When he got back to the hotel, Marcia was in the shower. They went out, had another little walk, and then dinner in the nearest restaurant. By ten o’clock Dan was utterly beat, and ready for bed. Marcia was speeding by then, however, and wanted to talk up the issues around Proposition 7, the cause de jour back home in Oregon. Dan hadn’t much cared about P7 when on his own turf (it was going to be defeated, which was a shame, but that’s what people are like), and sure as hell didn’t care about it now. What was the point of coming to another country if you were going to mire yourself in the same old crap?
When he eventually said this, yawning massively, Marcia led the discussion into a playful analysis of why he was apparently unable to enter into any kind of intellectual dialogue that wasn’t about books, before deftly turning back to Proposition 7.
This lasted a further twenty-five minutes. When Dan finally said he was just going to have to go to bed, she shook her head and stood up. First evening of the holiday ruined, her body language said: thank you once again, my brutish husband. Thanks a lot.
Dan slept like a baby that night.
Marcia, not so well.
They spent the next couple of days getting some tourism done, seeing the iconic sights, ticking the big ones off the list. Dan was happy to do this, knowing they’d relax by the weekend, find their vacation feet, be able to kick back and do their own thing. By Saturday he was locked on GMT, the lingering late-afternoon slump nothing that an extra-shot latté couldn’t shake off. Marcia meanwhile was getting further and further out of sync, however. She was waking at six, five, four in the morning: sitting up in bed reading (and reading a novel set in America, naturally, or else one of the magazines she’d brought from home); alternatively, as on the Monday morning, turning the television on—quietly, of course, but you could still hear the tube crackle—and obsessing about the rain.
The real problem wasn’t the jetlag, annoying though it was (when it could’ve been so easily avoided). Dan could sympathize with jetlag. Not sleeping, it’s no fun. You lie there on your back staring up at an unfamiliar ceiling and your brain goes round and round and round. He had sympathy with sleeplessness. What drove him quietly nuts was the mentioning of it, the endless fricking ... talk.
It was the same when Marcia had a cold. Dan got a cold, he took some tablets, waited for it to go away. He’d snuffle and wheeze a little, but you couldn’t do anything about that. With Dan, a cold lasted four days, tops, soup to nuts, first sneeze to oh-it’s-gone. With Marcia a cold was a two-week miniseries, an HBO Big Season Event. The first signs would be noted, discussed, held up for scrutiny. The danger of an approaching malaise would be flagged, and the particular inconvenience of its timing loudly mourned. Nine times out of ten this phase would last a single evening—and then the symptoms would disappear, having never been anything more than two sneezes, or a mild headache. Sometimes the cold would arrive for real, however—and she would wander down the next morning wrapped in a blanket, face crumpled, nose red, hair all crazy.
And then, for at least a week, the mentioning of it.
The constant updates—as if, twenty times a day, he’d said to her, “Now, darling, tell me exactly how every single little bit of your body feels, and don’t stint on the detail. Really. I have to know.” The sinus report. The lower back state-of-play. The throat film-at-eleven—but first here’s a message from our sponsor, Runny Noses R Us.
The cold would go away, eventually. Two days of noting its passing, and she’d be fine—would return, in fact, to the woman who said she never got colds, not ever. That’s when Dan knew he was in trouble. Ten days of reduced conversation would mean she was full to the brim with observations of pith and moment, stuff that simply had to get out of her head before it popped. Any chat, no matter how relaxed, could get suddenly derailed into a discussion of the major or minor issues of the day/year/century, with Marcia being firm but fair, subtle but strident, as if performing to a sizable radio audience. His participation was allowed once in a while, as a foil, a sentence thrown in as by an interviewer. Other than that, she’d just roll. Any suggestion that the length and depth of discussion was inappropriate to a dinner out at a local restaurant, to Sunday breakfast, or to when he was trying to have a quiet bath, would be met with the masterfully oblique suggestion that he just hadn’t thought about the issues enough, and that anyway he’d had his say and it was her turn now.
Followed by more discussion.
It was on one of these occasions, a romantic supper that had turned into a two-hour debate on their town’s zoning regulations, that Dan had first fantasized about the notion of some kind of independent adjudication: the idea that there might be some agency to which he could appeal, not with ill will, but just so he could be proved right—just so that it could be established, once and for all, that she did hog discussions, cheated in arguments (by shifting the topic whenever she realized she was on shaky grounds), and got mini-colds once a month.
He loved his wife and wouldn’t want her any different. But just once in a while he wished there was some way of proving that he was right.
No one was more surprised than he to find out that actually, there was.
The bookstore was in a side street halfway down Charing Cross Road. When they’d last been to London, back in the mid-1990s, the area had been wall-to-wall books. Like everywhere else in the world, it was now feeling the dual pinch of the megastores and online auction sites. The specialty shops were still in place, but the second-hand and antiquarian had closed or gone to seed, and there was a big hole left by the demise of a former Borders.
