One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1.­ -­ The BookWorld Remade

  Chapter 2.­ -­ A Woman Named Thursday Next

  Chapter 3.­ -­ Scarlett O’Kipper

  Chapter 4.­ -­ The Red-­Haired Gentleman

  Chapter 5.­ -­ Sprockett

  Chapter 6.­ -­ The Bed-­Sitting Room

  Chapter 7.­ -­ The Lady of Shalott

  Chapter 8.­ -­ The Shield

  Chapter 9.­ -­ Home

  Chapter 10.­ -­ Epizeuxis

  Chapter 11.­ -­ Plot Thickens

  Chapter 12.­ -­ Jurisfiction

  Chapter 14.­ -­ Stamped and Filed

  Chapter 15.­ -­ The Mimefield

  Chapter 16.­ -­ Commander Bradshaw

  Chapter 17.­ -­ The Council of Genres

  Chapter 18.­ -­ Senator Jobsworth

  Chapter 19.­ -­ JurisTech, Inc.­

  Chapter 20.­ -­ Alive!

  Chapter 21.­ -­ Landen Parke-­Laine

  Chapter 22.­ -­ Jenny

  Chapter 23.­ -­ The Stiltonista

  Chapter 24.­ -­ Goliath

  Chapter 25.­ -­ An Intervention

  Chapter 26.­ -­ Family

  Chapter 27.­ -­ Back Early

  Chapter 28.­ -­ Home Again

  Chapter 29.­ -­ TransGenre Taxis

  Chapter 30.­ -­ High Orbit

  Chapter 31.­ -­ Biography

  Chapter 32.­ -­ Homecoming

  Chapter 33.­ -­ The League of Cogmen

  Chapter 34.­ -­ The Metaphoric Queen

  Chapter 35.­ -­ We Go Upriver

  Chapter 36.­ -­ Middle Station

  Chapter 37.­ -­ Revision

  Chapter 38.­ -­ Answers

  Chapter 39.­ -­ Story-­Ending Options

  Chapter 40.­ -­ Thursday Next

  Chapter 41.­ -­ The End of the Book

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Jasper Fforde

  SHADES OF GREY

  The Thursday Next Series

  FIRST AMONG SEQUELS

  SOMETHING ROTTEN

  THE WELL OF LOST PLOTS

  LOST IN A GOOD BOOK

  THE EYRE AFFAIR

  (No longer available)

  The Nursery Crimes Series

  THE BIG OVER EASY

  THE FOURTH BEAR

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Jasper Fforde, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Illustrations by Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Fforde, Jasper.

  One of our Thursdays is missing / Jasper Fforde.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47600-0

  1. Next, Thursday (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Literary historians—

  England—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6106.F67O64 2011

  823'.92—dc22 2010043581

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Tif Loehnis

  To whom I owe my career

  and by consequence

  much else besides

  1.

  The BookWorld Remade

  The remaking was one of those moments when one felt a part of literature and not just carried along within it. In less than ten minutes, the entire fabric of the BookWorld was radically altered. The old system was swept away, and everything was changed forever. But the group of people to whom it was ultimately beneficial remained gloriously unaware: the readers. To most of them, books were merely books. If only it were that simple. . . .

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)

  Everyone can remember where they were when the BookWorld was remade. I was at home “resting between readings,” which is a polite euphemism for “almost remaindered.”

  But I wasn’t doing nothing. No, I was using the time to acquaint myself with EZ-Read’s latest Laborsaving Narrative Devices, all designed to assist a first-person protagonist like me cope with the strains of a sixty-eight-setting five-book series at the speculative end of Fantasy.

  I couldn’t afford any of these devices—not even Verb-Ease™ for troublesome irregularity—but that wasn’t the point. It was the company of EZ-Read’s regional salesman that I was interested in, a cheery Designated Love Interest named Whitby Jett.

  “We have a new line in foreshadowing,” he said, passing me a small blue vial.

  “Does the bottle have to be in the shape of Lola Vavoom?” I asked.

  “It’s a marketing thing.”

  I opened the stopper and sniffed at it gingerly.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  Whitby was a good-looking man described as a youthful forty. I didn’t know it then, but he had a dark past, and despite our mutual attraction his earlier misdeeds could only end in one way: madness, recrimination and despair.

  “I prefer my foreshadowing a little less pungent,” I said, carefully replacing the stopper. “I was getting all sorts of vibes about you and a dark past.”

