by Hal Duncan
Again the scale moved out and, on this map, the world I knew could have taken up no more than a sixteenth of the area shown. The northeast coastline of that Greater Antarctica curved up to meet the strange land in the east, which itself carried on to meet the coast that curved around and down from China; pincered by its own Gibraltar Strait formed by the tip of South America, the bump of Antarctica, this Eastern Pacific was no more than a landlocked sea here, like a larger Mediterranean, dwarfed by the lands surrounding it on three sides. Hyperborea to the north, I thought, the Subantarctic to the south, and an Orient beyond the farthest Orient we’ve ever known.
Another page, and another, and the world I knew was only a minuscule part of an impossibly vast landscape. I’m no physicist, but I know enough about matter and gravity to know when I’m looking at the surface of a world that couldn’t possibly support human existence. This was a world on the scale of Jupiter and Saturn. I turned more pages, two or three at a time, and still each map was at a larger magnitude than the one before, and still the world revealed was only a quarter of the world mapped out on the page to follow. Continents became islands off of coastlines that became continents. Ten pages, twenty. The world I knew wasn’t even visible at this scale, but there was still a world to be marked out, a fractured collision of earth and water, in areas so vast that terms like “continent” or “ocean” now seemed meaningless.
I kept turning the pages.
The Silent World
And as my heart pounded in my chest and my head swam, I realized that the alarm bell I’d been hearing was only a vague and distant ringing in my ears now. No one was coming. No one would ever come. I knew it with the certainty of dream knowledge. I knew it with the same certainty that told me that this archaic text before me was no piece of whimsy, that it was real, it was true, truer than reality.
I knew it even before turning to the very last page of the Book, to the very last map in which this ancient cartographer had laid out the edges of his known universe, a blank and featureless plain extending in all directions at the center of which, tiny and intricate, the world of worlds was only an oasis, with a dotted track leading out of it to the north as if to mark some unimaginably long road to the inconceivably distant.
I knew it even before I staggered out through the deep corridors of the library and out into the silent world, as I wandered through a campus entirely empty of human life, and out into streets of sandstone tenements and tarmac roads, traffic lights that still cycled through their sequences of red, amber and green although the empty cars just sat there, oblivious to their commands. I knew it even if I couldn’t find the words to shape my tongue around in order to express that vague, disturbing certainty.
I shouted, but there was no one to hear me.
I didn’t know at what point I had crossed over into this, my new reality: whether it had been my blood upon the Book that had somehow, like some magical anointment, released its power; or whether it had been simply my opening of the tome that had opened a gateway around me; whether that blast of shattering glass from the Book’s cabinet had thrown me clear out of my own world and into the next; whether the case itself had held not air under pressure but something even less substantial, some etheric force unbound by my meddling which even now might be traveling in a shock wave outward from its focus, transforming everything it touched.
Transformations
We stood there at the back of the church, Jack and Joey and I. He had a lot of family, a lot of friends, Puck did, and the church was full. I’ve heard it’s often like that when someone young dies. Young lives leave a lot of mourners. But we’d almost had to drag Jack there; he wouldn’t come at first, said he wouldn’t sit and listen to a minister reciting platitudes and singing fucking hymns, fucking praising fucking God in fucking Heaven. That’s how he put it.
I glanced at the two of them, Jack and Joey standing by my side, silent in black—black suits, black mood. And I had this absurd thought, this stupid, crazy idea, that the two of them looked like some kind of clichéd bloody Hollywood vision of secret agents, or Rat Pack gangsters, assassins, men in black. Angels of death, waiting patiently to collect.
They turned to look at me together, precisely in synch, like two parts of the same machine, and their hollow gazes sent a shiver down my spine, because I felt exactly the same emptiness.
I actually wonder now if nothing in this world has changed but me. It occurred to me as I wandered the empty streets of the world, walking down the middle of roads known and unknown—maybe the world was as it had always been and it was me that had been transformed, seeing for the first time the whole scope of it and myself alone within. I knew, as I wandered those streets so subtly familiar, that the whole world around me was abandoned, desolate; it didn’t make sense in any rational way but somehow I knew the world I’d walked into, whatever kind of hell it was, was mine and mine alone. It was like that moment in a dream when you realize you’re dreaming and wake up into the real world…and then you realize you’re still dreaming.
I don’t know how long I walked aimlessly around my new environment, struck by the surrealism of these buildings in all stages of abandonment, some overgrown ruins, some pristine with lights on in their rooms, children’s toys left sitting on carpets, radios hissing white noise. It was as if the city’s inhabitants had all simply dropped whatever they were doing and left, but over a period of centuries with none of them noticing the others’ departures, even until the very last, who, it seemed, had left mere seconds before my arrival.
“You really believe in this Book?” Jack had asked me. “You really think you can find it?”
He finished off his glass of ouzo, loosened his black tie and poured himself another. We were in his room, after the funeral, and the place was scattered with empty beer cans, empty bottles and plastic bags with more for us to drink. We were going to get wasted. We were all of us going to get completely wasted that night. Fucked out of our minds.
I shook my head, laughed sadly.
