One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

by Jasper Fforde

  “Time is of the essence. Senator, I need you to do something without question.”

  “And that is?”

  “Shut down every single Feedback Loop north of Three Men in a Boat.”

  “Are you mad?” he said. “That’s almost three hundred million books!”

  “Mad? Perhaps. But if you don’t do what I ask, you’ll have a genre war on your hands so devastating it will turn your blood to ice.”

  “My blood is already ice, Miss Next.”

  The senator paused, then looked at Zhark, who nodded his agreement.

  “Very well.”

  Jobsworth instructed Barnes to get the message to Text Grand Central in any way he could—and to expedite, code puce.

  “And you,” said Jobsworth, pointing a finger at me, “have some serious explaining to do.”

  We convened in the bar almost immediately. Jobsworth was there with Herring, Barksdale, the captain and Emperor Zhark—as well as all of Jobsworth’s D-3s and Sprockett, who had divested himself of his bar-steward disguise and was once more in full butler regalia.

  “Where would you like me to start?” I asked.

  “At the beginning,” said Jobsworth, “and don’t stop until you get to the end.”

  I took a deep breath and showed them the map Lyell had drawn.

  “We won’t find out exactly how she knew until we find her, but the real Thursday Next became aware that there might exist a huge quantity of raw metaphor under the Northern Genres. Such a state of affairs would throw the entire power balance of Fiction on its head, so she needed to make sure. She took leading geologist Sir Charles Lyell up-country to conduct some test drilling, and it seems she was right. Buried beneath Racy Novel are the largest reserves of untapped metaphor the BookWorld has ever seen.”

  I had everyone’s attention by now—you could have heard a pin drop.

  “It was potentially explosive news, and Thursday knew that she would be in severe danger if this got out—so she hid among the flat Thursdays out in Fan Fiction. Despite her precautions, her activities were being scrutinized without her knowledge, and Thursday—reliably touted as ‘the second-hardest person to kill in the BookWorld’—had to be gotten rid of. A cabbie named the Mediocre Gatsby was bribed to hang around Fan Fiction on the off chance she would want picking up. A previously scrapped book called The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was being kept in Vanity and as soon as she was in the cab, the book was dispatched to the Council of Genres. Mediocre piggybacked the book for the trip as instructed, and a second later a rhetorical device was detonated, leaving the book, the cabbie and, it was hoped, Thursday herself little more then textual confetti—a million graphemes littered all over Fiction.”

  There was silence, so I carried on. “That might have been the end of it. Most of the book was just small, tattered remnants not dissimilar to the usual detritus that flutters occasionally from the heavens and is absorbed into the ground, except that for some reason, Adrian Dorset described a bed-sitting room so well that it survived the sabotage intact and came to rest in Conspiracy, and JAID had to be alerted. This was tricky, because a diligent investigator might start to ask awkward questions, so Lockheed was ordered to employ his most useless investigator to look into it. Me. And that’s not a coincidence. Why would that be, Sprockett?”

  “There are no coincidences in the BookWorld—so long as you don’t count the last chapters in some of Charles Dickens’s books.”

  “Exactly. But we do find problems—the fact that someone scrubbed off the ISBN to avoid discovery, and the epizeuxis device. And as we look, we find ourselves one step behind the Men in Plaid, who are silencing anyone who had anything to do with the attempted hit on Thursday Next.”

  “Rogue Men in Plaid?” said Emperor Zhark in an accusatory tone, staring at Jobsworth and Herring—the two who were responsible for them.

  “Scrubbed ISBN?” demanded Jobsworth. “Dead geologists? Epizeuxis devices? Who is responsible for this outrage?”

  “One of us present here.”

  They all looked at one another.

  “It was little things to begin with—things that didn’t click until later. I learned from Adrian Dorset that he destroyed The Murders on the Hareng Rouge a month back, yet it was still floating around Vanity waiting to intercept Thursday. The rules state that it has to be scrapped immediately—on Red Herring’s signature.”

  They all looked at Herring, who had started to go pale.

