by Jeff Noon
Again, he jerked awake. Her face was close to his. He could see that she’d been crying, or at least holding back the tears. He watched her lips as they moved together and apart, making their different shapes. Now he could hear her. She was telling his story, reading out loud whatever was written on his face and chest and arms. The novel of his own self, this ever-changing narrative.
While she spoke to him like this, there was still a chance.
His story might continue, at least for a while.
He had to hope it was enough.
The Other Side of the Mirror
THE TWO men faced each other, the stranger at the doorway of the bedroom, and Nyquist on his feet near the chair. The man spoke calmly: “Did I wake you, Mr Nyquist? I’m so sorry.” Nyquist didn’t reply. The intruder was stocky and well built and he must’ve been quite powerful in his youth, but just now he was a poor, fragile specimen. He walked into the room a couple of steps, using a stick for added support. His face was truly shocking to look at: it was scarred all over, the gaps between each cut red with blood, most of them old and dried, a few others streaming anew, and crude surgical stitches held the whole fleshy mask together as best they could.
“I’ve been following your progress through the building. Young Benedict told me where you were heading. He’s easily persuaded.” He laughed and held up a key fob. “I let myself in.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Thomas Dreylock.”
Nyquist tried to not give anything away. He let the other man carry on speaking.
“I can assure you, we have met previously. In fact, we had quite an altercation.”
“I’ve never seen you before.”
“Really? People do say I have a memorable face. Many have remarked upon it. Still, there it is. We have met, we have spoken. We almost came to a business agreement. Sadly, you absconded, you and your lady friend.”
Nyquist rubbed at his neck and face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The smile left Dreylock’s face. “I think you do, if you would but make an effort.” He wiped a thin line of blood from a wound. “Actually, you saw me in difficult, even humiliating circumstances. That was not one of my finest days, no indeed. I was bedridden. And then I had one of my seizures, right in front of your eyes.”
“I need a drink.”
“Ah yes, such a tempting plot device. The brave but lonely private eye, his one true lover long vanished, believed dead, the bottle of whisky his only partner as he wanders the rain-washed night streets in search of a case or a clue, something to fill the emptiness.”
“A glass of water will do it.”
“I’ll wait here.”
Nyquist went through into the bathroom. He bent his head to the tap and slaked his thirst. He looked in the mirror and listened to his reflection speaking: Zelda was murdered. Dreylock and Wellborn. One of them knows the truth…
He took out the photograph and looked at the woman’s face. Her features were far less blurred now, as though Zelda Courtland was moving towards him one detail at a time.
Soon, soon he would know everything.
He went back into the bedroom. Dreylock was now sitting in the armchair, his hands folded on his lap, his stick propped at his side.
Nyquist got to the point. “What do you want from me?”
Dreylock considered the question. “A story is being played out in this building, upon this night, a story of some import. And I believe that you and I, Mr Nyquist, we are both vital to its ending.”
Nyquist took a chair at the desk. “Let’s hear it.”
“Of course, you must be very curious.” Dreylock smacked his lips. “Perhaps you’ve heard of a man called Patrick Wellborn?”
“In passing.”
“Well that is strange, I must say. After all, you did kill him.”
Nyquist closed his eyes. He was threatened by a memory and it circled in like a knife blade, slowly, from afar.
Dreylock’s voice rose up in glee. “Right here in this room. There, do you see!”
He pointed to where the blood and hair were plastered on the skirting board. Nyquist felt faint, looking at this evidence of his own crime. He didn’t want to believe it, yet at the same time he knew it was true. He had seen the vision.
“But don’t worry, you acted in self-defense. I believe you angered him, by destroying one of his favorite pages.”
As though in response the terrible scream was heard again.
Nyquist covered his ears.
Dreylock was smiling. He said, “This room keeps hold of its memories, especially ones created from pain. Just think; Wellborn’s cry will replay itself through the night hours, until the building is finally demolished.”
Nyquist sat down on the bed and felt his head bowing down. The scream blazed behind his eyelids as a fierce burst of red and orange shapes.
And then at last there was silence once more.
Dreylock watched the private eye. He said in a calm voice, “Look at me, please.”
Nyquist did so, raising his head.
Dreylock waved a hand in front of his damaged face. “This is my doorway.” The man’s scars bunched together. “Through my wounds, I will show you the world.” He smiled. “Oh, I have a number of such lines. Would you prefer another example?”
“I just want the facts.”
“As you wish.” Dreylock nodded. “This face of mine, as ugly and painful as it is, has one advantage. It means that I can see the truth about this place, and what’s happening to you, to me, to all of us here – my pitiful gang, dear sweet Lionel; Amber with her skillful, healing hands; and nasty spiteful Vito. All of us! I look through the gaps where my new persona has not quite gelled, and I see the reality.”
He was speaking from his heart, as broken and sullied as it might be.
“I was not always like this. Once upon a time I was an actor of some renown, noted for my handsomeness, and my passion. I played all the major roles. Hamlet, Oedipus, Kowalski. Only two years ago I played Vladimir in a new play called Waiting for Godot. Do you know of it?”
Nyquist didn’t answer.
