One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (35 page)

“Listen,” I said, changing my tone to one of conciliation, “we have an average weekly ReadRate of 3.7 at present—remaindered, out of print and, technically speaking, unread. You need my leadership to try to turn this series around. If you want to negotiate, we can negotiate—everything’s on the table. So let’s talk. Who’s for tea?”

They all stared at me in a stony-faced manner, and I suddenly felt that things were a lot worse than I’d thought. There had been grumblings before, but nothing like this.

“Well, then,” I said, my temper rising, “who’s going to lead the book? Carmine?”

“I can handle it.”

“You can handle it
now
. What if the ReadRate goes above forty? How screwed will you be then?”

“There is no need to be unkind,” said my father. “With our support she’ll manage. At least she doesn’t spend her days gallivanting around the BookWorld on arguably pointless quests for a namesake who doesn’t even like her.”

That hurt.

“Well,” I replied in a sarcastic tone, “how does consorting with a goblin fare on the ‘bringing the book into disrepute’ stakes?”

“You can talk,” retorted Carmine. “
Your
intended boyfriend set fire to a busload of nuns.”

“And puppies,” said Pickwick.

“
Orphaned
puppies,” added Rochester, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Besides,” said Carmine, “Horace and I have agreed to a trial separation.”

“I think we’ve all said quite enough,” announced Bowden haughtily. “All in favor of replacing Thursday with Carmine, raise a hand.”

They all raised a hand except Stig, who I know liked me, Bertha Rochester who was in a straitjacket, and Pickwick.

“Thank you, Pickwick,” I said. “Nice to know some friends haven’t abandoned me.”

“Are we voting now?” asked Pickwick, waking with a start. “I’m in.”

And she put a wing in the air.

“All right, you bunch of disloyal ingrates,” I said, taking the Snooze Button’s access codes and the key to the core containment from around my neck, “have the job. Who cajoled you all when you thought you were rubbish? Who made sure we rehearsed the whole way through the six weeks we were unread last winter?”

Victor looked at the ceiling, and Pickwick stared at her foot. They all knew I’d been holding things together for a while. The previous written Thursday had left the series in a terrible state. Everyone arguing with everyone else, and with a humor deficit that I had only just managed to plug.

“And a fat lot of good it did us,” replied Carmine angrily. “We’re the laughingstock of Speculative Fantasy.”

“We’re still being read. Do you know what to do if there is a flameout on the e-book throughput intensifiers?”

Carmine’s blank look told me she didn’t.

“Or if the metaphor depletes midscene? What about the irony injectors? How often should they be cleaned? Do you even
know
what an adjectivore looks like or what happens if you get Martha Stewarts behind the wainscoting?”

“Hey,” said Horace, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of the bureau, “why don’t you go do a Plot 9 on yourself? We can muddle through. With less than twenty active readers, we’ve certainly got enough time.”

“
We?
” I demanded. “Since when were you anything to do with this series?”

“Since Carmine asked me.”

“He has some very good ideas,” said Carmine. “Even Pickwick thinks they’re quite good. Isn’t that so, Pickers?”

“Sort of,” said Pickwick, looking the other way huffily.

“We’d better get on,” said Hades in a pointed fashion. “We’ve got some readings to attend to.”

“Right,” I said, lips pursed as I tried to control my temper, “I’ll let you get on with it.”

And without another word, I strode out of the house with as much dignity as I could muster. As soon as I was outside, I sat on the garden wall, my heart beating fast, taking short gasps of air. I looked back at the series. It was a jagged collection of settings—the towers of Thornfield Hall set among the floodlights of the Swindon croquet field and the Penderyn Hotel. There were a few airships, too, but only one-tenth scale. It was all I’d ever known. It had seemed like
home
.

“You should look on the bright side, ma’am,” said Sprockett, handing me a Chicago Fizz he had conjured up seemingly from nowhere.

“There
is
a bright side? No book, no home, no one to believe in me and no real idea what became of Thursday—or what the hell’s going on. And in addition I’d
really
like to punch Horace.”

“Punching goblins,” replied Sprockett soothingly, “while offering short-term relief, has no long-term beneficial value.”

I sighed. “You’re right.”

“By referring to the ‘bright side,’ ma’am, I merely meant that the recent upset simply frees your schedule for more pressing matters. You have larger fish to fry over the next couple of days.”

I stood up. Sprockett was right. To hell with the series—for the moment at least.

“So where do you suggest we go now?”

“Back to Vanity.”

S
prockett, I learned, lived in the Fantasy section of Vanity, not far from Parody Valley. I was more at leisure to look about upon this, my second visit, and I noticed that whereas in Fiction the landscape was well maintained, relatively open and with good infrastructure, years of self-publishing into the same geographic area meant that Vanity was untidy, chaotic and overcrowded.

The resident novels with their settings, props and characters now occupied every spare corner of the island and had accreted on top of one another like alluvial deposits. Grand towers of imaginative speculation had arisen from the bare rock, and the island was honeycombed with passageways, tunnels and shafts to provide access to the scenes and settings now buried far below the surface. In some places the books were so close that boundaries became blurred—a tiger hunt in 1920s Bengal merged seamlessly with the TT races on the Isle of Man, a western with the 1983 Tour de France. Space in Vanity was limited.

“Don’t let on you’re published,” remarked Sprockett as we arrived at his book, a badly worn tome cemented into a cliff face of similar books and supported on slender stilts that were anchored to the rock below. He needn’t have—I knew the score. Vanity’s beef with the rest of Fiction was long-lived and not without some degree of justification.

I wiped my feet on the doormat as we entered and noted that the novel was set mostly in the manor house that belonged to Professor Winterhope, Sprockett’s creator, and was populated by a large and mildly eccentric family of mechanical men, none of whom looked as though they had been serviced for years.

“Welcome to
The League of Cogmen,
” said Mrs. Winterhope once the professor had taken Sprockett off for an oil change and general service. “Would you like some tea?”

I told her I would, and we walked into the front room, which was like my kitchen back home, a command center and meeting place all in one. Mrs. Winterhope introduced me to the Cogmen, who had been wound sufficiently to converse but were under strict orders not to move, so as not to wear themselves out—quite literally, as they had a limited stock of spare parts. Despite these obvious drawbacks, they still expressed the languorous attitude of the long-unread. It didn’t look as though they rehearsed much either, which was a lamentable lapse in professionalism, although I wasn’t going to say so.

“We must thank you for rescuing Sprocky from that rabble in Conspiracy,” said Mrs. Winterhope, putting an empty kettle onto a cold stove. “And we were delighted to hear he was employed by Thursday Next—even if not the real one.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Has our Sprockett been serving you well?”

“He has been beyond exemplary,” I told her. “A gentleman’s gentleman.”

“Excellent,” she replied. “I can count on you to give good references?”

“I cannot see a scenario where I would let him go,” I said with a smile. “He is utterly admirable in every respect.”

But Mrs. Winterhope wasn’t smiling.

“I understand,” she said slowly, “that you have recently found yourself in diminished circumstances?”

This was true, of course. I had almost nothing except Sprockett and the clothes I was wearing.

“At present yes, that is true,” I admitted somewhat sheepishly.

Mrs. Winterhope poured the contents of the empty kettle into a teapot that I noted contained no tea.

“Sprockett is the most advanced automaton we possess,” she continued, “and whilst not wishing to be indelicate in these matters, I cannot help thinking that his career may not be well serviced by someone who finds herself—I’m sorry to be blunt—in a position of . . .
unreadness
.”

She stared at me with a kind yet desperate expression and handed me an empty cup.

“Would you like no milk?”

“Yes thank you,” I said, not wishing to embarrass her. Not a single reader in over seventeen years had graced the Winterhopes’ pages, so the reader stipend was unavailable to them, and they had, quite literally, nothing. The only possible avenue to a better life was through the one character who might conceivably find a placement in the world of wider readership. Four days ago I’d been a potential help; now I was a millstone. I knew what I had to do.

“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Winterhope, “I understand.”

She nodded politely and patted me on the arm. “Will you stay with us tonight?” she asked. “We have absolutely nothing, but we would be happy to share it with you.”

I told her I would be honored to share in their nothing, then excused myself to go for a walk.

 

I left the novel and wandered down through the narrow streets to where the Tennyson Boardwalk ran alongside the beach. The walk was full of evening strollers and traders, mostly selling book-clearance salvage from those novels that had been recently scrapped. I stopped to lean on the decorative cast-iron railings and absently watched the Text Sea lap against the foreshore, the jumbled collection of letters heaving and mixing in the swell. Every now and then, a chance encounter would construct a word, and the constituent parts glowed with the joyous harmony of word construction. Farther down, some kids were fishing these new words from the sea with hooked sticks. Three-letter constructions were thrown back to potentially grow larger, but longer ones were pulled ashore for possible sale. While I stood there watching, they caught a “theodolite,” a “linoleum” and a “pumpkin,” although truth to tell the “pumpkin” was actually a “pump” and a “kin” that were tickled together after being pulled from the Text Sea.

I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for myself. I had no job, no book, no friends and no immediate prospects. The man I loved was real and wholly unavailable, the deputy man I loved was a mass murderer. More important, I was no nearer to who had killed Thursday, nor to what Sir Charles Lyell had discovered about Racy Novel that was so potentially devastating that it was worth murdering him, Thursday and Mediocre for. The truth was this: I wasn’t up to scratch. I’d been trying too hard to be her, and I had failed.

I thought of Whitby, then of Landen, and what he had said about my actually
being
Thursday and not knowing it. I wasn’t in agreement with him over that one, and when I’d vanished in front of his eyes, he would have known that, too. I thought for a minute as I considered putting myself in Landen’s shoes. He might try to get in touch with me—after all, we both wanted Thursday back. The question was this: If I wanted to contact someone in the BookWorld, how would I go about it?

The Mediocre Gatsby had picked Thursday up in Sargasso Plaza, a stone’s throw from where I was now, right on the southeast tip of Vanity. She was likely to have been hiding close by, somewhere she would have been off the Council of Genres’ radar—somewhere even the Men in Plaid would fear to tread. And there it was, staring at me across the the bay—Fan Fiction. Where better to hide a Thursday than in a bunch of that? The small island was lit up by thousands of lightbulbs strung from trees and lampposts. It was a busy place, that much I knew, and given that Vanity had been unfairly shunned by the rest of Fiction, the fact that Fan Fiction was isolated still further gave one an idea how poorly it was regarded.

I walked to the entrance of the narrow causeway and approached the two game-show hosts who were guarding the entrance. One was sitting on a high stool and dressed in a gold lamé suit, while the other was holding a hunting rifle.

“Hello, Thursday!” said the first host, beaming happily at me with a set of teeth so perfectly white that I had to blink in the glare. “Back to win further prizes?”

It was Julian Sparkle of
Puzzlemania
. We had met a few years back when the real Thursday was attempting to train me up for Jurisfiction. He was what we called an “anecdotal,” someone who lived in the oral tradition, ready to leap to the Outland when puzzles and brain teasers were related—usually during boring car journeys or in pubs. The last time we’d met, I would almost certainly have been eaten by a tiger if not for Thursday’s brilliant intervention.

“I was actually thinking of visiting Fan Fiction,” I replied.

“No problem,” said Julian in his singsong voice. “Anyone can go in—but no one can come out.”

As if to bring home the point, the second game-show host showed me the hunting rifle.