A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (78 page)

“Then this isn't over yet?”

“No,” replied Gran sadly, shaking her head. “I wish it were. Be prepared for a shock, young Thursday—tell me Landen's name in full.”

“Don't be ridiculous!” I scoffed. “It's Landen Parke—”

I stopped as a cold fear welled up inside my chest. Surely I could remember my own husband's name? But try as I might, I could not. I looked at Gran.

“Yes, I do know,” she replied, “but I'm not going to tell you. When you remember, you will know you have won.”

Footnoterphone:
Although the idea of using footnotes as a communication medium was suggested by Dr. Faustus as far back as 1622, it wasn't until 1856 that the first practical footnoterphone was demonstrated. By 1895 an experimental version was built into
Hard Times
, and within the next three years most of Dickens was connected. The system was expanded rapidly, culminating in the first transgenre trunk line, opened with much fanfare in 1915 between Human Drama and Crime. The network has been expanded and improved ever since, but just recently the advent of mass junkfootnoterphones and the deregulation of news and entertainment channels has almost clogged the system. A mobilefootnoterphone network was introduced in 1985.

CAT FORMERLY KNOWN AS CHESHIRE
,
Guide to the Great Library

G
RAN HAD GOT
up early to make my breakfast and I found her asleep in the armchair with the kettle almost molten on the stove and Pickwick firmly ensnared in Gran's knitting. I made some coffee and cooked myself breakfast despite feeling nauseated. ibb and obb wandered in a little later and told me they had “slept like dead people” and were so hungry they could “eat a horse between two mattresses.” They were just tucking into my breakfast when there was a rap at the door. It was Akrid Snell, one-half of the Perkins & Snell series of detective fiction. He was about forty, dressed in a sharp fawn suit with a matching fedora, and wore a luxuriant red mustache. He was one of Jurisfiction's lawyers and had been appointed to represent me; I was still
facing a charge of Fiction Infraction after I changed the ending of
Jane Eyre
.

“Hello!” he said. “Welcome to the BookWorld!”

“Thank you. Are you well?”

“Just dandy! I got Oedipus off the incest charge—technicality, of course—he didn't know it was his mother at the time.”

“Of course. And Fagin?”

“Still due to hang, I'm afraid,” he said more sadly. “The Gryphon is onto it—he'll find a way out, I'm sure.”

He was looking around the shabby flying boat as he spoke.

“Well!” he said at last. “You do make some odd decisions. I've heard the latest Daphne Farquitt novel is being built just down the shelf—it's set in the eighteenth century and would be a lot more comfortable than this. Did you see the review of my latest book?”

He meant the book he was featured in, of course—Snell was fictional from the soles of his brogues to the crown of his fedora—and like most fictioneers, a little sensitive about it. I had read the review of
Wax Lyrical for Death
and it was pretty scathing; tact was of the essence in situations like these.

“No, I think I must have missed it.”

“Oh! Well, it was really—really quite good, actually. I was glowingly praised as ‘Snell is . . . very good . . .
well rounded
is . . . the phrase I would use,' and the book itself was described as ‘surely the biggest piece of . . . 1986.' There's talk of a boxed set, too. Listen, I wanted to tell you that your Fiction Infraction trial will probably be next week. I tried to get another postponement but Hopkins is nothing if not tenacious; place and time to be decided upon.”

“Should I be worried?” I asked, thinking about the last time I'd faced a court here in the BookWorld. It had been in Kafka's
The Trial
and it turned out predictably unpredictable.

“Not really,” admitted Snell. “Our ‘strong readership approval' defense should count for something—after all, you did actually do it, so just plain lying might not help so much after all.
Listen,” he went on without stopping for breath, “Miss Havisham asked me to introduce you to the wonders of the Well—she would have been here this morning but she's on a grammasite extermination course.”

“We saw a grammasite in
Great Expectations.
”

“So I heard. You can never be too careful as far as grammasites are concerned.” He looked at ibb and obb, who were just finishing off my bacon and eggs. “Is this breakfast?”