  “He controls the Book Transit Authority, and also the Men in Plaid. He’s the second-in-command to the BookWorld, but he wanted more. He was after the top job and, what’s more, control of the vast stores of metaphor that are lying under Racy Novel. He knew that whoever controlled the metaphor would control Fiction.”

  “But how could he control Speedy Muffler and Racy Novel?” asked Zhark.

  “That’s the clever bit. He planned to invade—using an army mustered from one of the most powerful genres on the island.”

  “Women’s Fiction?” said Colonel Barksdale with a smirk. “Not possible. They have neither the manpower nor the inclination.”

  Emperor Zhark and Jobsworth nodded their heads vigorously; WomFic was wholly against any sort of warfare and had agreed to sanctions only as a last resort.

  “Not WomFic,” I said. “A smaller subgenre with enough shock troops to take on the Fourteenth Clown and win. A genre that has for many years been the buffer zone between WomFic and Racy Novel. A genre that has successfully blended raciness and euphemism to create an empire that sells books by the billion—Daphne Farquitt. More readers than almost any other writer, and eighteen percent of total global readership.”

  “They don’t have any troops,” scoffed Barksdale. “You’re mistaken.”

  I chose my words carefully. Despite recent events, I’d be pushing my luck if I admitted I’d been in the RealWorld.

  “Today is Daphne Farquitt Day in the Outland. As we speak, a massive readathon is in progress. At even conservative estimates, there must be upwards of two hundred million readers making their way through Farquitt’s three hundred seventy-two novels. There will be speed-reading events, trivia quizzes and read-ins. The power of the Feedback Loop will be astronomical—and easy enough to create an unstoppable army of ditzy romantic heroines and their lantern-jawed potential husband/lovers.”

  “The nurses, secretaries and medical equipment you saw at Middle Station?”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “Not civilians at all—but the romantically involved honored dead. The Farquitt Army was working against Racy Novel by taking a preemptive strike and eradicating any possible threat from Speedy Muffler’s allies in Comedy. With members of the peace envoy all assassinated in an apparent Muffler attack, there would be no opposition to the total and complete invasion of Racy Novel by the Farquitt Army and, with it, control of the vast stocks of metaphor beneath our feet.”

  There was silence in the room. They all looked stunned. Barksdale was the first to speak.

  “That explanation,” he said in admiration, “was of a complexity that would gather plaudits from even the most intractable of political thrillers. With all of us dead in an attack that could be blamed on Speedy Muffler, Red Herring would step into the top slot, direct his allies to annex Racy Novel, secure the metaphor and set himself up as supreme dictator of Fiction.”

  “It’s a brilliant scheme,” murmured Zhark in admiration.

  “I’ll definitely be using it on the Rambosians next week. The little devils. They love a good subjugation. Senator?”

  “A plan of titanic proportions. If he weren’t going to be erased for treason, I’d offer him a job.”

  Red Herring was starting to shake when he heard this. He tried to speak, but only a strangled squeak came out.

  “Might I make an observation?” asked Sprockett.

  “Go ahead,” replied Jobsworth, who was now in a generous mood.

  “Mr. Herring is here with us now—how could he seize power if he was assassinated along
with the rest of us?”

  Barksdale’s and Zhark’s faces fell, and even Jobsworth’s smile dropped from his face. They looked at me.

  “Simple,” I said, placing my hand on Herring’s shoulder. “This isn’t Red Herring. Figuring that out was the key to the whole thing.”

  “That’s absurd,” remarked Jobsworth. “We were discussing the minutiae of the peace talks on the way in. He can’t be anything but.”

  “I assure you,” said Faux Herring, who had finally managed to find his voice. “I’m not Red Herring.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “This is Herring’s stunt double, Fallon Hairbag. He took Herring’s place when Red Herring made his escape in the boat’s tender.”

  “You’re the mysterious passenger?” asked Zhark, and the Herring-that-wasn’t nodded unhappily.

  “Mr. Herring promised me the pick of all the stunt work in the BookWorld if I did this for him. He said it was for a prank. That it would be funny.”

