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By Root 796 0

amount of grunting and swearing and finally made my way to the taxi and peered in. The rear door was open and the empty backseat scattered with papers, mostly about the geology under Racy Novel. The Mediocre Gatsby was still sitting in the front seat, impaled on the steering column. He had been killed by a bad case of selective nostalgia. For some peculiar reason, all TransGenre Taxis were modeled on the 1950s yellow Checker Cab design, at a time when safety standards were nonexistent and fatal accidents embraced by Detroit with an alarming level of indifference. The “hose down the dash and sell it to the next man” attitude pervaded all the way into the BookWorld, and not without good reason. In here there was always a battle between nostalgia and safety, and nostalgia usually won.

I stood up, pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and tried to think what might have happened. As I stared in turn at the taxi, the empty backseat and the remains of Mediocre Gatsby, I suddenly had a thought: The rear door had been open when I got here. I looked around to see where I might have gone if I’d found myself unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a rainy swamp at night, possibly injured and very alone. I took the most obvious way out of the marsh and managed to find a path to higher ground. I followed the trail as best as I could, and after stumbling through the forest for a few hundred yards in a generally uphill direction I came across a doorway in a high brick wall, upon the top of which were the remains of a corroded electrified fence. Attached to the brick wall was a weathered wooden board telling me to keep away from THE WILFRED D. AKRON HOME FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE.

If I had been real, I would doubtless have been more nervous than I was, but this was Psychological Thriller, and secure hospitals for the criminally insane were pretty much a dime a dozen, and rarely secure. I found myself in a small and very overgrown graveyard, the lichen-encrusted stones leaning with a frightening level of apparent randomness. I moved through the graveyard towards a mausoleum built of brick and stone but in an advanced state of decay. If I had crash-landed here in the taxi, this is where I would have sought shelter.

The double doors were bronze, heavy and streaked green with age. There was a hole about three feet wide in the middle, so both doors looked as though they had a semicircle cut from each. My foot knocked against something. It was Thursday’s well-worn pistol, her name engraved on the barrel—the hole in the locked doors had been blasted out for access. I was getting close. I carefully climbed through the hole and pushed my rain-soaked hair from my face. It was light enough to see, and below the broken skylight was a table that had once held flowers but was now a collection of dirty vases. There were a few personal items scattered about—a picture of Landen and the kids, a five-pound note, an Acme Carpets ID.

“It’s difficult to know sometimes who you are, isn’t it?”

I turned to see the small figure of a girl aged no more than eight standing in a shaft of light that seemed to descend vertically from the roof.

“Hello, Jenny,” I said.

“Did anyone figure you out?” she asked. “Hiding in plain sight as the written version of you. How did the written Thursday feel about taking a backseat for a while? And where is she, by the way?”

“I’m really Thursday?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” replied Jenny with a chuckle. “Doesn’t it all seem so obvious now?”

Two days ago I might have believed her.

“No,” I replied. “You see, I spoke to Landen, and he told me I vanished from the RealWorld as a good bookperson might do, so don’t give me any of your Psychological Thriller bullshit.”

“O-o-o-kay,” said Jenny, thinking quickly, “how about this: You’re actually just witnessing—”

“Don’t even think to try Owlcreeking me. And while we’re at it, you’re not Jenny.”

“Is she giving you any trouble?” said another voice I recognized.

“A little,” said Jenny, and Sprockett—or a reasonable facsimile of him—appeared from out of the shadows. I sighed. My mother would be