First Among Sequels Read online

  “Already done,” he said, and before I could make up an excuse, he passed me a clipboard full of addresses and contact names.

  “Good,” I muttered, “very efficient—nice job.”

  I took my coffee and walked to my own office, a small and windowless room next to the forklift-recharging point. I sat at my desk and stared despondently at the list Bowden had given me, then rocked back and forth on my chair in an absent mood. Stig had been right. I should tell Landen about what I got up to, but life was better with him thinking I was working at Acme. Besides, running several illegal SpecOps departments wasn’t all I did. It was…well, the tip of a very large and misshapen iceberg.

  I got up, took off my jacket and was about to change into more comfortable clothes when there was another tap at the door. I opened it to reveal a large and muscular man a few years younger than myself and looking even more incongruous in his Acme Carpets uniform than I looked in mine—although I doubted that anyone would ever try to tell him so. He had long dreadlocks that reached almost to his waist and were tied back in a loose hair band, and he was wearing a liberal amount of jewelry, similar to the sort that Goths are fond of—skulls, bats, things like that. But it wasn’t for decoration—it was for protection. This was ex–SO-17 operative “Spike” Stoker, the most successful vampire staker and werewolf hunter in the Southwest, and although no friend of the undead, he was a friend of mine.

  “Happy birthday, bookworm,” he said genially. “Got a second?”

  I looked at my watch. I was late for work. Not carpet work, of course, since I was already there, but work work.

  “Is it about health and safety?”

  “No, this is important and relevant.”

  He led the way to the other side of the storeroom, just next to where we kept the adhesive, tacks and grippers. We entered a door hidden behind a poster for Brinton’s Carpets and took a small flight of steps down to the level below. Spike opened a sturdy door with a large brass key, and we stepped into what I described as the “Containment Suite” but what Spike referred to as the “Weirdshitorium.” His appraisal was better. Our work took us to the very limits of credibility—to a place where even the most stalwart conspiracy theorists would shake their heads and remark sarcastically, “Oh, yeah…right.” When we were SpecOps, we had secrecy, manpower, budget and unaccountability to help us do the job. Now we had just secrecy, complimentary tea and cookies and a big brass key. It was here that Stig kept his creatures until he decided what to do with them and where Spike incarcerated any of the captured undead for observation—in case they were thinking of becoming either nearly dead or mostly dead. Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable.

  We passed a cell that was full of gallon-size glass jars containing captured Supreme Evil Beings. They were small, wraithlike objects about the size and texture of well-used dish cloths, only less substantial, and they spent most of the time bickering over who was the most supreme Supreme Evil Being. But we weren’t here to bother with SEBs; Spike led me on to a cell right at the end of the corridor and opened the door. Sitting on a chair in the middle of the room was a man in jeans and a plain leather jacket. He was staring at the floor with the light on above, so I couldn’t at first see his face, and his large and well-manicured hands were clenched tightly in front of him. I also noticed that his ankle was attached to the floor by a sturdy chain. I winced. Spike would have to be right about this one—imprisonment of something actually human was definitely illegal and could be seriously bad for business.

  “Hey!” said Spike and the figure slowly raised his head to look at me. I recognized him instantly and not without a certain degree of alarm. It was Felix8, Acheron Hades’ henchman from way back in the days of the Jane Eyre adventure. Hades had taken the face from the first Felix when he died and implanted it on a suitable stranger who’d been bent to his evil will. Whenever a Felix died, which was quite often, he just swapped the face. Felix8’s real name was Danny Chance, but his freewill had been appropriated by Hades—he was merely an empty vessel, devoid of pity or morals. His life had no meaning other than to do his master’s bidding. The point now was, his master had died sixteen years ago, and the last time I saw Felix8 was at the Penderyn Hotel in Merthyr, the capital of the Welsh Socialist Republic.

  Felix8 looked at me with a slight sense of amusement and gave a subtle nod of greeting.

  “Where did you find him?” I asked.

  “Outside your place half an hour ago. He had this on him.” Spike showed me an ugly-looking machine pistol with a delicately carved stock. “There was a single round in the chamber.”

