by Jeff Noon
“But you’ve been holding something back, haven’t you?”
She nodded. “We went back to his place and did the business. Afterwards, he fetched a metal plate from the kitchen and placed it on the table in front of me. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper. He asked me to read the words on the paper. And I tried to, I really did, but they just didn’t make any sense, no sense at all.”
“Like the one I found in his wallet?”
“Yes. A different page, but just like that. Exactly. All gobbledegook. But he insisted that I read it a second time, all of it, top to bottom, every word. He wanted me to read it out loud. I really felt like I was taking part in some occult ritual, or something like that. I was getting a bit scared, to be honest. But I read through the story again, if it can be called that, and this time… this time, as I read it…”
“Go on. What happened, Zelda?”
Her eyes glinted and her face took on a glow that had nothing to do with the moonlight, or the bedside lamp.
“As I read the words out loud, I got this feeling inside. Right here…” She touched at her heart. “A warmth. A tingle. It was very… it was pleasurable. It was exquisite!” Her eyes closed momentarily. “Johnny, let me tell you… I’d never felt anything like this, not in all my life.”
“What happened next?”
“Wellborn placed the paper in the bowl and he set fire to it.” She hesitated.
“Keep going.”
“He told me that burning a page was a sacred act, that the spirits of the story would be released by it, into the air, into the mind of the reader.” She laughed. “Oh, don’t give me that look! I know how it sounds. But then…” She breathed in deeply and a look of sheer pleasure came to her face. “He made me inhale the smoke.”
“That’s weird.”
“It was. It was truly weird, actually. But the man was paying, and he was paying well, and I thought, what the hell, what can happen that’s so bad?”
“So you did as he asked?”
“I did.” Zelda bowed her head slightly as she said this, as though reliving the moment. Now she looked up, directly at Nyquist, and he saw the love of life flooding her eyes. Love, or something darker. It worried him.
She continued, “I could feel the smoke in my eyes, entering my lungs. It stung at first, but then I felt the words drifting around inside me. The words on the page, inside my body. It was just incredible. It changed me. I became somebody new. A different person, a better person.”
“And Wellborn was doing the same thing?”
“Oh, he was well travelled. I reckon he’d been doing this for a good while. It’s why I came here to meet him tonight, because of what he promised me. More of the same, he said, but stronger, more powerful. The story folding around me, taking me in, protecting me.”
Nyquist looked away slightly. He needed time to think, to put the pieces together if he could. He recalled the pages he’d seen laid out in apartment 67, including the one with the tooth glued to it. That must’ve been Wellborn’s place of safekeeping. And when Nyquist had torn up one of the pages, Wellborn had then attacked.
Nyquist had destroyed the treasure.
He heard Zelda moaning and turned to see that she was rocking back and forth on the bed, her arms wrapped around her middle.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Can’t you hear them?”
“Who?”
“The voices. They’re calling to me again. Whispering my name. Listen.”
He did so. Hearing only silence this time, below the usual noises of the night.
“I can’t hear them.”
Her own voice took on a harder edge. “I need more.”
“Zelda?”
“Where’s the page, the one you took off Patrick’s body? Where is it?”
“I don’t have it.”
The need powered her voice, her movements. “We could burn it together, both of us.”
“Dreylock took it from me–”
“It’s The Body Library. It’s calling my name.”
“Zelda!”
His raised voice stopped her. Now she looked angry. She stood up. “I’m not leaving this place. I can’t. Not yet. Not until…”
Nyquist followed her across the room, trying to grab hold of her, but she skipped away. The telling of the story of Wellborn and the burning page and the smoke of words and the voices she had heard, all these things had triggered something in her, a new desire. She was possessed.
“Zelda, you can’t stay here.”
“You don’t understand! How can you, you’ve never felt it.”
He held her against the wall.
“Get off me.”
“Zelda…”
“Leave me alone!”
