The Well of Lost Plots

7 Feeding the minotaur

I found myself in a large meadow next to a babbling brook; willows and larches hung over the crystal-clear waters while mature oaks punctuated the land. It was warm and dry and quite delightful — like a perfect summer's day in England, in fact — and I suddenly felt quite homesick.

'I used to look at the view a lot,' said a voice close at hand. 'Don't seem to have the time, these days.'

I turned to see a tall man leaning against a silver birch, holding a copy of the Jurisfiction trade paper, Movable Type. I recognised him although we had never been introduced. It was Perkins, who partnered Snell at Jurisfiction, much as they did in the Perkins & Snell series of detective novels.

'Hello,' he said, proffering a hand and smiling broadly, 'put it there. Perkins is the name. Akrid tells me you sorted Hopkins out good and proper.'

'Thank you,' I replied. 'Akrid's very kind but it isn't over yet.'

He cast an arm towards the horizon.

'What do you think?'

I looked at the view. High snow-capped mountains rose in the distance above a green and verdant plain. At the foot of the hills were forests, and a large river wended its way through the valley.

'Beautiful.'

'We requisitioned it from the fantasy division of the Well of Lost Plots. It's a complete world in itself, written for a sword and sorcery novel entitled The Sword of the Zenobians. Beyond the mountains are icy wastes, deep fjords and relics of long-forgotten civilisations, castles, that sort of stuff. It was auctioned off when the book was abandoned. There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame — considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller. Still, the Outland's loss is our gain. We use it to keep grammasites and other weird beasts who for one reason or another can't live safely within their own books.'

'Sanctuary?'

'Yes — and also for study and containment — hence the password.'

'There seem to be an awful lot of rabbits,' I observed, looking around.

'Ah, yes,' replied Perkins, crossing an arched stone bridge that spanned the small stream, 'we never did get the lid on reproduction within Watership Down — if left to their own devices, the book would be so full of dandelion-munching lagomorphs that every other word would be "rabbit" within a year. Still, Lennie enjoys it here when he has some time off.'

We walked up a path towards a ruined castle. Grass covered the mounds of masonry that had collapsed from the curtain wall, and the wood of the drawbridge had rotted and fallen into a moat now dry and full of brambles. Above us, what appeared to be ravens circled the highest of the remaining towers.

'Not birds,' said Perkins, handing me a pair of binoculars. 'Have a look.'

I peered up at the circling creatures who were soaring on large wings of stretched skin.

'Parenthiums?'

'Very good. I have six breeding pairs here — purely for research, I hasten to add. Most books can easily support forty or so with no ill effects — it's just when the numbers get out of hand that we have to take action. A swarm of grammasites can be pretty devastating.'

'I know,' I replied, 'I was almost—'

'Watch out!'

He pushed me aside as a lump of excrement splattered on to the ground near where I had been standing. I looked up at the battlements and saw a man-beast covered in coarse dark hair who glared down at us and made a strangled cry in the back of his throat.

'Yahoos,' explained Perkins with disdain. 'They're not terribly well behaved and quite beyond training.'

'From Gulliver's Travels'?'

'Bingo. When truly original works like Jonathan Swift's are made into new books characters are often duplicated for evaluation and consultative purposes. Characters can be retrained but creatures usually end up here. Yahoos are not exactly a favourite of mine but they're harmless enough, so the best thing to do is ignore them.'

We walked quickly under the keep to avoid any other possible missiles and entered the inner bailey, where a pair of centaurs were grazing peacefully. They looked up at us, smiled, waved and carried on eating. I noticed that one of them was listening to a Walkman.

'You have centaurs here?'

'And satyrs, troglodytes, chimeras, elves, fairies, dryads, sirens, Martians, leprechauns, goblins, harpies, aliens, Daleks, trolls — you name it.' Perkins smiled. 'A large proportion of unpublished novels are in the fantasy genre, and most of them feature mythical beasts. Whenever one of those books gets demolished I can usually be found down at the salvage yard. It would be a shame to reduce them to text now, wouldn't it?'

'Do you have unicorns?' I asked.

