The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [748]
“This is the core-containment room,” explained Thursday. “You’d know about that if you’d listened in class.”
“How,” I asked, “is your survival a gift to me?”
“That’s easily explained,” replied Thursday, removing some pieces of packing case from the wall to reveal a riveted iron hatch. “Behind there is the only method of escape—across the emptiness of the Nothing.”
The inference wasn’t lost on me. The Nothing didn’t support textual life—I’d be stripped away to letters in an instant if I tried to escape across it. But Thursday wasn’t text: She was flesh and blood and could survive.
“I can’t get out of here on my own,” she added, “so I need your help.”
I didn’t understand to begin with. I frowned, and then it hit me. She wasn’t offering me forgiveness, a second chance or rescue—I was far too bitter and twisted for that. No, she was offering me the one thing that I would never, could never have. She was offering me redemption. After all I’d done to her, all the things I’d planned to do, she was willing to risk her life to give me one small chance to atone. And what’s more, she knew I would take it. She was right. We were more alike than I thought.
The roof fell away in patches as the erasure started to pull the containment room apart.
“What do I do?”
She indicated the twin latching mechanisms that were positioned eight feet apart. I held the handle and pulled it down on the count of three. The hatch sprung open, revealing an empty, black void.
“Thank you,” she said as the erasure crept inexorably across the room. The sum total of the book was now a disk less than eight feet across, and we were in the middle of what looked like a swirling cloud of dirt and detritus, while all about us the wind nibbled away at the remaining fabric of the book, reducing it to undescriptive textdust.
“What will it be like?” I asked as Thursday peered out into the inky blackness.
“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “No one knows what happens after erasure.”
I offered her my hand to shake. “If you ever turn this into one of your adventures,” I asked, “will you make me at least vaguely sympathetic? I’d like to think there was a small amount of your humanity in me.”
She took my hand and shook it. It was warmer than I’d imagined.
“I’m sorry about sleeping with your husband,” I added as I felt the floor grow soft beneath my feet. “And I think this is yours.”
And I gave her the locket that had come off when we fought.
As soon as Thursday1–4 returned my locket, I knew that she had finally learned something about me and, by reflection, her. She was lost and she knew it, so helping me open the hatch and handing over the locket could only be altruism—the first time she had acted thus and the last time she acted at all. I climbed partially out of the hatch into the Nothing. There was barely anything left of the book at all, just the vaguest crackle of its spark growing weaker and weaker. I was still holding Thursday1–4’s hand as I saw her body start to break up, like sandstone eroded by wind. Her hair was being whipped by the currents of air, but she looked peaceful.
She smiled and said, “I just got it.”
“Got what?”
“Something Thursday5 said about hot baths and a martini.”
Her face started to break down, and I felt her hand crumble within mine like crusty, sun-baked sand. There was almost nothing left of Fiasco at all, and it was time to go.
She smiled again, and her face fell away into dust, her hand turned to sand in mine, and the spark crackled and went out. I let go and was—
The textual world that I had become so accustomed to returned with a strange wobbling sensation. I found myself in another core-containment room pretty much identical to the first—aside from the spark, which crackled