A Rare Book of Cunning Device
A Rare Book of Cunning Device
by Ben Aaronovitch
“Ah hah,” said the librarian. You must be the Mamusa’s boy. The librarian was a tiny round-faced white woman, who appeared to be dressed in several layers of brightly-colored cardigans.
I confirmed that I was that Peter Grant, and she beamed at me. “I knew your mum back in Freetown when she was just a wee slip of a girl,” she said.
“Did you?” I asked, stupidly, because I was having trouble code shifting from job to family acquaintance, especially one who used my mum’s Sierra Leonian name. Most white people that know her call her Rose, even my Dad.
“I came to your Christening,” she said. “Enormous party. Food was brilliant.”
“I’ll tell her we met,” I said.
“I wonder if she’ll remember me,” she said.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“I haven’t said, have I?”
“No.”
“Ah. Yes.” She held her hand for me to shake. “Elsie Winstanley. I’m the specialist collection manager. Thank you for coming.”
“My pleasure,” I said. “What seems to be the problem?”
“We appear to have acquired a poltergeist,” she said.
This seemed unlikely. According to the massed wisdom of the practitioners who came before me, which was corroborated, at least in part, by my own research, ghosts, poltergeists, and other incorporeal phenomena fed off the vestigia that accumulates in the fabric of the material world. This buildup takes time and while stone, brick and even concrete retain vestigia well, a building generally had to be at least 30 years old before acquiring any ghosts. More than 100 years for a poltergeist, or something more exotic.
The British Library had been built in 1997 and was less than 17 years old. It was an odd building, too: a sort of collision between the monumental brick-built bulk of a 1930s power station, and the strange, post-modernist desire to recreate that famous Escher interior. You know, the one with all the perspective-defying staircases.
Ms Winstanley and me had met in the foyer, where I was issued with a security pass, because not even a warrant card gets you backstage at the second-largest book collection in the world.
Behind the reception desk rose the King’s Library, a six-story glass tower, containing 65,000 books donated by King George III during a rare fit of sanity. There are theories that he feared, in his madness, that they were possessed of unquiet spirits, and felt that he could not sleep soundly under the same roof. Or, more likely to my mind, he felt the palace needed the shelf space.
Still, that was a lot of historical material, so I wasn’t about to dismiss the claim out of hand.
“What makes you think you’ve got a poltergeist?” I asked.
“Things have been moved around during the night,” she said. “Doors that should be closed have been left open, and some books have been found on the wrong shelf.”
“You’re sure it isn’t just—”
“Yes, we’re sure,” she said. “We’re librarians. We notice that sort of thing. And in any case, while books may occasionally mislay themselves, priceless 16th-century globes do not.”
“It was stolen?”
“It was moved, from one end of the basement to the other,” she said.
“Well, perhaps somebody needed the space,” I said.
“This— erm—” began Ms Winstanley and then changed her mind. “I think it will be easier to just show you the basement,” which she did – all four sodding floors. All were very tight security, particularly the top-secret sections, where they keep the classified maps from the Ministry of Defence.
“Things don’t move of their own accord,” said Ms Winstanley. “Not in this library.”
So I did a preliminary IVA, or Initial Vestigia Assessment. And because it was a sodding big building, with four floors of basements, it took me most of the afternoon.
“It mostly manifests itself at night,” said Ms Winstanley when we stopped for coffee.
It certainly wasn’t manifesting itself to me. I noted down all the details, thanked Ms Winstanley for the tour, and headed back to the Folly. There, I planned to fill in one of our brand spanking new Falcon Incident Report forms and file it, until Nightingale came back from hunting big cats in Norfolk.
Only, I got back to find our archivist, Professor Harold Postmartin D.Phil, F.R.S. enjoying tea in the atrium. I made the mistake of telling him about the alleged poltergeist in the library, because he might find it of interest, and his face lit up. I know that look of enthusiasm, and the last time I saw it, I ended up covered in pesticide, and wrestling with a tree.
“Oi. Hatbox Winstanley,” said Postmartin.
I described her as best as I could and Postmartin confirmed that it was the woman he was thinking of. So called, because she was said to have travelled down the Amazon in a hatbox, swum the English Channel wearing nothing but goose fat, and run a library in Kolwezi until she was forcibly evacuated by the French Foreign Legion.
“I’m almost certain that the last two are true,” said Postmartin. “And if old Hatbox says there’s something supernatural in her stacks, then I for one would take her very seriously indeed.”
So, back we both went to the British Library where Ms Winstanley, upon hearing that Postmartin was staying the night, insisted that she join us in our ghost-hunting exploits.
“Not only am I intensely curious to see what you boys actually get up to,” she said, “but you also cannot leave these university types unsupervised amongst your stacks. They’re famously light-fingered. And they don’t call Harold ‘Postmartin the Pirate’ for nothing.”
When I asked who called Postmartin a pirate and why, she merely winked, and said that while she’d love to tell me, it was still subject to the thirty-year rule. “Official Secrets Act and all that,” she said.
