“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.

  “Where did you get these, then?”

  He was silent, and I backed off a few yards before telling him to turn slowly around and face me.

  “Now,” I said, “let’s have some answers: You’re too mediocre to have hatched this yourself, so you’re working for someone. Who is it?”

  Felix8 gave no answer, and the airship banked slightly as it made a trifling correction to its course. The aluminum-framed door to the exterior promenade walkway swung open and then clattered shut again. It was dusk, and two miles below, the small orange jewels that were the streetlights had begun to wink on.

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s the deal: You tell me what you know and I’ll let you go. Play the hard man and it’s a one-way trip to the Text Sea. Understand?”

  “I’ve only eighteen words and one scene,” he said at last. “One lousy scene! Do you have any idea what that’s like?”

  “It’s the hand you were dealt,” I told him, “the job you do. You can’t change that. Again: Who sent you into the Outland to kill me?”

  He stared at me without emotion. “And I would have done it, too, if it wasn’t for that idiot stalker. Mind you, Johnson blew it as well, so I’m in good company.”

  This was more worrying. “Mr. Johnson” was the pseudonym used by the Minotaur—and he’d referred to my murder as “a job,” so this looked to be better organized than I’d thought.

  “Who ordered my death? And why me?”

  Felix8 smiled. “You do flatter yourself, Ms. Next. You’re not the only one they want, you’re not the only one they’ll get. And now I shall take my leave of you.”

  He moved toward the exterior door that clattered in the breeze, opened it and stepped out onto the exterior promenade. I ran forward and yelled “Hold it!”—but it was too late. With a swing of his leg, Felix8 slipped neatly over the rail and went tumbling off into space. I ran to the rail and looked down. Already he was a small figure spiraling slowly downward as the airship droned on. I felt a curious sickly feeling as he became nothing more than a small dot and then disappeared from view.

  “Damn!” I shouted, and slapped the parapet with my palm. I took a deep breath, went inside out of the chill wind, pulled out my mobilefootnoterphone and pressed the speed-dial connection to the Cheshire Cat, who had assumed command of Text Grand Central.

  1

  “Chesh, it’s Thursday.”

  2

  “I’ve lost a C-3 generic Felix8 from page two hundred and seventy-eight of The Eyre Affair, ISBN 0-14-200180-5. I’m going to need an emergency replacement ASAP.”

  3

  “No.”

  4

  “Blast,” I muttered. “Can you find out who’s been dicking around with the Textual Sieves and get it lifted? I’ve no urge to hang around a cold airship for any longer than I have to.”

  5

  I told him that I’d be fine if he’d just call me back when the sieve was lifted, then snapped the phone shut. I pulled my jacket up around my neck and stamped my feet to keep warm. I leaned against an aluminum girder and stared out at the mauve twilight, where even now I could see stars begin to appear. Felix8 would have hit the ground so hard his text would have fused with the surrounding description; when we found him, we’d have to cut him from the earth. Either way he’d not be doing any talking.

  I started thinking of people who might want me to kill me but stopped counting when I reached sixty-seven. This would be harder than I thought. But…what did Felix8 say: that I shouldn’t flatter myself…it wasn’t just me? The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed, until suddenly, with a flash of realization, I knew what was going on. Sherlock Holmes, Temperance Brennan, the Good Soldier Svejk and myself—kill us and you kill not just the individual, but the series. It seemed too bizarre to comprehend, but it had to be the truth—there was a serial killer loose in the BookWorld.

  I looked around the airship, and my heart fell. They’d tried to kill me twice already, and who was to say they wouldn’t try again? And here I was, trapped ten thousand feet in the air by a Textual Sieve that no one had ordered, hanging beneath 20 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. I pulled out my cell phone and hurriedly redialed the cat.

  6

  “No questions, Chesh—I need a parachute and I need it now.”

  As if in answer, there was a bright flare from the rear of the airship as a small charge exploded in one of the gas cells. Within a second this had ignited the cell next to it, and I could see the bright flare arc out into the dusk; the airship quivered gently and started to drop at the stern as it lost lift.

  “I need that parachute!” I yelled into my phone as a third gas cell erupted, vaporizing the fabric covering and sending a shower of sparks out either side of the craft. The tail-down attitude increased as the fourth gas cell erupted, followed quickly by the fifth and sixth, and I grabbed a handrail to steady myself.

