One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (36 page)

“Unless,” said Julian Sparkle, “you want to play
Puzzlemania
?”

“What do I win?”

“A set of steak knives.”

“And if I lose?”

“We destroy you with a high-powered eraserhead.”

“Fair enough,” I replied. “I’m in.”

Sparkle smiled warmly, and I stepped to a mark on the floor that he indicated. As I did so, the lights seemed to dim, except for a bright spotlight on the two of us. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.

“So, Thursday Next, today we’re going to play . . . ‘Escape Across the Bridge.’”

He indicated the long, narrow causeway.

“It’s very simple. We erase anyone we see walking towards us across the causeway. There is no way to go round the causeway, and you’ll be dissolved in the Text Sea if you try to swim.”

“And?”

“That’s it. We check the bridge every half minute, and it takes four minutes to run across.”

As if to accentuate the point, the second host noticed someone trying to sneak across as we were talking. He shouldered the rifle and fired. The unfortunate escapee exploded in a chrysanthemum of text, which was quickly snapped up by the gulls.

“Ha-ha!” said the host, reloading the rifle. “Bagged another Baggins.”

And he made a mark on his tally board, which contained several hundred other Bagginses, three dozen Gandalfs, a plethora of Pratchett characters and sixty-seven Harry Potters.

“Right, then,” said Sparkle, “off you toddle.”

“Don’t you want the answer?”

He smiled in an oddly unpleasant way. “You can figure it out for the return journey.”

I walked across the causeway with a curiously heavy heart, as I had no idea how to get back, but once I arrived on the other side, it seemed a party was in full swing. Everyone was chatting to everyone else, and the mildly depressed feeling I had felt over in Vanity seemed to vanish completely.

“What’s the party about?” I asked a Hobbit who had thrust a drink into my hand.

“Where
have
you been?” she said with a smile. “Fan Fiction isn’t copying—it’s a
celebration
. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last period!”

“I never thought of that.”

“Few do—especially the authors who should really accept the praise with better grace. They’re a bunch of pompous fatheads, really—no slur intended. Nice clothes, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

And she wandered off.

“Thursday?”

I turned to find myself staring at . . . well,
myself.
I knew she wasn’t me or the real Thursday because she seemed somewhat narrow. In fact, now that I looked around, most people here were similar to real characters but of varying thickness. Some were barely flatter than normal, while others were so lacking in depth that they appeared only as an animated sheet of cardboard.

“Why is everyone so flat?” I asked.

“It’s a natural consequence of being borrowed from somewhere else,” explained the Thursday, who was, I noted, less than half an inch thick but apparently normal in every other way. “It doesn’t make us any less real or lacking in quality. But being written by someone who might not
quite
understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”

This made sense. I’d never really thought about it before, but it explained why the Edward Rochester and indeed
all
the borrowed characters in my series were of varying degrees of depth. Some weren’t that bad, but others, like Jane Eyre herself, were thin enough to be slipped under the door and could sleep rolled up and slipped into a drainpipe.

“How’s all that cloak-and-dagger stuff going?” asked Flat Thursday.

It seemed she thought I was the real one, and I wasn’t going to deny it.

“It’s going so-so,” I said. “How much did I tell you?”

She laughed. “You never tell us anything. Landen sent another message, by the way.”

“That’s good,” I replied, attempting to hide my enthusiasm. “Lead on.”

Thursday turned, and as she did so, she almost vanished as I saw her edge on. I wondered whether perhaps Agent Square might
not
be a Flatlander as he claimed, but a hyperfiction cube or something.

“We all think Landen’s totally Mr. Dreamcake,” said Flat Thursday as we walked past a reinterpretation of Middle Earth that was every bit as good as the real one, only flatter, “but he won’t speak to anyone except the real one.”

We walked down Thursday Street, and everything started to look vaguely familiar. The characters and settings were sort of similar, but the situations were not. The combinations were unusual, too, and although I had not personally supposed that Thursday might battle the Daleks with Dr. Who in a literary landscape, in here it was very much business as usual.

“He’s in there,” said Thursday, and she ushered me into a large, square room with a stripped pine floor, a thin skirting board and empty walls painted in magnolia. In the middle of the room was Landen, and he smiled as I walked in. But it wasn’t actually him; it was just a
feeling
of him.

“Hello, Landen.”

“Hello, Thursday. I needed to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically, “my answers are limited.”

I stared at him for a moment. Flat Thursday had said this was
another
message, so he must be communicating on a one-way basis by writing a short story—possibly with himself and his wife in conversation.

“Which Thursday do you want to talk to?” I asked.

“The written Thursday.”

So far, so good.

“Do you
now
believe I’m from the BookWorld?”

“You vanished as I was about to kiss you. Thursday never did that. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

“Do you know what the real Thursday was doing with Sir Charles Lyell?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Do you know who was trying to kill Thursday?”

“The Men in Plaid have tried to murder her on numerous occasions. At the last count, she had killed six of them. She doesn’t know who orders them to do it, or why.”

This was good news. Between Thursday and Sprockett and me, we’d taken out fourteen Plaids.

“Where is she now? Do you know?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Why did she ask the red-headed man to give me her badge?”

“She didn’t—
I did.
As soon as she was out of touch for over five days, I contacted Kiki.”

“Why did she ask
me
to help her?”

“She’d hoped you had evolved into something more closely resembling her. The only person she knew she could truly trust was . . . herself.”

