“A book? What kind of book?”
“I don’t know,” said Van Agteren.
“But you saw it?”
“Yes, and I cannot say why, but already I wish that I had never laid eyes on it.”
Eliene stared at him.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I think that you are most peculiar.”
“And if you love me, then you are most peculiar, too.”
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
Her lips parted, and he kissed her.
“My father—” she said.
“Is lost in the examination of his book.”
“It is almost my time of flowers,” she said. “But you can come to my bed.”
And he did.
• • •
Van Agteren did not stay with Eliene for the night. A pair of elderly servants tended to the needs of the house, and he wanted to give them no more cause for gossip than they already had. He also respected Schuyler, although not so much that he was above sleeping with his daughter. He did not know how much the old man suspected of his relationship with Eliene, but he wanted to give him no reason to act on any suspicions that he might have.
The study door was open when Van Agteren awoke. He knocked before entering, but received no reply. The room was empty, and the little compartment in which Schuyler slept was unoccupied. Neither was Schuyler in the kitchen or elsewhere in the house, but the front door was unlocked, which meant that he had left either very early or very late. The servants were already preparing breakfast and had not seen their master. It was most odd.
Eliene rose, but had no more idea of her father’s whereabouts than anyone else. She was not concerned for him, though. He was a man of capricious moods, even if they rarely led him to take to the streets at unusual hours. But Van Agteren was uneasy. After eating a hurried breakfast, he went in search of his master. Although Tilburg was a small town, he could find no trace of him.
• • •
At the Sign of the Oak, Van Agteren poured Couvret another glass of jenever.
“I admit that you have me intrigued,” said Couvret, “although I still don’t understand why you have chosen to share this tale with me.”
“Oh, there is more to come,” said Van Agteren. “And far less pleasant it is, too.”
Van Agteren excused himself to make water, leaving Couvret alone. The inn had grown stuffy and warm, and Couvret had drunk more than he might have wished. He felt the need for some air. He went to the front door and stepped outside. A boy was clearing the snow from in front of the inn so that its customers might have an unobstructed path, but already fresh flakes had begun to fall. Beyond him, Couvret saw a massive figure in black walking in the direction of the Nieuwe Kerk, although it appeared to be more shadow than man, a consequence, perhaps, of the poor light and descending snow.
“Do you know that man?” Couvret asked the boy.
“What man?”
“The one who passed by just moments before I came out.”
“You must be mistaken, mijnheer,” said the boy. “No one has passed since I started clearing this snow. You can see for yourself that there are no fresh prints on the ground.”
The boy was right. The new snow had partially filled the old footprints, and there were none more recent.
Despite the cold, Couvret moved past the boy and walked to where he had seen the man, but even here there was no sign of the presence of another, and Couvret’s were the only marks that led from the inn.
He returned to find Van Agteren seated at the table, waiting for him.
“Where did you go?” asked Van Agteren.
“To take some air,” Couvret replied.
“You’re a braver man than I. I didn’t even venture outside, but put most of my piss on the steps. Forgive me, but you seem troubled.”
Couvret took a sip of jenever.
“I thought I saw someone walking, but I was wrong,” he said.
Van Agteren regarded him carefully.
“When you say ‘someone,’ what precisely do you mean?”
“A figure in black. A man, I think, but almost a shadow against shadows. Yet when I went in pursuit of him I could find no sign that he had passed this way.”
Van Agteren looked to the door, as though the subject might make himself apparent, summoned by their discourse. Whatever animation the Dutchman had demonstrated up to that point voided itself in an instant, and he seemed to be on the verge of weeping.
“Then I have not much time left for my tale,” he said. “Listen . . .”
• • •
Schuyler had not returned to his house by the time Van Agteren reached it. By now even Eliene was starting to fear for his safety, and one of the servants had been sent to instruct the local militia to keep a watch for Schuyler.
Van Agteren found Eliene in her father’s study. She was sitting at his desk, the book that the laborer had brought the night before lying open in front of her. Van Agteren could not contain his surprise.
“How did you unlock it?” he asked.
“Unlock it?” replied Eliene. “I found it this way when I came to see if my father had left any indication of where he might have gone. It’s odd: only one page will open. The rest appear to be sealed.”
Van Agteren stood over her and watched as she demonstrated. The pages were made from what might have been vellum, with only one side of the parchment used, the roughness of the other betraying the animal origins of the material.
“Here it is,” she said, revealing what Van Agteren took to be a map of constellations, except none were familiar to him, and the markings beside them were in an unknown alphabet. An expert hand had created the map. Van Agteren could not recall ever seeing such perfection in illustration before.
“It’s beautiful,” he said.
“But no night sky looks like this,” said Eliene. “It is an invention.”
Although he could not interpret the markings, Van Agteren believed that they might be mathematical calculations, for among them were diagrams familiar to him from Euclidian geometry. Why would someone go to such trouble to indulge a fantasy?
