One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (28 page)

The synthetic Flanker was unceremoniously dragged from the compartment by Boris, and the first heavy came to sit in Flanker’s old place.

“An excellent move,” he said with the air of authority, “to pit one of your foes against another. Worthy of the real Thursday. Now, where is she?”

“I’m her,” I said, suddenly realizing that while this whole Goliath adventure was kind of amusing, it wasn’t helping me find out where Thursday had actually gone. The sum total of my knowledge was that she’d been gone a month, was not dead, and had said that Lyell was boring. Goliath didn’t have her, so I was wasting my time here. I needed to get back to Swindon.

“Are you a day player as well?” I asked.

“No,” said the man, “I’m real. I check every morning. I know better than most that Goliath can’t be trusted. Now, where are you from and where’s Thursday?”

“I’m her. You don’t need to look any further.”

“You’re not her,” he said, “because you don’t recognize me. It surprised me at first, which was why I had to make sure you weren’t one of ours gone rogue. They do that sometimes. Despite our best attempts to create synthetics with little or no emotions, empathy tends to invade the mind like a virus. It’s most troublesome. Flanker would have killed you this morning if I’d told him to, and by the afternoon he dies trying to protect you. It’s just too bad. Now, where’s Thursday?”

Finally I figured it out. The one person at Goliath who had more reason to hate me than any other.

“You’re Jack Schitt, aren’t you?”

He stared at me for a moment, and smiled.

“By all that’s great and greedy,” he said, staring at me in wonder, “what a coup. You’re the written one, aren’t you?”

“No.”

But he knew I was lying. Unwittingly, I had revealed everything. Jack Schitt wasn’t his real name—
it was his name in the series
. I didn’t know what his real name was, but he would certainly have known his fictional counterpart. He pulled the phone off the hook and punched a few buttons.

“It’s me. Listen carefully: It’s not Thursday, it’s the
written
Thursday. . . . Yes, I’m positive. She could melt back any second, so we need to get her Blue Fairyed the second we’re on Goliath soil. . . . I don’t care what it takes. If she’s not real by teatime, heads will roll. And no, I’m not talking figuratively.”

He hung up the phone and stared at me with a soft, triumphal grin. “When are you due back?”

I stared at him, a feeling of genuine fear starting to fill me. My actions so far had been based on the certainty that I would return. The idea of staying here forever was not in the game plan.

“What happened to the Austen Rover, Next?”

“The what?”

“The Austen Rover. Our experimental transfictional tour bus. The real Thursday traveled with it on its inaugural flight and never returned. Where is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, the Blue Fairy is fictional and lives inside
Pinocchio
. She doesn’t do any actualizing these days. The Council of Genres forbade it.”

“Better and better,” he said, waving away the second heavy, who had returned with my tea, and closing the compartment door. “So you
are
from the BookWorld. And I was bluffing—we don’t have a Blue Fairy. But we have the next best thing: a
green
fairy.”

“I’ve never heard of the Green Fairy.”

“It’s a concoction of our own. It’s not so much a fairy—more like a magnetic containment facility designed to keep fictional characters from crossing back. I understand that the first few hours can be
excruciatingly
painful, and it gets worse from there. You’ll talk—they always do. How do you suppose we managed to get the inside information necessary to even begin research into the Book Project? Perhaps we can’t make you real, but we can keep you here indefinitely—or at least until such time as you can’t bear it any longer and agree to help us. Make it easy for yourself, Thursday: Where is the Austen Rover?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’ll tell us eventually. A few hours of Green Fairy will loosen your tongue.”

“Goliath wouldn’t last twenty minutes inside fiction,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. If this “Jack Schitt” was even half as devious as the one written about, we were in big trouble. Thursday had spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Goliath Corporation didn’t get into fiction, either to dump toxic waste, use the people within it as unpaid labor or even just to find another market to dominate and exploit.

I said nothing, which probably was all he wanted to know. It was rotten luck that he’d been the one to figure me out. The real Thursday had once imprisoned the so-called Jack Schitt within Poe’s “The Raven,” so here was a man with some experience of being in the BookWorld.

“What’s your name, then?” I asked. “If not Jack Schitt?”

“It was a ridiculous name, not to mention insulting,” he snorted. “I’m Dorset. Adrian Dorset.”

A
drian Dorset?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure at all.”

“What’s your name, then?”

“You’re not as smart as her, are you? Of
course
it’s Dorset. I think I know my own name.”

“The Adrian Dorset who wrote
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge
?”

He looked surprised for a moment. “The worthless scribblings of a man who was fooling himself that he could write. It was following the death of Anne, but I don’t expect you’d know anything about that, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Anne was my wife,” he said. “Head of the Book Project. She was on board the Austen Rover’s inaugural journey. Thursday told me what had happened to her and what she’d done before she died. I don’t blame Thursday. Not anymore. Revenge is for losers, cash is the winning currency. I burned the book a month ago. I didn’t need it anymore. I’m over her.”

He looked down at his feet, and I suddenly felt sorry for him.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

He said very little for the rest of the journey, and I watched out the window as the English countryside zipped beneath us at breathtaking speed; we had nothing as fast as this in the BookWorld—not even in Sci-Fi, where they were a lot more conservative than they made out. As we approached Liverpool and the Tarbuck International Travelport, the traffic became more intense as other bullet gondolas joined the induction rail and clumped around for a while before moving off in separate directions. At all times the small, bullet-shaped craft, each no bigger than a bus, kept well spaced from one another, moving apart and together as congestion dictated.

