One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.

“Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”

She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.

“Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.

“Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”

“Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”

“Can he mix cocktails?”

“He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”

“Deal.”

We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.

“How are you enjoying the new BookWorld?” I asked by way of conversation.

“Too many baobabs and not enough smells,” she said, “but otherwise enjoyable.”

The baobabs were a problem, but it was hardly at the top of my list of complaints. After a few minutes with the cabbie telling me in a cheerful voice how she’d had Bagheera in the back of her cab once, we emerged blinking at the tunnel exit and the island of Poetry, where we were waved through by a border guard who was too busy checking the paperwork on a consignment of iambic pentameters to worry much about us.

We made our way slowly down Keats Avenue until we came to Tennyson Boulevard, and I ordered her to stop outside “Locksley Hall” and wait for me around the corner. I got out, waited until she had gone, then walked past “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to a small gate entwined with brambles and from there into a glorious English summer’s day. I walked up the river, past long fields of barley and rye that seemed to clothe the wold and meet the sky, then through the field where a road ran by, which led to many-towered Camelot. I walked along the river, turned a corner and found the island in the river. I looked around as aspens quivered and a breeze and shiver ran up and down my spine. I really wasn’t meant to be here and could get into serious trouble if I was discovered. I took a deep breath, crossed a small bridge and found myself facing a square gray building with towers at each corner. I didn’t knock, as I knew the Lady of Shalott quite well, and entered unbidden to walk the two flights of stairs to the tower room.

“Hullo!” said the lady, pausing from the tapestry upon which she was engaged. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

The Lady of Shalott was of an indeterminate age and might once have been plain before the rigors of artistic interpretation got working on her. This was the annoying side of the Feedback Loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, she was now a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with long flaxen tresses, flowing white gowns and a silver forehead band. She wasn’t the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn’t just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.

“Good afternoon, my lady,” I said, curtsying. “I would like to conduct more research.”

“Such adherence to duty is much to be admired,” replied the lady. “How are your readings going?”

“Over a thousand,” I returned, lying spectacularly. If I didn’t pretend to be popular, she’d never have granted me access.

“That’s wonderful news. Make good use of the time. I could get into a lot of trouble for this.”

Satisfied, she left her tapestry and summoned me to the window that faced Camelot. The Lady of Shalott took great care not to look out of the window but instead gently stroked a mirror that was held in a large bronze hanger and angled it towards the windows, as if to see the view outside. But this mirror wasn’t like other mirrors; the surface grew misty, turned the color of slate, then displayed an image quite unlike the reflection one might expect.

“Usual place?” she asked.

“Usual place.”

The image coalesced into a suburban street in the Old Town of Swindon, and the Lady of Shalott touched me on the shoulder.

“I’ll leave you to it,” she told me, and quietly returned to her tapestry, which seemed to depict David Hasselhoff in various episodes from Baywatch, Series 2.

I stared into the mirror. The image flickered occasionally and was mildly desaturated in color, but it was otherwise clear and sharp.

“Left forty-five degrees.”

The mirror shifted to look up the suburban road to the house where Thursday and Landen lived. But this wasn’t a book somewhere, or a memory. This was the RealWorld, the Outland. The Lady of Shalott uniquely possessed a window into re

ality and could see whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to. Great lives, great events—even Baywatch. The images she saw were woven into a tapestry, and she couldn’t look outside her own window on pain of death. It was all a bit weird, but that’s Tennyson for you.

The view was live, and aside from the fact that it was mute, was almost as good as being there.