One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (18 page)

“What do I do?” whispered Sprockett. “I can’t keep this up for long.”

“Head back towards the road.”

So he did, and I followed him. The mimes stayed with us, their grief and sadness changing to anger and surprise. Sprockett continued his overblown movements, but it wasn’t working. The mimes closed in, and just when their white gloves were upon us, they suddenly paused and exhibited the sort of mock surprise you can feign by opening your mouth wide and placing both hands on your cheeks.

The reason for this was soon apparent. One of their number had started to
copy
Sprockett in a series of similar robotic moves. Uncertain at first, the moves soon gained fluidity until his gestures exactly matched Sprockett’s. Within a few seconds, the “robot” idea had spread amongst them like a virus, and the field was full of five hundred or so mimes acting like robots. As soon as they were all distracted in this fashion, I yelled “Run!” and we sprinted back to the road.

“Well,” said Sprockett, stretching the barbed-quip wire back across the hole in the fence to keep the five hundred or so mimes from escaping, “I think that was a close-run thing, ma’am. Might I congratulate you on your quick thinking?”

“Let’s just say it was a team effort.”

He bowed politely, and I sat on a rock by the side of the road to regain my composure. I looked around. The dusty track was empty in both directions, and aside from the books drifting silently overhead and the now-robotic mimes, the only signs of life were corralled Jokes of Questionable Taste sitting silently in fenced-off areas a little way distant.

“Did you get a good look at that car that passed us?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. I believe it was a 1949 Buick Roadmaster.”

“Men in Plaid?”

“So it would appear. Their capacity for causing us harm and annoyance seems not to be abating.”

I saw it simpler:
They had just tried to kill us.
The only question that remained was, Why? And more worryingly, How much longer before they succeeded?

Just then a rattly pickup stopped opposite us. The bearded driver was staring at us with an amused twinkle in his eye. He was a Funnster, one of a hardy breed of crusty old men and women who spent their days trapping gags and taking them to market.

“Have an accident?” he asked.

It was the height of bad manners in Comedy to decline a feed line when offered, so I had to think quickly.

“No thanks,” I replied, “I’ve already had one.”

The Funnster laughed, took off his hat and mopped the sweat from his brow. He looked awhile at the mimes, who had evolved their new robot idea into robots going downstairs, robots canoeing, robots getting stuck inside glass cubes and robots walking against the wind.

“Looks like you may have started something,” said the Funnster with a chuckle, climbing out of the cab and rummaging for a net and a baseball bat in the flatbed. “Wait here.”

A few moments later, we were bowling down the road towards the local railway station, sitting in the back of the flatbed. On one side of us there was a mime who was miming a robot being trapped inside a net while
actually
being trapped inside a net, and on the other side of us a mature Austrian gentleman with a beard, a small hat and the look of someone who was trying to figure out what we were thinking and why we were thinking it.

After considering us for a moment, he leaned forward and said, “How many Sigmund Freuds does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How many?”

“Penis,” said the Freud, then quickly corrected himself. “I mean father. No, wait! One. One Sigmund Freud. All it takes. Yes.
Verflucht und zugenäht!
” He added gloomily, “
Wenn ich nur bei der Aalsektion geblieben wäre!
”

W
e were dropped off at Cooper Central, thanked the Funnster and said farewell to Freud, who had become all wobbly and tearful. We bought some tickets and then gave them to the fez-wearing inspector who hailed us with the customary “Just like that” before directing us to our carriage. Within a few minutes, the train was steaming out of the station and towards Fantasy.

We weren’t the only people in the compartment eager to get out of Comedy. A small man who wore the off-duty fatigues of a foot soldier enlisted in the Clown Army was looking about anxiously and sweating. You could tell he was off-duty because he wasn’t wearing his bright red nose and his long shoes were carefully strapped to his duffel bag.

“What’s your unit?” I asked.

“Sixth Clown,” he said nervously, “Supply and Gigglistics. We deploy next week to Bawdy Romp, the buffer zone between Comedy and Racy Novel. Purely as a precaution, you understand. I’m on leave and certainly not stealing military equipment, no, ma’am.”

And he stared at his feet, leaving Sprockett and me to wonder what he
was
stealing and whether it was hazardous. The Clown Army’s Supply division was notoriously porous, and sneeze and itching powder often found its way into the wrong hands, such as Blyton separatists—always an angry mob.

“I hope your deployment goes well.”

“Thank you,” said the clown, staring out the window.

We sat in silence for a while.

“Ma’am?” asked Sprockett, who had been buzzing quietly to himself in the corner.

“Yes?”

“Why do you think we were attacked?”

“Because of what we know.”

“But who knows what we know? Others have to
know
that we know. Just
us
knowing it isn’t enough—unless we attacked ourselves, which isn’t likely.”

I thought carefully. There were at least half a dozen people who might have had an idea that the investigation wasn’t totally open and shut, all the way from Captain Phantastic to Pickwick /Lorina. But it was also possible we were being silenced for some other reason entirely, an accident or even a textual glitch, such as happens from time to time in the BookWorld.

“The attempt on our life
might
have been a lexicographical literalism,” I said. “After all, comedians often ‘kill’ their audiences or ‘die’ onstage, and the phrases ‘You’ll be the death of me’ or ‘It was so funny I could have died’ might all have colluded to cause us harm.”

I was fooling myself. Although Buick Roadmasters
did
exist independently of the Men in Plaid, it seemed too suspicious to ignore. Besides, running people off the road was something that occurred in Crime, where it would be unusual to drive five miles without having it happen at least twice. It was much more unlikely in Comedy. Or at least not without a punch line. But then again, maybe my “No thanks, I’ve already had one”
was
the punch line. Comedy was never straightforward. When all the good jokes had left, only the dubiously amusing stuff remained. Was the mimefield funny or not? To us I think not. But it might have been funny to
someone
.

