The well of lost plots (12 page)

The truck missed us by about six inches.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

“You know, Thursday, you should really loosen up and learn to enjoy life more — you can be such an old stick-in-the-mud.”

I lapsed into silence.

“And don’t sulk,” added Miss Havisham. “If there’s something I can’t abide, it’s a sulky apprentice.”

We bowled down the road, nearly losing it on an S-bend, until miraculously we reached the main Swindon-Cirencester road. It was a no right turn but we did anyway, to a chorus of screeching tires and angry car horns. Havisham accelerated off, and we had just approached the top of the hill when we came across a large
Diversion
sign blocking the road. Havisham thumped the steering wheel angrily.

“I don’t believe it!” she bellowed.

“Road closed?” I queried, trying to hide my relief. “Good — I mean, good-
ness
gracious, what a shame — another time, eh?”

Havisham clunked the Special into first gear and we moved off round the sign and motored down the hill.

“It’s
him
, I can sense it!” she growled. “Trying to steal the speed record from under my very nose!”

“Who?”

As if in answer, another racing car shot past us with a loud
poop poop
!

“
Him
,” muttered Havisham as we pulled off the road next to a speed camera. “A driver so bad he is a menace to himself and every sentient being on the highways.”

He must have been truly frightful for Havisham to notice. A few minutes later the other car returned and pulled up alongside.

“What ho, Havisham!” said the driver, taking the goggles from his bulging eyes and grinning broadly. “Still using Count ‘Snail’ Zborowski’s old slowpoke Special, eh?”

“Good afternoon, Mr. Toad,” said Havisham. “Does the Bellman know you’re in the Outland?”

“Of course not!” yelled Mr. Toad, laughing. “And you’re not going to tell him, old girl, because you’re not meant to be here either!”

Havisham was silent and looked ahead, trying to ignore him.

“Is that a Liberty aero-engine under there?” asked Mr. Toad, pointing at the Special’s bonnet, which trembled and shook as the vast engine idled roughly to itself.

“Perhaps,” replied Havisham.

“Ha!” replied Toad with an infectious smile. “I had a Rolls-Royce Merlin shoehorned into this old banger!”

I watched Miss Havisham with interest. She stared ahead but her eye twitched slightly when Mr. Toad revved his car’s engine. In the end, she could resist it no more and her curiosity got the better of her disdain.

“How does it go?” she asked, eyes gleaming.

“Like a rocket!” replied Mr. Toad, jumping up and down in his excitement. “Over a thousand horses to the back axle — makes your Higham Special look like a motor-mower!”

“We’ll see about
that
,” replied Havisham, narrowing her eyes. “Usual place, usual time, usual bet?”

“You’re on!” Mr. Toad revved his car, pulled down his goggles and vanished in a cloud of rubber smoke. The
poop poop
of his horn lingered on as an echo some seconds after he had gone.

“Slimy reptile,” muttered Havisham.

“Strictly speaking, he’s neither,” I retorted. “More like a dry-skinned, land-based amphibian.”

It felt safe to be impertinent because I knew she wasn’t listening.

“He’s caused more accidents than you’ve had hot dinners.”

“And you’re going to race him?” I asked slightly nervously.

“And beat him, too, what’s more.” She handed me a pair of bolt cutters.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Open up the speed camera and get the film out once I’ve done my run.”

She donned a pair of goggles and was gone in a howl of engine noise and screeching of tires. I looked nervously around as she and the car hurtled off into the distance, the roar of the engine fading into a hum, occasionally punctuated by muffled cracks from the exhaust. I looked around. The sun was out and I could see at least three airships droning across the sky; I wondered what was going on at SpecOps. I had written a note to Victor telling him I had to be away for a year or more and tendered my resignation. Suddenly I was shaken from my daydream by something else. Something dark and just out of sight. Something I should have done or something I’d forgotten. I shivered and then it clicked. Last night. Gran. Aornis’s mindworm. What had she been unraveling in my mind? I sighed as the pieces slowly started to merge together in my head. Gran had told me to run the facts over and over to renew the familiar memories that Aornis was trying to delete. But how do you start trying to find out what it is you’ve forgotten? I concentrated. . . . Landen. I hadn’t thought about him all day and that was unusual. I could remember where we met and what had happened to him — no problem there. Anything else? His full name. Damn and blast! Landen Parke-
something
. Did it begin with a
B
? I couldn’t remember. I sighed and placed my hand on where I imagined our baby to be, now the size of a half crown. I remembered enough to know I loved him, and I missed him dreadfully — which was a good sign, I supposed. I thought of Lavoisier’s perfidy and the Schitt brothers and started to feel rage building inside me. I closed my eyes and tried to relax. There was a phone box by the side of the road, and on impulse I called my mother.

