My preliminary judgment, inevitably, was that the problem was probably in Martin’s mind. If he’d lived all his life in the Rhondda, heir to hundreds of years of mining tradition and having spent all his own working life in the industry, it must have been a terrible wrench to be forced to contemplate entry into an alien way of life. Reader or not, he was obviously no book-lover, he’d seen an opportunity and he’d felt obliged to seize it, but he must have thought himself caught between the devil of new endeavour and the deep blue sea of unemployment. Was it so very surprising that the devil in question had indeed turned, in his fearful mind, into a tangible force of darkness?
Lionel was still following his own train of thought. ‘What kind of book might that be, do you think?’ he asked, of no one in particular. For a moment, I thought he was really going to bring up the Necronomicon, but he took the second worst option. ‘A grimoire, maybe? A copy of the Key of Solomon?’
‘Sure,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘Every colliery in the Valley used to have its resident wizard, who kept his secret lore on the top shelf of the library, bound up to look like records of coal-production. You shift sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older an’ deeper in debt. Jesus don’t you call me, ‘cos I can’t go - I owe my soul to the pithead whore.’ I was content to recite the words with only the faintest lilt; I have the singing voice of a crow with laryngitis.
‘Actually,’ said Penny, ‘it wasn’t unknown for eighteenth-century mines, and even for early factories, to have luckmen - wizards of a sort. Miners, especially, were very superstitious. It was a high-risk industry, you see. The transition from forced labour to wage-labour wasn’t as long ago as you might think, even in these parts, and the transition from superficial workings - actual pits, that is - to deep-shaft mining was a step into unknown territory. The activities of the luckmen would have been vital to the morale of their fellow-workers.’
‘Did they teach you that at Duke?’ I asked, in a neutral tone.
‘No,’ she said. ‘The LSE. I did a degree in sociology before I did my master’s in parapsychology.’
I’d been a lecturer in sociology at Reading for twelve years before I quit to write fulltime, but I’d never heard of luckmen. On the other hand, I’d done my first degree in biology, so I’d never studied industrial sociology at all. ‘And were these luckmen in the habit of consulting books of protective rituals?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘If they did,’ Lionel put in, ‘moving the book might have been the crucial disturbance - like moving bones laid to eternal rest. Didn’t M. R. James once say that all his stories were variations on the theme of curst be he who moves my bones?’
‘If it’s a case of curst be him who moves my books,’ I opined, ‘we’re more likely to be dealing with a dyed-in-the-wool book-collector than a black magician. I’d come back to haunt anyone who creased the dust-wrapper on one of mine. Hell hath no fury like a collector who finds a shopping-list scribbled on a flyleaf.’
Lionel laughed, probably to be polite. Neither of the others cracked a smile. It looked as if it was going to be a long night, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I could keep myself busy for hours with that much stock - fool that I was, I had no inkling of the horrible shock that was to come.
* * * *
Martin’s shop wasn’t in a prime position, even by Barry’s standards, but it was close enough to the seafront to catch a certain amount of passing trade during the holiday season. He was enough of a businessman to realise that his bread-and-butter business would be selling paperback pulp to people who needed something to occupy their eyes while they lay around on the beach, so the wooden shelves he’d erected in the window were stocked with best-sellers that looked as if they’d been culled from all the charity shops in South Wales.
When Martin unlocked the front door Penny and Lionel had enough respect for the alleged supernatural presence to pause for a moment, so I was first in. Although the sun hadn’t quite set it was hidden by the houses on the far side of the street and the window display blocked out most of the light that was left, so I had to wait for Martin to switch on the electric light before I could actually set to work. It was not until the light came on that the full horror of the situation hit me.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course, but rampant acquisitiveness generates the kind of optimism which allows inconvenient realisations to slip through the cracks of consciousness. One sweep of my gaze across the shelves on the back wall was sufficient to tell me what I should have guessed the moment Martin started going on about old colliery libraries and the innate reluctance of honest folk to throw anything away. Maybe if his name had been Hywel or Dai the awful datum would have clicked into place, but Martin was an English name. Alas, the books he’d picked up for ‘next to nothing’ - the great majority of them, at least - were in Welsh.
What Martin had managed to acquire wasn’t the entire stock of the old libraries, I realised, but merely that fraction of it that had been left behind when the readily saleable stuff had gone - mostly texts whose utilitarian worth had been severely compromised by the fact that it was printed in a language falling swiftly into disuse.
If the bookshop really is haunted, I thought, bitterly, the culprit is more likely to be a dead language than a dead man.
‘Do you get many Welsh speakers in Barry?’ I asked, mournfully.
‘Welsh is taught in all the schools,’ Martin said, proudly. ‘Legal requirement, see. Not so many speak it at home nowadays, of course, except up north - but people from Gwynedd go on holiday like anyone else. Can’t keep a language alive without books, can you?’
