by Неизвестный
I start walking toward the locked fence.
I can’t hear Marie’s sobs any longer, not over the ruckus the dead are making. I wonder if she’s left, taken the keys and driven off into the night, leaving me without any means of transportation. Then I wonder if instead she’s watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do without her there. I worry about both these things long enough to realize I don’t really care. Let her watch. Let her watch as I lift the latches of the fence the dead are unable to operate on their own. Let me unleash the waves that come from that dark Atlantic ocean onto the tourist attraction of the Hopewell Rocks. Let man’s future roll in to greet him, let man’s future become his present. Make him his own past. Who we will be will soon replace who we are, and who we might once have been.
The dead, they don’t look at me as they stumble into the unchained night. And I smile. In six hours and thirteen minutes, the water will recede as quickly as it came, back out to the dark dead ocean. It will leave nothing behind but wet and desolate rocks the colour of sunbleached bone.
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
The Gist
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published eighty short stories and three novels – Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, and August Derleth awards, along with the Prix Bob Morane in France; he has been awarded the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.
Writing as “Michael Marshall”, he has also published seven international b estselling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders – recently filmed as a mini-series by BBC America – and Killer Move. His most recent novel is We Are Here.
“Usually I’m happiest with the stories that have been written quickly,” Smith reveals. “I like to have an idea, sit down to write it as soon as possible, and emerge with a first draft at most a day or two later.
“‘The Gist’ … well, I conceived of the basic notion in an instant – along with the idea of then having the story translated via a series of languages, and then back to English again, to see whether ‘the gist’ survived – but the story then took about seven years to write. A little bit here, a little bit there, a re-write, a fallow period. The translation process then took another three years, before it was finally ready to be published by Subterranean Press, who waited through the process with enormous patience.
“The end result is that I’m a different man to the one who started the project nearly a decade ago. I have no idea whether the gist of me has survived the years …”
I
“I’M NOT DOING it,” I said.
Portnoy gazed coolly back at me. “Oh? Why?”
“Where do I begin? Ah, I know – let’s start with the fact you haven’t paid me for the last job …”
“That situation could be remedied.”
“… or the one before that.”
The man behind the desk in front of me sighed. This made his sleek, moisturised cheeks vibrate in a way that couldn’t help but put you in mind of a successful pig, exhaling contentedly in its sty, confident that the fate that stalked its kind was not going to befall him tonight, or indeed ever. A pig with friends in high places, a pig with pull. Pork with an exit strategy. The impression was so strong you could almost smell the straw the pig lay in – along with a faint whiff of shit.
“Ditto.”
“Great,” I said, briskly. “We’ll attend to the financial backlog first, shall we? Then I’ll get onto the other reason.”
“You sadden me, John,” Portnoy said, as he reached down to the side and opened the top drawer of his desk. This meant, as the desk was double-sided, that the corresponding drawer-front on my side disappeared. From his end he withdrew a chequebook that was covered in dust. Literally. “Anyone would think you do this only for the money.”
“Anyone would be absolutely right.”
“I don’t believe you.” He tilted his head forward and allowed his spectacles to slide down his nose, the better to inspect the means of payment now laid in front of him. After a long pause he flipped it open, and peered bemusedly at the contents.
“Forgotten how to use it?”
He looked at me over the rims of his glasses, as if disappointed. “Surely you can do better, my boy.”
“Perplexed by the instructions printed thereon?” I elaborated, “Which must presumably be in Latin, at least, or Indo-European? Perhaps even facsimiles of petroglyphs representing routes to local lunching spots, with crosses indicating wine bars and the nearest cab rank?”
“Better. What manner of total were you expecting? For the two alleged late payments?”
“Seven hundred and fifty quid. Because it’s three. The Diary of Anna Kourilovicz, remember?”
“Good lord.” Portnoy shook his head, evidently wondering what had overcome him to vouchsafe such outlandish sums. I said nothing, however. I’d come this far in a settlement negotiation before to find Portnoy suddenly derailed by a phone call, an ill-advised comment on my part, or some movement of the spheres only he could sense. If that happened the whole process had to start again, at a later date, and so I wasn’t going to let it go pear-shaped this time. I needed the money, badly.
He took a pen from his tweed jacket – a pen which had, I entertained, no doubt cost him far more than the sum currently causing him such pain – and wrote in the book, concluding with his ponderous signature. He tore out the cheque with an oddly decisive movement and waved it in the air to dry the ink, before finally laying it on the desk.
I grabbed it and stuffed it in my wallet with a thick wash of relief. The rent was paid. Say what you like about Portnoy – and people did say many things, on the quiet – but his cheques never bounced.
“You’re a gent.”
He grunted, and sat looking at me while re-igniting the fat and noxious cigar which had been idling in a saucer at his elbow. I watched, and waited, casting half an eye over a page of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, purporting to be from the original folio edition, that Portnoy had framed on the wall behind his desk.
Those who knew Portnoy only slightly suspected the page of being fake, there to impress the naïve. People who knew him a little better, as I did, were prone to believe it was genuine – and that he’d started the rumour of it being fake just to mess with people’s heads. Along with many other aspects of Portnoy’s life and business, it was unlikely the real truth would ever be known.