I nodded.

“Fascinating! I've always wondered what a breakfast looked like. In our books we have twenty-three dinners, twelve lunches and eighteen afternoon teas—but no breakfasts.” He paused for a moment. “And why is orange jam called marmalade, do you suppose?”

I told him I didn't know and passed him a mug of coffee.

“Do you have any Generics living in your books?” I asked.

“A half dozen or so at any one time,” he replied, spooning in some sugar and staring at ibb and obb, who, true to form, stared back. “Boring bunch until they develop a personality, then they can be quite fun. Trouble is, they have an annoying habit of assimilating themselves into a strong leading character, and it can spread amongst them like a rash. They used to be billeted en masse, but that all changed after we lodged six thousand Generics inside
Rebecca
. In under a month all but eight had become Mrs. Danvers. Listen, I don't suppose I could interest you in a couple of housekeepers, could I?”

“I don't think so,” I replied, recalling Mrs. Danvers's slightly abrasive personality.

“Don't blame you,” replied Snell with a laugh.

“So now it's only limited numbers per novel?”

“You learn fast. We had a similar problem with Merlins. We've had aged-male-bearded-wizard-mentor types coming out of our ears for years.” He leaned closer. “Do you know how many Merlins the Well of Lost Plots has placed over the past fifty years?”

“Tell me.”

“Nine thousand!” he breathed. “We even altered plotlines to include older male mentor figures! Do you think that was wrong?”

“I'm not sure,” I said, slightly confused.

“At least the Merlin type is a popular character. Stick a new hat on him and he can appear pretty much anywhere. Try getting rid of thousands of Mrs. Danvers. There isn't a huge demand for creepy fifty-something housekeepers; even buy-two-get-one-free deals didn't help—we use them on anti-mispeling duty, you know. A sort of army.”

“What's it like?” I asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Being fictional.”

“Ah!” replied Snell slowly. “Yes—fictional.”

I realized too late that I had gone too far—it was how I imagined a dog would feel if you brought up the question of distemper in polite conversation.

“I forgive your inquisitiveness, Miss Next, and since you are an Outlander, I will take no offense. If I were you, I shouldn't inquire too deeply about the past of fictioneers. We all aspire to be ourselves, an original character in a litany of fiction so vast that we know we cannot. After basic training at St. Tabularasa's, I progressed to the Dupin school for detectives; I went on field trips around the works of Hammett, Chandler and Sayers before attending a postgraduate course at the Agatha Christie finishing school. I would have liked to be an original, but I was born seventy years too late for that.”

He stopped and paused for reflection. I was sorry to have raised the point. It can't be easy, being an amalgamation of all that has been written before.

“Right!” he said, finishing his coffee. “That's enough about me. Ready?”

I nodded.

“Then let's go.”

So, taking my hand, he transported us both out of
Caversham Heights
and into the endless corridors of the Well of Lost Plots.

The Well was similar to the library as regards the fabric of the building—dark wood, thick carpet, tons of shelves—but here the similarity ended. Firstly, it was
noisy
. Tradesmen, artisans, technicians and Generics all walked about the broad corridors appearing and vanishing as they moved from book to book, building, changing and deleting to the author's wishes. Crates and packing cases lay scattered about the corridors, and people ate, slept and conducted their business in shops and small houses built in the manner of an untidy shantytown. Advertising billboards and posters were everywhere, promoting some form of goods or services unique to the business of writing.
¹

“I think I'm picking up junkfootnoterphone messages, Snell,” I said above the hubbub. “Should I be worried?”

“You get them all the time down here. Ignore them—and never pass on chain footnotes.”
²

We were accosted by a stout man wearing a sandwich board advertising bespoke plot devices “for the discerning wordsmith.”

“No, thank you,” yelled Snell, taking me by the arm and walking us to a quieter spot between Dr. Forthright's Chapter Ending Emporium and The Premier Mentor School.

