The Last Revelation Of Gla'aki

by Ramsey Campbell

  Fairman was acutely relieved to see the man ushered into the wings once he'd uttered the familiar slogan. He'd scarcely vacated the stage before it was occupied by a troupe of singers, the foremost of whom swelled his chest like an amphibian to perform a solo. Was it a folk song or an unfamiliar hymn? Fairman had heard it before, but now he realised he hadn't quite caught the words; the refrain was "Thou great inspiration, come in from the sea." The woman behind the counter at Fishing For You might also have been practicing the dance with which the troupe supported the soloist. Fairman took it for a folk dance, a spiky jig interspersed with tortuously fluid movements and describing patterns on the stage too intricate for him to follow. The melody seemed related to the tune the band had played, and as hypnotic as the dance was proving to be—so mesmeric that when the performance ended, having grown slower on the way to stillness, he wakened himself by starting to clap. How long had he been asleep? Longer than he'd realised, to judge by the faces of the performers who crowded onstage to bow to him; they might almost have been honouring him, though surely that would have to be ironic. At least his having dozed must explain some of the spectacle he'd imagined he was seeing, even if he wasn't sure how much. As the players made their various ways offstage, the blindfolded man resting his fingertips on his assistant's arm, Fairman heard the audience depart, isolating uneven imprecise footsteps close behind him— Frank Lunt's footsteps. "What did you make of us?" the manager said.

  "Most impressed." Fairman might have liked to leave it there but added "I hope everyone will forgive me. I've been up late with the books and I did nod off a little."

  "So long as you dreamed of us."

  Fairman wasn't about to admit it. He could have asked why the manager was counting himself in—it seemed to be a local trait—but said only "I wasn't expecting so much home-grown talent."

  "Some of it is. Some came and stayed." Lunt motioned to him, crooking or rather curving a forefinger. "You'll be wanting Eric," he said.

  Fairman could have thought they were alone in the building. Certainly the audience had gone, unless they were keeping quieter than made any sense. He couldn't help wondering somewhat uneasily which of the players he was about to meet. Lunt preceded him into the office and beckoned him again with that uncommonly flexible finger. "Eric, this is Leonard."

  The man who rose with ponderous suppleness from a chair in front of the desk was the solo singer. Up close his expansive whitish face looked as though it needed all its chins to prevent it from collapsing out of somnolence. As he swallowed, his throat swelled so much that Fairman could have thought he was about to burst into song. "Leonard," he said. "Allow me to thank you personally for the part you're playing."

  His handshake was as moist as any Fairman had been offered—perhaps that had something to do with the Gulshaw air—and oddly imprecise. At least his voice was more defined than it had sounded on the phone. "You were the stars, not me," Fairman told him. "And I apologise if I wasn't as attentive as I should have been."

  "We entirely understand." Headon gazed at him with some kind of appreciation and said "Shall we walk? It's close."

  Lunt shut the glass doors after them and stepped back into the sudden darkness of the theatre. Headon turned uphill past the Shaw and then along another deserted street, this one running parallel to the promenade. It included a number of clothes shops: Tall Boy, Lots of Woman, Stout Fellow, Skinny Girl, Fat Lad. Fairman reflected ruefully that he might have to patronise some outfitters like the last one if he ate many more Gulshaw dinners. The shops gave way to terraces of houses, all of them unlit despite the relatively early hour. "People seem to like their sleep round here," he said.

  "We all need it, Leonard."

  Fairman hadn't meant to seem to be referring to their earlier conversation. Now that Headon's voice was more distinct it was apparent that he wasn't local. "How long have you lived here?" Fairman said.

  "Long enough."

  "You aren't a native, I mean."

  "I am now."

  If Sandra had been there she would certainly have queried that use of language, but Fairman only said "What kept you here?"

  "The same as you." Before Fairman could address this Headon said "I'm retired."

  "I understand you were a historian."

  "I still am." With some pique Headon added "It's all in here."