“Maybe it is just some fucking old, old hoax. But…I just want to know. My whole life, I’ve wanted to know if…it’s real.”
“Nothing’s real,” said Joey.
“Everything’s real,” said Jack. “Everything is true; nothing is permitted.”
I thought, that’s a quote. I thought, I recognize it, but I couldn’t place it and it didn’t sound quite right.
I looked from one to the other, all of us sodden with drink and grief, and felt one of those moments of acid significance, where you’re sure you’ve just realized something important and forgotten it instantly.
No Comfort, No Answers
So I sit in this pub now, writing, and there are pints poured sitting on the bar, packets of cigarettes left with lighters on tables—Christ, when I walked in there was one still burning in an ashtray—but no humanity. Only the remembrance of it. I’ve spent the last few hours turning everything over and over in my head and I’m no closer to making sense of any of this. I can find no comfort, no answers, only that same sense I feel each time I look upon the Book, a mingling of dread and wonder, horror and elation.
It sits before me on the table as a mystery.
I think maybe I’m dead, that this world exists for me alone because it is no more, no less, than my own personal gateway to…whatever lies beyond. And the Book? Maybe it’s my own invention, my own creation, placed here, waiting for the moment when I could finally face my own mortality and cross the boundary into the unknown. Was my life before now imagined…or reimagined, re-created with a path to lead me to this book of maps, with a family history filled with myths and legends, a drive to know, to grasp some secret, sacred mystery? And friends found and lost. All leading me inexorably to the opening of the Book, to the discovery of my state.
I miss Jack and Joey and Thomas. Nobody ever wonders if the dead grieve for the ones they leave behind, it seems, but I miss them, even if I’m not sure that they ever existed. If my whole world up until I found the Book was
just the fantasy of a dead man wishing he was still alive, maybe they were only ever little parts of me that I snipped off and carved into a human shape to keep me company in that dream of life. I think of Jack and Joey, fire and ice, light and dark. And I think of Thomas and I feel cheated, betrayed. I can’t accept that Puck was just a lonely ghost’s imagination. No. I think—I want to think—that they were all real, that I knew them, that that day on the grass outside the library was real, true, even if it happened differently. I think I had a life without the Book, without any of those stories, just a simple life, replayed in death with transformations as a quiet way of bringing me to this point. And when I picture Jack and Joey standing in that church, I picture Thomas standing beside them in my place. Maybe his death was just another signpost of my imagination, pointing the way. I hope that’s the truth. I dearly hope so.
So where do I go from here? It’s a lonely world, this limbo, and I only hope that it’s a borderland. The Book itself is evidence of something out there, surely, something greater than the scope of one man’s memory, of a world beyond the world beyond; and if its opening was my awakening then the content of its pages must be the story of my life—my death—from here on in. I’ve found myself alone within a world that’s only a minute portion of a larger whole. Somewhere out there, surely, other corners of this vast realm hold their own souls, born in death into their own imaginings. And will they know that they are dead, or does it fall to me to wake them? Are there already roads between the worlds, traveled by others? How many will have left their empty worlds in search of company, and what cities have been built where souls met in the great landscape of the afterworld? My God, this book might hold the Maps of Hell, but maybe it also holds the Keys of Heaven in the sigils that inscribe it. I don’t even know if every dead man has such a book to guide him through his death or if I have the only copy. I won’t know until some way into my journey, I imagine. I imagine there are many things that I am yet to know.
The Road of All Dust
I plan to set out tomorrow. I have the Book after all, calling me to this great adventure, and guiding my every step. As it sits on the table of the pub in front of me, I can see now what I did not understand at first. The cover of the Book no longer shows the vault I found it in. I didn’t notice it changing, but it happened; now the embossing of the leather cover maps out the tables and the chairs around me, and the first page shows the architecture of this abandoned pub. The Book changes as its reader moves. The map stays centered on its observer. And the glyph, the strange eye on its exterior that is repeated on the maps inside? A symbol of the reader—the keeper, the maker—himself, an oval of a body seen from above, a circle within it to mark out the head, and four semicircles to symbolize the limbs. And the rectangle that intersects it is, of course, the Book, the Macromimicon, the Great Copy, which I carry, perhaps as a part of me. Wherever I go, those first few maps, I’m sure, will show the world around me in all the detail I will ever need, even as I venture into regions as yet shown only at the widest scale.
Tomorrow my journey really begins. I’ll set out down this road I knew in my world as the Great Western Road, to where it joins another familiar but altered street. That it joins with Crow Road in an unfamiliar junction, fusing to become a new and unknown way, seems sort of significant—the road of the carrion bird, the bird of death, and the road toward the land beyond the sunset, the Western Lands. Perhaps I’m reading all this wrong, but it seems to make a sort of sense, as much sense as anything does now. What I’ll do when I get to the coast I really don’t know, but I suspect whatever lies in the far West is still only the beginning of my journey. I remember stories of New Mexico, that dusty, desert Land of Dreams, and of a road known as the Jornada del Muerto, the Journey of the Dead Man, and I wonder…but I can’t even imagine the road I’m setting out to travel, how I can hope to cross those oceans and continents that are mere puddles and islands in the greater scheme of things. I must be a fool to face distances that dwarf everything I’ve ever known.
