I closed my eyes for a moment and fell fast asleep without the nagging fear of Aornis, and it was nearly ten the next morning when I awoke. But I didn’t wake naturally—Pickwick was tugging at the corner of my dress.

  “Not now, Pickers,” I mumbled sleepily, trying to turn over and nearly impaling myself on a knitting needle. She carried on tugging until I sat up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes and stretched noisily. She seemed insistent so I followed her upstairs to my bedroom. Sitting on the bed and surrounded by broken eggshell was something that I could only describe as a ball of fluff with two eyes and a beak.

  “Plock-plock,” said Pickwick.

  “You’re right,” I told her, “she’s very beautiful. Congratulations.”

  The small dodo blinked at us both, opened its beak wide and said, in a shrill voice, “Plunk!”

  Pickwick started and looked at me anxiously.

  “Well!” I told her. “A rebellious teenager already?”

  Pickwick nudged the chick with her beak and it plunked indignantly before settling down.

  I thought for a moment and said, “You aren’t going to feed her doing that disgusting regurgitation seabird thing are you?”

  The door burst open downstairs.

  “Thursday!” yelled Randolph anxiously. “Are you in here?”

  “I’m here,” I shouted, leaving Pickwick with her offspring and coming downstairs to find a highly agitated Randolph, pacing up and down the living room.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s Lola.”

  “Some unsuitable young man again? Really, Randolph, you’ve got to learn not to be so jealous—”

  “No,” he said quickly, “it’s not that. Girls Make All the Moves didn’t find a publisher and the author burnt the only manuscript in a drunken rage! That’s why she wasn’t at the awards last night!”

  I stopped. If a book had been destroyed in the Outland, then all the characters and situations would be up for salvage—

  “Yes,” said Randolph, reading my thoughts, “they’re going to auction off Lola!”

  I quickly changed out of my dress and we arrived as the sale was winding up. Most of the descriptive scenes had already gone, the one-liners packaged and sold as a single lot, and all the cars and most of the wardrobe and furniture were disposed of. I pushed through to the front of the crowd and found Lola looking dejected, sitting on her suitcase.

  “Lola!” said Randolph, as they hugged. “I brought Thursday to help you!”

  She jumped up and smiled, but it was a despairing half smile at best and it spoke volumes.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing her by the hand, “we’re out of here.”

  “Not so fast!” said a tall man in an immaculate suit. “No goods are to be removed until paid for!”

  “She’s with me,” I told him as several hulking great bouncers appeared from nowhere.

  “No, she’s not. She’s lot ninety-seven. You can bid if you want to.”

  “I’m Thursday Next, the Bellman-elect, and Lola is with me.”

  “I know who you are and you did good, but I have a business to run. I haven’t done anything wrong. You can take the Generic home with you in ten minutes—after you have won the bidding.”

  I glared at him. “I’m going to close down this foul trade and enjoy it every step of the way!”

  “Really? I’m quaking in my boots. Now, are you going to bid or do I withdraw the lot and put it up for private tender?”

  “She’s not an it,” snarled Randolph angrily, “she’s a Lola—and I love her!”

  “You’re breaking my heart. Bid or bugger off, the choice is yours.”

  Randolph made to plant a punch on the dealer’s chin, but he was caught by one of the bouncers and held tightly.

  “Control your Generic or I’ll throw you both out! Get it?”

  Randolph nodded and he was released. We stood together at the front watching Lola, who was weeping silently into her handkerchief.

  “Gentlemen. Lot ninety-seven. Fine female B-3 Generic, ident: TSI-1404912-A, attractive and personable. An opportunity to secure this sort of highly entertaining and pneumatic young lady does not come often. Her high appetite for sexual congress, slight dopiness and winsome innocence mated to indefatigable energy makes her especially suitable for ‘racy’ novels. What am I bid?”

  It was bad. Very bad. I turned to Randolph. “Do you have any money?”

  “About a tenner.”

  The bidding had already reached a thousand. I didn’t have a tenth of that either here or back home—nor anything to sell to raise such a sum. The bidding rose higher, and Lola grew more depressed. For the amount that was being bid, she was probably in for a series of books—and the movie rights. I shuddered.

  “With you, sir, at six thousand!” announced the auctioneer as the bidding bounced backwards and forwards between two well-known dealers. “Any more bids?”

  “Seven thousand!”

  “Eight!”

  “Nine!”

  “I can’t watch,” said Randolph, tears streaming down his face. He turned and left as Lola stared after him, trying to see him as he pushed his way to the back.

  “Any more bids?” asked the auctioneer. “With you, sir, at nine thousand . . . going once . . . going twice . . .”

  “I bid one original idea!” I shouted, digging in my bag for the small nugget of originality and marching up to the auctioneer’s table. There was a deathly hush as I held the glowing fragment aloft, then placed it on his desk with a flourish.

  “A nugget of originality for a trollop like that?” muttered a man at the front. “The Bellman-elect’s got a screw loose.”

  “Lola is that important to me,” I said somberly. Miss Havisham had told me to use the nugget wisely—I think I did.