She pushed him away with all her strength. He let himself be pushed. It was true: he couldn’t possibly understand the need she felt. Her eyes glared with a sudden lust for whatever it was that drove her. A new personality was taking over, a new character, and it wasn’t anything good. Yet he was drawn to her. Gently he reached out and she took his hand in hers. The contact was brief, but telling. She relaxed a little and said a terrible thing in a calm voice:
“Story is a demon that visits in the night.”
Nyquist was shocked.
“It crouches on your chest, breathing words.”
“Zelda, don’t say that.”
Her eyes belied the calmness of her voice, and he knew that the demon she spoke of had taken up residence.
“I need to find The Body Library.” Her fingers wrapped tight around his arms, the nails digging in. “Wellborn promised he’d take me there.”
“It’s a book, that’s all. Not a place. Dreylock mentioned it. A manuscript.”
“He told me that all my wishes would come true.”
Nyquist frowned. “Whatever Wellborn promised you, it was a lie, a story.”
“A true story.”
“Zelda, you were brought here on purpose. It’s nothing to do with…”
“Listen!”
Her passion took him over. He had to stop, he had to listen.
The voices… his own name… now he heard it…
Nyquist… Nyquist…
She saw the look in his eyes.
“You see. The book is calling us, calling to us both.”
He quietened her with a gesture.
There was another sound, below the whispering.
Laughter.
One low note, one high. Repeated. Low, high, low, high.
Zelda heard it as well, and she said in a hushed tone, “Who is it?”
He moved away from her and went out into the hallway. It was difficult to tell where the sound was coming from. He checked the living room, the bathroom, the kitchen: all were empty. He opened the front door and went out into the corridor, looking to left and right. There was no one in sight. But he could hear it still, the laughter. Close now, louder. It was mocking him. He walked along the corridor, passing one door after another, each one closed. And then he stopped outside apartment 87. It was the only door in the corridor to have a number on it. The sound came from within. It was the boy laughing. Calvin. The door was ajar. Nyquist pushed it open and stepped inside. He was vaguely aware of Zelda at his back. The hallway was empty. He looked into the living room and saw the tree trunk emerging from the hole in the floor and disappearing into a hole in the ceiling. But this was a different apartment to before, a different part of the tree, with the branches more tangled, the black leaves fuller and more lush. They shone like dark-eyed mirrors, many hundreds of them. Did the tree grow through the entirety of the building? It was all he could imagine.
Nyquist stepped warily into the room. There was a faint wash of moonlight from the window, nothing more. Yet the room was so perfectly lit, so enclosed, so encased, so balanced, so bathed, that he made no attempt to switch on the light. No thoughts plagued him, only that the room welcomed him, it waited for him, it had waited here all night, waited
for him to get here, to find the room, the one room, to wander the corridor and stairwells of the tower of broken stories until he walked in through this doorway, as now, these last steps. He was here. This was his place. There was no other way to think of it. He belonged here. The boy’s laughter mingled with the sound of leaves rustling and twigs creaking, and the song of a bird, a sparrow sitting on a branch, twittering away. Regardless of its circumstances, the creature was happy in its tiny place in the world.
Zelda stood in the doorway, watching Nyquist. She called to him softly, asking him to be careful. She had sobered up now. He hardly heard her. Only the leaves, only the birdsong, only the laughter, until they too fell silent, each in turn. And then he saw a shape in the darkest corner of the room, a shadow moving, nothing more.
It was the boy.
Only his eyes were visible in the shadows, two white orbs staring at him. And then he emerged from the dark, stepping into moonlight. The whispers were heard once more, so many of them filling the space with their invisible bodies, the names of both Nyquist and Zelda being called out, called forth. Calvin reached with his hands and Nyquist came to him. Zelda followed after, drawn by the same spell. They both took those last few steps into the boy’s world. Now he had them.
The leaves of the tree rustled around Nyquist’s head. He was aware of fruit hanging down, of worms in the fruit; he was aware of the boy’s face and eyes, his red mouth moving with the words that came from him, the words that lived inside him, that crept out now from between those lips.