“There are twenty-six floors down here in the Well,” he told me, waving a hand towards the bustling crowd. “Most of them are chaotic factories of fictional prose like this one, but the twenty-sixth subbasement has an entrance to the Text Sea—we'll go down there and see them off-loading the scrawltrawlers one evening.”

“What do they unload?”

“Words”—Snell smiled—“words, words and more words. The building blocks of fiction, the DNA of story.”

“But I don't
see
any books being written,” I observed, looking around.

He chuckled. “You Outlanders! Books may
look
like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head. Vast storycode engines at Text Grand Central throughput the images to the readers as they scan the text in the Outland. We're currently using Book Operating System V8.3—not for long, though—Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.”

“Someone mentioned Ultra Word™ on the news last night,” I observed.

“Fancy-pants name. It's BOOK V9 to me and you. WordMaster Libris should be giving us a presentation shortly. UltraWord™ is being tested as we speak—if it's as good as they say it is, books will never be the same again!”

“Well,” I sighed, trying to get my head around this idea, “I had always thought novels were just, well,
written
.”

“
Write
is only the word we use to describe the recording process,” replied Snell as we walked along. “The Well of Lost Plots is where we interface the writer's imagination with the characters and plots so that it will make sense in the reader's mind. After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer—perhaps more.”

This was a new approach; I mulled the idea around in my head.

“Really?” I replied, slightly doubtfully.

“Of course!” Snell laughed. “
Surf pounding the shingle
wouldn't mean diddly unless you'd seen the waves cascade onto the
foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath your feet, now would it?”

“I suppose not.”

“Books”—Snell smiled—“are a kind of magic.”

I thought about this for a moment and looked around at the chaotic fiction factory. My husband
was
or
is
a novelist—I had always wanted to know what went on inside his head, and this, I figured, was about the nearest I'd ever get.
³
We walked on, past a shop called A Minute Passed. It sold descriptive devices for marking the passage of time—this week they had a special on seasonal changes.

“What happens to the books which are unpublished?” I asked, wondering whether the characters in
Caversham Heights
really had so much to worry about.

“The failure rate is pretty high,” admitted Snell, “and not just for reasons of dubious merit.
Bunyan's Bootscraper
by John McSquurd is one of the best books ever written, but it's never been out of the author's hands. Most of the dross, rejects or otherwise unpublished just languish down here in the Well until they are broken up for salvage. Others are so bad they are just demolished—the words are pulled from the pages and tossed into the Text Sea.”

“All the characters are just recycled like waste cardboard or something?”

Snell paused and coughed politely. “I shouldn't waste too much sympathy on the one-dimensionals, Thursday. You'll run yourself ragged and there really isn't the time or resources to recharacterize them into anything more interesting.”

“Mr. Snell, sir?”

It was a young man in an expensive suit, and he carried what
looked like a very stained pillowcase with something heavy in it about the size of a melon.

“Hello, Alfred!” said Snell, shaking the man's hand. “Thursday, this is Garcia—he has been supplying the Perkins and Snell series of books with intriguing plot devices for over ten years. Remember the unidentified torso found floating in the Humber in
Dead Among the Living
? Or the twenty-year-old corpse discovered with the bag of money bricked up in the spare room in
Requiem for a Safecracker
?”

“Of course!” I said, shaking the technician's hand. “Good, intriguing page-turning stuff. How do you do?”

“Well, thank you,” replied Garcia, turning back to Snell after smiling politely. “I understand the next Perkins and Snell novel is in the pipeline and I have a little something that might interest you.”

He held the bag open and we looked inside. It was a head. Or more importantly, a
severed
head.

“A head in a bag?” queried Snell with a frown, looking closer.

“Indeed,” murmured Garcia proudly, “but not
any
old head in a bag. This one has an intriguing tattoo on the nape of the neck. You can discover it in a skip, outside your office, in a deceased suspect's deep freeze—the possibilities are endless.”

Snell's eyes flashed excitedly. It was the sort of thing his next book needed after the critical savaging of
Wax Lyrical for Death
.