One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

4. The Red-Haired Gentleman

I stepped out of the front door and walked the eight blocks to the corner of Adams and Colfer. A bus arrived in a couple of minutes—they always do—and after showing my pass to the driver, who looked suspiciously like a Dr. Seuss character on furlough, I took a seat between a Viking and a nun.

“I’m on my way to a pillage,” said the Viking as he attempted to find some common ground on which to converse, “and we’re a bit lean in the ‘beating people to death with large hammers’ department. Would you like to join us?”

“That’s most kind, but it’s really not my thing.”

“Oh, go on, you might rather like it.”

“No thank you.”

“I see,” said the Viking in a huffy tone. “Please yourself, then.” And he lapsed into silence.

It was the nun’s turn to speak.

“I’m collecting,” she said with a warm smile, “for the St. Nancy’s Home for Fallen Women.”

“Fallen in what respect?”

“Fallen readership. Those poor unfortunate wretches who, through no fault of their own, now find themselves in the ignominious status of the less well read. Are you interested?”

“Not really.”

“Well,” said the nun, “how completely selfish of you. How would you like to be hardly read at all?”

“I am hardly read at all,” I told her, mustering as much dignity as I could. There was an unfair stigma attached to those characters who weren’t read, and making us into victims in need of saving didn’t really help, to be honest.

The Viking looked at me scornfully, then got up and went to the front of the bus to pretend to talk to someone. The nun joined him without another word, and I saw them glance in my direction and shake their heads sadly.

I took the bus across the Fantasy/Human Drama border, then changed to a tram at Hemingway Central. In the six months since the BookWorld had been remade, its citizens had learned much about their new surroundings. It was easier to understand; we had usable maps, a chain of outrageously expensive coffee shops in which to be seen, known as Stubbs, and most important, a network of road, rail and river to get from one place to another. We now had buses, trams, taxis, cars and even paddlewheel steamers. Bicycles might have been useful, but for some reason they didn’t work inside the BookWorld—no matter what anyone did, they just wouldn’t stay up. Jumping directly from book to book had rapidly become unfashionable and was looked upon as hopelessly Pulp. If you really wanted to be taken seriously and display a sense of cool unhurried insouciance, you walked.

“So what do you think?” asked a red-haired, jowly gentleman who had sat next to me. He was dressed in a double-breasted blue suit with a dark tie secured by a pearl tiepin. His hair was long but combed straight, and there seemed rather a lot of it. So much, in fact, that he had gathered the bright red locks that grew from his cheeks into fine plaits, each bound with a blue ribbon. Aside from that, his deep-set eyes had a kindly look, and I felt immediately at ease in his company.

“What do I think about what?”

“This,” he said, waving a hairy hand in the direction of the new BookWorld.

“Not enough pianos,” I said after a moment’s reflection, “and we could do with some more ducks—and fewer baobabs.”

“I’d prefer it to be more like the RealWorld,” said the red-haired gentleman with a sigh. “Our existence in here is very much life at second hand. I’d love to know what a mistral felt like, how the swing and drift of fabric might look and what precisely it is about a sunset or the Humming Chorus that makes them so astonishing.”

This was a sentiment I could agree with.

“For me it would be to hear the rattle of rain on a tin roof or see the vapor rise from a warm lake in the chill morning air.”

We fell silent for a moment as the tram rumbled on. I didn’t tell him what I yearned for above all, the most underappreciated luxury of the human race: free will. My life was by definition preordained. I had to do what I was written to do, say what I was written to say, without variance, all day every day, whenever someone read me. Despite conversations like this, where I could think philosophically rather than narratively, I could never shrug off the peculiar feeling that someone was controlling my movements and eavesdropping on my every thought.

“I’m sure it’s not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats,” I said by way of balance.

“Oh, I agree,” replied the red-haired gentleman, who had, I noticed, nut-brown hands with fingers that were folded tight along the knuckle. “For all its boundless color, depth, boldness, passion and humor, the RealWorld doesn’t appear to have any clearly discernible function.”

“Not that better minds than ours haven’t tried to find one.”