“Hi, Mum, it’s Thursday.”

“Thursday!” she screamed excitedly. “Hang on — the stove’s on fire.”

“The stove?”

“Well, the kitchen really — wait a mo!”

There was a crashing noise and she came back on the line a few seconds later.

“Out now. Darling! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Mum.”

“And the baby?”

“Fine, too. How are things with you?”

“Frightful! Goliath and SpecOps have been camping outside since the moment you left, and Emma Hamilton is living in the spare room and eats like a horse.”

There was an angry growl and a loud whooshing noise as Havisham swept past in little more than a blur. Two flashes from the speed camera went off in quick succession, and there were several more loud bangs as Havisham rolled off the throttle.

“What was that noise?” asked my mother.

“You’d never believe me if I told you. My, er,
husband
hasn’t been round looking for me, has he?”

“I’m afraid not, sweetheart,” she said in her most understanding voice. She knew about Landen and understood better than most — her own husband, my father, had been eradicated himself seventeen years previously. “Why don’t you come round and talk. The Eradications Anonymous meeting is at eight this evening; you’ll be among friends there.”

“I don’t think so, Mum.”

“Are you eating regularly?”

“Yes, Mum.”

“I managed to get DH-82 to do a few tricks.”

DH-82 was her rescue thylacine. Training a usually unbelievably torpid thylacine to do anything except eat or sleep on command was almost front-page news.

“That’s good. Listen, I just called to say I missed you and not to worry about me—”

“I’m going to try another run!” shouted Miss Havisham, who had drawn up. I waved to her and she drove off.

“Are you keeping Pickwick’s egg warm?”

I told Mum that this was Pickwick’s job, that I would call again and hung up. I thought of ringing Bowden but decided on the face of it that this was probably not a good idea. Mum’s phone was bound to have been tapped and I had given them enough already. I walked back to the road and watched as a small gray dot grew larger and larger until it swept past with a strident bellow. The speed camera flashed again and a belch of flame erupted from the exhaust pipe. It took Miss Havisham about a mile to slow down, so I sat on a wall and waited patiently for her to return. A small four-seater airship had appeared no more than half a mile away. It appeared to be a SpecOps traffic patrol and I couldn’t risk them finding out who I was. I looked urgently towards where Havisham was motoring slowly back to me.

“Come on,” I muttered under my breath, “put some speed on, for goodness’ sake.”

Havisham pulled up and shook her head sadly. “Mixture’s too rich. Take the film out of the speed camera, will you?”

I pointed out the airship heading our way. It was approaching quite fast — for an airship.

Miss Havisham looked over at it, grunted and jumped down to open the huge bonnet and peer inside. I cut off the padlock, pulled the speed camera down and rewound the film as quickly as I could.

“Halt!” barked the PA system on the airship when it was within a few hundred yards. “You are both under arrest. Wait by your vehicle.”

“We’ve got to go,” I said, this time more urgently.

“Poppycock!” replied Miss Havisham.

“Place you hands on the bonnet of the car!” yelled the PA as the airship droned past at treetop level. “You have been warned!”

“Miss Havisham, if they find out who I am, I could be in a lot of trouble!”

“
Nonsense
, girl. Why would they want someone as inconsequential as you?”

The airship swung round with the vectored engines in reverse; once they started asking questions, I’d be answering them for a long time.

“We have to go, Miss Havisham!”

She sensed the urgency in my voice and beckoned for me to get in the car. Within a moment we were away from that place, car and all, back to the lobby of the Great Library.

