“Ah!” he said as we walked in. “Glad you’re here, Bellman. Heavy weather moving in from the Western genre. This is Senator Jobsworth from the Council of Genres, here as part of the C of G committee for observation of anomalies.”

  Jobsworth, a small and weedy-looking man, didn’t look comfortable nor regal in his senatorial robes. As part of the regime change after the Ultra Word debacle, it was deemed that a senator should be present at any unusual event. He looked shifty and I took an instant dislike to him.

  “Senator,” I said, bowing slightly as protocol dictated.

  “Miss Next,” he said dryly, “I must tell you right now that I didn’t vote for you. I will be keeping a close eye on your behavior.”

  “Good,” I replied noncommittally, then added, “What’s up, Dr. Howard?”

  He motioned us towards the center of the room where beneath us in a recessed pit there was a large map of the BookWorld.

  “We plot everything,” he explained as the staff below moved marker tags with long sticks to the orders of the controllers above, “from the largest unconstrained narrative flexation to the smallest tense distortion. Then, by plotting the size of the changes and their positions, a rough map of the BookWorld’s weather can be constructed.”

  I looked down at the sea of small markers, which seemed, indeed, to have a sort of swirling pattern to them. He pointed to a mass of reports.

  “About two hours ago an outbreak of anomalous plot flexations began in Riders of the Purple Sage.”

  “The Minotaur was reported in Zane Grey last week,” I commented.

  “That’s what we thought at first,” replied Dr. Howard, “but the slight flexations were moving too fast to be a PageRunner. Within twenty minutes a cloud of grammatical oddities had joined the weather front, and together they left the Western genre. The front brushed the southeast corner of Erotica and vanished ten minutes later into Stream of Consciousness.”

  “Vanished?”

  “Difficult to spot, perhaps. It’s been quiet in SOC ever since. But that’s not all. At pretty much the same time a cloud of mispunctuation arose in Horror, circled twice and then developed into a pretty stiff breeze of split infinitives and jumbled words before traveling through Fantasy into Romance. Unchallenged, it hit the Farquitt series and split in two. One storm front headed north into Steel, the other along the Collins ridge just east of Krantz. We expect the two fronts to merge just past Cooper in a few minutes.”

  “So we can safely say it’s over then?” asked the senator, staring at the plotting table with more than a little confusion.

  “Up to a point, Senator,” replied Dr. Howard diplomatically. “As you so expertly point out, it just might dissipate into the Taylor Bradford canon harmlessly.”

  “Oh, good!” said the senator with relief.

  “However,” continued Dr. Howard, “and far be it from me to contradict Your Grace, it’s equally probable they will strengthen and then careen off on a destructive course towards Drama.”

  “Boss!” said a technician who had been staring at a list of recent anomalies. “I think you better see this.”

  Below us on the plotting table we could see a small bulge emerge on the western flanks of Stream of Consciousness.

  “How fast?” asked Dr. Howard.

  “About three pages a second.”

  “Give me a projected route.”

  The technician picked up a slide rule and scribbled some notes on a pad of paper. Unluckily for us, the front that had begun in Western had traversed Stream of Consciousness and emerged four times as strong.

  “I knew we hadn’t seen the last of it,” muttered Howard. “Damn and blast!”

  But that wasn’t all. In the next two minutes we watched nervously as the split storm fronts coursing through Romance rejoined, grew stronger and diverted off towards Drama, as feared.

  “And that’s why we called you,” said Dr. Howard, gazing at me intently. “In under ten minutes the Romance and Stream of Consciousness frontal systems will merge and strengthen. We’ve got a WordStorm brewing of magnitude five-point-four or more heading straight for Drama.”

  “Five-point-four?” echoed the senator. “That’s good, right?”

  “In storm terms, it’s very good,” replied Dr. Howard grimly, “make no mistake about that. A two-point-three might only scramble text and change tenses; a three-point-five can muddle chapters and remove entire words. Anything above a five has enough power to tear whole ideas and paragraphs out of a book and dump them several shelves away.”

