The Well of Lost Plots

5 The Well of Lost Plots

Gran 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 her knitting. I made some coffee and cooked myself breakfast despite feeling nauseous. 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 in to 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 with a luxuriant red moustache. 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!' he replied. 'I got Oedipus off the incest charge. Technicality, of course — he didn't know it was his mother at the time.'

'Of course,' I remarked, 'and Fagin?'

'Still due to hang, I'm afraid,' he said more sadly. 'The Gryphon is on to 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!' he replied. '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 had faced a court here in the BookWorld. It had been in Kafka's The Trial and had turned out predictably unpredictable.

'Not really,' admitted Snell. 'Our "strong readership approval" defence 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,' I told him.

'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 among 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' 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 plot lines 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,' added Snell. '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 realised 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 offence. If I were you I shouldn't enquire 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 have been 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 corridor and people ate, slept and conducted their business in shops and small houses built in the manner of an untidy shanty town. Advertising hoardings and posters were everywhere, promoting some form of goods or services unique to the business of writing.'[5]

'I think I'm picking up junk footnoterphone messages, Snell,' I said above the hubbub. 'Should I be worried?'

'You get them all the time down here,' he replied. 'Ignore them — and never pass on chain footnotes.'[6]

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 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 sub-basement has an entrance to the Text Sea — we'll go down there and see them offloading the scrawltrawlers one evening.'

'What do they unload?'

'Words,' smiled Snell, '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 Imagino-Transference technology that translates odd inky squiggles into pictures inside your head — we're currently using Book Operating System V8.3. Not for long, though — Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.'

'Someone mentioned UltraWord™ 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 colours 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 ran 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 on to the foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath your feet, now, would it?'

'I suppose not.'

'Books,' said Snell, '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.[7] 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 recharacterise 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 & 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 & 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. 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.

'How much?' he asked.

'Three hundred,' ventured Garcia.

'Three hundred?!' exclaimed Snell. 'I could buy a dozen head-in-a-bag plot devices with that and still have change for a missing Nazi gold consignment.'

Garcia laughed. 'No one's using the old "missing Nazi gold consignment" plot device any more. If you don't want the head you can pass — I can sell heads pretty much anywhere I like. I just came to you first because we've done business before and I like you.'

Snell thought for a moment.

'A hundred and fifty.'

'Two hundred.'

'One seven five.'

'Two hundred and I'll throw in a case of mistaken identity, a pretty female double agent and a missing microfilm.'

'Done!'

'Pleasure doing business with you,' said Garcia as he handed over the head and took the money in return. 'Give my regards to Mr Perkins, won't you?'

He smiled, shook hands with us both, and departed.

'Oh, boy!' exclaimed Snell, excited as a kid with a new bicycle. 'Wait until Perkins sees this! Where do you think we should find it?'

I thought in all honesty that 'head-in-a-bag' plot devices were a bit lame, but being too polite to say so, I said instead:

'I liked the deep-freeze idea, myself.'

'Me too!' he enthused as we passed a small shop whose painted headboard read: Backstories built to order. No job too difficult. Painful childhoods a speciality.

'Backstories?'

'Sure. Every character worth their salt has a backstory. Come on in and have a look.'

We stooped and entered the low doorway. The interior was a workshop, small and smoky. There was a workbench in the middle of the room liberally piled with glass retorts, test tubes and other chemical apparatus; the walls, I noticed, were lined with shelves that held tightly stoppered bottles containing small amounts of colourful liquids, all with labels describing varying styles of backstory, from one named idyllic childhood to another entitled valiant war record.

'This one's nearly empty,' I observed, pointing to a large bottle with: Misguided feelings of guilt over the death of a loved one/partner ten years previously written on the label.

'Yes,' said a small man in a corduroy suit so lumpy it looked as though the tailor was still inside doing alterations, 'that one's been quite popular recently. Some are hardly used at all. Look above you.'

I looked up at the full bottles gathering dust on the shelves above. One was labelled Studied squid in Sri Lanka and another Apprentice Welsh mole-catcher.

