The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  Taryn poked her head through the curtains. Bea tugged at the back of her jersey, but Taryn fended her sister off. ‘I’m watching to see if the door handle turns.’

  Out in the passage Grandfather said, ‘My Torah came from a scholar in Lodz, a gift to my venturesome ancestor William Northover. I’ve always kept it with due reverence, shawled, and shut away in its box.’

  ‘Box,’ said Battle.

  Grandfather said, ‘And why are you asking about my Torah, anyway?’

  Battle said, ‘My Torah, your Torah. The gross Torah, not the ghost Torah.’

  ‘Is that what this is? You’ve converted? Isn’t it usually Amway or Est with you people?’

  Battle said, ‘Who are “you people”?’

  ‘You young people.’ Grandfather sounded exasperated. ‘And if you have converted, Jason, why can’t you do it in the normal way and make an announcement: “I’ve discovered a Jewish ancestor and decided to study Hebrew.” Then I’d be saying “Good for you” and offering to show you my Torah.’

  The handle turned. Taryn pulled her head back and pinched the folds of the curtains to stop them from swinging.

  ‘They’re not here,’ said Grandfather. ‘And my fire is going to waste.’

  ‘Fire,’ said Battle.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Grandfather, who was a little hard of hearing. Then, ‘It’s time to knuckle down, Jason. We’d best fetch what we need and go. If the girls are up in the gallery, they’ll soon be back. On a day like today it’ll be positively Arctic up there. Except the polar regions at least have the virtue of being dry.’

  Battle said, ‘You take the estate manager’s journal. I’ll carry the map. Its case must be around here somewhere.’ He now sounded businesslike and ordinary.

  A library ladder trundled along its iron track. Its steps creaked. Volumes pulled from shelves and stacked made a solid, leathery thumping. It sounded to Taryn as if someone were putting a saddle on a horse.

  The library door creaked as one or both men went out. The girls didn’t move. It was dusk outside; Bea’s face was ghostly, bluish. Her brown eyes had lost all their warmth and were only alert. The girls listened for the sound of a map rolled and slipped into its case.

  Instead, the door closed and latched. Battle was still present, motionless, making no attempt to hunt for the map case. The flames in the fireplace were audible, fluttering. Then the girls heard the legs of the brass fire screen scraping on the hearth as Battle dragged it aside. There came a stealthy crackle. Bea put her hand over her mouth. The reflection in her eyes of light coming through the crack in the curtains turned from white-yellow to yellow-orange.

  Battle said, to himself, to the empty room: ‘The new Torah will issue from me. The new Torah is the aspect of the Torah which is above, which is the aspect of the Tree of Life in actuality. And this is above our Torah, which is garbed in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.’ His tone of voice was more that of someone telling a joke than intoning a sermon.

  Taryn put her eye to the gap in the curtains. She saw Battle holding a burning twist of paper. He touched the flame to the edges of Grandfather’s old map of Princes Gate and its surrounding countryside. The map was reluctant to burn, perhaps because of its linen backing, or something in the ink.

  Taryn said to Bea, ‘He’s setting fire to Grandad’s map!’ She didn’t bother to whisper.

  Bea gasped, and launched herself through the curtains. Taryn followed her.

  Bea picked up a book from Taryn’s stack and threw it at Battle. The book clipped him on the elbow, but not before the map caught fire.

  As it burned it curled up, rolling across the desk and setting other papers alight.

  ‘To purify and to separate!’ Battle yelled.

  Bea shoved him aside. She stretched her jersey cuffs over her hands, grasped the as-yet unlit edge of the map and whipped it off the table and onto the Turkestan rug. She stamped on the flames.

  Taryn opened the library door to shout for Grandfather. Fresh air rushed in past her, and Bea screamed. Taryn turned back to see her sister on fire. Flames streaked up Bea’s favourite cotton clown pants. Bea rushed to the French doors and rammed through them. She dropped onto the waterlogged gravel of the terrace and rolled. The flames went out.

