Read Online The well of lost plots by Jasper Fforde - Free Book Online Page B

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.”
    “We don’t tolerate these sort of places back home,” I murmured.
    “We
encourage
them here,” explained Snell. “Fiction wouldn’t be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.”
    I could feel the menace as soon as we stepped from the elevator. Low mutters were exchanged amongst several hooded figures who stood close by, their faces obscured by the shadows, their hands bony and white. We walked past two large cats with eyes that seemed to dance with fire; they stared at us hungrily and licked their