The Well of Lost Plots

'We'd better not,' replied MissHavisham coldly. 'Lose Heathcliff and the Council of Genres will have our colons for garters. Now, to work. We don't know what to expect as regards the minotaur, so we have to be prepared.'

'Like boy scouts?'

'Can't stand them, but that's beside the point. Turn to page seven eighty-nine in your TravelBook.'

I did as she bade. This was in an area of the book where the pages contained gadgets in hollowed-out recesses deeper than the book was thick. One page contained a device similar to a flare gun which had 'Mk IV TextMarker' written on its side. Another page had a glass panel covering a handle like a fire alarm. A note painted on the glass read: 'IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS'. The page Havisham had indicated was neither of these; page 789 contained a brown Homburg hat. Hanging from the brim was a large red toggle with 'In emergency pull down sharply' written on it. There was also a chin strap, something I've never seen on a Homburg before — or even a fedora or trilby, come to that.

Havisham took the hat from my hands and gave me a brief induction course.

'This is the Martin-Bacon Mk VII Eject-O-Hat,' she explained, for high-speed evacuation from a book. Takes you straight out in an emergency.'

'Where to?'

'A little-known novel entitled The Middle of Next Week. You can make your way out to the Library at leisure. But be warned: the jump can be painful, even fatal — so it should only be used as a last resort. Remember to keep the chin strap tight or it'll take your ears off during the ejection sequence. I will say "JUMP!" twice — by the third I will have gone. Any questions?'

'How does it work?'

'I'll rephrase that — any questions I can possibly hope to answer?'

'Does this mean we'll see Bradshaw without his pith helmet?'

'Ha-ha!' Bradshaw laughed, releasing the toggle from the brim. 'I have the smaller Mk XII version — it could be fitted into a beret or a veil, if we so wished.'

I picked up the Homburg from the table and put it on.

'What are you expecting?' I asked slightly nervously, adjusting the chin strap.

'We think the minotaur has escaped,' she answered gravely. 'If it has and we meet it, just pull the cord as quickly as you can. It always takes at least ten to twelve words to initiate a standard jump — you could be minotaur appetiser by that time.'

I pulled out my automatic to check it but Bradshaw shook his head.

'Your Outlander lead will not be enough.'

He held up the box of cartridges he had signed for.

'Boojum-tipped,' he explained, tapping the large hunting rifle he was carrying, 'for total annihilation. Back to text in under a second. We call them Eraserheads. Snell? Are you ready?'

Snell had a fedora version of the Eject-O-Hat which suited his trenchcoat a bit better. He grunted but didn't look up. This assignment was personal. Perkins was his partner—not just at jurisfiction but in the Perkins & Snell series of detective novels. If Perkins was hurt in some way, the future could be bleak. Generics could be trained to take over a vacated part, but it's never the same.

'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 Sword of the Zenobians.

Pretty soon Norland Park had vanished and the bright sun of Zenobia greeted us. The grass was springy under foot 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 realisation slowly dawned upon me. He meant the mispeling vyrus. The hinges had become singes. The vyrus was a lot more powerful than I had supposed. Mispeled speech was only the start of it.

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

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

'What do you think?' asked Bradshaw.

'Vyrus and a minotaur,' Havisham sighed. 'We need more than the four of us.'

'I'm going in,' said Snell, pulling a respirator from his TravelBook. The mask was made of rubber and similar to the ones at home — only with a dictionary where the filter would have been. It wasn't just one dictionary, either — the Lavina-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 catch 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. X

'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 a state of chaotic disorder. Mispeling was merely an annoyance to readers in the real world — but inside fiction 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 as a consequence 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 feather-bound rooks; we stepped forward on to the fattened tarpit only to see that the imposing table in the centre 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 colour — I could see tinges of red, yellow and blue.