The well of lost plots (2 page)

“Wyatt is the inbook exchange liaison officer; he’ll let you know. Jack might seem gruff to begin with,” continued Mary, “but he has a heart of gold. If he asks you to drive his Austin Allegro, make sure you depress the clutch fully before changing gear. He takes his coffee black and the love interest between myself and DC Baker is
strictly
unrequited, is that clear?”

“Very clear,” I returned, thankful I would not have to do any love scenes.

“Good. Did they supply you with all the necessary paperwork, IDs, that sort of thing?”

I patted my pocket and she handed me a scrap of paper and a bunch of keys.

“Good. This is my footnoterphone number in case of emergencies, these are the keys to the flying boat and my BMW. If a loser named Arnold calls, tell him I hope he rots in hell. Any questions?”

“I don’t think so.”

She smiled as a yellow cab with
TransGenre Taxis
painted on the side materialized in front of us. The cabbie looked bored and Mary opened the passenger door.

“Then we’re done. You’ll like it here. I’ll see you in about a year. So long!”

She turned to the cabbie, muttered, “Get me out of this book,” and she and the car faded out, leaving me alone on the dusty track.

I sat upon a rickety wooden seat next to a tub of long-dead flowers and let Pickwick out of her bag. She ruffled her feathers indignantly and blinked in the sunlight. I looked across the lake at the sailing dinghies that were little more than brightly colored triangles that tacked backwards and forwards in the distance. Nearer to shore a pair of swans beat their wings furiously and pedaled the water in an attempt to take off, landing almost as soon as they were airborne, throwing up a long streak of spray on the calm waters. It seemed a lot of effort to go a few hundred yards.

I turned my attention to the flying boat. The layers of paint that covered and protected the riveted hull had partly peeled off to reveal the colorful livery of long-forgotten airlines beneath. The Perspex windows had clouded with age, and high in the massive wing untidy cables hung lazily from the oil-stained cowlings of the three empty engine bays, their safe inaccessibility now a haven for nesting birds. Goliath, Aornis, and SpecOps seemed a million miles away — but then, so did Landen.
Landen
. Memories of my husband were never far away. I thought of all the times we had spent together that hadn’t actually happened. All the places we hadn’t visited, all the things we hadn’t done. He might have been eradicated at the age of two, but I still had our memories — just no one to share them with.

I was interrupted from my thoughts by the sound of a motorcycle approaching. The rider didn’t have much control of the vehicle; I was glad that he stopped short of the jetty — his erratic riding might well have led him straight into the lake.

“Hullo!” he said cheerfully, removing his helmet to reveal a youngish man with a dark Mediterranean complexion and deep sunken eyes. “My name’s Arnold. I haven’t seen you around here before, have I?”

I got up and shook his hand.

“The name’s Next. Thursday Next. Character Exchange Program.”

“Oh, blast!” he muttered. “Blast and double blast! I suppose that means I’ve missed her?”

I nodded and he shook his head sadly.

“Did she leave a message for me?”

“Y-es,” I said uncertainly. “She said she would, um, see you when she gets back.”

“She did?” replied Arnold, brightening up. “That’s a good sign. Normally she calls me a loser and tells me to go rot in hell.”

“She probably won’t be back for a while,” I added, trying to make up for not passing on Mary’s message properly, “maybe a year — maybe more.”

“I see,” he murmured, sighing deeply and staring off across the lake. He caught sight of Pickwick, who was attempting to outstare a strange aquatic bird with a rounded bill.

“What’s that?” he asked suddenly.

“I think it’s a duck, although I can’t be sure — we don’t have any where I come from.”

“No, the other thing.”

“A dodo.”
¹

“What’s the matter?” asked Arnold.

I was getting a footnoterphone signal; in the BookWorld people generally communicated like this.

“A footnoterphone call,” I replied, “but it’s not a message — it’s like the wireless back home.”
²

Arnold stared at me. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“I’m from the other side of the page. What you call the Outland.”
³

He opened his eyes wide. “You mean — you’re
real
?”

“I’m afraid so,” I replied, slightly bemused.