  Taryn had an idea. The rug wasn’t under the desk, in fact the only piece of furniture on the rug was a heavy leather armchair. It was on casters. Taryn put her shoulder to the chair and bulldozed it out of the way. Then she grabbed a big art book, came back to the desk and used the book’s edge to scrape the rest of the burning papers off the desk and onto the rug. Then she ran around and seized the corner of the rug nearest the French doors and hauled with all her might.

  Bea came back inside and joined her. Battle gave a mad cackle and came to stand on the far edge of the rug. The girls yelled at him, but he just stood, his face bright red and glaring challenge.

  Grandfather arrived. He roared in horror, then took in the girl’s problem and rushed at Battle, taking him by one arm and tugging him away. The girls gave a hard heave on the rug. Battle lost his footing and toppled backwards, his body rigid. His head slammed into the parquet floor.

  Bea and Taryn dragged the rug out the French doors, across the terrace, and onto the lawn. They flipped it over, tipping out the fire and smothering it. For a moment they were making smoke signals, black smoke, then white.

  Grandfather hurried down the steps. He eased himself onto his knees beside Bea to inspect her legs. Her pants hung in shrivelled tatters, and the skin on her calves looked as if it had been licked by a dog with its tongue coated in strawberry syrup. She shivered and wept.

  ‘It doesn’t look too bad, love,’ Grandfather said. ‘We’ll get you to a doctor.’

  From the corner of her eye Taryn saw movement in the library. Battle rose to his feet without using hands or arms but levering himself up, knock-kneed, by standing on the inner edges of each foot. His face tilted towards the ceiling as if he were balancing a ball on his nose. Taryn fumbled for her grandfather’s arm and tugged on it. She pointed—in her shock she’d lost her language, had gone as silent as a sole fledgling in a nest.

  Battle swivelled his head, eyes shut, scenting the air. He grinned and started for the hearth. His gait was peculiar, his legs lifting only from the hip. His ankles wouldn’t lock to keep his feet in line.

  Grandfather said, sternly, ‘Oh, no, you don’t.’ He got up with his granddaughters’ help and hurried to interpose himself between his secretary and the fire, until, struck by another thought, he dodged sideways and embraced a vase of flowers on a plinth to one side of the French doors. Hugging the vase to him, Grandfather shuffled over to the fire and tipped its contents into the grate. The fireplace billowed steam, and the room filled with the horrible smell of burning lilies.

  Battle turned his face to the grate. His nostrils vibrated, but he didn’t open his eyes. Then he ran. Taryn couldn’t remember ever having seen Battle move at anything faster than a pitched forward, flat-footed walk. His running gait was loose, caroming. He tottered from the terrace and slithered across the lawn. He rounded the southwest tower and passed out of sight.

  5

  Documentary Evidence

  Taryn’s agent, Angela, texted to ask if she was ready to be picked up. Taryn replied that she was waiting for her discharge papers. The ward was very busy and she didn’t want to nag.

  Taryn may have noticed how busy everyone was, but she’d been so low that she hadn’t considered how remarkable it was that she had a room to herself. Of course her father had paid for one—and when he visited she’d shown him no gratitude, nor even much politeness.

  After her double mastectomy Taryn’s mother had spent only a night in the quiet room next to the nurses’ station. When Taryn and Beatrice visited her, Taryn hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away from all the ins and outs of IV lines and drainage tubes. Later visits were to a six-bed cubicle on the post-surgical ward. Addy had improved and had more to say than jus
t asking someone to put salve on her lips. There were other women present, and their problems made Taryn’s mother seem less isolated and exceptional. When Addy’s cancer came back, Taryn’s father had the film money and, though he and his wife had been divorced for five years, he made sure she had a private room. A room filled with snowdrifts of all her favourite flowers—white roses, daisies, white peonies. Taryn’s memory of that room was indelible. Its view of the city. The river like silver gas. The off-white walls, white modular plastic furniture, everything smooth and pale as if they were inside a giant shell. The room had a full-length mirror, angled to reflect a view of the corridor. But the door was often closed. Taryn would shut it whenever her mother began her quiet weeping. When the door was closed the mirror showed only Addy’s black cashmere robe hanging on the back of it. The robe looked like the shadowy shape of a third person present in the room.

