That Book Your Mad Ancestor Wrote

by K. J. Bishop

  Nine of the rings glowed like little lightbulbs. Only one, on the fourth finger of the left hand, a marcasite panther curled around a moonstone as big as an olive, was dull. Uninhabited.

  She had captured all nine of his brothers and sisters, each win adding the imprisoned sibling’s suite of powers to her own. He was one of the strongest of the ten, and he was the luckiest. But he would have to be very lucky to beat her now. Very, very lucky.

  The spread suggested that luck was on his side. Madame Lenora’s smile was mischief itself.

  ‘Well, Marquis?’

  He pursed his lips and tapped the head of his cane. This was unexpected. She might lie, but her cards didn’t.

  On the other hand…

  There was a reason why no one had gone to anyone’s aid until it was too late. Sibling rivalry was the curse of their family. It had taken him a thousand years to start missing one or two of them. As allies they would never be better than unreliable.

  Yet it sat badly with him to take no action, attempt no revenge, to be a coward. But the consequence of failure… and there would be no rescue for any of them if he lost.

  Madame Lenora, still full of mirth – were fat people really happier? – interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘How about you try your luck tonight? I’m game if you are.’

  It was already over. The moment had passed, if there had even been a moment.

  ‘It seems I never am,’ he said, trying to be breezy.

  Her pity wasn’t a pleasant meal, but he had a cast-iron digestion. He could make something of it.

  He put the right amount of money down on the table and returned to his own black leather tent. Several customers were queued up outside, patiently waiting their turn to be flogged and humiliated.

  He wondered if he hadn’t picked up some of their quirks of character.

  SHE MIRRORS

  A horse cab dropped him off at the Delgano Library of Arts and Sciences at one o’clock, when the lawns in front of the building – a neo-Baroque box in the centre of Sheol, the city on the edge of the Teleute Shelf – were lying like sheets of malachite under a rather damp pale sky.

  A thin man in his sixties, he put in an appearance at the library on most Saturday afternoons. His suits were dressy for the daytime, his long grey hair was never without arrangement in a ribboned queue or flowing tail, and his cuffs and tie pin were invariably and variously jewelled. With his old-fashioned dandyism he looked like an ageing musician or actor, and it was as the latter that he had made himself known to the library’s staff.

  The lie had an element of truth, as a good lie should: an actor’s vocation had always been a constant in his substrate, a mine of pleasure and almost incidentally an aid to profit. It had served him well and he was too old to give it up. It was hardly a stretch to play the part of a cultivated, mildly eccentric, worldly but scholarly, retired knight of the footlights.

  He left his hat in the cloakroom, keeping his coat and silk muffler on. In the privacy of the men’s room he downed a measure of the snake oil his doctor had given him. In spite of being a cure for stuttering and an aid to conception, it contained the usual painkillers and helped allay the discomfort in his gullet and the newish aches in his ribs and pelvis. The liquid, at least, still went down handily enough. Within a few months if not a few weeks, the doctor had warned, it would not.

  After rinsing his mouth he emerged and crossed the coffered foyer to enter the library – a two-storeyed, galleried space that was large and light, crowned by a great circular skylight like an open umbrella above a frieze pierced with windows, and outfitted with electric lamps on the desks and over the bookcases. Downstairs, the march of mahogany shelves paused at pedimented doors to the music, manuscript and private study rooms.

  Not a helluo librorum as such, he was a reader mainly of magazines and journals, his interest being in what was current – which, taken together with his appearance, could be seen as a reversal of the usual situation where a body occupies the here and now and the mind some other point in time. Nevertheless, he had a list of bafflingly obscure books, none remotely new, on longstanding request. To the request was appended the instruction that he should be informed of the acquisition of any material illustrated by a particular artist.

  Having reserved some periodicals the week before, he presented himself at the service desk, where the girl on duty had a particularly bright smile for him.

  He could admit to himself that his vanity was consoled – and he had chosen not to care much what his pride, vanity’s fretful overlord, thought about the consolation – by the favour his moderately gussied-up, libertine-in-a-homeopathic-dose, Saturday character had found among the library’s complement of bluestockings. They did not like the naked, unchastened egos of young men; an old man’s wistful ego, on the other hand, and his skills in the art of deference, brought out the daddy’s girl in every one of them, so that they treated him with smiles and daughterly allegiance.

  Other men took up gardening or watercolours as hobbies in their retirement or semi-retirement; he had taken up sensitivity, for the same aesthetic reasons that he did everything.

  The girl would lightly prick the vein of small talk, and he would say something warm or witty–

  ‘Mr Casmir, one of your books has turned up,’ she revealed, her lowered voice making the information sound clandestine. ‘It came to us recently in a bequeathed collection. Shall I fetch it for you?’

  ‘Please do.’

  He had not prepared a reaction in advance of this admittedly unlikely moment. The fact was that he had given the list and the name to the bluestocking brigade on a whim in the nature of a ‘why not?’, since it was a matter on which his curiosity had never been laid to rest; but it had not been important for a very long time.