'So what can I do for you?' enquired the backstoryist, gazing at us happily and rubbing his hands. 'Something for the lady? Ill-treatment at the hands of sadistic stepsisters? Traumatic incident with a wild animal? No? We've got a deal this week on unhappy love affairs; buy one and you get a younger brother with a drug problem at no extra charge.'

Snell showed the merchant his Jurisfiction badge.

'Business call, Mr Grnksghty — this is apprentice Next.'

'Ah!' he said, deflating slightly. 'The law.'

'Mr Grnksghty here used to write backstories for the Brontës and Thomas Hardy,' explained Snell, placing his bag on the floor and sitting on a table edge.

'Ah, yes!' replied the man, gazing at me over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. 'But that was a long time ago. Charlotte Brontës, now she was a writer. A lot of good work for her, some of it barely used—'

'Yes, speaking,' interrupted Snell, staring vacantly at the array of glassware on the table. 'I'm with Thursday down in the Well … What's up?'

He noticed us both staring at him and explained:

'Footnoterphone. It's Miss Havisham.'

'It's so rude,' muttered Mr Grnksghty. 'Why can't he go outside if he wants to talk on one of those things?'

'It's probably nothing but I'll go and have a look,' said Snell, staring into space. He turned to look at us, saw Mr Grnksghty glaring at him and waved absently before going outside the shop, still talking.

'Where were we, young lady?'

'You were talking about Charlotte Brontë ordering backstories and then not using them.'

'Oh, yes.' The man smiled, delicately turning a tap on the apparatus and watching a small drip of an oily coloured liquid fall into a flask. 'I made the most wonderful backstory for both Edward and Bertha Rochester, but do you know she only used a very small part of it?'

'That must have been very disappointing.'

'It was.' He sighed. 'I am an artist, not a technician. But it didn't matter. I sold it lock, stock and barrel a few years back to The Wide Sargasso Sea. Harry Flashman from Tom Brown's Schooldays went the same way. I had Mr Pickwick's backstory for years but couldn't make a sale — I donated it to the Jurisfiction museum.'

'What do you make a backstory out of, Mr Grnksghty?' ,

'Treacle, mainly,' he replied, shaking the flask and watching the oily substance change to a gas, 'and memories. Lots of memories. In fact, the treacle is really only there as a binding agent. Tell me, what do you think of this upgrade to Ultra Word™?'

'I have yet to hear about it properly,' I admitted.

'I particularly like the idea of ReadZip™,' mused the small man, adding a drop of red liquid and watching the result with great interest. 'They say they will be able to crush War and Peace into eighty-six words and still retain the scope and grandeur of the original.'

'Seeing is believing,' I replied.

'Not down here,' Mr Grnksghty corrected me. 'Down here, reading is believing.'

There was a pause as I took this in.

'Mr Grnksghty?'

'Yes?'

'How do you pronounce your name?'

At that moment Snell strolled back in.

'That was Miss Havisham,' he announced, retrieving his head. 'Thank you for your time, Mr Grnksghty — come on, we're off.'

Snell led me down the corridor past more shops and traders until we arrived at the bronze-and-wood elevators. The doors opened and several small street urchins ran out holding cleft sticks with a small scrap of paper wedged in them.

'Ideas on their way to the books-in-progress,' explained Snell as we stepped into the elevator. 'Trading must have just started. You'll find the Idea Sales and Loan department on the seventeenth floor.'

The elevator plunged rapidly downwards.

'Are you still being bothered by junk footnoterphones?'

'A little.'[8]

'You'll get used to ignoring them.'

The bell sounded and the elevator doors slid open, introducing a chill wind. It was darker than the floor we had just visited and several disreputable-looking characters stared at us from the shadows. I moved to get out but Snell stopped me. He looked about and whispered:

'This is the twenty-second sub-basement. The roughest place in the Well. A haven for cut-throats, bounty hunters, murderers, thieves, cheats, shape-shifters, scene-stealers, brigands and plagiarists.'

'We don't tolerate these sorts of places back home,' I murmured.

'We encourage them here,' explained Snell. 'Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.'

I could feel the menace as soon as we stepped from the elevator.

