by Tom Harper
‘The cross must mean it’s a church, or maybe a monastery. That would make sense. If the Devils’ Library did exist, a monastery would have been the safest place to keep it.’
Nick stared at the picture a moment longer, then switched off the phone.
‘I hope I did the right thing, telling Atheldene where we’re going.’
Emily wrapped her hand in his and squeezed it. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it now.’
He stared into the water. Off the bow, black-backed rocks lurked beneath the surface like circling sharks.
If we don’t trust each other, we both hang.
LXXIV
Mainz
All that winter we worked like dogs. While October rains flooded the fields and turned the roads to bog, we were stuck in our own mire of ink and lead. I watched carters bruise their shoulders trying to heave their heavy wagons out of the mud, and felt a kinship.
Snow fell in December. As Fust would not allow fires in the Humbrechthof, we froze. I had to send the crews back to the Gutenberghof in shifts, to thaw beside the forge where we boiled ink and recast the old types. It made the short, dark days shorter still. One morning we found the piles of damp paper frozen solid. The presses jammed, and ink would not to stick to the page.
Yet even more fragile was the human machinery. I was making more books than perhaps any man in history, but my fingers rarely touched paper or ink. The whole house had become a mechanism, as intricate as anything Saspach ever built. I was the screw that drove it. Too much pressure and the mechanism would snap; too little, and we would not make an impression. I had to know how many pages the compositors should set each hour, each day, each week, and how many men the task would need, so that the press men neither sat idle nor rushed their work. I had to see which apprentices were quarrel some or placid, sloppy or over-meticulous, and match them accordingly. I had to make sure that it was impossible for a form to reach the press unless it had been approved, and I had to decide how to order the finished quires in the storeroom so that we could divide them correctly when we assembled them into books. These were invisible mechanisms – systems of thought, order and imagination – but they were as necessary to our art as any invention of wood or iron.
And there was Kaspar. At first I tried to put him in charge of a press, but after three days he disappeared. The press sat idle all morning while we searched for him, and Fust was furious. When we found him, in an alehouse, he told me he did not want the job. I told him I would give it to Schoeffer, which angered him so much he agreed to stay on. But I quickly regretted it. He arrived late, quarrelled with his assistants and in short order offended half the men in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes he insisted on re-pressing for the least blemish; at other times, he waved through the most horrendous errors, and I would spend an afternoon digging through the store house to locate them.
Too late, I admitted he was not suited to the work. He delighted in novelty, in the wild freedom of invention. But our task was a discipline as much as an art, novel only in its absolute routine.
One evening, I tried to explain it to him. ‘In this house we are a brotherhood, serving God, our art and each other. The books we make are not mine or yours or Fust’s. They are of God. The more perfect they are, the closer to God they advance.’
‘And will God take the profits when you sell them?’
I shook my head in frustration. ‘You’ve missed the point. The work is boring and repetitive -’
‘Like a hammer banging nails.’
‘- but what matters is that we do it. Like monks saying their services, the unchanging cycle holds a mirror to God.’
‘And a fine monk you’d have made, no doubt,’ said Kaspar cruelly. ‘If I wanted to live a flat and repetitious life I’d have become a farmer: plough, sow, reap; plough, sow, reap; ploughing the same old rut until it furrowed my grave.’ The scars on his face throbbed. ‘But I can do more, and so can you. More than pulling a lever to make another copy of your book, like a miller grinding flour.’
The next time he quit his post, as inevitably he did, I let him go. To avoid making the situation worse I gave the job to Keffer, but this only embarrassed him and offended Schoeffer, for both knew that Schoeffer was the better candidate. I paid Kaspar’s wages, but he had no place in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes – rarely – he would visit, drifting around the house and setting me on edge until he left. I think he enjoyed inflicting disorder on our work. The rest of the time he stayed in the Gutenberghof, taking work as an illuminator to occupy himself.
I was sad, though it had become inevitable. Somewhere in our journey, it had stopped being our art and become mine.
In April, things began to change. Longer days relieved the pressure to use every scrap of daylight; men saw their tasks with fresh eyes not wearied from squinting through the gloom. Shivering hands that had flinched to pick up the icy metal types now plucked them nimbly and set them in their rows. A rhythm established itself, beaten out every day by the clack of types in their racks, the creak of the press, the rattle of hand-carts bringing fresh ink. When Fust greeted me with, ‘How many pages?’ the answers no longer made him scowl.
I had told Kaspar we were like monks, and it was true. Like a monastery, we were locked away from the world. Men in the street could hear the sounds from within and wonder, but they never saw what passed behind our gates. The work of the books was our monastic rule. The fetching of paper and ink in the morning was our prime; the morning assembly, where we gathered in the print room to allocate the day’s tasks, our chapter – and so through to vespers, when we washed the ink off the forms and the presses, unscrewed the frames and returned the letters to the type room, to be sorted for the next day. We worked together, we ate together, we argued and laughed together: we were a brotherhood.