  I bent down to Felix8’s level and stared at him for a moment. “Who sent you?”

  Felix8 smiled, said nothing and looked at the chain that was firmly clasped around his ankle.

  “What do you want?”

  Still Felix8 said nothing.

  “Where have you been these past sixteen years?”

  All my questions were met with blank insolence, and after five minutes of this I walked back outside the cell block, Spike at my side.

  “Who reported him?” I asked.

  “Your stalker—what’s his name again?”

  “Millon.”

  “Right. He thought Felix8 might have been another stalker and was going to warn him off, but when he noticed the absence of notebooks, cameras or even a duffel coat, he called me.”

  I thought for a moment. If Felix8 was back on my trail, then somebody in the Hades family was looking for revenge—and they were big on revenge. I’d had run-ins with the Hades family before, and I thought they’d learned their lesson by now. I had personally defeated Acheron, Aornis and Cocytus, which left only Lethe and Phlgethon. Lethe was the “white sheep” of the family and spent most of his time doing charity work, which left only Phlgethon, who had dropped off the radar in the mid-nineties, despite numerous manhunts by SO-5 and myself.

  “What do you suggest?” I asked. “He doesn’t fall into any of the categories that might ethically give us a reason to keep him under lock and key without trial of some sort. After all, he’s only wearing the face of Felix—under there he’s an erased Danny Chance, married father of two who went missing in 1985.”

  “I agree we can’t keep him,” replied Spike, “but if we let him go he’ll just try to kill you.”

  “I live to be over a hundred,” I murmured. “I know—I’ve met the future me.”

  It was said without much conviction. I’d seen enough of time’s paradoxical nature to know that meeting the future me wasn’t any guarantee of a long life.

  “We’ll keep him for twenty-four hours,” I announced. “I’ll make a few inquiries and see if I can figure out which Hades is involved—if any. He might be simply trying to carry out the last order he was given. After all, he was under orders to kill me, but no one said anything about when.”

  “Thursday…?” began Spike in a tone that I recognized and didn’t like.

  “No,” I said quickly. “Out of the question.”

  “The only reason he’d mind being killed,” said Spike in an annoyingly matter-of-fact way, “is that it would mean he failed to carry out his mission—to kill you.”

  “I hear you, Spike, but he’s done nothing wrong. Give me a day, and if I can’t find anything, we’ll hand him over to Braxton.”

  “Okay, then,” replied Spike, with a sulky air of disappointment.

  “Another thing,” I said as we returned to the carpet storeroom. “My uncle Mycroft has returned as a ghost.”

  “It happens,” replied Spike with a shrug. “Did he seem substantial?”

  “As you or I.”

  “How long was he materialized for?”

  “Seven minutes, I guess.”

  “Then you got him at first haunting. First-timers are always the most solid.”

  “That might be so, but I’d like to know why.”

  “I’m owed a few favors by the Realm of the De
ad,” he said offhandedly, “so I can find out. By the way, have you told Landen about all this crazy SpecOps shit?”

  “I’m telling him this evening.”

  “Sure you are.”

  I walked back to my office, locked the door and changed out of the less-than-appealing Acme Carpets uniform and put on something more comfortable. I would have to speak to Aornis Hades about Felix8, but she would probably tell me to go and stick it in my ear—after all, she was seven years into a thirty-year enloopment based on my testimony, and yours truly was unlikely to fill her evil little soul with any sort of heartwarming benevolence.

  I finished lacing my boots, locked the door, refilled my water bottle and placed it in the shoulder bag. Acme Carpets might have been a cover for my clandestine work at SpecOps, but this itself was cover for another job that only Bowden knew about. If Landen found out about SpecOps, he’d be annoyed—if he found out about Jurisfiction, he’d go bonkers. Not long after the Minotaur’s attack following the ’88 SuperHoop, Landen and I had a heart-to-heart where I told him I was giving up Jurisfiction—my primary duty being wife and mother. And so it was agreed. Unfortunately, my other primary duty was to fiction—the make-believe. Unable to reconcile the two, I did both and lied a bit—well, a lot, actually—to plaster over the gaping crack in my loyalties. It wasn’t with an easy or light heart, but it had worked for the past fourteen years. The odd thing was, Jurisfiction didn’t earn me a penny and was dangerous and wildly unpredictable. There was another reason I liked it, too—it brought me into close contact with story. It would have been easier to get a registered cheesehead off a five-times-a-day Limburger habit than to keep me away from fiction. But, hey—I could handle it.

