One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (31 page)

“How’s this?” I asked, slapping Thursday’s shield on the counter.

The dispatch clerk stared at the badge for a moment, then picked up a clipboard from under the counter and started to flick through the pages. There were a lot of them.

“You’re fortunate we still have them,” he said. “We file with Captain Phantastic in an hour.”

He searched though them, chatting as he did so.

“We lose a couple of taxis every day to erasure, wastage, accidental reabsorption or simply to being used in books. For obvious reasons we’re keen to hide the actual number of accidents for fear of frightening people from our cabs.”

“Most thoughtful of you.”

“You’re in luck,” he said, staring at his notes. “The only taxi missing that morning was Car 1517. Its last-known fare was a pickup from Sargasso Plaza, opposite the entrance to Fan Fiction.”

“On Vanity Island?”

“Right. The driver departed Sargasso Plaza bound for the Ungenred Zone at 0823, and that was the last we heard.”

“You didn’t think about reporting it?”

“We usually wait a week. Besides, search parties are expensive.”

“Do we have a passenger name?”

“Tuesday Laste.”

Sprockett and I looked at each other. We seemed finally to be getting somewhere.

“And the name of the driver?”

“Gatsby.”

“The Great Gatsby drives taxis in his spare time?”

“No, his younger and less handsome and intelligent brother—the Mediocre Gatsby. He lives in Parody Valley over in Vanity. Here’s his address.”

We thanked him and left the office.

“
Tuesday Laste?
” repeated Sprockett as we hailed a cab.

“Almost certainly Thursday.”

Sprockett’s eyebrow pointer switched from “Puzzled” to “Bingo,” paused for a moment and then switched to “Worried.”

“Problems?” I asked as we climbed into the cab.

“In the shape of a Buick,” replied Sprockett, indicating a Roadmaster that had just pulled up outside the TransGenre Taxi office. It was the Men in Plaid, and they were following the same trail we were. I leaned forward.

“Vanity Island,” I said to the driver, “and step on it.”

Vanity wasn’t a place that conventionally published people liked to visit, as it was a bizarre mixture of the best and worst prose, where iambic pentameters of exceptional beauty rubbed shoulders with dialogue so spectacularly poor it could make one’s ears bleed. We skimmed low across the narrow straits that separated Vanity from the mainland and circled the craggy island, past sprawling shantytowns of abandoned novellas, half-described castles and ragged descriptions of variable quality before coming to land in a small square just outside Parody Valley.

“You can wait for us,” I said to the cabbie, who gave me a sarcastic, “Yeah, right,” and left almost immediately, which made me regret I’d paid up front and tipped him.

We took a left turn into Cold Comfort Boulevard and made our way past unpublished pastiches and parodies of famous novels that were only on Vanity at all due to their being just within the law. If they had used the same character names from the parodied novel, they were removed to the copyright-tolerance haven of Fan Fiction. This was situated on a smaller island close by and joined to Vanity by a stone arched bridge a half mile long, and guarded by a game show host.

“How long before the Men in Plaid follow us here?” asked Sprockett.

“Five or ten minutes,” I replied, and we quickened our pace.

Given that parodies—even unpublished ones—have a shelf life governed by the currency of the novel that is being parodied, the small subgenre was dominated by that year’s favorites. We walked on, and once past the still-popular Tolkien pastiches we were in the unread Parody hinterland, based on books either out of print themselves or so far off the zeitgeist radar that they had little or no meaning. We took a left turn by
When Nine Bells Toll; Hello, My Lovely
and
I, Robert
before finding the book we were looking for: an outrageously unfunny Fitzgerald parody entitled
The Diamond as Big as the South Mimms Travelodge.

Mediocre’s apartment was above a set of garages. There was a brand-new taxi parked in an empty bay beneath, and we carefully climbed the rickety stairs. I knocked on the screen door, and after a few moments a woman of slovenly demeanor stood on the threshold gnawing a chicken drumstick. She wore heavy eyeliner that had run, and she looked as though she’d just had a fight with a hairbrush—and lost.

