One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

14. Stamped and Filed

We walked down the seemingly endless corridors, every door placarded with the name of the department contained within. One was labeled OLD JOKES and another NOUN-TO-VERB CONVERSION UNIT. Just past the offices of the Synonym Squad and the Danvers Union headquarters was a small office simply labeled JAID.

“Right. Well,” I said, “I’ll see myself out when I’m done.”

“I’m afraid not,” replied the frog-footman. “I am instructed to escort you both in and out.”

So while the frog-footman sat on a chair in the corridor opposite, I knocked on the door.

“Commander Herring told me you would be stopping by,” said Lockheed as I entered. “Do come in. Tea?”

“No thank you.”

I looked around. The office was roomy, had a large window and was paneled in light pine. The pictures that decorated the walls all depicted a book disaster of some sort, mostly with Lockheed featured prominently in the foreground, grinning broadly. There was little clutter, and the single filing cabinet probably contained nothing but a kettle and some cookies. Jurisfiction had finally managed to commit itself to a paperless office—all files were committed to the prodigious memory of Captain Phantastic, just down the hall.

“Impressive office, eh?” said Lockheed. “We even have a window—with a view. Come and have a look.”

I walked over to the window and looked out. All I could see was a brick wall barely six feet away.

“Very nice,” I murmured.

“If you lean right out with someone hanging on to your shirttails, you can almost see the sky, but not quite. Would you like to try?”

“No thanks.”

“So,” said Lockheed, sitting down on his swivel chair and motioning me to a seat, “something to report to Commander Herring about the accident?”

I swallowed hard. “It was simply that,” I said, an odd leaden feeling dropping down inside me. “An accident.”

Lockheed breathed a visible sigh of relief. “Commander Herring will be delighted. When he hears bad news, he usually likes to hit someone about the head with an iron bar, and I’m often the closest. Are you sure there is nothing to report?”

I wondered for a moment whether to report the epizeuxis worm, scrubbed ISBN and the Vanity roots of The Murders on the Hareng Rouge. Not necessarily because it was the right thing to do, but simply to watch the eye-popping effect it might have on Lockheed.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Unprecedented and unrepeatable?”

“Exactly so.”

I felt the curious leaden feeling again. I didn’t know what it was; I patted my chest and cleared my throat.

“Little cog, big machine,” said Lockheed as he filled out a form for me to sign. “We are here to facilitate, not to pontificate. If we can sew this whole incident shut, the sooner we can get on with our lives and maintain our unimpeachable hundred percent dealt-with rate. Wheels within wheels, Thursday.”

“Wheels within wheels, sir.”

“Did you find out what the book was, by the way?”

“Not a clue,” I lied. “I didn’t find a single ISBN, so I thought ‘Why bother?’ and decided to simply give up.”

I didn’t know why I was suddenly being sarcastic. It might have been something to do with the odd leaden feeling inside. Lockheed, however, missed the sarcasm completely. Most D-3s did.

“Splendid!” he said. “I can see that you and Commander Herring will be getting on very well. You can expect a few more incidents heading your way with this kind of flagrant level of inspired disinterest. Sign here . . . and here.”

He handed the form over, and I paused, then signed on the dotted line. This isn’t what Thursday would have done, but then I wasn’t Thursday.

“Excellent,” he said, rising from his seat. “I’ll take this along to Captain Phantastic for memorizing.”

“Why don’t I take it?” I suggested. The odd leaden feeling in me had released a sense of purpose, but of what I was not sure. “You can stay here and have some tea and cookies or something.”

I nodded my head in the direction of the filing cabinet.

“Goodness me, that is so very kind,” replied Lockheed, condemning the lost souls in the unknown book to eternal anonymity with a ridiculously large rubber stamp before handing me the form. “Fourth door on the left.”

“Right you are.”

I opened the door, thanked him again and found the frog-footman waiting for me in the corridor. I told him I had some filing to do, and he led me past the doors marked PIANO DIVISION, ITALICS, and PEBBLES (MISCELLANEOUS) before we got to a door marked RECORDS. The frog-footman told me he’d wait for me there, and I stepped inside.

The room was small and shabby and had a half dozen people waiting to be seen, so I sat on a chair to wait my turn.

“Thursday Next,” I said to the gloomy-looking individual sitting next to me, who was reading a paper and appeared to have a toad actually growing out of the top of his head. The pink skin of his balding pate seemed to merge with the brownygreen of the toad. “The copy,” I added, before he asked. But the man ignored me. The toad growing out of his head, however, was more polite.

“Ah,” said the toad. “A good copy?”

“I do okay.”

“Humph,” said the toad before adding, “Tell me, do I look stupid with a human growing out of my bottom?”

“Not at all,” I replied politely. “In fact, I think it’s rather fetching.”

“Do you really?” said the toad with a smile.

“Who are you talking to?” asked the man, looking up from his paper.

“The toad.”

The man looked around. “What toad?”

“What did the man just say?” asked the toad.

“I like your books,” said the woman on the other side of me. “When are we going to see some more?”

“Five is all you’ll get,” I said, happy to get away from the man-toad. “What are you seeing Captain Phantastic for?”