“Goodness! Is it true that Outlanders can’t say ‘red-Buick-blue-Buick’ many times quickly?”

“It’s true. We call it a tongue twister.”

“Fascinating! There’s nothing like that
here
, you know. I can say ‘The sixth sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick’ over and over as many times as I want!”

And he did, three times.

“Now you try.”

I took a deep breath. “The sixth spleeps sics sleeks . . . sick.”

Arnold laughed like a drain. I don’t think he’d come across anything quite so funny in his life. I smiled.

“Do it again!”

“No thanks.
⁴
How do I stop this footnoterphone blabbering inside my skull?”

“Just think
Off
very strongly.”

I did, and the footnoterphone stopped.

“Better?”

I nodded.

“You’ll get the hang of it.”

He thought for a minute, looked up and down the lake in an overtly innocent manner, then said, “Do you want to buy some verbs? Not any of your rubbish, either. Good, strong, healthy regulars — straight from the Text Sea — I have a friend on a scrawltrawler.”

I smiled. “I don’t think so, Arnold — and I don’t think you should ask me — I’m Jurisfiction.”

“Oh,” said Arnold, looking pale all of a sudden. He bit his lip and gave such an imploring look that I almost laughed.

“Don’t sweat,” I told him, “I won’t report it.”

He sighed a deep sigh of relief, muttered his thanks, remounted his motorbike and drove off in a jerky fashion, narrowly missing the mailboxes at the top of the track.

The interior of the flying boat was lighter and more airy than I had imagined, but it smelt a bit musty. Mary was mistaken; she had not been halfway through the craft’s conversion — it was more like one-tenth. The walls were half-paneled with pine tongue-and-groove, and rock-wool insulation stuck out untidily along with unused electrical cables. There was room for two floors within the boat’s cavernous hull, the downstairs a large, open-plan living room with a couple of old sofas pointing towards a television set. I tried to switch it on but it was dead — there was no TV in the BookWorld unless called for in the narrative. Much of what I could see around me were merely props, necessary for the chapter in which Jack Spratt visits the Sunderland to discuss the case. On the mantelpiece above a small wood-burning stove were pictures of Mary from her days at the police training college, and another from when she was promoted to detective sergeant.

I opened a door that led into a small kitchenette. Attached to the fridge was the précis of
Caversham Heights
. I flicked through it. The sequence of events was pretty much as I remembered from my first reading in the Well, although it seemed that Mary had overstated her role in some of the puzzle-solving areas. I put the précis down, found a bowl and filled it with water for Pickwick, took her egg from my bag and laid it on the sofa, where she quickly set about turning it over and tapping it gently with her beak. I went forward and discovered a bedroom where the nose turret would have been and climbed a narrow aluminum ladder to the flight deck directly above. This was the best view in the house, the large greenhouselike Perspex windows affording a vista of the lake. The massive control wheels were set in front of two comfortable chairs, and facing them and ahead of a tangled mass of engine control levers was a complex panel of broken and faded instruments. To my right I could see the one remaining engine, looking forlorn, the propeller blades streaked with bird droppings.

Behind the pilots’ seats, where the flight engineer would have sat, there was a desk with reading lamp, footnoterphone and typewriter. On the bookshelf were mainly magazines of a police nature and lots of forensic textbooks. I walked through a narrow doorway and found a pleasant bedroom. The headroom was not overgenerous, but it was cozy and dry and was paneled in pine with a porthole above the double bed. Behind the bedroom was a storeroom, a hot-water boiler, stacks of wood and a spiral staircase. I was just about to go downstairs when I heard someone speak from the living room below.

“What do you think that is?”

The voice had an empty ring to it and was neuter in its inflection — I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

I stopped and instinctively pulled my automatic from my shoulder holster. Mary lived alone — or so it had said in the book. As I moved slowly downstairs, I heard another voice answer the first: “I think it’s a bird of some sort.”

The second voice was no more distinctive than the first, and indeed, if the second voice had not been
answering
the first, I might have thought they belonged to the same person.

As I rounded the staircase, I saw two figures standing in the middle of the room staring at Pickwick, who stared back, courageously protecting her egg from behind a sofa.

