The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [325]
We left the dark and fetid area beneath the old hall and walked back into the laboratory, where Perkins opened a large leatherbound book that was sitting on the table.
“This is the Jurisfiction bestiary,” he explained, turning the page to reveal a picture of the grammasite we had encountered in Great Expectations.
“An adjectivore,” I murmured.
“Very good. Fairly common in the Well but under control in fiction generally.”
He turned a page to reveal a sort of angler fish, but instead of a light dangling on a wand sticking out of its head, it had the indefinite article.
“Nounfish,” explained Perkins. “They swim the outer banks of the Text Sea, hoping to attract and devour stray nouns eager to start an embryonic sentence.”
He turned the page to reveal a picture of a small maggot.
“A bookworm?” I suggested, having seen these before at my uncle Mycroft’s workshop.
“Indeed. Not strictly a pest and actually quite necessary to the existence of the BookWorld. They take words and expel alternate meanings like a hot radiator. I think earthworms are the nearest equivalent in the Outland. They aerate the soil, yes?”
I nodded.
“Bookworms do the same job down here. Without them, words would have one meaning, and meanings would have one word. They live in thesauri but their benefit is felt throughout fiction.”
“So why are they considered a pest?”
“Useful, but not without their drawbacks. Get too many bookworms in your novel and the language becomes almost unbearably flowery.”
“I’ve read books like that,” I confessed.
He turned the page and I recognized the grammasites that had swarmed through the Well earlier.
“Verbisoid,” he said with a sigh, “to be destroyed without mercy. Once the Verbisoid extracts the verb from a sentence, it generally collapses; do that once too often and the whole narrative falls apart like a bread roll in a rainstorm.”
“Why do they wear waistcoats and stripy socks?”
“To keep warm, I should imagine.”
“Ah. What about the mispeling vyrus?”
“Speltificarious molesworthian,” murmured Perkins, moving to where a pile of dictionaries were stacked up around a small glass jar. He picked out the container and showed it to me. A thin purple haze seemed to wisp around inside; it reminded me of one of Spike’s SEBs.
“This is the larst of the vyrus,” explained Perkins. “We had to distroy the wrist. Wotch this.”
He picked up a letter opener and delicately brought it towards the vyrus. As I watched, the opener started to twist and change shape until it looked more like a miniature sheaf of papers—an operetta, complete with libretto and score. I think it was The Pirates of Penzance, but I couldn’t be sure.
“The vyrus works on a subtextual level and disstorts the meaning of a wurd,” explained Perkins, removing the operetta, which morphed back to its previous state. “The mispeling arises as a consekwence of this.”
He replaced the jar back in the dictosafe.
“So the mispeling itself is really only a symptom of sense distortion?”
“Exactly so. The vyrus was rampant before Agent Johnson’s Dictionary in 1744,” added Perkins. “Lavinia-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary keep it all in check, but we have to be careful. We used to contain any outbreak and off-load it in the Molesworth series, where no one ever notices. These days we destroy any new vyrus with a battery of dictionaries we keep on the seventeenth floor of the Great Library. But we can’t be too careful. Every mispeling you come across has to be reported to the Cat on a form S-12.”
There was the raucous blast of a car horn from outside.
“Time’s up!” Perkins smiled. “That will be Miss Havisham.”
Miss Havisham was not on her own. She was sitting in a vast automobile, the bonnet of which stretched ten feet in front of her. The large-spoked and unguarded wheels carried tires that looked woefully skinny and inadequate; eight huge exhaust pipes sprouted from either side of the bonnet, joined into one and stretched the length of the body. The tail of the car was pointed, like a boat, and just forward of the rear wheels two huge drive