Chapter 1 I''m Back I''d been gone twelve years. Too long, I thought. It was time to stretch, gather my thoughts and hop back into the fray. I didn''t know where I was headed but had confidence my Creator didn''t know either. It was better that way. Keeps us sharp. On our toes. And not in a ballet dancer sort of way.

--Thursday Next, Personal Diaries It was morning in the large manor house that we called home, a rambling and mostly rainproof Jacobean pile of rotted bricks, timbers and lime plaster held together by deluded hope and the hardened carapaces of deathwatch beetles. The ancient building had seen many wars both civil and global and had suffered badly under the hand of shifting architectural tastes, but was still charming in a how-many-times-can-I-get-lost-in-my-own-house sort of way. It had many quirks that were just curious enough to be romantic and others that were just plain vexing: a gas central heating system of such diabolical complexity that only a devil-worshipper with CORGI accreditation[1] could service, wiring that was unsafe beyond the lowest wattage bulb, plumbing that gave us water that tasted of something that wasn''t quite water and several priest holes that had a second priest hole hidden within them, so that disenfranchised priests whose doctrines were separated only by a comma within the scriptures would not have to suffer a crisis of theological disharmony. The toast popped up and I spread some butter on it--less than I used to--and then some bespoke marmalade I had traded with Swindon''s most exclusive marmaladia for some Welsh cheese I''d received as part of a decades-old illegal cheese deal that it would not be healthy to cancel. "Marmalade?" I said to Landen, whose turn it was not to make breakfast. "Please." Landen was my husband and father of my children, my best friend and confidant all rolled into one. I couldn''t imagine life without him, so never did.

He was ex-military like me and still very occasionally a writer. Although possessed of an odd sense of humour, as well as an increasingly age-related attention to small details, comfier shoes, and low-level outrage at the matters of everyday living, Landen was everything I could have wanted in a life partner. We knew each other so well that friends had jokingly suggested we go in for a local "Mr. and Mrs." competition. One thing led to another and before we knew it we had won the Nationals, then represented England in the World Championships only to be pipped to gold by a nauseating Swedish couple from Malmö. "Guess what?" I said. "You''re pregnant?" he said, a standard answer.

"The foetus would have a hard time finding somewhere to gestate," I replied, "so no." I paused, jamming my tongue into a hole in my jaw. "It''s this: I think I''ve lost a tooth." "Just now?" "Last night." He looked up. "How can you lose a tooth in your sleep?" "I don''t know," I said, jamming a pinky into the gap, "ik guth wafnnt her in fr morbing." "I can''t hear you, you have your finger in your mouth." "It just wasn''t there in the morning," I said, "and I didn''t find it in the bed.

Could I have swallowed it?" "Sounds more like radicalised Tooth Fairies attempting to fulfil unrealistic supply quotas." "Very funny." "If you did swallow it," he said, "it will turn up again quite soon, I suspect." He chuckled and went back to his paper. The old manor house was not all we called home. There were ninety acres of garden and mixed parkland attached to the house, with several lakes, a grotto, a cascading water feature, a temple to the Queen of the Muses, Calliope, and a real live ornamental hermit named Millon de Floss. He had managed to win an exemption from the Worshipful Grunge of Hermits to move into the house, so long as he ate only gruel, wore a flour sack and slept on boards with the window open. He promised faithfully he would do all those things, then did none of them.

"When you get your tooth back," said Landen, "will you--" "We''ll cross that bridge when we come to it, thank you." The entire property was surrounded by a high wall and security cameras, mostly to protect our daughter Tuesday''s intellectual property. She, like her great-uncle Mycroft Next, was one of the planet''s true geniuses and was always working on some exciting invention of dubious relevance but unassailable brilliance. When she wasn''t designing anti-smite shields to protect Mankind from a wrathful God, she was inventing an improved matchbox whose internal drawer was the right way up irrespective of the orientation of the outer cover, or formulating an advanced language model so speak-your-weight machines could understand better the concept of tact. More recently she had devised a proven method for counting hyperactive cats when their number is greater than nine, an intractable mathematical problem that had been considered unsolvable by no less a luminary than Sir Isaac Newton himself. She was currently engaged in some sort of field theory, and I don''t mean the sort of fields that have cows in them. Although with Tuesday, you never knew. "Do you want to try and choose our holiday destination again?" asked Landen once he''d taken a bite of his toast and another shlurp of coffee.

