There are people out there who want this stuff, and want it very much indeed.
So Portnoy receives these books, often battered and torn and water-damaged, and makes a judgement on their age. If they’re in English, he passes them by people he knows who can make guesses at authorship. These people can further refine the date, too, from clues in the use of language. There’s the issue of semantic drift, for example, where words start out meaning one thing and over time morph into something different.
“Henchman” is a mildly interesting English example. In the fourteenth century it was a positive term, literally meaning a “horse attendant” – the squire who walked beside high-ranking men and kept an eye on their boss’ steed. It continued to mean this for a few centuries, and appears thus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a matter of fact, where Oberon says, “I do but beg a little changeling boy/To be my henchman”. By the eighteenth century it had side-stepped to designate the chief sidekick of Scottish Highland chiefs, and then by nineteenth century America the word had strayed yet further, to mean a “political supporter” – a fairly short step from its current meaning of “a criminal associate”, ha ha. Working out the precise sense in which these shapeshifting words are being used can help nail a text to quite a specific time frame.
Sometimes they’re not in English, however, and that’s where I come in. If it’s in one of my fluent languages, I can do it right there in the basement beneath Portnoy’s deceptively bland shop in Cecil Court, one of London’s few remaining book alleys. I don’t like to do it that way, because it makes Portnoy feel he can pay me even less, but he’s too wily to fall for any nonsense about me needing reference books, when the thing’s obviously in a seventeenth century strand of one of the regional variations that eventually became subsumed into modern-day French.
Whenever I can, however, I take them home, and get to the bottom of them there. Most of the time, the results are mundane. A previously unknown pamphlet on the history of a one-horse town in Umbria in the 1760s remains dull, however few people knew it existed. There are collectors who revel in the purity of simply owning a book no one else knows exists, but that’s a precarious thrill. Portnoy knows about it now, of course, as do I … and as soon as anyone else comes across a reference to it somewhere, the bubble bursts. So there’s naturally a higher attraction to books that aren’t just unknown, but possess fascination in their own right. That’s when the price truly leaps up into the sky.
The Diary of Anna Kourilovicz was a case in point – a bound manuscript in a version of Russian used in the mid-1800s. Ms Kourilovicz had very bad handwriting. She also had an extremely colourful life – or imagination, I was never sure which – that she set down in detail, and that involved varied, frequent and eyebrow-raising couplings with men, women and pets of note in St Petersburg society of the time. There is a lot of cash swilling around the former Soviet Union these days, and the kinky stuff always goes for the highest prices. I don’t know how much Portnoy made when he sold The Diary, but for several weeks his sleekness went up a very significant notch. The next time I was in his office he even gave me a cigar, which I tried to enjoy, though it tasted like someone had set fire to a wet dog. It didn’t stop him paying me late, of course, but then he hadn’t offered me twelve hundred quid to do it, either.
Which made me think whatever I now held in my hands must be something he was hoping would turn out to be very interesting indeed.
IV
At first glance, the book had one obvious thing going for it – it was attractive. It had been laid out in a style between Arts & Crafts and Roycraft (tight and detailed typography, with woodcut-style design ornaments), and was actually a curious blend of the two, putting its publication – even to my graphically untrained eye – somewhere between 1890 to the early 1900s, and most likely in England, Germany or Austria.
So far, so good.
The problem was that it was nonsense.
There was text – rather a lot of it, in fact – but it wasn’t in any language I’d ever seen.
There used to be a lot more languages than there are now, of course. The Languedoc region of France was so named to distinguish its inhabitants as those who said “oc” to mean “yes”, rather than “oui”, as used elsewhere – and when Italy began to standardize its tongue late in the nineteenth century, only three per cent of the population were speaking the dialect which has now come to be known as “Italian”.
The lost varieties are generally at least recognizable, however. What was in front of me didn’t look like any breed of English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Scandinavian or Slavic language that I’d ever seen, and the lack of Cyrillic characters help rule out a slew of others.
The obvious answer was that it was a code. If so, then Portnoy was out of luck. One of the many things I have no skill for is working out puzzles. I hate them, actually. I suspected he had reason to believe this wasn’t a cipher, however, as in that case he’d have given it to someone who possessed those skills. In fact, he’d possibly already done so – ending up with me as a last resort.
So what made him think it was worth twelve hundred notes to work out what it was? It had to be the provenance – where the book had come from. One of his shadowy procurers must have told him the context was very good indeed. After three hours of flicking through the book it still looked like bollocks to me, however.
I photocopied a few random pages on the little printer/scanner/copier thing I have, and took them with me to the pub. At some point in the evening I lost track of them, a little before I lost track of myself.
V
When I woke in the middle of the following night, it took me a few moments to work out where I was. I’ll be honest and admit this is not an unknown phenomenon. What is unusual is for the location not to be my own dwelling, however. Once in a while I’ve regained consciousness in someone else’s house – that of a random woman, generally, in whose rumpled waking face I see mirrored my own weary disappointment at our mutual fate – but usually it’s my own gaff that I wake to find myself face-down on the carpet of. Not this time.
