by Jeff Noon
This is where the body had been found, hanging from a branch.
Zelda’s body.
A phrase came to his lips, something he’d heard before or read about, but he couldn’t remember where or when: On the edge of town, where the stories flow away…
He batted away a fly and scratched at the back of his neck. He had to wonder why Zelda had travelled so far from her home, why she’d chosen this godforsaken place. Perhaps she didn’t want any of her friends finding her strung up, which made a kind of sense given what he knew of her personality.
He tried to think back on the night they’d spent in Melville Five. Was there any clue at all in her behavior, that might point to suicidal tendencies? He knew that she’d changed towards the end, in their final conversation, when he’d seen her addiction plainly. Maybe all the lost promises had piled up, and tipped over? Or maybe DI Fabien had told it true: she’d been ashamed of the word sickness that was spreading over her skin.
Poor Zelda. And now all he could see were her final moments, the legs jerking, the body arched upwards in a last attempt to claw at life. He shuddered. One thing was certain: the events of that night in Melville were in some way to blame for Zelda’s death.
His thoughts were disturbed as the two kids walked over to join him at the outlet pipe. The girl told him, “This is where they found her, that woman.”
The boy laughed. “She was naked.”
“Did you see her?” Nyquist asked.
“I did. I saw her. I found her.”
“It’s true, he did.” the girl said. “But she wasn’t naked. He’s making that bit up.”
“I’m not!”
“He’s lying, mister.”
Nyquist watched their contest. They were eight or nine years old, already hooked on telling tales, early addicts of the city’s overriding desire to write itself into all the history books that have ever existed, in as many different versions of the truth as possible. Turning words into action, the girl punched the boy in a half playful, half threatening manner, and they scrambled together on the mud bank, their shoes slipping on the wet ground. Nyquist pulled them apart before they fell.
“What do you know about this place?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Who comes out here?”
“Just the two of us, really. It’s a bit of a dump, isn’t it.”
The girl butted in. “They used to kill people here, in the old days. I know that. There was a gallows pole, right where we’re standing.”
Her friend agreed with this. “It’s true. We learned it in school. And now it’s where all the bad stories end up.”
Nyquist asked him what he meant.
“All the stories, mister… all the lousy, unwanted, lonely, disgusting, forgotten stories, all the tales that no one wants in the city, they flow through the pipes, they get flushed clean away and they get pumped out, right here, in the mud and the dirt and the shit.”
The two kids giggled at the word.
Nyquist was confused.
The girl added her own pennyworth. “It’s why we like to come out here, and throw stones in the pond, because you never know what’s going to turn up. Show him, Luke.”
The boy looked left and right, checking for eavesdroppers. But Marlowe’s Field was empty for miles around. Satisfied, he reached into his satchel and pulled out an object wrapped in a dirty handkerchief. This was unwound, revealing a jam jar holding a captured insect. Nyquist took the jar from the boy’s hand and held it up to the light.
“It’s an alphabug,” Luke explained. “We found it yesterday.”
“But I don’t think it’s going to last for much longer,” the girl added.
“It’s dying.”
The insect was black with gold markings, a beetle of some kind. It moved sluggishly over the leaves and soil the kids had packed in the bottom of the jar. Nyquist studied it closely: the markings on the folded wing case resembled the letter Y.
“You should see them at night, mister, when their bodies light up. It’s special! You can see the letters they make in the dark.”
“They write in the darkness.”
“I know,” Nyquist said. “I’ve seen them in the city.”
“Nah, that’s not possible.”
“They don’t like the brightness and the heat. It confuses them.”
“Well, I’ve seen them. Do you have any more of these?”
The girl nodded. “Sure, we catch them all the time. But they don’t live long, that’s the trouble. Pretty much one day and a night, and then they’re gone.”
“They’re just trying to find a mate, Debbie.”
And they both laughed at that, even if they didn’t quite know what it meant.
Luke listed their findings. “We had an A and a B. But we couldn’t ever find a C. But we did have a G, and a K.”
“We had a Z once,” said Debbie, proudly. “Those are rare.”
“Not as rare as the X, though. Nothing’s as rare as that.”
“No one’s ever seen an X beetle, not ever!”
“The alphabugs were crawling all over the dead woman’s face and body.”
“They were not.”
“They were. Right there, as she was dangling from the tree, stark naked. One of them went in her mouth!”
“She wasn’t naked, why do you keep saying that?”
“OK, but the rest is true. And best of all, the woman’s face was covered in words.”
His friend groaned. “You’re making it up.”
“Everything’s made up, silly. The whole world.”
And so the two stories continued, one in battle against the other. Nyquist handed the jam jar back to the lad, asking, “Did you notice anything else, anything strange about the scene?”
“It was strange enough, just on its own.”