The jury had been out on this matter for some time. Some felt that the RealWorld was there only to give life to us, while others insisted that it did have a function, to which no one was yet party. There was a small group who suggested that the RealWorld was not real at all and was just another book in an even bigger library. Not to be outdone, the nihilists over in Philosophy insisted that reality was as utterly meaningless as it appeared.

“What is without dispute,” said my friend once we had discussed these points, “is that the readers need us just as much as we need them—to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else.”

“ Who are you?” I asked, unused to hearing such matters discussed on a Number 23 tram.

“Someone who cannot be saved, Miss Next. I have done terrible things.”

I started at the mention of my name and was suddenly suspicious. Our chance meeting was no chance meeting. In fiction they rarely are. But then again, he might have thought I was the other Thursday Next.

“Sir, I’m not her.”

He looked at me and smiled. “You’re more alike than you suppose.”

“Physically, perhaps,” I replied, “but I flunked my Jurisfiction training.”

“On occasion, people of talent are kept in reserve at times of crisis.”

I stared at him for a moment. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t have much time. I think they saw us talking. Heed this and heed it well: One of our Thursdays is missing!”

“What do you mean?”

“This: Trust no one but yourself.”

“Which ‘yourself’? I have several. Me, the real me and Carmine who is being me when I’m not me.”

He didn’t get to answer. The tram lurched, and with a sharp squeal of the emergency brakes we ground to a halt. The reason we had stopped was that two highly distinctive 1949 Buick Roadmaster automobiles were blocking the road, and four men were waiting for us. The cars and their occupants were among the more iniquitous features of the remaking. The Council of Genres, worried about increased security issues with the freedom of movement, had added another tier of law enforcement to the BookWorld. Shadowy men and women who were accountable only to the council and seemed to know no fear or restraint: the Men in Plaid.

The doors of the tram hissed open, and one of the agents climbed inside. He wore a well-tailored suit of light green plaid with a handkerchief neatly folded in his top pocket.

I turned to the red-haired gentleman to say something, but he had moved across the aisle to the seat opposite. The Man in Plaid’s eye fell upon my new friend, and he quickly strode up and placed a pistol to his head.

“Don’t make any sudden movements, Kiki,” ordered the Man in Plaid. “What are you doing so far outside Crime?”

“I came to Fantasy to look at the view.”

“The view is the same as anywhere else.”

“I was misinformed.”

The red-haired gentleman was soon handcuffed. With a dramatic flourish, the Man in Plaid pulled out a bloodstained straight razor from the red-haired gentleman’s pocket. A gasp went up from the occupants of the tram.

“This lunatic has been AWOL from his short story for twenty-four hours,” announced the agent. “You are fortunate to have survived.”

The red-haired gentleman was pulled from the tram and bundled into the back of one of the Buick Roadmasters, which then sped from the scene.

The Man in Plaid came back on the tram and stared at us all in turn.

“A consummate liar, whose manipulative ways have seen two dead already. Did he say anything to anyone?”

The red-haired gentleman had admitted to me that he’d done terrible things, but that wasn’t unusual. Out of their books, crazed killers could be as pleasant as pie.

“He murdered two women,” continued the first Man in Plaid, presumably in order to loosen our tongues. “He cut the throat of one and strangled the other. Now, did he say anything to anybody?”

I remained silent, and so did everyone else. In the short time the Men in Plaid had been operational, people had learned they were simply trouble and best not assisted in any way.

“Are you a Man in Plaid?” asked one of the passengers.

The man stared at the passenger in a way you wouldn’t like to be stared at. “It’s not plaid. It’s tartan.”

The agent, apparently satisfied that the red-haired gentleman had not spoken to anyone, stepped off the tram, and the doors hissed shut. I shivered as a sudden sense of foreboding shuffled through the four hundred or so verbs, nouns and similes that made up my being. The red-haired gentleman had told me he thought that “one of our Thursdays is missing,” and by that I took him to mean Thursday Next, the real Thursday Next. My flesh-and-blood alter-better ego. But I didn’t get to muse on it any further, for a few minutes later we arrived at the border between Human Drama and Thriller.