  “Is it enough?”

  “It’s enough,” said the vendor, picking up the nugget and staring at it avariciously through an eyeglass. “This lot is withdrawn from the sale. Miss Next, you are the proud owner of a Generic.”

  Lola nearly wet herself, poor girl, and she hugged me tightly during the five minutes it took to complete the paperwork.

  We found Randolph sitting on a bollard down by the docks, staring off into the Text Sea with a sad and vacant look in his eyes. Lola leaned down and whispered in his ear.

  Randolph jumped and turned round, flung his arms around her and cried for joy.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, I did mean it! Every bit of it!”

  “Come on, lovebirds,” I told them, “I think it’s time to leave this cattle market.”

  We walked back to Caversham Heights, Randolph and Lola holding hands, making plans to start a home for Generics who had fallen on hard times, and trying to think up ways to raise funding. Neither of them had the resources to undertake such a project, but it got me thinking.

  The following week and soon after the Bellman inauguration, I gave my proposal to the Council of Genres—Caversham Heights should be bought by the Council and used as a sanctuary for characters who needed a break from the sometimes arduous and repetitive course that fictional people are forced to tread. A sort of textual summer camp. To my delight the Council approved the measure, as it had the added bonus of a solution to the nursery rhyme problem. Jack Spratt was overjoyed at the news and didn’t seem in the least put out by the massive changes that would be necessary to embrace the visitors.

  “The drug plot is out, I’m afraid,” I told him as we discussed it over lunch a few days later.

  “What the hell,” he exclaimed, “I was never in love with it anyway. Do we have a replacement boxer?”

  “The boxing plot is out, too.”

  “Ah. How about the money-laundering subplot where I discover the mayor has been taking kickbacks? That’s still in, yes?”

  “Not . . . as such,” I said slowly.

  “It’s gone, too? Do we even have a murder?”

  “That we have.” I passed him the new outline I had been thrashing out with a freelance imaginator the previous day.

  “Ah!” he said, scanning the words eagerly. “It’s Easter in Reading—a bad time for eggs—and Humpty-Dumpty is found shattered beneath a wall in a shabby area of town. . . .”

  He flicked a few more pages. “What about Dr. Singh, Madeleine, Unidentified Police Officers 1 and 2 and all the others?”

  “All still there. We’ve had to reassign a few parts, but it should hold together. The only person who wouldn’t move was Agatha Diesel—I think she might give you a few problems.”

  “I can handle her,” replied Jack, flicking to the back of the outline to see how it all turned out. “Looks good to me. What do the nurseries say about it?”

  “I’m talking to them next.”

  I left Jack with the outline and jumped to Norland Park, where I took the news to Humpty-Dumpty; he and his army of pickets were still camped outside the doors of the house—they had been joined by characters from nursery stories, too.

  “Ah!” said Humpty as I approached. “The Bellman. The three witches were right after all.”

  “They generally are,” I replied. “I have a proposal for you.”

  Humpty’s eyes grew bigger and bigger as I explained what I had in mind.

  “Sanctuary?” he asked.

  “Of sorts,” I told him. “I’ll need you to coordinate all the nurseries who will find narrative a little bit alien after doing couplets for so long, so you’ll be dead when the story opens.”

  “Not . . . the wall thing?”

  “I’m afraid so. What do you think?”

  “Well,” said Humpty, reading the outline carefully and smiling, “I’ll take it to the membership, but I think I can safely say that there is nothing here that we can find any great issue with. Pending a ballot, I think you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  It took the C of G almost a year to scrap the pristine and unused Ultra Word engines, and many more arrests followed, although sadly, none in the Outland. Vernham Deane was released, and he and Mimi were awarded the Gold Star for Reading as well as the plot realignment they had wanted for so many years. They married and—quite unprecedented for a Farquitt baddy—lived happily ever after, something that caused a severe drop in sales for The Squire of High Potternews. Harris Tweed, Xavier Libris and twenty-four others at Text Grand Central were tried and found guilty of “crimes against the BookWorld.” Harris Tweed was expelled permanently from fiction and returned to Swindon. Heep, Orlick and Legree were all sent back to their books, and the rest were reduced to text.

  It was the first day of the influx of nursery rhyme refugees, and Lola and I were sitting on a park bench in Caversham Heights—soon to be renamed Nursery Crime. We were watching Humpty-Dumpty welcome the long line of guests as Randolph allocated parts. Everyone was happy with the arrangements, but I wasn’t overwhelmed with joy myself. I still missed Landen and I was reminded of this every time I tried—and failed—to get my old trousers to button up over my rapidly expanding waistline.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Landen.”

  “Oh,” said Lola, staring at me with her big brown eyes. “You will get him back, I am sure of it—please don’t be downhearted!”

  I patted her hand and thanked her for her kind words.

  “I never did say thank you for what you did,” she said slowly. “I missed Randolph more than anything—if only he’d told me what he felt I would have stayed in Heights or sought a dual placement—even as a C-grade.”

