The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [363]
“Where’s the Minotaur?” asked Havisham, who suddenly appeared close by.
I told her he had ejected with Snell’s fedora and she vanished without another word.
Bradshaw reappeared from the keep, dragging Snell behind him. The rubber on Akrid’s MV Mask had turned to blubber, his suit to soot. Bradshaw removed him from Sword of the Zenobians to the Jurisfiction sick bay just as Miss Havisham returned. We watched together as the stacked dictionaries rose around the remains of Perkins’s laboratory, twenty feet thick at the base, rising to a dome like a sugarloaf over the castle keep. It might have taken a long time but there were many Mrs. Danvers, they were highly organized and they had an inexhaustible supply of dictionaries.
“Find the Minotaur?” I asked Havisham.
“Long gon. There will be hell to pay about this, I assure you!”
When our carrots had returned to being crunchy vegetables, and the last vestiges of parrotness had been removed, Havisham and I pulled off our vyrus masks and tossed them in a heap—the dictionary filters were almost worn out.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“It is torched,” replied Tweed, who was close by, “it is the only way to destroy the vyrus.”
“What about the evidence?” I asked.
“Evidence?” echoed Tweed. “Evidence of what?”
“Perkins,” I replied. “We don’t know the full details of his death.”
“I think we can safely say he was killed and eaten by the Minotaur,” said Tweed, borrowing Havisham’s not-to-be-questioned voice. “It’s too dangerous to go back in, even if we wanted to. I’d rather torch this now than risk spreading the vyrus and having to demolish the whole book and everything in it—do you know how many creatures live in here?”
He lit a flare.
“You’d better stand clear.”
The DanverClones were leaving now, vanishing with a faint pop, back to wherever they had been pulled from. Bradshaw and I withdrew as Tweed threw the flare on the pile of dictionaries. They burst into flames and were soon so hot that we had to withdraw to the gatehouse, the black smoke that billowed into the sky taking with it the remnants of the vyrus—and the evidence of Perkins’s murder. Because I was sure it was murder. When we had walked into the Minotaur’s vault, I had noticed that the key was missing from its hook. Someone had let the Minotaur out.
18.
Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane
I didn’t notice it straightaway but Vernham, Nelly and Lucy all had the same surname: Deane. They weren’t related. In the Outland this happens all the time, but in fiction it is rare; the problem is aggressively attacked by the echolocators (qv), who insist that no two people in the same book have the same name. I learned years later that Hemingway once wrote a book that was demolished because he insisted that every single one of the eight characters was named Gordon.
THURSDAY NEXT,
The Jurisfiction Chronicles
THE MINOTAUR HAD given Havisham the slip and was last seen heading towards the works of Zane Grey; the semibovine wasn’t stupid—he knew we’d have trouble finding him amidst a cattle drive. Snell lasted another three hours. He was kept in an isolation tent made of fine plastic sheeting that had been overprinted with pages from the Oxford English Dictionary. We were in the sick bay of the Anti-mispeling Fast Response Group. At the first sign of any deviant mispeling, thousands of these volumes were shipped to the infected book and set up as barrages either side of the chapter. The barrage was then moved in, paragraph by paragraph, until the vyrus was forced into a single sentence, then word, then smothered completely. Fire was not an option in a published work; they had tried it once in Samuel