The intercom buzzed, and Dorset picked it up, looked at me, then said, “Security override seventeen,” before listening for a while and then saying, “
Bastards
. Very well.”

“Problems?”

“Nothing to worry your sweet fictional head about.”

We glided to a halt on Platform 24 at Tarbuck International. The doors hissed open, but we didn’t move, and a few minutes later a small, meek-looking man arrived. He was wearing a dark suit and a bowler hat, and he was carrying a small briefcase. When he spoke, his voice was thin and reedy, and his nose was red from a recent cold.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Meakle,” said my captor, without getting up.

“Good afternoon,” said Meakle, who looked strikingly similar to someone who had played a bit part early on in my series. “You will release Miss Next to the custody of a federal marshal.”

He indicated several marshals who were all standing on the platform outside the bullet.

“I’m afraid not, old chap,” said Dorset or Schitt or whoever he was. “Miss Next is under arrest for crimes against humanity, which effectively trumps anything you might have in store for her.”

“You’re right
and
wrong,” said Mr. Meakle. “She is under arrest, but
house
arrest, and will remain there until the government decides the best course of action. National heroes are not treated as common prisoners, Mr. Dorset.”

“I have the authority of the police and SpecOps,” replied Dorset coolly, “an authority given to us under mandate from the minister of justice.”

The bureaucrat opened his case and took out a sheet of paper. “I repeat, Miss Next is to be taken into custody by a federal marshal. Here is an executive order signed personally by President Redmond van de Poste. Need I say more?”

Dorset took the document and stared at it minutely. I could tell from his expression that all was very much in order. He handed it back, looked at me and told me the game “was far from over.”

 

I was taken across the concourse to where Meakle had his own private bullet with the presidential seal painted upon it, and within a few moments we were skimming back south across the countryside.

“Thank you.”

Mr. Meakle seemed distracted, as though this were just one of many jobs he had to do in a single day. It looked, in fact, as though he worked from the bullet.

“My pleasure,” said Mr. Meakle. “Where can we drop you?”

I asked for Swindon, and he relayed the instructions through the phone.

“I know I speak for the president when we say how fortunate it is to see you back,” he added. “NSA officials and SO-5 will be briefed to protect you from Goliath. Can I schedule a meeting with the president anytime soon? We are eager to receive the secret plans as soon as we can, and we hope that the security arrangements are to your satisfaction.”

I told him I’d meet with them tomorrow. Meakle nodded solemnly and returned to his work.

I sat back in my seat and ran the events of the afternoon through my head. I had just gotten to the bit where Spike had rescued me from the Stiltonista when I began to feel very peculiar. I started to have odd thoughts, then couldn’t figure out why I’d thought of them. The world would soften around the edges, and I could feel myself almost lose consciousness. I thought for a moment I might be dying, as I could feel my conscious mind nearly close down. Before I knew it, I had closed my eyes and an overwhelming darkness stole over me. I might indeed have died, but I didn’t, and I slept quite soundly until Mr. Meakle woke me when we arrived back at Clary-LaMarr.

W
here did you get to?” asked Landen as soon as I tapped on the back door to be let in. “I was thinking you’d gone missing again.”

“I brought down the Stiltonista, was arrested for crimes against humanity, found out where the other Thursdays are buried, was almost kidnapped by Goliath and was then rescued by the attorney general.”

“Is that all?”

“No. I found out what ghosts are. They’re childhood memories. Oh, and the president wants to see me tomorrow to discuss the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield—I think it’s what the whole ‘secret plans’ deal is all about.”

“Are you sure you’re not Thursday?”

“Positive. Hey, listen: Jack Schitt’s real name is Adrian Dorset. How weird is that?”

“Not weird at all. You and I have known for years. Jack Schitt is a daft pseudonym—not to mention actionable.”

“Perhaps so—but he wrote
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge,
the book I was asking you about.”

“And the significance of this is . . . ?”

“I don’t know, but the RealWorld’s kind of wild with all this strange stuff going on, although it’s a good thing this isn’t Fiction—it wouldn’t really make
any
sense.”

I was becoming quite animated by now—randomness has an intoxicating effect on the preordained.

“By the way,” I added, “do you want thirty grand?”

Landen raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You earned thirty thousand pounds this afternoon . . .
as well
?”

“From a Vole.”

“What the . . . ? No, I don’t want to know. But yes, we could do with the cash, so long as it’s not illegally earned.”

“Here you go,” I said, handing him the crumpled check.

I’d have to make good on my side of the bargain, but I felt sure I could drop some Toast Marketing Board references into the series without much problem.

“Oh, and if you see anyone who looks like NSA or SpecOps watching the house, don’t be alarmed. The president is protecting us—I don’t think Goliath is too keen on me right now.”

“Were they ever?”

“Not really. But I know what they’re up to, and it’s particularly unpleasant. In fact, I shouldn’t really hang around. I’ll only make things dangerous for you.”

“Until we prove you’re not my wife,” he said, “you’re staying.”

It seemed like a generous sentiment, so I accepted gracefully.

“Listen,” he said, “just in case I’m wrong and you really
are
written, you should know something.”

“Yes?”