The Well of Lost Plots

'You're making a mistake, Mr Bellman,' I said angrily, 'a very—'

'Oooh!' said Heep, who had been rummaging in my pockets and trying to feel my breasts again. 'Look what I've found!'

It was the Suddenly a Shot Rang Out plot device Snell had given me at the Slaughtered Lamb

'A plot device, Miss Next?' said Tweed, taking the small glass globe from Heep. 'Do you have any paperwork for this?'

'No. It's evidence. I just forgot to sign it in.'

'Carriage of all Narrative Turning Devices is strictly illegal. Are you a dealer? Who's your source? Peddle this sort of garbage in teenage fiction?'

'Blow it out of your arse, Tweed.'

'What did you say?'

'You heard me.'

He went crimson and might have hit me, but all I wanted was for him to move close enough for me to kick him — or his hand, at least.

'You piece of crap,' he sneered, 'I've known you were no good from the moment I saw you. Think you're something special, Miss SpecOps Outlander supremo?'

'At least I don't work for the Skyrail, Tweed. Inside fiction you're a big cheese but out in the real world you're less than a nobody!'

It had the desired effect. He took a step closer and I kicked out, connected with his hand and the small glass globe went sailing into the air, high above our heads. Heep, coward that he was, dived for cover, but Tweed and the Red Queen, wary of a Narrative Turning Device going off in a confined area, tried to catch it. They might have been successful but as it was they collided with a grunt and the small glass globe fell to the floor and shattered as they looked on helplessly.

Suddenly, a shot rang out. I didn't see where it came from but felt its full effect; the bullet hit the chain that was holding me to the anvils, shattering it neatly. I didn't pause for breath; I was off and running towards the door. I didn't know where I was heading; without my TravelBook I was trapped and Sense and Sensibility was not that big. Tweed and Heep were soon on their feet only to hit the floor again as a second volley followed the first. I ducked through the door and came upon … Vernham Deane, pistol in hand. Heep and Tweed returned fire as Deane holstered his pistol and took both my hands.

'Hold tight,' he said, 'and empty your mind. We're going to go abstract.'

I cleared my mind as much as I could and—[23]

'How odd!' said Tweed, walking to the place where he had last seen Thursday. He knew she couldn't jump without her book but something was wrong. She had vanished — not with the fade out of a standard bookjump, but an instantaneous departure.

Heep and the Bellman joined him, Keep with a bookhound on a leash which sniffed the ground and whimpered and yelped noisily, chops slobbering.

'No scent?' said the Bellman in a puzzled tone. 'No destination signature? Harris, what's going on?'

'I don't know, sir. With your permission I'd like to set up textual sieves on every floor of the Great Library. Heep will be your personal bodyguard from now on; Next is quite clearly insane and will try to kill you — I have no doubt about that. Do I have your permission to apply for an "Extremely Prejudicial Termination" order from the Council of Genres?'

'No, that is one step I am not prepared to take. Order the death of an Outlander? Not I.'

Tweed made to move off but the Bellman called him back.

'Tweed,' he began, 'Thursday said there was a problem with Ultra Word™; do you think we should contact Text Grand Central and delay its release?'

'You mean you take all this seriously, sir?' exclaimed Tweed in a shocked tone. 'Excuse me for being so blunt but Next is a murderer and a liar — how many more people does she have to kill before she is stopped?'

'UltraWord™ is bigger than all of us,' said the Bellman slowly. 'Even if sheisa murderer, she still may have found something wrong. I cannot afford to take any risks over the new upgrade.'

'Well, we can delay,' said Tweed slowly, 'but that would take the inauguration of the new operating system out of your term as Bellman. If you think that is the best course of action, perhaps we should take it. But whichever Bellman signs Ultra Word™ into law might be looked on favourably by history, do you not think?'

The Bellman rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

'What more tests could we do?' he asked at length.

