One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Don’t make any sudden movements, Kiki,” ordered the Man in Plaid. “What are you doing so far outside Crime?”

“I came to Fantasy to look at the view.”

“The view is the same as anywhere else.”

“I was misinformed.”

The red-haired gentleman was soon handcuffed. With a dramatic flourish, the Man in Plaid pulled out a bloodstained straight razor from the red-haired gentleman’s pocket. A gasp went up from the occupants of the tram.

“This lunatic has been AWOL from his short story for twenty-four hours,” announced the agent. “You are fortunate to have survived.”

The red-haired gentleman was pulled from the tram and bundled into the back of one of the Buick Roadmasters, which then sped from the scene.

The Man in Plaid came back on the tram and stared at us all in turn.

“A consummate liar, whose manipulative ways have seen two dead already. Did he say anything to anyone?”

The red-haired gentleman had admitted to me that he’d done terrible things, but that wasn’t unusual. Out of their books, crazed killers could be as pleasant as pie.

“He murdered two women,” continued the first Man in Plaid, presumably in order to loosen our tongues. “He cut the throat of one and strangled the other. Now, did he say anything to anybody?”

I remained silent, and so did everyone else. In the short time the Men in Plaid had been operational, people had learned they were simply trouble and best not assisted in any way.

“Are you a Man in Plaid?” asked one of the passengers.

The man stared at the passenger in a way you wouldn’t like to be stared at. “It’s not plaid. It’s tartan.”

The agent, apparently satisfied that the red-haired gentleman had not spoken to anyone, stepped off the tram, and the doors hissed shut. I shivered as a sudden sense of foreboding shuffled through the four hundred or so verbs, nouns and similes that made up my being. The red-haired gentleman had told me he thought that “one of our Thursdays is missing,” and by that I took him to mean Thursday Next, the real Thursday Next. My flesh-and-blood alter-better ego. But I didn’t get to muse on it any further, for a few minutes later we arrived at the border between Human Drama and Thriller.

5.

Sprockett

The logic of cog-based intelligences is unimpeachable. Unlike the inferior electronics-based intelligences, they cannot show error, for the constantly enmeshed cogs, wheels and drives never slip or jump. I think one can safely attest that there is no puzzle that Men of the Cog cannot solve, given sufficient oil, facts and winds.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (6th edition)

There was a queue to cross into Thriller, bookpeople either being permanently transferred or on a Character Exchange Program designed to stop characters from getting bored, restless and troublesome. There were a few traveling artisans, salesmen and a dozen or so tourists, apparently on a Get Beaten Senseless by Bourne package holiday, which had just overtaken the Being Shot in the Leg by Bond break for popularity, much to the Fleming camp’s disgust.

As little as two months ago, I would have been waved across with nary a glance, but the heightened security risk due to the potentially inflammable political situation up at Racy Novel had made everyone jumpy.

I took a TransGenre Taxi as far as the Legal part of Thriller, then continued on foot. I took a left turn by The Firm and picked my way along a weed-covered path and across a plank that spanned a ditch of brackish water, the best method to get into Conspiracy without being waylaid by deluded theorists, who always wanted to explain in earnest terms that President Formby was murdered by President Redmond van de Poste, that bestselling author Colwyn Baye was far too handsome and clever and charming to be anything other than an android or a reptile or an alien or all three.

I took a left turn at the Lone Gunman pub, and walked past a hangar full of advanced flying machines that all displayed a swastika, then entered a shantytown that was home to theories that lived right on the edge of Conspiracy due to a sense of overtired outrageousness. This was where the Protocols lived, along with alien abductions, 9/11 deniers and the notion that FDR somehow knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I had hoped I might tread unnoticed within the genre, but I was mistaken. Despite avoiding eye contact, I was spotted by a wildlooking loon with hair that stuck out in every direction.

“There’s no such thing as time,” he confided, with an unwavering sense of belief in his own assertions. “It’s simply a construct designed by a cabal of financiers eager to sell us pensions, life insurance and watches in their pursuit of a global, timepiece-marketing agenda.”

“Really?” I asked, which is probably the only answer to anything in Conspiracy.

“Definitely. And the seal is not a mammal—it’s an insect. The truth has been suppressed by the BBC and Richard Attenborough, who want to promote a global mammalcentric agenda.”

“Don’t you mean David Attenborough?”

“So you agree?” he said, eyes opening so wide I was suddenly worried I might see his brain. “Would you like to stone a robot?”

“What?”

“Stone a robot. Just one of the first generation of mechanical men, designed to be placed amongst us in order to take over the planet and promote a clockwork, global cogcentric agenda.”