  Beatrice.

  Taryn, in her private room, thought she should shed a tear—should be able to—for her father, who’d no doubt given the hospital his credit card the moment Carol called him. Who arrived soon afterwards, all the way from Lake Bled and the set of his television fantasy series, possibly causing the rearrangement of the whole shooting schedule. And Taryn had only snapped at him. She’d not let him be his own kind and variably sensible self.

  I was looked after for years by Alan and my father. I haven’t had to lift a finger. Writing books didn’t count. I almost have no fingers, she thought, which was an odd idea, though this one felt like her own. Taryn imagined herself as a smooth-skinned, thick-bodied eel, all sinew, a shadow in the river. That’s me, swimming around in my poisonous slime of grief and not letting anyone catch hold of me without coming away with their hands coated in it.

  Taryn had reached this nadir of self-disgust, when a very well-turned-out man walked into her room. She regarded him with a baleful expression and wished for more beds, and someone coughing, and someone else receiving a cellophane-wrapped fruit basket and the news of the day. There was of course some chance this might be another specialist, brought in by the neurologist for a second opinion. He was holding an envelope, though it looked too small for films of a scan. Taryn thought it more likely he was the ‘someone’ DI Berger had promised.

  The man introduced himself as Raymond Price, asked after her health and then, without waiting for an answer, told her he wanted to ask a few questions about the two men she’d spoken to following her appearance at the Southbank Centre. ‘Three and a half weeks ago. Faheem Khalef and Riad Tahan. The very odd circumstance is that it seems they were in the UK with the sole purpose of meeting you, and visiting a single tech company. Had you had any previous contact with either of them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You do remember them? They approached you after your session, when you were at the signing table.’

  Taryn remembered that she’d shared the signing table with a fantasy writer whose session had been scheduled opposite hers. Angela had been breezy about the clash. ‘Different audiences. Don’t worry yourself.’

  The fantasy writer was a grandfatherly man who, when Taryn took her seat, was quick to ask her how it had gone. His first fans were there already, several with bulging book bags stuffed with thumbed and furry copies of every one of his titles from their personal libraries, or their secondhand bookshops. The one at the head of the line swayed from foot to foot like an eager owl moving to check focal distances on prey before it swooped. Taryn took in this agitation, and kept what she wanted to say short, and waited for her own line to form. It did. And when it petered out after a respectable thirty-five minutes there was still a contour-snaking Great Wall of fans waiting for her table-mate.

  It was then that the gentlemen appeared. There was really no other way to describe them. They wore beautifully cut suits. Their hands were manicured. She noticed the bright half-moons on the fingernails of the hand holding a copy of her book. They each had their own copy. They stood side by side and asked her a series of questions about the book, and then one of them gave her his card.

  Taryn pointed at the bedside cabinet and asked Price if he’d please hand her the purse there.

  He opened the drawer and regarded her pale green beaded purse with consternation.

  ‘I was at a wedding,’ Taryn explained. She found her wallet. The business card was still there. Taryn was always tardy about transferring things from her wallet.

  Taryn remembered the men’s dark faces. Their groomed beards. Their smooth, cultivated voices and flattering eagerness. She couldn’t remember what they’d talked about. Probably the usual questions about deliberate book burnings. The Nazis. School boards in the Midwest banning and occasionally destroying gay and lesbian books. Or questions about Sappho and other famous manuscript losses and survivals.

  Taryn got out her phone, opened Google and typed in the name from the business card. Dr Abdul Alhazred. It seemed familiar. It had associations for her—something sickly, something pleasurable, something from the past she’d shared with Beatrice.

  The Wikipedia entry topped the search results. ‘Abdul Alhazred is a character created by American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. He is the so-called “mad Arab” credited with authoring the fictional book the Necronomicon.’