This sounded encouraging. “Can I trust Bradshaw?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“She told me that she would try to contact you. She said the circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I have no more answers for you. I won’t know if you even got these. Good luck, Thursday.”

He stopped talking and just stood there blinking, awaiting any possible response from me.

“Listen,” I said, lowering my voice and looking around to make sure that Flat Thursday wasn’t listening, “did you write in a kiss, just to make up for the one I missed earlier?”

“Good luck, Thursday,” he said again. “I’m in a hurry, as I told your mother I’d help her with the Daphne Farquitt Readathon. Remember:
The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.
Four pounds of carrots, one medium cabbage, four-pack tin of beans, Moggilicious for Pickwick, pick up dry cleaning, toilet paper.”

I was confused until I realized that he had probably written the short story on the back of a shopping list. I watched and listened while he went through “Tonic water, snacks and the latest Wayne Skunk album,
Lick the Toad
” before he stopped, smiled again and then just stood there blinking in a state of rest.

I walked back outside to where many Thursdays of varying thicknesses were waiting to be told a story and given a few tips. It felt like I was doing a Thursday master class in a hall of mirrors, but I think they appreciated it. By the time I left two hours later, some of the thinner Thursdays were a little bit thicker.

 

“Might I inquire where madam has been?” asked Sprockett once I had returned to
The League of Cogmen.
“
Vanity
can be a dangerous place for those published. Brigands, scoundrels, verb artists and the Unread lurk in doorways, ready to steal the Essence of Read from the unwary.”

“I was in Fan Fiction.”

Sprockett’s eyebrow shot to “Worried” in alarm.

“How did you get back across the causeway?”

“Quite easily. They shoot anyone trying to escape, and they check the causeway every half minute to make sure. You can’t possibly run the distance in less than four minutes, so the answer seemed quite obvious.”

He diverted his mainspring to his thought cogs and whirred and clicked noisily for a full minute before giving up, and I had to tell him.

“That’s quite clever.”

“Elementary, my dear Sprockett. Julian Sparkle was a bit annoyed. He said that he’d have to change the puzzle. I won these steak knives. Perhaps Mrs. Winterhope would like them?”

“I think she should be delighted. May I ask a question, ma’am?”

“Of course.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I’m going to accept Senator Jobsworth’s invitation to go to the peace talks tomorrow masquerading as the real Thursday Next. The paddle steamer leaves at seven A.M. Everything that has happened is to do with Racy Novel and Speedy Muffler, and unless I start getting to the heart of the problem, I’m not going to get anywhere. The Men in Plaid will think twice before doing anything while I’m in plain view, and Landen told me that this was the way to find Thursday: ‘The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.’ I don’t understand that, but I
can
become more confused—going upriver with Jobsworth will
definitely
provide the extra confusion I need.”

Sprockett stared at me for a moment, and I could tell by the way his eyebrow was quivering between “Thinking” and “Worried” that he knew something was up.

“Don’t you mean ‘we,’ ma’am?”

I pulled a letter from my pocket that I’d prepared while seated at a You for Coffee? franchise just off Sargasso Plaza.

“These are glowing references, Sprockett. They should allow you to find a position in Fiction without any problem. You have been a steadfast and loyal companion whom I am happy to have known as a friend. Thank you.”

I blinked as my eyes started to mist, and Sprockett stared back at me with his blank porcelain features. His eyebrow pointed in turn at all the possible emotions engraved on his forehead. There was nothing for “Sad,” so it sprang backwards and forwards between “Doubtful” and “Worried.”

“I must protest, ma’am. I do not—”

“My mind is made up, Sprockett. I have nothing to offer. You have a bright future. It will please me greatly if you find onward employment that I can be proud of.”

Sprockett buzzed quietly to himself for a moment. “This is compassion, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I can
recognize
it,” he said, “but I am at odds to understand it. Shall we go indoors?”

We had boiled cabbage for dinner, which might have been improved had there been any cabbage to go in it. But the Winterhopes were more than friendly, and after several rounds of bezique that might have been more enjoyable had there been cards, Sprockett played the piano accordion without actually having a piano accordion, and the empty unread book didn’t ring to the tune of the “Beer Barrel Polka” until the small hours.

T
he steamer was called the
Metaphoric Queen,
and when I arrived, it was lying at the dockside just above the lock gates that separated the river from the Text Sea. The
Queen
was built of a wooden superstructure on a steel hull, measured almost three hundred feet from stem to stern and was the very latest in luxury river travel. A covered walkway ran around the upper deck, and behind the wheelhouse on the top deck was a single central stack that breathed out small puffs of smoke. As I approached, I could see the crew making ready. They loaded and unloaded freight, polished the brasswork, checked the paddle for broken vanes and oiled the traction arm that turned the massive sternwheel.

The
Queen
had docked only an hour before, and the cargo was being offloaded when I arrived: crude metaphor, sealed into twenty-gallon wooden casks, each stenciled PRODUCT OF RACY NOVEL. I watched as the casks were taken under guard and moved towards the Great Library, where they would be distilled into their component parts for onward trade.

“Welcome aboard!” said the captain as I walked up the gangplank. “The senator will be joining us shortly. The staterooms are the first door on the left—tea will be served in ten minutes.”

I thanked him and moved aft to the rear deck, which afforded a good view of the docks and the river. The other passengers were already on board and were exactly the sort of people one would expect to see on a voyage of this type. There was a missionary, a businessman, a family of settlers eager to make a new home for themselves, two ladies of negotiable affection and, strangely enough,
several
odd foreigners who wore rumpled linen suits and looked a bit mad.