  I sat down, took a deep breath and opened the TravelBook I kept in my bag. It had been given to me by Mrs. Nakajima many years before and was my passport in and out of the world on the other side of the printed page. I lowered my head, emptied my mind as much as possible and read from the book. The words echoed about me with a resonance that sounded like wind chimes and looked like a thousand glowworms. The room around me rippled and stretched, then returned with a twang to my office at Acme. Blast. This happened more and more often these days. I had once been a natural bookjumper, but the skill had faded with the years. I took a deep breath and tried again. The wind chimes and glowworms returned, and once more the room distorted around me like a barrel, then faded from view to be replaced by a kaleidoscope of images, sounds and emotions as I jumped through the boundary that separates the real from the written, the actual from the fable. With a rushing sound like distant waterfalls and a warm sensation that felt like hot rain and kittens, I was transported from Acme Carpets in Swindon to the entrance hallway of a large Georgian country house.

  4.

  Jurisfiction

  Jurisfiction is the name given to the policing agency within books. Working with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of Text Grand Central, the Prose Resource Operatives at Jurisfiction work tirelessly to maintain the continuity of the narrative within the pages of all the books ever written, a sometimes thankless task. Jurisfiction agents live mostly on their wits as they attempt to reconcile the author’s original wishes and the reader’s expectations against a strict and largely pointless set of bureaucratic guidelines laid down by the Council of Genres.

  I t was a spacious hallway, with deep picture windows that afforded a fine view of the extensive parklands beyond the gravel drive and perfectly planted flower beds. Inside, the walls were hung with delicate silks, the woodwork shone brightly, and the marble floor was so polished I could see myself in it. I quickly drank a pint of water, as the bookjumping process could leave me dangerously dehydrated these days, and dialed TransGenre Taxis on my mobilefootnoterphone to order a cab in a half hour’s time, since they were always busy and it paid to book ahead. I then looked around cautiously. Not to check for impending danger, as this was the peaceful backstory of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. No, I was making quite sure my current Jurisfiction Cadet wasn’t anywhere in sight. My overriding wish at present was not to have to deal with her until roll call had finished.

  “Good morning, ma’am!” she said, appearing in front of me so abruptly I almost cried out. She spoke in the overeager manner of the terminally keen, a trait that began to annoy soon after I’d agreed to assess her suitability, twenty-four hours before.

  “Do you have to jump in so abruptly?” I asked her. “You nearly gave me a heart attack!”

  “Oh! I’m sorry. But I did bring you some breakfast.”

  “Well, in that case…” I looked into the bag she handed me and frowned. “Wait a minute—that doesn’t look like a bacon sandwich.”

  “It isn’t. It’s a crispy lentil cake made with soy milk and bean curd. It cleanses the bowels. Bacon definitely will give you a heart attack.”

  “How thoughtful of you,” I remarked sarcastically. “The body is a temple, right?”

  “Right. And I didn’t get you coffee because it raises blood pressure. I got you this beetroot-and-edelweiss energy drink.”

  “What happened to the squid ink and hippopotamus milk?”

  “They were out.”

  “Look,” I said, handing back the lentil animal-feed thing and the drink, “tomorrow is the third and last day of your assessment, and I haven’t yet made up my mind. Do you want to be a Jurisfiction agent?”

  “More than anything.”

  “Right. So if you want me to sign you out for advanced training, you’re going to have to do as you’re told. If that means killing a grammasite, recapturing an irregular verb, dressing Quasimodo or even something as simple as getting me coffee and a bacon roll, then that’s what you’ll do. Understand?”

  “Sorry,” she said, adding as an afterthought, “Then I suppose you don’t want this?” She showed me a small lump of quartz crystal.

  “What do I do with it?”

  “You wear it. It can help retune your vibrational energy system.”