It was a good answer. Nyquist looked around in all directions at the flat expanse of the field, this lonely place. A cold chill could be felt, the first hints of the coming autumn.
He said, “Tell me about the rhyme I heard you singing.”
“That old thing? Everyone knows that one.”
The two kids started to sing together.
There was a crooked man and he told a crooked tale,
He scratched a crooked story with a crooked nail.
He wrote a crooked sentence on a crooked page
And sang a crooked song in a little crooked cage.
Their young, pure, exuberant voices mixed in a fragile harmony that drifted far over the field as Nyquist made his way back across over the sodden grass towards his parked car at the end of Plath Lane. Thoughts stirred inside him. He imagined a file on a dusty shelf in an unlit storage room at the police station: Death by her own hand. That was all, Zelda’s memorial.
One more prostitute off the streets. Last name: unknown.
He stopped moving, and wondered about the scrawled remark she had made on the page of manuscript: Nyquist. Find him! But what then, if she had managed to locate him? What did Zelda want? Advice? His help? Something more? He couldn’t know. It was a message from the grave.
An intense awareness came over him; of the land around him, the field he was standing in, each blade of grass, each flower, each sound below and above the kids’ far-off chanting. Bird song, insects buzzing. The humming of the world. Knowledge trembled at the edge of his mind. It was something to do with the story he’d found himself in; or more truthfully, the stories, so many of them, a vast web of connections made up of every separate narrative he was currently occupying, crisscrossing, making the air shimmer with colors and sounds.
He was standing on a nodal point, a hub.
Zelda had died here in this field.
He knelt down. His fingers moved through the blades of wet grass. Something had drawn him, a sparkle in the undergrowth. It was a piece of jewelry, a silver locket. He recognized it as the one Zelda had shown him, or identical to it. He clicked open the lid and looked at the words written inside:
&n
bsp; A picture of my mother.
The chain of the locket was broken, snapped. Pulled loose.
He held it tightly within his closed palm, allowing a new story to form in his eyes.
A struggle. A woman fighting back, fighting for life. Perhaps being carried here, across the field towards the gallows tree. A victim.
A single thought came to him: perhaps Zelda had not taken her own life.
The Words Left Behind
NYQUIST FOUND a narrow alleyway at the end of the row. It was pitch dark. His hands groped ahead of him along the mossy, damp brick walls on each side until he reached the rear of the buildings.
It was almost one in the morning and as far as he could tell he was the only person still awake in the area. There were no street lights, but he managed to locate the back of the office by counting each doorway as he passed. He examined the ground floor window and, as he suspected, the frame was old and rotten, like most things in the district of Chaucer. He used a small chisel to chip away at the wood around one of the panels until the square of glass fell out intact onto his palm. He put a hand through the gap and turned the catch and the window opened. He climbed through and lowered himself down to the inside floor. Only now did Nyquist turn on his torch.
By its light he saw a tiny kitchen and dining area. He walked along a corridor until he reached the main office, where Antonia Linden would meet her clients. It was here, in fact, where Nyquist had first met her, at the start of the Wellborn job. If he had any chance at all of finding out the secrets of Zelda’s death, then this was the place to start: the beginning of the story. The torch beam flitted across the desk and shelving units. A wall calendar showed this month’s chosen writer to worship: James Joyce. Nyquist had tried to read a short story by him once, but nothing much happened in it: no fights, no car chases. He moved on, searching the room. He was hoping to find why Linden had left the office, and where she’d gone to. A home address would be perfect. He opened a filing cabinet and took out a few paper folders: each one held the details of clients, people who wanted their stories to change or disappear: such and such a tale to be erased. He searched through the Ws, but there was no folder marked with Patrick Wellborn’s name. He tried the drawers in the desk, finding pens, pencils, bills, receipts, invoices. The usual paraphernalia.
Nyquist sat down in the chair facing the desk and he turned off the torch. This simple act was enough to bring his previous visit to this office back to life.
Linden had rung Nyquist and asked him to come in and see her, tempting him with the offer of a substantial fee. It had been a clear, warm day when he’d arrived, the sunlight peeking into the narrow walkways and overhanging eaves of Chaucer. He was welcomed in by Harvey, a man who seemed far too damaged and world-weary to merit the word “assistant”: perhaps he’d had his own story erased at some point.
Nyquist had sat here in this same chair, facing Linden across the desk. Her face proudly showed off its age, the wrinkles and lines and the hard-won achievements they hinted at.
“I require you to follow a person of interest for me.”
“What’ve they done wrong?”
“Oh nothing serious, I can assure you. On occasion our more established clients require discretion, above all else. I hope you understand?”
“I can understand most things, for a price.”
Linden had smiled at this. “This is the subject.” She placed a photograph on the desk before him. “His name is Patrick Wellborn. This is his current address.”
