“Only Friday birth-plus-two for Something Rotten.”
“Here,” I said, selecting one from the stack. “This was taken on his second birthday.”
Buñuel recoiled in shock. “What’s that strangeturbing stick-brownymass on his face? Some species of alien facehugger or somewhat?”
“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.