The well of lost plots (11 page)

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 Houyhnhnms?” I asked, 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.”

“Don’t they notice?” I asked. “A horse, at Oxford?”

“You’d be surprised how unobservant some of the professors are,” replied Perkins. “Napoleon the pig studied Marxism at Nuffield. Got a first, too. 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.” Perkins 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 semidark.

“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. A door in the center 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.”

“Wasn’t he slain by Theseus?” I asked, as a dark shape started moving at the back of the vault accompanied by a low growling noise. Even with the bars I really wasn’t happy to be there.

“Usually,” replied Perkins, ladling out some yogurt, “but mischievous Generics took him out of a copy of Graves’s
The Greek Myths
in 1944 and dropped him in Stalingrad. A sharp-eyed Jurisfiction agent figured out what was going on and we took him out — he’s been here ever since.”

Perkins filled the steel bowl with yogurt, mixed in some bran from a large dustbin and then placed the bowl on the floor a good five feet from the bars. He pushed the dish the remainder of the way with the handle of a floor mop.

As we watched, the Minotaur appeared from the dark recesses of the cage and I felt the hair bristle on the back of my neck. His large and muscular body was streaked with dirt, and sharpened horns sprouted from his bull-like head. He moved with the low gait of an ape, using his forelegs to steady himself. As I watched, he put out two clawed hands to retrieve the bowl, then slunk off to a dark corner. I caught a glimpse of his fangs in the dim light, and a pair of deep yellow eyes that glared at me with hungry malevolence.

“I’m thinking of calling him Norman,” murmured Perkins. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

We left the dark and fetid area beneath the old hall and walked back into the laboratory, where Perkins opened a large leatherbound book that was sitting on the table.

“This is the Jurisfiction bestiary,” he explained, turning the page to reveal a picture of the grammasite we had encountered in
Great Expectations
.

“An adjectivore,” I murmured.

“Very good. Fairly common in the Well but under control in fiction generally.”

He turned a page to reveal a sort of angler fish, but instead of a light dangling on a wand sticking out of its head, it had the indefinite article.

“Nounfish,” explained Perkins. “They swim the outer banks of the Text Sea, hoping to attract and devour stray nouns eager to start an embryonic sentence.”

He turned the page to reveal a picture of a small maggot.

“A bookworm?” I suggested, having seen these before at my uncle Mycroft’s workshop.

“Indeed. Not strictly a pest and actually quite necessary to the existence of the BookWorld. They take words and expel alternate meanings like a hot radiator. I think earthworms are the nearest equivalent in the Outland. They aerate the soil, yes?”

I nodded.

“Bookworms do the same job down here. Without them, words would have one meaning, and meanings would have one word. They live in thesauri but their benefit is felt throughout fiction.”

“So why are they considered a pest?”

“Useful, but not without their drawbacks. Get too many bookworms in your novel and the language becomes almost unbearably flowery.”

“I’ve read books like that,” I confessed.

He turned the page and I recognized the grammasites that had swarmed through the Well earlier.

“Verbisoid,” he said with a sigh, “to be destroyed without mercy. Once the Verbisoid extracts the verb from a sentence, it generally collapses; do that once too often and the whole narrative falls apart like a bread roll in a rainstorm.”

“Why do they wear waistcoats and stripy socks?”

“To keep warm, I should imagine.”

“Ah. What about the mispeling vyrus?”

“
Speltificarious molesworthian
,” murmured Perkins, moving to where a pile of dictionaries were stacked up around a small glass jar. He picked out the container and showed it to me. A thin purple haze seemed to wisp around inside; it reminded me of one of Spike’s SEBs.

“This is the larst of the vyrus,” explained Perkins. “We had to distroy the wrist. Wotch this.”

He picked up a letter opener and delicately brought it towards the vyrus. As I watched, the opener started to twist and change shape until it looked more like a miniature sheaf of papers — an operetta, complete with libretto and score. I think it was
The Pirates of Penzance
, but I couldn’t be sure.

“The vyrus works on a subtextual level and disstorts the
meaning
of a wurd,” explained Perkins, removing the operetta, which morphed back to its previous state. “The mispeling arises as a consekwence of this.”

He replaced the jar back in the dictosafe.

“So the mispeling itself is really only a symptom of sense distortion?”

“Exactly so. The vyrus was rampant before Agent Johnson’s
Dictionary
in 1744,” added Perkins. “
Lavinia-Webster
and the
Oxford English Dictionary
keep it all in check, but we have to be careful. We used to contain any outbreak and off-load it in the
Molesworth
series, where no one ever notices. These days we destroy any new vyrus with a battery of dictionaries we keep on the seventeenth floor of the Great Library. But we can’t be too careful.
Every
mispeling you come across has to be reported to the Cat on a form S-12.”

There was the raucous blast of a car horn from outside.

“Time’s up!” Perkins smiled. “That will be Miss Havisham.”

