Despite her equable expression, he assumed this was a rebuke. When she handed him the book, her breasts seemed to swell as if she were taking an enormous breath. The cover of the volume was imprinted with unfamiliar constellations, presumably somehow illustrating the title, Of the Secrets behind the Stars. "Thank you," Fairman said and hesitated. "May I ask how you came by it?"
"The same as everybody. From our father."
The wording unsettled Fairman, and so did the remoteness of her gaze. "Can you tell me whom I should see now?" he said.
"Of course." Her pause might almost have implied that he should know as well. "Rhoda Bickerstaff," she said. "She looks after our old folk."
"Not all of them, surely."
"Just the worst ones, Leonard." Her face suggested she had taken his bemused comment as a joke. "We like to think our town's a healthy place," she said.
She added a heavy nod, not just for emphasis. When Fairman looked where she was indicating he saw a brace of joggers down on the promenade. He assumed she had them in mind rather than the people plodding uphill, though even the joggers didn't seem especially energetic. "You'll find Rhoda at the Leafy Shade," Heidi Dunscombe said.
"Would you happen to have the number? I ought to let her know I'm coming."
"If you think so," Heidi Dunscombe said and told him the number.
As he keyed it he was conscious of her watching him across the dormant book on the counter. Her gaze seemed as remote as the bell that began to ring in his ear—to ring at considerable length. He was preparing to leave a message on a machine when at last a woman's voice said "Leafy Shade."
She sounded at the very least harassed. "Could I speak to Rhoda Bickerstaff?" Fairman said.
"Who is it?"
"Don't you know?" Fairman almost retorted, having come close to thinking everybody knew about him in advance. "I'm from the Brichester University archive," he said. "Is that Ms Bickerstaff?"
"What do you want, Mr Fairman?"
So she did know who he was, in which case she didn't need to ask this question either. "I believe you have a book for me," Fairman said.
"I can't talk about it right now."
Her voice was growing more agitated, while her breath seemed in danger of falling short of her words. "No need to," Fairman said. "Just tell me when I can collect it. I'd appreciate the soonest you can manage."
"I told you, not now."
Although he didn't think she had, arguing would waste time. "Forgive me if I've caught you in the middle of a crisis, but when is it likely to be convenient?"
"I don't know. Not today."
"It really won't take long at all." When this failed to earn a response Fairman said "Couldn't you leave it with someone for me to pick up and then I wouldn't need to trouble you?"
"Who?" This came out not unlike a gasp, but she found enough breath to add "I can't. You'll have to wait for me."
He supposed whatever problems were preoccupying her could involve her staff as well. "Then could you just tell me whom else I can see while I'm waiting?"
"I can't. You'll have to wait. You've got enough to occupy your mind."
"You mean you—" Fairman said, only to find he was talking to waves of static.
Heidi Dunscombe hadn't even glanced away from him. "Isn't she ready?"
"Apparently not," Fairman said and couldn't restrain his frustration. "She won't give me a time and she won't say who else there is to see. Can you?"
"She's next, Leonard."
"Yes, but I can get the other volumes in the meantime. Who has them, do you know?"
"I can't tell you."
He was angered not just by her words but by the jovial expression that seemed independent of her distant gaze. "Can't or won't?" he blurted.
"You'll understand us better soon, Leonard."
He was almost furious enough to give this the answer it deserved. The glass doors had squealed shut by the time he muttered "I hope I never need to." Perhaps his muted outburst was the reason people stared at him as he marched to his car. While he drove along the promenade he looked out for signs of the healthiness Heidi Dunscombe had wanted him to notice, but he couldn't see much. A man sitting rather less than upright in a wheelchair was waving one floppy hand beside a wheel as though to urge it to turn faster. Several people were walking dogs whose faces seemed almost to scrape the pavement, and at least one owner's could compete for pendulousness. There were joggers, but none of them appeared to be capable of overtaking the walkers or the chair. Their energy seemed to flag even further as they came abreast of his hotel.
