One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

33. The League of Cogmen

Sprockett, I learned, lived in the Fantasy section of Vanity, not far from Parody Valley. I was more at leisure to look about upon this, my second visit, and I noticed that whereas in Fiction the landscape was well maintained, relatively open and with good infrastructure, years of self-publishing into the same geographic area meant that Vanity was untidy, chaotic and overcrowded.

The resident novels with their settings, props and characters now occupied every spare corner of the island and had accreted on top of one another like alluvial deposits. Grand towers of imaginative speculation had arisen from the bare rock, and the island was honeycombed with passageways, tunnels and shafts to provide access to the scenes and settings now buried far below the surface. In some places the books were so close that boundaries became blurred—a tiger hunt in 1920s Bengal merged seamlessly with the TT races on the Isle of Man, a western with the 1983 Tour de France. Space in Vanity was limited.

“Don’t let on you’re published,” remarked Sprockett as we arrived at his book, a badly worn tome cemented into a cliff face of similar books and supported on slender stilts that were anchored to the rock below. He needn’t have—I knew the score. Vanity’s beef with the rest of Fiction was long-lived and not without some degree of justification.

I wiped my feet on the doormat as we entered and noted that the novel was set mostly in the manor house that belonged to Professor Winterhope, Sprockett’s creator, and was populated by a large and mildly eccentric family of mechanical men, none of whom looked as though they had been serviced for years.

“Welcome to The League of Cogmen,” said Mrs. Winterhope once the professor had taken Sprockett off for an oil change and general service. “Would you like some tea?”

I told her I would, and we walked into the front room, which was like my kitchen back home, a command center and meeting place all in one. Mrs. Winterhope introduced me to the Cogmen, who had been wound sufficiently to converse but were under strict orders not to move, so as not to wear themselves out—quite literally, as they had a limited stock of spare parts. Despite these obvious drawbacks, they still expressed the languorous attitude of the long-unread. It didn’t look as though they rehearsed much either, which was a lamentable lapse in professionalism, although I wasn’t going to say so.

“We must thank you for rescuing Sprocky from that rabble in Conspiracy,” said Mrs. Winterhope, putting an empty kettle onto a cold stove. “And we were delighted to hear he was employed by Thursday Next—even if not the real one.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Has our Sprockett been serving you well?”

“He has been beyond exemplary,” I told her. “A gentleman’s gentleman.”

“Excellent,” she replied. “I can count on you to give good references?”

“I cannot see a scenario where I would let him go,” I said with a smile. “He is utterly admirable in every respect.”

But Mrs. Winterhope wasn’t smiling.

“I understand,” she said slowly, “that you have recently found yourself in diminished circumstances?”

This was true, of course. I had almost nothing except Sprockett and the clothes I was wearing.

“At present yes, that is true,” I admitted somewhat sheepishly.

Mrs. Winterhope poured the contents of the empty kettle into a teapot that I noted contained no tea.

“Sprockett is the most advanced automaton we possess,” she continued, “and whilst not wishing to be indelicate in these matters, I cannot help thinking that his career may not be well serviced by someone who finds herself—I’m sorry to be blunt—in a position of . . . unreadness.”

She stared at me with a kind yet desperate expression and handed me an empty cup.

“Would you like no milk?”

“Yes thank you,” I said, not wishing to embarrass her. Not a single reader in over seventeen years had graced the Winterhopes’ pages, so the reader stipend was unavailable to them, and they had, quite literally, nothing. The only possible avenue to a better life was through the one character who might conceivably find a placement in the world of wider readership. Four days ago I’d been a potential help; now I was a millstone. I knew what I had to do.

“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Winterhope, “I understand.”

She nodded politely and patted me on the arm. “Will you stay with us tonight?” she asked. “We have absolutely nothing, but we would be happy to share it with you.”

I told her I would be honored to share in their nothing, then excused myself to go for a walk.