As always, his basement office was murky, lit only by a small, old lamp on the corner of the desk, and thin slats of light striking down from a high, pavement-level window on the far wall, enlivened by turning motes of dust. The effect was so subdued that you couldn’t see what lined all four walls, or stood in haphazard-seeming piles over most of the floor, to almost shoulder height.
You could smell them, though, even through the permanent fug of cigar smoke.
Books. Thousands of them.
“Well?” he said, eventually.
“Well what?”
“We’re square. So what was the other reason?”
“Simple.” I picked up the object that had been the initial focus of our conversation. “It’s a fake. Or nonsense. Or both.”
“I don’t believe so. The gentleman I obtained it from has an immaculate record in providing me with titbits.”
Titbits. An interesting word for volumes that routinely fetched Portnoy upwards of ten, twenty or even a hundred thousand pounds. “He’s let you down this time. What’s the provenance?”
For a moment the dealer looked shifty. This intrigued me. Despite being roguishly dishevelled, and somewhere in that indefinable age (amongst the portly and ruddy-faced) between late-forties and mid-sixties, there was a word I always applied to Portnoy in my head. Sleek.
But now, for a period of time perhaps equal to that required for a hummingbird to flap its wings (once), he didn’t look sleek.
“You needn’t concern yourself with th
at,” he muttered. “I already have. I’m satisfied.”
“Well, that’s okay then,” I said, standing. I had a mind to celebrate payday with a visit to the pub, starting immediately. “You don’t need me to—”
“A thousand,” Portnoy said.
I sat back down. I realized immediately how very like him this was – not merely doubling my usual fee, but going straight for the financial jugular. He had the measure of me, and knew it. So did I.
“Maurice,” I said.
He winced. Apparently I always said it wrong, making it sound either too much or not enough like “Morris”, I’d never been clear which.
“I honestly think it’s a fake, or a joke.”
“It’s neither.”
“In which case I’m still not the man for the job.”
“You are.”
I laughed. This was ridiculous. “How can I translate something out of a tongue I’ve never seen before? Which I don’t even think is a real language?”
“I’m confident you’ll uncover the gist.”
“Look …”
“For twelve hundred pounds.”
Twelve hundred meant not just next month’s rent, but a replacement laptop (second hand, naturally, and scuffed after its most recent descent from the back of a lorry), of which I was in dire need. It meant a small gift for Cass (assuming I could track her down), in which case she might consent to being my sort-of girlfriend again, or at least going through the motions once or twice.
It meant a very long evening in the pub.
Portnoy reached into his jacket and pulled out his wallet. From this he drew a wad of notes, and slowly sorted the wheat from the chaff. I read them from where I sat. Six hundred quid. He coughed, a long, wet-sounding eruption bedded deep in his lungs.
“Half now, half when you come back,” he said, when he’d finished.
My head was spinning. Portnoy never paid except on completion – and this was nearly as much as the sum I’d just levered out of him, much of which had been owed for nearly two months.
“Just do what you can, my boy,” he said. “Hmm?”
I picked up the book and the cash and left before he could change his mind.
II
In a break from my usual practice, I’d bothered to pop home to stow Portnoy’s book there before going to the pub. It was, therefore, lying safely on the table when I jack-knifed to a sitting position on the sofa, at three o’clock the following afternoon.
A quick fumble through my wallet confirmed what I’d suspected immediately upon waking. The bulk of the six hundred quid was gone. Three hundred on an over-specced and under-the-counter laptop, to be fair – but where was the rest of it? Some of it in my stomach, a portion of it up my nose, plus I seemed to have a new and much groovier mobile phone that I didn’t remember acquiring via the usual highstreet channels – but that couldn’t account for all of it, surely?
I was exceedingly glad I’d brought the book home first, or it would have become Schrödinger’s Tome, equally likely to be at any random point in London – or at least the subset of those points which lay within easy lurching distance of The Southampton Arms.
Christ.
Being me is not a fate everyone would enjoy. There are risks, and frequent disappointments. I’m not all that keen on the arrangement myself, to be honest.
I braced myself by drinking a huge amount of coffee and going through the process of transferring my files from the old laptop, feeling like a military policeman supervising the last desperate airlift from Saigon. The screen flashed at regular intervals, staying blank for up to five seconds at a time. The hard disk was far too audible, and smelled alarming, like a digital grave.
When everything was safely transferred to the new one I shut the old machine with relief, and lobbed it into the corner of the room which holds things broken, empty, or otherwise held in disdain. Like the other three corners of the room, in fact. My flat is a craphole, or so I’ve been told. I don’t see it myself. It’s a single-room studio with a tiny bathroom off the far end, and a laughable kitchenette which I’ve never used. The place is certainly untidy, but that’s not my fault. I’ve tried tidying it and within hours it’s untidy again, far more quickly than can be accounted for by any normal means. Evidently that’s simply its natural state, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Three walls are lined with bookshelves which sag under the weight of dictionaries, grammars, other reference and theoretical texts. Actually, the fourth wall is too, now. This has a pair of windows in it, but I don’t like a lot of sunlight because it makes it harder to read a computer screen (not to mention it’s bad for old books and manuscripts, and hangovers), and so the blinds are permanently down and the piles of extra dictionaries, grammars, reference and theoretical texts have gradually grown to block most of their span.