I sat up, and saw I was in a park.
Not a very large one – only about seventy meters square – but with quite a lot of trees, the rest of the space given over to instruments designed to beguile the energies of children of pre-school age.
A roundabout, and a pair of swings. A couple of slides, one in the manner of a pirate ship.
Something in the shape of a horse, on which I could have rocked hectically back and forth, had I been much smaller and determined to make myself very sick.
Inspection of a metal waste bin a few yards away suggested I was in something called Dalmeny Park. This was promising, as I was pretty sure there was a Dalmeny Road not too far away from where I lived. The park in general looked very vaguely familiar, in fact, though it was hard to understand why. It was surrounded by houses and gardens except at the gate, which was accessed down an alley between a couple of unremarkable dwellings. It would be hard to even know of its existence, unless you were already inside, and I could imagine no circumstances in which I would have been in the park before.
Less positive was the fact that when I got to the gate, I found it was locked. This was not some small and easy-to-vault-over affair, either, but a ten feet high job, evidently designed to stop the place being used as an alfresco drugs den and/or informal homeless shelter. A sign on the gate alleged the place shut at dusk. As I hadn’t left the pub until well after closing time – the Southampton operates a generous lock-in policy – it didn’t seem likely that I’d entered the park this way.
I turned around and saw that much of the perimeter of the park gave onto people’s back gardens, the walls to which varied from five to eight feet in height. So it was more likely I’d come in via that route.
But … How had I got into someone’s garden, and then over the back of their wall and into here? And why, more to the point? What on earth had possessed me?
And how was I g
oing to get out?
I lurched around the edge of the park, pushing behind the tall shrubs which lined most of it. I was relieved to find that in the far corner was another gate, which – though it didn’t give onto public space – at least looked like it might lead by the side of a mansion block, beyond which the road presumably lay.
This gate was only about eight feet high. I stared up at it, feeling drunk, bilious and far from confident.
“What the hell are you doing?”
At first I couldn’t work out where the voice was coming from. Then I saw that someone was approaching the gate from the other side, occluded behind a hellishly bright torch beam.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do you mean you don’t know? What are you doing in there?”
It was a man’s voice, and had an odd rhythm to it.
“I don’t know that either,” I said.
“You’re drunk.”
“Yes,” I agreed, quickly, eager to be helpful. “I think that’s a big part of the problem.”
He lowered his torch enough to allow me to glimpse a man in late middle age, wearing a dressing gown.
“I’m really sorry,” I said.
He unlocked the gate, giving me a comprehensive ticking off in the process, rehearsing a number of things he should be doing – calling the police, the council, my mother – but I found it hard to make out the individual words, or to form a more comprehensive apology.
Instead I thanked him and hurried up the path past the side of the block. It occurred to me as I made it to the road that I’d only solved part one of the problem, as I still didn’t actually know where I was. But I didn’t want to push my luck.
It took forty minutes of wandering the streets to find my road, which – had I not been travelling in shambling circles for most of it – was actually only about half a mile from the park. I let myself into the house and climbed up the stairs on hands and knees, as if undertaking the final desperate assault on a very high and idiosyncratically carpeted mountainside.
Only when I was safely inside my flat did I realize I could still hear the rhythm of the voice of the man with the torch, beating inside my head.
VI
When I woke again late the next morning, my location was more explicable. I was exactly where I had been when I’d fallen back to sleep. Face-down on my own sofa. I was sufficiently relieved by this that I didn’t even much mind when rolling over sent me over the edge, to land with a crash on the floor.
I drank a lot of water while sitting at the table. I still didn’t understand what had happened. Sure, I’d drunk a lot of beer. But I’ve done that before (the previous night, for example, and the one before that). How I’d got from drunk-in-the-Southampton-Arms to being unconscious-inside-Dalmeny-Park remained a mystery.
As I’d scurried away under the torch-wielding man’s scrutiny, I’d had time to note that the side of the building didn’t look even remotely familiar. I suspected this meant it hadn’t been the way I’d gained access to the park. Climbing over even that lower gate would have been a major undertaking, one which you’d have thought should have stuck in my beer-addled brain.
So how had I got in there? Via someone’s garden?
In which case, had I also gone via someone’s house?
It suddenly seemed horribly possible that I’d met someone in the pub, gone back to their house with them, and then – for one reason or another – left by a rear exit, making it as far as the park before crashing out.
Not ideal, obviously. Not the outline of a classy evening, a soirée of distinction and restraint. Oh bloody hell. Why did I have to be me? Wasn’t it someone else’s turn yet? Wasn’t there anyone else who fancied taking on the job for a while, so I could have a rest?