I said that I did. Our annual holiday plans generally consisted of a family trip with the kids, somewhere warm but not too warm, and sandy but not too sandy, then a shorter getaway just for the two of us--a sort of holiday holiday--where we could be ourselves and not worry about very much at all. We always planned to leave our mobiles and weapons at home and not tell anyone where we were. It never turned out that way, as adventure and intrigue seemed to follow me around like a homesick spaniel,[2] but we could at least try. "Okay then," said Landen, heaving himself to his feet. Choosing a destination for our "without kids" holiday was very simple: a single dart and a world map. Landen would pin the map to the wall and I''d simply close my eyes, throw the dart and--so long as I hit the map and not the wall, fridge or, once, Landen''s leg--we went there, or the nearest coastal destination. In this way we''d discovered out-of-the-way places we would never have found by conventional methods.

With the Gravitube''s[3] recent expansion programme, 85 percent of the planet was only twelve hours away from anywhere else. We''d dart-chosen Swakopmund once and taken the Deep Drop from Swindon''s Clary-Lamarr Travelport to Johannesburg, then an Overmantle to Windhoek and from there a bus using Namibia''s excellent public transport system and were climbing Dune 7 to watch the sun set a mere nine hours after leaving home. It was a good holiday, as I recall, despite Landen''s being briefly kidnapped by Agents of a Foreign Power and then Doncaster''s second-best assassin, who tried to kill me. While these sorts of shenanigans were generally a welcome distraction from the often suboptimal hotel entertainments such as bingo, whist drives and Mr. and Mrs. --the quiz in which we had excelled, see earlier comment--random kidnappings and attempted assassinations could be disruptive. Despite all of this, the choosing of this year''s kid-free break wasn''t going according to plan. "How many times are we going to have to do this?" asked Landen as he pinned the map on the wall and retreated to a safe distance.

"As long as it takes," I said. "If I''m going on holiday, it won''t be to Wantage." Don''t get me wrong, Wantage might be a welcome holiday destination if you live in, say Istanbul, Vancouver or even Basingstoke, where a welcome holiday destination was pretty much "anywhere that wasn''t Basingstoke." But it wasn''t to us. Wantage was only half an hour away in the car or two stops on the Monorail and we''d been there numerous times. Agreed, the town had a lot going for it: the remains of a royal palace, a thriving cinema of international renown and an intriguing local pastry known as the mufflin. It also had a Shakespeare theme park definitely worth missing and a model village that was astonishing to behold, but really only once. Recently Wantage had undeservedly become the epicentre of the increasingly popular ultra-right-wing Blyton fundamentalist movement known as Neoblytonianism , which had progressed from laughable seven-person sparkler marches to not-so-laughable five-thousand-strong torch-bearing gatherings complete with chanting, nonsensical rambling speeches and a lot of quasi-military posturing.

But on the plus side Wantage was a friendly place that possessed one of the finest antiquarian libraries and research centres in Wessex, currently host to a travelling H. G. Wells exhibition that I''d not yet seen. It was also home to a recently opened rent in the earth that looked suspiciously like a gateway to the underworld. But the problem wasn''t really Wantage, it was this: We''d already thrown three darts at the world map hoping for Majorca or Kerala or Gower but each time the dart had embedded itself in Wantage--which was both annoying and statistically speaking about as likely as having breakfast with the now very dead Lola Vavoom. I closed my eyes and threw the dart. Landen moved closer to have a look. "Hmm," he said, "Wantage again.

It''s even in the same hole." "What''s going on?" asked Tuesday, who had just walked into the kitchen. Her laboratories were in the east wing of the house and she was not averse to figuring out the answer to two or three issues that h.