One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (2 page)

“Any work offers recently?” I asked.

“I was up for a minor walk-on in an Amis.”

“How did you do?”

“I read half a page and they asked me what I thought. I said I understood every word and so was rejected as being overqualified.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I was also offered a four-hundred-and-six-word part in a horror last week, but I’m not so sure. First-time author and a small publisher, so I might not make it past the second impression. If I get remaindered, I’d be worse off than I am now.”

“I’m remaindered,” I reminded him.

“But you were
once
popular,” he said, “so you might be again. Do you know how many characters have high hopes of a permanent place in the readers’ hearts, only to suffer the painful rejection of eternal unreadfulness at the dreary end of Human Drama?”

He was right. A book’s life could be very long indeed, and although the increased leisure time in an unread novel is not to be sniffed at, a need to be vigilant in case someone
does
read you can keep one effectively tied to a book for life. I usually had an understudy to let me get away, but few were so lucky.

“So,” said Whitby, “how would you like to come out to the smellies tonight? I hear
Garden Peas with Mint
is showing at the Rex.”

In the BookWorld, smells were in short supply.
Garden Peas with Mint
had been the best release this year. It only narrowly beat
Vanilla Coffee
and
Grilled Smoked Bacon
for the prestigious Noscar
^™
Best Adapted Smell award.

“I heard that
Mint
was overrated,” I replied, although I hadn’t. Whitby had been asking me out for a date almost as long as I’d been turning him down. I didn’t tell him why, but he suspected that there was someone else. There was and there wasn’t. It was complex, even by BookWorld standards. He asked me out a lot, and I declined a lot. It was kind of like a game.

“How about going to the Running of the Bumbles next week? Dangerous, but exciting.”

This was an annual fixture on the BookWorld calendar, where two dozen gruel-crazed and indignant Mr. Bumbles yelling, “More? MORE?!?” were released to charge through an unused chapter of
Oliver Twist.
Those of a sporting or daring disposition were invited to run before them and take their chances; at least one hapless youth was crushed to death every year.

“I’ve no need to prove myself,” I replied, “and neither do you.”

“How about dinner?” he asked, unabashed. “I can get a table at the Inn Uendo. The maîtred’ is missing a space, and I promised to give her one.”

“Not really my thing.”

“Then what about the Bar Humbug? The atmosphere is wonderfully dreary.”

It was over in Classics, but we could take a cab.

“I’ll need an understudy to take over my book.”

“What happened to Stacy?”

“The same as happened to Doris and Enid.”

“Trouble with Pickwick again?”

“As if you need to ask.”

And that was when the doorbell rang. This was unusual, as random things rarely occur in the mostly predetermined BookWorld. I opened the door to find three Dostoyevskivites staring at me from within a dense cloud of moral relativism.

“May we come in?” said the first, who had the look of someone weighed heavily down with the burden of conscience. “We were on our way home from a redemption-through-suffering training course. Something big’s going down at Text Grand Central, and everyone’s been grounded until further notice.”

A grounding was rare, but not unheard of. In an emergency all citizens of the BookWorld were expected to offer hospitality to those stranded outside their books.

I might have minded, but these guys were from
Crime and Punishment
and, better still, celebrities. We hadn’t seen anyone famous this end of Fantasy since Pamela from
Pamela
stopped outside with a flat tire. She could have been gone in an hour but insisted on using an epistolary breakdown service, and we had to put her up in the spare room while a complex series of letters went backwards and forwards.

“Welcome to my home, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.”

“Oh!” said Raskolnikov, impressed that I knew who he was. “How did you know it was me? Could it have been the subtle way in which I project the dubious moral notion that murder might somehow be rationalized, or was it the way in which I move from denying my guilt to eventually coming to terms with an absolute sense of justice and submitting myself to the rule of law?”

“Neither,” I said. “It’s because you’re holding an ax covered in blood and human hair.”

“Yes, it is a bit of a giveaway,” he admitted, staring at the ax, “but how rude am I? Allow me to introduce Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov.”

“Actually,” said the second man, leaning over to shake my hand, “I’m Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s loyal friend.”

“You are?” said Raskolnikov in surprise. “Then what happened to Svidrigailov?”

“He’s busy chatting up your sister.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“My sister? That’s Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, right?”

“No,” said Razumikhin in the tone of a long-suffering best friend, “that’s your mother. Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova is your sister.”

“I always get those two mixed up. So who’s Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova?”

Razumikhin frowned and thought for a moment.

“You’ve got me there.”

He turned to the third Russian.

“Tell me, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin: Who, precisely, is Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova?”

“I’m sorry,” said the third Russian, who had been staring at her shoes absently, “but I think there has been some kind of mistake. I’m not Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin. I’m Alyona Ivanovna.”

Razumikhin turned to Raskolnikov and lowered his voice.

“Is that your landlady’s servant, the one who decides to marry down to secure her future, or the one who turns to prostitution in order to stop her family from descending into penury?”

Raskolnikov shrugged. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been in this book for over a hundred and forty years, and even I can’t figure it out.”

“It’s very simple,” said the third Russian, indicating who did what on her fingers. “Nastasya Petrovna is Raskolnikov’s landlady’s servant, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova is your sister who threatens to marry down, Sofia Semyonovna Marmeladova is the one who becomes a prostitute, and Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova—the one you were
first
asking about—is Arkady Svidrigailov’s murdered first wife.”

“I knew that,” said Raskolnikov in the manner of someone who didn’t. “So . . . who are you again?”

“I’m Alyona Ivanovna,” said the third Russian with a trace of annoyance, “the rapacious old pawnbroker whose apparent greed and wealth led you to murder.”

