The Well of Lost Plots

'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 favourite 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 'A large proportion of unpublished novels are in the fantasy genre, and most of them feature mythical beasts.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?' I asked.

'Yes.' Perkins sighed. 'Sack-loads. 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 realised 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 in the process of 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 there was no one else 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 very deep voice:

'Delighted to make your acquaintance, madam. Permit me to join you in a few moments?'

I agreed and the horse returned to what I now saw were some complicated notes it was writing in a ledger open on the floor. Every now and then it paused and dipped the quill that was attached to its hoof into an inkpot and wrote in a large copperplate script.

'A Houyhnhnm?' I asked. 'Also from Gulliver's Travels?'

Perkins nodded. 'Mathias, his mare and the two Yahoos were all used as consultants for Pierre Boulle's 1963 remake: La planète des singes.'

'Louis Aragon once said,' announced Mathias from the other side of the room, 'that the function of geniuses was to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years on.'

'I hardly think that Boulle was a cretin, Mathias,' said Perkins, 'and anyway, it's always the same with you, isn't it? "Voltaire said this—", Baudelaire said that—". Sometimes I think that you just … just—'

He stopped, trying to think of the right words.

'Was it Da Vinci who said,' suggested the horse helpfully, 'that anyone who quotes authors in discussion is using their memory, not their intellect?'

'Exactly,' replied the frustrated Perkins, 'what I was about to say.'

'Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis,' murmured the horse, staring at the ceiling in thought.

'The only thing that proves is how pretentious you are,' muttered Perkins. 'It's always the same when we have visitors, isn't it?'

'Someone has to raise the tone in this miserable backwater,' replied Mathias, 'and if you call me a "pseudo-erudite ungulate" again, I shall bite you painfully on the buttock.'

Perkins and the horse glared at one another.

'You said there was a pair of Hounyhnhms?' I interjected, trying to defuse the situation.

'My partner, my love, my mare,' explained the horse, 'is currently at Oxford, your Oxford — studying political science at All Souls and paying her way by doing the odd job in the oral tradition.'

'Whereabouts?' I asked, wondering where a talking horse might find employment.

'Jokes about talking horses,' explained Mathias with a shiver of indignation. 'You have heard the one about the talking horse in the pub, I trust?'

'Not for a while,' I replied.

'I'm not surprised,' retorted the horse loftily. 'Her studies do tend to keep her quite busy. Whenever she runs out of funds she does the rounds with a new one. I think she is reprising the talking-horse-with-greyhound gag at the moment.'

It was true. Bowden had used that one at his Happy Squid talent contest. This was probably why jokes 'did the rounds' — it was oral tradition fictioneers going on tour. Another thought struck me.

'Don't you think they'd notice?' I asked. 'A horse, at Oxford?'

'You'd be surprised how unobservant some of the dons are,' snorted Perkins. 'Where do you think Napoleon the pig studied Marxism? The Harris bacon factory?'

'Didn't the other students complain?'

'Of course! Napoleon was expelled.'

'Was it the smell?'

'No — the cheating. This way. I keep the minotaur in the dungeons. You are fully conversant with the legend?'

'Of course,' I replied. 'It's the half-man, half-bull offspring of King Minos' wife, Pasiphaë.'

'Spot on.' He chuckled. 'The tabloids had a field day: "Cretan Queen in Bull Love-child Shock." We built a copy of the Labyrinth to hold it but the Monsters' Humane Society insisted two officials inspect it first.'

'And?'

'That was over twelve years ago; I think they're still in it. I keep the minotaur in here.'

He opened a door that led into a vaulted room below the old hall. It was dark and smelt of rotten bones and sweat.

'Er, you do keep it locked up?' I asked as my eyes struggled to see in the semi-dark.

'Of course!' he replied, nodding towards a large key hanging from a hook. 'What do you think I am, an idiot?'

As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I could see that the back half of the vault was caged off with rusty iron bars. There was a door in the centre which was secured with a ridiculously large padlock.

'Don't get too near,' warned Perkins as he took a steel bowl down from a shelf. 'I've been feeding him on yogurt for almost five years, and to be truthful he's getting a bit bored.'

'Yogurt?'

'With some bran mixed in. Feeding him on Grecian virgins was too expensive.'