One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“She means ‘a slow poke.’ It’s what we call readers who’ve been working their way through the series at a snail’s pace. When they falter—which they often do—you should try to alter your dialogue for simplicity. You’ll feel their ReadRate increase when you do, and we aim only to help. The reader is everything, yes?”

She looked up at me and bit her lip nervously.

“The reader is everything,” she repeated. “But you’ll step in if there are more then twenty concurrent reads, won’t you?”

Being read simultaneously was often described as like trying to visit everywhere in Paris at the same time during rush hour. The simile was lost on me, but I made a point of never wanting to visit Paris, real or imaginary.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “you’ll be fine. We’ve got at least four hours before the other readers come onstream. Take a deep breath and repeat the first person’s credo: ‘Pace, Atmosphere, Plot, Prose, Character.’”

“Pace, Atmosphere, Plot, Prose, Character.”

“Good. Give them hell.”

And she gave me a wan smile and headed off towards the SpecOps Twilight Homes, which were cemented just between Thornfield Hall and the interior Skyrail set. With an odd feeling, I watched her go. I liked the time off, but I liked being Thursday, too—even if it was to an audience of only one.

“Here,” I said, passing the Snooze access codes to Mrs. Malaprop. “Keep a close eye on her.”

“This is a last resort, yes?” asked Mrs. Malaprop, who licked kittens probably more than most.

“Last resort. Call me and I’ll come running.”

I walked out of the kitchen. There was work to be done.

10.

Epizeuxis

Maps of the BookWorld are constantly updated as the genres snake back and forth in response to Outland trends and fads. The borders move so rapidly, in fact, that any notion of a fully updated map is considered laughable, and most maps are these days published with average borders that reflect reading trends of the past ten years.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)

Despite the unwanted attentions of the Men in Plaid, the warnings from the red-haired gentleman and the worrying possibility that Thursday might be missing, I spent a busy and anxious afternoon going through the heap of book junk in the garage. I was, to be honest, torn. Part of me wanted nothing better than to accede to Red Herring’s wishes that this be an “unrepeatable” accident, and part of me was suspicious. The closer I examined the book junk, the worse it looked. It appeared that something, while not exactly rotten in the state of the BookWorld, was far from fresh.

At a little after five, and with a rising sense of foreboding, I called Sprockett into my study to compare notes.

“So what do you have?” I asked, letting him air his discoveries first.

He led me across to where the Atlas of the BookWorld lay open on my desk. He indicated the page that depicted the southeastern part of the island and showed me where he had plotted the crashed book’s debris trail by a series of black crosses. Most sections of text would have pulverized into graphemes and simply absorbed, which explains why we rarely find anything when short stories or limericks come to grief, just a hollow concussion in the distance.

Almost all the debris had been strewn across the Aviation genre, with the notable exception of the bed-sitting room already discovered inside Conspiracy and a Triumph motorcycle within Thriller (Spy) that narrowly missed George Smiley as it traveled through an early draft of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Hatmaker. The book seemed to have disintegrated somewhere above Deighton and then strewn objects in a roughly

straight line north, in the direction of the Great Library and the Ungenred Zone.

“What would tigers and a macaroon be doing in an Aviation novel?” asked Mrs. Malaprop, who was cleaning with a feather duster but actually wanted to be part of the investigation.

“They might be scrambled graphemes and not actually in the book at all. Best ignored.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any curve to the debris trail at all,” added Pickwick, who had entered unseen and jumped onto the table to look more closely. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she hadn’t upset the inkwell and then stood clumsily in the ink.

“You’re right,” I said. “Mind your feet. And that means either a rapid breakup or that the book—whatever it was—was not from the Aviation genre.”

“Look here,” said Pickwick as she pointed with one of her claws. “If we extend the debris-field line backwards, we come out of Aviation, across Military, and end up right here in Adventure—somewhere around King Solomon’s Mines.”

“Which might explain the tigers.”

“But not the macaroon.”

“Or the box-girder bridges—and the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.”