I left the novel and wandered down through the narrow streets to where the Tennyson Boardwalk ran alongside the beach. The walk was full of evening strollers and traders, mostly selling book-clearance salvage from those novels that had been recently scrapped. I stopped to lean on the decorative cast-iron railings and absently watched the Text Sea lap against the foreshore, the jumbled collection of letters heaving and mixing in the swell. Every now and then, a chance encounter would construct a word, and the constituent parts glowed with the joyous harmony of word construction. Farther down, some kids were fishing these new words from the sea with hooked sticks. Three-letter constructions were thrown back to potentially grow larger, but longer ones were pulled ashore for possible sale. While I stood there watching, they caught a “theodolite,” a “linoleum” and a “pumpkin,” although truth to tell the “pumpkin” was actually a “pump” and a “kin” that were tickled together after being pulled from the Text Sea.

I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for myself. I had no job, no book, no friends and no immediate prospects. The man I loved was real and wholly unavailable, the deputy man I loved was a mass murderer. More important, I was no nearer to who had killed Thursday, nor to what Sir Charles Lyell had discovered about Racy Novel that was so potentially devastating that it was worth murdering him, Thursday and Mediocre for. The truth was this: I wasn’t up to scratch. I’d been trying too hard to be her, and I had failed.

I thought of Whitby, then of Landen, and what he had said about my actually being Thursday and not knowing it. I wasn’t in agreement with him over that one, and when I’d vanished in front of his eyes, he would have known that, too. I thought for a minute as I considered putting myself in Landen’s shoes. He might try to get in touch with me—after all, we both wanted Thursday back. The question was this: If I wanted to contact someone in the BookWorld, how would I go about it?

The Mediocre Gatsby had picked Thursday up in Sargasso Plaza, a stone’s throw from where I was now, right on the southeast tip of Vanity. She was likely to have been hiding close by, somewhere she would have been off the Council of Genres’ radar—somewhere even the Men in Plaid would fear to tread. And there it was, staring at me across the the bay—Fan Fiction. Where better to hide a Thursday than in a bunch of that? The small island was lit up by thousands of lightbulbs strung from trees and lampposts. It was a busy place, that much I knew, and given that Vanity had been unfairly shunned by the rest of Fiction, the fact that Fan Fiction was isolated still further gave one an idea how poorly it was regarded.

I walked to the entrance of the narrow causeway and approached the two game-show hosts who were guarding the entrance. One was sitting on a high stool and dressed in a gold lamé suit, while the other was holding a hunting rifle.

“Hello, Thursday!” said the first host, beaming happily at me with a set of teeth so perfectly white that I had to blink in the glare. “Back to win further prizes?”

It was Julian Sparkle of Puzzlemania. We had met a few years back when the real Thursday was attempting to train me up for Jurisfiction. He was what we called an “anecdotal,” someone who lived in the oral tradition, ready to leap to the Outland when puzzles and brain teasers were related—usually during boring car journeys or in pubs. The last time we’d met, I would almost certainly have been eaten by a tiger if not for Thursday’s brilliant intervention.

“I was actually thinking of visiting Fan Fiction,” I replied.

“No problem,” said Julian in his singsong voice. “Anyone can go in—but no one can come out.”

As if to bring home the point, the second game-show host showed me the hunting rifle.

“Unless,” said Julian Sparkle, “you want to play Puzzlemania?”

“What do I win?”

“A set of steak knives.”

“And if I lose?”

“We destroy you with a high-powered eraserhead.”

“Fair enough,” I replied. “I’m in.”

Sparkle smiled warmly, and I stepped to a mark on the floor that he indicated. As I did so, the lights seemed to dim, except for a bright spotlight on the two of us. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.

“So, Thursday Next, today we’re going to play . . . ‘Escape Across the Bridge.’”

He indicated the long, narrow causeway.

“It’s very simple. We erase anyone we see walking towards us across the causeway. There is no way to go round the causeway, and you’ll be dissolved in the Text Sea if you try to swim.”

“And?”

“That’s it. We check the bridge every half minute, and it takes four minutes to run across.”

As if to accentuate the point, the second host noticed someone trying to sneak across as we were talking. He shouldered the rifle and fired. The unfortunate escapee exploded in a chrysanthemum of text, which was quickly snapped up by the gulls.

“Ha-ha!” said the host, reloading the rifle. “Bagged another Baggins.”

And he made a mark on his tally board, which contained several hundred other Bagginses, three dozen Gandalfs, a plethora of Pratchett characters and sixty-seven Harry Potters.