I stared out the window, thinking about my current predicament. I had a junker on its way to the scrap yard from Vanity that someone had destroyed and then tried to cover his tracks in case of discovery. The accident had been handed to the least skilled accident investigator for a quick and easy resolution, and I had almost been murdered by the Men in Plaid. I had compounded my difficulties by lying to Lockheed, gaining intelligence from Captain Phantastic on false pretenses, and I had not only failed to deliver a legal accident report but destroyed it. If I was found out, I would be confined to my series and as likely as not lose Carmine and possibly Sprockett, too. It was a good moment to pack it all in, accept the level of my own incompetence and start concentrating on what should be my primary goal: increasing readership in the Thursday Next series. Thursday, after all, could take care of herself—she had done so on numerous occasions. If I shared my plans with Sprockett, I reasoned, it would be an affirmation of my resolve, and harder to go back on.

“Sprockett?”

He started out of standby mode with a buzz.

“A cocktail, ma’am?”

“No thank you. It’s just that I’ve decided to . . .” I sighed and rubbed my temples.

“Decided to what, ma’am?”

“Nothing.”

And I slumped down into my seat, cursing the Thursday in me.

The train slowed to a halt at the border between Fantasy and Comedy and the off-duty clown started fidgeting.

“Identification, please.” One of the border guards was standing at the doorway, and we all rummaged for our identification papers.

“I’ll deal with this,” said a familiar voice, and Commander Bradshaw appeared in the corridor. He flashed his own ID at the border guard, who saluted smartly and moved on.

Sprockett and I both stood up politely, as did the clown, who didn’t want to be left out.

“Please,” said Bradshaw, “sit down. What’s this, a joke?” he asked, indicating the clown once we had all sat and Sprockett had offered Bradshaw a cocktail.

“A lance corporal in the Sixth Clown,” I said, “Supply and Gigglistics.”

“Oh, yes?” said Bradshaw with a smile. “And what would you be smuggling across the border?”

The clown sighed resignedly and opened his duffel bag to reveal boxes of military-grade custard pies. He wasn’t a very good smuggler. Few were.

“It’s jail for you, my lad,” said Bradshaw sternly. “CPs are banned in every genre outside Comedy. I’d turn you in, but I’m busy. If you can dispose of them all before we get to Gaiman Junction, I’ll overlook it.”

“How would I do that?”

“Do you have a spoon in your bag?”

So while the off-duty clown began to eat his way through four dozen custard pies, Bradshaw explained what he was there for.

“
Please
don’t ask Lorina to contact me,” he said. “That was just for Jobsworth to hear.”

“I figured.”

“Is she still a colossal pain in the butt, by the way?”

“Getting worse, if anything.”

Bradshaw looked at Sprockett, who took the cue and shimmered from the compartment with the clown, who was already on his ninth custard pie and groaning quietly to himself. Sprockett returned momentarily with the Chicago Fizz he had mixed for Bradshaw, then departed again.

Bradshaw leaned forward, looked left and right and whispered, “Are you her? The real one, I mean?”

“No.”

He stared at me for a while. “Are you sure? You’re not doing some sort of deep-cover double bluff or something?”

“Yes, quite sure. I think I know who I am.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t. You’ll have to take my word for it. Believe me, I wish I were.”

Bradshaw seemed satisfied with this and stared at me some more for quite some time. He wasn’t here on a social visit.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“The thing is,” he began, taking a sip from his Chicago Fizz,

“we’re in a bit of a pickle here in the BookWorld, what with Speedy Muffler and the whole Racy Novel debacle. Add to that the dwindling metaphor issue, the e-book accelerators using a disproportionate amount of Text Grand Central’s throughput capacity and all the other day-to-day whatnot we have to handle, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we need the real Thursday now more than ever. Do we agree?”

“We do.”

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “She was due to be the Jurisfiction delegate at the Racy Novel peace talks on Friday. I’ll have to send Emperor Zhark instead, and his negotiating skills are more along the lines of annihilate first, ask questions later, but without the ‘ask questions later’ part.”

“She may turn up.”

He shook his head. “I knew she was going undercover, but she said she’d check in two days ago without fail. She didn’t. That’s not like her. She might be stuck in a book somewhere, lost in a book somewhere—even held against her will. The possibilities are endless.”

“If she
was
lost, wouldn’t she have a TextMarker™ homing beacon on her?”

“True—but Textual Sieve coverage is patchy even in Fiction, and absent entirely across at least two-thirds of the BookWorld. We’ve sent unmanned probes into the most impenetrable tomes at Antiquarian and dispatched agents into almost every genre there is—nothing. The BookWorld is a big place. We’ve even considered that she might be in the DRM.”

I raised an eyebrow. If they were considering this, they really were desperate. The DRM was the Dark Reading Matter—the unseeable part of the BookWorld.

“It’s been almost two weeks,” continued Bradshaw, “and I fear that something dreadful might have happened.”

“Dead?”

“Worse—retired back to the RealWorld.”

He stopped and stared at me. It wasn’t just Thursday’s absence from Jurisfiction that he was worried about; he had lost a good friend, too. Thursday trusted Commander Bradshaw implicitly. I thought I should do likewise.

“I sneak-peeked the Outland yesterday,” I said. “I realize it was wrong. But it seemed to me that Landen was missing her, too.”

Bradshaw raised an eyebrow. “Truthfully?”

“Yes, sir.”

He took a sip of the cocktail, set it down and strode about the compartment for some minutes.

“Look here,” he said, “desperate situations call for desperate measures. I want you to talk to Landen and see if you can find out anything. Perhaps locate her in time for the peace talks.”