by Jeff Noon
“Help me.” It was a simple plea from the heart.
“Of course, of course. In any way I can.”
The two men were standing but a few inches apart, lost in two very different narratives, and separated by common goals. Bradshaw nodded in recognition. He turned once more to the wall and explained, “Your mind has been changed by the building. You are no longer in charge of what you can see and hear and touch, and so on. The Melville Tower has this effect on certain people, not all, but only those susceptible to its power.”
Nyquist shook his head in despair. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Ah, but the building likes you, I can feel it. It wants you to venture forth, to explore its different apartments and corridors. It has many things in store for you. Yes, Mr Nyquist, the tower likes your story.”
“You believe that?”
“I have studied the building’s ways, and I’ve learned one thing above all others.” His hands moved rapidly along the walls. “Everything happens according to a pattern.”
Nyquist looked around in wonder. “Is this a key, or a code? This whole room?”
“Yes, yes! The labyrinth, every pathway, every floor, every room.” Bradshaw smiled. “Every page, every chapter.”
“How do you mean?”
“The tower is a book and the book is a tower, they live inside each other, the tower in the book and the book in the tower, and so it goes on, ever turning, ever changing, as the seasons turn and change, as the hours pass, as the pages of the book are rearranged and new names are added to the text, such as your own, each new character given over to the story. As the tower changes with the book, so the book changes with the tower.” He looked at Nyquist with a troubled expression. “No one can know everything, I’m afraid. But we learn, little by little, night by night.”
Nyquist’s eyes followed Bradshaw’s hands as they moved across the wall. “So I’m looking for apartment 37 next, is that correct?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to hurry. It’s nearly time.”
“For what?”
“Babel. Quickly! Before the stampede begins.”
Nyquist was charged by Bradshaw’s urgency. He made his way back to the corridor and was barely outside when the door of apartment 21 banged shut, leaving him stranded. A great roar of noise greeted him, a chaotic jumble of voices, high and low, and he was immediately pushed back against the corridor wall by a mass of people. The space around the door was crowded with them, men, women and children, end to end, and every single one of them talking at once; not listening, not conversing, not communicating, but only shouting and arguing, all at cross-purposes.
Nyquist couldn’t move.
Coma
JOHN NYQUIST woke up. For a moment he struggled with the sheets on the bed before realizing that the bonds were inside his own body; he was still trapped there, helpless, a coma victim, still lying in the room in Kafka Court. Bella Monroe had disappeared from the edge of his vision but he could hear her talking to somebody; it sounded like Overseer K. They spoke in whispers. He settled back inside his own mind and contemplated the ceiling. In the distance, the far hazy distance, he could see the second floor corridor of Melville Five. He could see his other self in the corridor surrounded by people, many of them, a whole crowd of residents all jostling for position. Nyquist had heard the conversation with Sam Bradshaw, and he knew that apartment 37 was the next destination. The sensation was uncanny, as though he were reading about his own life in a novel, seeing himself as a character in a book. The other self was fictional. A fictional being. But he couldn’t speak to this other self, he couldn’t cry out or scream, he couldn’t pass on a message, or offer help, not directly. Or at least, he hadn’t yet found a way to do so.
Nyquist was alone in the silence of his thoughts. He felt the words at play in his body, continually updating and rewriting their stories through his flesh.
He had to concentrate.
Send a message. Give instruction. Reach out towards the tower and make sure this time, make it clear what has to be done. The task.
Inside his eyes that could never close, his eyes closed.
He began to write, conjuring out of the dark the first stroke of the first letter. The others followed one by one, each bringing more pain than the last.
Z e l d a
Yggdrassil Press
NYQUIST STRUGGLED along the corridor, trying to force a way through the crowd. From all sides they closed in, pressing at him with their warm flesh, their sweat-stained clothes. The many lips moved incessantly, opening and closing, letting the words out in swirls of nonsense. Everyone had a different opinion about a different subject and a different way of speaking, a different accent. This truly was the Tower of Babel after the fall, language battling against language, each seeking supremacy. Nyquist found himself talking as well, he couldn’t help it, even as he pushed on through the crowd as best he could. His mouth moved, the words poured out even though he was completely unaware of what he was saying: his brain had no control over his utterance. He was a mouth, a human mouth, a mouth alone with no other organs; his body had one purpose only, to speak: to speak aloud, to cry, to whisper, to sing, to yell in pain, to spit in anger, to mumble and sigh with pleasure, to orate and recite and pronounce deftly, each consonant perfectly placed when needed or swallowed when not, each vowel clipped or elongated. He spoke the Queen’s English, he spoke in slang and jargon, he spoke in a working class accent and he spoke in dialects from the North and South. He spoke the finest rhetoric and he spewed out pure filth, all at the same time. His mouth led him on, past one person after another, exchanging threats and promises, demands and murmurs of undying love. He moved from one story to another, through the maze, his clothes rumpled and torn in places, and the further he went, the more violent, the more determined he was that his story, his subject matter alone, should be the victor! And everyone around him in that tangled mass of humanity had exactly the same desire: to win, to secure through the power of argument their own place in the corridor, the high-rise, the world.