I have a couch/bed thing, a big table, and a useful collection of pub ashtrays and pint glasses. What else do you need? I don’t think it’s a craphole.
Eventually I left off tinkering with the new laptop (whose own hard drive had a disconcertingly choppy whine, but at least the screen worked properly) and pulled Portnoy’s book toward me.
It was time to start earning the rest of the money.
III
What I do for Portnoy, as you may have gathered, is translate. I can read nine languages fluently, another eight or ten given a bit of warning, and pick my way through fragments of quite a few more. It’s just something I can do, and doesn’t betoken any great intelligence in other spheres, more’s the pity.
The annoying thing is that I can’t actually speak any of them. Give me a tattered document in medieval High German or Welsh or even Basque – which is as near a Stone-Age remnant as you’ll find, and really hard – and I’ll be able to tell you what it says. The gist, at the very least. Put me in a café in Paris, however, and while I can understand perfectly what people are saying, I can’t seem to say much in reply. It’s like there’s a barrier in my head, a glass wall that the words get trapped behind. I have the vocabulary, I know the grammar so well it’s as if I don’t know it – which is exactly how it should be – but the words just won’t come out of my head and dance on my tongue. I went to Calais for a boozy weekend with Cass once, and she did far better than I with the waiters just by bellowing English nouns.
The upside, almost as if it’s there to compensate, is that I’m unusually good at the written or printed word – which is why Maurice Portnoy pays me (when he remembers).
The core of the antiquarian book trade naturally lies in providing clients with books they’re actually looking for. Through an immense and spidery network of contacts, Portnoy keeps his eye out for works on customers’ wish lists, or those he knows he can find a home for: first editions, modern and ancient; short-run autobiographies or privately produced ephemera; seminal illustrated volumes of botany, alchemy or alarmingly frank (and to modern tastes, downright illegal) pornography – whatever these men have set their foetid collectors’ hearts on (and the majority of them are men, members of our obsessive and fetish-friendly sex). In this regard Portnoy is much the same as other dealers, and plies an unexceptional trade.
His real business, however, is in the books that people don’t know about. The books that got lost.
I got talking to this bloke once in the pub, a novelist. He told me he’d just discovered there was a Romanian edition of one of his novels. An acquaintance happened to be on holiday in the region, recognized the writer’s name on the spine of a battered paperback on a second-hand stall in the market of a small town. Otherwise, the author would never have known about it. Granted, that’s just a translation, but bear in mind this was only a couple of years ago, too. Think back over the hundreds of years we’ve been printing books – and the centuries before that, when they were copied by hand. How are you going to know that a book once existed, long after anyone involved with it is dead? If there’s a copy somewhere, yes, or a reference to it in another book. Otherwise … they’ve
vanished. People didn’t keep records like they do now. You printed a book, sold it, and when it was gone, it was gone. Often books were printed privately, in runs of a hundred, twenty, even just five, and proudly so – it’s said that Goethe’s old man viewed his son’s willingness to appeal to a more “mass” market with permanent disdain.
It’s different now, of course. Our entire culture has turned obsessive-compulsive, recording everything and storing it on computer servers across the world, the better to information-swamp us into a state of baffled ignorance. But a book hand-copied by unknown scriveners in the twelth century? It’s history. Vanished into the undertow, as if it had never existed.
Until … someone finds one.
That’s what Portnoy’s “titbits” are. Lost books. Not in the sense that no one can find a copy, but because no one knew there was a copy out there to be found.
Some are merely volumes by unknown authors, or previously unknown titles by established names. Others turn up in more mysterious states, missing covers or whole chunks and without any indication of who wrote it, or when. Portnoy can fill in the “when” – expertise in bookbinding techniques, the evolution of paper stock and modes of printing or hand-written script will generally give you a date within twenty-five years either way. You have to be on the look-out for fakes, of course, (when someone’s tried to make a manuscript look older than it is) or occasions when a genuinely eldritch tome has been rebound at a much later date, an old book now lurking between younger covers. Portnoy has an eagle eye for this kind of thing, too.
Most collectors are searching for the known, naturally. Being known – and merely rare – is precisely what makes something conventionally collectable. That’s why Gutenberg Bibles, the first “mass” printing of that venerable fantasy tale, fetch the head-spinning sums they command. Only about fifty copies survive from the original paper edition of one hundred and eighty, and examples of the much smaller vellum edition are even more scarce. Most are in museums, and they’re genuine works of art over and above their state of precedence. But what if an unknown rival had done a small trial printing the year before – of which only one copy remained, lost and forgotten in some hidden attic? And what about copies of other, more unknown books, collections of words now vanished from public awareness – like dinosaurs without bones or fossilized tracks to mark their passing?