“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.