One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (9 page)

“This book could be any one of thousands,” said Sprockett.

“
Millions
.”

With nothing more to see here, we stepped back outside the bed-sitting room, and I laid a map of the BookWorld on the hood of Lola’s car and marked where the section had been found. This done, I called in Pickford Removals, and within twenty minutes the bed-sitting room had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed for onward delivery to the double garage at the back of my house. This was ostensibly to allow the books in which they had landed to carry on unhindered. Not that a ton of tattered paragraph would necessarily be a problem. The entire cast of
A Tale of Two Cities
has steadfastly ignored a runaway pink gorilla that has evaded capture for eighty-seven years but, as far as we know, has not been spotted by readers once.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” I said to Lola, who stubbed out her cigarette and climbed into her car. She stomped on the accelerator, and the Delahaye shot across the car park, drove straight through the wooden barrier behind her and landed with a crunch on top of the Mairzy Doats sandwich bar ten stories below.

“Come on,” I said to Sprockett. “Work to be done.”

 

The debris field extended across four genres, and we spent the next three hours listening to residents who claimed that falling book junk had “completely ruined their entrance,” and on one rare occasion it actually had. There was a reasonable quantity of wreckage, but nothing quite as large as the bed-sitting room. We found a yellow-painted back axle, the remains of at least nine tigers, a few playing cards, some lengths of silk, a hat stand, sections of a box-girder bridge, nine apples, parts of a raccoon and a quantity of slate. There was a lot of unrecognizable scrap, too, much of it desyntaxed sentences that made no sense at all. We found only one piece of human remains—a thumb—except it might not have been a thumb at all but simply reformed graphemes.

“Graphemes?” asked Sprockett when I mentioned it.

“Everything in the BookWorld is constructed of them,” I explained. “Letters and punctuation—the building blocks of the textual world.”

“So why might that thumb not actually be a thumb?”

“Because once broken down below the ‘word’ unit, a grapheme might come from anywhere. The same s can serve equally well in a sword, a sausage, a ship, a sailor or even the sun. It doesn’t help that under extreme pressure and heat, graphemes often separate out and then fuse back together into something else entirely. At Jurisfiction basic training, we were shown how a ‘sheet of card,’ once heated up white-hot and then struck with a blacksmith’s hammer, could be made into ‘cod feathers’ and then back again.”

“Ah,” said Sprockett, “I see.”

“Because of this, anything under a few words long found at an accident site can be disregarded as evidence—it might once have been something else entirely.” Oddly enough, the process of graphusion and graphission, while occurring naturally in the Text Sea, was hard to do synthetically in the BookWorld but simplicity itself in the Outland. The long and short of it was that victims of extreme trauma in the BookWorld were rarely found. A sprinkling of graphemes was soon absorbed into the fabric of the book it fell upon and left no trace.

Once Sprockett and I had logged everything we’d found and dispatched it via Pickford’s to my double garage, I called Mrs. Malaprop to check that all was well. It was, generally speaking. Pickwick was suspicious that there really might be goblins around, and Carmine was spending her time rehearsing with the various members of the cast. Whitby Jett had called to say that now that Carmine was there, he would be taking me out to Bar Humbug for a drink and nibbles at nine—and no arguments.

I’d known him for nearly two years, and I think I’d just come to the end of a very long trail of excuses and reasons that I couldn’t go out on a date. I sighed. There was still one. Perhaps the
only
one I’d ever had. I told Mrs. Malaprop I would be home in half an hour, thought for a moment and then turned to Sprockett.

“Can I shut you down for a while?”

“Madam, that is a
most
improper suggestion.”

“I’m about to do something illegal, and since you are incapable of lying, I don’t want you in a position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”

“Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”

“Not yet.”

We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.

“I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.

“In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”

“I promise.”

And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.

I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.

“Where to?”

“Poetry.”

T
he taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as
I, Robot.

The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.

“Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”

She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.

“Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.

“Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”

“Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”

“Can he mix cocktails?”

“He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”

“Deal.”

We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.

“How are you enjoying the new BookWorld?” I asked by way of conversation.

“Too many baobabs and not enough smells,” she said, “but otherwise enjoyable.”

The baobabs
were
a problem, but it was hardly at the top of my list of complaints. After a few minutes with the cabbie telling me in a cheerful voice how she’d had Bagheera in the back of her cab once, we emerged blinking at the tunnel exit and the island of Poetry, where we were waved through by a border guard who was too busy checking the paperwork on a consignment of iambic pentameters to worry much about us.

