One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [29]
Whatever it was, it was a burden shouldered by Landen alone.
“When did you last see Thursday?” I whispered.
Landen took a deep breath, wiped his eyes and returned to the children. I put out my hand to touch the mirror, but it simply rippled, like water in a pool.
“Left thirty degrees, three yards forward.”
The mirror complied, and I found myself close enough to the memo board above the telephone to read the notes. I peered amongst the receipts, pictures and old theater tickets before finding what I was looking for. A telephone message in Thursday’s hand telling Landen that his sister wanted to talk to him. It was dated seven days ago. If Thursday was missing, it was for the maximum of a week.
“Did you see what you wanted?”
I jumped. The Lady of Shalott had returned and was standing just behind me.
“I think so,” I replied hastily. “It was the . . . ah . . . state of her memo board I was looking at. You know what they say: ‘A view into a woman’s ephemera is a window to her soul.’”
“Do they say that?” asked the Lady of Shalott doubtfully.
“Frequently.”
I made ready to leave. The visits to Shalott were as frequent as I could make them without arousing suspicion, the views they offered all too fleeting. I wanted to know where Thursday was, sure, but I had to see Landen and the kids, too. Had to.
I thanked her, and she walked me to the door. But this wasn’t a favor, and she and I both knew it. I wasn’t allowed to be in Poetry without just cause, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to sneak-peek the Outland. She handed me a wooden box.
“You will look after them, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I replied, and placed the box in my shoulder bag. I walked outside the castle and returned to where the taxi was waiting to take me home. I was none the wiser as to where Thursday was, but I could reasonably surmise she was missing in the Outland, too. I took a deep breath. It had been, as always, difficult. I loved and hated seeing him, all at the same time. But it helped when it came to finally going on a date with Whitby. It lessened the sense of betrayal.
8.
The Shield
The evidence for the existence of Dark Reading Matter remains obscure at best. Supposedly the vast amount of unread material either forgotten or deleted, DRM is also said to be home to the Unread: zombielike husks of former characters, their humanity sucked from their heads by continued unreadfulness. It is generally agreed that these stories belong to metamyth—stories within stories—and are used by drill sergeants at character college to frighten recruits into compliance.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th edition)
The queue to get out of Poetry was long, as always. The smuggling of metaphor out of the genre was a serious problem, and one that made the border guards extremely vigilant. The increased scarcity of raw metaphor in Fiction had driven prices sky-high, and people would take unbelievably foolish risks to smuggle it across. I’d heard stories of metaphor being hidden in baggage, swallowed, even dressed up to look like ordinary objects whose meanings were then disguised to cloak the metaphor. The problem at that point was trying to explain why you had a “brooding thunderstorm” or “broad sunlit uplands” in your luggage.
“Can we take the High Road?” I asked.
She turned around to look at me. Taking the High Road out of Poetry meant only one thing—that I wanted to avoid any entanglements with the border guards.
“My friend Jake was carrying a mule without realizing it last week,” said the cabbie in a meaningful tone. “The mule had two kilos of raw metonym on him—hidden in the saddlebags.”
Metonym wasn’t as dangerous as smuggling raw metaphor, but the underworld would try anything to turn a buck and had set up labs to enrich variable forms of metaphor into the real McCoy. Extracting the “like” from simile was