Nyquist had studied the man’s face and the address, and nodded. Normally, he would demand further information, but he was still struggling to make his living in Storyville and he agreed to the job without much thought; the fee really was too good to turn down.
“Will you be capable, Mr Nyquist?”
Linden had looked at him with eyes that held secrets, and Nyquist didn’t like too much of what he glimpsed there.
“What exactly is it that you do here?”
“I help people out of difficult circumstances.”
“Are we in the same business then?”
Linden shrugged. “Let’s say this, shall we: you do the dirty work, and I clean up.”
And so the details were arranged: “The subject matter is to be followed from his place of residence each day and evening, with the various routes noted, the places visited, the people met with, descriptions thereof, names if you have them; your report will be handed to my assistant Harvey each morning. He will come to your office for this purpose. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear.” Nyquist shrugged. “But what if something goes wrong?”
“What can go wrong?”
“Maybe this Wellborn doesn’t take to having two shadows.”
“Well then, Mr Nyquist…” Her teeth were on view. “Don’t get too close.”
These had been her final words. Nyquist never saw or spoke to Antonia Linden again; he’d dealt only with the assistant. And now, as he sat alone in the darkened office, he felt that he’d been led a merry dance, he’d been hoodwinked. And all he had to show for it was a dead man and a dead woman, and a whole series of questions. He spent a while going over them in his mind. Wellborn and Zelda had both reached the blank page, to use a typical Storyville phrase. The way it goes.
Or rather, the way Nyquist had let it go.
He stood up and was about to leave when he spotted a wastepaper basket under the desk: it was filled with scrunched-up sheets of typing paper. He unwrapped each one in turn, finding nothing of interest. But then he reached down to the bottom of the bin and found a book, a paperback novel, a copy of Deadly Nightshade by Bradley Sinclair. This was the third copy he’d seen since this case had begun, and that puzzled him.
Nyquist took the book with him as he made his way back towards the kitchen. A narrow stairway led upwards from the corridor; he hadn’t noticed it before. He walked up it and found a storeroom filled with a few odds and ends, cardboard boxes, piles of magazines and files and the like. A smaller room off to the side was empty except for a table and a chair. The wallpaper was a garish flowery design in yellow and blue. He clicked on the art deco reading lamp on the table. It shone down on the bare surface beneath. The room struck him as strange in some way, almost haunted, and he shivered. He thought of Antonia Linden’s true job: erasure. And he imagined stories disappearing here and there across the city’s vast network, the threads breaking apart, one character disconnected from another.
This room was filled with ghosts.
The Next Page
NYQUIST WOKE late, exhausted from a dream that prowled through the darkness of the skull, leaving no traces in the light other than the sense that his skin was covered in ink, jet black ink. He got up, washed, cooked breakfast, checked the mail: junk, junk, junk, a bill, another bill – he pushed them all in a drawer unseen. Within an hour he had set off on his day’s task, retracing the various routes that Patrick Wellborn had taken around Storyville. He hoped to find a pattern, a type of behavior. But Wellborn had been a true wanderer, moving from one story to another seemingly at random. Conan Doyle Park, Poe Terrace, Austen Promenade: from place to place, genre to genre, sentence to sentence, ever moving. Nyquist followed the same twisting routes, passing through different areas of narrative as storytellers sang and orated from the corners, bandstands and soapboxes, some with eager, attentive crowds around them, others with sparser audiences. But whenever Nyquist asked anyone along the way if they knew of a Patrick Wellborn he received only suspicious looks and shakes of the head. Where was he going, what was he looking for, what was Wellborn’s goal? Was Melville Towers his final destination all along? Or had he been drawn there by someone he’d met along the way? Only once did Nyquist get a positive recognition and that was from one of the prostitutes who worked the corner where Nin Lane and Lawrence Road met. He’d seen Wellborn talking to them once or twice, but never to pick any of them up; he always walked on after a brief conversation, and Nyquist had moved on as well, following his subject
matter. But now he stopped and talked to the women.
“Patrick Wellborn? No, sorry, pet, never heard of him.”
“He’s not a regular, not that I know of.”
“Patrick who?”
One after another they spoke up, all answering in the negative. And then he met with a woman who stood apart from the others, hunched in the shadows of a shop doorway as she lit a cigarette for herself. Nyquist joined her in a smoke.
“Let me finish this, love. If you don’t mind waiting?”
“I’m not looking for company.”
“That a fact? What’s your story, then?”
“It’s not my story.”
Now she looked at him with interest. “Well whose is it, then?”
“A man called Patrick. Patrick Wellborn.”
“Oh yeah. I talked to him once.”
“You did?”
She blew a trail of smoke from her lips. “He was quite chatty, as it happens.”