The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  An officer asked them where they’d come from.

  ‘This morning? Chepstow. Our friends were supposed to join us at the Rose and Crown in Tintern, but they say there’s a traffic delay. Instead we’re going to meet them at the brewery in Brockweir. But that’s a further forty-minute hike, and I’m the only one with a torch.’ Taryn waved her phone. Excited by this gesture, the nearest dog lunged and dragged its handler several staggering steps forward. Taryn stepped back. ‘Hey, boy,’ she said to the dog.

  ‘You’re travelling light,’ said a constable.

  ‘We’ve eaten our sandwiches.’

  Not too glib, thought Jacob.

  ‘And you are?’ The man produced a small spiral-bound notebook.

  ‘Taryn Cornick. This is Jacob Berger.’

  The man asked for some ID. The other one spoke into his radio.

  ‘I have my passport,’ Taryn said. She fished an oilcloth pouch from her felt bag, opened it and produced her passport, which was inspected.

  One of the handlers responded to some urgency from his dog and let it lead him back through the fringe of the forest—where it discovered Battle, asleep under a tree. The handler called out and the man with the notebook went over.

  After a few minutes they managed to wake Battle, who cried out like a lost child. The constable spoke soothingly to him. In a minute Battle would offer his name and his relationship to the antiquarian bookshop in Tintern. What can I do? Jacob thought.

  The radio clipped on the vest of the constable still with them coughed and began with questions and information. Before whoever was talking had got far, the officer shot Taryn and Jacob a galvanised glance, swapped a meaningful look with the dog handler who’d stayed by them, and went a short way off to listen to his brief without being overheard.

  Battle was speaking now between sniffles, spilling everything.

  Taryn took Jacob’s hand.

  The handler told his dog to sit. It sat. ‘Don’t worry about the time,’ the handler said. ‘Someone can light you down to our vehicles and run you to the Kingstone in Brockweir.’

  Jacob’s shoulders kept wanting to twitch upwards. He made an effort to relax. It must have worked because the dog put its ears forward and its tongue out.

  ‘That would be kind of you,’ Taryn said to the handler.

  The man with the notebook joined the one on the radio. Jacob heard him report that the man on the ground was the antiquarian bookshop’s owner’s nephew, who was in the shop when the fire started. ‘He’s not very helpful on how he got up here.’

  The one with the radio still had his hand on the call switch, his elbow cocked upwards. He was waiting on something further.

  I’m a missing person, Jacob thought.

  The radio came alive; the voice on the other end rose and surged with excitement. The officer asked a few questions then came back to Jacob and Taryn.

  ‘You’re the couple who were attacked at Scolt Head,’ he said. ‘When everyone saw the crocodile.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Taryn said. ‘I saw the crocodile.’

  ‘I’m told you took yourselves off before satisfying all inquiries.’

  ‘I’ve had my phone with me the whole time,’ Taryn waved it again.

  ‘Is there an inquiry?’ Jacob said—foolishly, before realising that the degree of naivety he was putting on was completely out of character with who the police knew him to be. If he had to play a part he must play himself.

  ‘You weren’t supposed to be mobile, sir.’ The officer looked Jacob up and down.

  The other dog handler joined in. ‘That was some crocodile. I saw it on YouTube.’

  His dog’s head abruptly snapped around. It rose to its feet and slowly dropped its nose to the ground, eyes on the forest. Its shoulders sharpened inside round bristling bosses of raised hair. The hair on the ridge of its spine stood up. It laid its ears back, bared its teeth and began to growl.

  The other dog was doing the same, while also stepping sideways to edge away from its handler and closer to its canine companion. Its handler was remonstrating with it. The dog glanced at him, twitched back to duty, its job, its loyalties—but only for a second. For the rest of the time it trod stiffly sideways until it was as close to the other dog as it could get.

  Something was moving through the forest. A rustling, crackling progress coming their way.

  The police turned the beams of their torches on the trees.

  The dogs simultaneously stopped growling and crepitating backwards, and lunged out to the end of their leads, barking madly, drool dropping from their wholly bared black gums.