Tweed smiled. 'I'm not sure, sir. We fixed the flight manual conflict and debugged AutoPageTurnDeluxe™. The raciness overheat problem has been fixed and the Esperanto translation module is now working a hundred per cent. All these faults have been dealt with openly and transparently. We need to upgrade and upgrade now — the popularity of non-fiction is creeping up and we have to be vigilant.'

Heep ran up and whispered in Tweed's ear.

'That was our intelligence sources, sir. It seems that Next has been suffering from a mnemonomorph recently.'

'Great Scott!' gasped the Bellman. 'She might not even know she has done it!'

'It would explain that convincing act,' added Tweed. 'A woman with no memory of her evil has no guilt. Now, do I have your permission to apply for an "Extremely Prejudicial Termination" order?'

'Yes.' The Bellman sighed, taking a seat 'Yes, you better had and Ultra Word™ is to go ahead, as planned. We have dithered enough.'

We jumped back into the Jurisfiction offices. Tweed and Heep were alone with the Bellman, overseeing a document that I found out later was my termination warrant. I had Deane's gun pointed — at Deane; he had his hands up. Heep and Tweed exchanged nervous glances.

'I've brought you Deane, Bellman,' I announced. 'I had no other way of proving my innocence. Vern, tell them what you told me.'

'Go to hell!'

I whacked him hard on the back of the head with the butt of his pistol and he fell to the ground, momentarily stunned. Blood welled up in his hairline and I winced; luckily, no one saw me.

'That's for Miss Havisham,' I told him.

'Miss Havisham?' echoed the Bellman.

'Oh yes,' I replied. 'Bastard.'

Deane touched the back of his head and looked at his hand.

'Bitch!' he muttered. 'I'd have killed you, too!'

He turned and leaped at me with surprising speed, grasping me by the throat before I could stop him, and we both crashed to the floor, knocking over a table as we went. It was an impressive charade.

'The little slut serving wench deserved to die!' he screamed. 'How dare she spoil the happy life that could have been mine!'

I couldn't breathe and started to black out. I had wanted it to look realistic — and so, I suppose, did he.

Tweed placed a gun under Deane's chin and forced him off. He spat in my face as I lay there, trying to get my breath back. Deane was then set upon by Heep, who took an unhealthy delight in beating him despite the fact that he apologised in a supercilious manner every time he struck him.

'Stop!' yelled the Bellman. 'Calm down, all of you!'

They propped the now bleeding Deane in a chair and Heep bound his hands.

'Did you kill Perkins?' asked the Bellman and Deane nodded sullenly.

'He was going to blow the whistle on me — Havisham too. Snell and Mathias just got in the way. Happiness should have been mine!' he sobbed. 'Why did the slut have to turn up with that little bastard? I should have married Miss O'Shaugnessy — all I wanted was something no evil squire in Farquitt ever gets—!'

'And what was that?' asked the Bellman sternly.

23

The Jurisfiction office vanished and was replaced by a large and shiny underground tube. It was big enough to stand up in but even so I had to keep pressed against the wall as a constant stream of words flashed past in both directions. Above us another pipe was leading upwards, and every now and then a short stream of words was diverted into this small conduit.

'Where are we?' I asked, my voice echoing about the steel walls.

'Somewhere quite safe,' replied Deane. 'They'll be wondering where you went.'

'We're in the Outland — I mean, home?'

Deane laughed.

'No, silly — we're in the footnoterphone conduits.'

I looked at the stream of messages again.

'We are?'

'Sure.'

'Come on, let me show you something.'

We walked along the pipe until it opened out into a bigger room — a hub where messages went from one genre to the next. The exits closest to me were marked 'Crime', 'Romance', 'Thriller' and 'Comedy', but there were plenty more, all routeing the footnoterphone messages towards some sub-genre or other.

'It's incredible!' I breathed.

'Oh, this is just a small hub,' replied Deane, 'you should see the bigger ones. It all works on the ISBN number system, you know — and the best thing about it is that neither Text Grand Central nor the Council of Genres knows that you can get down here. It's sanctuary, Thursday. Sanctuary away from the prying eyes of Jurisfiction and the rigidity of the narrative.'

I caught his eye.

