The well of lost plots (22 page)

“Okay,” said Havisham, adjusting her own homburg, “we’re out of here. Hold on to me, Next — if we are split up, we’ll meet at the gatehouse — no one enters the castle without Bradshaw, okay?”

Everyone agreed and Havisham mumbled to herself the code word and some of the text of
The Sword of the Zenobians
.

Pretty soon Norland Park had vanished and the bright sun of Zenobia greeted us. The grass was springy underfoot and herds of unicorns grazed peacefully beside the river. Grammasites wheeled in the blue skies, riding the thermals that rose from the warm grassland.

“Everyone here?” asked Havisham.

Bradshaw, Snell, and I nodded our heads. We walked in silence, past the bridge, up to the old gatehouse and across the drawbridge. A dark shadow leaped from a corner of the deserted guardroom, but before Bradshaw could fire, Havisham yelled, “Wait!” and he stopped. It was a Yahoo — but he hadn’t come to throw his shit about — he was running away in terror.

Bradshaw and Havisham exchanged nervous looks and we moved closer to where Perkins and Mathias had been doing their work. The door was broken and the hinges had vanished, replaced by two very light burn marks.

“Hold it!” said Bradshaw, pointing at the hinges. “Did Perkins hold any vyrus on the premises?”

For a moment I didn’t understand why Bradshaw was asking this question, but realization slowly dawned upon me. He meant the mispeling vyrus. The hinges had become
singes
.

“Yes,” I replied, “a small jar — well shielded by dictionaries.”

There was a strange and pregnant pause. The danger was real and clear, and even seasoned PROs like Bradshaw and Havisham were thinking twice about entering Perkins’s lab.

“What do you think?” asked Bradshaw.

“Vyrus
and
a Minotaur,” sighed Havisham. “We need more than the four of us.”

“I’m going in,” said Snell, pulling the MV mask from his TravelBook. The device was made of rubber and similar to the gas respirator I had worn in the Crimea — only with a dictionary on the side where the filter would have been. It wasn’t just one dictionary, either — the
Lavinia-Webster
had been taped back to back with the
Oxford English Dictionary
.

“Don’t forget your carrot,” said Havisham, pinning a vegetable to the front of his jacket.

“I’ll need the rifle,” said Snell.

“No,” replied Bradshaw, “I signed for it, so I’m keeping it.”

“This is not the time for sticking to the rules, Bradshaw, my partner’s in there!”

“This is
exactly
the time we should stick to the rules, Snell.”

They stared at one another.

“Then I’ll go alone,” replied Snell with finality, pulling the mask down over his face and releasing the safety on his automatic.

Havisham caught his elbow as she rummaged in her TravelBook for her own mask. “We go together or not at all, Akrid.”

I found the correct page for the mask, pulled it out of its slot and put it on under the Eject-O-Hat. Miss Havisham pinned a carrot to my jacket, too.

“A carrot is the best litmus test for the mispeling vyrus,” she said, helping Bradshaw on with his mask. “As soon as the carrot comes into contact with the vyrus, it will start to mispel into
parrot
. You need to be out before it can talk. We have a saying: ‘When you can hear Polly, use the brolly.’ ” She tapped the toggle of the Eject-O-Hat. “Understand?”

I nodded.

“Good. Bradshaw, lead the way!”

We stepped carefully across the door with its mispeled hinges, and into the lab, which was in chaotic disorder. Mispeling was merely an annoyance to readers — but
inside
the BookWorld it was a menace. The mispeling was the effect of sense distortion, not the cause — once the internal meaning of a word started to break down, then the mispeling arose merely as a result of this. Unmispeling the word at TGC might work if the vyrus hadn’t taken a strong hold, but usually it was pointless; like making the beds in a burning house.

The interior of the laboratory was heavily disrupted. On the far wall the shelves were filled with a noisy company of
featherbound rooks;
we stepped forward onto the
fattened tarpit
only to see that the imposing table in the center of the room was now an enormous
label
. The glass apparatus had become
grass asparagus
, and worst of all, Mathias the talking horse was simply a large model
house
— like a doll’s house but much more detailed. Miss Havisham looked at me and pointed to her carrot. Already it was starting to change color — I could see tinges of red, yellow and blue.

“Carefool,” said Snell, “look!”

