by Jeff Noon
He watched Officer Monroe now, as she worked. She carried with her at all times a selection of notebooks, a slide rule, and several pens of different colors. Storylines were notated, locations marked on a street atlas, the names of all known participants recorded. Of course sometimes Nyquist followed the wishes of his clients more than the council’s, hiding personal details, changing names and so on, but more or often than not he obeyed the law. Many cautionary tales were whispered about the council’s methods of extraction, if a story turned out to contain criminal elements.
Bella Monroe tapped at her notepad. “Anything else, John?”
“That’s it.”
“If you don’t mind me saying, it all seems rather paltry.”
“What can I do?”
“Unfaithful husbands, embezzled funds. A lost cat? Really?”
“Stolen, Bella. A stolen cat.”
“Quite. But still…”
“It pays the rent. Just about.”
Monroe looked at the private eye over the tip of her eyeglasses. “You know, you’ve been here now for what is it…”
“Three months. A little more.”
“Usually, after such a period we expect our citizens to be taking part in slightly more complex or intriguing narratives.”
“Nothing ever happens to me.”
“Well make it happen, Mr Nyquist! Make it happen.”
A tremble of exasperation shot through Monroe, but then she settled herself once more and studied her open notebook for a few moments. Nyquist had to feel for her: every week this same conversation took place, and every week Monroe made her notes and went away, back to her office deep in one of the council’s buildings.
At last she closed her notebook. “Well, the city’s grand narrative will not be troubled by your exploits. Not quite yet. Tell me, how is the novel coming along?”
“Slowly.”
“One word a day?” It was said with a smile.
“Two. If inspiration strikes.”
Monroe studied the private eye again. “I’ve been doing this job for more than twenty years now.”
“You’ve mentioned that, yes.”
“And over that time, certain instincts have been honed. And I believe… I truly believe that you’re holding out on me.”
Nyquist looked back at the officer, hoping not to give anything away.
Monroe kept her voice even as she spoke: “I think you’ve been involved in another story. A tantalizing story. A dangerous story, even. What do you say?”
He shrugged.
“You know you can be fined for hiding stories. And perhaps, worse…”
“Easy on the threats, Bella. I’ve got nothing to tell you.”
Nyquist’s voice had risen, just a little, enough to make Monroe bristle. They stared at each other in silence. The blades of the desk fan made the only noise in the room.
He said, “The last office fan I had, it had a bullet hole in one blade.”
“What are you saying?”
“This one hasn’t.” He paused. “It’s how I know my life is better now.”
Monroe blew out a breath. “Very well. Nothing to report.” She started to collect her things together. “If you insist.”
Nyquist stood up to show the officer out. But at the door he stopped her and asked, “Is it possible for a person to be taken over by a story?”
“How do you mean?”
“Say they’re having trouble telling where the story begins, or ends. Maybe the story is just as real as life. Just as real, just as vivid.”
Monroe shook her head sadly. “There are such conditions, yes.”
“Tell me about them.”
“Well, some of them are self-induced. Others are brought about by the use of certain preparations.”
“Preparations? You mean drugs?”
“Listen to me, John…”
Nyquist moved away from the door. Monroe watched him carefully. The private eye looked agitated; he was rubbing at his face with one hand, while the other, clenched into a fist, rapped at the desktop repeatedly.
“We advise people against the use of such things. Really, we do. They are designed to inhibit the mind’s sense of reality, and replace it with another.”
“So they can make you believe in things that never happened?”
“Yes, perhaps. But they’re unsafe. They can lead to–” She broke off. “Why are you asking this?”
“No reason. None at all.”
“Well then.” Bella Monroe hovered in the doorway, wondering what to say for the best. In the end all she could manage was, “Tread carefully. Some stories are best left untold.”
Nyquist didn’t reply. The narrative officer left him there, daylight streaming through the blinds, the desk fan cutting his thoughts into ribbons of black and white.
Zelda…
Often she came to his mind. Her face as it was, as she talked about her real reasons for being in Melville Five: how she needed to escape the story demon sitting on her chest, breathing words into her sleeping face. It was a frightening image.
And he remembered Zelda’s story of the burning manuscript pages, the smoke rising, how it made her feel that she was a different person. Perhaps the ink on the paper itself had some property to it, some psychotropic quality? Maybe it had seeped into Nyquist’s fingertips as he read the page from The Body Library he’d found in Wellborn’s pocket? It was possible. It was easy to imagine the people of Storyville resorting to such practices: anything to make the story come alive, to intensify the drama of their lives. Tricks of the mind. And he thought of his own experiences in the tower – the sense of being trapped in a labyrinth, the helplessness. He remembered it as he might a dream.
Often he felt a sadness within, and it ate at him, daily, nightly. He should never have let Zelda go at the end, he should have chased her through the streets and taken her in his arms and kissed her madly, like some dumb hero in a throwaway romance pamphlet.