  He was poking his forehead to demonstrate. In the inert greyish light, which resembled a luminous distillation of the fog beyond the promenade, Fairman could have imagined that the fingertip had sunk into the ridged flesh. He looked away before saying "You ought to write a book."

  "Soon we'll have no more use for those."

  Sometimes Fairman was afraid this would indeed be an effect of the internet, but not so long as he worked in the archive. "Better not let Don Rothermere hear you saying that," he said.

  "He knows. Everybody has to."

  Fairman stopped short of demanding to be left out, instead saying "So what can you tell me about Gulshaw?"

  "It's shaped by its history."

  "We all are, I should think."

  "That's the truest word so far," Headon declared and turned his head to him.

  It felt like being watched from an unreasonable distance, and Fairman was grateful to be distracted by noises ahead. Around one uphill corner of a junction he heard a series of soft irregular thuds reminiscent of the impacts of the dancers' feet onstage. When he reached the crossing he saw children at hopscotch in a floodlit schoolyard. Apparently in this version of the game they had to hop simultaneously about various sections of the yard. "Is that peculiar to this part of the world?" he said.

  "A lot of things are."

  Fairman was on the edge of demanding why the man's responses were so absurdly guarded, and then he wondered if they were. Might Headon be crediting him with too much local knowledge? The schoolyard railings and the shadows of the players confused his vision, so that he could have thought the children were hopping higher than they should and adopting grotesque postures too. The patterns of the game seemed increasingly reminiscent of the Gulshaw Players' dance, and weren't the children chanting a rhyme under their breaths? As he strained to make out the jagged whisper, which reminded him less of the song than of the comedian's unknown lingo, Headon said "Don't put them off, will you? Not far to go now."

  In fact his house was just across the junction. Like its neighbours, it was so tall and thin that every front window appeared to have been squeezed narrow. A haphazardly paved path wandered between rockeries, unless they were overgrown heaps of rubble, to the front door. When Headon switched on the hall light, it seemed reluctant to respond. Presumably it was designed to conserve energy, but the glow reminded Fairman of old paper and left the reaches of the house in darkness. The hall and the stairs that climbed from it stretched further than he could see, and the grudging light from a room on the left didn't help. In the room faded armchairs faced a black iron fireplace, and dozens of images of Gulshaw hung on the drab brownish walls—presumably old photographs, unless they owed their sepia tinge to the illumination. "It doesn't change much, does it?" he commented as Headon ushered him into the room.

  "It does where it counts. You'll be seeing." Headon stayed in the doorway and murmured "Shall I fetch it to you?"

  Fairman found the conversation a good deal too ambiguous. "The book, you mean."

  "And everything it brings."

  More sharply Fairman said "What are you saying that is?

  "Knowledge, Leonard. What we're all waiting for," Headon said and turned away, though not with his whole body at once. Fairman heard him pad into the depths of the house, presumably switching on at least one more light. The large soft footfalls receded into silence, and then a muffled noise might have denoted the opening of a door. Fairman had grown far too used to the moist stagnant Gulshaw smell, but it seemed more apparent in this house, and he felt oppressed by the dimness that resembled an emanation of old paper. He wasn't sure if the smell was intensifying as slow footste
ps advanced towards the room, sounding furtive and yet heavier than he would have expected or invited. Apparently all of this signified the care Headon was taking with the book, which rested on his outstretched hands as he paced into the room like a priest approaching an altar. He watched Fairman lay it in its excelsior nest, having ascertained that it was the seventh volume, Of the Symbols the Universe Shows. Headon's throat bulged with swallow after nervous swallow, which made Fairman blurt "You aren't a believer, are you?"

  "We're of the same mind, Leonard."

  "Speak for yourself," Fairman almost retorted. He wasn't sure what daunted him—surely not the distant gaze that seemed bent on including him. "Well," he said awkwardly, "I'd best be off to keep it safe."

  "Nobody would dream of taking any of them away from you." Headon paused to let this gain more weight before he said "And you're going to see the little ones."

