One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

16. Commander Bradshaw

We were dropped off at Cooper Central, thanked the Funnster and said farewell to Freud, who had become all wobbly and tearful. We bought some tickets and then gave them to the fez-wearing inspector who hailed us with the customary “Just like that” before directing us to our carriage. Within a few minutes, the train was steaming out of the station and towards Fantasy.

We weren’t the only people in the compartment eager to get out of Comedy. A small man who wore the off-duty fatigues of a foot soldier enlisted in the Clown Army was looking about anxiously and sweating. You could tell he was off-duty because he wasn’t wearing his bright red nose and his long shoes were carefully strapped to his duffel bag.

“What’s your unit?” I asked.

“Sixth Clown,” he said nervously, “Supply and Gigglistics. We deploy next week to Bawdy Romp, the buffer zone between Comedy and Racy Novel. Purely as a precaution, you understand. I’m on leave and certainly not stealing military equipment, no, ma’am.”

And he stared at his feet, leaving Sprockett and me to wonder what he was stealing and whether it was hazardous. The Clown Army’s Supply division was notoriously porous, and sneeze and itching powder often found its way into the wrong hands, such as Blyton separatists—always an angry mob.

“I hope your deployment goes well.”

“Thank you,” said the clown, staring out the window.

We sat in silence for a while.

“Ma’am?” asked Sprockett, who had been buzzing quietly to himself in the corner.

“Yes?”

“Why do you think we were attacked?”

“Because of what we know.”

“But who knows what we know? Others have to know that we know. Just us knowing it isn’t enough—unless we attacked ourselves, which isn’t likely.”

I thought carefully. There were at least half a dozen people who might have had an idea that the investigation wasn’t totally open and shut, all the way from Captain Phantastic to Pickwick/Lorina. But it was also possible we were being silenced for some other reason entirely, an accident or even a textual glitch, such as happens from time to time in the BookWorld.

“The attempt on our life might have been a lexicographical literalism,” I said. “After all, comedians often ‘kill’ their audiences or ‘die’ onstage, and the phrases ‘You’ll be the death of me’ or ‘It was so funny I could have died’ might all have colluded to cause us harm.”

I was fooling myself. Although Buick Roadmasters did exist independently of the Men in Plaid, it seemed too suspicious to ignore. Besides, running people off the road was something that occurred in Crime, where it would be unusual to drive five miles without having it happen at least twice. It was much more unlikely in Comedy. Or at least not without a punch line. But then again, maybe my “No thanks, I’ve already had one” was the punch line. Comedy was never straightforward. When all the good jokes had left, only the dubiously amusing stuff remained. Was the mimefield funny or not? To us I think not. But it might have been funny to someone.

I stared out the window, thinking about my current predicament. I had a junker on its way to the scrap yard from Vanity that someone had destroyed and then tried to cover his tracks in case of discovery. The accident had been handed to the least skilled accident investigator for a quick and easy resolution, and I had almost been murdered by the Men in Plaid. I had compounded my difficulties by lying to Lockheed, gaining intelligence from Captain Phantastic on false pretenses, and I had not only failed to deliver a legal accident report but destroyed it. If I was found out, I would be confined to my series and as likely as not lose Carmine and possibly Sprockett, too. It was a good moment to pack it all in, accept the level of my own incompetence and start concentrating on what should be my primary goal: increasing readership in the Thursday Next series. Thursday, after all, could take care of herself—she had done so on numerous occasions. If I shared my plans with Sprockett, I reasoned, it would be an affirmation of my resolve, and harder to go back on.

“Sprockett?”

He started out of standby mode with a buzz.

“A cocktail, ma’am?”

“No thank you. It’s just that I’ve decided to . . .” I sighed and rubbed my temples.

“Decided to what, ma’am?”

“Nothing.”

And I slumped down into my seat, cursing the Thursday in me.

The train slowed to a halt at the border between Fantasy and Comedy and the off-duty clown started fidgeting.

“Identification, please.” One of the border guards was standing at the doorway, and we all rummaged for our identification papers.

“I’ll deal with this,” said a familiar voice, and Commander Bradshaw appeared in the corridor. He flashed his own ID at the border guard, who saluted smartly and moved on.

Sprockett and I both stood up politely, as did the clown, who didn’t want to be left out.

“Please,” said Bradshaw, “sit down. What’s this, a joke?” he asked, indicating the clown once we had all sat and Sprockett had offered Bradshaw a cocktail.

“A lance corporal in the Sixth Clown,” I said, “Supply and Gigglistics.”

“Oh, yes?” said Bradshaw with a smile. “And what would you be smuggling across the border?”

The clown sighed resignedly and opened his duffel bag to reveal boxes of military-grade custard pies. He wasn’t a very good smuggler. Few were.

“It’s jail for you, my lad,” said Bradshaw sternly. “CPs are banned in every genre outside Comedy. I’d turn you in, but I’m busy. If you can dispose of them all before we get to Gaiman Junction, I’ll overlook it.”

“How would I do that?”

“Do you have a spoon in your bag?”