  “O-kay,” I said slowly as Commander Bradshaw appeared, looking a bit bleary-eyed.

  “Glad you could make it, Trafford. We’ve got a potential WordStorm brewing.”

  “WordStorm, eh?” he mused. “Reminds me of a typhoon that struck The French Lieutenant’s Woman ten years back. By gad, we were picking superfluous adjectives out of the book for a month!”

  “And that had been a small one,” added Dr. Howard, “barely a two-point-one.”

  “Cat,” I said, “issue a storm warning to the residents of all books on the storm’s path. Trafford, we need every single Danver-Clone we have on thirty-second readiness. I want textual sieves ready and standing by.”

  “Well,” said Senator Jobsworth, “this is all quite exciting, isn’t it? And what is a textual sieve, anyway?”

  We all ignored him and moved to a table in Dr. Howard’s office where one of his team had unrolled a more detailed map of the threatened area of Drama. It was essentially one of Bradshaw’s booksploring charts overlaid with the footnoterphone conduits in red ink. The map looked like a giant spiderweb of interconnections, the books that remained unexplored standing alone and unprotected. If we couldn’t get in to warn them, they certainly wouldn’t be able to see it coming.

  We waited patiently as the minutes ticked by, the plotters updating the course of the two storm fronts on the chart as they merged, gathered speed and hurtled across the emptiness of intergenre space, directly towards Drama. Bradshaw had relayed my orders to the DanverClones; all we needed was the title of the books most likely to be hit by the coming storm.

  “Why don’t we set up those textual sieves across this area here?” suggested Senator Jobsworth, waving a hand at the chart.

  “We mustn’t spread our sieves too thin,” I explained. “We need them concentrated at the place the storm hits to do any good at all.”

  As if to confirm its waywardness, the storm changed direction. It had been heading almost straight for the Satire end of Drama when it veered away and headed instead for Novel.

  “Which one do you think, old girl?” asked Bradshaw, footnoterphone in hand. It was one of those moments where leadership has a lonely, hollow emptiness to it. The wrong decision now and we could be mopping up the mess for years. Give my order too early and the storm might veer again and cut an ugly swath through Trollope; give the order too late and the textual sieves might not be up in time to stop the storm in its tracks. A half-unfurled sieve would be broken like matchwood and carried with the storm to who knows where.

  “What shall we do, Bellman?” asked the Cat. He wasn’t smiling.

  A technician updated the plot. The storm had moved slightly to the west and was now four minutes from hitting Drama. Would it hold that course or veer off again?

  “Dr. Howard,” I said, “I need your best estimate.”

  “It’s almost impossible to say—!”

  “I know that!” I snapped. “Like it or not, you are the best guesser and I’m going to go with your hunch—that’s my decision. Now, where do you think it will hit?”

  He sighed resignedly and stabbed a finger on the map. “I think about here. Page two hundred fourteen of The Scarlet Letter, give or take a chapter or two.”

  “Hawthorne,” I murmured, “not good.”

  No one had ever traveled into any of his books before, so the DanverClones would be working on the books closest to it—never a satisfactory alternative.

  “Right,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “do we have an updated report on the size of this WordStorm?”

  “It’s now a five-point-seven,” replied the technician in a voice tinged with fear, “and it’s heavy with ideas and plot devices picked up on its journey so far.”

  “Compact?”

  “I’d say,” replied the technician, reading the latest weather report, “barely three paragraphs wide but with a density over six-point-four. It’s currently moving at eight pages a second.”

  “It could tear a hole straight through The Scarlet Letter at that rate,” exploded Bradshaw, “and litter the whole book with dramatic events!”

  The consequence of this was terrible to consider—a new version of The Scarlet Letter where things actually happen.

  “Impact time?”

  “Three minutes.”

  I had an idea. “How many people are reading Scarlet Letter at present?”

  “Six hundred and twenty-two,” replied the Cat, who as librarian had these figures at his paws twenty-four hours a day.

