One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

by Jasper Fforde

  I resisted the temptation to look up. The shield was in plain sight, embedded in the ceiling. “Do you want me to try to guess what you’re after, or are you going to tell me?”

  The MiP exchanged glances.

  “It has come to our attention,” said the taller of the two,

  “that someone’s been waving the real Thursday Next’s Jurisfiction shield around. That person used it to get out of Poetry an hour ago. Were you in Poetry today, Miss Next?”

  I wasn’t supposed to be there, so the answer had to be no. “No.”

  They stared at me. “The officers involved told us that someone of your description had a robotic butler in the trunk of a taxi. Do you still deny this?”

  I looked at Sprockett, who stared impassively ahead.

  “There are probably hundreds of robotic manservants in Fiction,” I replied, “and all of them are technically luggage. But since automatons are incapable of misstatements, why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  They did, and Sprockett could answer without lying that he had absolutely no knowledge of the trip at all.

  “Perhaps it was Thursday herself,” I suggested. “Have you asked her?”

  There was, perhaps, a subtle change in the Plaids’ demeanor. But if she was missing, as I supposed, they weren’t going to let on.

  “How about Conspiracy?” asked the smaller Plaid. “We have a report from Elvis561 that someone looking a lot like Thursday and holding her Jurisfiction shield rescued a mechanical man from stoning.”

  “That was definitely me,” I said. “I was on JAID business.”

  They both stared at me. It was highly uncomfortable.

  “Then you did have her shield?”

  “I used my JAID shield. Here.”

  I passed it across, and they stared at it. It was nothing like a Jurisfiction shield.

  “The Elvis must have been mistaken,” I continued. “There is a certain degree of inbuilt hyperbole to the genre that might generate outrageous claims, wouldn’t you agree?”

  I stared at them intently as I tried to read their expressions, but their emotionless construction made them impossible to penetrate. They probably didn’t do well at singles bars but would doubtless be able to play poker at tournament level.

  “Very well,” said the first Man in Plaid. “We will leave you for now. One more thing: A call to Thursday Next at Jurisfiction was traced to this book not ten minutes ago. Was there a reason for this?”

  “I have a new understudy,” I explained. “I thought Thursday might like to give her a few tips on how to play her. If you see her, will you pass my message along?”

  “We’re not messengers,” said the second Plaid, and they left without another word.

  There followed a moment of silence. I had just lied to the Men in Plaid, which was illegal, and even if they thought I was telling the truth, my being on their radar was probably not conducive to good health. But one thing that did cross my mind was this: If Thursday was missing, the Men in Plaid had been ordered to find her, and they didn’t yet know of the connection between me and the red-haired gentleman.

  But I didn’t have any time to muse on it further, as I heard the Read Alarm go off. Somewhere in the Outland, a reader had picked up one of my books. Luckily for us, things can happen instantaneously in the BookWorld, so I dashed through to the kitchen to find Carmine already dressed and ready to go. I half thought of taking over, but I had to let her give it a whirl sooner or later.

  “It’s barely teatime in the Outland,” I said, glancing at the clock. “Someone must be taking a break. Are you ready?”

  Carmine nodded.

  I turned to Mrs. Malaprop, who was monitoring the progress of all the readings on a circular screen that plotted in word-for-word detail which readers were where, and in what book.

  “It’s a slope oak,” she said. “Lost in a Good Book, page 133, SpecOps Twilight Homes. I’ll contract Granny Next.”

  She flipped a switch on the intercom, and her voice echoed around the series on the intercom.

  “Hear this, hear this. Would Granny Next please pro-seed Toe-wads TN2, P133.”

  “An easy scene,” I said, turning to Carmine. “How’s your Ping-Pong?”

  “Not bad.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Granny Next will crush you anyway.”

  “What is a ‘slope oak’?”

  “She means ‘a slow poke.’ It’s what we call readers who’ve been working their way through the series at a snail’s pace. When they falter—which they often do—you should try to alter your dialogue for simplicity. You’ll feel their ReadRate increase when you do, and we aim only to help. The reader is everything, yes?”

  She looked up at me and bit her lip nervously.

  “The reader is everything,” she repeated. “But you’ll step in if there are more then twenty concurrent reads, won’t you?”

  Being read simultaneously was often described as like trying to visit everywhere in Paris at the same time during rush hour. The simile was lost on me, but I made a point of never wanting to visit Paris, real or imaginary.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her, “you’ll be fine. We’ve got at least four hours before the other readers come onstream. Take a deep breath and repeat the first person’s credo: ‘Pace, Atmosphere, Plot, Prose, Character.’”

  “Pace, Atmosphere, Plot, Prose, Character.”

  “Good. Give them hell.”

  And she gave me a wan smile and headed off towards the SpecOps Twilight Homes, which were cemented just between Thornfield Hall and the interior Skyrail set. With an odd feeling, I watched her go. I liked the time off, but I liked being Thursday, too—even if it was to an audience of only one.

  “Here,” I said, passing the Snooze access codes to Mrs. Malaprop. “Keep a close eye on her.”

