One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” I said to Lola, who stubbed out her cigarette and climbed into her car. She stomped on the accelerator, and the Delahaye shot across the car park, drove straight through the wooden barrier behind her and landed with a crunch on top of the Mairzy Doats sandwich bar ten stories below.

“Come on,” I said to Sprockett. “Work to be done.”

The debris field extended across four genres, and we spent the next three hours listening to residents who claimed that falling book junk had “completely ruined their entrance,” and on one rare occasion it actually had. There was a reasonable quantity of wreckage, but nothing quite as large as the bed-sitting room. We found a yellow-painted back axle, the remains of at least nine tigers, a few playing cards, some lengths of silk, a hat stand, sections of a box-girder bridge, nine apples, parts of a raccoon and a quantity of slate. There was a lot of unrecognizable scrap, too, much of it desyntaxed sentences that made no sense at all. We found only one piece of human remains—a thumb

—except it might not have been a thumb at all but simply reformed graphemes.

“Graphemes?” asked Sprockett when I mentioned it.

“Everything in the BookWorld is constructed of them,” I explained. “Letters and punctuation—the building blocks of the textual world.”

“So why might that thumb not actually be a thumb?”

“Because once broken down below the ‘word’ unit, a grapheme might come from anywhere. The same s can serve equally well in a sword, a sausage, a ship, a sailor or even the sun. It doesn’t help that under extreme pressure and heat, graphemes often separate out and then fuse back together into something else entirely. At Jurisfiction basic training, we were shown how a ‘sheet of card,’ once heated up white-hot and then struck with a blacksmith’s hammer, could be made into ‘cod feathers’ and then back again.”

“Ah,” said Sprockett, “I see.”

“Because of this, anything under a few words long found at an accident site can be disregarded as evidence—it might once have been something else entirely.” Oddly enough, the process of graphusion and graphission, while occurring naturally in the Text Sea, was hard to do synthetically in the BookWorld but simplicity itself in the Outland. The long and short of it was that victims of extreme trauma in the BookWorld were rarely found. A sprinkling of graphemes was soon absorbed into the fabric of the book it fell upon and left no trace.

Once Sprockett and I had logged everything we’d found and dispatched it via Pickford’s to my double garage, I called Mrs. Malaprop to check that all was well. It was, generally speaking. Pickwick was suspicious that there really might be goblins around, and Carmine was spending her time rehearsing with the various members of the cast. Whitby Jett had called to say that now that Carmine was there, he would be taking me out to Bar Humbug for a drink and nibbles at nine—and no arguments.

I’d known him for nearly two years, and I think I’d just come to the end of a very long trail of excuses and reasons that I couldn’t go out on a date. I sighed. There was still one. Perhaps the only one I’d ever had. I told Mrs. Malaprop I would be home in half an hour, thought for a moment and then turned to Sprockett.

“Can I shut you down for a while?”

“Madam, that is a most improper suggestion.”

“I’m about to do something illegal, and since you are incapable of lying, I don’t want you in a position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”

“Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”

“Not yet.”

We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.

“I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.

“In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”

“I promise.”

And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.

I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.

“Where to?”

“Poetry.”

7.

The Lady of Shalott

Here in the BookWorld, the protagonists and antagonists, gatekeepers, shape-shifters, heroes, villains, bit parts, knaves, comedians and goblins were united in that they possessed a clearly defined motive for what they were doing: entertainment and enlightenment. As far as any of us could see, no such luxury existed in the unpredictable world of the readers. The Outland was extraordinarily well named.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)

The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as I, Robot.