Read Online One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde - Free Book Online

tried anything since. Vanity’s contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labor and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted onto the island with an apologetic, “Gosh, don’t know how that happened.”
    We continued our walk through Conspiracy, past something odd that had been dug up on the Quantock Hills, and Sprockett asked me if I conducted many accident investigations.
    “My last investigation was in a book-club edition of Three Men in a Boat, which had sprung a leak,” I told him, “and lost forty thousand gallons of the river Thames as it passed across Crime Noir, where it fell quite helpfully as rain. My theory had been that it was a sticky pressure-relief valve on the comedy induction loops, probably as a result of substandard metaphor building up on the injectors. I penned an exhaustive report to Commander Herring, who congratulated me on my thoroughness but tactfully pointed out that comedy induction loops were not introduced until April 1956—long after the book was built.”
    “Oh,” said Sprockett, who perhaps had been expecting a story with a happier ending. “So what had really happened?”
    I sighed. “Someone had simply left the plug out of the Thames and it had drained away.”
    We walked on in silence for a moment.
    “Ma’am, if you would forgive the impertinence, might I place one small condition upon my employment?”
    I nodded, so he continued.
    “I have an overriding abhorrence for honey. No matter what happens, it always seems to end up in my insides, and it is the very devil to remove. In my last employ, my master insisted upon honey for breakfast, and a small quantity became lodged in my thought cogs. Until steam-cleaned, I became convinced I was the Raja of Sarawak.”
    “No honey,” I said. “Promise.”
    And so, fully introduced, we talked about the much-heralded and much-delayed introduction of the advanced Duplex-6 clockwork automaton. And, after that, the relative merits of phosphor-bronze over stainless steel for knee joints. So it was that I arrived, thoroughly versed in the Matters of the Cog, at the regional Conspiracy offices a few minutes later.

6.
    The Bed-Sitting Room
    The ISBN security numbering system achieved little. Thieves simply moved into stealing and trading sections of older books. The members of the Out-of-Print Brigade were furious; after looking forward to a long and happy retirement, they instead found their favorite armchairs pinched from under them as they dozed. Entire books were stripped of all nouns, and in the very worst cases large sections of dramatic irony were hacked from the books and boiled down to extract the raw metaphor, rendering once-fine novels mere husks suitable only for scrapping.
    Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (14th edition)
    T he local genre representative was sitting on a wicker chair on the veranda of his office, a clapboard affair that looked much ravaged by overreading. The rep was described as what we termed “UK-6 Aristocracy Dapper-12,” which meant that he had a fine pencil mustache and spoke as though he were from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I told Sprockett to wait for me outside, which he unhesitatingly agreed to do.
    The rep did not rise from his chair and instead looked me up and down and then said in a disparaging tone, “You’re a long way from Mind, Body and Soul, old girl.”
    It’s true that I may have looked a bit New Agey, but I didn’t really need this. Bolstered by my earlier claim to be the real Thursday, I decided to try the same here.
    “The name’s Thursday Next,” I said, waving my shield. The reaction was electric. He choked on his afternoon tea and crumpet and, in his hurry to get to his feet, nearly woke a large and very hairy Sasquatch who dozed in a wicker chair a little way down the veranda.
    “Good gracious!” exclaimed the genre rep. “Please excuse me. The name’s Bilderberg. Roswell Bilderberg. My office is your office. Hey!” He kicked the foot of