“Yes?” she asked in a lazy manner. “Can I help?”

I flashed Thursday’s badge. “Thursday Next,” I announced, “and this is my butler, Sprockett. Your name is . . . ?”

“Gatsby.”

This was unexpected.

“The Mediocre Gatsby?”

“No, the
Loser
Gatsby, the youngest of the three Gatsbys. I haven’t seen Great for a while. How did it turn out with crazy Daisy? She looked like trouble to me.”

“Not . . .
terrific
, as I recall.”

“Did they let Mia Farrow play her in the movie?”

“I’m not sure. Is Mediocre here?”

“I’ve not seen the miserable fart for three days,” she sniffed, picking her nose. “How did you know he was missing? I didn’t call you.”

“May we come in?”

“I guess,” said Loser Gatsby with a shrug, and we walked into the apartment. Sprawled in the front room were a half dozen men and women who looked as though life had not been kind to them. One of the women had been crying recently, and two of the men still were.

“This is our Siblings of More Famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group,” explained Loser. “That’s Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Brian Heep, who despite admonishments from his family continues to wash daily; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can’t keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is . . . well, let’s just say she’s a term that is subject to several international trademark agreements.”

“She’s a Muggle?”

“Pretty much.”

They all nodded a greeting.

“We meet twice daily to try to iron out the feelings of low self-worth we experience, given our more famous family members. It’s quite hard, I assure you, being a nobody when an elder sister or brother is iconic for all time. Tracy Capulet was telling us what it was like living in Verona.”

“It’s ‘Juliet this, Juliet that’ all day long,” said Tracy petulantly. “Juliet’s on the balcony, Juliet’s shagging a Montague, Juliet’s pretending to be dead—blah, blah, blah. I tell you, I’m totally sick of it.”

Sprockett moved to the window and peered out. The Men in Plaid would be here soon.

“This is a matter of some urgency,” I said. “Does Mediocre have a room?”

Loser pointed to a door, and before she could explain that it was locked, Sprockett had wrenched it off its hinges.

The room was grubby and the floor scattered with discarded pizza containers and empty hyphen cans. The TV was still on and was tuned to a shopping channel, and his record collection contained
Hooked on Classics
and
Footloose.
Mediocre lived up to his name.

“What do you make of this?” asked Sprockett, who had come across a large model of the Forth Rail Bridge. It had large spans that in reality would have thrust boldly across the Forth Estuary, not just to connect two landmasses separated by a barrier that was also an arterial trade route but to demonstrate man’s technological prowess in the face of natural obstacles.

“It’s not a bridge,” I whispered, “it’s
metaphor
.”

We started opening boxes and found three more bridges, two rivers and a distant mountain range, swathed in mist with a road leading to unknown valleys beyond. Loser Gatsby was at the door, mouth open.

“Tell me,” I said, “where did your brother get all this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Truthfully?”

“I’m a loser,” she said. “If I’d known about this little lot, I would have sold it all, gone on a bender and had a dolphin tattooed on my left boob.”

Her logic was impeccable. I questioned her further, but she knew nothing.

“In two minutes the Men in Plaid will be coming through that door,” I told her. “Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”

I didn’t need to say it twice, and she and the rest of the loser literary siblings made a hasty exit down the stairs.

“So,” said Sprockett, staring at all the metaphor, “stolen?”

“Not if Mediocre was as his name suggests,” I replied. “How much do you think this is all worth?”

“Twenty grand,” said Sprockett. “People will pay good money to get hold of raw metaphor. There’s enough here to keep a man comfortable for a long time.”

“Or even enroll at character college,” I said holding up a prospectus from St. Tabularasa’s. “Looks like Mediocre was trying to better himself and shed his epithet. A cabbie couldn’t earn this much in a decade of Octobers.” I added, “I reckon we’re looking at a bribe.”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know.”