At last he reached the stairwell. It was just as crowded as the corridor he’d left, but it was easier here, as three channels opened up, one ascending, the other descending, and the middle of the stairs reserved for those yet to make up their minds. Nyquist joined the right-hand side, slowly making his way to the next floor. He pushed through the doorway onto the corridor. Thankfully here it was slightly less crowded. He soon found out why: a siren rang out along the corridor and the people responded with joy to the sound: they all fell silent, the clamor of voices dying in an instant. Babel time was over. The residents were moving more freely now, as some of them made their way inside apartments and others headed for the nearest stairs or the elevator doors.
Soon Nyquist was alone once more. He rang the bell of apartment 37. It was opened immediately by a teenage boy who smiled at Nyquist in a beatific manner. This boy said not a word, but simply turned and walked back into the apartment. Nyquist followed him inside. He stood in the living room doorway, watching the scene that unfolded before him.
There were a dozen or so children present, ranged from four or five years old to perhaps twelve or thirteen. They stood quietly in attitudes of prayer around the central object: a tree. Or rather, part of a tree. The trunk grew from a large, jagged hole in the carpeted floor and rose to disappear into a corresponding aperture in the center of the ceiling. Patterns of dust drifted down from above, sparkling in the glow of the lanterns that a few of the children held aloft, the only given light. Nyquist was the only adult present and he thought of himself as an intruder on a private realm, a world cut off from his own. He took a step into the room, being careful not to disturb the prayer meeting. He could hear the tweeting and chirruping of birds and he saw sparrows, a canary and a bluefinch flitting about the branches of the tree. He saw a blackbird grab the letter Y of an alphabug from the bark and swallow it down.
The children present were drawn from different classes and groups: middle-class kids, st
reet urchins, well-behaved boys and girls, a schoolboy holding a catapult, ragamuffins, bullies and swots. Nyquist saw one of the older girls actually talking to the tree. She knelt down before it in an attitude of supplication, her hands raised high above her head and her face taken over by rapture. Now the other children joined with her to sing a rhyme of strange enchantment:
The crying tree, the crying tree
All around the crying tree,
I’ll catch you and you’ll catch me
All around the crying tree.
The verse ended and the children bowed their heads, the birds fell silent and the insects stopped their buzzing. Only the shiny black leaves of the tree made any sound at all, rubbing against each other in whispers. Only two people remained standing. One was Nyquist: the other was the older teenage boy who had greeted him at the door. Now the boy explained: “If you’re wondering, the tree reaches all the way from its roots in the basement up to the roof garden, where it emerges into the night air.”
Nyquist asked, “What are they praying for?”
“Salvation. A way out.”
“Tell me, is it always night here?”
“Always.”
“And in the daytime?”
Instead of answering, the boy gestured for Nyquist to follow him. They walked into the hallway and then through into a gloom-filled box room. The boy stood in the semi-dark and said, “In the daytime we sleep. For the tower is dark in the sunlight, empty, devoid of all movement or sound.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen this autumn. Yet I will never reach my birthday.” For the first time the boy’s smile wavered. “Not ever. My story won’t let me. It doesn’t reach that far.” His voice cracked with a sudden hurt. “They tore it out! They tore out the page and they cut it into pieces, tiny pieces. The shreds were cast aside, scattered.”
Nyquist looked at the teenager. His face was pale, almost bloodless, and glowed lunar-like in the shadowed room. Long straggles of mousy hair hung down in a fringe. His eyes blinked repeatedly like signals of distress, or warning lights. The smile had by now vanished completely. A lone alphabug crawled along the nearest wall, its glowing letter T acting as a tiny lamp. The teenager held out his hand and the bug flew willingly onto his palm.
Nyquist asked for the boy’s name.
“Benedict.”
Tears rolled down his barely formed face and his young body shook with anguish.
“What’s wrong, lad?”
“The bugs fly out, they travel far and wide and come back home when they please, day and night. But for us, no. Not for us. Here we stay.”
“You really can’t leave?”
“None of us can. Yourself included. Don’t you know that?” The boy flicked his hand and the bug took off once more. “We are born again every night, over and over, and our lives continue in these rooms and corridors, changing by a few degrees only.”
Nyquist thought about the information that Sam Bradshaw had told him. “Is it only kids who come here, to this apartment?”
“Mainly, yes.”
“Adults?”
“One or two. But only now and then.”
“I’m looking for a woman called Zelda Courtland. I think she might’ve visited a few nights ago.”
Benedict nodded. “Yes, she came here to worship at the word tree.”
Nyquist looked quizzical.
“Yggdrasil,” Benedict explained. “The old Norse name for the great tree that reaches up from the earth to the heavens. I learned about it at school, didn’t you?”
“I was playing hooky that day.”
“Odin suspended himself upside down from the tree’s branches, as a sacrifice.” The teenager’s eyes retrieved a little light. “And over the nine long days and nights of his suffering, the king studied the tangled roots of the tree and made from their shapes the runes, the letters of the alphabet. In this way, language was born. The letters were passed on, hand to hand and mouth to mouth down the centuries. Many stories were told using them, and in this way the word tree lived on.” His face trembled with fear. “Until the good King Oberon, bless his soul, took over the task.”
