'I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,' I told him sadly, 'but in all honesty the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only offer yourself and any others who survived my protection.'

He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candour. I looked beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.

'Are there any other Shakespeares here?' asked Bowden.

'Only myself — yet the night echoes with the cries of my cousins,' replied Shgakespeafe. 'You will hear them anon.'

As if in answer there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.

'We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,' said Shgakespeafe, looking around nervously. 'Follow me and give me audience, friends.'

He led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of paper — the product of Shgakespeafe's outpourings. He led us across and gave us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all — merely scraps of existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters, their minds filled with the Bard's plays, and scientists moving among them trying to find one, just one, who had even one half the talent of the original.

Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there showed us mounds and mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in the future to peruse. I looked again at the mound of paperwork. There must have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, mouldy and unstable.