One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“I didn’t say it was Haggard,” said Pickwick, “only that it came from Adventure.”

Unusually, Pickwick was being helpful. Probably because she’d taken Sprockett for some cash, had already had her nap but was not yet ready for her afternoon snack and was thus in an atypically good temper.

“I have an idea,” said Sprockett. “Could we try unscrambling the letters of the items we found, and thereby find tantalizing clues as to what the book might be about?”

“To an outside observer, that would seem entirely logical,” I replied, “but for one thing: Anagram-related clues were outlawed six years ago by the NCU.”

“NCU?”

“Narrative Clunker Unit. Villains haven’t been allowed to be albinos for years, identical twins as plot devices are banned, and double negatives are a complete no-no. Forget anagrams.”

“Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.”

“Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense genre, so they have a tendency to go missing until dramatically being found right at the end of an investigation. It’s undoubtedly suspenseful, but a little useless. Want to see what I found?”

We walked out through the French windows and the garden to my double garage, which was another example of the inverted physics of the BookWorld. The more you filled it, the emptier it appeared. But it could never be entirely empty, as that would require an infinite amount of stuff—or in the case of a double garage, twice an infinite amount of stuff.

All the sections of crashed book were laid out on the concrete floor, ostensibly so we could try to find a reason for the accident, or even to figure out a rough plot of the mystery book. We had a few page numbers, but nothing attached to any dialogue. It was a mess. I walked past the yellow-painted back axle, pushed aside a fridge/freezer and beckoned them to one particular piece of wreckage.

“What do you make of this?” I asked.

We were standing over the bent Triumph motorcycle, and I told them to be quiet. There was a whisper in the air, and if you leaned close to the damaged motorcycle, you could hear it:The works that built the cycle worked;

The cycle’s labor labored on.

And workers sought and workers bought

The managers out and managed ’owt

Until the cycle’s cycle cycled round.

But markets moved and markets shifted,

To Eastern trade that Eastern made.

Loans were pleaded, loans were needed,

The workers’ workers worked their last.

But ruin didn’t do as ruin does,

For Triumph’s collapse led to Triumph’s triumph.

“I don’t get it,” said Pickwick, who had always favored Harley-Davidson.

“It’s a poem that charts the fall and rise of the Triumph motorcycle company in the late seventies and early eighties,” I said. “It’s seeped out of the descriptive flux of the motorcycle—a glowing afterember of the accident.”

“That’s not unusual,” replied Pickwick. “Poetry and prose are different facets of the same basic element. When prose breaks down, it often spontaneously rhymes. Poetry is prose in another form, and prose is simply poetry waiting to happen.”

“Epizeuxis,” murmured Sprockett, “a rhetorical device that repeats the same word in the same sentence for increased dramatic effect. This book was almost certainly destroyed by a rhetorical worm.”

I had come to the same conclusion myself. The worm would attempt to restructure sentences, and when that failed, it would take words from other sentences, leaving dangerous holes in the narrative. Once there were no more complete words to be taken, the worm would start to harvest letters to make up the shortfall, weakening the structure until the entire book disintegrated. In RealWorld terms it would be like instantaneously removing every rivet from an aircraft that was in flight.

“The problem,” I said slowly, “is that rhetorical worms don’t occur naturally. They’re used in the demolition business to tear apart sections of scrapped books. It’s cheaper and safer than chains, hooks and crowbars. A well-placed worm can burrow into prose, dissolve away tired exposition and leave description and dialogue untouched. Either the book was carrying unlicensed worms that were accidentally activated or it was—”

“Sabotage!” hissed Mrs. Malaprop, and I felt myself suddenly go quite cold. Such a device would require a level of sophistication utterly outside the realm of ordinary citizens. There were stories of the Council of Genres’ Men in Plaid using rhetorical devices to cause injury or death, but that was mostly conjecture—drummed up by Conspiracy, no doubt.

“Okay,” I said, “we have the possibility of skulduggery—but it’s not the only explanation. Epizeuxis is often used as a rhetorical device.”