“Right, then,” said Sparkle, “off you toddle.”

“Don’t you want the answer?”

He smiled in an oddly unpleasant way. “You can figure it out for the return journey.”

I walked across the causeway with a curiously heavy heart, as I had no idea how to get back, but once I arrived on the other side, it seemed a party was in full swing. Everyone was chatting to everyone else, and the mildly depressed feeling I had felt over in Vanity seemed to vanish completely.

“What’s the party about?” I asked a Hobbit who had thrust a drink into my hand.

“Where have you been?” she said with a smile. “Fan Fiction isn’t copying—it’s a celebration. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last period!”

“I never thought of that.”

“Few do—especially the authors who should really accept the praise with better grace. They’re a bunch of pompous fatheads, really—no slur intended. Nice clothes, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

And she wandered off.

“Thursday?”

I turned to find myself staring at . . . well, myself. I knew she wasn’t me or the real Thursday because she seemed somewhat narrow. In fact, now that I looked around, most people here were similar to real characters but of varying thickness. Some were barely flatter than normal, while others were so lacking in depth that they appeared only as an animated sheet of cardboard.

“Why is everyone so flat?” I asked.

“It’s a natural consequence of being borrowed from somewhere else,” explained the Thursday, who was, I noted, less than half an inch thick but apparently normal in every other way. “It doesn’t make us any less real or lacking in quality. But being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”

This made sense. I’d never really thought about it before, but it explained why the Edward Rochester and indeed all the borrowed characters in my series were of varying degrees of depth. Some weren’t that bad, but others, like Jane Eyre herself, were thin enough to be slipped under the door and could sleep rolled up and slipped into a drainpipe.

“How’s all that cloak-and-dagger stuff going?” asked Flat Thursday.

It seemed she thought I was the real one, and I wasn’t going to deny it.

“It’s going so-so,” I said. “How much did I tell you?”

She laughed. “You never tell us anything. Landen sent another message, by the way.”

“That’s good,” I replied, attempting to hide my enthusiasm. “Lead on.”

Thursday turned, and as she did so, she almost vanished as I saw her edge on. I wondered whether perhaps Agent Square might not be a Flatlander as he claimed, but a hyperfiction cube or something.

“We all think Landen’s totally Mr. Dreamcake,” said Flat Thursday as we walked past a reinterpretation of Middle Earth that was every bit as good as the real one, only flatter, “but he won’t speak to anyone except the real one.”

We walked down Thursday Street, and everything started to look vaguely familiar. The characters and settings were sort of similar, but the situations were not. The combinations were unusual, too, and although I had not personally supposed that Thursday might battle the Daleks with Dr. Who in a literary landscape, in here it was very much business as usual.

“He’s in there,” said Thursday, and she ushered me into a large, square room with a stripped pine floor, a thin skirting board and empty walls painted in magnolia. In the middle of the room was Landen, and he smiled as I walked in. But it wasn’t actually him; it was just a feeling of him.

“Hello, Landen.”

“Hello, Thursday. I needed to speak to you.”

“What about?”

“I’m sorry,” he said apologetically, “my answers are limited.”

I stared at him for a moment. Flat Thursday had said this was another message, so he must be communicating on a one-way basis by writing a short story—possibly with himself and his wife in conversation.

“Which Thursday do you want to talk to?” I asked.

“The written Thursday.”

So far, so good.

“Do you now believe I’m from the BookWorld?”

“You vanished as I was about to kiss you. Thursday never did that. I’m sorry I doubted you.”

“Do you know what the real Thursday was doing with Sir Charles Lyell?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Do you know who was trying to kill Thursday?”

“The Men in Plaid have tried to murder her on numerous occasions. At the last count, she had killed six of them. She doesn’t know who orders them to do it, or why.”

This was good news. Between Thursday and Sprockett and me, we’d taken out fourteen Plaids.

“Where is she now? Do you know?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Why did she ask the red-headed man to give me her badge?”

“She didn’t— I did. As soon as she was out of touch for over five days, I contacted Kiki.”

“Why did she ask me to help her?”

“She’d hoped you had evolved into something more closely resembling her. The only person she knew she could truly trust was . . . herself.”

