by Jeff Noon
“Can you answer me?”
He hadn’t been given the overseer’s name, only her title. She was old and withered in face and body, with lined features and fragile limbs, but despite her outward appearance she exuded power and confidence. Yet Nyquist kept seeing glimpses of something beneath that, shown in an occasional facial tic, or the sudden trembling of her hands. She was nervous. Something was troubling her, and her colleagues, and anyone with any kind of authority on the council.
“You’ve kept me here all day,” he said. “Locked up.”
“Yes, I’m sorry about that. I needed to meet with my fellow seers, to discuss your case.”
“And now you expect me to just answer your questions.”
“Yes, that would be useful.”
Nyquist had been searched and photographed, and then placed in a tiny cell with a bench along one wall and a toilet in the corner. The walls were covered in scrawled writing: names, dates, slogans, lines from favorite stories and poems, made-up rhymes both dirty and heartfelt, nonsense limericks and misspelt cries from the heart. These were messages left there by previous occupants, other poor souls called in for questioning. The walls of the cell were a novel in themselves, a book of escape with no ending. No food or drink had been offered to him beyond a jug of water. At one point Nyquist had howled in frustration, howled like a wild beast at the covered light bulb above his head, a cheap substitute for the moon. Nobody heard him. And so the hours went by; he had no way of knowing how many. At one point he’d lain down on the bench and managed to fall asleep, at least for a little while. In a dream the walls of his cell had spoken to him: a wordless, blighted, hopeless dirge, and he awoke feeling even worse than before. Some time later the door had opened at last, and he’d been marched to the overseer’s office, on some upper floor of Kafka Court.
“Useful in what way?” he now asked.
“To the city’s wellbeing.”
“I don’t believe that’s the case.”
The overseer peered at him. She said, “There is something terrible and possibly very evil happening to our city. For all of our knowledge of the city’s stories, none of us here really know what it is that threatens us. But we fear for the people. A number of them have already fallen ill, one or two have died. That’s the truth, Mr Nyquist.”
Still he hesitated.
“Or perhaps you would prefer to go back to your cell?”
“I’ll speak.” He took a moment to locate the start. “I was given the job of following Wellborn. I had to find out where he went during the day, and at night, to note the kind of people he talked to, to remember streets and districts he traveled through. And so on.”
“Who employed you in this task?”
“An agency run by a woman called Antonia Linden.”
“And the purpose of this agency?”
“Erasure.”
The overseer bristled. The word sent a shiver through her. Her mouth, hardly visited by joy to begin with, folded inwards to a thin straight line, and her hands curled around into claws. She groaned. But with an effort she managed to relax.
“Good. You’re being very cooperative.”
The overseer rested her elbows on her desk and put her hands together in an attitude of prayer. She had the look of a corpse found in a Saxon grave or a peat bog, her face creased and folded in many places, peppered with liver spots, her eyes rheumy, her teeth discolored when she opened her mouth. Nyquist couldn’t imagine which god or goddess she was praying to – probably to a deity of words, or writing, or writers – but nowhere in her face could he make out a sign of beatitude.
“Why did this Linden woman want Patrick Wellborn’s story erased?”
“She never said. I believe she was doing it on behalf of a client.”
“And who would that be?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well… Linden was certainly very successful at her job. You already know, I think, that Officer Wellborn has disappeared.”
Nyquist felt uneasy. The hours of isolation were catching up on him; he was hungry and tired and his body ached from the hard bench and the confines of his cell. Yet he needed to test the case they had on him, so he said in a calm voice:
“Perhaps he’s dead.”
There was little reaction. “Yes. It’s a possibility.” The overseer picked up a sheaf of papers from her desk. “These were found in your office. Do you know what they are?”
“They’re part of a manuscript, from the draft of a novel called The Body Library.”
“And you’ve read it?”
Nyquist nodded. “Only those few pages. I’ve tried to.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to you?”
“There’s no proper sense to it.”
The overseer smiled. “Exactly. And that worries us. You see, we have no record of this book, and no real knowledge of the person or persons involved in its creation, nor of the people who’ve read it.”
Nyquist knew what this meant: “It’s outside of your control.”
“It appears that way.”
She nodded to herself for a second, and then said: “Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
Nyquist answered, “The pages of the book can be burned and the smoke inhaled.”
“I see.”
“It has an effect on the reader.”
The overseer nodded. “We know of such things, actually. It’s a property of the special ink they’ve used in the manuscript. Addicts refer to as midnight’s ink. For a short period – a few minutes or hours or even a day, depending on the individual’s sensitivity – a user will believe that they are actually inside a story. Not reading it, not listening to it. But actually a part of it. A vital part. The leading role. The user is incapable of distinguishing between real life and fiction. The two separate worlds will merge, here…” She placed one finger on the side of her brow. “Here, in the mind.”
Nyquist wondered how far he’d been affected himself.