  “This is a last resort, yes?” asked Mrs. Malaprop, who licked kittens probably more than most.

  “Last resort. Call me and I’ll come running.”

  I walked out of the kitchen. There was work to be done.

  10.

  Epizeuxis

  Maps of the BookWorld are constantly updated as the genres snake back and forth in response to Outland trends and fads. The borders move so rapidly, in fact, that any notion of a fully updated map is considered laughable, and most maps are these days published with average borders that reflect reading trends of the past ten years.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)

  Despite the unwanted attentions of the Men in Plaid, the warnings from the red-haired gentleman and the worrying possibility that Thursday might be missing, I spent a busy and anxious afternoon going through the heap of book junk in the garage. I was, to be honest, torn. Part of me wanted nothing better than to accede to Red Herring’s wishes that this be an “unrepeatable” accident, and part of me was suspicious. The closer I examined the book junk, the worse it looked. It appeared that something, while not exactly rotten in the state of the BookWorld, was far from fresh.

  At a little after five, and with a rising sense of foreboding, I called Sprockett into my study to compare notes.

  “So what do you have?” I asked, letting him air his discoveries first.

  He led me across to where the Atlas of the BookWorld lay open on my desk. He indicated the page that depicted the southeastern part of the island and showed me where he had plotted the crashed book’s debris trail by a series of black crosses. Most sections of text would have pulverized into graphemes and simply absorbed, which explains why we rarely find anything when short stories or limericks come to grief, just a hollow concussion in the distance.

  Almost all the debris had been strewn across the Aviation genre, with the notable exception of the bed-sitting room already discovered inside Conspiracy and a Triumph motorcycle within Thriller (Spy) that narrowly missed George Smiley as it traveled through an early draft of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Hatmaker. The book seemed to have disintegrated somewhere above Deighton and then strewn objects in a roughly
straight line north, in the direction of the Great Library and the Ungenred Zone.

  “What would tigers and a macaroon be doing in an Aviation novel?” asked Mrs. Malaprop, who was cleaning with a feather duster but actually wanted to be part of the investigation.

  “They might be scrambled graphemes and not actually in the book at all. Best ignored.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any curve to the debris trail at all,” added Pickwick, who had entered unseen and jumped onto the table to look more closely. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she hadn’t upset the inkwell and then stood clumsily in the ink.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Mind your feet. And that means either a rapid breakup or that the book—whatever it was—was not from the Aviation genre.”

  “Look here,” said Pickwick as she pointed with one of her claws. “If we extend the debris-field line backwards, we come out of Aviation, across Military, and end up right here in Adventure—somewhere around King Solomon’s Mines.”

  “Which might explain the tigers.”

  “But not the macaroon.”

  “Or the box-girder bridges—and the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.”

  “I didn’t say it was Haggard,” said Pickwick, “only that it came from Adventure.”

  Unusually, Pickwick was being helpful. Probably because she’d taken Sprockett for some cash, had already had her nap but was not yet ready for her afternoon snack and was thus in an atypically good temper.

  “I have an idea,” said Sprockett. “Could we try unscrambling the letters of the items we found, and thereby find tantalizing clues as to what the book might be about?”

  “To an outside observer, that would seem entirely logical,” I replied, “but for one thing: Anagram-related clues were outlawed six years ago by the NCU.”

  “NCU?”

  “Narrative Clunker Unit. Villains haven’t been allowed to be albinos for years, identical twins as plot devices are banned, and double negatives are a complete no-no. Forget anagrams.”

  “Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.”

  “Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense genre, so they have a tendency to go missing until dramatically being found right at the end of an investigation. It’s undoubtedly suspenseful, but a little useless. Want to see what I found?”

  We walked out through the French windows and the garden to my double garage, which was another example of the inverted physics of the BookWorld. The more you filled it, the emptier it appeared. But it could never be entirely empty, as that would require an infinite amount of stuff—or in the case of a double garage, twice an infinite amount of stuff.

  All the sections of crashed book were laid out on the concrete floor, ostensibly so we could try to find a reason for the accident, or even to figure out a rough plot of the mystery book. We had a few page numbers, but nothing attached to any dialogue. It was a mess. I walked past the yellow-painted back axle, pushed aside a fridge/freezer and beckoned them to one particular piece of wreckage.

  “What do you make of this?” I asked.

  We were standing over the bent Triumph motorcycle, and I told them to be quiet. There was a whisper in the air, and if you leaned close to the damaged motorcycle, you could hear it:The works that built the cycle worked;

  The cycle’s labor labored on.

  And workers sought and workers bought

  The managers out and managed ’owt

  Until the cycle’s cycle cycled round.

  But markets moved and markets shifted,

  To Eastern trade that Eastern made.

  Loans were pleaded, loans were needed,

  The workers’ workers worked their last.

  But ruin didn’t do as ruin does,

  For Triumph’s collapse led to Triumph’s triumph.

  “I don’t get it,” said Pickwick, who had always favored Harley-Davidson.

  “It’s a poem that charts the fall and rise of the Triumph motorcycle company in the late seventies and early eighties,” I said. “It’s seeped out of the descriptive flux of the motorcycle—a glowing afterember of the accident.”