  “I wish,” replied Whitby sadly. His book had been deleted long ago, so he was one of the many thousands of characters who eked out a living in the BookWorld while they waited for a decent part to come along. But because of his minor DLI character status, he had never been given a backstory. Those without any sort of history often tried to promote it as something mysterious when it wasn’t, but not Whitby, who was refreshingly pragmatic. “Even having no backstory as my backstory would be something,”
he had once told me in a private moment, “but the truth is this: My author couldn’t be bothered to give me one.”

  I always appreciated honesty, even as personal as this. There weren’t many characters in the BookWorld who had been left unscathed by the often selfish demands of their creators. A clumsily written and unrealistic set of conflicting motivations can have a character in therapy for decades—perhaps forever.

  “Any work offers recently?” I asked.

  “I was up for a minor walk-on in an Amis.”

  “How did you do?”

  “I read half a page and they asked me what I thought. I said I understood every word and so was rejected as being overqualified.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I was also offered a four-hundred-and-six-word part in a horror last week, but I’m not so sure. First-time author and a small publisher, so I might not make it past the second impression. If I get remaindered, I’d be worse off than I am now.”

  “I’m remaindered,” I reminded him.

  “But you were once popular,” he said, “so you might be again. Do you know how many characters have high hopes of a permanent place in the readers’ hearts, only to suffer the painful rejection of eternal unreadfulness at the dreary end of Human Drama?”

  He was right. A book’s life could be very long indeed, and although the increased leisure time in an unread novel is not to be sniffed at, a need to be vigilant in case someone does read you can keep one effectively tied to a book for life. I usually had an understudy to let me get away, but few were so lucky.

  “So,” said Whitby, “how would you like to come out to the smellies tonight? I hear Garden Peas with Mint is showing at the Rex.”

  In the BookWorld, smells were in short supply. Garden Peas with Mint had been the best release this year. It only narrowly beat Vanilla Coffee and Grilled Smoked Bacon for the prestigious Noscar™ Best Adapted Smell award.

  “I heard that Mint was overrated,” I replied, although I hadn’t. Whitby had been asking me out for a date almost as long as I’d been turning him down. I didn’t tell him why, but he suspected that there was someone else. There was and there wasn’t. It was complex, even by BookWorld standards. He asked me out a lot, and I declined a lot. It was kind of like a game.

  “How about going to the Running of the Bumbles next week? Dangerous, but exciting.”

  This was an annual fixture on the BookWorld calendar, where two dozen gruel-crazed and indignant Mr. Bumbles yelling, “More? MORE?!?” were released to charge through an unused chapter of Oliver Twist. Those of a sporting or daring disposition were invited to run before them and take their chances; at least one hapless youth was crushed to death every year.

  “I’ve no need to prove myself,” I replied, “and neither do you.”

  “How about dinner?” he asked, unabashed. “I can get a table at the Inn Uendo. The maîtred’ is missing a space, and I promised to give her one.”

  “Not really my thing.”

  “Then what about the Bar Humbug? The atmosphere is wonderfully dreary.”

  It was over in Classics, but we could take a cab.

  “I’ll need an understudy to take over my book.”

  “What happened to Stacy?”

  “The same as happened to Doris and Enid.”

  “Trouble with Pickwick again?”

  “As if you need to ask.”

  And that was when the doorbell rang. This was unusual, as random things rarely occur in the mostly predetermined BookWorld. I opened the door to find three Dostoyevskivites staring at me from within a dense cloud of moral relativism.

  “May we come in?” said the first, who had the look of someone weighed heavily down with the burden of conscience. “We were on our way home from a redemption-through-suffering training course. Something big’s going down at Text Grand Central, and everyone’s been grounded until further notice.”

  A grounding was rare, but not unheard of. In an emergency all citizens of the BookWorld were expected to offer hospitality to those stranded outside their books.

  I might have minded, but these guys were from Crime and Punishment and, better still, celebrities. We hadn’t seen anyone famous this end of Fantasy since Pamela from Pamela stopped outside with a flat tire. She could have been gone in an hour but insisted on using an epistolary breakdown service, and we had to put her up in the spare room while a complex series of letters went backwards and forwards.

  “Welcome to my home, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.”

  “Oh!” said Raskolnikov, impressed that I knew who he was. “How did you know it was me? Could it have been the subtle way in which I project the dubious moral notion that murder might somehow be rationalized, or was it the way in which I move from denying my guilt to eventually coming to terms with an absolute sense of justice and submitting myself to the rule of law?”

