by Steven Hall
“Map reading?”
“Come on.”
We found another scrap a few minutes later, and then another, and then another. We followed the word-crumb trail through the old towers of books and down an uncared-for staircase deeper into the stacks. Down here, the books were even older; sombre columns of washed-out grey and red leather covers curling away at the tops and bottoms of spines. They made me think of the old British army, the Empire army, abandoned and left behind, still standing in their dusty formations. As we went deeper the book-soldiers got older still–Wellington’s men trimmed in peeling gold leaf giving way to the tall silent royalists with flamboyant but barely legible stencilling on their individual, aged-away backs. After a while the books petered out altogether, replaced by yellowing hand-bundled folios secured with rotting silk ribbons.
“Scout, where the fuck are we?”
“Don’t touch anything,” is all she said from up ahead.
The paper trail led to a mound. A huge great mound in the dim distant reaches of the stacks. A mound like the ones they buried ancient kings in, but a mound made from, instead of soil, all kinds of paper–newspapers, chip wrappers, glossy magazines, great strips of wallpaper, tiny labels and instruction manuals, heaps of plain and lined and letterheaded A4, the stripped-out leaves of diaries and ledgers and novels and photo books. Tons and tons of paper and all of it, every scrap covered, smothered, buried in lines and squares and triangles and swirls of blue and black and green and red biro words.
“Fucking hell,” I said.
Scout unhooked her backpack and started to inspect the mound’s edge. Eventually she settled on a spot and started to excavate, lifting and scooping away piles of paper.
“What are you doing?”
“Come and see.”
She pushed a stack of old car magazines over and they slid and skidded away like a pack of over-sized playing cards. Behind them was a chair. Only the two rear legs and the backrest were visible, the rest covered and buried and incorporated into the side of the mound.
“I don’t get it.”
“Kneel down and look.”
I did. Shored up by the seat and the back legs and disappearing into the depths of the mound I saw a small dark tunnel. I looked up at her.
“You’re joking, right?”
Scout smiled, bent over and kissed me on the forehead.
“’fraid not,” she said. “That’s where we’re going.”
23
Biro World
We knelt at the edge of the mound with Ian’s carrier between us, all looking into the deep, papery tunnel.
“Right,” Scout said, “same crawlspace procedure as before. We’ll rope-tie our backpacks and I’ll push Ian ahead of me, which means you’ll have to follow behind with the map. Sound okay?”
“Yeah, except for the map part. I didn’t know we had a map.”
“Well, that’s why I’m the guide and you’re the one asking all the questions, sweetie.”
“You’re hard work sometimes, do you know that?”
“Hush now.”
We took our bulky coats off and stuffed them into our backpacks. Next, we used two long lengths of cord to tie the tops of our packs to the backs of our belts, so they would drag into the chair tunnel behind us as we crawled. Scout used masking tape to attach her torch to the side of Ian’s cat box. She was happy with the results of this, but Ian–even after a whole tub of tuna and sweetcorn from the sandwich shop–didn’t look too pleased with it, or about the prospect of being shoved first into a small dark hole.
“I’m sorry,” I told him again. “Not far to go now.”
He gave me a look to let me know that wherever we were going had better be a lot of fun for cats.
“Okay, soldier,” Scout slipped her hands onto my hips. “Are we ready to do this?”
“Erm.”
She smiled. “It’ll be fine. Looks worse than it is. Crawl on your elbows and push yourself along with your knees and the toes of your boots. Go slowly, try to keep your arms in and try not to touch the sides. The tunnel’s only made of paper.”
“Riiiight.”
“What else? Yeah, probably best to get your torch out before you go in, you’ll need it to read the map. If you need to stop, shout up to me–not too loudly–and we’ll stop. Okay?”
“Okay. Are you going to give me this map then?”
“Yep.” Scout rummaged in one of the leg pockets in her combats, pulling out half a dozen small pieces of paper. “If we’re at the right mound, and I reckon we are, then we’ll need…this one.”
