'You have centaurs here?'

'And satyrs, troglodytes, chimeras, elves, fairies, dryads, sirens, Martians, leprechauns, goblins, harpies, aliens, Daleks, trolls – you name it.' Perkins smiled. 'A large proportion of unpublished novels are in the fantasy genre, and most of them feature mythical beasts. Whenever one of those books gets demolished I can usually be found down at the salvage yard. It would be a shame to reduce them to text now, wouldn't it?'

'Do you have unicorns?' I asked.

'Yes.' Perkins sighed. 'Sack-loads. More than I know what to do with. I wish potential writers would be more responsible with their creations. I can understand children writing about them, but adults should know better. Every unicorn in every demolished story ends up here. I had this idea for a bumper sticker. "A unicorn isn't for page twenty-seven, it's for eternity." What do you think?'

'I think you won't be able to stop people writing about them. How about taking the horn off and seeking placement in pony books?'

'I'll pretend I didn't hear that,' replied Perkins stonily, adding: 'We have dragons, too. We can hear them sometimes, at night when the wind is in the right direction. When – or if – Pellinore captures the Questing Beast it will come to live here. Somewhere a long way away, I hope. Careful – don't tread in the orc shit. You're an Outlander, aren't you?'

'Born and bred.'

'Has anyone realised that platypuses and sea horses are fictional?'

'Are they?'

'Of course – you don't think anything that weird could have evolved by chance, do you? By the way, how do you like Miss Havisham?'

'I like her a great deal.'

'So do we all. I think she quite likes us, too, but she'd never admit it.'

We had arrived at the inner keep and Perkins pushed open the door. Inside was his office and laboratory. One wall was covered with glass jars filled with odd creatures of all shapes and sizes, and on the table was a partially dissected grammasite. Within its gut were words in the process of being digested into letters.

'I'm not really sure how they do it,' said Perkins, prodding at the carcass with a spoon. 'Have you met Mathias?'

I looked around but could see nothing but a large chestnut horse whose flanks shone in the light. The horse looked at me and I looked at the horse, then past the horse – but there was no one else in the room. The penny dropped.

'Good morning, Mathias,' I said as politely as I could. 'I'm Thursday Next.'

Perkins laughed out loud and the horse brayed and replied in a very deep voice:

'Delighted to make your acquaintance, madam. Permit me to join you in a few moments?'

I agreed and the horse returned to what I now saw were some complicated notes it was writing in a ledger open on the floor. Every now and then it paused and dipped the quill that was attached to its hoof into an inkpot and wrote in a large copperplate script.