One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

by Jasper Fforde

  I told him I’d meet with them tomorrow. Meakle nodded solemnly and returned to his work.

  I sat back in my seat and ran the events of the afternoon through my head. I had just gotten to the bit where Spike had rescued me from the Stiltonista when I began to feel very peculiar. I started to have odd thoughts, then couldn’t figure out why I’d thought of them. The world would soften around the edges, and I could feel myself almost lose consciousness. I thought for a moment I might be dying, as I could feel my conscious mind nearly close down. Before I knew it, I had closed my eyes and an overwhelming darkness stole over me. I might indeed have died, but I didn’t, and I slept quite soundly until Mr. Meakle woke me when we arrived back at Clary-LaMarr.

  26.

  Family

  Places to Visit #7: Poetry Island. Although this is at first glance a wild and powerful place, by turns beautiful, wayward, passionate and thought provoking, any visit longer than a few hours will start to have an exaggerating effect on the senses. Upbeat poems will tend to have you laughing uncontrollably, while somber poems will have you questioning your own worth in a most hideously self-obsessed manner. Early explorers of Poetry spent weeks acclimatizing in Walter de la Mare and Longfellow before daring to explore the Romantics.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (12th edition)

  Where did you get to?” asked Landen as soon as I tapped on the back door to be let in. “I was thinking you’d gone missing again.”

  “I brought down the Stiltonista, was arrested for crimes against humanity, found out where the other Thursdays are buried, was almost kidnapped by Goliath and was then rescued by the attorney general.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. I found out what ghosts are. They’re childhood memories. Oh, and the president wants to see me tomorrow to discuss the Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield—I think it’s what the whole ‘secret plans’ deal is all about.”

  “Are you sure you’re not Thursday?”

  “Positive. Hey, listen: Jack Schitt’s real name is Adrian Dorset. How weird is that?”

  “Not weird at all. You and I have known for years. Jack Schitt is a daft pseudonym—not to mention actionable.”

  “Perhaps so—but he wrote The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, the book I was asking you about.”

  “And the significance of this is . . . ?”

  “I don’t know, but the RealWorld’s kind of wild with all this strange stuff going on, although it’s a good thing this isn’t Fiction—it wouldn’t really make any sense.”

  I was becoming quite animated by now—randomness has an intoxicating effect on the preordained.

  “By the way,” I added, “do you want thirty grand?”

  Landen raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You earned thirty thousand pounds this afternoon . . . as well?”

  “From a Vole.”

  “What the . . . ? No, I don’t want to know. But yes, we could do with the cash, so long as it’s not illegally earned.”

  “Here you go,” I said, handing him the crumpled check.

  I’d have to make good on my side of the bargain, but I felt sure I could drop some Toast Marketing Board references into the series without much problem.

  “Oh, and if you see anyone who looks like NSA or SpecOps watching the house, don’t be alarmed. The president is protecting us—I don’t think Goliath is too keen on me right now.”

  “Were they ever?”

  “Not really. But I know what they’re up to, and it’s particularly unpleasant. In fact, I shouldn’t really hang around. I’ll only make things dangerous for you.”

  “Until we prove you’re not my wife,” he said, “you’re staying.”

  It seemed like a generous sentiment, so I accepted gracefully.

  “Listen,” he said, “just in case I’m wrong and you really are written, you should know something.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know I said I didn’t know where she was?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s not strictly true. I didn’t know whether I could trust you. You see, when Thursday went to the BookWorld, she always came and went via her office at Acme Carpets. Bowden is the manager over there, and when she went missing, I asked him to go and look for her.”

  “She wasn’t in her office?”

  “No—and the door was locked from the inside.”

  He let this information sink in. She had gone to the BookWorld four weeks ago—and not returned.

  “So,” he said, “if you’re not her, it’s where you need to be looking. If you are her, it’s where you need to go to find out what has happened to you.”

  I stared at him and bit my lip. Thursday was definitely somewhere in the BookWorld. Lost, alone, perhaps hurt—who knows? But at least I had somewhere to start. My mission, such as it was, was at least a partial success.

  “Well, then,” said Landen, clapping his hands together, “you’d better meet Tuesday.”

  So I sat down at the kitchen table and felt all goose-bumpy and hot. I’d been less nervous facing down Potblack, but this was different. Landen and the children were everything I’d ever wanted. Potblack was just a jumped-up cheesemonger.

  Tuesday wandered shyly into the room and stared at me intently.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m not your mother.”

  “You look like her. Dad says that you might be Mum but you don’t know it.”

  “That’s possible, too,” I said, “and I’d like to be.”

  “Could she be?” asked Tuesday of Landen.

  “It’s possible, but we won’t know until later.”

  “Oh, well,” said Tuesday, sitting next to me at the kitchen table. “Do you want to see what I’m working on?”

  “Sure.”

  So she opened her exercise book and showed me a sketch of an idea she’d been having.

  “This is a sundial that works in the overcast—or even indoors. This is a method of sending power wirelessly using music, and what do you make of this?” She showed me several pages of complex mathematical notation.