We made our way slowly down Keats Avenue until we came to Tennyson Boulevard, and I ordered her to stop outside “Locksley Hall” and wait for me around the corner. I got out, waited until she had gone, then walked past “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to a small gate entwined with brambles and from there into a glorious English summer’s day. I walked up the river, past long fields of barley and rye that seemed to clothe the wold and meet the sky, then through the field where a road ran by, which led to many-towered Camelot. I walked along the river, turned a corner and found the island in the river. I looked around as aspens quivered and a breeze and shiver ran up and down my spine. I really wasn’t meant to be here and could get into serious trouble if I was discovered. I took a deep breath, crossed a small bridge and found myself facing a square gray building with towers at each corner. I didn’t knock, as I knew the Lady of Shalott quite well, and entered unbidden to walk the two flights of stairs to the tower room.

“Hullo!” said the lady, pausing from the tapestry upon which she was engaged. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

The Lady of Shalott was of an indeterminate age and might once have been plain before the rigors of artistic interpretation got working on her. This was the annoying side of the Feedback Loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even
wanted
to look, she was now a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with long flaxen tresses, flowing white gowns and a silver forehead band. She wasn’t the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn’t just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

“Good afternoon, my lady,” I said, curtsying. “I would like to conduct more research.”

“Such adherence to duty is much to be admired,” replied the lady. “How are your readings going?”

“Over a thousand,” I returned, lying spectacularly. If I didn’t pretend to be popular, she’d never have granted me access.

“That’s wonderful news. Make good use of the time. I could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

Satisfied, she left her tapestry and summoned me to the window that faced Camelot. The Lady of Shalott took great care not to look out of the window but instead gently stroked a mirror that was held in a large bronze hanger and angled it towards the windows, as if to see the view outside. But this mirror wasn’t like other mirrors; the surface grew misty, turned the color of slate, then displayed an image quite unlike the reflection one might expect.

“Usual place?” she asked.

“Usual place.”

The image coalesced into a suburban street in the Old Town of Swindon, and the Lady of Shalott touched me on the shoulder.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she told me, and quietly returned to her tapestry, which seemed to depict David Hasselhoff in various episodes from
Baywatch
, Series 2.

I stared into the mirror. The image flickered occasionally and was mildly desaturated in color, but it was otherwise clear and sharp.

“Left forty-five degrees.”

The mirror shifted to look up the suburban road to the house where Thursday and Landen lived. But this wasn’t a book somewhere, or a memory. This was the RealWorld, the Outland. The Lady of Shalott uniquely possessed a window into reality and could see whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to. Great lives, great events—even
Baywatch
. The images she saw were woven into a tapestry, and she couldn’t look outside her own window on pain of death. It was all a bit weird, but that’s Tennyson for you.

The view was live, and aside from the fact that it was mute, was almost as good as being there.

“Move forward six yards.”

The viewpoint moved forward to a front door that was very familiar to me. I had a similar front door in my own book, but my version didn’t have peeling paint or the random fine crackle that natural weathering brings. I sensed my heart beat faster.

“Go inside.”

The viewpoint drifted through the door, where the hall was less familiar. Thursday and Landen’s real house was only ever described briefly to the ghostwriter who wrote my series, so the interior was different. I jumped as someone moved past the mirror. It was a young girl aged no more than twelve, and she looked very serious for her years. This would have been Thursday and Landen’s daughter, Tuesday, as brilliant as Uncle Mycroft but in the “confusing petulant” state of pubescence. Nothing was right and everything was wrong. If it wasn’t problems over the revectoring of electrogravitational field theory, it was her brother, Friday, whom she regarded as a total loser and layabout.

“Advance two yards.”

The viewpoint moved forward to the hall table. I could see that Thursday was not in, as her bag, keys, cell phone and battered leather jacket were absent. It didn’t say she was missing; only that she wasn’t at home right now.

“Advance six yards, rotate left twenty degrees.”

The viewpoint moved into the kitchen, where a man was sitting at the table attempting to help Tuesday with her GSD uni-Scripture homework. He was graying at the temples and had a kindly face that was
very
familiar. This was Landen Parke-Laine, Thursday’s husband. I blinked as my eyes moistened. They were talking, and he laughed. I couldn’t hear him, but imagined as best I could how he might have sounded. Sort of like . . .
music
.