“I can do this!” she exclaimed.

“No,” I whispered. “Sparkle might seem like an innocuous game-show host, but he’s a potential killer.”

“I thought you said overcaution was for losers?” she returned, attempting to make up for the bacon-roll debacle. “Besides, I can look after myself.”

“Then be my guest,” I said with a smile. “Or, rather, you can be his guest.”

My namesake turned to Sparkle and walked up to a mark on the floor that he had indicated. As she did so, the lights in the room dimmed, apart from a spotlight on the two of them. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.

“So, Contestant Number One, what’s your name, why are you in Geppetto’s kitchen, and where do you come from?”

“My name’s Thursday Next-5, I want to visit the core-containment chamber as part of a training mission, and I’m from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco.”

“Well, then, if you can contain your excitement, you could have a prize visited upon you-fail and it might well be a fiasco.”

Thursday5 blinked at him uncomprehendingly.

“Contain your excitement…prize visited…not a fiasco?” repeated Sparkle, trying to get her to understand his appalling attempts at humor.

She continued to stare at him blankly.

“Never mind. All righty, then. Ms. Next who wants to visit core containment, today we’re going to play…Liars and Tigers.”

He indicated the two doors leading off the kitchen, each with a bored-looking individual staring vacantly into space in front of it.

“The rules are very simple: You have two identical doors. Behind one is the core-containment chamber you seek, and behind the other…is a tiger.”

The confident expression dropped from Thursday5’s face, and I hid a smile.

“A what?” she asked.

“A tiger.”

“A real one or a written one?”

“It’s the same thing. Guarding each door is an individual, one who always tells the truth and another who always lies. You can’t know which is which, nor which door is guarded by whom-and you have one question, to one guard, to discover the correct door. Ms. Next, are you ready to play Liars and Tigers?”

“A tiger? A real tiger?”

“All eight feet of it.” Julian smiled, enjoying himself again. “Teeth one end, tail the other, claws at all four corners. Are you ready?”

“If it’s just the same to you,” she said politely, “I’ll be getting on my way.”

In a flash, Sparkle had pulled out a shiny automatic and pressed it hard into her cheek.

“You’re going to play the game, Next,” he growled. “Get it right and you win today’s super-duper prize. Get it wrong and you’re tiger poo. Refuse and I play the Spread the Dopey Cow All Over the Kitchen game.”

“Can’t we form a circle of trust, have a cup of herbal tea and then discuss our issues?”

“That,” said Sparkle softly, a maniacal glint in his eyes, “was the incorrect answer.”

His finger tightened on the trigger, and the two guards both covered their heads. This had gone far enough.

“Wait!” I shouted.

Sparkle stopped and looked at me. “What?”

“I’ll take her place.”

“It’s against the rules.”

“Not if we play the Double-Death Tiger-Snack game.”

Sparkle looked at Thursday5, then at me. “I’m not fully conversant with that one,” he said slowly, eyes narrowed.

“It’s easy,” I replied. “I take her place, and if I lose, then you get to feed us both to the tiger. If I win, we both go free.”

“Okay,” said Sparkle, and he released Thursday5, who ran and hid behind me.

“Shoot him,” she said in hoarse whisper.

“What about the herbal tea?”

“Shoot him.”

“That’s not how we do things,” I said in a quiet voice. “Now, just watch and listen and learn.”

The two guards donned steel helmets, and Sparkle himself retreated to the other side of the room, where he could escape if the tiger was released. I walked up to the two individuals, who looked at me with a quizzical air and started to rub some tiger repellent on themselves from a large tube. The doors were identical, and so were the guards. I scratched my head and thought hard, considering my question. Two doors, two guards. One guard always told the truth, one always lied-and one question to one guard to find the correct door. I’d heard of this puzzle as a kid but never thought my life might depend upon it. But hey, this was fiction. Strange, unpredictable-and fun.

I turned to the guard on the left.

“If I asked the other guard,” I said with some trepidation, “which was the door to the core-containment chamber, which one would he say?”

The guard thought for a moment and pointed to one of the doors, and I turned back to look at Sparkle and the somewhat concerned face of Thursday5, who was rapidly coming to terms with the idea that there was a lot of weird shit in the BookWorld that she’d no idea how to handle-such as potential tiger attacks inside Pinocchio.

“Have you chosen your door, Ms. Next?” asked Julian Sparkle. “Remember, if you win, you get through to core containment-and if you lose, there is a high probability of being eaten. Choose your door…wisely.”

I gave a smile and grasped the handle-not on the door that had been indicated by the guard but the other one. I pulled it open to reveal…a flight of steps leading downward.

Sparkle’s eyebrow twitched, and he grimaced momentarily before breaking once more into an insincere grin. The two guards breathed a sigh of relief and removed their helmets to mop their brows-it was clear that dealing with tigers wasn’t something they much liked to do-and the tiger, itself a bit miffed, growled from behind the other door.

“Congratulations,” muttered Sparkle. “You have chosen…correctly.”

I nodded to Thursday5, who joined me at the doorway, leaving Sparkle and the two guards arguing over what my super-duper prize should be.

“How did you know which guard was which?” she asked in a respectful tone.

“I didn’t,” I replied, “and still don’t. But I assumed that the guards would know who told the truth and who didn’t. Since my question would always show me the wrong door irrespective of whom I asked, I just took the opposite of the one indicated.”

“Oh!” she said, trying to figure it out. “What were they doing there anyway?”

“Sparkle and the others are what we call ‘anecdotals.’ Brain teasers, puzzles, jokes, anecdotes and urban legends that are in the oral tradition but not big enough to exist on their own. Since they need to be instantly retrieved, they have to be flexible and available at a moment’s notice-so we billet them unseen around the various works of fiction.”

“I get it,” replied Thursday. “We had the joke about the centipede playing rugby with us at Fiasco for a while. Out of sight of the readers, of course. Total pest-we kept on tripping over his boots.”

We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The room was about the size of a double garage and seemed to be constructed of riveted brass that was green with oxidization. The walls were gently curved, giving the impression that we were inside a huge barrel, and there was a hollow, cathedral-like quality to our voices. In the center of the room was a circular, waist-high bronze plinth about the size and shape of a ship’s capstan, upon which two electrodes sprouted upward and then bent gently outward until they were about six inches apart. At the end of each electrode was a carbon sphere no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and between the two of them a languid blue arc of electricity crackled quietly to itself.