  Forbidden books were another thing Taryn’s audiences asked about. Forbidden books, secret books, cursed books. Like The Lesser Key of Solomon—lost in 1608, and found again in two pieces, one in the British library and the other in the Bodleian, back in the early twentieth century, about the time that Lovecraft came up with his terrible Necronomicon. Which probably meant that he had read about The Lesser Key in the newspapers of the day and it gave him the idea.

  Taryn told Price that one of the men had given her a business card in the name of a fictional character.

  Price plucked the card from her fingers and studied it. ‘We have their names from their credit cards. Faheem Khalef and Riad Tahan. We have no idea about their passports because there’s no record of them entering any port in Europe.’

  ‘But you know they left the UK?’

  ‘After a fashion.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘At this point I’d rather not pollute your recollection with narrative. Let’s just see what your memory turns up.’

  ‘I’m having difficulties with my memory. Have you spoken to my doctors?’

  Price waved the business card. ‘Might I have this?’

  ‘Of course. I’m not going to contact him. “Abdul Alhazred” is a character invented by H.P. Lovecraft. He’s the author of a cursed book.’

  Price looked displeased. His lips pursed. He produced his phone and showed Taryn a couple of photos. The enhanced beauty of the men’s flattened-out faces, and the soft focus background, told Taryn the photos were taken with a long lens.

  ‘Yes. That’s them,’ she said. Then, ‘You’re MI5.’

  ‘I’m a public servant.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to tell me if you’re MI5?’

  ‘I imagined it would declare itself.’

  Taryn thought that MI5 would almost certainly be able to monitor her phone calls without the permission of a judge. And MI5 were helping Hemms and Berger. She also wondered how much information Price might give her in order to discover what she knew. She asked about the name of the company on the business card. ‘Are Khalef and Tahan from Dynamic Systems? Does the company exist?’

  ‘Yes. Dynamic Systems is a tech start-up specialising in the design of cluster computers. For the past months they’ve been buying PCs in the thousands and shipping them to Skardu, where they’re building a server farm. They are also recruiting coders.’

  ‘So this is cyberterrorism?’ Taryn said.

  ‘What do you know about cyberterrorism?’

  ‘Only what I get from the Guardian. What did the tech company they visited here have to say?’

  ‘Agile Media claim there was no visit—and indeed Khalef and Tahan didn’t go through the gates and report at reception, or show up
on any of the internal security cameras.’

  ‘You mean they showed up on the external security cameras?’

  Price’s smile might be described as functionally warm.

  ‘Is Agile Media another server farm?’ Taryn asked.

  ‘Agile Media make RPGs.’

  ‘Rocket-propelled grenades?’ Taryn was quite confused by now.

  ‘Role-playing games. The Blue Empire is one. I’m told it’s a little like Dark Souls. Which sheds no light, I might say.’

  ‘All I remember about Khalef and Tahan was that I signed their copies of my book,’ said Taryn. ‘And answered questions that they were too shy or diffident to ask during my session’s question time. I can’t recall what those questions were—which almost certainly means it was stuff I always get asked. Though “always” is a bit pretentious since I’m new to this business.’

  ‘What are the usual questions?’

  ‘About deliberate book burnings. The Nazis and so forth.’

  ‘Why would Khalef or Tahan use an alias?’

  ‘What we’d call a pseudonym in my business. The Necronomicon is a fictional forbidden book, like M.R. James’s Tractate Middoth or Robert Chambers’s Yellow Sign. Someone handing me a card with Abdul Alhazred on it would mean to say: “I am the master of forbidden knowledge.”’

  All this was strangely like something in one of Beatrice’s favourite books. In fact Beatrice’s love of those books hadn’t begun with The Da Vinci Code or The Shadow of the Wind, but with the book-haunted stories of old horror writers—James, Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood.

  Price stood, face turned partly away, eyes hooded, nodding slightly, more thoughtful than assenting. He kept turning and turning the yellow envelope he held.

  Taryn said, ‘I could make a case for a bookish person from a games production company wanting to speak to me. But not cyberterrorists.’