  “Looks important.”

  “It’s an algorithm that can predict the movement of cats with ninety-seven percent accuracy,” she explained with a smile. “I’m presenting it to Nuffield College the day after tomorrow. Do you want to come?”

  Over the next few minutes, she explained her work, which was far-ranging in its originality and depth. My inventor uncle Mycroft was dead now, and his intellect had crossed to Tuesday. If at age twelve she was working out the complex mathematics required to accurately predict random events, her work when she was an adult would be awe inspiring. She spoke to me of her latest project: a plausible method to crack one of the most intractable problems in modern physics, that of attempting to instill a sense of urgency in teenagers. After that she explained how she was designing daylight fireworks, which would sparkle darkness in the light, and then finally mentioned the possibility of using beamed electron fields as a kind of impermeable barrier with such diverse applications as enabling people to go underwater without need for an Aqua Lung or to protect one from rockfalls or even for use as an umbrella. “Especially useful” remarked Tuesday, “for an electron-field umbrella wouldn’t poke anyone in the eye and never needs shaking.”

  After Tuesday had gone off to fetch a photograph album, I turned to Landen. “She’s the secret plans, isn’t she?”

  He looked at me but said nothing, which I took to mean she was. Tuesday’s intellect would be the driving force behind the government’s Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield.

  “I guess we’re just about to find out if you’re the Goliath Thursday,” said Landen. “If you are, you’ll be contacting them straightaway.”

  I wouldn’t, of course. “How long do you think before they figure it out?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Landen, scraping the carrots he’d been chopping into a saucepan, “but know this: I’ll die to protect my daughter.”

  “Me, too.”

  Landen smile
d. “Are you sure you’re not her?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Tuesday came back with the photograph album, and I joined her as she leafed through the family holidays of which I had no knowledge. I stared at the Thursday in the pictures and tried to figure her out. She never looked totally relaxed—not as much as Landen and the kids anyway, but clearly loved them all, even if she seemed to be glancing around her as though on the lookout for anyone wishing to do them or her harm. There were very few pictures in which she was smiling. She took life seriously, but her family kept her anchored, and probably as sane as she could ever hope to be. Tuesday reached for my hand and held it tightly without really thinking, and as we chatted, it crossed my mind that I could become Thursday, if the real one never showed up. I could go Blue Fairy, and all this would be mine. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like a good, worthy and attainable idea, but reality quickly returned. I was fooling myself. The longer I listened to Tuesday, the more I realized just how much she needed her mother. Not any mother, but her mother. I would never be anything more than a pale reflection.

  “Landen,” I said when Tuesday had gone off to watch Bonzo the Wonder Hound, Series Twelve, “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “No, really. It was a huge mistake. I can’t be her, no matter how much I want to.”

  “You sell yourself short—I’m more convinced by the minute. The way you sat with Tuesday.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s how Thursday used to do it. Proud, loving—but not understanding a single word she said.”

  “Land, I’m not her. I’ve got no idea what’s going on, I didn’t recognize Adrian Dorset, I didn’t know that you’d lost a leg and, and, and . . . I can’t see Jenny. I should just go and hide in a large cupboard somewhere until I’m whisked back into Fiction.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “I never said her name was Jenny.”

  “Damn.”

  He took a step closer and held my hand. “You saw her?”

  I nodded. “Jenny mentioned Thursday saying ‘Lyell was boring.’ Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Thursday didn’t discuss her BookWorld work with me. She pretended it was a secret, and I pretended I didn’t know about it. Same as the SpecOps work. But I don’t know anyone called Lyell, and she hated boring people. Except me.”

  “You’re not boring.”

  “I am, but I’m okay with it. I’m the anchor. The shoulder.”

  “And you’re all right with the support role?”

  He laughed. “Of course! It’s my function. Besides, I love her. More than anything on the planet—with the possible exception of Tuesday and Friday. And I’m actually quite fond of Jenny, too, even though she doesn’t exist.”

  “You’re a good man.”

  He smiled. “No, I’m an average man . . . with a truly extraordinary wife.”

  I rubbed my temples with the frustration of it. I so wanted to be her and have all this—Landen, the kids. There was a dull throb in my head, and I felt hot and prickly. It was a lot easier being fictional—always assuming that I was, of course.

  “That’s another reason I should leave,” I said in a harsher tone than I might have wished. “This morning I knew who I was and what I was doing. Now? I’ve got no idea.”

  And I started to sob.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, resting a hand on mine, “don’t cry. There’s four hours to go before you vanish or not, and I’m not sure I can wait that long. I’m pretty confident you’re her. You called me ‘Land,’ you saw Jenny, you’re a bit odd, you love the kids. But there’s one simple way I’ll be able to tell.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Kiss me.”

  I felt myself shiver with anticipation, and my heart—my real heart, that is, not the descriptive one—suddenly thumped faster. I placed my hand on his cheek, which was warm to the touch, and leaned forward. I felt his breath on my face, and our lips were just about to touch when suddenly I once more felt the hot needles and Klein-Blue Wagnerian treacle, and I was back in the arrivals lounge at JurisTech. As Plum had promised, there was a glass of water and some cookies waiting for me. I picked up the water glass and threw it at the wall.