By this time I had quick-scanned all eight of the shelves against the back wall and had turned my attention to the books behind the desk where the ancient cash-register stood. Most dealers keep their best stock - or what they think of as their best stock - behind their own station, to minimise the risk of theft. Not all the books behind the cash-register were in Welsh, but eighty per cent of them were, and the rest were evenly divided between books on mining and religious texts. This seemed to me to be a sad comment on Martin’s values as well as his stock.
‘Didn’t the library stock includeany English literature?’ I asked him, plaintively. ‘Or any illustrated books, perhaps?’
‘Some,’ Martin conceded. ‘I put the old fiction upstairs. That’s standard practice, isn’t it?’ He’d obviously done a little market research and observed that most second-hand bookdealers relegated the dross of ancient bestsellers and book club editions to the remotest corner they had. My spirits recovered a little; it was in such neglected corners that I always found my best bargains: rare works of nineteenth- or early twentieth-century fantasy whose specialist significance was unappreciated by dealers whose own expertise was in railway books or natural history.
‘The luckmen would have been Welsh speakers, of course,’ observed Penny, who was bringing in her second load of equipment and supplies while Lionel went back to the car for his third. ‘All their spells and incantations would have been handed down from time immemorial.’
‘They must have been true descendants of Merlin and Owen Glendower, mustn’t they?’ I put in, insouciantly. ‘The last custodians of the authentic Druidic tradition.’
She looked at me as if I were a caterpillar in a salad sandwich. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘That’s exactly what they were.’
Diplomacy compelled me to refrain from making any clever remarks about Taliesin, the Bardic motto, Eisteddfods or male voice choirs. I eyed the rickety staircase that led up to the first floor, carpeted in what had once been red felt but was now almost completely black. ‘Is there a switch for the upstairs lights?’ I asked Martin.
‘There’s one at the top on the left,’ he informed me, ‘and another just inside the door of the front room. You shouldn’t need them, though - the windows up there let in more light than this one.’
As I headed up the stairs I could feel renewed optimism putti
ng a spring in my step. The uncluttered windows of the short corridor and the ‘so-called bedroom’ did indeed let in more light than the window downstairs, but they were also a lot smaller, so the advantage was not as marked as I could have wished. Even so, I let the electric switch alone as I stepped through the open door into the room directly over the shopfront.
As soon as I had moved into the room the feeling hit me. It took me completely by surprise, and the impact was sufficient to make me catch my breath.
I had been in that room before.
I had, of course, experienced the commonplace sensation of déjà vu, but never so intensely as to make me doubt the conventional explanation that it arose from an illusion generated when the same sensory information was accidentally duplicated in the brain, having been transmitted there by two distinct neuronal pathways. This was different, not just because of its intensity but because I knew - vaguely, at least - when and where I had had the experience that was being so carefully and so improbably reproduced by the present moment.
Most people, it is said, have recurring dreams. They may dream repeatedly of houses, of sexual encounters, of flying, or of appearing naked in public. When they have such dreams - or, at least, when they become conscious that they are having such dreams - they know that they are revisiting scenes already familiar: that the house is one they have previously visited in dreams, or that their power of flight is something which they are rediscovering. Some such dreams may be enigmatic, perhaps because they are symbolically disguised, but others are trivially literal; mine have always been perfectly understandable. My own recurrent dreams are of second-hand bookshops.
I have never considered it at all unusual that my long-standing addiction to combing the shelves of second-hand bookshops should be reflected in my dreams. Nor have I ever considered it unusual that such dreams should often be attended by the sense of returning to familiar haunts - because that, after all, is the form that the vast majority of my actual book-hunting trips take. It is only to be expected that when I dream of bookshops - or, at least, when I become conscious that I am dreaming of bookshops - I usually feel that they are familiar bookshops. Interestingly, however, they are never bookshops that really do exist in the everyday world; they are always imaginary bookshops. This means, of course, that when I have the sense of having visited them before, I know that I can only have done so in other dreams. It is as if the virtual geography of my private dream-world numbers amongst its fixtures a series of shops, some fascinating and some not-so-fascinating, which I visit at irregular intervals: a population parallel to that with which the geography of the real world is dotted.
Sometimes, when dreaming of bookshops, I become conscious that I am dreaming - but I resist waking up, because I know that when I do I shall have to leave behind any interesting books I might have found. When my bookshop dreams become lucid in this fashion I often become conscious of the fact - or at least the illusion - that the shop I am in is one of which I have dreamed before.
Just as I had never dreamed of entering an actual bookshop, so I had never actually entered a bookshop of which I had dreamed. That I seemed to be doing so now was more than a cause for astonishment; it seemed, in fact, to be a violation of natural law, as threatening in its fashion as any conventional apparition or ominous shadow. I stood transfixed, appalled by the thought that I - a great and hitherto worthy champion of scepticism - could be assailed in this rude and nasty fashion.