On the floor next to more shards of broken
grass
was a small layer of the same purple mist I had seen the last time I was here. The area of the floor touched by the vyrus was constantly changing meaning, texture, color and appearance.

“Where waz the Minotour kept?” asked Havisham, her carrot beginning to sprout a small beak.

I pointed the way and Bradshaw took the lead. I pulled out my gun, despite Bradshaw’s assurances that it was a waste of time, and he gently pushed the door open to the vault beneath the old hall. Snell snapped on a torch and flicked it within the chamber. The door to the Minotaur’s cage was open, but of the beast, there was no sign. I wish I could have said the same for Perkins. He — or what was left of him — was lying on the stone floor. The Minotaur had devoured him up to his chest. His spine had been picked clean and the lower part of a leg had been thrown to one side. I choked at the sight and felt a knot rise in my throat. Bradshaw cursed low and turned to cover the doorway. Snell dropped to his knees to close Perkins’s eyes, which were staring off into space, a look of fear still etched upon his features. Miss Havisham laid a hand on Snell’s shoulder.

“I’m so sory, Akrid. Perkins wos a good man.”

“I can’t beleive he wood have been sew stewpid,” muttered Snell angrily.

“We shood be leaving,” said Bradshaw, “now we kno there is
definitly
a Minotour loose, we must come bak beter armed and with more peeple!”

Snell got up. Behind his MV Mask I could see tears in his eyes. Miss Havisham looked at me and pointed to her carrot, which had started to sprout feathers. A proper cleanup gang would be needed. Snell placed his jacket over Perkins and joined us as Bradshaw led the way out.

“Bak to Norland, yes?”

“I’ve hunted Minotour befour,” said Bradshaw, his instincts alerted, “Stalingrad, 1944. They neffer stray far from the kil.”

“Bradshore — !” urged Miss Havisham, but the commander wasn’t the sort to take orders from another, not even someone as forthright as Havisham.

“I don’t git it,” murmured Snell, stopping for a moment and staring at the chaos within the laboratory and the small glob of purple mist on the floor. “Their just isn’t enuff vyrus here to corze the problims we’ve seen.”

“Wot are U saying?” I asked.

Bradshaw looked carefully out of the open door, indicated all was clear and beckoned for us to leave.

“There mite be some
moor
vyrus around,” continued Snell. “Wot’s in this cuppboard?”

He strode towards a small wooden cabinet that had telephone directory pages pasted all over it.

“Wate!” cried Bradshaw, striding from the other side of the room. “Let me.”

He grasped the handle as a thought struck me. They weren’t telephone directory pages, they were from a dictionary. The door was
shielded
.

I shouted but it was too late. Bradshaw opened the cupboard and was bathed in a faint purple light. The cabinet contained two dozen or so broken jars, all of which leaked the pestilential vyrus.

“Ahh!” he cried, staggering backwards and dropping his
gum
as the carrot transformed into a loud
parrot
. Bradshaw, his actions instinctive after years of training, pulled the cord on his Eject-O-Hat and vanished with a loud
bang
.

The room mutated as the mispeling got a hold. The floor buckled and softened into
flour
, the walls changed into
balls
. I looked across at Havisham. Her carrot was a parrot, too — it had hopped to her other shoulder and was looking at me with its head cocked to one side.

“
Go, go
!” she yelled at me, pulling the cord and vanishing like Bradshaw before her. I grasped the handle and pulled — but it came off in my hand. I threw it to the ground, where it became a
candle
.

“Hear,” said Snell, removing his own Eject-O-Hat, “use myne.”

“Bat the vyruz!”

“Hange the vyruz, Neckts — jist go!”

He did not look at me again. He just walked towards the cupboard with the broken jars and slowly closed the door, his hands morphing into
lands —
complete with miniature trees, forests and hills — as he touched the raw power of the vyrus. I ran outside, casting off the now useless hat and attempting to clip on the chin strap of Snell’s. It wasn’t easy. I caught my foot on a piece of half-buried masonry and fell headlong — to land within three paces of two large cloven hooves.

I looked up. The Minotaur was semicrouched on his muscular haunches, ready to jump. His bull’s head was large and sat heavily on his body — what neck he did have was hidden beneath taut muscle. Within his mouth two rows of fine-pointed teeth were shiny with saliva, and his sharpened horns pointed forward, ready to attack. Five years eating nothing but yogurt. You might as well feed a tiger on Ryvita.

