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

constantly enmeshed cogs, wheels and drives never slip or jump. I think one can safely attest that there is no puzzle that Men of the Cog cannot solve, given sufficient oil, facts and winds.
    Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (6th edition)
    T here was a queue to cross into Thriller, bookpeople either being permanently transferred or on a Character Exchange Program designed to stop characters from getting bored, restless and troublesome. There were a few traveling artisans, salesmen and a dozen or so tourists, apparently on a Get Beaten Senseless by Bourne package holiday, which had just overtaken the Being Shot in the Leg by Bond break for popularity, much to the Fleming camp’s disgust.
    As little as two months ago, I would have been waved across with nary a glance, but the heightened security risk due to the potentially inflammable political situation up at Racy Novel had made everyone jumpy.
    I took a TransGenre Taxi as far as the Legal part of Thriller, then continued on foot. I took a left turn by The Firm and picked my way along a weed-covered path and across a plank that spanned a ditch of brackish water, the best method to get into Conspiracy without being waylaid by deluded theorists, who always wanted to explain in earnest terms that President Formby was murdered by President Redmond van de Poste, that bestselling author Colwyn Baye was far too handsome and clever and charming to be anything other than an android or a reptile or an alien or all three.
    I took a left turn at the Lone Gunman pub, and walked past a hangar full of advanced flying machines that all displayed a swastika, then entered a shantytown that was home to theories that lived right on the edge of Conspiracy due to a sense of overtired outrageousness. This was where the Protocols lived, along with alien abductions, 9/11 deniers and the notion that FDR somehow knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I had hoped I might tread unnoticed within the genre, but I was mistaken. Despite avoiding eye contact, I was spotted by a wildlooking loon with hair that stuck out in every direction.
    “There’s no such thing as time,” he confided, with an unwavering sense of belief in his own assertions. “It’s simply a construct designed by a cabal of financiers eager to sell us pensions, life insurance and watches in their pursuit of a global, timepiece-marketing agenda.”
    “Really?” I asked, which is probably the only answer to anything in Conspiracy.
    “Definitely. And the seal is not a mammal—it’s an insect. The truth has been suppressed by the BBC and Richard Attenborough, who want to promote a global mammalcentric agenda.”
    “Don’t you mean David Attenborough?”
    “So you agree?” he said, eyes opening so wide I was suddenly worried I might see his brain. “Would you like to stone a robot?”
    “What?”
    “Stone a robot. Just one of the first generation of mechanical men, designed to be placed amongst us in order to take over the planet and promote a clockwork, global cogcentric agenda.”
    “I’m not really into stoning anyone.”
    “Oh, well,” said the theorist as he picked a rock off the ground. “Suit yourself.”
    And he walked off. Intrigued and somewhat concerned, I followed him to New World Order Plaza, where a small crowd had gathered. They were an odd bunch that comprised everything from small gray aliens to reptilian shape-shifters, Men in Black, Elvises, lost cosmonauts and a smattering of Jimmy Hoffa/Lord Lucan secret genetic hybrids. They were arranged in a semicircle around a tall man dressed in a perfectly starched frock coat, striped trousers and white gloves. Of his clockwork robotic origins there seemed little doubt. His porcelain face was bland and featureless, the only moving part his right eyebrow, which was made of machined steel and could point to an array of emotions painted in small words upon the side of his head. From the look of him, his mainspring was at the very last vestige of tension—he had shut