  "The little ones," Fairman said and felt as though he'd been overtaken by a local tendency to repeat other people's words.

  "Our youngsters. The ones at the nursery."

  "Why should I need to see them?"

  "I expect they'd like to see you." As more of an explanation Headon added "Phyllida Barnes runs the Sprightly Sprouts, and she's got the next book."

  "I'd better find out when she can accommodate me."

  "I wouldn't trouble yourself, Leonard. Just go over in the morning. Nobody's going to give you any more problems."

  Could Headon really undertake this on behalf of the rest of the town? Certainly he didn't seem to be giving voice just to himself. As Fairman emerged into the hall he avoided glancing into the dark that felt unpleasantly like a lair, but sensed it massing at his back all the way to the front door, an impression far too reminiscent of being spied upon. Outside the house he thanked Headon and peered along the deserted street. "Don't worry," Headon told him. "Nobody can be safer than you are."

  The children were still hopping or dancing about the schoolyard. The surrounding silence magnified their footfalls, which sounded oddly loose, insufficiently defined. Fairman didn't look towards the yard as he turned downhill to the promenade, beyond which the fog hung like a vast curtain the colour of a dusty cobweb. He was put in mind of a stage with the streetlamps for footlights, and couldn't help recalling the restless anticipatory sounds he'd heard behind the curtains at the Shaw. Of course any presence behind the fog could only be the moon.

  The arcades were dark and silent now. The lunar glare of the streetlamps seemed to lend more substance to the fog, which blotted out a good deal of the beach. The visible stretch was deserted apart from a scattering of plastic cushions. Could people have left them to keep their places on the beach? He remembered seeing a woman leave one near the hotel—and then, with a not especially mirthful laugh at his mistake, he saw that the objects were jellyfish.

  They didn't belong to any species he recognised. Perhaps it was rare enough to be represented in the Bywood aquarium, if such creatures ever were. They glistened in the pallid light as if they'd just crawled up from the veiled sea. Obviously they were being moistened by the fog, which appeared to trail over them as Fairman advanced along the promenade. It revealed dozens of them, every one as broad as his midriff. They put him in mind of exposed flattened greyish brains, which wasn't their only unappealing aspect; each of them had stretched out gelatinous tendrils as if to help them crawl, tendrils that resembled spines gone translucent and flabby. Quite a few of the tendrils seemed to have ambitions to gain more of a shape, swelling to form excrescences reminiscent of embryonic hands. When Fairman started to fancy that he could distinguish small splayed fingers, in some cases fewer than a hand should have and in others an unpleasant profusion, he did his best to fix his attention on the promenade as he tramped faster towards the hotel.

  At last all the inert misshapen lumps were behind him. He refused to imagine that he'd seen tiny greyish nails on any of the finger-like protrusions, still less that he'd glimpsed one gelatinous slab beginning to extrude features that suggested a rudimentary face. He needed sleep, that was all, once he'd spent time with the book. Just now he could hardly control his thoughts, which was why he needed to fend off the notion that all the creatures washed up on the beach were only playing dead. The prolonged slithering noise somewhere behind and below him must be a wave on the beach, but it made him look over his shoulder. As the fog surged towards him, hiding the stretch where he'd seen all the jellyfish, he was sure he glimpsed an utterly deserted beach.

  He was about to hurry onwards when he heard the movement again. It sounded close enough for its source to be hidden at the base of the sea wall. Fairman gripped the chilly railing and made to crane over, and then he dodged across the promenade instead. As he hastened past the hotels, all of which were lit only by the streetlamps, he kept glancing behind him. Were lumpy greyish shapes crouching almost flat on some of the ramps that led up from the beach? While he couldn't be sure about that, he was glad to see people seated in the shelter opposite the Wyleave, though the scarves around their faces made them unidentifiable. "Sea wall," their muffled voices called—no, surely they were telling him to sleep well, not even to see that way. As they raised their left hands to wave to him if not to dab at their glistening foreheads, he let himself into the hotel.