  He found himself waiting with very little in the way of anticipation stirring – due less to surprise or even the habit of prefacing passion with dispassion, his self-observing side opined, than to dullness of mind and body – even when the librarian returned from the room behind the desk, wearing white cotton gloves and carrying a slim folio-sized volume.

  She placed the book on the counter in front of him. ‘It’s quite terrifically rare,’ she said, her eyes following the drop of his own to the cover, whose wealth of gold decoration was stamped on ultramarine leather, as he unfolded a pair of reading spectacles.

  ‘Yes, only a few were printed.’

  And then, finally, he did begin to succumb to something, feeling it show on his face as he put on the gloves she passed to him.

  The girl had a clever and kind smile, and he feared that behind it her thoughts were patronising him, then wondered why he cared. Wasn’t it a vain man’s silliness to worry about the facade when the structure behind was in the final stages of rot?

  Brushing off these mental ants, he opened the book to the title page. The real jolt happened then – it was rather like having a suitcase of old belongings thrown at him, all its contents falling willy-nilly over his head – at the actual sight of it printed there – Illustrated in Limment Inks by – and a name to conjure with. A name that had conjured.

  He thought that he must have looked devoid of intelligence for several seconds, and was pleased to hear nothing out of order in his voice when he said, ‘Thank you, Miss Airlie, I should like to read this.’

  ‘I hope it was worth the wait,’ the girl replied, informing him then that rare books could not be taken to the gallery upstairs or the study rooms, but had to be perused in the main reading room. He assured her that this was not a problem. Selecting a free desk – an easy matter, since there were only six or seven other persons drinking from the well of knowledge, or perchance trapped at its bottom – he eased his tall frame into the chair. The movement caused a detonation of pain in his right hip, and he sat stock still waiting for the nuisance to pass, but it dug its claws in and stayed. Seizing his chance when the girl was bent over writing in a ledger, he drew the flask out of his pocket and took a surreptitious sec
ond dose.

  Having had from his doctor a fascinating lecture on the vagrant tendencies of malignant cells and their wont to set up camp in distant regions of the organism, he knew exactly what was happening to his bones. His body, which had always been as tough, serviceable and obedient a body as one could wish for, was now losing all of its previously excellent character and common sense. It was really no longer his; it had declared independence; though like some tin-pot upstart state, it had no idea how to organise itself and was doing monstrous things.

  So that it smacked somewhat of parodic coincidence to be revisited by this particular book, of all his long-ago lover’s works that might have turned up here in the present.

  It was a simulacrum of a medieval illuminated bestiary. The cover’s gilded image was that of a sort of super-chimera, a beast with an abundance of heads, which, not content with being numerous, were chimeras themselves – half-baboon, half-eagle; half-tiger, half-ram; half-fly, half-elephant, and so on – as if to say, ‘Boys, it’s chimeras all the way down.’ A short preface informed the reader that the volume was intended as a showcase for the chemical inks perfected by paint and dyestuffs maestro Durn Limment. It had been produced during the craze for the Middle Ages (a nostalgia the culture had quickly purged from its system, replacing it with peculiar nostalgias for the future and even the present moment).

  The colour engravings were as vivid and as splendidly rendered as he remembered, and as full of figures conjured out of the enchanted valleys between the beacons of wisdom – the lyre-shaped beast, or demon, called Bonvorog, with two heads whose beautifully evil faces were composed of flames, and within its body, in nine chambers depicted in cross-section, images of a human head catching fire and passing through agony until reaching a condition of pure flame like the outer two, with a final expression of coarse joy; the Ombelex, a stone with a beard of grass, locked in a cage; the Sarasp, a hand facing palm outward, pierced by a window showing a view, against a mountain background, of a flying bird cut in four quarters; the Lantamagenta, a tree bearing fleshy stalks from which grew the figures of several sleeping men whose virile members were burning candles.

  She had been obsessed, he remembered well, with rearranging forms, and thus meanings, in bizarre ways, as if she had been trying to create something much more powerful out of the original elements. Like the Sarasp, many of the combinations were hardly beasts, but more like inapprehensible, perhaps only hypothetically possible experiences expressed as symbolic bodies – but if that was true and worth understanding, it was a deadly dry way to think of a bursting heart, a vase full of hate, or the eyes of prisoners. In other words, there was a command to leap and grasp onto something, even if it was the hand of an evil spirit. One could feel the restless mind behind them questing for new qualia – for sights never possessed, for spiritual cargoes not yet on the market. One saw – one knew, one had heard her talk about it at odd times – the attempt to use artifice to get beyond itself and into a magical reality which would become factual at the moment of being breached and entered. Monstrosity, frantic disorganisation, invasion of one form by another, nothing doing what was proper to itself: these were her methods, her own little war on a reality that simply would not do as it was. He wondered if she would have liked his wayward cells.

  Among the more conventional unconventional figures there was the sphinx, her symbol for herself, whose red hair in the image became red waves in which tiny figures of men and women were drowning; and the basilisk, the king of snakes, a feathered serpent with the sharp, devilish face of a man whose leering grin implied a nature more like Vice than Royalty. These images dragged him out of the abstractions with which he had been dallying and threw him back into the memory of love that had got out of hand.