Mercifully, the moment did not last. The shock of awful discovery was replaced soon enough by a struggle to remember what, if anything, I had found in this room when it had only been the figment of a dream. The mental reflex of the book-collector was powerful enough to drive away the alarm of revelation; I ceased to worry about the how of the mystery and focused my mind instead on the truly crucial question of what there might he to be found, and whether the illusion of having dreamed about the room - I was already content to dismiss the sensation as an illusion - might somehow assist my search.
No sooner had I begun to scan the nearest shelves, however, than the force of reality began to reassert itself upon my senses. The proportion of Welsh texts here was considerably smaller than on the shelves below - no more than half, and perhaps a little less - but that did not make the remainder seem significantly more promising. There were several sets of standard authors, more poetry than prose, in horribly shabby pocket editions. My expert eye immediately picked out a number of yellowbacks, but their condition was so awful that it would hardly have mattered had they been more interesting titles than they were. A few bound volumes of old periodicals turned out on closer inspection to be Sunday at Home andPick-Me-Up, not even Longman’s or Temple Bar, let alone anything more interesting.
In brief, it looked like the kind of stock over which a collector might toil for hours in order to turn up a couple of items whose significance to his collection was marginal at best. Not, of course, that I could contentedly let it alone; I knew that I would indeed have to inspect every single shelf, lifting every volume whose title was not clearly inscribed on its spine, in order to make perfectly certain that nothing evaded me. No matter how laborious the task became, I would have to stick to it come Hell or high water - but first I had to return downstairs, in answer to Lionel’s urgent call.
* * * *
All Lionel wanted, it turned out, was to hand me a cup of tea and ask my opinion as to what kind of pizza he ought to have delivered.
There is nothing like a four-way debate about pizza toppings to bring a ghost-hunting expedition right down to earth; by the time we had settled on two mediums, one with bacon, mushroom and tomato and the other with olives, anchovies and pepperoni, mundanity had such a secure hold on Martin’s bookshop that even Madame Arcati at her most lunatic would have been hard-pressed to find the least hint of spirit activity.
By this time, of course, Penny and Lionel had set up all the SPR’s apparatus. The video camera was on its tripod, ready to be spun around in quest of the kinds of things that one glimpses in the corners of one’s eyes. A quaint little pointer was inscribing a record of the room’s temperature on a slowly rotating drum. (I was glad to note that since we had entered the shop our combined bodyheat had contrived to raise the temperature by a whole degree Celsius to a reasonably comfortable sixteen.) I still wasn’t sure what it was that the ammeter was hooked up to but whatever it was had not yet succeeded in generating a flicker of current.
Lionel asked Penny to tell him a little more about luckmen and their role in the mines of yore, but Penny had already run to the limit of her information on the subject so she tried to pump Martin about residual superstitions in the modern industry - a subject on which he was not at all forthcoming.
‘I was always above ground, see,’ he said. ‘The boys at the face had their own little community - they’d tell you tales for a laugh, like, but they’d never let on that they took any of it seriously.’
‘What tales?’ Lionel wanted to know.
‘You know. Not a pit in the Valley has a clean sheet mortality-wise - not any that’s been open longer than twenty years, anyhow. The eldest are full of worked-out shafts and old rockfalls, an’ there’s always talk of voices - voices of men killed by gas or crushed, you see. Offering warnings as often as not; I’ve heard far more tales of men being saved than men being lost. Nobody goes down a pit needs scaring, see; work’s dangerous enough without that.’
‘Judging by the dust on some of the books upstairs,’ I said, ‘one or two of them must have made a good number of trips down into the shafts.’
‘I doubt that,’ Martin said. ‘No time to read down there, nor light good enough to read by. The dust on the bindings is the kind that gets in everywhere - the fine stuff that hangs about in the air and never quite washes out. Almost like a liquid, it is, or amiasma — smears and clings and blackens even if you never set foot in the cage or a hand on a hopper.’
I had to admire the way he pronounced ‘miasma’, lingering over the vowels as only a Welsh
man could.
‘The dark spirit of the pit,’ said Penny, softly. It would almost have been enough to make us look over our shoulders if we hadn’t heard the delivery boy’s moped rattling over the potholes in the street. We fell upon the pizza-slices with the kind of eager rapacity that only competition can generate, even though we all knew perfectly well that we were only entitled to four apiece.
While we ate, darkness fell - and shadows crept upon us in spite of the electric light. Martin, born and bred to the economy of the Valleys, had only fitted sixty-watt bulbs.
Martin was watching us now, alert for any sign of tension or unease. As with many Celts, his eyes were pale even though his hair was dark, but they weren’t blue; they were as grey as slate. Although Penny was a very different physical type - ectomorphic rather than endomorphic - she had very similar colouring. Her eyes did retain a slight hint of blue, but her complexion lacked the hint of rosy pink that Martin’s had. Lionel must have been at least twenty years older than Martin and thirty years older than Penny but he looked more robust than either of them. He was originally from Norfolk, which probably meant that he - like me - was a descendant of Viking settlers. Our ancestors had never been bards or Druids; our family trees were as devoid of luckmen as of mistletoe.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 47