  “Goddamn it!” I yelled to no one in par tic ular. “How hard can it be to get a parachute around here?!” The airship trembled again as another explosion ripped through the envelope, and with an unpleasant feeling of lightness I felt the craft very slowly begin to fall. As I looked down to see where we were heading and how fast, twelve parachutes of varying styles, colors and vintage appeared in front of me. I grabbed the most modern-looking, stepped into the leg straps and quickly pulled it onto my back as the ship was again rocked by a series of explosions. I clicked the catch on the front of the webbing and without even pausing for breath, leaped over the rail and out into the cold evening air. There was a sudden sense of rapid acceleration, and I tumbled for a while, eventually coming to rest on my back, the air rushing past me, flapping my clothes and tugging at my hair. Far above me the airship was now a chrysanthemum of fire that looked destructively elegant, and from even this distance I could feel the heat on my face. As the airship grew smaller, I snapped out of my reverie and looked for a toggle or something to deploy the chute. I found it across my chest and pulled as hard as I could. Nothing happened for a moment, and I was just thinking that the chute had failed when there was a whap and a jerk as it opened. But before I had even begun to sigh with relief, there was a thump as I landed on the ground, bounced twice and ended up inside the lines and the canopy, which billowed around me. I scrambled clear, released the harness, pulled out my phone and pressed the speed dial for Bradshaw, running as fast as I could across the empty and undescribed land as the flaming hulk of the airship fell slowly and gracefully in the evening sky, the blackened skeleton of the stricken ship silhouetted dark against the orange fireball above it, an angry flaming mass that even now was beginning to spread to the fabric of the book, as the clouds and sky started to glow with the green iridescence of text before it spontaneously combusts.

  “It’s Thursday,” I panted, running to get clear of the airship before it hit the ground, “and I think we’ve got a situation….”

  My Thanks to:

  My very dear Lipali Mari Roberts, for countless hours of research, assistance and for looking after her writer and partner in the throes of creation. I hope that in the fullness of time I might do the same for her.

  Molly Stern and Carolyn Mays, the finest editors in the galaxy, to whom I am always grateful for support and guidance. And by extension, to the hordes of unsung heroes and heroines at Hodder and Penguin who diligently support and promote me and my work.

  My grateful thanks goes to Kathy Reichs for allowing Dr. Temperance Brennan to make a guest appearance in this book.

  Jordan Fforde, my own teenage son, who is a fine, upstanding young man and displays nothing like the worst excesses of Friday’s idleness, and who served only vaguely as any sort of reference material.

  Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis of Portland, Oregon, for their outstanding artwork completed in record time and with an understanding of the author’s brief that left me breathless. Further examples of their work and contact details for commissions can be found at www.thequirkybird.com (Dylan) and www.excelsiorstudios.net (Bill).

  Professor John Sutherland for his Puzzles in Fiction series of books, which continue to fascinate and inspire.

  The Paragon tearooms exist in the same or greater splendor in which they are referred to in the pages of this novel. They can be found on the main street of Katoomba, in the Blue Mountain region of New South Wales, Australia, and no visit to the area would be complete without your attendance. Who knows—you may even see a giant hedgehog and a tyrannical leader of the known universe sharing a booth and discussing Irritable Vowel Syndrome in hushed tones.

  This novel was written in BOOK V8.3 and was sequenced using a Mark XXIV ImaginoTransferenceRecording Device. Harley Farley was the imaginator. Generics supplied and trained by St. Tabularasa’s. Holes were filled by apprentices at the HoleSmiths’ Guild, and echolocation and postcreative grammatization was undertaken by Outland contractors at Hodder and Penguin.

  The “Galactic Cleansing” policy carried out by Emperor Zhark is a personal vision of the emperor’s, and its inclusion in this work does not constitute tacit approval by the author or the publisher for any such projects, howsoever conducted.

  Thursday Next will return in:

  The War of the Words

  or

  Last Among Prequels

  or

  Apocalypse Next

  or

  Dark Reading Matter

  or

  Paragraph Lost

  or

  Herrings Red

  or

  The Palimpsest of Dr. Caligari

  or

  The Legion of the Danvers

  or

  Some Other Title Entirely

  1. “Thursday Next!”

  2. “Miss Next—hello? Testing testing. One, two, three.”

  3. “If you’re busy, Ms. Next, we can talk later.”

  4. “The name is Snell, Akrid Snell. Who was that disturbingly attractive woman in the tight pink—”

  5. “Really? Is she married?”

  6. “Sorry. Should have said. I’m the defense attorney assigned to your case.”