So while the off-duty clown began to eat his way through four dozen custard pies, Bradshaw explained what he was there for.

“Please don’t ask Lorina to contact me,” he said. “That was just for Jobsworth to hear.”

“I figured.”

“Is she still a colossal pain in the butt, by the way?”

“Getting worse, if anything.”

Bradshaw looked at Sprockett, who took the cue and shimmered from the compartment with the clown, who was already on his ninth custard pie and groaning quietly to himself. Sprockett returned momentarily with the Chicago Fizz he had mixed for Bradshaw, then departed again.

Bradshaw leaned forward, looked left and right and whispered, “Are you her? The real one, I mean?”

“No.”

He stared at me for a while. “Are you sure? You’re not doing some sort of deep-cover double bluff or something?”

“Yes, quite sure. I think I know who I am.”

“Prove it.”

“I can’t. You’ll have to take my word for it. Believe me, I wish I were.”

Bradshaw seemed satisfied with this and stared at me some more for quite some time. He wasn’t here on a social visit.

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“The thing is,” he began, taking a sip from his Chicago Fizz,

“We’re in a bit of a pickle here in the BookWorld, what with Speedy Muffler and the whole Racy Novel debacle. Add to that the dwindling metaphor issue, the e-book accelerators using a disproportionate amount of Text Grand Central’s throughput capacity and all the other day-to-day whatnot we have to handle, and I’m sure you’ll appreciate that we need the real Thursday now more than ever. Do we agree?”

“We do.”

He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “She was due to be the Jurisfiction delegate at the Racy Novel peace talks on Friday. I’ll have to send Emperor Zhark instead, and his negotiating skills are more along the lines of annihilate first, ask questions later, but without the ‘ask questions later’ part.”

“She may turn up.”

He shook his head. “I knew she was going undercover, but she said she’d check in two days ago without fail. She didn’t. That’s not like her. She might be stuck in a book somewhere, lost in a book somewhere—even held against her will. The possibilities are endless.”

“If she was lost, wouldn’t she have a TextMarker™ homing beacon on her?”

“True—but Textual Sieve coverage is patchy even in Fiction, and absent entirely across at least two-thirds of the BookWorld. We’ve sent unmanned probes into the most impenetrable tomes at Antiquarian and dispatched agents into almost every genre there is—nothing. The BookWorld is a big place. We’ve even considered that she might be in the DRM.”

I raised an eyebrow. If they were considering this, they really were desperate. The DRM was the Dark Reading Matter—the unseeable part of the BookWorld.

“It’s been almost two weeks,” continued Bradshaw, “and I fear that something dreadful might have happened.”

“Dead?”

“Worse—retired back to the RealWorld.”

He stopped and stared at me. It wasn’t just Thursday’s absence from Jurisfiction that he was worried about; he had lost a good friend, too. Thursday trusted Commander Bradshaw implicitly. I thought I should do likewise.

“I sneak-peeked the Outland yesterday,” I said. “I realize it was wrong. But it seemed to me that Landen was missing her, too.”

Bradshaw raised an eyebrow. “Truthfully?”

“Yes, sir.”

He took a sip of the cocktail, set it down and strode about the compartment for some minutes.

“Look here,” he said, “desperate situations call for desperate measures. I want you to talk to Landen and see if you can find out anything. Perhaps locate her in time for the peace talks.”

“Talk to Landen? How can I do that?”

“By traveling to the RealWorld.”

My heart nearly missed a beat.

“You’re joking.”

“No joke, Miss Next. In fact, I’ll tell you a joke so you’ll know the difference. How many Sigmund Freuds does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I’ve heard it.”

“You have? Blast. In any event, you look exactly like Thursday—the best cover in the world. And what could possibly go wrong?”

There was actually quite a lot, but before I could itemize the first sixteen, Bradshaw had moved on.

“Splendid. All transfictional travel has been strictly banned this past eighteen months, so you’ll be doing this covertly. If anyone finds out, I’ll deny everything. Most of all, you can’t tell anyone from the Council of Genres. If Jobsworth or Red Herring finds I’ve been breaking the transfictional travel embargo, they’ll want to send their own. And I can’t have that. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then that’s all agreed,” said Bradshaw, rising from his seat and handing me a signed authorization. “This will give you access to Norland Park to see Professor Plum on the pretext of adding e-book accelerators to your series. He’ll know why you’re there. I’ll also contact my deep-cover agents to offer you every assistance in the Outland. Any questions?”

I had several hundred, but didn’t know where to start. Bradshaw took my silence to mean I didn’t have any, and he shook me by the hand.

“Good to have you on board. Twelve hours in the RealWorld isn’t long, but enough to at least get an idea of what’s happened to her. I could send you out for longer, but Thursday has many enemies in the RealWorld, and they’ll be onto you pretty quick. If you die in the RealWorld, you die for real, and I’m not having that on my conscience. Shall we say tomorrow morning? Oh, and officially speaking, I was never here.”

“You were never here.”

“Good show. Appreciate a girl who knows she wasn’t somewhere. Oh, and thank your man for the Chicago Fizz, will you? But next time a little less gherkin. Cheerio.”