As revenge, I popped back and fetched Toby. When Ms Winstanley objected, I told her that Toby was a highly-trained police dog. She gave Toby a skeptical look. “Trained in what?” she asked.
“Many strange things,” I said. “Of which the uninitiated is not meant to know.””
“Ah,” said Ms Winstanley. “Ah. Not meant to know. Not is.” And that is why I don’t normally argue with librarians.
So, me and one of the security staff carried gear down to the basement while Ms Winstanley and Postmartin compared ninja librarian notes.
We were making a camp in one of the central workrooms on Basement 2. Underground, the workspaces and stacks were as generously proportioned as a billionaire’s basement, with high ceilings and wide corridors. Everything that wasn’t painted 1970s sci-fi white was a brilliant red or blue, causing me to have an almost irresistible urge to tattoo my eyeball, and parcours my way up the walls. The ceilings had to be high, because not only did the bookshelves go up over 2 meters, but above them ran the Paternoster Book Delivery System. Essentially the same as the baggage-handling system in a major airport, only designed not to destroy the packages they were carrying.
Ms Winstanley explained how it worked on the first tour. Readers upstairs, in one of the many reading rooms, order a book on the computer. The book got pulled off one of the 625 km of shelf, put in a box, the box goes into the patented Paternoster Book Delivery System, and it’s carried upstairs, where — you can guess the rest.
By law, the British Library gets two copies of every book published in the UK and Ireland, which adds up to a lot of books — over 14 million so far.
“Although the vast majority of the Mills and Boone collection is kept at Boston Spa,” said Ms Winstanley. And that wasn’t counting the 260,000 journals, 4 million maps, and 60 million pate
nts.
“60 million?”
“Oh yes,” said Ms Winstanley. “People are extraordinarily inventive.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“Most of them are complete tosh, of course,” she said.
There were specialist bookcases for old, rare, and strangely-shaped books. But most of the stock was kept in huge ranks of mechanical bookcases, the kind that close together to minimize floorspace. When you wanted a book, you found the right section and turned a handle which drove a series of gears that prised two of the shelves apart to form a temporary aisle. The gearing was high and the shelves were heavy.
Ms Winstanley must have spotted me testing the weight with my shoulder. “Now you have to make sure people know you’re in there,” she said. “Otherwise somebody might close it and you’d be squished.”
“Whoever knew this job was so dangerous?” I said.
“Ah, yes. Librarianship,” said Ms Winstanley. “It’s not for the faint-hearted.”
By 11 o’clock that evening, we were all set up. So we cracked open one of the industrial-sized thermoses I’d brought from the Folly, while we waited for the last of the staff to vacate the basement. Even the security staff were leaving, so we wouldn’t mistake them for a marauding poltergeist.
Since neither our phones, or my airwave, or my now patent pending magic detectors would work in the basement, our strategy was to leave at least one person at the base camp, while the others went out as a single group and didn’t split up under any circumstances. Team Folly was not at home for Mr. Scooby Doo.
“Particularly since I am, in fact, the only one of us that knows their way around,” said Ms Winstanley. So a little bit before 12:00, me, Toby, and Ms Winstanley went for our first patrol.
Now, what with the sloppy procedure, the size of the basement, the lack of any detection equipment, and the newness of the building, I thought it was pretty unlikely that we were going to discover anything during this, or any subsequent night’s searching. So, of course, less than half an hour later, we practically tripped over the bloody thing.
There’s a particular kind of spookiness about being brightly lit underground. The constant fluorescent light pushes at your peripheral vision, and the absence of shadows flattens out your perspective. It also doesn’t help that the climate control system is prone to random ticks and hums.
We started with the closest of the caged-in areas set aside for holding rare, valuable, or classified parts of the collection.
“Or, more likely because these are the last empty shelves available,” said Ms Winstanley as she unlocked the gate and let us in to the first one.
The stacks inside had large shelves holding big leather-bound books that looked like props for a fantasy film. The tan and brown of the covers were brilliant against the sterile grey-white of the shelves. I wanted to reach out and run my fingers along their spines, to see if some of the history would rub off. But I’m better trained than that.
I caught Toby eyeing up the corner of the stack, so I tugged on his lead to make him behave.
“This is mainly—” started Ms Winstanley, but before she could finish her sentence, something shot past our feet and sculled out into the open gate.
I didn’t get much more than an impression, but it was bigger than Toby, angular, brown, and had lots of legs. By the time I’d activated enough neurons to run to the cage door, the thing had gone.
“Tell me that wasn’t a spider,” said Ms Winstanley in a deceptively calm tone.
“Can’t have been,” I said.
“Thank God for that,” she said. “Can’t stand spiders.”
“It was too big,” I said. “You can’t scale an exoskeleton up that far.” The inverse square law can be such a comfort sometimes. Plus I definitely remembered something about gas diffusion and box lungs — or something like that.
“So, magic can’t make things bigger?” asked Ms Winstanley. And I really wished she hadn’t.
“It definitely wasn’t a poltergeist,” I said. “That much is certain.”
I looked at Toby, who hadn’t reacted until the thing, whatever it was, ran past him. And I hadn’t registered a hint of vestigia, either. Perhaps it wasn’t magical at all. Could it be mechanical, electronic — a machine? The spider configuration was considered a good shape for autonomous robots.
