the sheriff's killer and fired. There was an almighty detonation, a brief flash and a large cloud of smoke. The eraserhead hit home and the gunman disintegrated mid-stride into a brief chrysanthemum of text which scattered across the main street, the meaning of the words billowing out into a blue haze which hung near the ground for a moment or two before evaporating.

  'What are you doing?' I asked, annoyed at his impetuosity.

  'Him or us, Thursday,' replied Bradshaw grimly, pulling the lever down on his Martini-Henry to reload, 'him or us.'

  'Did you see how much text he was composed of?' I replied angrily. 'He was almost a paragraph long. Only featured characters get that kind of description – somewhere there's going to be a book one character short!'

  'But,' replied Bradshaw in an aggrieved tone, 'I didn't know that before I shot him, now, did I?'

  I shook my head. Perhaps Bradshaw hadn't noticed the missing button, the sweat stains and the battered shoes, but I had. Erasure of a featured part meant more paperwork than I really wanted to deal with. From form F36/34 (discharge of an eraserhead) and form B9/32 (replacement of featured part) to the P13/36 (narrative damage assessment), I could be bogged down for two whole days. I had thought bureaucracy was bad in the real world, but here in the paper world it was everything.

  'So what do we do?' asked Bradshaw. 'Ask politely for them to surrender?'

  'I'm thinking,' I replied, pulling out my footnoterphone and pressing the button marked Cat. In fiction, the commonest form of communication was by footnote, but way out here . . .

  'Blast!' I muttered again. 'No signal.'

  'Nearest repeater station is in The Virginian,' observed Bradshaw as he replaced the spent cartridge and closed the breech before peering outside. 'And
we can't bookjump direct from pulp to classic.'

  He was right. We had been crossing from book to book for almost six days, and although we could escape in an emergency, such a course of action would give the Minotaur more than enough time to escape. Things weren't good, but they weren't bad either – yet.

  'Hey!' I yelled from the sheriff's office. 'We want to talk!'

  'Is that a fact?' came a clear voice from outside. 'Mr Johnson says he's all done talkin’ – less you be in mind to offer amnesty.'

  'We can talk about that!' I replied.

  There was a beeping noise from my pocket.

  'Blast,' I mumbled, consulting the Narrative Proximity Device. 'Bradshaw, we've got a story thread inbound from the east, two hundred and fifty yards and closing. Page seventy-four, line six.'

  Bradshaw quickly opened his copy of Death at Double-X Ranch and ran a finger along the line:

  '. . . McNeil rode into the town of Providence, Nebraska, with fifty cents in his pocket and murder on his mind . . .'

  I peered cautiously out of the window. Sure enough, a cowboy on a bay horse was riding slowly into town. Strictly speaking it didn't matter if we changed the story a little as the novella had been read only sixteen times in the past ten years, but the code by which we worked was fairly unequivocal. 'Keep the story as the author intended!' was a phrase bashed into me early on during my training. I had broken it once and suffered the consequences – I didn't want to do it again.

  'I need to speak to Mr Johnson,' I yelled, keeping an eye on McNeil, who was still some way distant.

  'No one speaks to Mr Johnson less Mr Johnson says so,' replied the voice, 'but if you'll be offerin’ an amnesty, he'll take it and promise not to eat no more people.'

  'Was that a double negative?' whispered Bradshaw with disdain. 'I do so hate them.'

  'No deal unless I meet Mr Johnson first!' I yelled back.

  'Then there's no deal!' came the reply.

  I looked out again and saw three more gunmen appear. The Minotaur had clearly made a lot of friends during his stay in the Western genre.

  'We need back-up,' I murmured.

  Bradshaw clearly thought the same. He opened his TravelBook and pulled out something that looked a little like a flare gun. This was a textmarker, which could be used to signal to other Jurisfiction agents. The TravelBook was dimensionally ambivalent; the device was actually larger than the book that contained it.

  'Jurisfiction know we're in Western Pulp; they just don't know where. I'll send them a signal.'

  He dialled in the sort of textmark he was going to place using a knob on the back of the gun, then moved to the door, aimed the marker into the air and fired. There was a dull thud and the projectile soared into the sky. It exploded noiselessly high above us and for an instant I could see the text of the page in a light grey against the blue of the sky. The words were back to front, of course, and as I looked at Bradshaw's copy of Death at Double-X Ranch I noticed the written word 'ProVIDence' had been partially capitalised. Help would soon arrive – a show of force would deal with the gunman. The problem was, would the Minotaur make a run for it or fight it out to the end?

  'Purty fireworks don't scare us, missy,' said the voice again. 'You comin' out, or do wes have to come in and get yer?'

  I looked across at Bradshaw, who was smiling.

  'What?'

  'This is all quite a caper, don't you think?' said the commander, chuckling like a schoolboy who had just been caught scrumping apples. 'Much more fun than hunting elephant, wrestling lions to the ground and returning tribal knick-knacks stolen by unscrupulous foreigners.'