The thump of the club attached to his key greeted him as he made for the reception counter. "Another one for the vault?" Janine Berry said, pressing her brow pallid with a fingertip.
"You could put it that way if you like," Fairman said despite thinking that somebody other than her might have—Frank Lunt, for instance, or the bookseller. All the way to his room the key rattled against the carton as though eager to unlock the secrets within. The wardrobe and the safe inside it were shut tight, and no marks were visible on the metal door. It didn't matter that the safe had space for just one more carton; he was determined to be back at the archive tomorrow with the entire set of books. He removed the four volumes from their cartons and lined them up on the dressing-table, where they seemed to bring too much darkness into the room—because the mirror doubled them, of course. Presumably this was what people called daydreaming, and he ought to be examining the books, but not until he'd made a call.
By the time Sandra answered he'd begun to wonder if she had switched her mobile off. "Are you only just starting out?" she said.
"Hasn't Nathan kept you informed? I hear you've been discussing me."
"It was library business, Leonard. You surely don't object to that"
"Not in the slightest. Keep him posted by all means. He already knows I won't be back today, though."
"You mean you told him but not me."
"I'm telling you now, Sandra." Fairman wasn't going to be made to feel unreasonable. "And he might have passed the information on to you," he said.
No doubt her pause was a form of rebuke. "So what's keeping you where you are?"
"What else except the books?" He'd turned towards the window, but seemed to feel their massed blackness behind him, making him impatient to read. "I still have to lay my hands on some of them," he said. "I will tomorrow."
"I don't understand. How many are you leaving until then?"
"About half. Well, just more than half." With mounting irritation Fairman said "I told you they're being held by a number of people. The one I have to see next isn't available today."
"I'm not grasping this at all. Why can't you deal with the others while you're waiting?"
"Because apparently it isn't done like that. Don't bother asking me why." This left him feeling so inadequate that he blurted "If you talk to Nathan you might like to know he's suggesting I'll have to take my time here as leave."
"But you haven't any left this year, Leonard. Our holiday is all you have."
"You don't need to tell me that." In a bid to make up for his abruptness Fairman said "You might try to use your wiles to change his mind."
"I really don't believe we have that kind of relationship."
"Then maybe you should work on having one for both our sakes." When she gave him another silence to construe Fairman said "I'll call you tomorrow as soon as I'm done here."
"Meanwhile you'll be enjoying the sort of holiday you wish you'd had, will you?"
"No," Fairman said, not seeing why he should feel accused. "I'll be doing my job."
He gazed through the window as he ended the call. Several old folk had their backs against the graffiti in the shelter on the promenade, hiding the unreadable clumps of letters. Dozens of people were sitting or lying on the beach, and there were even swimmers in the sea despite the greyish haze that enclosed it. The haze made the more distant ones hard to distinguish, but the most unstable of the shapes among the
waves had to be jellyfish. In any case he ought to be attending to the books.
It made sense to start with the first volume, but he found himself lingering over the colophon. He wasn't far from imagining that the inhumanly distorted hand could conjure up some idea in his mind, and perhaps this had been the book designer's aim, since the volume was On Conjuration. "The tongues of men reduce the world to words..." Was that supposed to mean that gestures achieved something else? In that case, what was the point of this book entirely composed of words? Surely he oughtn't to expect it to make too much sense. Ah, here was some kind of enlightenment further down the page. "Let no man utter the secret words who has not first prepared his mind and spirit in the occult ways, for otherwise the words shall batten on him and shape him to their liking..."