Low mutters were exchanged among several hooded figures who stood close by, the faces obscured by the shadows, their hands bony and white. We walked past two large cats with eyes that seemed to dance with fire; they stared at us hungrily and licked their lips.

'Dinner,' said one, looking us both up and down. 'Shall we eat them together or one by one?'

'One by one,' said the second cat, who was slightly bigger and a good deal more fearsome, 'but we'd better wait until Big Martin gets here.'

'Oh yeah,' said the first cat, retracting his claws quickly, 'so we'd better.'

Snell had ignored the two cats completely; he glanced at his watch and said:

'We're going to the Slaughtered Lamb to visit a contact of mine. Someone has been cobbling together Plot Devices from half-damaged units that should have been condemned. It's not only illegal — it's dangerous. The last thing anyone needs is a Do we cut the red wire or the blue wire? plot device going off an hour too early and ruining the suspense — how many stories have you read where the bomb is defused with an hour to go?'

'Not many, I suppose.'

'You suppose right. We're here.'

The gloomy interior of the Slaughtened Lamb was shabby and smelt of beer. Three ceiling fans stirred the smoke-filled atmosphere and a band was playing a melancholy tune in one corner. The dark walls were spaced with individual booths where sombreness was an abundant commodity; the bar in the centre seemed to be the lightest place in the room and gathered there, like moths to a light, were an odd collection of people and creatures, all chatting and talking in low voices. The atmosphere in the room was so thick with dramatic cliches you could have cut it with a knife.

'See over there?' said Snell, indicating two men who were deep in conversation.

'Yes.'

'Mr Hyde talking to Blofeld. In the next booth are Von Stalhein and Wackford Squeers. The tall guy in the cloak is Emperor Zhark, tyrannical ruler of the known galaxy. The one with the spines is Mrs Tiggy-winkle — they'll be on a training assignment, just like us.'

'Mrs Tiggy-winkle is an apprentice?' I asked incredulously, staring at the large hedgehog who was holding a basket of laundry and sipping delicately at a dry sherry.

'No; Zhark is the apprentice — Tiggy's a full agent. She deals with children's fiction, runs the Hedge-pigs Society — and does our washing.'

'Hedge-pigs society?' I echoed. 'What does that do?'

'They advance hedgehogs in all branches of literature. Mrs Tiggy-winkle was the first to get star billing and she's used her position to further the lot of her species; she's got references into Kipling, Carroll, Aesop and four mentions in Shakespeare. She's also good with really stubborn stains — and never singes the cuffs.'

'Tempest, Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth,' I muttered, counting them off on my fingers. 'Where's the fourth?'

'Henry VI Part 1, act four, scene 1: "hedge-born swaine".'

'I always thought that was an insult, not a hedgehog,' I observed. 'Swaine can be a country lad just as easily as a pig — perhaps more so.'

Snell sighed. 'Well, we've given her the benefit of the doubt — it helps with the indignity of being used as a croquet ball in Alice. Don't mention Tolstoy or Berlin when she's about, either — conversation with Tiggy is easier when you avoid talk of theoretical sociological divisions and stick to the question of washing temperatures for woollens.'

'I'll remember that,' I murmured. 'The bar doesn't look so bad with all those pot plants scattered around, does it?'

Snell sighed again.

'They're Triffids, Thursday. The big blobby thing practising golf swings with the Jabberwock is a Krell, and that rhino over there is Rataxis. Arrest anyone who tries to sell you Soma tablets, don't buy any Bottle Imps no matter how good the bargain, and above all don't look at Medusa. If Big Martin or the Questing Beast turn up, run like hell. Get me a drink and I'll see you back here in five minutes.'

'Right.'

He departed into the gloom and I was left feeling a bit ill at ease. I made my way to the bar and ordered two drinks. On the other side of the bar a third cat had joined the two I had seen previously. The newcomer pointed to me but the others shook their heads and whispered something in his ear. I turned the other way and jumped in surprise as I came face to face with a curious creature that looked as though it had escaped from a bad science fiction novel — it was all tentacles and eyes. A smile may have flicked across my face because the creature said in a harsh tone:

'What's the problem, never seen a Thraal before?'