  There was nothing at all to see until it emerged from the trees above the path, on the raised wall of King Offa’s Dyke. A green branch ten feet up the trunk of an oak bent forward then whipped back as if it had been held and then released. Dead leaves billowed up and stayed suspended in the air within the thing that ploughed, and sometimes bounced, and sometimes floated, towards them all. Heavy and weightless, leaves and bark spinning in turbulence near its surface, its centre clear like a lens through which the two beautiful people following it appeared, pale and graceful; Neve with her long caramel-coloured hair, and Aeng, his curls the colour of blood in the dusk, his many rings scintillating in the beams of the police torches.

  The dogs broke and fled, one pulling the lead from its handler’s grip, the other practically airborne at the end of its harness until it rounded on its handler and bit his arm. The man let go.

  The dogs ran straight down the hill. By the sounds, one went over the bluff, while the other doubled back to the path and continued to run silently, as fast and far as it could go.

  The forcebeast spilled onto the path. It stopped, rocking in the six-foot-wide depression it made in the ground, a depression filled with tree roots, the soil brushed off them and tamped down around them by a pressure so finely calibrated that it cleaned the roots as it pressed the soil.

  ‘Get their radios,’ Jacob said.

  Aeng made a gesture at the beast, which floated forward, leaves rolling inside it, and seized the police by the radios clipped to their vests. It closed tiny, inexorable fists around each radio and crushed it, then pulled away, bearing a collection of shattered black plastic and bent circuit boards.

  Neve helped Battle to his feet. She fed him another few cape gooseberries, letting his wet lips linger on her slender fingertips.

  ‘Taryn, you should ditch that phone,’ Jacob said.

  Taryn looked at her phone, then threw it in the direction of the river. It clipped the edge of the Devil’s Pulpit and spun out of sight.

  Neve joined them, leading Battle, his hand in hers.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jacob said to the police, who stood frozen, or crouched cowering, their legs refusing to let them straighten up.

  ‘Best to put these men up a tree,’ Aeng said. ‘A tall tree.’

  Neve made a gesture—this one more complicated than Aeng’s.

  The forcebeast drifted forward and seemed to lick the men. Their turned cheeks flattened, their clothes were pushed up, shirts coming loose from belts, trousers raised to expose vulnerable ankles above their boot tops. The forcebeast first wiped the men upward, then lifted them into the air. It left the ground with all four men. They struggled furiously until, twenty feet up, two of them managed to calm themselves, or at least decide that, at this height, passive acceptance might be the better option.

  They floated out of sight above the crowns of the nearer trees.

  Jacob knew when the forcebeast had left the police, because the men immediately began to shout for help—from a place some distance off and upward.

  Neve said to Taryn, ‘The beast doesn’t have to wait for the ashes to cool.’

  To Jacob’s surprise, Taryn seemed near to tears. ‘I was going to call my friends and my father when all this was over. Now you’ve given me things I can’t explain.’

  ‘You’ll have to rethink your plans,’ Neve said.

  Aeng picked up one of the dropp
ed torches. ‘Let us be quick, before the loose dogs or the men in the trees attract notice.’ Then, ‘Jacob, Taryn, it is safer for you behind the beast.’ He came right up to Jacob, held him close, and kissed him.

  Aeng’s mouth tasted of blue borage honey, and the ozone of a fresh rainfall. ‘Soon you’ll be able to sleep in my arms. Even if I must remain awake for as long as we need this beast.’

  Jacob closed his eyes and leaned his face against Aeng’s neck. He felt his own body grow steady and calm.

  Aeng kissed him once more, a lingering gentle kiss, then walked ahead.

  They came across the bridge into Tintern, Aeng and Neve flanking the beast, which had no more or less forest matter roiling inside it. From thirty feet behind it, where Jacob walked, it looked like a strangely sustained dust devil. Jacob kept trying to find its top—its head—but the thing seemed to have no agreed-upon dimensions or form. Jacob thought he’d worked out where it ended. Then as they crossed the bridge it brushed a streetlight high on its pole, cracking the plastic casing around the lamp and causing the light to arc, with a jolt of blue electricity.

