“No, I think I must have missed it.”

  “Oh! 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’d faced a court here in the BookWorld. It had been in Kafka’s The Trial and it turned out predictably unpredictable.

  “Not really,” admitted Snell. “Our ‘strong readership approval’ defense 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.”

  “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 amongst 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’s 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 plotlines 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. 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 realized 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 offense. If I were you, I shouldn’t inquire 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 be 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 corridors, and people ate, slept and conducted their business in shops and small houses built in the manner of an untidy shantytown. Advertising billboards and posters were everywhere, promoting some form of goods or services unique to the business of writing.1

  “I think I’m picking up junkfootnoterphone messages, Snell,” I said above the hubbub. “Should I be worried?”

  “You get them all the time down here. Ignore them—and never pass on chain footnotes.”2

  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 down here 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 subbasement has an entrance to the Text Sea—we’ll go down there and see them off-loading the scrawltrawlers one evening.”

  “What do they unload?”

  “Words”—Snell smiled—“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 imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head. Vast storycode engines at Text Grand Central throughput the images to the readers as they scan the text in the Outland. We’re currently using Book Operating System V8.3—not for long, though—Text Grand Central want to upgrade the system.”

  “Someone mentioned Ultra Word™ 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 colors 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 mulled 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 onto the foreshore, or felt the breakers tremble the beach beneath your feet, now would it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Books”—Snell smiled—“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.3 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 recharacterize 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 and 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 and 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. Or 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.”

  “No one’s using the old ‘missing Nazi gold consignment’ plot device anymore.” Garcia laughed. “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 seventy-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-freezer idea, myself.”

  “Me, too!” Snell enthused as we passed a small shop whose painted headboard read: Backstories built to order. No job too difficult. Painful childhoods a specialty.

  “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. A workbench in the middle of the room was 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 colorful 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 were 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 labeled Studied squid in Sri Lanka and another, Apprentice Welsh mole catcher.

  “So what can I do for you?” inquired 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 from over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. “But that was a long time ago. Charlotte Brontë, 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 colored 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.”

  “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 ornate elevator plunged rapidly downwards.

  “Are you still being bothered by junkfootnoterphones?”

  “A little.”4

  “You’ll get used to ignoring them.”

  The bell sounded and the elevator doors slid open, bringing with it 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 subbasement. The roughest place in the Well. A haven for cutthroats, bounty hunters, murderers, thieves, cheats, shape-shifters, scene-stealers, brigands and plagiarists.”