“The only clue we have is the name Calvin. A boy. He’s been mentioned by a few of the word sickness sufferers. And now…” She held up another sheet of paper. “Here he is again, typed out by yourself in the night, in a dream, apparently…”
She stopped speaking and stared at Nyquist. His hand had reached round to to scratch at the back of his neck. He was hot and feverish, and he could feel slight bumps just under the skin.
“Are you uncomfortable?”
He shook his head. Yet his whole sensory experience was targeted on those few square inches of flesh. With an effort he pulled his hand away.
The overseer stood up from her desk and gestured for him to do the same. He did so, following her over to a glass display case fixed to the wall. They both stared at it. The box contained twenty-five beetles, all of the same species, each specimen mounted with a pin to the green baize beneath. Depicted on the folded wing case of each beetle was a different letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. Only one example was missing, that carrying the X design. There was a space on the backing where the absent beetle might be pinned one day, if the overseer should ever find one, right between W and Y. Nyquist was fascinated by the collection. Many of the beetles had jet black carapaces, but others were colored bright blue, green or orange and glittered with electrical effects; they shone like jewels, like an oil spill in paradise. The empty space reserved for the missing letter especially held Nyquist’s interest, as though it contained everything that was missing in his life, all the lost details.
The overseer said: “There are twenty-six administrative areas in Storyville, each one with its own overseer. My name is K. My job is to look after all the stories in the area, to make sure they mesh together properly, that they are evenly distributed between the different classes, races and creeds, so that no one group or individual is favored. Most of all we try to ensure that stories make sense, that they have their proper outcomes, regardless of their individual moral nature. Without our guidance, the city would quickly descend into chaos.”
Nyquist turned to her. “Why am I here? What have I done wrong?”
“I think you know that already.”
“I’m not sure if I do.”
Overseer K sighed. Nyquist looked at her face. He saw her features in a new light: every wrinkle and crevice was the path of a story, and those contained within them smaller stories, and so on, down to the core, the dark red heart. Her face held the city’s tales within it and the weight of this burden over the years, the many years of her career, had affected her deeply. Thus, she was bent and battered, and only willpower kept her functioning. Yet she spoke proudly: “Almost every story connects to another story, even if it’s only in the tiniest way, a glance, a tangent, or a ricochet. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nodded.
The overseer continued: “Your story has tangled with Patrick Wellborn’s one too many times. We’ve followed your progress, from linkage to linkage, event to event – as told to us by this person and that, in the plazas, in bars, cafés, on street corners. Yet nothing of this was ever mentioned to Officer Monroe in your weekly briefing. And so, it made us curious.”
“You know everything?” he asked. “Everything that we do?”
“Not everything. Many events are still personal, still private, unseen by any witnesses. Some parts of the city, certain buildings for instance, are entirely unknown to us. There are nodes of silence, blind spots, dead ends. This is how erasure works. A story’s connections are severed one by one, until it stands alone. And then it disappears.”
Almost without thinking, Nyquist had started to scratch at his neck again.
The overseer smiled. “You should know, Mr Nyquist, that we found some marks on your body. Precisely where you’re feeling the pain.”
“Marks? What do you mean?”
“To be precise: letters.”
He stared at her blankly as she continued with her description.
“Sometimes these letters form into words, moving around on your skin. Or rather, just beneath the epidermal layer. They act very much like a virus.”
“A virus?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Nyquist pulled his hand out from his collar; there was blood smeared on his fingertips. The sight of it made him feel faint.
“But that’s not possible. I don’t understand.”
The overseer removed a speck of dirt from her jacket. “Sadly, neither do we. A few other sufferers have been examined, but the underlying cause remains a mystery. We do believe, however, that it’s tied up in some way with The Body Library. In fact, it’s possible that book is the cause of the sickness. Maybe as some serious after-effect of the drug usage, or perhaps something more than that. We are still looking into it.”
Nyquist was filled with horror. He remembered Zelda’s corpse at the morgue, and the photographs he’d seen at the police station.
Words. Words in the flesh, eating at her body…
He felt dizzy. The office whirled around him.
“Get them out of me!”
It was a raw cry from deep down. He said it a second time, this time unheard by anyone but himself, a whisper inside.
Please. Get them out of me.
The overseer remained calm. Her eyes were clear and focused; she didn’t even blink. She said, “There’s very little hope for you, I’m afraid. The words are alive in your body, and there’s no cure. Not yet.”
He could hardly breathe. He felt that his skin was on fire. He’d never felt so weak, or so helpless. His whole body screamed against the sense of being invaded, of being taken over, but there was no escape.
The overseer guided him back to the desk. She sat down opposite him and pulled open a drawer, from which she removed a series of story cards.
“The sickness is the least of your worries.”
She laid the cards on the desk, one by one.
“These are various story fragments, each from a different witness, each relating to a journey that you undertook in your car some four days ago.”
