One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

But he knew I was lying. Unwittingly, I had revealed everything. Jack Schitt wasn’t his real name—it was his name in the series. I didn’t know what his real name was, but he would certainly have known his fictional counterpart. He pulled the phone off the hook and punched a few buttons.

“It’s me. Listen carefully: It’s not Thursday, it’s the written Thursday. . . . Yes, I’m positive. She could melt back any second, so we need to get her Blue Fairyed the second we’re on Goliath soil. . . . I don’t care what it takes. If she’s not real by teatime, heads will roll. And no, I’m not talking figuratively.”

He hung up the phone and stared at me with a soft, triumphal grin. “When are you due back?”

I stared at him, a feeling of genuine fear starting to fill me. My actions so far had been based on the certainty that I would return. The idea of staying here forever was not in the game plan.

“What happened to the Austen Rover, Next?”

“The what?”

“The Austen Rover. Our experimental transfictional tour bus. The real Thursday traveled with it on its inaugural flight and never returned. Where is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and besides, the Blue Fairy is fictional and lives inside Pinocchio. She doesn’t do any actualizing these days. The Council of Genres forbade it.”

“Better and better,” he said, waving away the second heavy, who had returned with my tea, and closing the compartment door. “So you are from the BookWorld. And I was bluffing—we don’t have a Blue Fairy. But we have the next best thing: a green fairy.”

“I’ve never heard of the Green Fairy.”

“It’s a concoction of our own. It’s not so much a fairy—more like a magnetic containment facility designed to keep fictional characters from crossing back. I understand that the first few hours can be excruciatingly painful, and it gets worse from there. You’ll talk—they always do. How do you suppose we managed to get the inside information necessary to even begin research into the Book Project? Perhaps we can’t make you real, but we can keep you here indefinitely—or at least until such time as you can’t bear it any longer and agree to help us. Make it easy for yourself, Thursday: Where is the Austen Rover?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’ll tell us eventually. A few hours of Green Fairy will loosen your tongue.”

“Goliath wouldn’t last twenty minutes inside fiction,” I said, but I wasn’t convinced. If this “Jack Schitt” was even half as devious as the one written about, we were in big trouble. Thursday had spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring that the Goliath Corporation didn’t get into fiction, either to dump toxic waste, use the people within it as unpaid labor or even just to find another market to dominate and exploit.

I said nothing, which probably was all he wanted to know. It was rotten luck that he’d been the one to figure me out. The real Thursday had once imprisoned the so-called Jack Schitt within Poe’s “The Raven,” so here was a man with some experience of being in the BookWorld.

“What’s your name, then?” I asked. “If not Jack Schitt?”

“It was a ridiculous name, not to mention insulting,” he snorted. “I’m Dorset. Adrian Dorset.”

25.

An Intervention

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Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (5th edition)

Adrian Dorset?” I said. “Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure at all.”

“What’s your name, then?”

“You’re not as smart as her, are you? Of course it’s Dorset. I think I know my own name.”

“The Adrian Dorset who wrote The Murders on the Hareng Rouge?”

He looked surprised for a moment. “The worthless scribblings of a man who was fooling himself that he could write. It was following the death of Anne, but I don’t expect you’d know anything about that, do you?”

I shook my head.

“Anne was my wife,” he said. “Head of the Book Project. She was on board the Austen Rover’s inaugural journey. Thursday told me what had happened to her and what she’d done before she died. I don’t blame Thursday. Not anymore. Revenge is for losers, cash is the winning currency. I burned the book a month ago. I didn’t need it anymore. I’m over her.”

He looked down at his feet, and I suddenly felt sorry for him.