  Apart from the lobby and the upstairs corridor, it was dark. The silence felt as expectant as a held breath, and prompted him to make even more noise with the plumbing than usual. He was shutting himself in his room when he thought he heard a restless movement, too large and undefined to be anything except a wave, not an indication that all the neighbouring rooms were occupied. Just the same, he couldn't help reminding himself of Headon's reassurance as he sat down with the latest book.

  "We are all but symbols of the vagaries of the becoming of the universe. May a symbol read a symbol?" Presumably the book was setting out to convey how that was possible, but Fairman found the text at least as obscure as the colophon, a circle that appeared to be blank until his fingertips traced a series of irregularities that might form a secret diagram or motif. "The old dances conjure the ancient patterns and celebrate the imminence of revelation..." This was among the more intelligible sentences, and even then he felt he hadn't entirely grasped the point. "Most potent are the words of becoming, which shape the voice and the mouth when spoken, and mould the brain which seeks to comprehend them. No wholly human lips may pronounce the language of creation, and the brain must yield its customary form to rediscover the making of the universe..." Beyond this the book might as well have been composed of the language it regarded as unfathomable by the ordinary reader. When Fairman shut the book at last he felt as though it had been a dream he was already forgetting, its details sinking out of reach in the depths of his mind.

  He might have liked to think the view from the window was a dream. The denizens of the shelter had entirely covered their faces with scarves, and their hands lay so slackly on their knees that there might have been no fingers inside the whitish gloves. The clumps of hair perched on their heads accentuated their resemblance to waxworks. People were still sitting on the beach in the restless fog, which blurred their outlines so much that he couldn't even tell which way they were facing. Perhaps all the pallid heads were bald, but he had the odd notion that every figure had its back to the sea. The view was enough to send him to bed.

  His night thoughts were waiting for him. He saw the monstrous shape as vast and spiky as a cathedral burrowing into the earth, and then all sense of time deserted him. As the passing of ages reshaped the landscape a lake was formed, and perhaps it remained unvisited for at least as long before the inhabitant was roused from its monstrous torpor by wanderers whose dreams had been touched by its reverie. It found a crude way to bind the intruders, injecting them with a trace of its essence through its spines. Fairman had heard rumours of this relatively modern legend, which he'd assumed to be a variant on tales of alien abduction, but now it felt as if the volumes of the Revelations were carrying on a dialogue in his hea
d, composing annotations there. At some point the entity was injured and retreated to its sanctuary beneath the lake. Over the ages it had withered to little more than a seed of itself, but now it rediscovered its primal substance, extending its spines through the land. Or was this yet another symbol—a veiled account of how it was reaching for the world? It was just a dream, Fairman reassured himself, or rather it would have been one if he were asleep. At some point he was, since daylight wakened him.

  Not just the greyish light did, nor even the suspicion that he could have been mumbling in his sleep. He'd had an idea during the night, and his gaze drifted towards the safe. Had he been less thorough than he ought to be? He lined up the books on the dressing-table before he opened the first volume at the rear flyleaf. The breath he released felt like starting awake once again, and he saw his eyes widen in the mirror. The book and all the others had been annotated on the flyleaf.

  The addition that he'd previously seen wasn't in the same handwriting as the others, although they looked similar. They were even more loosely scrawled than the first example had been. Perhaps the writers had been drunk or half asleep, which might explain the vagueness of the annotations too. "The mage need not speak the words nor shape them in his mind, for reading them has made of him a conduit for their power." This had been added to On Conjuration, while On the Purposes of Night now ended by exhorting "Embrace the night, that the old dreams may walk by day" and Of the Secrets of the Stars had acquired an extra scrap of wisdom. "Gaze not upon the stars but into the gulf beyond, where you may glimpse the eternal watchers whose sport is the shrivelling of worlds." Fairman was distracted by a knocking—more a series of loose flat thumps—at the door. "Mr Fairman?" Janine Berry called. "Leonard?"