The folded piece of paper she gave me was about the size of a small birthday-card envelope.
“This is it?”
“Told you it was easy,” she said, and then she was back on her knees and slide-angling Ian’s carrier into the hole. I unfolded the piece of paper. It was completely blank except for the word ThERa.
“Hey, there’s nothing on this.”
“What? Nothing?”
“Just a word, Thera.”
“Yeah, that’s it. We’re starting at the bottom of the ‘T’ and we’re going to the round bit of the ‘a’. Think you can manage that?”
I looked at the paper again.
“Sure,” I said.
The air inside the tunnel smelled like the pages of a second-hand Charles Dickens novel; yellowy paper, old print and finger grease, that pressed, preserved sort of smell.
My torch put a white ring of light on the bottom of Scout’s rucksack as it start-stopped its way through the tunnel up ahead, almost filling the space completely. I angled the torch at the tunnel walls and the white ring stretched and was slashed up with shadows from the jutting pages and uneven piles, a whole haphazard Braillescape of paper, print and biroed words somehow not collapsing into this tiny black space. I pushed forward with my toes, keeping my feet as close together as I could and inch-shuffling forwards with my hips and elbows. Stray paper hissed against my arms, back, hips as I moved. Everything, everything had been covered in words, words in so many languages. Scraps flapped against me or passed under my crawling wrists covered in what I vaguely recognised as French and German, in hard Greek and Russian letters, in old fashioned English with the long ‘f’s instead of ‘s’s and in Chinese or Japanese picture symbols. There were formulae too, numbers, mathematical abbreviations and complicated visual arrangements. What English I saw ran from complex to incomplete to meaningless:…The simultaneous considerment of two conjugate variables (such as persuasive implication and delivery deficiency or the apex notion lumen and time for a moving concept) entails a limitation on the precision…to…abandon honest the consideration After-clap poma haunt duration saying goldfinches: a charm…
Overloaded, I tried to turn my mind off, tried to blank out the billions of words crowding tight in the shaky torch flicks and piled-up darkness. I concentrated only on inching forwards, second by second, minute by minute, following the hiss-scrape of Scout’s bag deeper into the mound.
The bag stopped moving.
“What’s up?”
Up ahead, Scout said something but I couldn’t catch it.
“What?”
“T-junction.” Her voice sounded squeezed and muffled with most of the treble missing. “We’re going right.”
I managed to unfold the piece of paper she’d given me and bring the torch down onto it. ThERa. T-junction. Scout’s bag started to move again and I followed. Just like she’d said, our tunnel soon connected with another, this one running left to right. I closed the gap between me and Scout’s rucksack and helped it around the tight corner as much as I could. I had a horror of my own bag getting wedged there, being trapped in the crossbar of the T. Luckily for me, when the time came there was only a small amount of resistance from behind. I pulled against it gently, so, so gently, and with only the shhhh flutter of light paper debris, my bag rounded the corner without complications.
The new tunnel seemed to be a little higher and wider than the old one and after
a few minutes’ shuffling I found I could just about get up on my hands and knees. Scout must have been crawling too, her bag moving faster up ahead. Before long, the tunnel made a curving ninety-degree turn to the right.
“Hey, am I crazy or are we going–”
“Down, yeah.”
The floor sloped away in a gentle gradient but the ceiling stayed level. As a result, the crawlspace became a full-time hands and knees space, then a stoop space and, finally, a narrow walk space. I stopped to pick up my bag then sidestepped forwards between walls made of stacked jumbled untidy paper. Up ahead, Scout did the same. I could see the torch beam coming from Ian’s carrier bouncing off stacked sheets into the black.
“This thing is fucking huge.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“It’s nuts. It must have taken years to stack all this. And the words–” I shone my torch up against the wall in front of me. Every loose page–as far as I could tell, every page making up the entire tunnel–had been covered, crammed, with rolling handwritten language.
