The well of lost plots (10 page)

“
Heights
isn’t a bad place to live,” I ventured, hoping to elicit a bit of compassion.

“Doubtless,” she murmured, staring at the floor indicator. “I remember when I was in the Well, when they were building
Great Expectations
. I thought I was the luckiest girl in the world when they told me I would be working with Charles Dickens. Top of my class at Generic College and, without seeming immodest, something of a beauty. I thought I would make an admirable young Estella — both refined and beautiful, haughty and proud, yet ultimately overcoming the overbearing crabbiness of her cantankerous benefactor to find true love.”

“So . . . what happened?”

“I wasn’t tall enough.”

“Tall enough? For a book? Isn’t that like having the wrong hair color for the wireless?”

“They gave the part to a little strumpet who was on salvage from a demolished Thackeray. Little cow. It’s no wonder I treat her so rotten — the part should have been mine!”

She fell into silence.

“Let me get this straight,” said the Painted Jaguar, who was having a bit of trouble telling the difference between a hedgehog and a tortoise. “If it’s slow and solid, I drop him in the water and then scoop him out of his shell—”

“Son, son!” said his mother, ever so many times, graciously waving her tail. “Now attend to me and remember what I say. A hedgehog curls himself up into a ball and his prickles stick out every way—”

“Did you get the Jurisfiction exam papers I sent you?” asked Miss Havisham. “I’ve got your practical booked for the day after tomorrow.”

“Oh!” I said with quite the wrong tone in my voice.

“Problems?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“No, ma’am — I just feel a bit unprepared — I think I might make a pig’s ear of it.”

“I disagree. I
know
you’ll make a pig’s ear of it. But wheels within wheels — all I ask is you don’t make a fool of yourself or lose your life. Now that
would
be awkward.”

“So,” said the Painted Jaguar, rubbing his head, “if it can roll itself into a ball it must be a tortoise and—”

“
Ahhh
!” cried the Mother Jaguar, lashing her tail angrily. “
Completely
wrong. Miss Havisham, what am I to do with this boy?”

“I have no idea,” she replied. “All men are dolts, from where I’m standing.”

The Painted Jaguar looked crestfallen and stared at the floor.

“Can I make a suggestion?” I asked.

“Anything!” replied the Mother Jaguar.

“If you make a rhyme out of it, he
might
be able to remember.”

The Mother Jaguar sighed. “It won’t help. Yesterday he forgot he was a Painted Jaguar. He makes my spots ache, really he does.”

“How about this?” I said, making up a rhyme on the spot:

Can’t curl, but can swim —

Slow-Solid, that’s him!

Curls up, but can’t swim —

Stickly-Prickly, that’s him!

The Mother Jaguar stopped lashing her tail and asked me to write it down. She was still trying to get her son to remember it when the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor and we got out.

“I thought we were going to the Jurisfiction offices,” I said as we walked along the corridors of the Great Library, the wooden shelves groaning under the weight of the collected imaginative outpourings of nearly two millennia.

“The next roll call is tomorrow,” Miss Havisham replied, stopping at a shelf and dropping the grammasite’s waistcoats into a heap before picking out a roughly bound manuscript, “and I told Perkins you’d help him feed the Minotaur.”

“You did?” I asked slightly apprehensively.

“Of course. Fictionalzoology is a fascinating subject and believe me, it’s an area in which you should know more.”

She handed me the book, which, I noticed, was handwritten.

“It’s code-word protected,” announced Havisham. “Mumble
sapphire
before you read yourself in.” She gathered up the waistcoats again. “I’ll pick you up in about an hour. Perkins will be waiting for you on the other side. Please pay attention and don’t let him talk you into looking after any rabbits. Don’t forget the password — you’ll not get in or out without it.”

“Sapphire,” I repeated.

“Very good,” she said, and vanished.

I placed the book on one of the reading desks and sat down. The marble busts of writers that dotted the library seemed to glare at me, and I was just about to start reading when I noticed, high up on the shelf opposite, an ethereal form that was coalescing, wraithlike, in front of my eyes. At home this might be considered a matter of great pith and moment, but here it was merely the Cheshire Cat making one of his celebrated appearances.