Having left Marcia back at the hotel in the health spa for the morning, Dan was mildly ticked to find he’d done the street with an hour and a half to spare. He didn’t want to go back early, kick his heels in the hotel. Marcia had been her most jetlagged yet that morning, and very down about the weather. He’d been unsympathetic on two subjects over which he considered himself powerless, and sharp words had been spoken.
On a whim, he started poking around the uncharted streets just behind the main road, and it was here that he found Pandora’s Books. A little wooden shop front, the name appropriately picked out in faded gold paint. The window was littered with a random selection of ancient-looking volumes, none of which he’d heard of. Perfect. Especially as it was beginning to drizzle. Again.
The smell made him smile as soon as he was inside. Old, forgotten paper, books foxed and creased and bumped. The scent of old shelves and venerable dust added their own welcome notes. It was the way these places should smell, the smell of peace and quiet and your own thoughts, the odor of not being in a hurry. The room wasn’t too big—probably only twenty feet by fifteen—but the high shelves packed into it, along with the dim light, made it seem larger. In the back there were wooden staircases leading both up and down, neither marked “Private,” promising more of the same (and second-hand bookstores are all about promise). There was a little desk over on the right, piled high with books waiting categorization, but nobody behind it, or in sight. Dan dithered, then propped his bag against the desk. Usually bookstores preferred it that way, to discourage shoplifters, and it would leave both hands free.
He worked his way down from the top. They had a whole lot of books, that was for damned sure. Most of the stuff on the upper level was modern and of no interest, though he did find a pulp paperback worth keeping in his hand. He thought he heard someone coming up the stairs while he turned this book over, debating the couple of pounds it would cost, but when he looked up no one was there. By the time he got back to street level they’d evidently headed down to the basement.
He took his time around the shelves on the ground floor, as many were dedicated to local history. In the end he found one thing he thought was a definite, plus a couple of maybes. Depended on whether they shipped. The book he wanted was heavy—a vast Victorian facsimile of an older history of London—and he went over to prop it up against his bag. As he did so he thought he heard someone coming into the ro
om from the back, but when he turned, a small loving-your-store smile on his face, there was no one there. Evidently just a noise from upstairs. Booksellers creep in mysterious ways, their alphabetizing to perform.
It was in the basement that he found the book.
At first he thought there was nothing for him down there: the room was only half the size of the higher floors, and had none of their sense of order. Tomes of all ages and conditions were piled onto cases in danger of imminent collapse. There was a strong smell of damp down there, too, doubtless caused or at least enhanced by the grim-looking patches on the walls. The plaster had come away in many places, revealing seeping brickwork behind.
Dan poked around for a while nonetheless, shoving aside piles of bashed-up book-length ephemera (do your own accounts, learn Spanish in twenty seconds, find your inner you and dream your inner dream), finding and quickly rejecting a few older tomes. It’s a shame when the floor you do last has the least of interest in it, but sometimes that’s just the way it is. He was about to give up and go pay for what he’d already put aside, when a bookcase half-hidden right at the end caught his eye. He decided to check it out. He was in no hurry, after all.
He’d thought from a distance these books were much older than the rest, but he soon saw they were not. Most were Everyman Editions, leather-bound and quite attractive, but commonplace and not worth the carrying. He had already turned away when something made him turn back and look again. He stood square onto the case and ran his eyes back and forth in a grid pattern. He’d evidently glimpsed something without really seeing it. He wasn’t expecting much, but it would be mildly interesting to see what had caught his eye. Eventually he found it, a book whose spine was much more scuffed up than the rest.
He gently eased it out. It was called Hopes of a Lesser Demon, Part II, which was kind of odd, for a start. It was a small, chunky thing with battered boards and old leather covers; about an inch thick, six inches high, and four deep. The title on the spine seemed to have been handwritten in ink. When Dan turned to the front the frontispiece claimed the book had been published in Rome in 1641, but that couldn’t be right. For a start, that meant it should have been in Latin, or Italian at the very least. It wasn’t. It was in English, for the most part.
As he leafed through the book it also seemed clear that it could never actually have been published in this form at all. Chunks of it did look very old, the paper spotted and towelly, the text in languages he didn’t understand and typefaces that were hard to read. Others had been printed far more recently; the paper fresh and glossy, the subjects contemporary. Though there were sections in French and German and something Eastern European, plus something he guessed was Korean from its similarity to the signs on a food market he walked by back home.
It was also far from clear what the book was about.
There was a sermon on chastity, a few pages on deciduous trees. Part seemed to be a travel guide to Bavaria, with spotty black-and-white plates that must have been taken before the First World War. A polemic on some obscure Middle Eastern sect was followed by a stretch of love poetry, which had mathematical equations in the footnotes, and proceeded by two handwritten pages of what looked like the accounts of a sugar plantation in the West Indies in the eighteenth century. There was no sense to it whatsoever, and yet at the bottom of each page was a folio—a page number—and the ordering of these numerals was consistent from front to back, regardless of subject change or whether they were printed in decaying hand-plated Gothic type or super-crisp computer-generated Gill Sans.