“Are you
sure
you’re Ivanovna?” asked Raskolnikov with a worried tone.

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re still alive?”

“So it seems.”

He stared at the bloody ax. “Then who did I just kill?”

And they all looked at one another in confusion.

“Listen,” I said, “I’m sure everything will come out fine in the epilogue. But for the moment your home is my home.”

Anyone from Classics had a celebrity status that outshone anything else, and I’d never had anyone even remotely famous pass through before. I suddenly felt a bit hot and bothered and tried to tidy up the house in a clumsy sort of way. I whipped my socks from the radiator and brushed off the pistachio shells that Pickwick had left on the sideboard.

“This is Whitby Jett of EZ-Read,” I said, introducing the Russians one by one but getting their names hopelessly mixed up, which might have been embarrassing had they noticed. Whitby shook all their hands and then asked for autographs, which I found faintly embarrassing.

“So why has Text Grand Central ordered a grounding?” I asked as soon as everyone was seated and I had rung for Mrs. Malaprop to bring in the tea.

“I think the rebuilding of the BookWorld is about to take place,” said Razumikhin with a dramatic flourish.

“So soon?”

The remaking had been a hot topic for a number of years. After Imagination™ was deregulated in the early fifties, the outburst of creative alternatives generated huge difficulties for the Council of Genres, who needed a clearer overview of how the individual novels sat within the BookWorld as a whole. Taking the RealWorld as inspiration, the CofG decided that a Geographic model was the way to go. How the physical world actually appeared, no one really knew. Not many people traveled to the RealWorld, and those who did generally noted two things: one, that it was hysterically funny and hideously tragic in almost equal measure, and two, that there were far more domestic cats than baobabs, when it should probably be the other way round.

Whitby got up and looked out the window. There was nothing to see, quite naturally, as the area
between
books had no precise definition or meaning. My front door opened to, well, not very much at all. Stray too far from the boundaries of a book and you’d be lost forever in the interbook Nothing. It was confusing, but then so were
Tristram Shandy
,
The Magus
and Russian novels, and people had been enjoying them for decades.

“So what’s going to happen?” asked Whitby.

“I have a good friend over at Text Grand Central,” said Alyona Ivanovna, who had wisely decided to sit as far from Raskolnikov and the bloody ax as she could, “and he said that to accomplish a smooth transition from Great Library BookWorld to Geographic BookWorld, the best option was to close down all the imaginotransference engines while they rebooted the throughput conduits.”

This was an astonishing suggestion. The imaginotransference engines were the machines that transmitted the books in all their subtle glory from the BookWorld to the reader’s imagination. To shut them down meant that reading—
all
reading—had to stop. I exchanged a nervous glance with Whitby.

“You mean the Council of Genres is going to shut down the entire BookWorld?”

Alyona Ivanovna nodded. “It was either that or do it piecemeal, which wasn’t favored, since then half the BookWorld would be operating one system and half the other. It’s simple: All reading needs to stop for the nine minutes it requires to have the BookWorld remade.”

“But that’s insane!” exclaimed Whitby. “People will notice. There’s always someone reading
somewhere.
”

From my own failed experience of joining the BookWorld’s policing agency, I knew that he spoke the truth. There was a device hung high on the wall in the Council of Genres debating chamber that logged the Outland ReadRate—the total number of readers at any one time. It bobbed up and down but rarely dropped below the 20-million mark. But while spikes in reading were easier to predict, such as when a new blockbuster is published or when an author dies—always a happy time for their creations, if not their relatives—predicting slumps was much harder. And we needed a serious slump in reading to get down to the under-fifty-thousand threshold considered safe for a remaking.

I had an idea. I fetched that morning’s copy of
The Word
and turned to the week’s forecast. This wasn’t to do with weather, naturally, but trends in reading. Urban Vampires were once more heavily forecast for the week ahead, with scattered Wizards moving in from Wednesday and a high chance of Daphne Farquitt Novels near the end of the week. There was also an alert for everyone at Sports Trivia to “brace themselves,” and it stated the reason.

“There you go,” I said, tapping the newspaper and showing it to the assembled company. “Right about now the Swindon Mallets are about to defend their title against the Gloucester Meteors, and with live televised coverage to the entire planet there is a huge potential fall in the ReadRate.”

“You think that many people are interested in Premier League croquet?” asked Razumikhin.

“It
is
Swindon versus Gloucester,” I replied, “and after the Malletts’ forward hoop, Penelope Hrah, exploded on the forty-yard line last year, I would expect ninety-two percent of the world will be watching the game—as good a time as any to take the BookWorld offline.”

“Did they ever find out
why
Hrah exploded?” asked Whitby.

“It was never fully explained,” put in Ivanovna, “but traces of Semtex were discovered in her shin guards, so foul play could never be ruled out entirely. A grudge match is always a lot of fu—”

Her voice was abruptly cut dead, but not in the way one’s is when one has suddenly stopped speaking. Her voice was clipped, like a gap in a recording.

“Hello?” I said.

The three Russians made no answer and were simply staring into space, like mannequins. After a moment they started to lose facial definition as they became a series of complex irregular polyhedra. After a while the number of facets of the polyhedra started to lessen, and the Russians became less like people and more like jagged, flesh-colored lumps. Pretty soon they were nothing at all. The Classics were being shut down, and if Text Grand Central was doing it alphabetically, Fantasy would not be far behind. And so it proved. I looked at Whitby, who gave me a wan smile and held my hand. The room grew cold, then dark, and before long the only world that I knew started to disassemble in front of my eyes. Everything grew flatter and lost its form, and pretty soon I began to feel my memory fade. And just when I was starting to worry, everything was cleansed to an all-consuming darkness.