“The only word we need to worry about is the one on the map. You still keeping track of where we are?”
I unfolded the sheet and stared again at the word: ThERa. I visualised the route we’d taken so far–
–then traced the shape over the letters on the page with my finger.
“I think we’re in the stem of an ‘h’,” I said, surprised at how matter of fact it all sounded.
“Great,” Scout said, moving off up ahead.
“Great,” I echoed after her, looking at the map again.
We made it to the bulb of the ‘R’. This turned out to be a room-sized chamber with a yellow domed roof made of what looked to be telephone directories. More telephone directories were stacked up around the walls. The walls themselves had been built from more solid material than we’d seen previously–hardback books mainly, with the odd thick softback dictionaries, thesauruses, textbooks–and had been constructed with careful bricklaying techniques. A simple wooden chair and desk stood in the middle of the room and the whole space was illuminated by a single bright light bulb hanging down on a long cord.
“Wow.” Scout stood by the desk looking up at the dome. “It’s like a church or something. Come and look.”
I propped my backpack against the table and perched on the edge. “Crazy.”
She caught the tone in my voice. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat next to me on the desk, looking at me for a second before giving me a slow gentle nudge. “Come on, what is it?”
I heard myself do one of those laughs, the ones where the air for a laugh comes out but no real sound. Breath in the shape of a ha that never really happens. “I don’t think I can cope with church domes made from telephone directories.”
“Ah.”
“I mean–what is this doing here? How does something like this even happen?”
Arms out behind her, Scout lowered herself down onto the table until she lay on her back looking up at the dome. “I think it’s kind of cool actually. You should look at it like this.”
“Oh yeah, it’s cool. It’s just–wrong.”
She stayed quiet for a minute then sat up, slipping an arm around my shoulders. “It’s only paper you know.”
“It’s not only paper though, is it? Look at it.”
“It is, it’s just paper. Did you never make igloos as a kid? I did, me and my dad. You cut out blocks of snow and you make them into rings. A big ring and then a ring that’s a bit smaller on top of it, and then a ring that’s a bit smaller on top of that. After five or six rings you’ve got a little igloo. This is just the same, but with phone books.” She nudged her head against mine. “It isn’t really a big deal.”
I looked at her. “Scout, it might as well be a fucking gingerbread house.”
She gave me a big smile. “Well, that’s technically possible too.”
I laughed, a proper laugh this time. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“I do my best.”
“You’re just fine with all this, aren’t you?”
“That’s me. I’m always fine, until I’m not.”
I nodded.
“The way I look at it,” she said, “things are always happening. Sometimes things that nobody believed were possible just happen. Beforehand everyone says that’s impossible, or I’ll never live to see something like that but afterwards, it’s just a fact. It’s just history. These things become history every day.”
“You’re secretly quite clever.”
“Ten years from now you’ll see another dome made of telephone directories or a maze with paper walls and you’ll shrug and go looking for the ice cream stand.”
“Ten years from now?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I don’t see why not.”
“Thanks.” I kicked up my legs for a while, watching the toes of my boots swing up. We sat together like that, under a dome made of telephone directories. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What do you think is really going to happen to us?”
She looked into my eyes and I saw that cold in her; the deserted windswept beach, the boarded-up seafront, snow falling in the deep heart of a forest of bare black trees. She took her arm from around me and went back to looking up at the ceiling. “The truth?”
“Yes, please.”
“I think we’re going to wear away from the world, just like the writing wears off old gravestones in the aisles of churches.”
I carried on kicking my legs, not saying anything.
“That’s what happens,” she said. “Up there, I’m mostly gone already.”
“Well, I know you’re still here. If that counts for anything.”
She didn’t answer. With a little burst of shock I realised she was almost crying. Her eyes had glassed up with tears she was working hard not to let fall. “I do care about you, you know.”
“Hey, it’s okay. I believe you.”
Face tipped upwards, she risked a side-on glance at me. “Jesus.”