“I’m head of the Metaphor Allocation Committee,” she explained. “Once we move to the Metaphor Credit Trading System, those books with excess metaphor will be able to trade it on the floor of the Narrative Device Exchange. Naturally, more complex figurative devices such as hypothetical futures and analogy and simile trust funds will have to be regulated; we can’t have hyperbole ending up as overvalued as it was—the bottom dropped out of the litotes market, which, as anyone will tell you, was most undesirable.”

“ Most undesirable,” I remarked, having not understood a word. “And how will Captain Phantastic help with all this?”

She shrugged. “I just want to run the idea past him. There might be a historical precedent that could suggest collateralized metaphor obligations might be a bad idea. Even so,” she added, “we might do it anyway—just for kicks and giggles. Excuse me.”

While we’d been talking, Captain Phantastic had been dealing with each inquiry at lightning speed. This wasn’t surprising, as the Records Office relied on nothing as mundane as magnetic storage, paper filing or even a linked alien supermind. It had in its possession instead a single elephant with a prodigiously large memory. It was efficient and simple, and it required only buns, hay and peanuts to operate.

When it was my turn, I walked nervously into his office.

“Hello,” said the elephant in a nasally, trumpety, blocked-nose sort of voice. I noticed he was dressed in an unusual three piece pin-striped suit, unusual in that not only did it have a watch fob the size of a saucepan in the waistcoat pocket, but the pinstripes were running horizontally.

“So how can I help?”

“Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department,” I said, holding up my shield. I paused as a sudden thought struck me. Not about elephants, or even of a toad with a man growing out of its bottom, or of the volatile metaphor market. I suddenly thought about lying. Of subterfuge. It was wrong, but in a right kind of way, because I had finally figured out what the leaden feeling was. It was a deficiency of Right Thing to Do—and I needed to remedy the shortfall, and fast.

“We’re investigating a crashed book out in Conspiracy,” I said, tearing up the accident report behind my back, “and we need some background information on The Murders on the Hareng Rouge by Adrian Dorset.”

“Of course,” trumpeted the elephant. “Take a seat, Miss . . . ?”

“Next. Thursday Next. But I’m not—”

“It’s all right,” he said, “I know. I know everything. More even than the Cheshire Cat. And that’s saying something. I’m Captain Phantastic, by the way, but you can call me ‘the Captain.’ You and I haven’t met, but the real Thursday and I go back a ways—even partnered together during the whole sorry issue surrounding The Cat in the Hat III—Revenge of the Things. Did you hear about it?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t.”

“No matter.” And he sniffed at me delicately for a moment with his trunk.

“Do you have a chicken living in your house?”

“A dodo.”

“Would that be Lorina?”

“We call her Pickwick these days, but yes.”

“Tell her that Captain Phantastic is still waiting for that date she promised.”

I wasn’t aware that Pickwick dated elephants—or anyone, come to that.

“Did she promise you recently?”

“Eighty-six years, three months, and two days ago. Would you like me to relate the conversation? I can do it word for word.”

“No thanks. I’ll give her the message.”

The Captain leaned back on his chair and closed his eyes.

“Now, The Murders on the Hareng Rouge. I try to read most books, but for obvious reasons those in Vanity I delegate. So many books, so little time. Listen, you don’t have a bun on you, do you? Raisins or otherwise, I’m not fussy.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Shame. Okay, well, there’s not much to tell, really. The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was a junker on its way to be scrapped.”

I wasn’t expecting this. “I’m sorry?”

“It was a stinker. One of the very worst books ever written. Self-published by one Adrian H. Dorset, who as far as we know has not written anything else. He printed two copies and spiral bound them in his local print shop. Semiautobiographical, it was the story of a man coming to terms with the death of his wife and how he then immersed himself in work to try to take revenge on the person he thought responsible. Flat, trite and uninspiring. The author burned it as a form of catharsis. By rigid convention, the version here in the BookWorld has to be scrapped before sundown. Did it hurt anyone?”

“Only the people in it.”

“It should have been empty,” said the elephant. “Scrapped books always have the occupants reallocated before the book is torn apart.”

“We found the remains of someone.”

“How much?”

“A thumb.”

The elephant shrugged. “A hitchhiker, perhaps? Or reformed graphemes?”

“We thought the same.”

“In any event,” concluded Phantastic, “that’s all I have.”

“You’re sure it was a junker?” I asked, trying to figure out why anyone would risk almost certain erasure by deleting the ISBN and then using demolition-grade epizeuxis to destroy an unreadable book from Vanity that was destined to be scrapped anyway.

“Completely sure.”

I thanked Captain Phantastic for his time, promised to bring some buns next time and walked out of his office, deep in thought.

“You were in there a while,” said the frog-footman as he escorted me from the building.

“The Captain likes to talk,” I said. “‘Hannibal said this, me and Dumbo did that, Horton’s my best friend, I was Celeste’s first choice but she took Babar on the rebound’—you know what it’s like.”

“After Madame Bovary,” said the frog-footman, rolling his eyes, “the Captain is the worst name-dropper I’ve ever been ignored by.”