Nyquist felt dazed. He tried to stay in focus. “Can you help me find Miss Courtland? Do you know where she might be right now? Which apartment?”
“Maybe I do. If you’ll help me in turn.”
“What do you need?”
“What are you going to do, when you find her?”
The answer came to Nyquist without any prior thought. “Get out of this place.”
“And you’ll take this Zelda with you?”
“Yes.”
“So you have a way out?”
“I’ll find a way.”
“Then just come back for me.” Benedict reached out to him. “Come back here, to this room, when you’re ready to leave, and seek me out. Take me with you.”
Nyquist couldn’t find a good response to this. “I’m not sure…”
A single line etched the teen’s forehead and his voice broke on a word he could never quite say out loud.
“OK, listen. I’ll do what I can.”
Benedict nodded at this. He looked to one side, his eyes lost in thought. And then he came to a decision. He said, “When Zelda left here, I took the elevator with her. She pressed the button for the sixth floor. I live on the same floor, so I walked along the corridor with her, a little way.”
“You saw which apartment she went into?”
“I did. 67.”
Nyquist mused on this. “I’m climbing higher each time.”
“Just don’t go up to the roof, whatever you do.”
“Why not?”
Benedict shuddered. “People are apt to throw themselves over the edge.”
“I’ll do what I can to avoid that.”
The teenager nodded in the gloom and for a moment he seemed satisfied. Nyquist turned towards the doorway.
“You will promise, won’t you?”
Nyquist carried on walking, into the hallway.
“Take me with you!”
He’d taken just one more step when the howling began. The teenage boy cried out with such despair that Nyquist had to steel himself against responding, against turning back and offering some small comfort, or a real promise of escape, even if such a thing might well be impossible. But the children around the word tree also heard this cry of agony and assumed Nyquist was to blame for it, for causing their friend trouble. One by one they came out of the living room and stood before him in the hallway, blocking his route to the front door. Their faces stared at him, expressionless. The lanterns glowed with a subdued, flickering light.
“I don’t mean any harm,” Nyquist told them.
“What have you done to Benedict?” the eldest girl asked.
“Nothing.”
Another one repeated the question. “What did you do?”
“He wants to get out of here, out of the building.”
“Did you make a promise?”
“No. I can’t do that.”
They stared at him, all of them, the lantern light dancing in their eyes. And Nyquist felt helpless before them, because none of his usual tactics applied to this situation. Not words, not actions, not gestures. Not even his old standby, silence. All he could manage was a few syllables of gibberish. And then he was hit in the face by a projectile of some kind. Startled, he looked for the culprit and spotted the schoolboy grinning, his catapult proudly held aloft. Nyquist couldn’t believe it, he’d been hit by a pebble or a conker or a penny or something! His cheek stung. And there was nothing at all he could do except stand there as motionless as the children were. Even the clock on the wall seemed to quiver between one moment and the next. Until one of the younger girls broke the silence: “We all want the same.” And that started them all off, all the children speaking at once, a whisper to begin with: “Take us with you. Take us with you, when you leave. Take us with you. Take us. Take us with you, when you leave.” Louder now, louder. “Take us
with you. Take us with you!” They moved around Nyquist, obstructing his way forward. Benedict joined in from the box-room doorway, lending his slightly deeper voice to the mix.
Take us with you, take us with you, take us with you…
But now another sound could be heard, over the top of the kids’ voices. It was the sound of a bell chiming. Benedict was the first to react. He held up a hand for quiet and one after another the children fell silent under his wish. He spoke in hushed, reverential tones:
“A page. A page is given to us!”
The children turned their gaze away from Nyquist, towards the source of the chime, and they filed back into the living room possessed by a sudden intent, a need that had taken them over completely. Nyquist followed them. A bell was hanging down from one of the branches of the word tree, and was being pecked at by the blackbird. Each jab of the beak set the chime ringing. The congregation stood in wonder. They were waiting for something to happen, that was evident. Nyquist stepped closer, careful not to disturb the room’s atmosphere. In truth, he was as hypnotized as the youngsters. He saw worms crawling in the trunk of the tree. He saw wasps mulching at the softened bark. Spiders working their webs. Birds flittering twig to branch, caterpillars weaving their cocoons in black leaves. Reddish water dripped from the hole in the ceiling, dampening the bark of the tree further. The insects scurried about. Nyquist saw it all, each minuscule event magnified in his sight. The entire tree was a world unto itself. And where the insects worked the most, the bark was peeling away from the trunk in a thin, almost translucent layer.
Paper.
That most mysterious of all substances.
The home to stories.
That off-white field of dreams.
Parchment drawn from nature for one purpose only: communication.
The sheet was fragile, it trembled in the slightest of breezes. Benedict reached up and gently pulled it loose from the tree. He held it by two opposite corners, his fingers hardly brushing the surface. A few tiny black symbols were visible on the paper: letters of the alphabet. His eyes scanned the writing.