Most of my days were occupied far from the press: answering questions, solving disputes, settling payments and accounts. But there were moments of peace, times when the whole house turned in ordered motion, like the orbit of the planets around the earth. Those were the hours I was most happy. I walked through the house, observing the world I had brought into being and marvelling at the daily acts of creation under its roof.
Of course it was not all sunshine. Men quarrelled; presses broke; errors emerged, usually just after we had broken apart the offending page and scattered its type. Stores went missing, occasioning furious arguments with Fust. As time passed, the burden of our enterprise began to tell on me. I lay awake in my bed, alone, obsessively counting the pages printed, pages set, pages yet to come. No longer flush with the adventure’s promise, instead I longed for it to end. Each time I crossed the threshold of the Gutenberghof I glanced up at the stone pilgrim, bent double under his invisible burden, and felt a twinge of sympathy.
But I cannot complain. After all that had come before, and what happened after, these were good days.
LXXV
Oberwinter
Nobody disembarked at Oberwinter except Nick and Emily. The boat barely paused: by the time they reached the end of the pier, all they could see were running lights receding up the river. They crossed the empty highway, walked through a culvert under the railway tracks and entered the village through a stone gateway. Crooked houses leaned over them, as if the timbers within still preserved some vestigial memory of the trees they had once been. There were no cars, no people, not even footprints in the snow. If not for the wilting Christmas lights still draped between the houses, they could have been back in the Middle Ages.
They passed several guesthouses along the riverfront walls, but all were shuttered and dark. Paper notices pinned on doors said most wouldn’t reopen until Easter. Nick’s feet ached with the cold; he began to worry they wouldn’t find anywhere, but wander this deserted town until they froze to death.
The high street ended in an irregular town square. A wide three-storey building with a roof like a gingerbread house towered over it, and a legend painted on the plasterwork in tangled Gothic letters announced the Drei K
önige Hotel. To Nick’s unbounded relief, the lights were on.
The hotel was almost as cold inside as out. They rang a bell and waited. Nick eyed the rows of keys on hooks behind the desk.
‘Looks like they should be able to give us a room.’
Emily shivered. ‘I’ll take a cupboard as long as it’s got hot water and a duvet.’
The back door opened and a man came out. He was wearing a dressing gown and smoking a filterless cigarette so low Nick worried it would set his moustache on fire. He was the only living soul they’d seen in Oberwinter, but he didn’t seem the least surprised to see them.
He took a key from the wall and pointed upstairs. ‘Room seven, second floor.’
It wasn’t much: a few pieces of heavily varnished furniture marked with cigarette burns, a threadbare rug slung across the floorboards. When Nick touched the desk his finger came away damp from condensation. A freezing draught blew against his shoulder from the open bathroom door. He glanced in. Snow gathered on the sill where one of the windowpanes was missing. Perhaps he could stop it up with a towel.
The moment he stepped inside the bathroom he felt a dizzy wave of recognition. Reality blurred and the room seemed to darken. Instead of a bathroom, he was staring at a pixellated window in a living room thousands of miles away. A scene he had replayed in his head every day since. There was the mirror, the same shower curtain with the Christmas-tree stencils. But the wall was white. In the video it had been brown – he was certain.
He rushed out of the room onto the landing.
‘Where are you going?’ Emily called after him. He ignored her. There were five rooms on this floor, all with their doors cracked ajar in the forlorn hopes of welcoming a guest, and a door marked PRIVAT. One by one, he tiptoed into the rooms and examined the bathrooms. None of them was brown.
He went back out on the landing. On a hunch, he examined the door with the sign more closely. The frame was new, bare wood, while the lock must have been about the shiniest thing in the hotel. In the middle of the door, four dimples showed where screw holes had been filled in with putty. When Nick stepped back, he could see the ghost of the number 14 preserved in the faded paint.
He tried the handle. Locked. He looked back. Emily was standing on the landing outside their room, looking at him in confusion.
‘What are you doing?’
Nick crept down to the lobby and counted the keys behind the desk. Thirteen plus a gap where theirs had come from. He listened a moment. All he heard was the distant roar of a soccer match coming out of a television in the back room.
Heart racing, he darted round and lifted the last key off its hook. There was no number on the fob, but the brass was shiny as a new penny, no scratches on its smooth surface. He palmed it against his leg so it didn’t jangle and tiptoed back up the stairs.
‘If anyone comes, stop them,’ he told a by-now utterly bewildered Emily.
He approached the door. Nightmarish visions taunted his imagination. The key slotted into the lock and turned with a whisper. As the door creaked open he felt a shiver, as if a ghost had just passed through him.
He knew at once it must be the right room. The light from the landing that spilled through the door illuminated a scene of utter destruction. The whole place had been torn apart. Floorboards prised off the joists, wainscoting pulled away from the walls, the bed dismantled and the mattress sliced open. His stomach turned over when he saw that. But there was no trace of blood, and the cuts looked too straight and efficient to have been aimed at someone lying on it.
He flicked the light switch but nothing happened. When he looked up, all he saw was a bundle of wires spilling out of the ceiling where the lamp had been unscrewed and taken away.
‘What happened here?’