  “That’s not unusual,” replied Pickwick. “Poetry and prose are different facets of the same basic element. When prose breaks down, it often spontaneously rhymes. Poetry is prose in another form, and prose is simply poetry waiting to happen.”

  “Epizeuxis,” murmured Sprockett, “a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect. This book was almost certainly destroyed by a rhetorical worm.”

  I had come to the same conclusion myself. The worm would attempt to restructure sentences, and when that failed, it would take words from other sentences, leaving dangerous holes in the narrative. Once there were no more complete words to be taken, the worm would start to harvest letters to make up the shortfall, weakening the structure until the entire book disintegrated. In RealWorld terms it would be like instantaneously removing every rivet from an aircraft that was in flight.

  “The problem,” I said slowly, “is that rhetorical worms don’t occur naturally. They’re used in the demolition business to tear apart sections of scrapped books. It’s cheaper and safer than chains, hooks and crowbars. A well-placed worm can burrow into prose, dissolve away tired exposition and leave description and dialogue untouched. Either the book was carrying unlicensed worms that were accidentally activated or it was—”

  “Sabotage!” hissed Mrs. Malaprop, and I felt myself suddenly go quite cold. Such a device would require a level of sophistication utterly outside the realm of ordinary citizens. There were stories of the Council of Genres’ Men in Plaid using rhetorical devices to cause injury or death, but that was mostly conjecture—drummed up by Conspiracy, no doubt.

  “Okay,” I said, “we have the possibility of skulduggery—but it’s not the only explanation. Epizeuxis is often used as a rhetorical device.”

  “But so blatantly? And in a poem to describe the failure of a motorcycle-manufacturing cooperative?” exclaimed Pickwick. “What kind of nut would try something like that?”

  “We still need to find out what the book was called,” I said as we walked back into the house. “We need an ISBN. Did we check the thumb we found for fingerprints?”

  “Not a single one.”

  “That’s annoying. Those severed hands we found a few weeks ago had fingerprints all over them.”

  “What about DNA evidence?” asked Sprockett.

  “DNA fingerprinting is still under a blanket ban,” I explained. “Forensic Procedural is allowed to use it, but you know how tight the Crime genre can be.”

  Sadly, this was true. The Guild of Detectives had argued that although DNA fingerprinting had a use in the RealWorld, such annoyingly precise and utterly noncerebral detection methods really had no place in Fiction. And because the Crime lobby represented such a huge part of Fiction, the Council of Genres had reluctantly agreed. Mind you, detection rates hadn’t suffered as a result, so everyone was happy.

  I looked up at the Read-O-Meter. There were twelve simultaneous readings going on, and Carmine hadn’t hit the panic button, so she was doing fine. I had a look at the clock and then went upstairs to have a bath and change. Despite all that was going on, what with sabotaged books, worms and missing Jurisfiction agents, I still had a date with Whitby Jett. I tried a call to Jurisfiction myself and was told that Thursday Next was still unavailable. I dried, then tried on several dresses but didn’t like any of them. I had just dismissed the sixth and was rummaging in the bureau for a yellow top I remembered buying last time I was in Chick Lit, when I came across a photograph. It was one I had wanted to throw away but had pushed to the back of a drawer instead. It was a backstory snap of me and Landen, taken when we were in the Crimea, before Landen had lost a leg and I’d los
t a brother. Happy days. I stared at it for a long time, then rang for Sprockett.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Is Whitby downstairs?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s waiting in the kitchen with a bunch of flowers the size of the Amazonian Basin.”

  “Would you send him my apologies and ask him to leave? Politely, of course.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I need to keep an eye on Carmine. It’s her first day, and I need to stand by in case of mishaps.”

  “Miss Carmine is doing very well, by all accounts, ma’am, and Mr. Jett seems happily effusive over the prospect of an evening with you. I believe that his conduct has all the hallmarks of . . . love, ma’am.”

  “Sprockett,” I said, “ just do this for me, would you? Tell him I’m busy and I’ll meet him for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Very good, ma’am. Where shall I say you will be meeting him?”

  “I’ll call him.”

  I came downstairs twenty minutes later to find the flowers on the hall table. I sighed at my own foolishness, then walked into the book and found Carmine about to play the croquet match in The Well of Lost Plots. I told her my date was canceled and that I’d take over from her. I think she was secretly relieved.

  “Don’t forget there’s a party tonight at Castle of Skeddan Jiarg,” I told her. “The queen said to drop in anytime.”

  “I think I might just do that,” she said with a smile. “I could get hyphenated, let my hair down and chat up a goblin or something.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this.

  “I don’t mean to seem judgmental. Actually, come to think of it,” I said, changing my mind, “I do mean to seem judgmental. You mustn’t bring goblins home. Quite apart from the hygiene and theft issues, Pickwick can be a real prude. She’ll be plocking on about it for months, and frankly, I could do without her endless complaints.”

  She winked.

  “I will be most discreet. Why don’t you join me when you’re done? I know goblins aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but what they lack in physical beauty they make up for in endurance.”