The well of lost plots Read Free

thing.”
    “A dodo.” 1
    “What’s the matter?” asked Arnold.
    I was getting a footnoterphone signal; in the BookWorld people generally communicated like this.
    “A footnoterphone call,” I replied, “but it’s not a message — it’s like the wireless back home.” 2
    Arnold stared at me. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
    “I’m from the other side of the page. What you call the Outland.” 3
    He opened his eyes wide. “You mean — you’re
real
?”
    “I’m afraid so,” I replied, slightly bemused.
    “Goodness! Is it true that Outlanders can’t say ‘red-Buick-blue-Buick’ many times quickly?”
    “It’s true. We call it a tongue twister.”
    “Fascinating! There’s nothing like that
here
, you know. I can say ‘The sixth sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick’ over and over as many times as I want!”
    And he did, three times.
    “Now you try.”
    I took a deep breath. “The sixth spleeps sics sleeks . . . sick.”
    Arnold laughed like a drain. I don’t think he’d come across anything quite so funny in his life. I smiled.
    “Do it again!”
    “No thanks. 4 How do I stop this footnoterphone blabbering inside my skull?”
    “Just think
Off
very strongly.”
    I did, and the footnoterphone stopped.
    “Better?”
    I nodded.
    “You’ll get the hang of it.”
    He thought for a minute, looked up and down the lake in an overtly innocent manner, then said, “Do you want to buy some verbs? Not any of your rubbish, either. Good, strong, healthy regulars — straight from the Text Sea — I have a friend on a scrawltrawler.”
    I smiled. “I don’t think so, Arnold — and I don’t think you should ask me — I’m Jurisfiction.”
    “Oh,” said Arnold, looking pale all of a sudden. He bit his lip and gave such an imploring look that I almost laughed.
    “Don’t sweat,” I told him, “I won’t report it.”
    He sighed a deep sigh of relief, muttered his thanks, remounted his motorbike and drove off in a jerky fashion, narrowly missing the mailboxes at the top of the track.
    The interior of the flying boat was lighter and more airy than I had imagined, but it smelt a bit musty. Mary was mistaken; she had not been halfway through the craft’s conversion — it was more like one-tenth. The walls were half-paneled with pine tongue-and-groove, and rock-wool insulation stuck out untidily along with unused electrical cables. There was room for two floors within the boat’s cavernous hull, the downstairs a large, open-plan living room with a couple of old sofas pointing towards a television set. I tried to switch it on but it was dead — there was no TV in the BookWorld unless called for in the narrative. Much of what I could see around me were merely props, necessary for the chapter in which Jack Spratt visits the Sunderland to discuss the case. On the mantelpiece above a small wood-burning stove were pictures of Mary from her days at the police training college, and another from when she was promoted to detective sergeant.
    I opened a door that led into a small kitchenette. Attached to the fridge was the précis of
Caversham Heights
. I flicked through it. The sequence of events was pretty much as I remembered from my first reading in the Well, although it seemed that Mary had overstated her role in some of the puzzle-solving areas. I put the précis down, found a bowl and filled it with water for Pickwick, took her egg from my bag and laid it on the sofa, where she quickly set about turning it over and tapping it gently with her beak. I went forward and discovered a bedroom where the nose turret would have been and climbed a narrow aluminum ladder to the flight deck directly above. This was the best view in the house, the large greenhouselike Perspex windows affording a vista of the lake. The massive control wheels were set in front of two comfortable chairs, and facing them and ahead of a tangled mass of engine control levers was a complex panel of broken and faded instruments.