  “Pleasure readers?”

  “Mostly,” replied the Cat, thinking hard, “except for a class of thirty-two English students at Frobisher High School in Michigan who are studying it.”

  “Good. Bradshaw? I want you to set up textual sieves in every book ever written by Hemingway—even the bad ones. Sieves are to be set to coarse in all short stories, letters, Winner Take Nothing and In Our Time, medium in The Sun Also Rises and The Green Hills of Africa. I want to channel the storm, slowing it down as it passes. By A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, sieves should be set to fine. The storm will bounce between all the works, moving west towards the void between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If it makes it that far, we’ll reset the sieves and attack it again.”

  There was a pause.

  “But, Thursday,” said Bradshaw slowly, “the storm isn’t going to hit Hemingway.”

  “It will if we shut The Scarlet Letter down.”

  “Out of the question!” exploded Senator Jobsworth, spontaneously and automatically rejecting any possible infringements of his sacred regulations. “The rules do not permit any book to be shut down without a vote at the Council of Genres—I can quote the rule number if you wish!”

  Technically, he was right. Even with a vote, nobody had tried anything so audacious before. It usually took an hour to shut down a book, more to bring it up to full readability again.

  “Is that wise?” asked Dr. Howard.

  “Not in the least,” I replied, “but I’m out of time and ideas right now.”

  “Isn’t anyone listening to me?” continued the senator, more outraged at our lack of respect than at losing The Scarlet Letter.

  “Oh, we’re listening all right,” purred the Cat, “we just don’t agree with you.”

  “Rules are there for a good reason, Miss Next. We have ordered the demolition of bigger books than The Scarlet Letter. I personally—”

  “Listen,” I said, “classics have been lost before but never during my tenure as Bellman. Tomorrow morning you can have my badge if I’m wrong and send me packing. Right now you can sit down and shut up. Cat and Bradshaw, are you with me on this?”

  “Appreciate a woman who can make bold decisions!” muttered Bradshaw, repeating my orders to the DanverClones. Senator Jobsworth had gone red with impotent fury, and his mouth was twitching as he sought to find words to adequately express his anger at my insubordination.

  “Two minutes to impact.”

  I picked up the footnoterphone and asked to be put through to the storycode engine floor.

  “Bradshaw, I want you to take a trip to the Outland and set the fire alarm off at Frobisher High in exactly seventy-eight seconds. That will give us a few minutes breathing space. The pleasure readers will just think they’ve got bored and lost concentration when the book shuts down. Hello, storycode floor? This is the Bellman. I want you to divert Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter to an empty storycode engine and shut it down. . . . Yes, that’s quite correct. Shut it down. I don’t have time to issue a written order so you’re going to have to take my word for it. You are to do it in exactly sixty-three seconds.”

  “Sieves are going up as requested, Thursday,” reported Bradshaw. “Think they’ll hold?”

  I shrugged. There was nothing else we could do. The storm plot ran towards The Scarlet Letter and struck it just as the storycode engine shut down. The book closed. The characters stopped in their tracks as an all-pervading darkness swept over every descriptive passage, every line of dialogue, every nuance, every concept. Where a moment ago there had been a fascinating treatise on morality, there was now only a lifeless hulk of dark reading matter. It was as if The Scarlet Letter had never been written. The storm bounced off, then attracted to the brighter lights of the Hemingway canon next door, struck off on a new course. I breathed a sigh of relief but then held my breath once more as the storm struck In Our Time—and glanced off. The sieve had held. Over the next few minutes the WordStorm ran between the books as planned, the textual sieves slowing it down as it brushed past the collected works of Hemingway.

  “Damage report?”

  “Slight grammatical warpage in A Farewell to Arms, but nothing serious,” said the Cat. “The Sun Also Rises is reporting isolated bursts of narrative flexations, but nothing we can’t handle. All other books report no damage.”

  “Good. Bring The Scarlet Letter back on-line.”