But her own story had taken her elsewhere, dragged her away.
Three days had passed since the visit to Melville Towers, since the death of Patrick Wellborn. Memories of that night wavered like smoke before his eyes. How on earth had he and Zelda escaped the building? He could remember plainly the boy Calvin speaking to him, but the words themselves were no more discernible than an ancient text scrawled on a moss-covered stone. They must’ve been carried out, that was it: perhaps Vito and Lionel had helped. Who could tell what any of them were up to, in that place.
And right there and then Nyquist was standing once more in the bedroom of apartment 67 with Patrick Wellborn lying on the floor, his head a pulpy mess and the blood and hair already sticking to Nyquist’s hands.
It sent a shudder through him.
Of course he’d thought about going to the police. Yesterday morning he’d got as far as the main entranceway of the precinct station, only to decide against it at the last minute. And he’d lived in trepidation ever since, expecting them to arrive at his office at any minute, asking questions, blaming him for Wellborn’s murder. But nothing had happened, he’d been left alone. And no mention had been made in the Storyville Reporter about the body being found. Nyquist could only think that Dreylock or some other party had removed the corpse and hidden it somewhere, covered up all evidence of the death.
And last night, safe in his bed, he had dreamed that Patrick Wellborn was still alive, back at home with some imagined happy family, or else laughing and drinking with his friends in a bar.
The morning’s light burned such thoughts clean away.
Nyquist felt sick and weary. He had to be in charge of his own tale, that was the number one rule of the city, everyone had drilled it into him.
Tell your own tale. Make it real, goddamnit!
He left his office. He paced the afternoon streets like a ghost in search of a human body to inhabit. He was tempted by narrators and raconteurs of all persuasions on every corner; prostitutes called to him from alleyways, offering the best story
he’d ever been told; young beggars or kids playing truant prattled around him, trying to sell him penny dreadful tales of evil deeds and hideous mutilated corpses. He ignored them all and walked on until he reached Rabelais Plaza, where his own story had taken such a dreadful turn. The festival was coming to an end at last and so the streets were a little emptier, but there were still many shoppers and tourists about. Nyquist felt he was cut off from all their narratives. He walked alone, along a single strand that led through the streets and into the dark alleyway he had taken that night, following Wellborn. Why? Why was he doing this? He was a man who revisits his own wound with his fingers every day, a self-doubting Thomas. He knew well enough that a story path can never be walked twice, not without changes creeping in. Yet here he was, travelling in his own footsteps.
The alleyway, he now saw, was called Betjeman’s Way; he couldn’t imagine a place further removed from that particular poet’s daydreams of a lost England, the sun beating down on young women playing tennis and stopping for afternoon tea. Rather, the alleyway was filled with litter, graffiti, animal excrement, piles of empty boxes, a rat or two, dustbins overflowing next to locked doors. The place stank of rot and filth. He hadn’t noticed any of this four nights ago, fully engaged as he’d been with the task ahead, the shadowing.
He stepped out from the end of the alley into daylight once more and looked across Calvino Road to the five towers of Melville. The estate gave off a very different atmosphere in the daytime; looking more benign, and more decrepit. But then as he drew nearer he noticed signs of life: a woman hanging out washing on a balcony of the first tower, two girls playing hopscotch in the car park, a group of men working on a van, the engine lying in pieces around them. They nodded at Nyquist as he passed, and one of the young girls ran rings round him. He stopped outside the entrance to tower number five, but he couldn’t bring himself to enter the lobby. The place seemed to have a negative magic about it, a spell to keep out strangers and the unwanted. As he hesitated, two women walked by along the pathway, each one carrying a bundle of laundry. One of them said, “I wouldn’t go in there, love, if I were you.”
“Why not?”
“Nothing good will come of it,” her friend said. “Nothing at all.”
“No one lives there.”
“No one good, that is.”
The women walked on. Nyquist entered the building. He pressed for the elevator and straight away a bell dinged and the door opened. The car was empty. He darted inside. He saw the buttons for the different floors, all seventeen of them, and he saw that the ground floor was clearly marked. There was nothing suspicious here, nothing to remind him of the night of death and confusion, when he and Zelda couldn’t find their way outside, no matter how they tried. Perhaps then he’d been too weak, too beaten, too drugged up, to really see his way forward. He pressed the button for the sixth floor. The car started to ascend. Immediately he felt his stomach cramp with fear, and sweat break out on his brow. The thought of what he was doing set his whole body trembling, head to foot. He had killed a man here, in this building. One thousand tiny incidents made up the story of his life, up to the moment when he had smashed his assailant’s head against the wall. Nyquist closed his eyes and prayed for the dread to subside. At the sixth floor he exited the car and walked down the corridor towards apartment 67. Everything looked the same as it had on his previous visit, but perfectly normal now, without any sign of threat. The building was empty, that was obvious: he could smell damp, rot, loneliness and abandonment. He paused outside the apartment and rang the bell. Nobody answered. No one came to greet him, no one spoke or welcomed him inside, or explained the events of the previous night in a perfectly logical manner.