In the end I decided to just forget about it. I find that’s the best approach to events in your past which you’d prefer not to bring into your present or future. Just pretend they didn’t happen.
In the meantime distract yourself.
To aid this I reached once more for Portnoy’s tome. I dimly remembered having spent a fairly diligent hour or so in the pub the previous evening, trying to make sense of the photocopied pages I’d taken with me – even swapping words back to front, in the hope it was some simple code which Portnoy’s other sages might have missed through lack of familiarity with foreign or obsolete languages.
Nothing had come out of it, and at first glance the text looked no more explicable this morning than it had the day before. After a few minutes of flipping back and forth through the pages, however, I noticed something was tugging at my brain, trying to bring itself to my attention. It wasn’t until I tried saying some of the words out loud that I understood what it was.
The words remained nonsensical, but there was a rhythm to them.
I never paid much attention in class during the parts where they explained iambic pentameters and all that jazz (nor during quite a lot of the other bits, to be honest) so I couldn’t put an actual na me to the rhythm, but as I turned to other pages at random and read out further chunks, I became convinced I’d finally spotted something. The ratio of long and short words, the way in which the blocks of text were organized and contained by commas and full stops, seemed to have a kind of pattern.
It wasn’t universal – it’s not like the whole thing went ti-tum-ti-tum ti-tum-ti-tum – but each section did seem to have a kind of aural organising principle, when you said the words aloud. By chance I happened to come across one of the passages I’d photocopied the night before, and as I read through it, I realized something else. It was this rhythm I’d heard in the voice of the man with the torch, who’d let me out of the park I’d found myself in.
It hadn’t been in his words, but in my mind – put there through reading and re-reading this section while pouring beer into my head. Which was kind of weird.
VII
Portnoy took a long puff on his cigar and looked at me.
“Yes?” he said. “And?”
“Well, that’s it,” I said.
My head was splitting, and it was becoming clear that the hope that this insight would do – and be worth the other six hundred quid – had been overly optimistic. “I still can’t make anything of the actual words – and I’ve tried everything I know. But these rhythms can’t be unintentional. It must be what the thing is about.”
“A book of rhythms.”
“Yeah.”
Portnoy just looked at me some more.
“I mean, that must be pretty unusual, right? Very rare?” I could sense this wasn’t at all what Portnoy had been hoping for, but ploughed on regardless. “Maybe it’s a manual of poetic meter, or something.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful news,” he snorted. “Those go for simply enormous sums, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
He thought for a while in silence, staring down at the surface of his desk, gently biting his lip.
“No,” he said eventually. “I’m not convinced. You’re not there yet. You need to keep on trying.”
“Christ,” I said, “Look, it’s something. And I honestly don’t think there’s anything else there to be found. I spent all yesterday evening in the pub with this bloody thing, trying everything I could—”
“You took this book to the pub?” Portnoy said, sharply.
“No,” I said, hurriedly. “Obviously not. I photocopied some pages, and—”
“Which pub?”
“Um, the Southampton Arms,” I said. “On Junction Road. You won’t know—”
“Of course I know it,” he snapped. “I had the misfortune to grow up in that very area.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “Do you have any idea what would happen to the value of this book, if it got out that it existed?”
“Trust me, I don’t think there are any antiquarian book dealers working undercover in my local boozer.”
“Your fellow sops probably don’t imagine that amongst their n
umber is someone who can sight-read medieval Dutch,” he bellowed, semi-reasonably. “And yet there you are, getting merrily shit-faced and falling off stools.”
“Sorry,” I said, chastened. “I just didn’t think that … well, sorry. Sorry.”
For the second time in three days, Portnoy wasn’t looking sleek. In fact, he was looking the closest I’ve ever seen to angry. And a little scary, too.
“Where are the photocopies now?”
“Um,” I said.
VIII
Even to someone well acquainted with the practice of drinking in the afternoon, pubs look different during the day. Natural light is friendly to neither their interiors nor denizens, and since the Nazi health bastards stopped us smoking inside, they smell bad too. Stale alcohol, a waft of disinfectant from the toilets, whatever vile gunk they use to clean out the pumps – all overlaid with the background tang of dust in ancient carpets. Now this olfactory assault is no longer hidden below the welcoming fug of fag smoke, walking into a pub of a late morning can make you wonder why on earth you spent the whole of the previous evening there. Luckily, a quick pint can usually remind you.
I got half of one down me before asking what I’d come to ask.
“Ron?” I said, addressing the slab-faced landlord. It would be romantic to imagine he’d once been a boxer, a plucky local hopeful gone spectacularly to seed – and Ron wasn’t adverse to that rumour being spread around – but it’s more likely he merely spent his youth and post-youth engaged in the kind of villainous pursuits that come hand in hand with outbursts of spirited violence. Even in his sixties he remains an extremely handy-looking geezer, and I definitely wouldn’t want to wind up on the wrong end of either of his ham-sized fists.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 34