"No chance of that," Fairman said and was glad that Sandra couldn't hear him talking to himself. He stared at his reflection as though holding it responsible, and it stared at him across the inverted volume in its hands. He glimpsed it ducking its head to read "The beliefs to which the mass of men cling are the foes of revelation" and imagined it reading not just the words but all the letters in reverse. "The prating of the prophets chatters down the centuries without beginning to encompass the truths which shape the world. Still less can the gewgaws of religion challenge forces older than the universe we know. In his enfeebled Christian travesty of Al-Hazred, John Dee speaks of a glowing cross which appeared above the sabbats to confound the summoned powers. Say rather that the sabbats were no more than puerile parodies of ancient rituals, so mired in the tradition of the celebrated Jew that the biblical bauble could be misapprehended as a talisman..."
Fairman took a few moments to consider the Dee allusion. It referred to the alchemist's unpublished English paraphrase of the Necronomicon, which survived only in the form of fragments held by the British Museum, together with a fifteenth-century Latin translation, and Fairman couldn't have said why it left him feeling oddly vulnerable. His reflection gave him a conspiratorial nod as he bent his head once more to the book.
"And what shall be said of the star-signs which some claim as protection against entities no less immemorial than creation? How blurred the ancient truths become in the minds of the uninitiated What are these signs but imperfect renderings of a stage in the formation of the universe? None but the ignorant seek to invest them with power, and only the most imbecilic of the old survivals may mistake them for a hostile charm, to be cowed by them for a short while. Let the star-signs never be confused with the secret gesture of the Children of the Moon, whose true nature is disguised in many a fairy-tale. Whereas to the rudimentary minds of lesser entities the star-sign may appear to threaten a return to primal chaos, and on occasion may temporarily interfere with the ethereal sendings of the dormant masters of our world, the gesture of the Children recalls that paradisiacal state of fluidity which the Bible bids to deny with its fabricated tales about the father of the Jew. Even these betray their imperfectly veiled secrets to the initiate, for the serpent in the garden is but a symbol of fluidity, an occult promise that the upstart race and its beliefs cannot wholly trammel the potential of the world..."
Was the image on the cover meant to illustrate the gesture? Fairman had the irrational thought that it was just a human approximation; perhaps that was the kind of thing the book was meant to put into your mind. He held up his left hand and could only laugh at his pathetic attempt to describe the sign. His reflection did no better, but at least its fingers didn't twinge. It watched him until they bowed their heads over the book.
The more he read, the less he seemed to grasp, and yet he felt close to understanding, as if the incantatory prose were leading him in that direction. Of course this wasn't the original text, it was whatever Percy Smallbeam had made of it. How much did that matter? Why should it matter to Fairman at all? He could almost have imagined that he was dreaming the material, letting it take shape in his head. He had no sense of how long it took him to read to the end, where he found he was eager to continue, in case the next volume helped him understand. He shut the book and saw that darkness had gathered behind him.
Night was at the window. It had fallen more than an hour ago, according to his watch. He couldn't recall switching on the standard lamp beside him, though why should a librarian feel troubled by having been engrossed in a book? He should at least eat, and he returned the books to the safe without boxing them up. Once he'd pressed his hands against the metal door to reassure himself that it was locked, he let himself out of the room.
Janine Berry was waiting at the counter by the time he came in sight. "Will you be having our dinner?" she said.
"Would you excuse me if I just nip out for something quick so I can get back to work?"
"The work you're doing here, you mean."
"Examining what I've acquired." In case this was unclear Fairman added "Yes."
"Then we've nothing to excuse." As she took hold of the bludgeon attached to his room key her fingernails glistened, and he thought the skin around them did; she must have been painting them again. "There won't be much difference," she said. "It's all our own produce."
The glare of the streetlamps blanched the promenade and blackened the cars parked outside the hotels but left the buildings as grey as the fog that had crept back across the sea. For the moment the seafront was deserted, though Fairman heard a metallic rattle that might have belonged to a restless car on the roller coaster or a shutter at a shop window, if it wasn't the sound of the bars of a cage. He made his way past Fishing For You to another such establishment among the noisily wakeful arcades. "Trying us tonight?" said the blubbery man at the counter of Fish It Up, dabbing the infirm pallid ridges of his brow with a paper napkin. "It's the only thing to have while you're here."