Nick almost jumped out of his skin. Emily had come up behind him and was peering over his shoulder at the vandalised room. She looked frightened.
‘You were supposed to be keeping a lookout.’
‘You’re supposed to tell me what’s going on.’
‘When Gillian called me, the day she went missing, she left her webcam on.’
He stepped carefully across the room, balancing on the joists like railway sleepers. The bathroom door stood open, cracked from the impact of heavy blows, while the frame around the latch hung loose in splinters. A glance inside confirmed his suspicions.
‘This is where she was. I remember the brown tiles on the walls. The curtain.’ The side panel of the bath had been ripped off, but the Christmas-tree shower curtain still hung from the ceiling. He pulled it back. A small ledge was set in the tiled wall, about shoulder high, with a window behind overlooking a snowy roof.
‘That must have been where she put the laptop.’
He looked around, trying to silence the scream that was echoing in his memory. The linoleum floor had been rolled back to the skirting board, the mirror unscrewed and leaned against the towel rail. A half-used toilet roll had been placed on top of the radiator, still clipped into the plastic holder that had been removed from the wall. Almost as if someone might need a pit stop amid all the destruction.
‘This isn’t random. They were looking for something.’ Emily surveyed the wreckage. ‘They probably found it. If it was here.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Well there’s no point waiting for them to come back and find us instead.’ Emily headed for the door. ‘Seriously, Nick. Everything’s gone.’
But Nick didn’t hear her. He was staring at the radiator, remembering.
Valentine’s Day. Waking up, Gillian snuggled against him, the best Valentine’s morning he’d ever had. He’d brought her waffles and Bloody Marys in bed, nervous in case she thought it was too cheesy. He suspected she’d have no time for Valentine’s Day; wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d suggested visiting a war memorial or a soup kitchen instead. But she’d smiled and rubbed herself against him like a kitten, though when he tried to kiss her she pulled away, spilling tomato juice on the bedclothes.
‘First you have to find my present to you,’ she told him, with a gleam in her eye that said he’d have his work cut out.
He’d turned the apartment upside down. Even Bret had been shocked by the mess. Gillian watched, goading him with hints that seemed completely arbitrary. The waffles went cold. Several times he begged her to tell him, but she just laughed and said love would find a way. Eventually he got so mad he pulled on his clothes and stormed out to the park.
She never told him.
Bret found it four days later. He was sitting on the toilet reading a dirty magazine when he came to the end of the toilet tissue. He came blundering out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, a tiny envelope in one hand and a cardboard tube in the other.
‘I think it’s for you.’
Bret had already opened the envelope. There was a card inside with a plastic gold key on the front, under the legend ‘Key to my heart’. Over the flap Gillian had written three words.
‘You got me.’
‘Gillian used to have a trick.’
He went over to the radiator and pulled the toilet roll off its holder. He slid his finger in the cardboard tube. Don’t expect anything, he told himself.
There was a crack. He squeezed his fingernail into it and teased it apart. The cardboard tube coiled back. Instead of a flimsy wad of toilet tissue, he felt the crisp crackle of writing paper. He pulled it out. Two pages, ragged at the top where they’d been torn from a spiral notebook.
A creak sounded from the stair.
LXXVI
Mainz
Devils haunted our house. So many of our crew believed. Over the next autumn and winter, a sullen joylessness overtook our works. They did not speak of their fears in front of me; they knew I did not like it. But I caught snatches in conversations heard through open doors: nervous comments muttered under their breath. I knew some of the men still distrusted the press. They found its power unnatural, felt discomfited by its casual surpassing of human ability. Som
e ascribed its powers to black magic. I thought these notions must have come from the townsfolk, anxious and ignorant of the goings-on behind our walls, but clearly many who should have known better thought so too.
And – I had to admit – strange things did happen. Sometimes at night I could have sworn I heard the creak and clank of the press in the room below. I thought it must be my cares creeping into my dreams, but gradually I discovered that others heard it too. One night the whole house woke to the sound of a great crash. We rushed to the press and found a fresh ink jar smashed open on the floor. We blamed the cat, or swallows who had come in the window.
Eventually it became something of a joke. When a compositor reached into his case and found an x in place of an e; when a ream of paper was found to be two sheets short; when Götz’s tools went blunt overnight; when a form left in the press was backwards next morning, men crossed themselves and blamed the press devils.
One morning, I found the compositors gathered in a high state of excitement. It was unusual to see them thus: by their nature most were sober and quiet men. They were examining a composing stick filled with type. When they had calmed enough for me to understand, Günther explained that they had found it on the desk when they arrived for work. None knew where it had come from.
I took it through to the proofing room and rubbed ink on the type. I used my thumbs to press a scrap of paper against it. A crude line of text appeared.
tifex is a most curious beast with mouths at
‘That is no verse from the Bible,’ said Günther.
I shot him a cautioning look. I did not want him frightening the others.
‘It’s nonsense – obviously. One of the apprentices must have crept in last night thinking to make himself a compositor.’
‘The room was locked,’ said Günther’s assistant.