  In the village Neve kept to the narrow footpath while Aeng walked on the far side of the road, where there was no footpath. The forcebeast made its way along the stone channel of Tintern’s high street, flipping the hanging signs as it went. It plucked the petals from the white climbing roses on an arched gate and carried them off. The petals quickly grew transparent, crushed, as if the barometric pressure inside the forcebeast exceeded even that in a decompression chamber set to its highest atmosphere. The beast crushed the white out of the petals, made them wet, and rolled them into a mass, as if it hated flowers.

  The side of the beast slapping the signs so that they spun on their poles was Neve’s; the side crushing the colour out of the flowers was Aeng’s.

  The fire appliances had gone. The road was open, but the traffic was very sparse, no doubt discouraged by the problems earlier. The one car that came along the road drove into the beast and was upended, turned to lie on its roof, and dragged a little way along the road as the beast shook itself free. Jacob crouched to check on the driver, who was hanging in his seatbelt looking astonished. His airbag hadn’t even deployed. Jacob helped the man out of his car, and sat him down on the kerb out of the way of any further traffic. Then he hurried to catch up with the others. When he reached Taryn she was asking a question. ‘Was the whirlwind that raised the River Monnow during the forest fire a forcebeast?’

  Jacob said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Taryn shook her head at him. No one answered her question.

  They reached the antiquarian bookshop. The already narrow road was halved by a cordon of heavy plastic interlocking barriers. The cordon blocked off the small gabled house. The bookshop’s door and lovely mullioned windows had gone, replaced by sheets of hardboard. The stonework around the door was stained by a flaring corona of soot.

  Aeng raised his hand and pushed the air.

  The beast parted the barrier. It made a gap three sections wide. Enough for it to stand in. The hardboard on the door creaked, cracked, then exploded inwards.

  A little way down the road, headlights and the blue and white bars on a police vehicle lit up. The police car bumped down off the high kerb, where it had been parked, and rolled the short distance to stop beside them.

  Aeng and Neve dropped into a crouch. They were making small motions with their hands, as if parting long grass. They looked poised and preoccupied and, lit up by the headlights, they resembled people performing a dance on a stage.

  Soot billowed out of the doorway as the greatly compressed forcebeast pushed its way into the shop. It passed all the way in, sucking an ash-filled bubble of itself after it.

  Three officers emerged from the car and stood staring at the crouching figures, who seemed oblivious to their presence.

  ‘What the hell are you people playing at?’ demanded a voice behind the headlights.

  Neve turned her head a fraction and said, ‘Don’t tiger, dragon, crocodile, or anything else, no matter what they do. Remember, we’ll drop the forcebeast if you do.’

  ‘Jacob,’ Taryn said, ‘I think it might be wise for us to kneel and put our hands behind our heads.’

  It was a shrewd suggestion and Jacob followed it. His back gave a twinge as his knees settled on the hard road. For a moment he was wholly engulfed in his fear of pain. Pain for weeks, months, and if he wasn’t careful, years.

  He said, ‘Aeng, I want to go home.’

  ‘Yes, so do I, my love,’ Aeng answered.

  ‘I hope this won’t take too long. But we can’t teach the beast to recognise the Firestarter any more than we can recognise it ourselves when it’s right under our noses,’ Neve said. ‘Instead we’ve instructed it to retrieve, and present to us, anything in the shop’s downstairs which is loose, and intact.’

  ‘If we just said “intact” it would bring us the stones from the walls,’ said Aeng.

  ‘It looks like they’re praying,’ opined one of the police.

  Neve and Aeng glanced at each other and brought their palms together in a pious attitude. Neve’s lips were touching her fingertips. She whispered over the top of them, ‘They’ll get really excited when it starts bringing out charred shelving.’

  As if on cue the forcebeast emerged with a blackened oil-fin heater, an electric kettle, and a two-drawer filing cabinet. It deposited all three objects on the road before the dark doorway.

  Aeng and Neve made discreet opening motions.