"Seaside food, you mean? I expect you're right. Fish and chips for me."
He was relieved not to see the man touch the food, instead using a spade like a child's seaside toy to scoop chips out of the fryer and employing tongs to crown them with a fish. At first he'd thought the man was wearing plastic gloves, since his rudimentary nails were virtually indistinguishable from the stubby fingers. He was careful not to touch the man's hand when he paid—he still remembered vividly how the coin with which he'd tipped the porter had seemed to sink into the moist palm—and took the package from the sweating metal counter.
When he crossed the promenade to a bench he was surprised to see how many people were still on the beach, but he supposed he wasn't behaving entirely unlike them. Most were seated, which made them look as if they were protruding from the pebbly sand, and a few were lying down. He saw none of them move even slightly while he ate his dinner; in the pasty light he could have taken them for dummies that had strayed out of a waxworks. The meal was very much like last night's, with the same odd texture to the fish, but he felt as if he wasn't quite able to grasp the familiar taste. Perhaps he was too anxious to be back at the books, though he was also distracted by the sight of a supine figure on the beach lurching upright at the waist as though roused from a dream. The man's face was covered by a floppy hat, which had slipped so far down the head that Fairman could easily have imagined it had taken the face with it; there certainly appeared to be an unreasonable amount of greyish brow beneath the glistening hairless cranium. He finished his dinner as quickly as digestion would allow, while the figure stayed half upright with the hat dangling from the unseen face, and then he made some haste to the hotel.
As he reached it a chorus bade him good evening from the shelter opposite. The voices were feeble enough to add up to a single one, and they belonged to several old folk— surely not the same ones he'd seen earlier—who sat facing the Wyleave. For an absurd moment he wondered if they were about to address him by name. "Good night," he called and felt as if the chilly fog had lurched across the seafront after him.
The thump of the metal club on the counter reminded him of a gavel. "Here for good now?" Mrs Berry said.
"In for the night, if that's what yo
u mean."
"That's good." As Fairman took the key she said "You know who to ring if you need anything at all."
Perhaps he was making too much of this, but he blurted "Isn't Mr Berry with you?"
"We don't leave Gulshaw, Mr Fairman. I think you saw him at the zoo."
Fairman was so embarrassed by his own question that he could only protest "I didn't see very much."
"The season's over for this year." As if she were reassuring a disappointed child Mrs Berry said "We promise you won't miss them."
"I appreciated your husband's help," Fairman said to leave his peevishness behind. "Please do thank him for me."
He wasn't expecting this to be met with a stare so distant he couldn't identify an expression. "Dream well, then," she said as he moved away. "Try and lose yourself."
He wondered if the state of the man in the booth at the zoo was her excuse for seeking solace elsewhere. In any case she mustn't look to Fairman. Once he'd checked the safe he hurried to the bathroom. He couldn't hear a sound in the hotel, and the silence seemed so expectant that it made him even more conscious of the noise he tried to muffle by flushing the toilet. As soon as he was able he retreated like a culprit to his room.
He left the first book in the darkness of the safe and lined up the others in front of the mirror before opening the second volume, On the Purposes of Night. "What is daylight but the ally of brutish creation, the progenitor of mindless growth? Let the night be celebrated as friend to the true possessors of the world. Let its powers be roused that it may reveal the nocturnal truth which lies even within men."
Did this refer to dreams? It would take more than a book to rouse any within him, although while reading he did feel as if the night was growing not just darker but more substantial—the fog, of course. The book wasn't capable of persuading him that the night was pregnant with secrets, let alone teeming with creatures best left unseen, but he was quite glad to reach the final page. He'd finished the third volume last night—however little of it he recalled, he felt as though its burden had lodged somewhere in his head—and so he turned to Of the Secrets of the Stars, the fourth book. "Cry out the names of the ancient constellations ..."
The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki Page 5