“It’s a most fascinating work, and one that rather chimes with our current predicament.” Dreylock frowned. “So yes, I was by all accounts a fine performer. Sadly, I was seduced away from such delights when an old friend of mine met up with me in the theater bar one evening, a few weeks ago, this was. It was a chance meeting, but one which changed my life forever, and for the worse. Of course, I wasn’t to know that at the time.”
Nyquist found himself interested in the story. “What was the friend called?”
“Patrick Wellborn. He introduced me to a novel called The Body Library. Not the whole book however but just a few pages, discards, those deemed unfit for the final volume. Still, even these discarded pages had a power far stronger than the words they contained. And via their power I made my way here, to the Melville Tower, seeking further pleasures.”
Dreylock paused. He wiped at his face and his hand came away with a mixture of tears and blood. He stared at the sight as he carried on with his tale.
“Once inside this terrible place, I fell under a spell. Does this mean anything to you?”
Again, Nyquist glimpsed a distant image. But it wouldn’t settle, and his eyes closed involuntarily as though to hold what little remained firmly inside his head.
“There it is, you see!” Dreylock cried. “The thought exists, the memory. The boy Calvin has performed the same spell on you, indeed on all of us who live here.”
“But I can’t remember any of this, not clearly.”
Dreylock lit a cigarette.
“Well that’s the thing, the actual process is hidden to us. How the spell plays out, in which room, the details thereof, all is hidden. The truth is veiled, even from myself. But tell me, you woke up in your room this morning and all seemed real to you?”
“Yes.”
“This is what happens, we lose part of ourselves in the pro
cess.”
Nyquist felt he was nearing the truth of the matter. “What is this spell?”
Dreylock dragged smoke from his cigarette. “I know only what I have surmised. That we are taken to see a man called Oberon, who lives somewhere in this apartment block. Somewhere unknown. We might think of him as the king of this tower.”
“Is this a fairy tale?”
“Of a kind. The cruelest kind.” Dreylock grimaced. “Oberon splits us in two.”
As these words were spoken Nyquist felt a sharp pain in his guts, as though he had been wounded there.
“Yes, it’s painful to think upon it. But there it is, the facts, as you requested of me.” He stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray. “From that moment on we exist as two beings. One who lives out there…” he gestured broadly to the window. “In what they dare to call the real world. And the other self stays in this building. Trapped here, for Oberon’s pleasure. We become characters, nothing more. Characters in The Body Library.”
Nyquist wished for something more than water. He got up from the bed and searched the room, finding a half bottle of whisky on a bookshelf. He stood by the window, looking out, sipping the fiery liquid directly from the bottle. His thoughts were spoken aloud, as the truth came to him.
“So we are the discarded ones?”
“If you like, yes. Mere fictional beings, while our real selves carry on out there, in the world. Out there in Storyville, doing what they will, living their lives.”
Nyquist remained at the window.
“A sorry state.” Dreylock’s voice was filled with bitterness. “Fiction and Non-Fiction, the two modes entirely separated. In most cases, the others will have no knowledge at all that we even exist.”
Nyquist flinched. He looked back to the bed where only a short while before he’d been talking to his other self – his real self, if Dreylock was to be believed. Was it possible that this other self was trying to reach out to him, to send him messages, to guide him, to urge him on? Just thinking about the idea made him wonder whether one of those alphabugs had got inside his skull.
Dreylock continued, “But I am different. I am cursed.” He touched at his broken face with his hand. “The spell didn’t take with me, not fully. I was left with these wounds all over my body. I am the broken story and through these scars, I glimpse both sides.”
Nyquist turned to face the other man. “Which Patrick Wellborn did I kill? The real, or the fictional?”
“Well there is the question, the number one question.”
“Which is it?”
“You killed the fiction. You ended his part in the story. I imagine the real Wellborn is mightily pissed off at this. No more games in the bedroom.”
“And what does that mean?”
Dreylock smiled. “For most people, one visit is enough to the tower. They stay well away, leaving us in peace. But Wellborn was different. He knew everything about the two sides of his life. I think he was one of the first people to fall under the spell. Because of this he liked coming to Melville Five. He actually liked meeting up with his fictional self. Can you imagine such a thing? The two of them chatted, they shook hands, they shared stories. And even weirder…” Dreylock lowered his voice. “Wellborn brought women here, prostitutes usually, and he’d hide in the shadows and watch his other self making love to them. Oh Lord. He watched his fictional self having sex.”
“That’s sick.”
“Oh, I agree. It’s perverse beyond measure.” Dreylock started to laugh. “But you know, that’s why your precious Zelda ended up here.”
“Zelda Courtland?”
“Wellborn brought her here, just for his viewing pleasure. Of course, it never happened. Thanks to you and your brutal actions.”
Nyquist finished his drink and walked towards the seated man. “Why do say precious? Did I know Zelda?”
“I believe you loved her. Or whatever might pass for love in a few hours of meeting.”
“It’s too late. She’s dead. She was murdered.”
“Which one?”
Nyquist stared at him. It was a simple question. In his mind he could see a tree standing in a field, a body hanging from the branches, a woman’s body. He saw Zelda’s face, the rope tight around her neck, her skin bulging at the throat.