  “I overheard Herring and his stunt double talking in the cabin—about ‘not doing the talks’—and my butler discovered knee and elbow pads as well as a gallon of fire retardant.”

  “Whatever for?” asked Barksdale.

  “Just in case I had to set myself on fire and leap out a window waving my arms,” replied Fallon wistfully. “It always pays to be prepared.”

  “The switch was subtly done,” I said, “but when I met the replaced Herring later on, he was polite and asked me if I wanted a doughnut—the real Herring would never have been so accommodating.”

  “I’ve heard enough,” announced Senator Jobsworth, rising to his feet. “Send word that the peace talks are postponed. I want an emergency meeting of everyone in the debating chamber this evening, a press conference at five and the WomFic and Farquitt senators in my office the minute we get back. Barnes?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Implement Emergency Snooze Protocol 7B on the whole Farquitt canon immediately. I want every Farquitt reader yawning and nodding off in under ten minutes. We need to not only close down their feedback but send Daphne Farquitt a clear message that we will not be trifled with.”

  “What about the kittens?” asked Zhark in a shocked tone.

  “It’s a feline-compliant executive order,” replied Jobsworth grandly. “No kittens will be harmed in the great Farquitt Snoozathon.”

  While Barnes and the rest of the D-3s scurried off to do Jobsworth’s bidding, the senator and the others put their heads together. I told Fallon to go hide in his cabin until we got in, by which time he would doubtless be forgotten. He thanked me and gave me his card in case I needed someone to attempt to leap fourteen motorcycles in a double-decker bus or something, and Sprockett and I went and sat on the foredeck to watch the riverbank drift slowly past. Despite keeping a careful eye out for Herring, we saw only the upturned tender he had escaped in and figured that he was either making his escape to Farquitt or had been eaten by a crocodile who had mistaken him for fodder.

  “Well,” said Sprockett, “that denouement went very well. Your first?”

  “Did it show?”

  “Not at all.”

  I was glad of this. “I think Thursday might have been proud.”

  “Yes,” agreed Sprockett, “I think she might.”

  39.

  Story-Ending Options

  To finish off your Character Exchange Program break, Thomas Cook (BookWorld) Limited is offering tourists the option to choose how they would like to end their holidays. The “Chase” or “Scooby-Doo” endings remain popular, as do the “Death Scene” and “Reconciliation with Sworn Enemy.” Traditionalists may be disappointed, though. The ever-popular “Riding Off into the Sunset” option has recently had to be withdrawn owing to irreconcilable cliché issues.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (15th edition)

  The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words. By the time the Metaphoric Queen had docked, the senator for Farquitt had already denied that her genre had anything to do with Herring’s plan and expressed “great surprise” and “total outrage” that someone had “faked Romantic Troops” in order to attack the Fourteenth Clown. For its part, Comedy had mobilized its Second and Sixth Clown divisions to its borders and was demanding reparations from Farquitt, at the same time bringing pressure to bear on WomFic by threatening to withdraw all humor. Not to be outdone, Speedy Muffler had declared that the “presence of untapped metaphor” within his territory was “unproven and absurd,” and he had so far refused all offers of commercial extraction contracts, further commenting that individual senators were welcome to see him personally in his “love train.”

  “Looks like it’s business as usual,” I said to Commander Bradshaw.

  We were in the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park, and I was having a lengthy debrief that same afternoon. I had entered the offices not as a bit player nor an apprentice but on my own merit. Emperor Zhark had awarded me a gift of some valuable jewelry that he said had been buried with his grandfather, Mr. Fainset doffed his cap in an agreeable manner, and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle had kindly offered to do my laundry. It felt like I was part of the family.

  “So what are you going to do now?” asked Bradshaw, leaning back in his chair.

  “I had a small mutiny in my series,” I explained. “My own fault, really—I was thinking of Thursday and not my books. It’ll need a lot of tact and diplomacy to win it back.”