  'I used to think so,' I said under my breath. Two years of assignments like these had been enjoyable and challenging, but not without their moments of terror, uncertainty and panic – and I had a two-year-old son who needed more attention than I could give him. The pressure of running Jurisfiction had been building for a long time now and I needed a break in the real world – a long one. I had felt it about six months before, just after the adventure that came to be known as The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, but had shrugged it off. Now the feeling was back – and stronger.

  A low, deep rumble began somewhere overhead. The windows rattled in their frames and dust fell from the rafters. A crack opened up in the plaster and a cup vibrated off the table to break on the floor. One of the windows shattered and a shadow fell across the street. The deep rumble grew in volume, drowned out the Narrative Proximity Device that was wailing plaintively, then became so loud it didn't seem like a sound at all – just a vibration that shook the sheriff's office so strongly my sight blurred. Then, as the clock fell from the wall and smashed into pieces, I realised what was going on.

  'Oh . . . NO!' I howled with annoyance as the noise waned to a dull roar. 'Talk about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut!'

  'Emperor Zhark?' queried Bradshaw.

  'Who else would dare pilot a Zharkian Battle Cruiser into Western Pulp?'

  We looked outside as the vast spaceship passed overhead, its vectored thrusters swivelling downward with a hot rush of concentrated power that blew up a gale of dust and debris and set the livery stables on fire. The huge bulk of the battle cruiser hovered for a moment as the landing gear unfolded, then made a delicate touchdown – right on top of McNeil and his horse, who were squashed to the thickness of a ha'penny.

  My shoulders sagged as I watched my paperwork increase exponentially. The townsfolk ran around in panic and horses bolted as the A-7 gunmen fired pointlessly at the ship's armoured hull. Within a few moments the interstellar battle cruiser had disgorged a small army of foot-soldiers carrying the very latest Zharkian weaponry. I groaned. It was not unusual for the emperor to go overboard at moments like this. Undisputed villain of the eight 'Emperor Zhark' books, the most feared Tyrannical God-Emperor of the known Galaxy just didn't seem to comprehend the meaning of restraint.

  In a few minutes it was all over. The A-7s had either been killed or escaped to their own books, and the Zharkian Marine Corps had been dispatched to find the Minotaur. I could have saved them the trouble. He would be long gone. The A-7s and McNeil would have to be sourced and replaced, the whole book rejigged to remove the twenty-sixth-century battle cruiser that had arrived uninvited into 1875 Nebraska. It was a flagrant breach of the Anti-Cross-Genre Code that we attempted to uphold within fiction. I wouldn't have minded so much if this had been an isolated incident, but Zhark did this too often to be ignored. I could hardly control myself as the emperor descended from his starship with an odd entourage of aliens and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, who also worked for Jurisfiction.

  'WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE PLAYING AT?!?'

  'Oh!' said the emperor, taken aback at my annoyance, 'I thought you'd be pleased to see us!'

  'The situation was bad but not irredeemable,' I told him, sweeping my arm in the direction of the town. 'Now look what you've done!'

  He looked around. The confused townsfolk had started to emerge from the remains of the buildings. Nothing so odd as this had happened in Western since an alien brain-sucker had escaped from SF and been caught inside Wild Horse Mesa.

  'You do this to me every time! Have you no conception of stealth and subtlety?'

  'Not really,' said the emperor, looking at his hands nervously. 'Sorry.'

  His alien entourage, not wanting to hang around in case they also got an earful, walked, slimed or hovered back into Zhark's ship.

  'You sent a textmarker—'

  'So what if we did? Can't you enter a book without destroying everything in sight?'

  'Steady on, Thursday,' said Bradshaw, laying a calming hand on my arm, 'we did ask for assistance, and if old Zharky here was the closest, you can't blame him for wanting to help. After all, when you consider that he usually lays waste to entire galaxies, torching just the town of ProVIDence and not the whole of Nebraska was actually quite an achievement . . .' His voice trailed off before he added: '. . . for him.'

  'AHHH!' I yelled in frustration, holdi
ng my head. 'Sometimes I think I'm—'

  I stopped. I lost my temper now and again, but rarely with my colleagues, and when that happens, things are getting bad. When I started this job it was great fun, as it still was for Bradshaw. But just lately the enjoyment had waned. It was no good. I'd had enough. I needed to go home.

  'Thursday?' asked Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, concerned by my sudden silence. 'Are you okay?'

  She came too close and spined me with one her quills. I yelped and rubbed my arm while she jumped back and hid a blush. Six-foot-high hedgehogs have their own brand of etiquette.

  'I'm fine,' I replied, dusting myself down. 'It's just that things have a way of, well, spiralling out of control.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'What do I mean? What do I mean? Well, this morning I was tracking a mythological beast using a trail of custard pie incidents across the old West, and this afternoon a battle cruiser from the twenty-sixth century lands in ProVIDence, Nebraska. Doesn't that sound sort of crazy?'

  'This is fiction,' replied Zhark in all innocence, 'odd things are meant to happen.'