Dan flipped back to the front, and saw a price written there in pencil. Five pounds. Eight-nine bucks. Hmm. He already wanted the book, without really knowing why.
He glanced through the pages a little further, looking for an excuse to turn his impulse into a no-brainer, and finding merely further pockets of unrelated non-information. A handful of reproductions of watercolors, none by artists he recognized, and few of them any good. A list of popular meadows in Armenia. A section on advanced electronic engineering, complete with circuit diagrams, then a Da Vinci-like ink sketch of a man holding an axe, followed by a long portion of what seemed to be an illustrated children’s book, about a happy dog.
And then there were the “Invocations.”
The paper of this section was very, very old, and the writing had been entered by hand. Portions had faded back almost to nothing, and even those that were strong weren’t very easy to read. The first page seemed to be a kind of index. Item One read: “The Vision of Love’s Arc invocation—for to glimpse what man or woman (or both) shall come into your life, hopefully.” Item Eleven: “The Sadness of Cattle Invocation—the purpose being to make less gloomy your livestock in the night.” Item Twenty-Two: “The Regeneration of Heat invocation—a most useful gesture for the revitalization of a time-cooled hot beverage.”
What? A spell to warm up a cup of coffee?
That was silly. The whole index was dumb, in fact, the most stupid section of what was evidently a very stupid book. Dan had more-or-less changed his mind about buying it—five pounds was five pounds, after all, and the book was surprisingly heavy for its size—when he caught sight of the last entry in the index:
Item Thirty-Eight: “The Listening Angel—an invocation for to prove whether you are right.”
Frowning, Dan flicked to the indicated page and read just enough to establish that yes, this meant exactly what he thought it did.
He seemed suddenly to hear a rushing noise, quite loud, like the tread of a hundred feet, or the beat of thousands of tiny wings. He closed the book and hurried up the stairs.
There was still no one at the desk, though he saw the explanation for the sound he’d heard. It was raining properly outside now, raining hard. The store’s dim lamps struggled against the lowering darkness.
Dan waited for a few moments, moving impatiently from foot to foot, and then ventured to call out. There was no response. He waited a little longer, then strode to the back of the store and hiked up the stairs. There was no one up there. No one in the basement, either, when he went back down to look. He found himself back at street level, standing again in front of a desk which was still deserted.
Dan dug in his wallet and took out a five pound note. He put it on the desk and picked up his bag. He left the big Victorian book behind. It no longer seemed very interesting.
When he got back to the hotel he was soaked, and surprised to discover he was also late. Somehow it had become three o’clock. He was half-expecting to find Marcia waiting huffily in the lobby, but she wasn’t there. He took the elevator up to the room. It was empty. Baffled, he called the spa—and was relieved to find that a woman of his wife’s description was currently fast asleep on one of the loungers around the pool. Relieved and, of course, irritated.
He left the book on the bed and wandered around the hotel room, drying his hair with a towel. He could go down and wake Marcia, remind her they were supposed to be ... but what was the point? By the time she was dressed it would be too late to get to the Tate. And he would also, he realized, have to account for the fact he’d returned well after he’d said he would. It was not the first time, and “looking at books” never seemed to be a good-enough explanation.
He set up the room’s coffee machine and waited for it to do its thing. Meanwhile he sat in the chair at the desk, and watched the book on the bed. It wasn’t moving, naturally, and there was no danger that it would. And yet ... it didn’t feel as if he was merely looking at it. Of course you couldn’t actually “watch” something if it wasn’t doing anything, though, right? And yet. And yet.
When coffee was made, he went and picked the book up. At first he couldn’t find the Index of Invocations. After dipping into the book at random, he started at the beginning and rigorously leafed through from front to back. He saw a lot of odd things, but not the index. His heart, which had been beating rather faster that usual, gradually returned to normal. He flicked through the book again, more slowly, obscurely relieve
d. He had imagined it, that was all. Perhaps it had just been a kind of delayed jetlag fever: annoyance at the crossed words that morning, a fantasy born of the dust and damp of the shop ...
Then he found them. The Invocations, sandwiched between two sections he knew he’d seen on the front-to-back pass. Whatever.
He scanned a few of the other entries:
“Item Twenty-Four: The Strengthening of Bark—a whisper for aiding the defenses of a tree or bush (of considerable size) that is under attack.”
“Item Ninety: The Hail of Destiny—a snap to force unto yourself the attentions of any passing taxi cab.”
“Item Six: The Flattening Stroke—for to redress a planet that has become mistakenly round. Use only once.”
But they were just diversions. Very quickly he made it down to Item Thirty-Eight, then flicked through the pages until he again found the one that entry referred to.
As he opened the page he heard the sound again, the beating of wings.
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