'It's probably nothing but I'll go and have a look,' said Snell, staring into space. He turned to look at us, saw Mr Grnksghty glaring at him and waved absently before going outside the shop, still talking.

'Where were we, young lady?'

'You were talking about Charlotte Brontë ordering backstories and then not using them.'

'Oh, yes.' The man smiled, delicately turning a tap on the apparatus and watching a small drip of an oily coloured liquid fall into a flask. 'I made the most wonderful backstory for both Edward and Bertha Rochester, but do you know she only used a very small part of it?'

'That must have been very disappointing.'

'It was.' He sighed. 'I am an artist, not a technician. But it didn't matter. I sold it lock, stock and barrel a few years back to The Wide Sargasso Sea. Harry Flashman from Tom Brown's Schooldays went the same way. I had Mr Pickwick's backstory for years but couldn't make a sale – I donated it to the Jurisfiction museum.'

'What do you make a backstory out of, Mr Grnksghty?' ,

'Treacle, mainly,' he replied, shaking the flask and watching the oily substance change to a gas, 'and memories. Lots of memories. In fact, the treacle is really only there as a binding agent. Tell me, what do you think of this upgrade to Ultra Word™?'

'I have yet to hear about it properly,' I admitted.

'I particularly like the idea of ReadZip™,' mused the small man, adding a drop of red liquid and watching the result with great interest. 'They say they will be able to crush War and Peace into eighty-six words and still retain the scope and grandeur of the original.'

'Seeing is believing,' I replied.

'Not down here,' Mr Grnksghty corrected me. 'Down here, reading is believing.'

There was a pause as I took this in.

'Mr Grnksghty?'

'Yes?'

'How do you pronounce your name?'

At that moment Snell strolled back in.

'That was Miss Havisham,' he announced, retrieving his head. 'Thank you for your time, Mr Grnksghty – come on, we're off.'

Snell led me down the corridor past more shops and traders until we arrived at the bronze-and-wood elevators. The doors opened and several small street urchins ran out holding cleft sticks with a small scrap of paper wedged in them.

'Ideas on their way to the books-in-progress,' explained Snell as we stepped into the elevator. 'Trading must have just started. You'll find the Idea Sales and Loan department on the seventeenth floor.'

The elevator plunged rapidly downwards.

'Are you still being bothered by junk footnoterphones?'

'A little.'⁸

'You'll get used to ignoring them.'

The bell sounded and the elevator doors slid open, introducing a chill wind. It was darker than the floor we had just visited and several disreputable-looking characters stared at us from the shadows. I moved to get out but Snell stopped me. He looked about and whispered:

'This is the twenty-second sub-basement. The roughest place in the Well. A haven for cut-throats, bounty hunters, murderers, thieves, cheats, shape-shifters, scene-stealers, brigands and plagiarists.'