“Hullo!” he said as soon as his mouth had appeared. “How are you getting along?”

The Cheshire Cat was the librarian and the first person I had met in the BookWorld. With a penchant for non sequiturs and obtuse comments, it was hard not to like him.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “I was attacked by grammasites, threatened by Big Martin’s friends and a Thraal. I’ve got two Generics billeted with me, the characters in
Caversham Heights
think I can save their book and right now I have to give the Minotaur his breakfast.”

“Nothing remarkable
there
. Anything else?”

“How long have you got?”
¹

I tapped my ears.

“Problems?”

“I can hear two Russians gossiping, right here inside my head.”

“Probably a crossed footnoterphone line,” replied the Cat.

He jumped down, pressed his head against mine and listened intently.

“Can you hear them?” I asked after a bit.

“Not at all,” replied the Cat, “but you do have
very
warm ears. Do you like Chinese food?”

“Yes, please.” I hadn’t eaten for a while.

“Me, too,” mused the Cat. “Shame there isn’t any. What’s in the bag?”

“Something of Snell’s.”

“Ah. What do you think of this Ultra Word™ lark?”

“I’m really not sure,” I replied, truthfully enough. “How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“What do you think of the new operating system?”

“When it comes in, I shall give it my fullest attention,” he said ambiguously, adding, “It’s a laugh, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“That noise you make at the back of your throat when you hear something funny. Let me know if you need anything. Bye.”

And he slowly faded out, from the tip of his tail to the tip of his nose. His grin, as usual, stayed for some time after the rest of him had gone.

I turned back to the book, murmured, “Sapphire,” and read the first paragraph aloud.

Name and Operator’s Number:
Perkins, David “Pinky.” AGD136-323

Address:
c/o Perkins & Snell Detective Series

Induction Date:
September 1957

Notes:
Perkins joined the service and has shown exemplary conduct throughout his service career. After signing up for a twenty-year tour of duty, he extended that to another tour in 1977. After five years heading the mispeling Protection Squad, he was transferred to grammasite inspection and eradication and in 1981 took over leadership of the grammasite research facility.

ENTRY FROM JURISFICTION SERVICE RECORD
(ABRIDGED)

I FOUND MYSELF IN a large meadow next to a babbling brook. Willows and larches hung over the crystal clear waters while mature oaks punctuated the land. It was warm and dry and quite delightful — like a perfect summer’s day in England, in fact, and I suddenly felt quite homesick.

“I used to look at the view a lot,” said a voice close at hand. “Don’t seem to have the time, these days.”

I turned to see a tall and laconic man leaning against a silver birch, holding a copy of the Jurisfiction trade paper,
Movable Type
. I recognized him although we had never been introduced. It was Perkins, who partnered Snell at Jurisfiction, much as they did in the Perkins & Snell series of detective novels.

“Hello,” he said, proffering a hand and smiling broadly, “put it there. Perkins is the name. Akrid tells me you sorted Hopkins out good and proper.”

“Thank you. Akrid’s very kind, but it isn’t over yet.”

He cast an arm towards the horizon. “What do you think?”

I looked at the view. High, snowcapped mountains rose in the distance above a green and verdant plain. At the foot of the hills were forests, and a large river wended its way through the valley.

“Beautiful.”

“We bought it from the fantasy division of the Well of Lost Plots. It’s a complete world in itself, written for a sword-and-sorcery novel entitled
The Sword of the Zenobians
. Beyond the mountains are icy wastes, deep fjords and relics of long-forgotten civilizations, castles, that sort of stuff. It was auctioned off when the book was abandoned. There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame — considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller. Still, the Outland’s loss is our gain. We use it to keep grammasites and other weird beasts who for one reason or another can’t live safely within their own books.”

“Sanctuary?”

“Yes — and also for study and containment — hence the password.”

“There seem to be an awful lot of rabbits,” I observed, looking around.