Miss Havisham was not on her own. She was sitting in a vast automobile, the bonnet of which stretched ten feet in front of her. The large-spoked and unguarded wheels carried tires that looked woefully skinny and inadequate; eight huge exhaust pipes sprouted from either side of the bonnet, joined into one and stretched the length of the body. The tail of the car was pointed, like a boat, and just forward of the rear wheels two huge drive sprockets carried the power to the rear axle on large chains. It was a fearsome beast. It was the twenty-seven-liter Higham Special.

The wealthy son of a Polish count and an American mother, Louis Zborowski lived at Higham Place near Canterbury, where he built three aero-engined cars, all called Chitty Bang Bang. But there was a fourth: the Higham Special, a car he and Clive Gallop had engineered by squeezing a twenty-seven-liter aero-engine into a Rubery Owen chassis and mating it with a Benz gearbox. At the time of Zborowski’s death at Monza behind the wheel of a Mercedes, the Special had been lapping Brooklands at 116 mph — but her potential was as yet unproved. After a brief stint with a lady owner whose identity has not been revealed, the Special was sold to Parry Thomas, who with careful modifications of his own pushed the land speed record up to 170.624 mph at Pendine sands, south Wales, in 1926.

THE VERY REVEREND MR. TOREDLYNE,
The Land Speed Record

“HAS SHE BEEN boring you, Mr. Perkins?” called out Havisham.

“Not at all,” replied Perkins, giving me a wink, “she has been a most attentive student.”

“Humph,” muttered Havisham. “Hope springs eternal. Get in, girl, we’re off!”

I paused. I had been driven by Miss Havisham once before, and that was in a car that I thought relatively safe. This beast of an automobile looked as though it could kill you twice before even reaching second gear.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” said Havisham impatiently. “If I let the Special idle any longer, we’ll coke up the plugs. Besides, I’ll need all the fuel to do the run.”

“The run?”

“Don’t worry!” shouted Miss Havisham as she revved the engine. The car lurched sideways with the torque, and a throaty growl filled the air. “You won’t be aboard when I do — you’re needed for other duties.”

I took a deep breath and climbed into the small two-seater body. It looked newly converted and was little more than a racing car with a few frills tacked on to make it roadworthy. Miss Havisham depressed the clutch and wrestled with the gearshift for a moment. The large sprockets took up the power with a slight tug; it felt like a Thoroughbred racehorse that had just got the scent of a steeplechase.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Home!” answered Miss Havisham as she moved the hand throttle. The car leaped forward across the grassy courtyard and gathered speed.

“To
Great Expectations
?” I asked as Miss Havisham steered in a broad circuit, fiddling with the levers in the center of the massive steering wheel.

“Not my home,” she retorted, “yours!”

With another deep growl and a lurch the car accelerated rapidly forward — but to where I was not sure. In front of us lay the broken drawbridge and stout stone walls of the castle.

“Fear not!” yelled Havisham above the roar of the engine. “I’ll read us into the Outland as easy as blinking!”

We gathered speed. I expected us to jump straightaway, but we didn’t. We carried on towards the heavy castle wall at a speed not wholly compatible with survival.

“Miss Havisham?” I asked, my voice tinged with fear.

“I’m just trying to think of the best words to get us there, girl!” she replied cheerfully.

“Stop!” I yelled as the point of no return came and went in a flash.

“Let me see . . . ,” muttered Havisham, thinking hard, the accelerator still wide open.

I covered my eyes. The car was running too fast to jump out and a collision seemed inevitable. I grasped the side of the car’s body and tensed as Miss Havisham took herself, me and two tons of automobile through the barriers of fiction and into the real world.
My
world.

I opened my eyes again. Miss Havisham was studying a road map as the Higham Special swerved down the middle of the road. I grabbed the steering wheel as a milk-float swerved into the hedge.

“I won’t use the M4 in case the C of G get wind of it,” she said, looking around. “We’ll use the A419 — are we anywhere close?”

I recognized where we were instantly. Just north of Swindon outside a small town called Highworth.

“Continue round the roundabout and up the hill into the town,” I told her, adding, “but it’s
not
your right of way, remember.”

It was too late. To Miss Havisham, her way
was
the right way. The first car braked in time but the one behind it was not so lucky — it drove into the rear of the first with a crunch. I held on tightly as Miss Havisham accelerated rapidly away up the hill into Highworth. I was pressed into my seat, and for a single moment, perched above two tons of bellowing machinery, I suddenly realized why Havisham liked this sort of thing — it was, in a word,
exhilarating
.

“I’ve only borrowed the Special from the count,” she explained. “Parry Thomas will take delivery of it next week and aim to lift the speed record for himself. I’ve been working on a new mix of fuels; the A419 is straight and smooth — I should be able to do at least a ton-eighty on
that
.”

“Turn right onto the B4019 at the Jesmond,” I told her, “
after
the lights turn to greeeeeeen.”