  “Men are like that. I’m just glad you’re both happy.”

  “I’ll miss being the main protagonist,” she said wistfully. “Girls Make All the Moves was a good role but in a crap book. Do you think I’ll ever be the heroine again?”

  “Well, Lola, some would say that the hero of any story is the one who changes the most. If we take the moment when we first met as the beginning of the story and right now as the end, I think that makes you and Randolph the heroes by a long straw.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled and we sat in silence for a moment.

  “Thursday?”

  “Yes?”

  “So who did kill Godot?”

  34a.

  Heavy Weather

  (Bonus chapter exclusive to the U.S. edition)

  BookWorld Meteorology: Aside from the rain, snow and wind that often feature within the pages of novels for dramatic effect, another weather system works within the BookWorld; a sort of transgenre wind that is not a moving mass of air but one of text, sense distortion and snippets of ideas. It is usually only a mild zephyr whose welcome breeze brings with it a useful cross-fertilization of ideas within the genres and usually has no greater vice than the spread of the mispeling vyrus. On occasion, however, the wind has been known to whip itself up into a WordStorm that can dislodge whole sentences and plot devices and deposit them several genres away. It’s not a common phenomenon, but it’s wise to keep an eye on it. In my second week as Bellman, a WordStorm of unprecedented ferocity hit the library. It was the first real test of my Bellmanship. I think I did okay.

  THURSDAY NEXT,

  Private Diaries

  I WAS ASLEEP IN my room in the Sunderland not long after my inauguration as Bellman. Everything had been pretty quiet that week. A few PageRunners and a sighting of the Minotaur, but nothing too serious. Text Grand Central was still coming to grips with the new management regime, and all the storycode engines had been shut down and rebooted to rid them of the UltraWord Operating System. So a lull was not only welcome, but necessary.

  I was awoken from my slumber by a loud purring and was shocked to find the Cat formerly known as Cheshire about an inch from my nose.

  “Hullo!” he purred, grinning fit to burst. “Were you dreaming about oysters?”

  “No,” I confessed. “In fact,” I added, rubbing my eyes and attempting to sit up, “I don’t think I’ve ever dreamt about oysters.”

  “Really? I dream about them all the time. Sometimes on the half shell and other times in an oyster bed. Sometimes I dream about them playing the piano.”

  “How can an oyster play the piano?”

  “No, I dream about them when I’m playing the piano.”

  I looked at the clock. It was three in the morning.

  “Did you wake me up to tell me about your oyster dreams?”

  “Not at all. I can’t think for a moment why you are interested. Something has come up over at Text Grand Central and we thought you should be informed.”

  I was suddenly a great deal wider awake. I moved to get up and the Cat politely faded from view as I stepped from the bed.

  “So what’s up?” I asked, slipping on a T-shirt.

  “It’s the TextWind,” said the Cat from the corridor. “We’ve been monitoring it all day and there is a possibility it could whip itself up into a WordStorm.”

  Weather inside fiction is much like weather at home, only usually more extreme. Book rain generally comes down in stair rods, and book snow always has flakes the size of farthings. But these all exist within books for narrative purposes. The BookWorld itself has less easily recognized weather patterns but has them, just the same—a particularly bad storm in ’34 swept through Horror and rained detritus on Drama for weeks, the most notable result being the grisly spontaneous-combustion sequence in Dickens’s Bleak House.

  I pulled on my trousers and shoes and walked out of the door, leaving Pickwick and her chick asleep in an untidy snoring mass on the rug. The Cat was waiting for me and together we jumped to Text Grand Central.

  TGC was the technical nerve center of the BookWorld. Modified from an unpublished Gothic horror novel, the one hundred floors of TGC were lit by flickering gas mantles that only faintly illuminated the vaulted ceilings high above the polished marble floors. We entered near the corner of floor sixty-nine and I followed the Cat as we walked past the humming storycode engines, each one a colossi of cast iron, shiny brass and polished mahogany. Just one of five hundred on this floor alone, the bus-sized machine could cope with up to fifty thousand simultaneous readings of the same book—or one reading apiece of fifty thousand different books, as demand saw fit. I had only visited TGC once before as part of my induction to the Bellman’s job and was amazed not only on how impossible the concept was to my flat Outlander mind, but the supreme scale of it all. The technicians scurried like tireless ants over the clanking machinery, checking dials, oiling moving parts and venting steam while keeping a close lookout for any narrative anomalies to report to the collators upstairs. It was from these collators that reports of Fiction Infractions, PageRunners and all the other BookWorld misdemeanors filtered through to us at the Jurisfiction offices. The whole system was hopelessly antiquated and manpower intensive—but it worked.

  We left the engine floor and walked into a large anteroom where the BookWorld Meteorological Department worked. It was here the ten-strong team spent their days busily searching for patterns in the seemingly random textual anomalies that occur throughout fiction. The department was run by Dr. Howard. I had met him briefly once before and knew that a century or two ago he had been real, like me. TGC had commissioned a biography of the original Luke Howard solely so a Generic could be trained and then employed part-time in this office.