  We watched nervously as the storm slowly subsided. It had littered the Hemingway canon with words and ideas, but nothing violent enough to embed them and change the narrative. As likely as not the residents of the novels would just pick them up and sell them to traveling scrap merchants. But the WordStorm wasn’t quite finished with us yet. After brushing past the preface to For Whom the Bell Tolls, the storm suddenly sped up and, in its last dying throes, embedded a Bride Shot at the Altar plot device right at the end of Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, where it remains to this day. Aside from that minor flexation, no real harm was done by the WordStorm. The senator berated me for a good ten minutes and filed a report on my behavior the following day, which was summarily rejected by the other members of the Jurisfiction oversight committee.

  I left the Cat and Bradshaw to log the damage reports and thanked Dr. Howard and his staff for their slavish attention. I decided to walk back home, across the storycode engine floor and down the empty corridors of the Great Library to the Well of Lost Plots and back to bed. I was feeling quite good about myself. I had run a team of highly skilled technicians and saved The Scarlet Letter from almost certain devastation. It would be one of my easier tasks as Bellman, but I didn’t know that yet. The evening had gone well. Landen would have been proud of me.

  Credits

  Falstaff, the three witches, Banquo’s ghost, Beatrice and Benedict—all kindly supplied by Shakespeare (William) Inc.

  Our thanks to Mr. Heathcliff for graciously agreeing to appear in this novel.

  Uriah Heep kindly loaned by Wickfield & Heep, attorneys-at-law.

  My thanks to ScarletBea, Yan, Ben, Carla, Jon, Magda, AllAmericanCutie and Dave at the Fforde Fforum for their nominations in the Bookie Awards.

  Hedgepig research, Anna Karenina footnoterphone gossip and “dodo egg” sarcasm furnished by Mari Roberts.

  Solomon’s Judgments © The Council of Genres, 1986.

  “Chocolate orange” joke used with the kind permission of John Birmingham.

  UltraWord—the Ultimate Reading Experience™ remains a trademark of Text Grand Central.

  Bookie category Best Dead Person in Fiction courtesy of C. J. Avery.

  Fictionaut wordsmithed by Jon Brierley.

  Evilness consultant: Ernst Blofeld.

  Mrs. Bradshaw’s gowns by Coco Chanel.

  Aornis little-sister idea courtesy of Rosie Fforde.

  Our grateful thanks to the Great Panjandrum for help and guidance in the making of this novel.

  No unicorns were written expressly for this book, and no animals or Yahoos (other than grammasites) were harmed in its construction.

  This novel was written in BOOK V8.3 and was sequenced using an Mk XXIV ImaginoTransferenceDevice. Peggy Malone was the imaginator. Plot Devices and Inciting Incidents supplied by Billy Budd’s Bargain Basement and the WOLP Plot Salvage and Recycling Corporation. Generics supplied and trained by St. Tabularasa’s. Holes were filled by apprentices at the Holesmiths’ Guild, and echolocation and grammatization were undertaken by Outland contractors at Hodder and Viking.

  The “galactic cleansing” policy undertaken by Emperor Zhark is a personal vision of the emperor’s, and its inclusion in this work does not constitute tacit approval by the author or the publisher for any such projects, howsoever undertaken. Warning: The author may have eaten nuts while writing this book.

  Made wholly on location within the Well of Lost Plots.

  A Fforde/Hodder/Viking production. All rights reserved.

  PERMISSIONS

  Extract from Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (copyright © Evelyn Waugh, 1945) by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the Estate of Laura Waugh.

  Reference to the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (copyright © The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.

  References to Shadow the Sheepdog by Enid Blyton by kind permission of Enid Blyton Limited and with thanks to Chorion plc.

  Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights, and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.

  Extract from Tiger Tiger (copyright © Alfred Bester, 1955) by kind permission of the Estate of Alfred Bester and the Sayle Literary Agency.

  KAINE

  PUBLISHING

  Warning: This book may become subject to retrospective

  book-burning legislation. To comply with Kaine Directive

  CSBO-812864, the Mandatory Combustibility Information