“Ah, yes,” replied Perkins, crossing a stone-arched bridge that spanned the small stream, “we never did get the lid on reproduction within
Watership Down
— if left to their own devices, the book would be so full of dandelion-munching lagomorphs that every other word would be
rabbit
within a year. Still, Lennie enjoys it here when he has some time off.”

We walked up a path towards a ruined castle. Grass covered the mounds of masonry that had collapsed from the curtain wall, and the wood of the drawbridge had rotted and fallen into a moat now dry and full of brambles. Above us, what appeared to be ravens circled the highest of the remaining towers.

“Not birds,” said Perkins, handing me a pair of binoculars. “Have a look.”

I peered up at the circling creatures who were soaring on large wings of stretched skin. “Parenthiums?”

“Very good. I have six breeding pairs here — purely for research, I hasten to add. Most books can easily support forty or so with no ill effects — it’s just when the numbers get out of hand that we have to take action. A swarm of grammasites can be pretty devastating.”

“I know, I was almost—”

“Watch out!”

He pushed me aside as a lump of excrement splattered on the ground near where I had been standing. I looked up at the battlements and saw a man-beast covered in coarse, dark hair who glared down at us and made a strangled cry in the back of his throat.

“Yahoos,” explained Perkins with disdain. “They’re not terribly well behaved and
quite
beyond training.”

“From
Gulliver’s Travels
?”

“Bingo. When truly original works like Jonathan Swift’s are made into new books, characters are often duplicated for evaluation and consultative purposes. Characters can be retrained, but
creatures
usually end up here. Yahoos are not exactly a favorite of mine but they’re harmless enough, so the best thing to do is ignore them.”

We walked quickly under the keep to avoid any other possible missiles and entered the inner bailey, where a pair of centaurs were grazing peacefully. They looked up at us, smiled, waved and carried on eating. I noticed that one of them was listening to a Walkman.

“You have centaurs here?”

“And satyrs, troglodytes, chimeras, elves, fairies, dryads, sirens, Martians, leprechauns, goblins, harpies, aliens, daleks, trolls — you name it.” Perkins smiled. “A large proportion of unpublished novels are in the fantasy genre, and most of them feature mythical beasts. Whenever one of those books gets demolished, I can usually be found down at the salvage yard. It would be a shame to reduce them to text, now wouldn’t it?”

“Do you have unicorns?”

“Yes,” sighed Perkins, “sackloads. More than I know what to do with. I wish potential writers would be more responsible with their creations. I can understand children writing about them, but adults should know better. Every unicorn in every demolished story ends up here. I had this idea for a bumper sticker: ‘A unicorn isn’t for page twenty-seven, it’s for eternity.’ What do you think?”

“I think you won’t be able to stop people writing about them. How about taking the horn off and seeking placement in pony books?”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” replied Perkins stonily, adding, “We have dragons, too. We can hear them sometimes, at night when the wind is in the right direction. When — or
if
— Pellinore captures the Questing Beast, it will come to live here. Somewhere a long way away, I hope. Careful — don’t tread in the Orc shit. You’re an Outlander, aren’t you?”

“Born and bred.”

“Has anyone realized that platypuses and sea horses are fictional?”

“Are they?”

“Of course — you don’t think anything that weird could have evolved by chance, do you? By the way, how do you like Miss Havisham?”

“I like her a great deal.”

“So do we all. I think she quite likes us, too, but she’d never admit it.”

We had arrived at the inner keep and Perkins pushed open the door. Inside was his office and laboratory. One wall was covered with glass jars filled with odd creatures of all shapes and sizes, and on the table was a partially dissected grammasite. Within its gut were words being digested into letters.

“I’m not really sure how they do it,” said Perkins, prodding at the carcass with a spoon. “Have you met Mathias?”

I looked around but could see nothing but a large chestnut horse whose flanks shone in the light. The horse looked at me and I looked at the horse, then past the horse — but no one else was in the room. The penny dropped.

“Good morning, Mathias,” I said as politely as I could. “I’m Thursday Next.”

Perkins laughed out loud and the horse brayed and replied in a deep voice, “Delighted to make your acquaintance, madam. Permit me to join you in a few moments?”