This sounded encouraging. “Can I trust Bradshaw?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “my answers are limited.”

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“She told me that she would try to contact you. She said the circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I have no more answers for you. I won’t know if you even got these. Good luck, Thursday.”

He stopped talking and just stood there blinking, awaiting any possible response from me.

“Listen,” I said, lowering my voice and looking around to make sure that Flat Thursday wasn’t listening, “did you write in a kiss, just to make up for the one I missed earlier?”

“Good luck, Thursday,” he said again. “I’m in a hurry, as I told your mother I’d help her with the Daphne Farquitt Readathon. Remember: The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment. Four pounds of carrots, one medium cabbage, four-pack tin of beans, Moggilicious for Pickwick, pick up dry cleaning, toilet paper.”

I was confused until I realized that he had probably written the short story on the back of a shopping list. I watched and listened while he went through “Tonic water, snacks and the latest Wayne Skunk album, Lick the Toad” before he stopped, smiled again and then just stood there blinking in a state of rest.

I walked back outside to where many Thursdays of varying thicknesses were waiting to be told a story and given a few tips. It felt like I was doing a Thursday master class in a hall of mirrors, but I think they appreciated it. By the time I left two hours later, some of the thinner Thursdays were a little bit thicker.

“Might I inquire where madam has been?” asked Sprockett once I had returned to The League of Cogmen. “ Vanity can be a dangerous place for those published. Brigands, scoundrels, verb artists and the Unread lurk in doorways, ready to steal the Essence of Read from the unwary.”

“I was in Fan Fiction.”

Sprockett’s eyebrow shot to “Worried” in alarm.

“How did you get back across the causeway?”

“Quite easily. They shoot anyone trying to escape, and they check the causeway every half minute to make sure. You can’t possibly run the distance in less than four minutes, so the answer seemed quite obvious.”

He diverted his mainspring to his thought cogs and whirred and clicked noisily for a full minute before giving up, and I had to tell him.

“That’s quite clever.”

“Elementary, my dear Sprockett. Julian Sparkle was a bit annoyed. He said that he’d have to change the puzzle. I won these steak knives. Perhaps Mrs. Winterhope would like them?”

“I think she should be delighted. May I ask a question, ma’am?”

“Of course.”

“What are we going to do now?”

“I’m going to accept Senator Jobsworth’s invitation to go to the peace talks tomorrow masquerading as the real Thursday Next. The paddle steamer leaves at seven A.M. Everything that has happened is to do with Racy Novel and Speedy Muffler, and unless I start getting to the heart of the problem, I’m not going to get anywhere. The Men in Plaid will think twice before doing anything while I’m in plain view, and Landen told me that this was the way to find Thursday: ‘The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.’ I don’t understand that, but I can become more confused—going upriver with Jobsworth will definitely provide the extra confusion I need.”

Sprockett stared at me for a moment, and I could tell by the way his eyebrow was quivering between “Thinking” and “Worried” that he knew something was up.

“Don’t you mean ‘we,’ ma’am?”

I pulled a letter from my pocket that I’d prepared while seated at a You for Coffee? franchise just off Sargasso Plaza.

“These are glowing references, Sprockett. They should allow you to find a position in Fiction without any problem. You have been a steadfast and loyal companion whom I am happy to have known as a friend. Thank you.”

I blinked as my eyes started to mist, and Sprockett stared back at me with his blank porcelain features. His eyebrow pointed in turn at all the possible emotions engraved on his forehead. There was nothing for “Sad,” so it sprang backwards and forwards between “Doubtful” and “Worried.”

“I must protest, ma’am. I do not—”

“My mind is made up, Sprockett. I have nothing to offer. You have a bright future. It will please me greatly if you find onward employment that I can be proud of.”

Sprockett buzzed quietly to himself for a moment. “This is compassion, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I can recognize it,” he said, “but I am at odds to understand it. Shall we go indoors?”

We had boiled cabbage for dinner, which might have been improved had there been any cabbage to go in it. But the Winterhopes were more than friendly, and after several rounds of bezique that might have been more enjoyable had there been cards, Sprockett played the piano accordion without actually having a piano accordion, and the empty unread book didn’t ring to the tune of the “Beer Barrel Polka” until the small hours.