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' murder. Because I was sure it was murder. When we walked into the 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 straight away 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 (q.v.), 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 Geoff.'

THURSDAY NEXT – TheJurisfiction Chronicles

The minotaur had given Havisham the slip and was last seen heading towards the works of Zane Grey; the semi-bovine wasn't stupid – he knew we'd have trouble finding him amongst a cattle drive. Snell lasted another three hours. He was kept in an isolation tent made of fine plastic sheeting that had been over-printed with pages from the Oxford English Dictionary. We were in the sickbay 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 a word, then smothered completely. Fire was not an option in a published work; they had tried it once in Samuel Pepys' Diary and burnt down half of London.

'Does he have any family?' I asked.

'Snell was a loner detective, Miss Next,' explained the doctor. 'Perkins was his only family.'

'Is it safe to go up to him?'

'Yes – but be prepared for some mispelings.'

I sat by his bed while Havisham stood and spoke quietly with the doctor. Snell lay on his back and was breathing with small shallow gasps, the pulse on his neck racing – it wouldn't be long before the vyrus took him away and he knew it. I leaned closer and held his hand through the sheeting. His complexion was pail, his breething laboured, his skein covered in painful and unsightly green pastilles. As I wotched, his dry slips tried to foam worlds but all he could torque was ninsense.

'Thirsty!' he squeeked. 'Wode – Cone, udder whirled – doughnut Trieste—!'