“Wait!” said Eliene. “I think another page has freed itself from whatever substance was used to seal the whole.”
She used two hands to turn a number of folios, such was the weight of the book.
“What’s this?” she said. “It cannot be.”
Revealed to them was an intricate drawing of Schuyler’s study and its contents—his instruments, his books, his shelves and furniture—but the word drawing did not do justice to the execution. Rather, what was contained in the book was a perfect copy of the room, as though the page were not made from paper but was instead a mirror without tarnish. The skill with which it had been created was beyond even the greatest artist. It was impossible to comprehend how it might have been done, or how long it must have taken to complete.
Van Agteren licked his finger and pressed it against the page. It came back without a trace of ink or paint. He gazed at the drawing. The angle of depiction was unusual. It was almost as if . . .
Van Agteren turned and squatted behind the desk, so that he was facing Eliene.
“What are you doing?” asked Eliene.
“I could not swear to it, but the one who did this could only have produced it by using a glass to reflect the room back to him at the same angle as the book. But why?”
“When did you say this book came to my father?”
“Last night.”
“And where was it found?”
“Buried deep beneath the foundations of the old home of Dekker, or so the man who brought it to us claimed.”
“You must find him and bring him back here. He may have more to tell.”
“I promise you that he does not. He is a simple man, but an honest one. He wanted only to be rid of the book.”
“And did you go by Dekker’s plot when searching for my father?”
“Yes. I asked after him this morning, b
ut was told that he had not been seen there.”
“Will you try again?”
“Of course.”
She held his hand in hers and kissed the knuckles, one by one.
“Thank you.”
“We will find him,” said Van Agteren. “I shall not rest until he is with us again.”
• • •
It was growing dark, and by the time Van Agteren reached the Dekker plot all work had ceased, and the workmen had gone. He found Dekker and his family staying at his father’s house while work continued on their own, but the thatcher had not seen Schuyler in days. Neither did he have any knowledge of a book, but he demonstrated considerable interest in any possible value it might have, and was quick to claim ownership of it, and to curse the now deceased laborer who had brought it to Schuyler. It was left to Van Agteren to remind Dekker that anything found on the land was ultimately the property of the lords of Tilburg, and it might be better for all if Dekker did not make a fuss until more could be learned about the book. Dekker assented, but only reluctantly.
As Van Agteren was leaving, Dekker asked him, “Tell me, who was that who walked here with you?”
“I came alone,” said Van Agteren. “There is no other.”
“But I would swear that I saw a man following in your footsteps. Big he was, all dressed in black. I might almost have taken him for a priest.”
Van Agteren denied it again, and left Dekker to puzzle over the mystery without him. But he was reminded of what the unfortunate laborer had told him the previous night, and on the walk back to Schuyler’s dwelling he spent as much time looking behind him as ahead.
• • •
He was met at the door by Eliene. Only the candlelight gave life to her face. Otherwise, it resembled a porcelain mask.
“Nobody has seen your father,” he said.
But the only reply she made was “Come,” as she led him upstairs to the study.
Another page of the book was open. It showed a detailed anatomical drawing of her father’s face, split evenly down the middle, rendered in a manner that would have incited the envy of Vesalius himself. One side depicted him as he was in life, except that his mouth was open wide, as though caught in the act of screaming. The other, the left, was without skin, and some unknown insects writhed in the exposed flesh, four claws visible around the maw of their mouths, and the pincers of an earwig jutting from the end of their lower abdomens. One was forcing itself out of the hollow socket of Schuyler’s left eye.
“Someone is playing a cruel game,” said Eliene, and Van Agteren thought he caught a hint of suspicion directed at him.
“Not I!” he said. “I have not even been here.”
Eliene instantly relented.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and clasped herself to him. “I don’t know why I should have thought such a thing. But I don’t understand what is happening. I came into the study after you’d left, and the book was open at this page. The servants claim to know nothing about it, and I believe them. They never come into this room, not even to clean. They know better than to disturb my father’s work.”
Van Agteren closed the book, hiding that dreadful version of Schuyler. For a moment, as he touched his hand to the cover, he felt it pulse in an unpleasant way.
“It is the book,” he said. “It should have been left in the ground.”
“Then what do you propose to do with it? Return it there?”
“No,” said Van Agteren. “I’m going to burn it.”
The fire in the kitchen was already blazing when Van Agteren and Eliene arrived with the book. They sent the servants out, and Van Agteren added more wood to the blaze, until even to approach it was to feel one’s skin begin to prickle. Finally, when he was satisfied, he threw the book on it, but the stench that immediately arose was so terrible that they could not stay in the kitchen. Even outside the room the smell was foul, like the rotting carcass of an animal that had been set to roast. It filled the house, and Eliene became violently ill. They heard a knock on the door, and their neighbor, Janzen, was found to be standing before them, come to complain about the smell. The whole street was filled with it, and Van Agteren had no choice but to remove the book from the fire. It was slightly damaged on one side, but no more than that. The cover had blistered like skin.