  27.

  Back Early

  Plot 9 (Human Drama) revolved around a protagonist returning to a dying parent to seek reconciliation for past strife and then finding new meaning to his or her life. If you lived anywhere but HumDram, “go do a Plot 9” was considered a serious insult, the Outlander equivalent of being told to “go screw yourself.”

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)

  I found Professor Plum working on his Large Metaphor Collider. As soon as he saw me, he pressed a couple of buttons on his mobilefootnoterphone, uttered a few words and smiled at me.

  “Oh!” he said in some surprise. “You’re back.”

  “What happened? I wasn’t meant to come back for another four hours!”

  “Transfictional travel isn’t an exact science,” he replied with a shrug. “Sometimes you’ll pop back early for no adequately explained reason.”

  “Can you send me out there again? I was right in the middle of something important.”

  “If Bradshaw allows it, I’ll be more than happy to.”

  “Please?”

  “There are safety issues,” he explained. “The more you stay out there, the less time you can spend there. Bradshaw used to travel across quite often, but these days he can barely stay out for ten minutes before popping back.”

  I thought about the excitement I’d felt just as I was about to kiss Landen and the potential chain of events that might have occurred from there on in.

  “I really need to get back, Professor. Lives . . . um, depend on it.”

  “Whose lives?”

  Commander Bradshaw had appeared in the laboratory. But he didn’t walk in, he had bookjumped in. I hadn’t seen that for a while; it was considered very common and was actively discouraged. The Ungenred Zone and Racy Novel, to name but two, even had antijump sieves set up on their borders—large sails of a fine mesh that snagged the punctuation in one’s description and brought one down to earth with a thump.

  “I’m very busy,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Walk with me.”

  So I walked with Bradshaw out of the labs, past the frog-footman, who followed at a discrete distance and up the stairs.

  “So,” said Bradshaw, “how did you get on?”

  “Not very well. Lots happened, but I’ve got no way of knowing which of the facts were significant and which weren’t.”

  “The RealWorld is like that. It’s possible that nothing was significant or that everything was. It scares the bejesus out of me, I can tell you—and I don’t scare easily. Anything on Thursday’s whereabouts?”

  I told him about the locked room at Acme.

  “Hmm,” he said, “definitely in here somewhere. I’ll ask Professor Plum to attempt another Textual Sieve triangulation.” He thought for a moment. “How were Landen and the kids?”

  “As good as might be expected. Permission to speak honestly, sir?”

  “I welcome nothing else.”

  “Is it possible that Thursday is alive and well but just suffering some bizarre mental aberration?”

  He stared at me. “You think you might be Thursday?”

  I shrugged. “Landen seems to think so. I saw Jenny, and I could do things—fight, think on my feet and disarm a man in under a second. Things I never knew I could do.”

  He smiled and patted my arm. “It’s not uncommon to have feelings of elevated status after visiting the RealWorld. It’ll soon pass.”

  “But could I tell if I were real? Could anyone tell?”

  “There are lots of signs,” said Bradshaw, “but here’s the easiest: What am I doing now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How about now?”

  “As far as I can tell, you’re not doing anything at all.” Bradshaw took his finger
off my nose and smiled. “I suppressed my action line. The real Thursday could have seen what I was doing, but you had to rely on the description. You’re fictional, my dear, through and through.”

  “But I could be just thinking you did that—the same as I thought I saw Jenny, and all my backstory about being the written Thursday. I could be . . . delusional.”

  “And part of this delusion is you thinking you might be delusional? And me here right now talking to you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Pull yourself together, girl,” he snapped, “and don’t be such a bloody fool. If you were Thursday, you’d be saving the BookWorld, not blundering around the Outland like a petulant bull in a china shop. This is Fiction, not Psychology.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “That’s okay. Now, is there anything else to report?”

  I told him about Jenny, the comment about Lyell and how Goliath had developed a Green Fairy and wanted to know where the Austen Rover had ended up.

  “Goliath is an ongoing thorn,” said Bradshaw grimly, “but we’re dealing with the problem. Anything else?”

  I thought for a moment. If I couldn’t trust Bradshaw, I couldn’t trust anyone.

  “This morning Jobsworth and Red Herring asked me to pretend to be Thursday and go to the peace talks on Friday.”

  “We thought they might.”

  “Should I go?”

  “It would be my advice that you shouldn’t. Don’t be insulted by this, but civilians are ill equipped to deal with anything beyond that which is normally expected of them. The BookWorld is fraught with dangers, and your time is best served bringing as many readers as you can to your series, then keeping them.”

  “Can I go back to the RealWorld?”

  “No.”

  “I have unfinished business. I did go on a somewhat risky mission for you—I could have ended up erased or dead—or both.”

  “You have the gratitude of the head of Jurisfiction,” he said.

  “That should be enough. He’s not your husband, Thursday. He’s Thursday’s. Go back to your book and just forget about everything that’s happened. You’re not her and never can be. Understand?”