Something rotten

'AHHH!' I yelled in frustration, holding 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.'

'Not to me,' I said with finality. 'I want to see some sort of semblance of. . . of reality in my life.'

'Reality?' echoed Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. 'You mean a place where hedgehogs don't talk or do washing?'

'But who'll run Jurisfiction?' demanded the emperor. 'You were the best we ever had!'

I shook my head, threw up my hands and walked over to where the ground was peppered with the A-7 gunman's text. I picked up a 'D' and turned it over in my hands.

'Please reconsider,' said Commander Bradshaw, who had followed me. 'I think you'll find, old girl, that reality is much overrated.'

'Not overrated enough, Bradshaw,' I replied with a shrug. 'Sometimes the top job isn't the easiest one.'

'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,' murmured Bradshaw, who probably understood me better than most. He and his wife were the best friends I had in the BookWorld; Mrs Bradshaw and my son were almost inseparable.

'I knew you wouldn't stay for good,' continued Bradshaw, lowering his voice so the others didn't hear. 'When will you go?'

I shrugged.

'Soon as I can. Tomorrow.'

I looked around at the destruction that Zhark had wrought upon Death at Double- X. There would be a lot of clearing up, a mountain of paperwork — and there might be the possibility of disciplinary action if the Council of Genres got wind of what had happened.

'I suppose I should complete the paperwork on this debacle first,' I said slowly. 'Let's say three days.'

'You promised to stand in for Joan of Arc while she attended a martyrs refresher course,' added Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, who had tiptoed closer.

I'd forgotten about that.

'A week, then. I'll be off in a week.'

We all stood in silence, I pondering my return to Swindon, and all of them considering the consequences of my departure — except Emperor Zhark, who was probably thinking about invading the Planet Thraal, for fun.

'Your mind is made up?' asked Bradshaw. I nodded slowly. There were other reasons for me to return to the real world, more pressing than Zhark's gung-ho lunacy. I had a husband who didn't exist, and a son who couldn't spend his life cocooned inside books. I had retreated into the old Thursday, the one who preferred the black-and-white certainties of policing fiction to the ambiguous mid-tone greys of emotion.

'Yes, my mind's made up,' I said, smiling. I looked at Bradshaw, the emperor and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. For all their faults, I'd enjoyed working with them. It hadn't been all bad. Whilst at Jurisfiction I had seen and done things I wouldn't have believed. I'd watched grammasites in flight over the pleasure domes of Xanadu, felt the strangeness of listeners glittering on the dark stair. I had cantered bareback on unicorns through the leafy forests of Zenobia and played chess with Ozymandias, the King of Kings. I had flown with Biggies on the Western Front, locked cutlasses with Long John Silver and explored the path not taken to walk upon England's mountains green. But despite all these moments of wonder and delight, my heart belonged back home in Swindon and to a man named Landen Parke-Laine. He was my husband, the father of my son, he didn't exist, and I loved him.

2 No Place Like Home

'Swindon, Wessex, England, was the place I was born and where I lived until I left to join the literary detectives in London. I returned ten years later and married my former boyfriend, Landen Parke- Laine. He was subsequently murdered at the age of two by the Goliath Corporation, who had decided to blackmail me. It worked, I helped them — but I didn't get my husband back. Oddly, I kept his son, my son, Friday — it was one of those quirky time-travel paradoxical things that my father understands but I don't. Two years farther on Landen was still dead, and unless I did something about it soon, he might remain that way for ever.'

THURSDAY NEXT — Thursday Next, a Life in SpecOps

It was a bright and clear morning in mid-July two weeks later when I found myself on the corner of Broome Manor Lane in Swindon, on the opposite side of the road to my mother's house, with a toddler in a pushchair, two dodos, the Prince of Denmark, an apprehensive heart and hair cut way too short. The Council of Genres hadn't taken the news of my resignation very well. In fact, they refused to accept it at all and gave me instead unlimited leave, in the somewhat deluded hope that I might return if actualising my husband 'didn't work out'. They also suggested I might like to deal with escaped fictionaut Yorrick Kaine, someone with whom I had crossed swords twice in the past.

Hamlet had been a late addition to my plans. Increasingly concerned over reports that he was being misrepresented as something of a 'ditherer' in the Outland, he had requested leave to see for himself. This was unusual in that fictional characters are rarely troubled by public perception, but Hamlet would worry about having nothing to worry about if he had nothing to worry about, and since he was the indisputable star of the Shakespeare canon and had lost the 'Most Troubled Romantic Lead' crown to Heathcliff once again at this year's BookWorld awards, the Council of Genres thought they should do something to appease him. Besides, Jurisfiction had been trying to persuade him to police Elizabethan drama since Sir John Falstaff retired on grounds of 'good health', and a trip to the Outland, it was thought, might persuade him.

'’Tis very strange!' he murmured, staring at the sun, trees, houses and traffic in turn. 'It would take a rhapsody of wild and whirling words to do justice to all that I witness!'

'You're going to have to speak English out here.'

'All this,' explained Hamlet, waving his hands at the fairly innocuous Swindon street, 'would take millions of words to describe correctly!'

'You're right. It would. That's the magic of the book ImaginoTransference technology,' I told him. 'A few dozen words conjure up an entire picture. But in all honesty the reader does most of the work.'

'The reader? What's it got to do with them?'

'Well, each interpretation of an event, setting or character is unique to the person who reads it because they clothe the author's description with the memory of their own experiences. Every character they read is actually a complex amalgam of people that they've met, read or seen before — far more real than it can ever be just from