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The Well of Lost Plots

Ффорде Джаспер

Jasper Fforde

(Thursday Next #3)

For Mari Who makes the torches burn brighter

A wise man wants for only nourishing cabbage soup; seek not other things. Except perhaps a toaster.

Acknowledgements

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

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

This book has been bundled with Special Features including: the 'making of' wordamentary, deleted scenes from all three books, out-takes and much more. To access all these free bonus features, log on to: www.jasperfforde.com/specialfeatures.html and enter the code word as directed.

The absence of breakfast

'The Well of Lost Plots: To understand the Well you have to have an idea of the layout of the Great Library. The library is where all published fiction is stored so it can be read by the readers in the Outland; there are twenty-six floors, one for each letter of the alphabet. The library is constructed in the layout of a cross with the four corridors radiating from the centre point. On all the walls, end after end, shelf after shelf, are books. Hundreds, thousands, millions of books. Hardbacks, paperbacks, leather-bound, everything. But beneath the Great Library are twenty-six floors of dingy yet industrious sub-basements known as the Well of Lost Plots. This is where books are constructed, honed and polished in readiness for a place in the library above. But the similarity of all these books to the copies we read back home is no more than the similarity a photograph has to its subject; these books are alive.'

Making one's home in an unpublished novel wasn't without its compensations. All the boring day-to-day mundanities that we conduct in the real world get in the way of narrative flow and are thus generally avoided. The car didn't need refuelling, there were never any wrong numbers, there was always enough hot water, and vacuum-cleaner bags came in only two sizes — upright and pull-along. There were other, more subtle differences, too. For instance, no one ever needed to repeat themselves in case you didn't hear, no one shared the same name, talked at the same time or had a word a

I was able to take up residence inside fiction by virtue of a scheme entitled the Character Exchange Programme. Owing to a spate of bored and disgruntled bookpeople escaping from their novels and becoming what we called 'PageRu

The choice of book for my self-enforced exile had not been arbitrary; when Miss Havisham asked me in which novel I would care to reside I had thought long and hard. Robinson Crusoe would have been ideal considering the climate but there was no one female to exchange with. I could have gone to Pride and Prejudice but I wasn't wild about high collars, bo

I read my way into Caversham Heights. The air felt warm after the wintry conditions back home and I found myself standing on a wooden jetty at the edge of a lake. In front of me there was a large and seemingly derelict flying boat of the sort that still plied the coastal routes back home. I had flown on one myself not six months before on the trail of someone claiming to have found some unpublished Burns poetry. But that was another lifetime ago, when I was with SpecOps in Swindon, the world I had temporarily left behind.

I do

'Hello!' she shouted, trotting up and offering me a hand. 'I'm Mary. You must be Thursday. My goodness! What's that?'

'A dodo. Her name's Pickwick.'

Pickwick plocked and stared at Mary suspiciously.

'Really?' she replied, looking at the bird curiously. 'I'm no expert, of course, but … I thought dodos were extinct.'

'Where I come from they're a bit of a pest.'

'Oh?' mused Mary. 'I'm not sure I've heard of a book with live dodos in it.'

'I'm not a bookperson,' I told her, 'I'm real.'

'Oh!' exclaimed Mary, opening her eyes wide. 'An Outlander.'

She touched me inquisitively with a slender index finger, as though I might be made of glass.

'I've never seen someone from the other side before,' she a