The door remained closed.
Nyquist couldn’t face the elevator a second time so he took the stairs, all six floors, down to the lobby. He walked outside and he stood in the clean bright air, trying to calm himself. It took a while, but eventually he traced his steps back through the streets to where he’d parked his car. He drove out to Chaucer, a precinct to the southwest of the city. This was one of the oldest districts, its foundations first set down in the medieval period. Now it was a tumble of crooked houses and churches squeezed into a maze of narrow side streets, many of the older buildings converted into cheap apartments or offices. Among a ragbag of small factories and bargain stores he found the office of A. P. Linden Associates. He’d been here just once before, when he’d first taken on the job of following Patrick Wellborn. Antonia Linden was a tough-natured businesswoman in her thirties. The office gave little away about her personality: a dull job-lot of furniture and fittings, nondescript prints on the wall, a bored assistant called Harvey. But this tumbledown building stacked between two larger premises was the first sentence of a story that eventually led to Melville Towers and the blood on his hands.
Nyquist rang the bell and waited. He looked through the dusty window and saw an empty reception desk, with no sign of activity. This wasn’t right; it was only four o’clock, they should still be at work. He was about to walk away when an elderly woman appeared at the door of the tailor’s shop next door.
“There’s no one there,” she said to Nyquist.
“Is that right?”
“The place has been locked up and empty for days. No staff, no customers. A typical fly-by-night, if you ask me.”
“How do you mean?”
The woman came forward, obviously keen to impart her knowledge. “Around here companies tend to come and go.”
“I see.” Nyquist stared at the locked door. “Well, thank you.”
“Did she owe you money?”
“No.” It was a lie; there was still an amount owing, but Nyquist had cast such demands aside; he wanted only the truth of the story he had fallen into.
Quickly he invented a story. “I’m an old friend of Antonia’s. Just looking her up, while I was in town.”
“She might come back to work one day, who knows.”
Nyquist mused on this. “I heard she ran an investigative agency.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“What’s the other way?”
“Linden worked on people’s stories. On the narratives of life.”
Nyquist must’ve looked confused, because the next-door neighbor started to explain: “Sometimes she completed people’s stories for them, for good or for ill. But most of the time she erased them.”
“Erasure?”
“Surely. Don’t you have a few incidents you’d rather had never happened? Things you don’t want to tell the council about?”
“Of course, of course.”
It gave Nyquist much to think about as he drove back to his office, through the now crowded streets. He remembered what Officer Monroe had said to him: some stories are best left untold. Well, it was too late for such caution. The task of following Wellborn was taking on other aspects, it was turning even darker, more mysterious. Just who had employed Linden to unwrite their story? And why had Nyquist been given the shadowing job?
As he walked upstairs to his first floor apartment he saw a man and a woman standing outside the door. Immediately he pegged them as detectives; he’d seen enough of them over the years to recognize that precise mixture of determination and world-weariness.
It was too late to retreat; the female officer had already spotted him.
“John Henry Nyquist?”
“That’s what my mother named me. What of it?”
The woman didn’t respond at all to his attitude. Her eyes were green and bright and set as the only precious things in an otherwise cold face. They gave Nyquist hope that a human being was alive in there, somewhere.
She showed her warrant card and gave herself a name: “Detective Inspector Molloy. And this…” she nodded to her partner, “this is DS Fabien.”
Nyquist looked at them both.
“We need to talk to you,” Molloy said.
“Talk away.” He made to push past her and unlock his door, but she
stopped him with a touch on his sleeve.
“It’s about a dead body.”
Nyquist could feel again the splatter of Patrick Wellborn’s blood and the torn-out hair and no matter how he tried, they would not be removed.
His hands would never be cleansed.
The Body In Question
NOT A word was said between them. The only sound came from their footsteps echoing down the bare, grey corridor. Molloy walked at Nyquist’s side, Fabien slightly behind them both. They signed in and went through into a viewing room. Nyquist was directed towards a large window, where he stood waiting until a curtain was pulled aside from within, and then he stared through the glass at the inner room. The walls, floor and ceiling were white all over, a room without human atmosphere. He looked at the dead body that lay on the trestle bed just a few feet away, its form covered by a sheet as white and as clean as the walls. All reminders of life had been removed. A morgue attendant folded back the sheet, revealing the upper shoulders and head of the corpse.
It wasn’t Patrick Wellborn. It was the face of a woman. Her features were distorted, pulled to the side and upwards as though by a great force, and a darker ring of flesh was visible around the neck, red at the edges and a darker color within. It looked like she’d been strangled. There were some other markings on the face and body, disfigurements of some kind. He couldn’t make them out properly. Had she been beaten up, prior to the death?