'Tweed thinks you killed Perkins, Snell and that serving girl.'

He stopped walking and sighed.

'Tweed is working with Text Grand Central to make sure Ultra Word™ is launched without any trouble. He knew I didn't like it. He offered me a plot realignment in The Squire of High Potternews to "garner my support".'

'He tried to buy you?'

'When I refused he threatened to kill me — that's why we escaped.'

'We?'

'Of course. The maidservant that I ravage in chapter eight and then cruelly cast into the night. She dies of tuberculosis and I drink myself to death. Do you think we could allow that?'

'But isn't that what happens in most Farquitt novels?' I asked. 'Maidservant ravaged by cruel squire?'

'You don't understand, Thursday. Mimi and I are in love.'

'Ah!' I replied slowly, thinking of Landen. 'That can change things.'

'Come,' said Deane, beckoning me through the hub and dodging the footnoterphone messages, 'there is a settlement in a disused branch line. After Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway the Council of Genres thought Stream of Consciousness would be the next Detective — they built a large hub to support the rack-loads of novels that never appeared.'

We turned into a large tunnel about the size of the underground back in Swindon, and the messages whizzed back and forth, almost filling the tube to capacity.

After a few hundred yards we came to another hub and took the least used — barely two or three messages a minute buzzed languidly past, and these seemed to be lost; they moved around vaguely for a moment and then evaporated. The sides of the tube were less shiny, rubbish had collected at the bottom and water leaked in from the roof. Every now and then we passed small unused offshoots, built to support books that were planned but never written.

'Why did you come for me, Vern?'

'Because I don't believe you would kill Miss Havisham, and, like it or not, despite my rejection of Farquitt, I love stories as much as anyone. UltraWord™ is flawed. Havisham, Perkins, Snell and I were all trying to figure out some sort of a proof when Perkins was eaten.'

The tunnel opened out into a large chamber where a settlement of sorts had been built from rubbish and scrap wood — items that could be removed from the BookWorld without anyone noticing. The buildings were little more than tents with the orange flicker of oil lamps from within.

'Vern!' came a voice, and a dark-haired young woman waved at him from the nearest tent. She was heavily pregnant and Deane rushed up to hug her affectionately. I watched them with a certain degree of jealousy. I noticed I had placed my hand on my own turn quite subconsciously. I sighed and pushed my thoughts to the back of my mind.

'Mimi, this is Thursday,' said Vern. I shook her hand and she led us into their tent, offering me a small wooden box to sit on that I noticed had once been used to held past tenses.

'We scrounge a lot from the Well,' explained Deane, making some coffee. 'It's pretty unregulated down there and we can pinch almost anything.'

'So what's wrong with UltraWord™?' I asked him, my curiosity overcoming me.

'Flawed by the need for control,' he said slowly. 'Think the BookWorld is over-regulated? Believe me, it's an anarchist's dreamworld compared to the future seen by TGC!'

And so, over the next hour, he proceeded to tell me exactly what he had discovered. The problem was, it might very well be seen as hearsay. We needed something more than possibilities and allegations, we needed proof.

'Proof,' said Deane, 'yes, that was always the problem. I don't have any. Perkins died trying to protect the only proof he said we have. I'll go and fetch it.'

He returned with a birdcage containing a skylark and set it on the table.

I looked at the bird and the bird looked back.

'This is the proof?'

'So Perkins said.'

'Do you have any idea what he meant?'

'None at all.' He sighed. 'He was minotaur shit long before he tried to explain it to any of us.'

I leaned forward for a closer look and smelt — cantaloupes.

'It's UltraWord™,' I breathed.

'It is?' echoed Deane in surprise. 'How can you tell?'

'It's an Outlander thing. Do you still have your UltraWord™ copy of The Little Prince?'

He handed me the slim volume.

'What's on your mind?'

'I have a plan,' I told him, 'but to do it I have to be at liberty — and free from the Bellman's suspicions.'

'I can arrange that.' Deane smiled. 'Come on, let's do this thing before it gets any worse.'