  How was he to describe it to himself now? His inner descriptions had changed with the years, as time fiddled with the stuff of the past. Subsequent loves had altered the dreamish memory; fashions in thought and discoveries in science had adjusted and recast it. He felt that only a few parts of the whole edifice had held up under the strain.

  It had been more than thirty years, during which he had never once chanced across, nor been able to locate – on the admittedly few occasions when he had actively looked – a single one of her works, even though her output, both commercial and private, had been prolific. The appearance of this one book was therefore rather too neat a reprise of the way their affair had begun – with one and only one of her etchings appearing in his world and serving as a maddening clue through which he was to find her.

  Two coincidences, then. And so what, one might say. Yet there it was, as unexpected as the book: the recrudescence, gathering momentum after the vaguest of beginnings, of interest in playing the tracking game. He was ready to feel disgusted at himself for imagining that the game might have stakes – but he had to wait for the disgust to come, and when it did, it was so old and weak and uncertain of its own validity that it made him sigh through his teeth.

  He could hardly forget her theory that each person, in an exaggeration of subjective experience, existed in his or her own world, and that these worlds could join and part like dancers in a ballroom. According to this notion, her world and his had united, then parted decisively. Yet he wondered whether even she could have come up with an explanation for the seeming disappearance of all her marks from the world that remained around him.

  As he studied the images, he found mismatches between such of their content as his memory had retained and that which was before him now. The sphinx, for instance; he was sure she had been playing with a glass fishing float – a private allusion to their jungle picnic when they had found the float in the canal.

  Conceivably she had made more than one version of some of the plates. More likely, his memory was fuddled, by the strong drugs he had enjoyed all his life as well as by the usual accumulation of lies and fantasies.

  His own logic argued that, to an actor, lies and fantasies were valid currency.

  Like hell money for the dead.

  Chimeras all the way down, was it?

  A thin smile creased his thin face. Here might be amusement, at least – if only, eventually, it meant that he would laugh at himself.

  Having thought of how he could play with the book, he rose, wondering if he would be lucky this time; he was, and without uncomfortable interruption he walked to the desk, obtained paper and pencil from the obliging Miss Airlie, and returned to absorb himself in engagement with a pretence: namely, that the book might contain a message.

  He began at the first page again, reviewing each image and the descriptions on the facing pages, which to the best of his recall had been produced by a copywriter of poetic bent. It was suitably delirious stuff. Any secret messages passed between text and image should be accidental – he would have to throw a net and see what it caught.

  He studied the sphinx and the basilisk first, the directions in which eyes gazed and limbs and tails pointed, and drew imaginary lines (another sheet of paper serving as a ruler) from any seeming indicators to the text. When this yielded nothing, his hunting nature felt warmed up and ready to work through the whole book.

  He went through the same procedure with each picture, and when, as he had expected, no individual image revealed a message, he drew up a table for indicated words, with the columns marked Eyes, Hands, Tails, and so on, and the rows numbered for the plates, of which there were forty-three, one for each letter of the alphabet.

  Altogether this took two hours, and after poring over permutations of words for another hour and coming up empty, he decided some way of reducing their number was needed.

  He tried using her name as a key, taking words from the entries for those letters; he then tried his own name, both their names together, the name of the street she had lived on, and words that had been important to her: Escape, Transformation, Theurgy, Power, Art of course, and a few synonyms and variations in lexical and grammatical category; he resorted to trying it with Love. He tried words in his own languag
e, and the name of his sword. He tried Death, and Rebirth, and Mystery, and Where Are You, and Where Am I, and Hello.

  All to nothing gained.

  He did not allow himself to sigh or appear disturbed. That would be distasteful. Certain shows of emotion might be forgiven an old and ill man, but not to be included among those, under any circumstances, the grumblings of a player who was getting nowhere in a game!

  He pursed his lips, visualising a long wait on a rooftop with a rifle; the patience of a donkey essential to the job.

  Trying a more properly ludic approach, he fashioned keys out of bedroom talk, vulgarities, cant and slang, pornographic clichés, curses and insults. None of these opened a door.

  He was aware of the afternoon ticking on, the light deserting the overhead glass – he had turned the desk lamp on already – other readers leaving one by one, until he was alone.

  Now Miss Airlie was going to come and tell him to get out. Out of the corner of his eye he watched her: a Girl Guide’s forthright walk, but thin wrists.

  Chimeras all the…

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Casmir. I’m afraid we close at seven-thirty, so I shall have to ask you to return the book in a few minutes.’

  He felt a slithering vampiric lust for her. Unconnected to his personal tastes, it was certainly the hunger of age for youth, questing for what was most alive in its vicinity. He was inclined to view it with celebration.

  ‘Of course,’ he said smoothly, moving his arm to cover the notes he had been writing, since they contained words that ‘Mr Casmir’, whose scent of rakishness was a mere dab on a handkerchief, would not wish to show a young woman.

  The librarian went back to her post at the desk, and he folded his failed attempts and put them away in a pocket. Then he sat with his thoughts for five minutes; he stood up, enduring a brief nasty jab; and, approaching the desk, after handing back the gloves, but not yet the book, and saying a few words in its praise, asked the question on his mind: