Bradshaw looked at me for a long time.
“I reluctantly respect your decision to stay with your books,” he said at last, “and I understand your wanting to tell it like it is. Naturally we’re very grateful for everything you’ve done, but even if Jobsworth and I sign off on a Textual Flexation Certificate to change your series, I must point out that you can’t truly be Thursday without Landen, and even if you get his permission, you still have to get Thursday’s approval before you even begin to think about trying to change your series. And as far as we know, she may already be . . . dead.”
He had trouble saying the final word and had to almost roll it around in his mouth before he could spit it out.
“She’s not dead,” I said firmly.
“I hope not, too. But without any leads—and we have none—it’s going to be an onerous task to find her. Here in Fiction we have over a quarter of a billion titles. That’s just one island in a BookWorld of two hundred and twenty-eight different and very distinct literary groupings. Most of those islands have fewer titles but some—like Nonfiction—have more. And then there are the foreign-language BookWorlds. Even if you are right—and I hope you are—Thursday could be anywhere from the Urdu translation of Wuthering Heights to the guarantee card on a 1965 Sunbeam Mixmaster.”
“But you’re still looking, right?”
“Of course. We rely on telemetry from our many unmanned probes that move throughout the BookWorld, all Textual Sieves have been set to pick her up if she makes a move, and Text Grand Central is keeping the waste gates on the imaginotransference engines on alert for a ‘Thursday Next’ word string. There’s always hope, but there’s a big BookWorld out there.”
“If she’s alive,” I said in a resolute tone, “I can find her.”
“If you do,” said Bradshaw with a smile, “you can change whatever you want in your book—even introduce the Toast Marketing Board.”
I started. “You heard about that?”
He smiled. “We hear about everything. Take the shield. Use her rights and privileges. You might need them. And if you change your mind and want to be her, call me.”
I picked up the badge from the table and put it in my pocket.
“Commander?” said the Red Queen, who had been hovering and stepped in when she saw that our conversation was at an end. “Text Grand Central has reported a major narrative flexation over in Shakespeare. It seems Othello has murdered his wife.”
“Again? I do wish that trollop Desdemona would be more careful when she’s fooling around. What is it this time? Incriminating love letters?”
The Red Queen looked at her notes. “No, it seems there was this handkerchief—”
“Hell’s teeth!” yelled Bradshaw in frustration. “Do I have to do everything around here? I want Iago in my office in ten minutes.”
“He’s doing that spinoff with Hamlet,” said Mr. Fainset from across the room.
“Iago v. Hamlet? They got the green light for that?”
“Shylock bankrolled their appeal and got Portia to represent them. They were seriously pissed off about the mandatory European directive of ‘give me my .453 kilo of flesh’—hence the anti-European subplot in Iago v. Hamlet.”
“Get him to see me as soon as he can. What is it, Mr. Fainset?”
“The Unread, sir.”
“Causing trouble again?”
“They’re all over Horror like cheap perfume.”
I moved off, as tales of the Unread gave me the spooks. Most characters who were long unread either made themselves useful like Bradshaw or went into a downward spiral of increased torpidity. Others, for some unknown reason, went bad and became the Unread. They festered in dark alleys, in holes in the ground, the crevices between paragraphs—anywhere they could leap out and ensnare characters and suck the reading light out of them. Even grammasites, goblins and the Danvers avoided them.
I moved away. Bradshaw was busy, and my debrief was over. Thursday was missed, but Jurisfiction’s work couldn’t stop just so it could utilize its full resources to find her. It would be the same for any one of them, and they all knew it.
I walked across to Thursday’s desk and rested my fingertips on the smooth oak surface. The desk was clean and, aside from a SpecOps mug, a picture of Landen, a stack of messages and a goodly caseload in the in-basket, fairly tidy. I looked at the worn chair but didn’t sit down. This wasn’t my desk. I opened the drawers but could find little of relevance, which wasn’t hard—I didn’t know what would be relevant.
I stepped outside the Jurisfiction offices and found the frog-footman dozing on a chair in the lobby.
“Wesley?”
He started at hearing his name called and almost fell off the chair in surprise. “Miss Next?”
“Where do I requisition a vehicle?”
His eyes lit up. “We have a large choice. What would you like?” “A hover car,” I said, having always wanted to ride in one. “A convertible.”
I picked up Sprockett, who had been waiting outside, and soon we were heading west out of HumDram/Classics in a Zharkian Bubble-Drive Hovermatic. We arrived over Thriller within a few minutes and flew slowly over the area in which The Murders on the Hareng Rouge had come down almost a week ago. If Thursday had survived the sabotage, she would have landed somewhere within the half million or so novels along the debris trail.
If Thursday had survived, I reasoned, the cab had come down more or less intact. No one had reported the remains of a taxi falling to earth, and I wanted to know why. We flew up and down the area of the debris trail for a while, searching for even the merest clue of what might have happened but seeing nothing except an endless landscape of novels. We were yelled at several times by cabbies annoyed that we were “hovering about like a bunch of numpties,” and on one occasion we were pulled over by a Thriller border guard and made to explain why we were loitering. I flashed Thursday’s badge, and he apologized and moved on.
“What are we looking for, ma’am?”
“I wish I knew.”
I had a thought and took out my notebook to remind me what Landen had told me when I spoke to him in Fan Fiction.
He had stated that in an emergency, Thursday would try to contact me. As far as I knew, she hadn’t. She had also said, The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.
I stared at the sentence for a long time, then took my Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion from my bag and flicked to the map section at the back. And then all was light. She had been contacting me, and my confusion was indeed the answer.
“Bingo,” I said softly.
40.
Thursday Next
A trip to Text Grand Central is a must for the technophile, and a day spent on one of the main imaginotransference-engine floors is not to be missed. A visit will dispel forever the notion that those at TGC do little to smooth out the throughputting of the story to the reader’s imagination. Tours around the Reader Feedback Loop are available on Tuesday afternoons, but owing to the sometimes hazardous nature of feedback, exposure is limited to eighteen seconds.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (15th edition)
It took nearly an hour to find what we were looking for. Sandwiched between Political Thriller and Spy Thriller and well within the condemned book’s debris trail was Psychological Thriller. The whole “Am I really Thursday?” stuff I’d been laboring through over the past few days had all the hallmarks of a PsychoThriller plot device and made total sense of Thursday’s obscure “confusion enlightenment” sentence.
Finding the genre, however, was harder. It was difficult to spot from the air, as a sense of ambiguity blurred the edges of the small genre, and with good reason. Psychological was another “rogue genre” where nothing could be taken at face value, trusted or even believed, a genre whose very raison d’être was to confuse and obfuscate. Often accused of harboring known felons and offering safe haven to deposed leaders of other rogue genres, PsychoThriller could never be directly indicted, as not
hing was ever quite what it seemed—a trait it shared with others that also had a tenuous hold on reality, such as Creative Accounting and Lies to Tell Your Partner When S/He Finds Underwear in the Glove Box.
We found it by using our small onboard Textual Sieve to home in on a trail of confused reader feedback, and Sprockett expertly brought us in for a landing at the corner of Forsyth and Ludlum. We walked across a vacant lot to the unfenced border of Psychological Thriller. The weather, naturally, was atmospheric. On the Thriller side of the border, the skies were clear, but across into Psychological there seemed to be an impenetrable wall of rain-soaked air. Jurisfiction had considerately posted signs along the border at regular intervals, warning trespassers to stay away or potentially suffer “lethal levels of bewilderment.” Only fools or the very brave ventured into Psychological Thriller alone.
“Ma’am?” said Sprockett, his eyebrow flickering “Alarm.”
“Problems?”
“You find me hugely embarrassed.”
“What is it? You need winding?”
“No, ma’am. It’s the damp. Humans might fear viruses and old age, two things with which cog-based life-forms have very little issue. But when it comes to corrosion, honey, magnets and damp, I’m afraid to say I must warn you that a rebuild might be necessary, and spare parts are becoming scandalously expensive.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Just wait for me here.”
I stepped across. Inside Psychological Thriller it was raining, and night. The cold wind lashed my face and drove the rain into every crevice of my clothes, until within a very short period I was soaked through. The tops of the trees swayed dangerously in the wind, and every now and then there was a flash of lightning followed by a splintering crack and the sound of a tree falling with a muffled crash somewhere in the dark.
I moved on, occasionally sinking ankle-deep in the marshy ground. After a few hundred yards, I came to a small clearing of tussock grass, pools of brackish water and a scattering of broken branches. On the far side, partially immersed in ooze, were the remains of a TransGenre Taxi. The front had been staved in, the engine torn out and the bodywork rippled and bent. Scraps of tree had been caught in the side mirrors as the taxi tore through the foliage on its way down. While I stared at the mangled wreck, the lightning flashed, and on the side was painted NO TIPS and, farther along, 1517. It was Thursday’s cab.
I hurried round to see if anyone had survived. I was perhaps in too much haste and swiftly sank up to my thighs in the fetid waters. I extricated myself with a considerable amount of grunting and swearing and finally made my way to the taxi and peered in. The rear door was open and the empty backseat scattered with papers, mostly about the geology under Racy Novel. The Mediocre Gatsby was still sitting in the front seat, impaled on the steering column. He had been killed by a bad case of selective nostalgia. For some peculiar reason, all TransGenre Taxis were modeled on the 1950s yellow Checker Cab design, at a time when safety standards were nonexistent and fatal accidents embraced by Detroit with an alarming level of indifference. The “hose down the dash and sell it to the next man” attitude pervaded all the way into the BookWorld, and not without good reason. In here there was always a battle between nostalgia and safety, and nostalgia usually won.
I stood up, pushed the wet hair out of my eyes and tried to think what might have happened. As I stared in turn at the taxi, the empty backseat and the remains of Mediocre Gatsby, I suddenly had a thought: The rear door had been open when I got here. I looked around to see where I might have gone if I’d found myself unceremoniously dumped in the middle of a rainy swamp at night, possibly injured and very alone. I took the most obvious way out of the marsh and managed to find a path to higher ground. I followed the trail as best as I could, and after stumbling through the forest for a few hundred yards in a generally uphill direction I came across a doorway in a high brick wall, upon the top of which were the remains of a corroded electrified fence. Attached to the brick wall was a weathered wooden board telling me to keep away from THE WILFRED D. AKRON HOME FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE.
If I had been real, I would doubtless have been more nervous than I was, but this was Psychological Thriller, and secure hospitals for the criminally insane were pretty much a dime a dozen, and rarely secure. I found myself in a small and very overgrown graveyard, the lichen-encrusted stones leaning with a frightening level of apparent randomness. I moved through the graveyard towards a mausoleum built of brick and stone but in an advanced state of decay. If I had crash-landed here in the taxi, this is where I would have sought shelter.
The double doors were bronze, heavy and streaked green with age. There was a hole about three feet wide in the middle, so both doors looked as though they had a semicircle cut from each. My foot knocked against something. It was Thursday’s well-worn pistol, her name engraved on the barrel—the hole in the locked doors had been blasted out for access. I was getting close. I carefully climbed through the hole and pushed my rain-soaked hair from my face. It was light enough to see, and below the broken skylight was a table that had once held flowers but was now a collection of dirty vases. There were a few personal items scattered about—a picture of Landen and the kids, a five-pound note, an Acme Carpets ID.
“It’s difficult to know sometimes who you are, isn’t it?”
I turned to see the small figure of a girl aged no more than eight standing in a shaft of light that seemed to descend vertically from the roof.
“Hello, Jenny,” I said.
“Did anyone figure you out?” she asked. “Hiding in plain sight as the written version of you. How did the written Thursday feel about taking a backseat for a while? And where is she, by the way?”
“I’m really Thursday?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” replied Jenny with a chuckle. “Doesn’t it all seem so obvious now?”
Two days ago I might have believed her.
“No,” I replied. “You see, I spoke to Landen, and he told me I vanished from the RealWorld as a good bookperson might do, so don’t give me any of your Psychological Thriller bullshit.”
“O-o-o-kay,” said Jenny, thinking quickly, “how about this: You’re actually just witnessing—”
“Don’t even think to try Owlcreeking me. And while we’re at it, you’re not Jenny.”
“Is she giving you any trouble?” said another voice I recognized.
“A little,” said Jenny, and Sprockett—or a reasonable facsimile of him—appeared from out of the shadows. I sighed. My mother would be appearing next, and then probably myself. It was all becoming a little tedious.
“Did you try her on the You really are Thursday twist ending?” asked Sprockett.
“She didn’t buy it. I tried the It’s all in your last moment before dying gambit, too.”
Ersatz Sprockett thought for a moment. “What about the You’re actually a patient in a mental hospital and we’ve been enacting all this to try to find out if you killed Thursday? That usually works.”
“Goodness,” said Faux Jenny, “I’d clean forgotten about that one.”
“And now that you’ve told me,” I said, “I’m hardly likely to go for it, am I?”
“Well done, Einstein,” said Faux Jenny to her partner in a sarcastic tone. “Any other bright ideas?”
Ersatz Sprockett looked at me, then at Faux Jenny, then tried to telegraph an idea across to her in a very lame portrayal of someone being in a shower.
“Oh!” said Faux Jenny as she twigged to what he was talking about. “Good idea.”
But I had figured it out, too.
“You wouldn’t be thinking about pulling a Bobby Ewing on me, would you?”
And they both swore under their breath.
“Well,” grumbled Ersatz Sprockett with a shrug, “that’s me, clean out of ideas.”
And as I watched, they reverted to the strangely misshapen shape-changers who skulked around Psychological Thriller, hoping to trap unwary travelers into thinking they had once been homicidal mania
cs but now had amnesia and all their previous visions depicted in horrific nightmares were actually recovered memories. In a word, they were a pair of utter nuisances.
“Thank heavens for that,” I said. “Let’s get down to business. Where is Thursday, and why didn’t you report her presence here to Jurisfiction?”
“We send so many conflicting and utterly bizarre plot lines out of the genre that everyone ignores us,” said Shifter Once Jenny sadly. “I think Jurisfiction set our messages to ‘auto-ignore.’”
“For good reason,” I replied. “You’re only marginally less troublesome than Conspiracy.”
“That’s why Thursday asked us to transmit all those ambiguities direct to you. We were hoping you’d get here sooner than this. We peppered you with as much confusion as we could, but you didn’t pick it up.”
If I’d been Thursday, I would have. Being confused over identity had been a mainstay of Psychological Thriller for years. I had a lot to learn.
“I’m new to this.”
“You’ll get the hang of it.”
“I hope not. Where is she?”
“In that antechamber.”
I turned and followed a short corridor to where there was a small room off the main mausoleum. It was obviously where the shape-changers usually lived, as there were posters of Faceache on the wall. They had given over the one bed to Thursday, who was lying on her back. The room was lit by a gas lantern, and by its flickering jet I could see that she was in a bad state. There was an ugly bruise on her face, and one eye was red with blood. She moved her head to look at me, and I saw her eyes glisten.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” said Thursday in a weak voice.
I placed my hand on her forehead. It was hot.