One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (19 page)

“Talk to Landen? How can I do that?”

“By traveling to the RealWorld.”

My heart nearly missed a beat.

“You’re joking.”

“No joke, Miss Next. In fact, I’ll
tell
you a joke so you’ll know the difference. How many Sigmund Freuds does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I’ve heard it.”

“You have? Blast. In any event, you look
exactly
like Thursday—the best cover in the world. And what could possibly go wrong?”

There was actually quite a lot, but before I could itemize the first sixteen, Bradshaw had moved on.

“Splendid. All transfictional travel has been strictly banned this past eighteen months, so you’ll be doing this covertly. If anyone finds out, I’ll deny everything. Most of all, you can’t tell anyone from the Council of Genres. If Jobsworth or Red Herring finds I’ve been breaking the transfictional travel embargo, they’ll want to send their own. And I can’t have that. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then that’s all agreed,” said Bradshaw, rising from his seat and handing me a signed authorization. “This will give you access to Norland Park to see Professor Plum on the pretext of adding e-book accelerators to your series. He’ll know why you’re there. I’ll also contact my deep-cover agents to offer you every assistance in the Outland. Any questions?”

I had several hundred, but didn’t know where to start. Bradshaw took my silence to mean I didn’t have any, and he shook me by the hand.

“Good to have you on board. Twelve hours in the RealWorld isn’t long, but enough to at least get an idea of what’s happened to her. I could send you out for longer, but Thursday has many enemies in the RealWorld, and they’ll be onto you pretty quick. If you die in the RealWorld, you die for real, and I’m not having that on my conscience. Shall we say tomorrow morning? Oh, and officially speaking, I was never here.”

“You were never here.”

“Good show. Appreciate a girl who knows she wasn’t somewhere. Oh, and thank your man for the Chicago Fizz, will you? But next time a little less gherkin. Cheerio.”

And without another word, he opened the outside door, a motorcycle drew alongside the train, Bradshaw hopped onto the pillion and was gone.

“Might I inquire of madam what that was all about?” asked Sprockett, who returned with a very ill-looking clown.

“A little too much gherkin in the Chicago Fizz.”

“He came all the way over here just to tell you that?”

“No—I’m going to the RealWorld to look for Thursday so we can get her to the peace talks on Friday.”

“In that case,” said Sprockett, “I’ d better lay out your things. Will madam be staying long?”

“Twelve hours.”

“I’ll pack you a toothbrush, a scrunchie and some clean socks.”

“I’ d be grateful.”

I spent the rest of the journey fretting about my trip to reality. It was only a twelve-hour trip—barely a flash in and out—but that wasn’t important. What
was
important was that I would meet Landen in person, and although the notion of that filled me with a tingly sensation of anticipation, his rejection of me when he found out I wasn’t his wife would be . . . well, not pleasant—for him and for me. I almost thought of not going. Bradshaw couldn’t exactly punish me for not doing something he hadn’t told me to do. But then there was the possibility that I might help to find Thursday, and that filled me with the same sense of purpose I’d felt when I lied to Lockheed and Captain Phantastic. I sighed inwardly. Life was easier when I was just a character in a book, going from Preface to Acknowledgments without a care in the world. Within another twenty minutes, the train steamed into Gaiman Junction, and we took the bus home.

 

“You’re back,” said Pickwick, who liked to open any conversation by pointing out the obvious.

“Yes indeed,” I replied. “What’s the news?”

“My water dish is empty.”

“That’s because you just trod in it.”

Pickwick looked at her foot. “I have a wet foot . . . and my water dish is empty.”

“Anything else?”

“I saw Carmine with that goblin again. Sitting in the
niche d’amour
at the bottom of the garden, they were.”

“As long as she doesn’t invite him over the threshold again, I’m not bothered.”

“You should be. Goblins.
Nasty
. Full of diseases.”

“That’s Carmine’s problem. I told you, I’m not bothered.”

Actually, I was. I had tried to give Carmine a dressing-down for her poor choice in men, but she’d just stared at me and retorted that yes, Horace
might
be a thief, but at least he hadn’t set fire to a busload of nuns.

“Any news of Whitby?” I asked.

“Being questioned in custardy,” replied Mrs. Malaprop, who had walked in with a clipboard full of reports that all needed my signature. “His pasta is catching up with him. How were things at Jurisfiction?”

I didn’t tell them what had happened as it was safer that way.

“Captain Phantastic mentioned you owed him a date,” I said to Pickwick.

“The Captain?” she said with a fond smile. “I’m amazed he remembers—it was a long time ago. We were both young and foolish, and I’d do anything for a dare. Ah, Frederic—so many cats, so little recipes.”

“
Few
recipes.”

“What?”

“So many cats, so
few
recipes,” I said, pleased that I had figured out who’d been talking earlier.

Pickwick looked at me disdainfully, muttered “amateur” and marched out.

“The investigation is still on,” I said to Mrs. Malaprop as soon as Pickwick had gone, “but keep it under your hat, will you?”

“Squirtainly, ma’am. I found this note pinned to the newel post.”

 

 

“Horace?”

“The goblin.”

I wasn’t particularly annoyed with Carmine for chasing after the goblin—as long as he wasn’t invited back in again—but I
was
very annoyed that she had gone AWOL. It meant that for the past ten minutes there’d been no one here to play Thursday. If word had gotten out, there might have been a panic from the other characters, and it was against at least nine regulations that I could think of.

“Do we report her as absinthe without leaf?” asked Mrs. Malaprop.

I scrunched up the note. Reporting her as missing would get Jurisfiction involved, and Carmine would probably be shipped off to spend the next decade in
Roger Red Hat
.