“Four days?” He tried to think where he was on that date, but his mind was blank. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s quite simple. Here, you see…” She nudged one card forward so he could read it. “You are seen picking up the woman in your vehicle. And here, in another precinct, you are seen driving out towards the east of the city. Do you see?” She pushed more of the cards forward. “There are numerous accounts, all tallying. It’s quite linear, once you put it all together. Here, and here. Look closely. The woman is described plainly. One account gives us her name.”
Nyquist read the words on the card: Zelda Courtland.
He started to protest, but the overseer simply carried on with her laying out of the cards, like a fortune teller consulting the Tarot. “This final witness places you and Miss Courtland driving out towards Plath Lane. Marlowe’s Field is quite close by, I think.”
Nyquist felt cold inside, as though he already knew what was coming next.
One last card was placed on the table. He read it himself, a description given by two children, a young boy and girl, both of them describing a man dragging a woman across the field, towards the tree. She was struggling to escape.
“I think they describe you quite well, don’t you think?”
He stared at the final card without speaking.
The overseer pursed her lips. “It’s very sad, such a young life taken from us. I imagine poor Zelda had many stories left to tell.”
At last he managed to say, “I didn’t do any of this. I didn’t kill her.”
“The narrative is plain.” She looked at him. “All the evidence points to one conclusion, one ending.”
The words were breaking out on his skin, he could feel them moving around, spreading down from his neck to his back, around to his chest and from there crawling up towards his face. He was covered in sweat and his whole body itched terribly.
“You’ve made this up,” he managed to say. “The whole thing… it’s fiction.”
“Of course…” She studied him dispassionately. “A story can be seen from many angles. And the slightest change of focus might well produce an entirely new explanation of the events. Does that make sense to you?”
This time Nyquist stared at her without answering. His fingernails were scratching away, first at one shoulder and then the other. The words swarmed over his hands.
“All it takes is for the eye to shift slightly, and there it is. Suddenly, it doesn’t look like murder at all, or it wasn’t you in the car, or perhaps another person was seen in the vicinity. And so on and so forth, the patterns are woven, and unwoven, as we choose.”
Nyquist hardly heard himself speak. “What do I have to do?”
“It’s quite simple.” Overseer K leaned back in her chair. “I want you to find The Body Library for me. And destroy it.”
Night Drive
IT WAS dark by the time Officer Monroe’s car left Kafka Court. She drove the vehicle along Jules Verne Way, back towards the city center. Occasionally she would glance in the rearview mirror at Nyquist, who was slumped in the back seat. The street lamps cast his face in a sulphurous, intermittent glow. His eyes were closed. He looked to be asleep, and she could only imagine the terrible dreams he might be having. But then his eyes opened slightly and he spoke in a tired drawl.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home, John. Home.”
They drove on in silence, but the day’s events proved too much for Monroe to bear. She had to speak out.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly sorry.”
“That’s all right, Bella. I survived.”
“You did, you did.”
“And it’s over now, isn’t it?”
“Of course. You’re free again.”
Nyquist laughed bitterly. “Free? That’s a good word for it.”
The lights grew darker as they took the turning towards Clarke Town. The car drove on and on and Nyquist was lulled by the motion. He looked a
t his hands and saw they were clean, no sign of the words that had crawled there earlier. He had imagined the illness taking him over completely, a vision real enough to cause him to almost black out.
“I don’t feel too good.”
“I know.”
“I’m infected. Bella. There’s something inside me. It’s eating at me.”
“You just have to…”
“Can’t you help me?”
“Just do as the overseer asked. That’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Nothing more. She’s a woman of her word.”
“She wants me to find The Body Library. Do you know of it?”
“Only a little. Enough to know it’s a dangerous task to take on.”
“But some poor bastard’s got to do it, right?”
“What choice do you have, John?”
“The overseer’s got something on me, a made-up story.”
“She wouldn’t do that. It’s against all our rulings.”
“Well, it’s being used against me.”
“There must be a reason. There must be!”
He groaned. “Don’t give me the party line, Bella, please.”
“It’s for the city,” she said. “For the good of the city, and the people who live here.”
He watched the buildings pass by, the few people strolling along in the evening air. They were moving through a quiet part of town and most of the stories of the night had fallen quiet, or asleep, with no one to tell them. And he wondered how the city would operate if the stories were ever to fall into chaos, as Overseer K had envisioned.
He said, “I feel like I’ve walked into the wrong bar at the wrong time of night and been hit around the head, and now I’m to blame for it, somehow.”
Monroe just kept on driving.
“Stop the car.”
She wouldn’t. He leaned forward and put his hand on her shoulder. “Stop the goddamn car, Bella. We need to talk. Give me that at least.”
Something in his voice made her follow his command. She pulled over to the curb and cut the engine and the silence folded itself around them like an animal’s shadow.
A few moments passed before Nyquist said, “I’ve messed up, haven’t I?”