“It’s taken you a time, crooked man.”
“Yes, I know. I lost my way.”
The answer came easily to Nyquist. He was in a trance. Lost, lost totally.
Zelda was at Nyquist’s side, as bound as he was.
The boy said, “Not everyone makes it this far. I gave you some games to play.”
“You did.”
“And now, are you ready to step forward?”
“I am.”
Zelda echoed Nyquist. “I am.”
“We are.”
They spoke as one, one body, one mouth. One decision.
Calvin smiled briefly. He intoned his binding spell: “We are gathered here this night to bind these two into our circle of words and magic. Within our story, let them live anew.” He reached up to a low hanging branch and plucked a globular fruit from it. The peel was red, the flesh white within when he bit into it. The worms writhed. He fed them, Nyquist and Zelda, he fed them the fruit that he had chosen for them, half-eaten: fruit, flesh, saliva, worms and all. The taste of it, both sweet and bitter, had an adverse effect on Nyquist. He came to, observing himself from afar, seeing himself eating the fruit offered to him by a boy, with Zelda at his side, yes, he saw it all, the tree, the moon-washed room, his own body swaying under the spell as it took him over, whatever it was, wherever it might lead, and he screamed, from the depths of his being he screamed aloud, the sound of it lost somewhere between thought and lips.
There was nothing he could do, no other steps he could take.
Now his body took him back and he was lost once more.
The boy was chanting. “Let us bow down, each of us, to King Oberon. Let us partake of the story. The library of the body beckons.”
Nyquist felt one last flicker of recognition: that he was in danger.
And then that too was gone.
His eyes closed.
Ink
… his eyes closed and he sank further down into the dark into the flow the fluid all was fluid a black liquid in which his body floated drifted suspended submerged breathing yes still breathing in the liquid in the blackness of the pool he sank down and lay there suspended and dreaming and being read yes being read head to foot every part of him his mind his thoughts his blood and bone his eyes his limbs his heart yes all of him read again and again as a book of flesh where the ink was seeking the stories all the stories of his life every last one being read by the pool of ink in which he lay suspended drifting floating submerged breathing yes breathing still and being read and his eyes opened in the black and all he could see was the black there was nothing else only the blackness of the ink seeping into his skin in which he floated in which his body was read and read over and over again and his stories taken from him and others given to him in return yes words taken and words given as one story mingled with another in the pool of midnight’s ink closing over him…
Z
WHEN NEXT he opened his eyes Nyquist saw the open sky far above, the night sky with the moon and the stars visible and the faint wash of the Milky Way. It took him a while to realize that he was outside, that he was lying on the ground outside the tower of Melville Five.
He tried to sit up, and groaned in pain as he did so.
A simple thought came to him: I’m free. Somehow or other, I got out of that building. I escaped. He was bruised, cut around the face and hands, aching in his limbs. But most of all: alive. And he prayed to the storytelling gods of the city for letting him get this far.
He looked around, as though seeing the world for the first time. He was sitting on a stone pathway that skirted the outside wall of the building. Strangely, he couldn’t remember how he’d ended up here. He racked his brains for an answer, a single memory, a glimpse of meaning, an image. But there was nothing at all, no answers. He remembered the room with the tree and the fruit and Calvin making his spell. That was all.
He stood up warily, a little shaky on his feet.
The courtyard between the five towers of Melville was empty and quiet, and most of the windows he could see were dark. It must have been the early hours of the morning. A humming noise disturbed him. He looked for its source and was drawn to a fissure in the building’s wall: an insect was just leaving its nest, crawling along the brickwork. A beetle, it looked like, large and dark of body. But then the creature’s wing case clicked open and it launched itself into the night, and its body glowed in the air, transformed into a bright yellow bulb in the shape of the letter A. Another glow bug followed, and then one more, these two describing the letters K and M with their luminous bodies. Nyquist tried to follow them in their flight, but they darted hither and thither around his head.