  “Neither,” I said. “It’s because you’re holding an ax covered in blood and human hair.”

  “Yes, it is a bit of a giveaway,” he admitted, staring at the ax, “but how rude am I? Allow me to introduce Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov.”

  “Actually,” said the second man, leaning over to shake my hand, “I’m Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin, Raskolnikov’s loyal friend.”

  “You are?” said Raskolnikov in surprise. “Then what happened to Svidrigailov?”

  “He’s busy chatting up your sister.”

  He narrowed his eyes.

  “My sister? That’s Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, right?”

  “No,” said Razumikhin in the tone of a long-suffering best friend, “that’s your mother. Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova is your sister.”

  “I always get those two mixed up. So who’s Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova?”

  Razumikhin frowned and thought for a moment.

  “You’ve got me there.”

  He turned to the third Russian.

  “Tell me, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin: Who, precisely, is Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova?”

  “I’m sorry,” said the third Russian, who had been staring at her shoes absently, “but I think there has been some kind of mistake. I’m not Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin. I’m Alyona Ivanovna.”

  Razumikhin turned to Raskolnikov and lowered his voice.

  “Is that your landlady’s servant, the one who decides to marry down to secure her future, or the one who turns to prostitution in order to stop her family from descending into penury?”

  Raskolnikov shrugged. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve been in this book for over a hundred and forty years, and even I can’t figure it out.”

  “It’s very simple,” said the third Russian, indicating who did what on her fingers. “Nastasya Petrovna is Raskolnikov’s landlady’s servant, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova is your sister who threatens to marry down, Sofia Semyonovna Marmeladova is the one who becomes a prostitute, and Marfa Petrovna Svidrigailova—the one you were first asking about—is Arkady Svidrigailov’s murdered first wife.”

  “I knew that,” said Raskolnikov in the manner of someone who didn’t. “So . . . who are you again?”

  “I’m Alyona Ivanovna,” said the third Russian with a trace of annoyance, “the rapacious old pawnbroker whose apparent greed and wealth led you to murder.”

  “Are you sure you’re Ivanovna?” asked Raskolnikov with a worried tone.

  “Absolutely.”

  “And you’re still alive?”

  “So it seems.”

  He stared at the bloody ax. “Then who did I just kill?”

  And they all looked at one another in confusion.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m sure everything will come out fine in the epilogue. But for the moment your home is my home.”

  Anyone from Classics had a celebrity status that outshone anything else, and I’d never had anyone even remotely famous pass through before. I suddenly felt a bit hot and bothered and tried to tidy up the house in a clumsy sort of way. I whipped my socks from the radiat
or and brushed off the pistachio shells that Pickwick had left on the sideboard.

  “This is Whitby Jett of EZ-Read,” I said, introducing the Russians one by one but getting their names hopelessly mixed up, which might have been embarrassing had they noticed. Whitby shook all their hands and then asked for autographs, which I found faintly embarrassing.

  “So why has Text Grand Central ordered a grounding?” I asked as soon as everyone was seated and I had rung for Mrs. Malaprop to bring in the tea.

  “I think the rebuilding of the BookWorld is about to take place,” said Razumikhin with a dramatic flourish.

  “So soon?”

  The remaking had been a hot topic for a number of years. After Imagination™ was deregulated in the early fifties, the outburst of creative alternatives generated huge difficulties for the Council of Genres, who needed a clearer overview of how the individual novels sat within the BookWorld as a whole. Taking the RealWorld as inspiration, the CofG decided that a Geographic model was the way to go. How the physical world actually appeared, no one really knew. Not many people traveled to the RealWorld, and those who did generally noted two things: one, that it was hysterically funny and hideously tragic in almost equal measure, and two, that there were far more domestic cats than baobabs, when it should probably be the other way round.

  Whitby got up and looked out the window. There was nothing to see, quite naturally, as the area between books had no precise definition or meaning. My front door opened to, well, not very much at all. Stray too far from the boundaries of a book and you’d be lost forever in the interbook Nothing. It was confusing, but then so were Tristram Shandy, The Magus and Russian novels, and people had been enjoying them for decades.

  “So what’s going to happen?” asked Whitby.

  “I have a good friend over at Text Grand Central,” said Alyona Ivanovna, who had wisely decided to sit as far from Raskolnikov and the bloody ax as she could, “and he said that to accomplish a smooth transition from Great Library BookWorld to Geographic BookWorld, the best option was to close down all the imaginotransference engines while they rebooted the throughput conduits.”