“You’re not so popular in the Outland, then?” Havisham asked, turning off the engine, which spluttered and shook to a halt, the sudden quiet a welcome break.

“You could say that.”

“Broken the law?”

“Not really.”

She stared at me for a moment. “I thought it a bit odd that Goliath had you trapped in their deepest and most secure subbasement. Do you have the film from the speed camera?”

I handed it over.

“I’ll get double prints,” she mused. “Thanks for your help. See you at roll call tomorrow — don’t be late!”

I waited until she had gone, then retraced my steps to the library where I had left Snell’s head-in-a-bag plot device and made my way home. I didn’t jump direct; I took the elevator. Bookjumping might be a quick way to get around, but it was also kind of knackering.

ImaginoTransferenceRecordingDevice:
A machine used to write books in the Well, the ITRD resembles a large horn (typically eight feet across and made of brass) attached to a polished mahogany mixing board a little like a church organ but with many more stops and levers. As the story is enacted in front of the
collecting horn
, the actions, dialogue, humor, pathos, etc., are collected, mixed and transmitted as raw data to Text Grand Central, where the wordsmiths hammer it into readable storycode. Once done, it is beamed direct to the author’s pen or typewriter, and from there through a live footnoterphone link back to the Well as plain text. The page is read, and if all is well, it is added to the manuscript and the characters move on. The beauty of the system is that authors never suspect a thing — they think
they
do all the work.

COMMANDER TRAFFORD BRADSHAW, CBE
Bradshaw’s Guide to the BookWorld

“I’M HOME!” I yelled as I walked through the door. Pickwick plocked happily up to me, realized I didn’t have any marshmallows and then left in a huff, only to return with the gift of a piece of paper she had found in the wastepaper basket. I thanked her profusely and she went back to her egg.

“Hello,” said ibb, who had been experimenting, Beeton-like, in the kitchen. “What’s in the bag?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Hmm,” replied ibb thoughtfully, “since I wouldn’t have asked if I
didn’t
want to know, your response must be another way of saying, ‘I’m not going to tell you, so sod off.’ Is that correct?”

“More or less,” I replied, placing the bag in the broom cupboard. “Is Gran around?”

“I don’t think so.”

obb walked in a little later, reading a textbook entitled
Personalities for Beginners
.

“Hello, Thursday,” it said. “A hedgehog and a tortoise came round to see you this afternoon.”

“What did they want?”

“They didn’t say.”

“And Gran?”

“In the Outland. She said not to wait up for her. You look very tired; are you okay?”

It was true, I
was
tired, but I wasn’t sure why. Stress? It’s not every day that you have to fight swarms of grammasites and deal with Havisham’s driving, Yahoos, Thraals, Big Martin’s friends or head-in-a-bag plot devices. Maybe it was just the baby playing silly buggers with my hormones.

“What’s for supper?” I asked, slumping in a chair and closing my eyes.

“I’ve been experimenting with alternative recipes,” said ibb, “so we’re having Apples Benedict.”

“
Apples
Benedict?”

“Yes; it’s like Eggs Benedict but with—”

“I get the picture. Anything else?”

“Of course. You could try Turnips à l’Orange or Macaroni Custard; for pudding I’ve made Anchovy Trifle and Herring Fool. What will you have?”

“Beans on toast.”

I sighed. It was like being back home at mother’s.

I didn’t dream that night. Landen was absent, but then so, too, was . . . was . . . what’s-her-name. I slept soundly and missed the alarm. I woke up feeling terrible and just lay flat on my back, breathing deeply and trying to push away the clouds of nausea. There was a rap at the door.

“ibb!” I yelled. “Can you get that?”

My head throbbed but there was no answer. I glanced at the clock; it was nearly nine and both of them would be out at St. Tabularasa’s practicing whimsical asides or something. I hauled myself out of bed, steadied myself for a moment, wrapped myself in a dressing gown and went downstairs. No one was there when I opened the door. I was just closing it when a small voice said:

“We’re down here.”

It was a hedgehog and a tortoise. But the hedgehog wasn’t like Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who was as tall as me; this hedgehog and tortoise were just the size they should have been.