The well of lost plots by Jasper Fforde Page A

into an inkpot and wrote in a large copperplate script.
    “A Houyhnhnm?” I asked. “Also from
Gulliver’s Travels
?”
    Perkins nodded. “Mathias, his mare and the two Yahoos were all used as consultants for Pierre Boulle’s 1963 remake:
La planète des singes
.”
    “Louis Aragon once said,” announced Mathias from the other side of the room, “that the function of geniuses was to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years on.”
    “I hardly think that Boulle was a cretin, Mathias,” said Perkins, “and anyway, it’s always the same with you, isn’t it? ‘Voltaire said this,’ ‘Baudelaire said that.’ Sometimes I think that you just, just—”
    He stopped, trying to think of the right words.
    “Was it da Vinci who said,” suggested the horse helpfully, “that anyone who quotes authors in discussion is using their memory, not their intellect?”
    “Exactly,” replied the frustrated Perkins, “what I was about to say.”
    “
Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis
,” murmured the horse, staring at the ceiling in thought.
    “The only thing
that
proves is how pretentious you are,” muttered Perkins. “It’s always the same when we have visitors, isn’t it?”
    “Someone has to raise the tone in this miserable backwater,” replied Mathias, “and if you call me a ‘pseudo-erudite ungulate’ again, I shall bite you painfully on the buttock.”
    Perkins and the horse glared at one another.
    “You said there was a pair of Houyhnhnms?” I asked, trying to defuse the situation.
    “My partner, my love, my mare,” explained the horse, “is currently at Oxford,
your
Oxford — studying political science at All Souls.”
    “Don’t they notice?” I asked. “A horse, at Oxford?”
    “You’d be surprised how unobservant some of the professors are,” replied Perkins. “Napoleon the pig studied Marxism at Nuffield. Got a first, too. This way. I keep the Minotaur in the dungeons. You are fully conversant with the legend?”
    “Of course,” I replied. “It’s the half-man, half-bull offspring of King Minos’ wife, Pasiphaë.”
    “Spot on.” Perkins chuckled. “The tabloids had a field day: ‘Cretan Queen in Bull Love-Child Shock.’ We built a copy of the labyrinth to hold it, but the Monsters’ Humane Society insisted two officials inspect it first.”
    “And?”
    “That was over twelve years ago; I think they’re still in it. I keep the Minotaur in here.”
    He opened a door that led into a vaulted room below the old hall. It was dark and smelt of rotten bones and sweat.
    “Er, you do keep it locked up?” I asked as my eyes struggled to see in the semidark.
    “Of course!” he replied, nodding towards a large key hanging from a hook. “What do you think I am, an idiot?”
    As my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, I could see that the back half of the vault was caged off with rusty iron bars. A door in the center was secured with a ridiculously large padlock.
    “Don’t get too near,” warned Perkins as he took a steel bowl down from a shelf. “I’ve been feeding him on yogurt for almost five years, and to be truthful he’s getting a bit bored.”
    “Yogurt?”
    “With some bran mixed in. Feeding him on Grecian virgins was too expensive.”
    “Wasn’t he slain by Theseus?” I asked, as a dark shape started moving at the back of the vault accompanied by a low growling noise. Even with the bars I really wasn’t happy to be there.
    “Usually,” replied Perkins, ladling out some yogurt, “but mischievous Generics took him out of a copy of Graves’s
The Greek Myths
in 1944 and dropped him in Stalingrad. A sharp-eyed Jurisfiction agent figured out what was going on and we took him out — he’s been here ever since.”
    Perkins filled the steel bowl with yogurt, mixed in some bran from a large dustbin and then placed the bowl on the floor a good five feet from the bars. He pushed the dish the remainder of the way with the handle of a floor mop.
    As we watched, the