  The filing cabinet doors creaked, then burst open, spilling paper, brittle and browned by heat, plus some leather cases containing coins and medals.

  Neve made a motion as if she were stuffing a thick quilt into a small cupboard. The now clear bubble of air that was the beast pushed itself back into the black haze of the antiquarian bookshop.

  From behind the headlights there was complete silence. It was as if the three police officers had vanished. Then a light went on inside the car, as someone had got in to use the radio. The headlights were too bright for Jacob to see where the officers were. Perhaps they were sitting in the front seat or perhaps they were lying down, as if bracing themselves for the invisible bearer and breaker of filing cabinets to pull a gun and start shooting.

  The forcebeast returned with a large square object, which proved to be a book so voluminous and dense that it had resisted the fire. That, and the bottom half of an antique swivel chair, and a whole antique page press—the sort of thing a Victorian botanist might have used to preserve specimens of leaves and flowers.

  Another police vehicle pulled up next to them on the bridge side of the village. The two cars were now blinding each other, so both dipped their lights.

  Hundreds of moths had come, their bodies and shadows a whirling flurry in the cones of light.

  Someone called out, ‘Is that Taryn Cornick?’

  ‘Yes,’ Taryn said, and gave a little wave, making shadow antlers above her own head.

  ‘Taryn Cornick of the Northovers,’ Neve said. ‘Valravn. Hero of Understanding.’

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ said the voice. ‘And you are?’

  ‘None of your business,’ said Neve.

  The forcebeast returned with a mesh wastepaper basket, a cashbox, and two bronze bookends shaped like winged sphinxes.

  ‘How the hell are you doing that?’ someone asked, sounding on the verge of hysteria.

  The forcebeast went back into the shop.

  The much more collected man from the first car said, ‘Is that Jason Battle I see there? Are you all right, Mr Battle?’

  ‘Jason. You must get up and go quietly to those men and stay with them for the time being,’ Neve said.

  Jason Battle had been lying face down on the road. He rose, shook his head dumbly for a time, then continued from all fours onto his feet and went unsteadily towards the first police car.

  The forcebeast returned with some pots and pans, and the cash register.
It was now at work on the upper level—kitchenette and shop proper, it seemed.

  ‘Neve,’ said Jacob. ‘Do you want it to search the whole premises or only the basement?’

  ‘Anywhere burnt,’ Neve answered.

  ‘What say the Firestarter is somewhere unburnt, like upstairs?’ Taryn said.

  ‘Is that Jacob Berger?’ asked the collected voice.

  Jacob didn’t answer.

  ‘What did you do with our officers? They called you and Ms Cornick and Jason Battle in, and then we lost them.’

  ‘They are in the treetops,’ Aeng said. ‘And perfectly safe if they stay put until rescued.’

  ‘Fuck this.’ It was an officer in the car nearest the bridge. There came a small series of highly specific clicks that Jacob knew very well. He shouted, ‘Gun!’

  The forcebeast erupted through the shop doorway, blasting bits of stonework out into the street. One large piece thumped into Neve’s shoulder, several small pieces stung Jacob’s face and neck. Neve reeled back and caught herself on one hand. She came upright again and shouted, ‘No!’

  Then she and Aeng flung out their arms, fingers at full stretch, as if they’d been pulled roughly into that position rather than assuming it voluntarily. Jacob watched blood well up in the beds of Aeng’s fingernails.

  The forcebeast tore in two. The divided volumes of roiling air swelled, filled with static electricity, like the light in a plasma ball. The sizzling masses fell on both cars. The headlights died. The cars rocked several feet backwards as if in a shockwave, and two of the four men and one woman behind the lights were ripped up into the air by the guns they wouldn’t let go of.

  The forcebeast pulled one man and his gun apart. The gun’s trigger guard completely ungloved the man’s thumb. The other man let go of his. The forcebeast released the men; one fell onto the hood of his car, while the other landed on the road. The beast then drifted broodily back into one mass and shrank into a dense ball of electrical shorts and ballistic explosions as it fired every bullet from the guns, and held the explosions inside itself.