One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [77]
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (6th edition)
I knocked twice. There was the sound of noises from within, and the door opened. It was Landen, and we stared at each other for a few seconds.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” said Landen.
“Hello,” I said again.
“Are you her?” he asked.
“No, not really.”
“Then you’d better come in.”
He moved aside, and I stepped into the hallway that was familiar to mine, but only in layout. Thursday’s real house was more real, more worn, more lived in. The banisters were chipped, the newel post was draped with discarded clothes, and a tide mark of children’s fingerprints ran along the wall and up the staircase. Pictures hung askew, and there was a small cobweb around the lampshade. Landen led me through to the kitchen, which was a big extension at the back of the house, partly consuming the garden and covered with a large glazed roof above the junk-strewn kitchen table. It was packed with the chaotic assortment of the minutiae of life being lived—not the sanitized shorthand we get in the BookWorld, even with the Reader Feedback Loop set to max. Life seemed to be a lot messier than people wanted fiction to be. Feedback reflected hopes, not realities. I looked around carefully and sat in the seat he had indicated.
“Tea?” he asked.
“Do I drink it?”
“Gallons of it, usually.”
“At a single sitting?”
“No, generally one cup at a time.”
“Then I’d love some, thank you.”
He went to put the kettle on.
“You look a lot like Thursday,” he said.
“I’m often mistaken for her,” I replied, feeling less nervous around familiar questions. “In fact, I’m surprised you needed so little convincing I wasn’t the real Thursday.”
“I don’t know that for certain,” he replied. “Not yet anyway. I’d like you to be her, naturally, but there have been others who looked a lot like her. Not quite as much as you do, but pretty similar. Goliath is keen to know what Thursday gets up to when she’s not at home, and they’ve sent one or two to try to trick me into giving information. The first was just a voice on the phone, then one who could be seen only from a distance. The last one almost took me in, but up close she didn’t pass muster. Her texture was all wrong, the smell was different, the smile lopsided and the ears too high. I don’t know why they keep sending them, to be honest—nor where they end up. After I booted the last one out the door, someone from Goliath’s Synthetic Human Division came round demanding to know what I’d done with it. Then, after I asked about the legality of such a device, he denied there had been any, or even that he was from the Synthetic Human Division. He then asked to read the meter.”
“So how can they lose two synthetic Thursdays?”
“They lost three. There was another that I hadn’t even seen. They said it was the best yet. They dropped it off two weeks ago near Clary-LaMarr and haven’t heard anything since. Are you that one?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I replied, vaguely indignant. “I’m not a Goliath robot.”
“Not a robot—a synthetic. Human in everything but name.”
I took a deep breath. I had to lay my cards on the table. “She’s missing, isn’t she?”
There was a flicker of consternation on Landen’s face. “Not at all. Her absences are quite long, admittedly, but we’re always in constant communication.”
“From the BookWorld?”
He laughed. “That old chestnut! It was never proved she could move across at will. I think you’ve perhaps spent a little too much time listening to deranged theories.”
It sounded like a cover story to keep the real nature of the BookWorld secret. I didn’t expect him to tell me anything. He didn’t know who or what I was, after all. But he had to know.
“I’m the written her,” I told him. “She may have spoken to