One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

The Red Queen looked at her notes. “No, it seems there was this handkerchief—”

“Hell’s teeth!” yelled Bradshaw in frustration. “Do I have to do everything around here? I want Iago in my office in ten minutes.”

“He’s doing that spinoff with Hamlet,” said Mr. Fainset from across the room.

“Iago v. Hamlet? They got the green light for that?”

“Shylock bankrolled their appeal and got Portia to represent them. They were seriously pissed off about the mandatory European directive of ‘give me my .453 kilo of flesh’—hence the anti-European subplot in Iago v. Hamlet.”

“Get him to see me as soon as he can. What is it, Mr. Fainset?”

“The Unread, sir.”

“Causing trouble again?”

“They’re all over Horror like cheap perfume.”

I moved off, as tales of the Unread gave me the spooks. Most characters who were long unread either made themselves useful like Bradshaw or went into a downward spiral of increased torpidity. Others, for some unknown reason, went bad and became the Unread. They festered in dark alleys, in holes in the ground, the crevices between paragraphs—anywhere they could leap out and ensnare characters and suck the reading light out of them. Even grammasites, goblins and the Danvers avoided them.

I moved away. Bradshaw was busy, and my debrief was over. Thursday was missed, but Jurisfiction’s work couldn’t stop just so it could utilize its full resources to find her. It would be the same for any one of them, and they all knew it.

I walked across to Thursday’s desk and rested my fingertips on the smooth oak surface. The desk was clean and, aside from a SpecOps mug, a picture of Landen, a stack of messages and a goodly caseload in the in-basket, fairly tidy. I looked at the worn chair but didn’t sit down. This wasn’t my desk. I opened the drawers but could find little of relevance, which wasn’t hard—I didn’t know what would be relevant.

I stepped outside the Jurisfiction offices and found the frog-footman dozing on a chair in the lobby.

“Wesley?”

He started at hearing his name called and almost fell off the chair in surprise. “Miss Next?”

“Where do I requisition a vehicle?”

His eyes lit up. “We have a large choice. What would you like?” “A hover car,” I said, having always wanted to ride in one. “A convertible.”

I picked up Sprockett, who had been waiting outside, and soon we were heading west out of HumDram/Classics in a Zharkian Bubble-Drive Hovermatic. We arrived over Thriller within a few minutes and flew slowly over the area in which The Murders on the Hareng Rouge had come down almost a week ago. If Thursday had survived the sabotage, she would have landed somewhere within the half million or so novels along the debris trail.

If Thursday had survived, I reasoned, the cab had come down more or less intact. No one had reported the remains of a taxi falling to earth, and I wanted to know why. We flew up and down the area of the debris trail for a while, searching for even the merest clue of what might have happened but seeing nothing except an endless landscape of novels. We were yelled at several times by cabbies annoyed that we were “hovering about like a bunch of numpties,” and on one occasion we were pulled over by a Thriller border guard and made to explain why we were loitering. I flashed Thursday’s badge, and he apologized and moved on.

“What are we looking for, ma’am?”

“I wish I knew.”

I had a thought and took out my notebook to remind me what Landen had told me when I spoke to him in Fan Fiction.

He had stated that in an emergency, Thursday would try to contact me. As far as I knew, she hadn’t. She had also said, The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.

I stared at the sentence for a long time, then took my Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion from my bag and flicked to the map section at the back. And then all was light. She had been contacting me, and my confusion was indeed the answer.

“Bingo,” I said softly.

40.

Thursday Next

A trip to Text Grand Central is a must for the technophile, and a day spent on one of the main imaginotransference-engine floors is not to be missed. A visit will dispel forever the notion that those at TGC do little to smooth out the throughputting of the story to the reader’s imagination. Tours around the Reader Feedback Loop are available on Tuesday afternoons, but owing to the sometimes hazardous nature of feedback, exposure is limited to eighteen seconds.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (15th edition)

It took nearly an hour to find what we were looking for. Sandwiched between Political Thriller and Spy Thriller and well within the condemned book’s debris trail was Psychological Thriller. The whole “Am I really Thursday?” stuff I’d been laboring through over the past few days had all the hallmarks of a PsychoThriller plot device and made total sense of Thursday’s obscure “confusion enlightenment” sentence.