  “The only energy system I need right now is a bacon roll. You might be a veggie, but I’m not. I’m not you—you’re a version of me. You might be into tarot and yogurt and vitamins and standing naked in the middle of crop circles with your eyes closed and your palms facing skyward, but don’t think that I am as well, okay?”

  She looked crestfallen, and I sighed. After all, I felt kind of responsible. Since I’d made it into print, I’d been naturally curious about meeting the fictional me, but I’d never entertained the possibility that she might want to join Jurisfiction. But here she was—the Thursday Next from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. It was mildly spooky at first, because she wasn’t similar just in the way that identical twins are similar, but physically indistinguishable from me. Stranger still, despite Pepys Fiasco’s being set six years before, she looked as old as my fifty-two years. Every crag and wrinkle, even the flecks of gray hair I pretended I didn’t care about. For all intents and purposes, she was me. But only, I was at pains to point out, in facial appearance. She didn’t act or dress like me; her clothes were more earthy and sustainable. Instead of my usual jeans, shirt and jacket, she wore a naturally dyed cotton skirt and a homespun crocheted pullover. She carried a shoulder bag of felt instead of my Billingham, and in place of the scarlet scrunchie holding my ponytail in place, hers was secured with a strip of hemp cloth tied in a neat bow. It wasn’t by accident. After I had endured the wholly unwarranted aggression of the first four Thursday books, I’d insisted that the fifth reflect my more sensitive nature. Unfortunately, they took me a little too seriously, and Thursday5 was the result. She was sensitive, caring, compassionate, kind, thoughtful—and unreadable. The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco sold so badly it was remaindered within six months and never made it to paperback, something I was secretly glad of. Thursday5 might have remained in unreadable retirement, too, but for her sudden wish to join Jurisfiction and “do her bit,” as she called it. She’d passed her written tests and basic training and was now with me for a three-day as
sessment. It hadn’t gone that well—she was going to have to do something pretty dramatic to redeem herself.

  “By the way,” I said as I had an unrelated thought, “can you knit?”

  “Is this part of my assessment?”

  “A simple yes or no will suffice.”

  “Yes.”

  I handed her Pickwick’s half-knitted sweater. “You can finish this. The dimensions are on that piece of paper. It’s a cozy for a pet,” I added as Thursday5 stared at the oddly shaped stripy piece of knitting.

  “You have a deformed jellyfish for a pet?”

  “It’s for Pickwick.”

  “Oh!” said Thursday5. “I’d be delighted. I have a dodo, too—she’s called Pickwick5.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Yes—how did yours lose her plumage?”

  “It’s a long story that involves the cat next door.”

  “I have a cat next door. It’s called…now, what was her name?”

  “Cat Next Door5?” I suggested.

  “That’s right,” she said, astonished at my powers of detection. “You’ve met her, then?”

  I ignored her and pushed open the doors to the ballroom. We were just in time. The Bellman’s daily briefing was about to begin.

  Jurisfiction’s offices were in the disused ballroom of Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood’s residence of Norland Park, safely hidden in the backstory of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Wagging and perhaps jealous tongues claimed that it was for “special protection,” but I’d never seen any particular favors shown myself. The room was painted pale blue, and the walls, where not decorated with delicate plaster moldings, were hung with lavish gold-framed mirrors. It was here that we ran the policing agency that functioned within books to keep order in the dangerously flexible narrative environment. We called it Jurisfiction.

  The offices of Jurisfiction had long been settled at Norland. It had been many years since they had been used as a ballroom. The floor space was liberally covered with tables, chairs, filing cabinets and piles of paperwork. Each desk had its own brass-horned footnoterphone, a typewriter and an in-tray that always seemed larger than the out. Although electronics were a daily part of life in the real world, here in fiction there was no machine so complicated that it couldn’t be described in a line or two. It was a different story over in nonfiction, where they had advanced technology coming out of their ears—it was a matter of some pride that we were about eight times more efficient with half the workforce. I paused for a moment. Even after sixteen years, walking into the Jurisfiction offices always gave me a bit of a buzz. Silly, really, but I couldn’t help myself.