I didn't understand; it sounded like a form of Courier Bold but I wasn't sure so said nothing, hoping to brazen it out.

'Hey!' it said. 'I'm talking to you, Two-eyes.'

The altercation had attracted another man, who looked like the product of some bizarre genetic experiment gone hopelessly wrong.

'He says he doesn't like you.'

'I'm sorry.'

'I don't like you either,' said the man in a threatening tone, adding, as if I needed proof: 'I have the death sentence in seven genres.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' I assured him, but this didn't seem to work.

'You're the one who'll be sorry!'

'Come, come, Nigel,' said a voice I recognised. 'Let me buy you a drink.'

This wasn't to the genetic experiment's liking, for he moved quickly to his weapon; there was a sudden blur of movement and in an instant I had my automatic pressed hard against his head — Nigel's gun was still in his shoulder holster. The bar went quiet.

'You're quick, girlie,' said Nigel. 'I respect that.'

'She's with me,' said the newcomer. 'Let's all just calm down.'

I lowered my gun and replaced the safety catch. Nigel nodded respectfully and returned to his place at the bar with the odd-looking alien.

'Are you all right?'

It was Harris Tweed. He was a fellow Jurisfiction agent and Outlander, just like me. The last time I had seen him was three days ago in Lord Volescamper's library when we flushed out the renegade fictioneer Yorrick Kaine after he had invoked the Questing Beast to destroy us. Tweed had been carried off by the exuberant bark of a bookhound and I had not seen him since.

'Thanks for that, Tweed,' I said. 'What did the alien thing want?'

'He was a Thraal, Thursday — speaking in Courier Bold, the traditional language of the Well. Thraals are not only all eyes and tentacles, but mostly mouth, too — he'd not have harmed you. Nigel, on the other hand, has been known to go a step too far on occasion. What are you doing alone in the twenty-second sub-basement anyway?'

'I'm not alone. Havisham's busy so Snell's showing me around.'

'Ah,' replied Tweed, looking about. 'Does this mean you're taking your entrance exams?'

'Third of the way through the written already. Did you track down Kaine?'

'No. We went all the way to London, where we lost the scent. Bookhounds don't work so well in the Outland and besides, we have to get special permission to pursue PageRunners into the real world.'

'What does the Bellman say about that?'

'He's for it, of course,' replied Tweed, 'but the launch of UltraWord™ has dominated the Council of Genre's discussion time. We'll get round to Kaine in due course.'

I was glad of this; Kaine wasn't only an escapee from fiction but a dangerous right-wing politician back home. I would be only too happy to see him back inside whatever book he'd escaped from — permanently.

At that moment Snell returned and nodded a greeting to Tweed, who returned it politely.

'Good morning, Mr Tweed,' said Snell. 'Will you join us for a drink?'

'Sadly, I cannot,' replied Tweed. 'I'll see you tomorrow morning at roll-call, yes?'

'Odd sort of fellow,' remarked Snell as soon as Tweed had left. 'What was he doing here?'

I handed Snell his drink and we sat down in an empty booth. It was near the three cats and they stared at us hungrily while consulting a large recipe book.

'I had a bit of trouble at the bar and Tweed stepped in to help.'

'Good thing, too. Ever see one of these?'

He rolled a small globe across the table and I picked it up. It was a little like a Christmas decoration but a lot more sturdy. There was a small legend complete with a barcode and ID number printed on the side.

'Suddenly, a Shot Rang Out! FAD/167945,' I read aloud. 'What does it mean?'

'It's a stolen freeze-dried Plot Device. Crack it open and pow! — the story goes off at a tangent.'

'How do we know it's stolen?'

'It doesn't have a Council of Genres seal of approval. Without one, these things are worthless. Log it as evidence when you get back to the office.'

He took a sip of his drink, coughed and stared into the glass.

'W-what is this?'

'I'm not sure but mine is just as bad.'

'Not possible. Hello, Emperor, have you met Thursday-Next? Thursday, this is Emperor Zhark.'

