One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [36]
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)
Despite the unwanted attentions of the Men in Plaid, the warnings from the red-haired gentleman and the worrying possibility that Thursday might be missing, I spent a busy and anxious afternoon going through the heap of book junk in the garage. I was, to be honest, torn. Part of me wanted nothing better than to accede to Red Herring’s wishes that this be an “unrepeatable” accident, and part of me was suspicious. The closer I examined the book junk, the worse it looked. It appeared that something, while not exactly rotten in the state of the BookWorld, was far from fresh.
At a little after five, and with a rising sense of foreboding, I called Sprockett into my study to compare notes.
“So what do you have?” I asked, letting him air his discoveries first.
He led me across to where the Atlas of the BookWorld lay open on my desk. He indicated the page that depicted the southeastern part of the island and showed me where he had plotted the crashed book’s debris trail by a series of black crosses. Most sections of text would have pulverized into graphemes and simply absorbed, which explains why we rarely find anything when short stories or limericks come to grief, just a hollow concussion in the distance.
Almost all the debris had been strewn across the Aviation genre, with the notable exception of the bed-sitting room already discovered inside Conspiracy and a Triumph motorcycle within Thriller (Spy) that narrowly missed George Smiley as it traveled through an early draft of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Hatmaker. The book seemed to have disintegrated somewhere above Deighton and then strewn objects in a roughly straight line north, in the direction of the Great Library and the Ungenred Zone.
“What would tigers and a macaroon be doing in an Aviation novel?” asked Mrs. Malaprop, who was cleaning with a feather duster but actually wanted to be part of the investigation.
“They might be scrambled graphemes and not actually in the book at all. Best ignored.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any curve to the debris trail at all,” added Pickwick, who had entered unseen and jumped onto the table to look more closely. I wouldn’t have minded so much if she hadn’t upset the inkwell and then stood clumsily in the ink.
“You’re right,” I said. “Mind your feet. And that means either a rapid breakup or that the book—whatever it was—was not from the Aviation genre.”
“Look here,” said Pickwick as she pointed with one of her claws. “If we extend the debris-field line backwards, we come out of Aviation, across Military, and end up right here in Adventure—somewhere around King Solomon’s Mines.”
“Which might explain the tigers.”
“But not the macaroon.”
“Or the box-girder bridges—and the Triumph Bonneville motorcycle.”
“I didn’t say it was Haggard,” said Pickwick, “only that it came from Adventure.”
Unusually, Pickwick was being helpful. Probably because she’d taken Sprockett for some cash, had already had her nap but was not yet ready for her afternoon snack and was thus in an atypically good temper.
“I have an idea,” said Sprockett. “Could we try unscrambling the letters of the items we found, and thereby find tantalizing clues as to what the book might be about?”
“To an outside observer, that would seem entirely logical,” I replied, “but for one thing: Anagram-related clues were outlawed six years ago by the NCU.”
“NCU?”
“Narrative Clunker Unit. Villains haven’t been allowed to be albinos for years, identical twins as plot devices are banned, and double negatives are a complete no-no. Forget anagrams.”
“Isn’t there a black box data reorder in every book?” asked Mrs. Malaprop. “We could analyze the tea lemon tree.”
“Usually,” I replied, “but engineering contracts have to be spread around the BookWorld, and the construction of Book Data Recorders was subcontracted to James McGuffin and Co. of the Suspense