“We’re going to be alright,” I said. “Come on, we’re going to be alright.”
I tried to put my arm around her to bring her towards me but she wouldn’t move, stiff and bobbing with internal sobs, staring up at the ceiling.
“Hey,” I said again. “Please, come here.”
I put my arm around her again and this time she allowed herself to fold up against me, sobbing quietly into my shoulder.
“Sometimes it’s just hard to see what’s in front of you. But once you do see it, or once something connected to the it touches you, I don’t think there’s any going back.” Her face streaky from the crying, Scout stared dead ahead.
“Well, then,” I said uncapping a water bottle and passing it to her. “It’s a good job we’re pushing forwards so heroically, isn’t it?”
She looked at me with an almost smile. “You’ve changed your tune.”
“Yeah, well. I thought it was about time. I’m guessing we’re nearly there?”
“Yeah, just one more letter to go.”
“Then I say we should take a break, let’s say half an hour or something, and get our heads together.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m resisting giving you my five grand.”
“Ah,” Scout said, smiling, “my money.”
“Amazing, you’re getting your colour back.”
She laughed a wet laugh. “That’s because you know just what to say to a girl.”
I rummaged around in my backpack. “Coronation chicken or chicken tikka?”
“Wow.”
“Well?”
“Coronation please.”
“Right then. I’m going to let Ian out so he can piss on some of these books.”
Ian sauntered his big ginger self out of the carrier and strolled away, sniffing occasionally at the bookwork walls.
“Don’t go too far.” I called after him. His tail twitched a bit, le
tting me know I was in no position to be telling him to do anything. He disappeared out through the entranceway.
Scout seemed to have a case of after-trauma vagueness, chewing slowly on her sandwich and staring out at nothing. I decided it would be best to give her some time and sat myself down against a wall.
I took the top telephone directory off the stack next to me and flicked it open. Classified adverts for caterers, carpet and upholstery cleaners, car hire, bus and coach operators. A picture of a woman in a designer hat, a truck with a haulage company’s logo on the side, a guitar, a special bath that lifts you in and out, all in familiar yellow and black. Scout was right; these were just phone books–ordinary adverts for ordinary businesses without even a trace of the biroing that covered everything in the tunnels. Just normal directories. The fact that someone had used them to make a yellow domed ceiling didn’t really mean anything at the end of the day. It was just there, a fact. And the tunnels themselves; it was possible to create a maze from stacked, written-on paper. Bizarre, unlikely, stupidly time-consuming and dangerous, but, yes, possible.
Putting the phone book to one side, I unwrapped my sandwich.
What a difference a day makes, twenty-four little hours. Staring into space myself, I found the light floaty scrap of tune rising up out of the back of my mind as I chewed. It made me think about how, in the dark places of yourself, thinking machines you never get near enough to see are constantly building things and running their own secretive programmes all of their own. Maybe you get a snippet of what’s going on back there, like this fragment of a song drifting its way into the light, or a phrase, or an image, or maybe just a mood, a wash of content or a bleak draining of colour that floods your chest and your stomach more than it ever finds its way into the bright halogen chrome of your mind.
I looked up at the ceiling dome again, at Scout still chewing vaguely.
How did I become this? I’d been an empty nothing for so long, and now suddenly I was here, somehow an adventurer in a strange place, somehow sleeping with this strong-brittle girl with the thing in her mind. Where had I found all these new parts? Perhaps they came from the real Eric Sanderson, the man in The Light Bulb Fragment. Maybe I’d found his old buried tools–his batsuit and batcar and all his sharp one-liners–and now I was walking around in boots that would never really be mine. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it was real. That’s what I wanted to believe. I’d been a flat thing, something I always mistook for a shadow, but maybe the eroding effect of events had begun weathering me out of the ground, revealing new surfaces and edges. Can nothing really be scraped away the same way that something can? I wondered about what else might be down there, what I could become if all these layers of absence and loss and bad things could ever be excavated and taken away.