So I sit here in the empty pub, as a final act of hesitation, uncertainty.
I know my destination though. I think of that final page in the Book of All Hours and the road leading north out of the minuscule oasis in the center of the map, out of this world the size of a universe, and out of the scope of even this Book. I wonder if it is a road we all must travel eventually, even if it takes us eternity to get to its beginnings, and an eternity of eternities to walk its way. It may be the road to Hell or out of it, to Heaven or to something more profound; after all, if this whole empty world is my Limbo, Heaven and Hell may be no more than rural backwaters in the metaphysics mapped out by the Book, and maybe I’ll pass them on my way like some pilgrim passing a village, his heart set on his destination, his gaze set on a distance farther even than the far horizon, the dust under his feet the dust we all become, the life we cast off in the skin we shed.
I finish off the beer that I’ve poured for myself from the taps in this deserted but plentifully stocked pub and, I think, it’s time that I was looking for a place to sleep. I wish that my own home was still here in this remade world; I’d like to sleep one last night in my own bed. But perhaps there is a reason for that comfort being denied me. Perhaps I’d wake tomorrow back in a world busy with people, in an illusion of reality reconstructed from my memories as a buffer against the cold truth. I know a part of me would like that. But I have the Book, and in the pages of the Book, I have the map and, on that map, I have the way that I must travel marked out. There is another part of me that wants to wake tomorrow with that truth.
But, yes, it’s time for me to sleep—even if it is only an imagined sleep within the sleep of death—so I can wake to face tomorrow fresh. The irony of it all does strike me as I sit here, but it seems that even in eternal rest I need…rest.
I have a long road ahead of me, a long and winding road of dust…perhaps the road of all dust.
one
A DOOR OUT OF REALITY
FROM THE GREAT BEYOND
From the Great Beyond she heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond the goddess heard it, coming from the Deep Within. From the Great Beyond Inanna heard it, coming from the Deep Within.
She gave up heaven and earth, to journey down into the underworld, Inanna did, gave up her role as queen of heavens, holy priestess of the earth, to journey down into the underworld. In Uruk and in Badtibira, in Zabalam and Nippur, in Kish and in Akkad, she abandoned all her temples to descend into the Kur.
She gathered up the seven me into her hands, and with them in her hands, in her possession, she began her preparations.
Her lashes painted black with kohl, she laid the sugurra, crown of the steppe, upon her head, and fingered locks of fine, dark hair that fell across her forehead, touched them into place. She fastened tiny lapis beads around her neck and let a double strand of beads fall to her breast. Around her chest, she bound a golden breastplate that called quietly to men and youths, come to me, come, with warm, metallic grace. She slipped a golden bracelet over her soft hand, onto her slender wrist, and took a lapis rod and line in hand.
And finally, she furled her royal robe around her body.
Inanna set out for the Kur, her faithful servant, Lady Shubur, with her.
“Lady Shubur,” said Inanna, “my sukkal who gives wise consul, my steadfast support, the warrior who guards my flank, I am descending to the Kur, the underworld. If I do not return then sound a lamentation for me in the ruins. Pound the drum for me in the assemblies where the unkin gather and around the houses of the gods. Tear at your eyes, your mouth, your thighs. Wearing the beggar’s single robe of soiled sackcloth, then, go to the temple of the Lord Ilil in Nippur. Enter his sacred shrine and cry to him. Say these words:
“O father Lord Ilil, do not leave your daughter to death and damnation. Will you let your shining silver lie buried forever in the dust? Will you see your precious lapis shattered into shards of stone for the stoneworker, your aromatic cedar
cut up into wood for the woodworker? Do not let the queen of heaven, holy priestess of the earth, be slaughtered in the Kur.
“If Lord Ilil will not assist you,” she said, “go to Ur, to the temple of Sin, and weep before my father. If he will not assist you, go to Eridu, to Enki’s temple, weep before the god of wisdom. Enki knows the food of life; he knows the water of life; he knows the secrets. I am sure he will not let me die.”
Thick with Trees and Thunderstorms
North Carolina, where the old 70 that runs from Hickory to Asheville cuts across the 225 running up from the south, from Spartanburg and beyond, up through the Blue Ridge Mountains and a land that’s thick with trees and thunderstorms. It’s on the map, but it’s a small town, or at least it looks it, hidden from the freeway, until you cut down past the sign that says Welcome to Marion, a Progressive Town, and gun your bike slow through the streets of the town center with its thrift stores and pharmacy, fire department, town hall, the odd music store or specialist shop that’s yet to lose its market to the Wal-Mart just a short drive down the road.
She rides past the calm, brick-fronted architecture that’s still somewhere in the 1950s, sleeping, waiting for a future that’s never going to happen, dreaming of a past that never really went away, out of the small town center and on to a commercial strip of fast-food restaurants and diners, a steak house and a Japanese, a derelict cinema sitting lonely in the middle of its own car park—all of these buildings just strung along the road like cheap plastic beads on a ragged necklace. She pulls off the road into a Hardee’s, switches off the engine and kicks down the bike-stand.