  7. “Of course not! That’s our defense strategy in a nutshell. You are completely innocent. If we can convince the examining magistrate we can probably get a postponement.”

  8. “Miss Next, I’m so sorry, I had to take a call. Portia again; she wanted to discuss the timing of her ‘drop of blood’ defense. Bit of a feisty one, that. Your hearing is next Thursday—so be prepared!”

  9. “That’s good, Thursday. Can I call you Thursday? Keep up that sort of wide-eyed innocent babe-in-the-woods stuff and we’ll have you off the hook quicker than you can say verruca.”

  10. “I’ll explain it all when we meet. Sorry to have to communicate with you in footnotes but I’m due in court in ten minutes. Don’t speak to anyone at all about the case and I’ll see you on Thursday, Thursday. That’s quite funny, that. ‘Thursday . . . Thursday.’ Hmm. Maybe not. Got to go. Remember: Speak to no one about the case, and if you have a moment, see if you can find out anything about that Flakk girl’s domestic arrangements. Well, chin-chin and toodle-pip.”

  1. “Thursday, for heaven’s sake what have you done?!”

  2. “I told you not to talk to anyone about your case!”

  3. “How can I be expected to help you if you go and blab everything to the prosecution?”

  4. “Why Hopkins, you idiot! You pretty much confessed there and then on your own doorstep. This is going to really screw things up for us. Don’t speak to anyone about anything, for Christ’s sake—do you want to spend the next thousand readings imprisoned in Castle Doubting or something?”

  5. “No time. I’ll speak to you before we go in to court. Remember: Don’t talk to anyone at all about the case. By the way, did you manage to find anything out about that delightfully odd Flakk girlie?”

  6. “Really? That is interesting news. Well, must dash. Pip pip.”

  1. “Miss Next? Havisham speaking!”

  2. “I hope you didn’t say what I thought I heard you say!”

  3. “I am here, young lady, but I am shocked by your coarse language!”

  4. “Really? Well, I will not hear it from my apprentices. But I forgive you, I suppose. I need you to attend to me right now. Norland Park, Chapter Five, paragraph one—you’ll find it in the travelbook Mrs. Nakajima left for you.”

  1. “Loud and clear, whiskers pressed, fed and watered, boots on and laced, ready to—”

  2. “Not yet—none of the names appear in the register of fictioneers— I’m just going through the reams of unpublished characters from the Well of Lost Plots—it might take some time.”

  3. “I hope I’m mistaken but you’ve got the Questing Beast approaching from the southeast—one hundred yards and closing.”

  4.“He’s in Middlemarch at the moment. I’ll try him on the footnoterphone—but you know how deaf he is.”

  5. “He’s not answering. Do you know, this reminds me of the time the Demogorgon met Medusa in the 1923 Miss Loathsome competition—”

  6. “Coming up!”

  7. “Any second now, Tweedy.”

  1. “. . . This is WOLP-12 on the Well of Lost Plots’ own footnoterphone station, transmitting live on the hour every hour to keep you up-to-date with news in the Fiction Factory . . .”

  2. “. . . After the headlines you can hear our weekly documentary show WellSpeak, where today we will discuss hiding exposition; following that there will be a WellNews special on the launch of the new Book Operating System, UltraWord™, featuring a live studio debate with WordMaster Xavier Libris of Text Grand Central . . .”

  3. “. . . here are the main points of the news. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index. The Council of Genres has announced the nominations for the 923rd annual BookWorld Awards; Heathcliff is once again to head the Most Troubled Romantic Lead category, for the seventy-eighth year running . . .”

  4. “. . . A new epic poem is to be constructed for the first time in eighty-seven years. Title and subject to be announced, but pundits reckon that it’s a pointless exercise: skills have all but died out. Next week will also see the launch of a new shopping chain offering off-the-peg narrative requisites. It will be called Prêt-à-Écrire . . .”

  1. “. . . Visit Aaron’s Assorted Alliteration Annex, the superior sellers of stressed-syllable or similar-sounding speech sequences since the sixteenth century. Stop soon and see us situated on floor sixteen, shelf six seventy-six . . .”

  2. “. . . Visit Bill’s Dictionorium for every word you’ll ever need! From be to antidisestablishmentarianism, we have words to suit all your plotting needs—floor twelve, shelf seventy-eight . . .”

  3. “. . . Soon to be launched: Ultra Word™—the ultimate reading experience. For free information on the very latest Book Operating System and how its new and improved features will enhance your new book, call Text Grand Central on freefootnoterphone/ultraword . . .”