And without another word, he opened the outside door, a motorcycle drew alongside the train, Bradshaw hopped onto the pillion and was gone.

“Might I inquire of madam what that was all about?” asked Sprockett, who returned with a very ill-looking clown.

“A little too much gherkin in the Chicago Fizz.”

“He came all the way over here just to tell you that?”

“No—I’m going to the RealWorld to look for Thursday so we can get her to the peace talks on Friday.”

“In that case,” said Sprockett, “I’ d better lay out your things. Will madam be staying long?”

“Twelve hours.”

“I’ll pack you a toothbrush, a scrunchie and some clean socks.”

“I’ d be grateful.”

I spent the rest of the journey fretting about my trip to reality. It was only a twelve-hour trip—barely a flash in and out—but that wasn’t important. What was important was that I would meet Landen in person, and although the notion of that filled me with a tingly sensation of anticipation, his rejection of me when he found out I wasn’t his wife would be . . . well, not pleasant—for him and for me. I almost thought of not going. Bradshaw couldn’t exactly punish me for not doing something he hadn’t told me to do. But then there was the possibility that I might help to find Thursday, and that filled me with the same sense of purpose I’d felt when I lied to Lockheed and Captain Phantastic. I sighed inwardly. Life was easier when I was just a character in a book, going from Preface to Acknowledgments without a care in the world. Within another twenty minutes, the train steamed into Gaiman Junction, and we took the bus home.

“You’re back,” said Pickwick, who liked to open any conversation by pointing out the obvious.

“Yes indeed,” I replied. “What’s the news?”

“My water dish is empty.”

“That’s because you just trod in it.”

Pickwick looked at her foot. “I have a wet foot . . . and my water dish is empty.”

“Anything else?”

“I saw Carmine with that goblin again. Sitting in the niche d’amour at the bottom of the garden, they were.”

“As long as she doesn’t invite him over the threshold again, I’m not bothered.”

“You should be. Goblins. Nasty. Full of diseases.”

“That’s Carmine’s problem. I told you, I’m not bothered.”

Actually, I was. I had tried to give Carmine a dressing-down for her poor choice in men, but she’d just stared at me and retorted that yes, Horace might be a thief, but at least he hadn’t set fire to a busload of nuns.

“Any news of Whitby?” I asked.

“Being questioned in custardy,” replied Mrs. Malaprop, who had walked in with a clipboard full of reports that all needed my signature. “His pasta is catching up with him. How were things at Jurisfiction?”

I didn’t tell them what had happened as it was safer that way.

“Captain Phantastic mentioned you owed him a date,” I said to Pickwick.

“The Captain?” she said with a fond smile. “I’m amazed he remembers—it was a long time ago. We were both young and foolish, and I’d do anything for a dare. Ah, Frederic—so many cats, so little recipes.”

“Few recipes.”

“What?”

“So many cats, so few recipes,” I said, pleased that I had figured out who’d been talking earlier.

Pickwick looked at me disdainfully, muttered “amateur” and marched out.

“The investigation is still on,” I said to Mrs. Malaprop as soon as Pickwick had gone, “but keep it under your hat, will you?”

“Squirtainly, ma’am. I found this note pinned to the newel post.”

Gone to find Horace, back in half an hour.

P. S.: I don’t care what Pickwick thinks.

“Horace?”

“The goblin.”

I wasn’t particularly annoyed with Carmine for chasing after the goblin—as long as he wasn’t invited back in again—but I was very annoyed that she had gone AWOL. It meant that for the past ten minutes there’d been no one here to play Thursday. If word had gotten out, there might have been a panic from the other characters, and it was against at least nine regulations that I could think of.

“Do we report her as absinthe without leaf?” asked Mrs. Malaprop.

I scrunched up the note. Reporting her as missing would get Jurisfiction involved, and Carmine would probably be shipped off to spend the next decade in Roger Red Hat.

“No,” I said, “but let me know the moment she gets back so I can give her a ticking off.”

Sprockett knocked and entered, his eyebrow pointing firmly at the “Worried” mark.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but the Men in Plaid are back.”

“So soon? You better admit th—”

“Thursday Next?” said the first of the MiP as he walked in the door.

“Yes?”

“You’re coming with us,” said the second.

“I can’t leave the series,” I said. “My understudy is at lunch.”

“That’s not what the board says,” observed the first, pointing at Carmine’s status on the indicator board, which was now blinking an orange “at readiness” light, despite the fact that she was out looking for Horace. “Is she AWOL?”

“No,” I lied.

“Then she’s in?”

“Yes,” I lied again.

“Then you can come with us.”

I looked at Malaprop and Sprockett. They knew what needed to be done—find Carmine at the earliest opportunity.

The Man in Plaid who seemed to be in charge jerked a thumb in the direction of the front door, and we walked outside. Predictably, there was a Buick Roadmaster, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The left-hand mudguard was dented and streaked with yellow paint—the sort of yellow paint that taxis are finished in. This was the car that had forced us off the road and into the mimefield.

“Am I in some sort of trouble?”

“You are if you don’t come with us.”