“I brought the wrong gear,” I said. “We should have had cameras, motion detectors, and infrared sensors. Isn’t that always the way? You set out to hunt a ghost, and you trip over a robot instead.”
“Shouldn’t we go after it?” asked Ms Winstanley.
“Let’s see if we can find out what it was doing in here,” I said.
I found marks on the side of the stacks, and more on one of the posts that supported the metal wire cage on the opposite side.
The shelves were full of exactly the books Ms Winstanley said she expected to be there. Some hugely valuable, some historically significant. “All of them priceless,” she said.
“Anything missing?”
Ms Winstanley said she couldn’t tell without checking the catalogue on her terminal back at base camp. So we trooped back and I briefed Postmartin and suggested we call it a night.
“Nonsense,” said Postmartin. “Where is your sense of adventure?”
I said it was back at the Folly with my forensic collection kit, motion sensors, and taser.
He literally said “Pish,” which I never heard a real person say in my life.
“We should at least give deduction a chance,” he said. “Is it possible it was a book?”
“It had legs,” I said.
“There is a long history of extraordinary things being hidden in books,” said Postmartin. “Alcohol, keys, letters, very small heirs to a throne…”
“Hand grenades,” said Ms Winstanley without looking up from her terminal.
“Um— er— When was that?” asked Postmartin.
“Bulawayo,” she said. “In ‘75.”
“Hand grenades, pistols, radios,” said Postmartin. “Why not a robot?”
A book-robot seemed a bit Despicable Me to me, but why not?
Once Ms Winstanley had her list, it took us less than five minutes to locate the space on the shelves, above head-height, of course, where a book was missing.
"A Book of Cunning Device," said Ms Winstanley reading the details off her tablet. “Attributed to Salman ibn Jabir al Rasheed, a 10th-century scholar from Baghdad.”
“Why ‘attributed’?” I asked.
There was a theory, explained Ms Winstanley, that the book didn’t originate in the Islamic near east at all — that it had been manufactured in the west, probably Venice, in imitation of the works that were being brought home from the Holy Land by pilgrims and crusaders.
“Like a cargo cult object,” she said. “Because if you look at the so-called writing, and you have any Arabic or Farsi at all, it’s clear that it’s nothing like real Arabic. Not even close.”
She showed me pictures, lines of squiggly text running across a page. The images were poor, and judging by the color saturation, derived from mid-20th-century photography. But it looked to me that the writing had been done in gold ink.
“Last catalogued in 1972,” said Ms Winstanley. “And poorly done at that. We were waiting for our Persian specialist to get back from holiday and have a look.”
Another image showed what looked like a musical instrument built into the body of the book, like a horizontal harp, with pegs to adjust tension. A horizontal dulcimer – what they called a santur in Iran and Iraq. I recognized it from an album my dad had, by the bloke from Deep Forest.
“Or perhaps a musical instrument disguised as a book,” said Ms Winstanley. “Intriguing, no?”
I asked why, if it was so intriguing, it hadn’t been catalogued yet, which caused Ms Winstanley to snort.
“There are never enough people to get through your backlog,” said Postmartin. “That’s the curse of librarianship. If your library is of any quality at
all, then its collection is going to outpace your manpower.”
I spotted Toby sniffing around another corner of the stack, and moved smartly to stop him marking his territory. But I saw he was sniffing at something at his head height. It looked like a sort of scuff mark, left behind by the foot of a tripod, or the stud of a football boot. There was a second, further up the stack, and a third and a fourth, making a trail to an empty shelf far up enough for me to need to use a kick stool to reach it.
“And that’s where the book was kept,” said Ms Winstanley.
I put my gloves on, just in case, and reached gingerly into the empty shelf. And there it was — a vibration, like the wind breaking through the strings of a harp, and a cascade of notes like running water. It was magical then. Which was a bit of a relief given the alternative was superscience, and I didn’t really want to have to explain that to Nightingale.
“That globe that was moved,” I said. “Where exactly did you find it?”
The uppermost basement was much larger than the ones below and most of the space was taken up with the kind of heavy engineering required to keep 165 km of shelving at just the right temperature and humidity. Plus the humans using the building above, of course, but that was pretty much an afterthought.
Unlike the book storage areas below, which had been mainly grey and white with red trimming, the plant rooms were silver, with huge cylinders painted blue connected with yellow pipes. "Definitely the Boss level," I thought, as we crept through it.
Both Ms Winstanley and Postmartin followed me in, because neither wanted to be left behind. Ms Winstanley was carrying Toby, because he most definitely had wanted to be left behind. But fortunately, I had a stash of Molly’s home-cooked sausages on hand to bribe him with.
The misplaced globe had been found close to the central air-conditioning unit that served the 6-story tower which housed the King’s collection. The unit itself was a huge blue metal box capped with silver and vanishing upwards into a web of silver struts and pipes at roof level. A row of chunky green boxes, like the lockers at a gym, festooned with yellow and black warning markers, housed the power regulators.
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