'Yes.' Perkins sighed. 'Sack-loads. More than I know what to do with. I wish potential writers would be more responsible with their creations. I can understand children writing about them, but adults should know better. Every unicorn in every demolished story ends up here. I had this idea for a bumper sticker. "A unicorn isn't for page twenty-seven, it's for eternity." What do you think?'

'I think you won't be able to stop people writing about them. How about taking the horn off and seeking placement in pony books?'

'I'll pretend I didn't hear that,' replied Perkins stonily, adding: 'We have dragons, too. We can hear them sometimes, at night when the wind is in the right direction. When — or if — Pellinore captures the Questing Beast it will come to live here. Somewhere a long way away, I hope. Careful — don't tread in the orc shit. You're an Outlander, aren't you?'

'Born and bred.'

'Has anyone realised that platypuses and sea horses are fictional?'

'Are they?'

'Of course — you don't think anything that weird could have evolved by chance, do you? By the way, how do you like Miss Havisham?'

'I like her a great deal.'

'So do we all. I think she quite likes us, too, but she'd never admit it.'

We had arrived at the inner keep and Perkins pushed open the door. Inside was his office and laboratory. One wall was covered with glass jars filled with odd creatures of all shapes and sizes, and on the table was a partially dissected grammasite. Within its gut were words in the process of being digested into letters.

'I'm not really sure how they do it,' said Perkins, prodding at the carcass with a spoon. 'Have you met Mathias?'

I looked around but could see nothing but a large chestnut horse whose flanks shone in the light. The horse looked at me and I looked at the horse, then past the horse — but there was no one else in the room. The penny dropped.

'Good morning, Mathias,' I said as politely as I could. 'I'm Thursday Next.'

Perkins laughed out loud and the horse brayed and replied in a very deep voice:

'Delighted to make your acquaintance, madam. Permit me to join you in a few moments?'

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 Hounyhnhms?' I interjected, 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 and paying her way by doing the odd job in the oral tradition.'

'Whereabouts?' I asked, wondering where a talking horse might find employment.

'Jokes about talking horses,' explained Mathias with a shiver of indignation. 'You have heard the one about the talking horse in the pub, I trust?'

'Not for a while,' I replied.

'I'm not surprised,' retorted the horse loftily. 'Her studies do tend to keep her quite busy. Whenever she runs out of funds she does the rounds with a new one. I think she is reprising the talking-horse-with-greyhound gag at the moment.'

It was true. Bowden had used that one at his Happy Squid talent contest. This was probably why jokes 'did the rounds' — it was oral tradition fictioneers going on tour. Another thought struck me.

'Don't you think they'd notice?' I asked. 'A horse, at Oxford?'

'You'd be surprised how unobservant some of the dons are,' snorted Perkins. 'Where do you think Napoleon the pig studied Marxism? The Harris bacon factory?'

'Didn't the other students complain?'

'Of course! Napoleon was expelled.'

'Was it the smell?'

'No — the cheating. 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.' He 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 semi-dark.

'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. There was a door in the centre which 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' The Greek Myths in 1944 and dropped him in Tsaritsyn. 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 up 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 hairs 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 which 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 leather-bound 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,' replied Perkins. '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,' replied Perkins. 'Not strictly a pest and actually quite necessary to the existence of the BookWorld. They take words and expel alternative 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 recognised 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.'

'What's this?' I asked as he turned the page again. 'Another verbinator?'

'Well, kind of,' replied Perkins. 'This is a Converbilator. It actually creates verbs out of nouns and other words. Mostly by appending ize or ise but sometimes just by a direct conversion, such as knife, lunch and question. During a drought they have been known to even create compound verbs such as air-condition, and signpost. Like the bookworms they are necessary — but can't be allowed to get out of hand.'

'Some would say there are too many verbs already,' I commented.

'Those that do,' replied Perkins testily, 'should come and work for Jurisfiction for a bit and try and stop them.'

'What about the mispeling vyrus?' I asked.

'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. It's very powarfull — can u feel it, even through the glas?'

'Unnessary,' I said, testing it out, 'undoutadly, professor, diarhea, nakijima. You're right, it's prety strong, isn't it?'

He replaced the jar bak in the dictosafe.

'Rampant before Agent Johnson's Dictionary in 1744,' commented 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 offload 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 form S-I2.'

'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 tyres 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-litre Higham Special.