“No,” I said, “but let me know the moment she gets back so I can give her a ticking off.”

Sprockett knocked and entered, his eyebrow pointing firmly at the “Worried” mark.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but the Men in Plaid are back.”

“So soon? You better admit th—”

“Thursday Next?” said the first of the MiP as he walked in the door.

“Yes?”

“You’re coming with us,” said the second.

“I can’t leave the series,” I said. “My understudy is at lunch.”

“That’s not what the board says,” observed the first, pointing at Carmine’s status on the indicator board, which was now blinking an orange “at readiness” light, despite the fact that she was out looking for Horace. “Is she AWOL?”

“No,” I lied.

“Then she’s in?”

“Yes,” I lied again.

“Then you can come with us.”

I looked at Malaprop and Sprockett. They knew what needed to be done—find Carmine at the earliest opportunity.

The Man in Plaid who seemed to be in charge jerked a thumb in the direction of the front door, and we walked outside. Predictably, there was a Buick Roadmaster, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The left-hand mudguard was dented and streaked with yellow paint—the sort of yellow paint that taxis are finished in. This was the car that had forced us off the road and into the mimefield.

“Am I in some sort of trouble?”

“You are if you don’t come with us.”

I
sat between the Men in Plaid in the back, which was uncomfortable, as they seemed to have a plethora of weapons beneath their suits, all of which poked me painfully in the ribs.

“So,” I said brightly, doing what I hoped Thursday would do—showing no fear. “How long have you been in plaid?”

“It’s not plaid. It’s tartan.”

“Right,” said the second one, “tartan.”

And despite more questions of a similar nature, they declined to talk further. I hoped to goodness that Mrs. Malaprop and Sprockett managed to hunt down Carmine in time for the early-evening readers.

We drove past Political Thriller on the Ludlum Freeway and made our way towards the towering heights of the Great Library, and I guessed where we were headed. On the twenty-sixth floor would be the Council of Genres and Senator Jobsworth, the man from whom the Men in Plaid ultimately drew their authority. Like Bradshaw, he must have figured out a way in which a Thursday Next look-alike could be used.

The security was even tighter here, and the Roadmaster slowed to negotiate the concrete roadblocks and high antibookjump mesh. We were waved through with only a cursory glance and drove across a narrow bridge and into the Ungenred Zone. This was an area of independent, narrative-free space where the governing body of the BookWorld could exist free from influence and bias. Or at least that was the theory. I’d been a few times to the Council of Genres, but only with the real Thursday. Ordinary citizens didn’t come here unless strictly on business. If we wanted to pretend we had influence, we could take any grievances to our genre representatives, and they would intercede on our behalf—or so the theory went.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

“Right to the very top.”

“That high, huh?”

Having the Great Library and the Ungenred Zone on Fiction Island was not without problems. Theoretically speaking, if it was located here, then it must be potentially readable by the RealWorld population, something about which the CofG was not happy. If it became common knowledge that there was a text-based realm on the other side of the printed page, hacking into the BookWorld would be a far bigger problem than it was already. The Outlander corporation known as Goliath had been attempting to find a way in for decades, but aside from their transfictional tour bus, quaintly named the Austen Rover and the occasional bookhacker, the independent existence of the BookWorld remained secret.

Even so, council officials were taking no chances, and the entire Ungenred Zone was rendered invisible to potential bookhackers by the simple expedient of not being written about. At least not directly. The adventures in my own series hinted at a BookWorld but these were heavily fictionalized, since the ghostwriter had no collaboration from Thursday when writing them. There was only the vaguest reference to the Great Library, and nothing about Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. Despite this, some of the more talented readers in the Outland had managed to hack into the zone by exploiting a hole in the defenses that allowed one to “read between the lines.” To counter this, the CofG had all the borders covered in soporific paint the shade of young lettuces, which worked like a charm. Every attempted incursion into the Ungenred Zone was met by drowsiness followed by an almost instantaneous torpor on the part of the potential hacker. It had exactly the same effect as the emergency Snooze Button, except that no kittens were ever hurt or injured.

The Roadmaster drove up to the BookWorld’s main port, where the Metaphoric River joined the Text Sea by a series of locks, weirs, traps and sluices. The port was large, and several hundred scrawl trawlers rode gently in the swell, grammasites wheeling above the mast tops, hoping to dart down and snatch a dropped article. On the dockside was the day’s catch. Most scrawlers simply netted the words that basked upon the surface for a quick and easy sale to the wordsmiths, while others deep-trawled for binary clause systems, whereby a verb and a noun had clumped together in a symbiotic relationship to form a protosentence. But even these hardened scrawlers were in awe of those who hunted fully formed sentences. These weatherbeaten sea dogs would sail far across the Text Sea in search of an entire paragraph, a descriptive zinger or even an original comedy monologue—the elusive Moby-Shtick that legends speak of.

Facing the docks and beyond the coils of ropes, nets, harpoons and infinitive splitters were several rows of single-story workshops where the words and letters were crocheted, knitted, sewed, glued, riveted or nailed together into sentences, depending on the softness of the prose to which they were destined. The completed sentences were either rough-sorted into bundles and sold direct to the Well of Lost Plots or woven into standard paragraphs on power looms, the nouns, verbs and adjectives left loose so the end users could make their own choices.

The Buick pulled to a stop outside the main entrance of the Great Library, and we climbed out. The library was housed in a towering Gothic skyscraper that stood as a reminder of the BookWorld before it was remade. Back then the area below the Great Library had been simply unexplored jungle. All that was swept away in the nine minutes of the remaking. The BookWorld may be slow when it comes to changing fashions and storytelling conventions, but it can rebuild itself in a flash if required.