“Hey!” I said, pointing my gun in their direction. “Hold it right there!”

The two figures looked up and stared at me without expression from features that were as insipid and muted as their voices. Because of their equal blandness it was impossible to tell them apart. Their arms hung limply by their sides, exhibiting no body language. They might have been angry or curious or worried or elated — but I couldn’t tell.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We are nobody,” replied the one on the left.

“Everyone is
someone
,” I replied.

“Not altogether correct,” said the one on the right. “We have a code number but nothing more. I am TSI-1404912-A and this is TSI-1404912-C.”

“What happened to B?”

“Taken by a grammasite last Tuesday.”

I lowered my gun. Miss Havisham had told me about Generics. They were created here in the Well to populate the books that were to be written. At the point of creation they were simply a human canvas without paint — blank like a coin, ready to be stamped with individualism. They had no history, no conflicts, no foibles — nothing that might make them either readable or interesting in any way. It was up to various institutions to teach them to be useful members of fiction. They were graded, too. A to D, one through ten. Any that were D-graded were like worker bees in crowds and busy streets. Small speaking parts were C-grades; B-grades usually made up the bulk of featured but not
leading
characters. These parts usually — but not always — went to the A-grades, handpicked for their skills at character projection and multidimensionality. Huckleberry Finn, Tess and Anna Karenina were all A-grades, but then so were Mr. Hyde, Hannibal Lecter and Professor Moriarty. I looked at the ungraded Generics again. Murderers or heroes? It was impossible to tell how they would turn out. Still, at this stage of their development they would be harmless. I reholstered my automatic.

“You’re Generics, right?”

“Indeed,” they said in unison.

“What are you doing here?”

“You remember the craze for minimalism?” asked the one on the right.

“Yes?” I replied, moving closer to stare at their blank faces curiously. There was a lot about the Well that I was going to have to get used to. They were harmless enough — but decidedly creepy. Pickwick was still hiding behind the sofa.

“It was caused by the 1982 character shortage,” said the one on the left. “Vikram Seth is planning a large book in the next few years and I don’t think the Well wants to be caught out again — we’re being manufactured and then sent to stay in unpublished novels until we are called into service.”

“Sort of stockpiled, you mean?”

“I’d prefer the word
billeted
,” replied the one on the left, the slight indignation indicating that it wouldn’t be without a personality forever.

“How long have you been here?”

“Two months,” replied the one on the right. “We are awaiting placement at St. Tabularasa’s Generic College for basic character training. I live in the spare bedroom in the tail.”

“So do I,” added the one on the left. “Likewise.”

I paused for a moment. “O-kay. Since we all have to live together, I had better give you names. You,” I said, pointing a finger at the one on the right, “are henceforth called
ibb
. You” — I pointed to the other — “are called
obb
.”

I pointed at them again in case they had missed it as neither made any sign of comprehending what I’d said — or even hearing it.

“
You
are ibb, and
you
are obb.”

I paused. Something didn’t sound right about their names but I couldn’t place it.

“ibb,” I said to myself, then: “obb. ibb. ibb-obb. Does that sound strange to you?”

“No capitals,” said obb. “We don’t get capitalized until we start school — we didn’t expect a name so soon, either. Can we keep it?”

“It’s a gift from me,” I told them.

“I am ibb,” said ibb, as if to make the point.

“And I am obb,” said obb.

“And I’m Thursday,” I told them, offering my hand. They shook it in turn slowly and without emotion. I could see that this pair weren’t going to be a huge bundle of fun.

“And that’s Pickwick.”

They looked at Pickwick, who plocked quietly, came out from behind the sofa, settled herself on her egg and pretended to go to sleep.

“Well,” I announced, clapping my hands together, “does anyone know how to cook? I’m not very good at it and if you don’t want to eat beans on toast for the next year, you had better start to learn. I’m standing in for Mary, and if you don’t get in my way, I won’t get in yours. I go to bed late and wake up early. I have a husband who doesn’t exist and I’m going to have a baby later this year so I might get a little cranky — and overweight. Any questions?”