Van Agteren placed the book in a sack, added bricks to it, then walked to the canal and threw it in the water. He watched it sink before returning to the Schuyler home.
• • •
The smell remained in the house, and the servants were burning sage to get rid of it. Van Agteren sat with Eliene, and their only visitor was a militiaman who came to confirm that Schuyler had not returned. He told them that a search would be organized at first light.
Van Agteren did not sleep with Eliene that night. She wanted to be alone. He smelled nutmeg, which he knew she used during her time of flowers.
Van Agteren went to his room and worked by candlelight, transcribing some of Schuyler’s untidy notes. He only ceased his labors when his eyes began to ache. He dipped his quill in water to clean it and watched the ink spread through the liquid, turning it from clear to dark.
He lay on his narrow cot and thought of the book.
• • •
It was still dark when he woke. A sound had pulled him out of sleep. He heard a creak, and saw his door closing, although it remained sufficiently ajar to enable him to discern a figure in the shadows beyond.
“Eliene?” he said.
There was no reply.
He climbed from his cot and went to the hall. He looked to his left and saw Eliene enter her father’s study. He followed her. A light burned inside the study. He could see it under the bottom of the door.
He put his hand on the handle. It was warm. He pushed, and the door opened.
Eliene stood naked, her back to the door. It took Van Agteren a moment to realize that her feet were not touching the floor, and she was instead hanging suspended. In the shadows behind her was a greater darkness, a thing of substance like a statue made from black glass, and within it Van Agteren glimpsed an infinite number of angles, and the lights of multitudinous stars. And while the being before him was physically present, it also appeared hollow, for there was embryonic movement inside it, and a cluster of eyes peered back at Van Agteren from within.
On Schuyler’s reading stand lay the book, the same one he had last seen sinking into the dank waters of the canal.
Eliene’s body rotated in the air. She turned—or was turned—to face him. Her eyes were gone, and her face was cracked around their empty sockets like a child’s doll to which a hammer had been taken in a fit of rage. It seemed as though an unseen blade were being used upon her flesh, for her body began to bleed: her belly, her breasts, her thighs. Van Agteren glimpsed patterns forming on her skin, and he thought that they resembled the coastlines of unfamiliar continents and maps of unknown constellations.
And all the time the glass being, the obsidian man, stood unmoving behind her.
Eliene spoke.
“Maarten,” she said. “The book contains worlds.”
She stretched out her arms, then her legs. From behind her came a sound like the grinding and shattering of glass.
The entity exploded, sending shards of darkness splintering through Eliene before freezing them in place, so that for just an instant she was a being of both flesh and mineral, her body petrified at the moment that her soul departed. Then once again all was movement, and Van Agteren instinctively shielded his face with his arms and waited for the fragments to pierce him, but nothing happened.
He opened his eyes, and there was only blood.
• • •
The jenever was gone. Van Agteren’s story was nearly complete.
“Do you believe me?” he asked.
And Couvret heard himself answer yes before the word even formed in his head.
“What did you do?”
“I fled,” sai
d Van Agteren. “They would think me a murderer, or a sorcerer, after what had befallen Eliene. Even now, they are at my heels, but they will never take me.”
“Why? Will you leave the country?”
“No, I will never leave here. Another comes. Wherever Eliene may be, there too shall I also be before this night is out. I feel it.”
“That figure I saw outside . . .”
“Yes.”
“What is it? What do you believe it to be?”
“You served Henry of Navarre, did you not?”
“I did.”
“Did you fear him?”
“Sometimes.”
“And Henry is not even a great king,” said Van Agteren. “Perhaps someday he may be, but not now. He was forced to run from Paris or be annihilated by a more powerful force. Every king, if he looks, will see another who threatens him—a king in name, or a king in waiting. Only God has no fear of kings, or so I once believed.
“But does God fear the Devil? Does he fear the King Below? This I now wonder. Because if He could, would God not wipe from existence the creature that took Eliene? Would He not have destroyed that book, or prevented it from ever being found? Is God cruel, or careless, or are there beings that threaten even His rule?”
“That is heresy,” said Couvret.
“And you are an expert on that, Huguenot,” said Van Agteren.
“Perhaps I am. And what of the book?”
“Gone,” said Van Agteren.
“Where?”
“You saw what is coming for me,” said Van Agteren. “Do you really wish to know?”
Couvret did not answer. There was no need.
Van Agteren stood.
“Where will you go now?” asked Couvret.
“I will walk, and I will breathe the air while I still can. Thank you for listening to my tale.”
“I still do not understand why you chose to share it with me,” said Couvret.
“I think you do,” said Van Agteren. “I chose you because you smell of the hunted, just like me. And maybe,” he added, “I chose you because you are unlucky.”
Couvret watched him leave. A flurry of snowflakes entered in his stead and melted on the floor.
He never heard of Van Agteren again.
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