I went and found Sprockett in the local Stubbs. He had got chatting to a Mystical Meg Fortune-Telling Automaton and discovered that they were distantly related.

“I’ve got you a fortune card, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Archie was a great-great-uncle to us both, and Meg’s father-in-law is Gort.”

“Nice chap?”

“So long as you don’t get him annoyed.”

I looked at the small card he had given me. It read, “Avoid eating oysters if there is no paycheck in the month,” which is one of those generic pieces of wisdom that Mechanical Mystics often hand out, along with “Every chapter a new beginning” and “What has a clause at the end of the pause?”

Sprockett hailed a cab, and we were soon trundling off in the direction of Fantasy.

“Did all go as planned, ma’am?” he asked as we made our way back out of the genre on the Dickens Freeway.

I paused. It was better if Sprockett didn’t know that the investigation was covertly still running. Better for me, and better for him. Despite being a cog-based life-form, he could still suffer at the hands of inquisitors, and he needed deniability. If I was going to go down, I’d go down on my own.

In ten minutes I had told him everything. He nodded sagely, his gears whirring as he took it all in. Once I was done, he suggested that we not tell anyone, as Carmine might tell the goblin and Pickwick was apt to blurt things out randomly to strangers. Mrs. Malaprop we didn’t have to worry about—no one would be able to understand her. Besides, she probably already knew.

“The less people who know, the better.”

“Fewer. The fewer people who know, the better.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“That’s what who meant?”

“Wait—who’s speaking now?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must know.”

“Damn. It must be me—you wouldn’t say ‘damn,’ would you?”

“I might.”

We both paused for a moment, waiting for either a speech marker or a descriptive line. It was one of those things that happened every now and again in BookWorld—akin to an empty, pregnant silence in the middle of an Outland dinner party.

“So,” said Sprockett once we had sorted ourselves out, “what’s the plan?”

“I don’t know our next move,” I said, “but until I do, we do nothing—which is excellent cover for what we should be doing—nothing.”

“An inspired plan,” said Sprockett.

The taxi slowed down and stopped as the traffic ground to a halt. The cabbie made some inquiries and found that a truckload of “their” had collided with a trailer containing “there” going in the opposite direction and had spread there contents across the road.

“Their will be a few hiccups after that,” said the cabbie, and I agreed. Homophone mishaps often seeped out into the RealWorld and infected the Outlanders, causing theire to be all manner of confusion.

“I know a shortcut through Comedy,” said the cabbie, who was, purely as an irrelevant aside, an anteater named Ralph. “It shouldn’t be too onerous—the risibility is currently at thirty yards and the mirthrate down to 1.9.”

“What about puns?”

“Always about, but they’re not funny, so the chance of unbridled hysteria is low.”

Trips through Comedy were usually avoided, as the giggling could be painful and sometimes fatal, but the comedy in Comedy had been muted of late. I told him to go ahead, and we pulled out of the traffic and drove off in the opposite direction.

“What kind of man sets fire to a busload of nuns?” I asked, Whitby still annoyingly on my mind.

“I cannot answer that, ma’am, but I suspect one who is neither kind nor considerate.”

There was a pause.

“May I ask a question regarding the subject of empathy, something I am at a loss to understand?”

“Of course.”

“Since I have set neither a nun nor a puppy on fire nor gleefully pushed an old lady downstairs, does that make me kind and compassionate?”

“Not really,” I replied. “It makes you normal, and respectful of accepted social rules.”

“But not compassionate?”

“To be compassionate you have to demonstrate it in some sort of act that shows you care for someone.”

“Care for someone? Care as in how a butler cares for someone?”

“More than that.”

“I’m not sure I can envisage any greater care than that which a butler can offer.”

And he sat and buzzed to himself in such deep thought that I had to give him two extra winds, much to the cabbie’s sniffy disapproval.

We entered Comedy a few miles farther on by way of the Thurber Freeway, then took a funny turn at Bad Joke and bumped along a back road of compacted mother-in-law oneliners. We passed the Knock-Knock? Quarry, where we were held up for a few minutes while they did some blasting, then continued on past Limericks, Amusing Anecdotes and Talking-Horse Gags to the empty wilderness known as the Burlesque Depression. The huge influx of stand-up comedians in the RealWorld had overjoked the stocks of natural glee, and the stony comedic landscape was now almost barren. As an emergency measure, unfunny comedy sneakily branded “alternative” was now flooding the RealWorld until the natural stock of jokes had replenished itself. The lack of comedy in Comedy was no laughing matter.

Almost from nowhere a car shot past us at speed and, as it did so, swerved violently. The cabbie attempted to avoid a collision and spun the wheel hard to the left. He overcorrected, slewed sideways and hit the fence at the side of the road. There was a crunch as splintered wood flew everywhere, the windscreen crazed, and the taxi thumped down the short embankment, ran across some rough ground and came to rest with a clatter and a hiss against a tree.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Sprockett nodded, even though I could see he had a crack in his porcelain face. The cabbie looked a bit shocked and was about to open his door when I placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Wait. Don’t anyone move. . . . I think we’ve driven into a mimefield.”