I picked up Mediocre’s account book. It outlined all the trips he had done and which needed to be billed. The last day was not there, of course, but the previous day
was
.

“Well, well,” I said, “looks like Thursday went on a trip to Biography the day before she vanished. And that’s not all,” I added. “Every single fare Mediocre accepted was picked up from the same place—Sargasso Plaza, just outside the entrance to Fan Fiction. Coincidence?”

“We have company,” murmured Sprockett, who’d been standing at the window.

I joined him and noted that a 1949 Buick Roadmaster had pulled up outside the building. Two Men in Plaid got out and looked around.

“Time we weren’t here.”

We crossed to the other side of the room and exited though the French windows, which opened onto a veranda. From there we climbed down onto the roof of a garden shed, then let ourselves out into an alley beyond. We walked back around the house and watched as the Plaids went into the building.

“What now, ma’am?”

I handed him a set of keys I’d found in Mediocre’s room and nodded towards the brand-new taxi parked outside. “Can you drive one of those?”

“If it has wheels, I can drive it, ma’am. Are we heading for Biography?”

“We are.”

“And what will we do when we get there?”

“Find out if Lyell is as boring as Thursday said he was.”

S
prockett reversed the cab out of the garage, engaged the Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive and powered vertically upwards from Parody Valley and Vanity. I was pressed back into my seat by the acceleration and the ascent angle, and I might have been frightened had my mind not been tumbling with what we’d discovered so far—or even with what we had still yet to find out. Within a few minutes, we were hanging in the heavens a couple of thousand feet from the surface, right at the cruising altitude of local books that were being moved around Fiction. Below us the islands that made up the Fiction Archipelago were laid out in precise detail.

“Would it be impertinent to point out that visiting another island in the BookWorld without transit papers is strictly forbidden?”

“What does Thursday Next care for transit papers?”

“I would politely point out that you’re not her, ma’am.”

“I might as well be. I have a shield and I look like her. Who can say I’m not?”

“Who indeed, ma’am?”

I looked behind us and out to sea. Biography was situated beyond Artistic Criticism, and it was unlikely that any books would be going that way at this lower level. I wound down the window, poked my head out and looked up. Several miles above us, I could see the high-level books crisscrossing the sky, their journey made less arduous by traveling at the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cancels the force of gravity from above—the gravopause. At that height you could usually find someone going your way—so long as you could get up there. The Technobabble™ drive on the cab would get us to local traffic height, but after that we were on our own.

We had to wait a nail-biting two and three-quarters minutes, every second worrying that the Plaids would spot us.

“Buckle up, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Looks like someone’s been discovered.”

As we watched, an entire section of Vanity Island seemed to fall away. A book had been accepted into the mainstream and was rising from the flanks of Mount Sleeper, trailing the debris of a ramshackle group of shameless Zadie Smith rip-offs that had been unwisely built on top of it.

The settings—mostly of a winter scene in London, it appeared—rotated slowly about its axis as it rose vertically to meet us, and just as it transitioned into forward flight, Sprockett stepped on the throttle and accelerated to meet the book, which loomed as large as eight cathedrals in the windscreen. As soon as we were close enough, Sprockett slewed the vehicle to a stop on the side of a dream sequence—a picnic the family had once spent on a grassy hill in spring, where a silver pond alive with bulrushes lay within the dappled glade of beech trees.

“Congratulations on the publication,” I said to a small boy who was playing with a tin train, and he waved shyly in return. We weren’t there for long. Piggybacking around the BookWorld was a dark art that needed calm nerves and good timing; within a few minutes, Sprockett lifted off again and made the short hop to a historical novel that was moving up to join the High Stream in order to make its way to History for fact-checking. They looked less friendly in this book, so Sprockett simply fired one of the vehicle’s two grapnels into the soft intratextual matrix to which the book’s settings were bolted, and we began the tow into the high orbit dangling on the end of a slender length of steel cable.