  Bradshaw smiled and thought for a minute. “The BookWorld is falling apart at the seams,” he said, waving his hand at the huge pile of paperwork in his in-tray. “We’ve got a major problem with e-books that we’d never envisioned. The Racy Novel-Farquitt affair will rumble on for years, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of Red Herring. Ten Duplex-6s have gone missing, and everyone has escaped from The Great Escape.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “There was a fourth tunnel we didn’t know about—Tom, Dick, Harry and Keith. There’s a serial killer still at large, not to mention several character assassins—and that pink gorilla running around inside A Tale of Two Cities is really beginning to piss me off.”

  He took a sip of coffee and stared at me.

  “I’m down to only seven agents. You’ve proved your capacity for this sort of work. I want you to join us here at Jurisfiction.”

  “No, no,” I said quickly, “I’ve had quite enough, thank you. The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity. Besides, you’ve already got a Thursday—you just have to find her. That reminds me.” I dug Thursday’s shield from my pocket and pushed it across the desk.

  Bradshaw picked it up and rubbed his thumb against the smooth metal. “Where did you get this?”

  “The red-haired man. I think Thursday knew she was compromised before she set off on her last trip and wanted me to carry on her work.”

  “So that’s why he was out of his book,” muttered Bradshaw. “I’ll see him pardoned at the earliest opportunity.”

  Bradshaw looked at the badge, then at me.

  “So how do you think this story’s going to end?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Are you sure you’re not her?”

  “It’s a tricky one,” I replied after giving the matter some thought, “and there’s evidence to suppose that I am. I can do things only she can do, I can see some things that only she can see. Landen thought I was her, and although he now thinks I’m the written one, that might be part of a fevered delusion. His or mine, I’m not sure. It’s even possible I’ve been Owlcreeked.”

  Bradshaw knew what I was talking about. “Owlcreeking” was a Biercian device in which a character could spend the last few seconds of his life in a long-drawn-out digression of what might have happened had he lived. I might be at this very moment spiraling out of control in Mediocre’s cab, Herring’s coup still ahead of me and perfect in its unrevealed complexity.

  “Carmine might actually be the Thurs
day I think I am,” I added. “It’s even possible I’m suffering the hallucinatory aftershock of a recent rewriting. And while we’re pushing the plausibility envelope, the BookWorld might not be real at all, and maybe I’m simply an Acme carpet fitter with a vibrant imagination.”

  I shuddered with the possibility that none of this might be happening at all.

  “This is Fiction,” said Bradshaw in a calm voice, “and the truth is whatever you make it. You can interpret the situation in any way you want, and all versions could be real—and what’s more, depending on how you act now, any one of those scenarios could become real.”

  I frowned. “I can be Thursday just by thinking I am?”

  “More or less. We may require you to undergo a short narrative procedure known as a ‘Bobby Ewing,’ where you wake up in the next chapter and it’s all been a dream, but it’s pretty painless so long as you don’t mind any potential readers throwing up their hands in disgust.”

  “I can be Thursday?” I said again.

  He nodded. “All you have to do is know you are. And don’t deny that you’ve had some doubts over the past few days.”

  It was tempting. I could be her and do Thursday things and never have to worry about falling ReadRates, keeping Bowden in line or dealing with Pickwick. I could even have Landen and the kids. I looked around at the Jurisfiction office. The Red Queen was hopping mad as usual, Mr. Fainset was attempting to figure out why Tracy Capulet had locked her sister in a cupboard, Lady Cavendish was drafting an indictment against Red Herring for “impersonating a red herring when you’re not one,” and Emperor Zhark was putting together an interim peace deal for the Northern Genres. It looked enjoyable, relevant and a good use of anyone’s time.

  Commander Bradshaw smiled and pushed Thursday’s shield back across the table, where I stared at it. “What do you say?”

  “I can be Thursday,” I said slowly. “I can work at Jurisfiction. But at a fictional Jurisfiction. I want to depict the real Thursday doing everything she really did. I want her series to feature the BookWorld and you and Miss Havisham and Zhark and all the rest of them. That’s where I’d like to be Thursday. That’s the Thursday I can be. A fictional one. I’d like to help you out, but I can’t.”