There was a tall man swathed in a high-collared cloak standing next to our table. He had a pale complexion, high cheekbones and a small and very precise goatee. He looked at me with cold dark eyes and raised an eyebrow imperiously.

'Greetings,' he intoned indifferently. 'You must send my regards to Miss Havisham. Snell, how is my defence looking?'

'Not too good, Your Mercilessness,' he replied. 'Annihilating all the planets in the Cygnus cluster might not have been a very good move.'

'It's those bloody Rambosians,' Zhark said angrily. 'They threatened my empire. If I didn't destroy entire star systems no one would have any respect for me; it's for the good of galactic peace, you know — stability, and anyway, what's the point in possessing a devastatingly destructive death-ray if you can't use it?'

'Well, I should keep that to yourself. Can't you claim you were cleaning it when it went off or something?'

'I suppose,' said Zhark grudgingly. 'Is there a head in that bag?'

'Yes,' replied Snell. 'Do you want to have a look?'

'No thanks. Special offer, yes?'

'What?'

'Special offer. You know, clearance sale. How much did you pay for it?'

'Only a … hundred,' he said, glancing at me. 'Less than that, actually.'

'You were done.' Zhark laughed. 'They're forty a half-dozen at CrimeScene, Inc. — with double stamps, too.'

Snell's face flushed with anger and he jumped up.

'The little scumbag!' he spat. 'I'll have him in a bag when I see him again!'

He turned to me.

'Will you be all right getting out on your own?'

'Sure.'

'Good,' he replied through gritted teeth. 'See you later!'

'Hold it!' I said, but it was too late. He had vanished.

'Problems?' asked Zhark.

'No,' I replied slowly, holding up the dirty pillowcase. 'He just forgot his head — and careful, Emperor, there's a Triffid creeping up behind you.'

Zhark turned to face the Triffid, who stopped, thought better of an attack and rejoined his friends, who were cooling their roots at the bar.

Zhark departed and I looked around. On the next table a fourth cat had joined the other three. It was bigger than the others and considerably more battle scarred — it had only one eye and both ears had large bites taken out of them. They all licked their lips as the newest cat said in a low voice: 'Shall we eat her?'

'Not yet,' replied the first cat, 'we're waiting for Big Martin.'

They returned to their drinks but never took their eyes off me. I could imagine how a mouse felt. After ten minutes I decided that I was not going to be intimidated by outsize house pets and got up to leave, taking Snell's head with me. The cats got up and followed me out, down the dingy corridor. Here the shops sold weapons, dastardly plans for world domination and fresh ideas for murder, revenge, extortion and other general mayhem. Generics, I noticed, could just as early be trained in the dark art of being an accomplished evildoer. The cats yowled excitedly and I quickened my step, only to stumble into a clearing among the shanty town of wooden buildings. The reason for the clearing was obvious. Sitting atop an old packing case was another cat. But this one was different. No oversized house cat, this beast was four times the size of a tiger, and it stared at me with ill-disguised malevolence. Its claws were extended and fangs at the ready, glistening slightly with hungry anticipation. I stopped and looked behind me to where the four other cats had lined up and were staring at me expectantly, tails gently lashing the air. A quick glance around the corridor revealed that there was no one near who might offer me any assistance; indeed, most of the bystanders seemed to be getting ready for something of a show. I pulled out my automatic as one of the cats bounded up to the newcomer and said:

'Can we eat her now, please?'

The large cat placed one of its claws in the packing case and drew it through the wood like a razor-sharp chisel cutting through soft clay; it stared at me with huge green eyes and said in a deep rumbling voice:

'Shouldn't we wait until Big Martin gets here?'

'Yes,' sighed the smaller cat with a strong air of disappointment, 'perhaps we should.'

Suddenly, the big cat pricked up his ears and jumped from his box into the shadows; I pointed my gun but it wasn't attacking — the overgrown tiger was departing in a panic. The other cats quickly left the scene and pretty soon the bystanders had gone, too. Within a few moments I was completely alone in the corridor, with nothing to keep me company but the rapid thumping of my own heart, and a head in a bag.