“Nice Minotaur,” I said soothingly, slowly reaching for my automatic, which had fallen on the grass beside me, “good Minotaur.”

He took a step closer, his hooves making deep impressions in the grass. He stared at me and breathed out heavily through his nostrils, blowing tendrils of mucus into the air. He took another step, his deep-set yellow eyes staring into mine with an expression of loathing. My hand closed around the butt of my automatic as the Minotaur bent closer and put out a large clawed hand. I moved the gun slowly towards me as the Minotaur reached down and — picked up Snell’s hat. He turned it over in his claws and licked the brim with a tongue the size of my forearm. I had seen enough. I leveled my automatic and pulled the trigger at the same time as the Minotaur’s clawed hand caught in the toggle and activated the Eject-O-Hat. The mythological man-beast vanished with a loud detonation as my gun went off, the shot whistling harmlessly through the air.

I breathed a sigh of relief but quickly rolled aside because, with a loud whooshing noise, a packing case fell from the heavens and landed with a crash right where I had lain. The case had
Property of Jurisfiction
stenciled on it and had split open to reveal —
dictionaries
. Another case landed close by, then a third and a fourth. Before I had time to even begin to figure out what was happening, Bradshaw had reappeared.

“Why didn’t you jump, you litle fool?”

“My hat failed!”

“And Snell?”

“Insyde.”

Bradshaw pulled on his MV Mask and rushed off into the building as I took refuge from the packing cases of dictionaries that were falling with increased rapidity. Harris Tweed appeared and barked orders at the small army of Mrs. Danvers that had materialized with him. They were all wearing identical black dresses high-buttoned to the collar, which only served to make their pale skin seem even whiter, their hollow eyes more sinister. They moved slowly but purposefully, and began to stack, one by one, the dictionaries against the castle keep.

“Where’s the Minotaur?” asked Havisham, who suddenly appeared close by.

I told her he had ejected with Snell’s fedora and she vanished without another word.

Bradshaw reappeared from the keep, dragging Snell behind him. The rubber on Akrid’s MV Mask had turned to
blubber
, his suit to
soot
. Bradshaw removed him from
Sword of the Zenobians
to the Jurisfiction sick bay just as Miss Havisham returned. We watched together as the stacked dictionaries rose around the remains of Perkins’s laboratory, twenty feet thick at the base, rising to a dome like a sugarloaf over the castle keep. It might have taken a long time but there were many Mrs. Danvers, they were highly organized and they had an inexhaustible supply of dictionaries.

“Find the Minotaur?” I asked Havisham.

“Long gon. There will be hell to pay about this, I assure you!”

When our carrots had returned to being crunchy vegetables, and the last vestiges of parrotness had been removed, Havisham and I pulled off our vyrus masks and tossed them in a heap — the dictionary filters were almost worn out.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“It is torched,” replied Tweed, who was close by, “it is the only way to destroy the vyrus.”

“What about the evidence?” I asked.

“Evidence?” echoed Tweed. “Evidence of what?”

“Perkins,” I replied. “We don’t know the full details of his death.”

“I think we can safely say he was killed and eaten by the Minotaur,” said Tweed, borrowing Havisham’s not-to-be-questioned voice. “It’s too dangerous to go back in, even if we wanted to. I’d rather torch this now than risk spreading the vyrus and having to demolish the whole book and everything in it — do you know how many creatures live in here?”

He lit a flare.

“You’d better stand clear.”

The DanverClones were leaving now, vanishing with a faint pop, back to wherever they had been pulled from. Bradshaw and I withdrew as Tweed threw the flare on the pile of dictionaries. They burst into flames and were soon so hot that we had to withdraw to the gatehouse, the black smoke that billowed into the sky taking with it the remnants of the vyrus — and the evidence of Perkins’s murder. Because I was sure it
was
murder. When we had walked into the Minotaur’s vault, I had noticed that the key was missing from its hook.
Someone had let the Minotaur out
.

I didn’t notice it straightaway but Vernham, Nelly and Lucy all had the same surname: Deane. They weren’t related. In the Outland this happens all the time, but in fiction it is rare; the problem is aggressively attacked by the
echolocators
(qv), who insist that no two people in the same book have the same name. I learned years later that Hemingway once wrote a book that was demolished because he insisted that every single one of the eight characters was named Gordon.

THURSDAY NEXT,
The Jurisfiction Chronicles