And then he saw a figure, over by an adjacent tower, a dark figure. This person made a gesture, a signal of some kind, a wave perhaps.
It was a woman, he saw that now. The woman he’d met earlier. His companion on this night’s story. Somehow or other, they had both escaped.
And yet. And yet…
He couldn’t remember her name.
The lack pained him.
Nyquist started to walk towards her. It was a simple plan: wherever she led, he would follow. He passed a pair of drunken middle-aged men, poor souls who could not give up on the day’s stories. Like himself. He felt that he was moving through a dream: he was tired and his mind flickered with a sense of unreality, so much so that he saw more and more of the glow bugs encircling him, each of their bodies lit up with a different letter of the alphabet. He was haloed by language. The bugs flitted about. They stirred his eyes with their colors, and he reached up and actually took one in his hand, quite easily, the letter Z, plucking it from the air, gently, gently. He could feel the insect pulsating in his closed palm, its warmth heating his skin and its yellow light showing between his clenched fingers like a lamp. A single word entered his mind.
The word was Zelda.
Yes, that was right. Now he remembered. Her name.
But when he looked up again, when he scanned the streets all around, the woman was gone, lost from sight. Nyquist was alone.
He opened his fingers and the captured beetle took flight. But his palm was not empty: a small amount of pulpy substance remained, of no proper color or shape. He tried to cast it away but the substance clung to his fingers. A residue. The night’s tale had left its mark upon him.
He moved on at last, away from the five towers. His heart was heavy.
Zelda, Zelda…
It was like this: a man a
nd a woman had walked the same story path for a while, a few hours. And then parted. That should be enough.
Surely it was.
Part Two
AT THE END OF PLATH LANE
A Second Telling
NYQUIST LIVED and worked in A.C. Clarke Town, a small precinct some way from the center of the city. It was a low-rent area and he could afford a three-room flat. The front room served as his office, and he lived and slept and ate in the back room. The third room, the bathroom, was tiny, but adequate. It was enough. He had few expectations in life, and merely desired a place to live, to spend time alone, to make himself anew. He existed on small town cases and small town money, and got by, making a few friends along the way and a few enemies. He could handle both, keeping friends and foes at a suitable distance. This was a city where words were currency, and stories the life blood that kept the people and the place moving forward, and he was happy to be one more minor character in the narrative. Yes, the people’s flow of words kept him going, it worked as whisky used to work: stirring the soul, hiding the pain. But sometimes, despite all his precautions, the faces of people he had lost along the way – either dead or missing or blurred forever in the mind’s eye – would pile in and assail him, most often at night as he lay on the edge of sleep. At such moments he would often get out of bed and walk through to his office. Here he would sit at his desk to type out a few more pages of his own novel, A Man of Shadows, based on his experiences in the city of his birth.
Life continued in this manner. Once a week his narrative officer would visit and ask about the stories Nyquist was currently involved in. The officer was called Bella Monroe, a woman of middling years and soft to middling temperament. He could never work out how such a person should end up working for a council department with such a terrible reputation. She always wore the same outfit on every visit: a threadbare brown trouser suit and a white, ruffled blouse buttoned high at the neck, almost tight enough to cut off the circulation. Her hair was long and thick and greying here and there and brushed back from her brow in waves. She kept it in place with a pair of eyeglasses which, when lowered over her eyes, gave her the look of a creature in constant surprise at the world’s nature. Nyquist knew her husband had passed away a few years back, that she had no children. From a hint or two he also knew that she was in love with someone, a man whose name he didn’t know. Nyquist liked her. He appreciated her understanding of his life, his struggles to fall into step with the city’s mode of being; and she seemed to sense within him the darkness, the troubles he’d run away from, the need to conform, to find a good, peaceful story and settle into it. No doubt she’d witnessed such a need many times in newcomers.