He spoke in a whisper: “She was hanged from a tree in Marlowe’s Field.”
Word by word, the story was coming back to him.
Dreylock said, “Zelda’s fictional self might still be alive somewhere in the building. But I haven’t seen her. And that’s unusual; I make it my business to meet with everyone who comes here, to interrogate them. You never know who might be able to help me.” Again he probed at his scars.
Nyquist remembered how Sam Bradshaw had been unable to locate Zelda on his wall charts. He said to Dreylock, “I need to find her. I need to find Zelda Courtland.”
“That’s perfectly understandable.” Dreylock looked at his wristwatch. “Well, it’s past two o’clock. The reading will have started by now.”
“The reading?”
With an effort Dreylock stood up from the chair, using his stick as a lever. “There is one person here who knows more than I do. Who might perhaps know Zelda’s whereabouts. That is, if you can find a way of talking to her.”
He held out his hand, gesturing towards the doorway.
As Nyquist followed him from the apartment, the strange, ghostly scream was heard yet again, once more hoping for a witness, or a physical body to rest in at last.
A Long Way Down
THEY EXITED the elevator at the top floor of the building and walked down a short corridor. A single door stood at the end. There was no bell, no number, no nameplate. Dreylock walked along slowly, on account of his injuries. He produced a key and opened the door.
“This is the penthouse suite. Very few people come here.”
Nyquist followed him inside. “Do you have a key to every room?”
“Sadly, no. But I barter and I steal, where I can.”
The main living area was huge. The two longest walls were made entirely of framed glass, giving excellent views of Storyville to the north and south. A long narrow roof garden was visible on one side, complete with chairs, potted plants and a dried-up water feature. The furniture in the room was upscale and yet barely used from the look of it. Clumps of dirt and piles of leaves were scattered over the carpet, and on tables and chairs. The whole place stank of damp, of rain, of rot. The reason was obvious: the word tree ended here, or at least it almost did. Its final flourishing reached up from the center of the floor, the sparse topmost branches disappearing through a hole in the penthouse’s ceiling. This high up, the leaves looked to be devoid of wildlife, and the room was quiet. Over the years, rain and snow and dust had crept in through the hole in the ceiling, gradually taking over the apartment. Evidently, no one had lived here, not for a long time.
Nyquist was about to ask a question when Dreylock held a finger to his lips, indicating silence. Nyquist listened. He heard the whispering of a voice. No, not a voice, but something very close to it: the rustle of paper. He walked around the trunk of the tree, following the sound, and through the leaves and branches he saw a woman sitting at a small table, her head bowed as she studied a large book that lay on the table before her, illuminated by an ornate metalwork reading lamp. There was a soft yellowish glow surrounding the seated figure. The woman’s face was hidden, and the edges of the room she occupied faded away at the limits of the sphere of light. Nyquist noticed blue and yellow flowers.
Dreylock kept his voice low. “Don’t disturb her, whatever you do.”
“Who it is?”
“This is the reader.”
The woman made no acknowledgment of the two men, but continued with her task in utter concentration. The fingers of her right hand reached out to turn a page. Now Nyquist heard again the rustling noise. He had heard nothing like it ever before. This was the sound of paper speaking, whispering, urging, crying, pleading, praying, dream
ing. On top of this the woman was murmuring or breathing each word to herself as her eyes scanned the page. Hush meeting hush. Nyquist was held spellbound. His hand reached out, almost touching the outer rim of the yellow glow of light.
“You won’t be able to reach her,” Dreylock said. “The reader isn’t actually here, in the building. But every so often she visits us. Not every night, sadly, and when she does appear, it’s only for a few hours at a time.”
Nyquist was reminded of the vision he’d seen in apartment 67, but this was of a different nature: stronger, more defined, and far more exquisite.
“What is she doing?” he asked.
“She’s reading. She’s just reading. Nothing more.”
“And the book on the table?”
“The Body Library. The book of the tower.”
Nyquist was lost in wonder.
Dreylock explained: “In these pages we all exist. Yourself, myself, and all the other residents. As the spell takes us over, our names enter the book as characters. And the reader keeps us alive. She breathes air into our lungs, forces the blood through our veins. Even the blood that flowed from Wellborn’s head when you killed him, this also was conjured from the book’s pages.”
Nyquist’s hand tingled as it touched the glow. It was slightly painful and he knew without being told that if he pushed further, the pain would only increase.
His hand withdrew.
“But where is she, really?”
“Somewhere out there.” Dreylock gestured to the nearest window frame. “Somewhere in this vast city, the reader sits in her little room with its blue and yellow flowered wallpaper and she reads from the novel, and she gives us life.” He turned back to Nyquist. “I know only that her name is Ava Beaumont. She was one of the book’s creators.” He pointed to the novel on her reading desk. “And because The Body Library is made up of so many other books and magazines and newspapers arranged in a random order, it contains not one story, but an infinite number.”
Another page was turned.
Whisper…
Dreylock paused to breathe deeply, and to wipe another trail of blood from a scar. And when next he spoke, the words seem to come from the scars themselves.