Suddenly I heard footsteps, followed by a voice, loud and indignant: ‘ … not what I was hired to do and I said to him, “You have to be joking. You have to be fucking joking, mate.”’
Another, glummer voice said: ‘People have no shame. I mean what goes through their heads when …’ The footsteps died away.
I leapt back from the South-Eastern Corner as if I had been stung.
What had just happened? Cautiously, I approached the Statues again and peered between them. The Shadows now looked unremarkable. I could sort of see how they might suggest the shape of a corridor, but that was all. The cold draught played around my ankles and I could still smell rain, metal and petrol, but the lights and the noises had vanished.
As I stood thinking of these things, four old crisp packets blew along the Pavement, one after the other. I made a sound of exasperation; this was a problem I thought I had dealt with. At one time I was forever finding crisp packets scattered about the First Vestibule. I also found old fish finger packets and sausage-roll wrappings. I gathered them up and burnt them so that they did not mar the Beauty of the House. (I do not know who it was that ate all the crisps and the fish fingers and the sausage rolls, but I cannot help wishing that he or she had been more tidy!) I also found a sleeping bag under the marble Sweep of the Staircase. It was very dirty and evil-smelling, but I washed it thoroughly and it has served me well.
I ran after the four crisp packets and picked them up. The fourth crisp packet was not a crisp packet at all. It was a crumpled-up piece of paper. I smoothed it out. On it was written the following:
All I am asking you to do is to give me directions to the statue you were telling me about – the one of an elderly fox teaching some young squirrels and other creatures. I would like to see it for myself. This task is not difficult and should be well within your capabilities. Write the directions in the space below. I have left a biro next to your lunch.
Eat it while it is hot – the lunch, not the biro.
Laurence
P.S. Please try to remember to take your multivitamin.
Underneath the message there was a large blank space for the recipient to write in but as it was still blank, I deduced that he or she had not given the writer the information they requested.
I would have liked to have kept the paper. It was evidence of two of the People who have lived: firstly, a person called Laurence and secondly, a person to whom Laurence had written and whose lunch and multivitamin he had provided. But who were they? I considered and immediately discounted the possibility that either of them was 16. The Other had said that 16 did not know the way here and clearly both Laurence and his friend had been familiar with these Halls at one time. They might well belong to my own Dead. But there was another possibility: that they were inhabitants of the Far-Distant Halls. If Laurence was still alive and waiting for the information about the Statue, then it would be wrong to take the paper.
I got out my own pen and wrote the following in the empty space.
Dear Laurence
The Statue of the Dog-Fox teaching two Squirrels and two Satyrs is in the Fourth Western Hall. From this Place go through the Western Door. In the next Hall go through the Third Door on the right. You will be in the First North-Western Hall. Follow the Southern (left-hand) Wall and again take the Third Door you come to. You will find yourself in a Corridor at the end of which is the Fourth Western Hall. The Statue is in the North-Western Corner. It is one of my favourites too!
1. If you are alive then my hope is that you will find this letter and that the information I have given will be useful to you. Perhaps one day we will meet. You may find me in any of the Halls North, West and South of here. The Halls to the East are derelict.
2. If you are one of my own Dead (and if your Spirit passes through this Vestibule and reads this paper) then I hope you already know that I visit your Niche or Plinth regularly to talk with you and bring you offerings of food and drink.
3. If you are dead – but not one of my own Dead – then please know that I travel far and wide in the World. If ever I find your remains I will bring you offerings of food and drink. If it seems to me that no one living is caring for you then I will gather up your bones and bring them to my own Halls. I will put you in good order and lay you with my own Dead. Then you will not be alone.
May the House in its Beauty shelter us both.
Your Friend
I placed the paper at the foot of one of the Minotaurs – the one nearest to the South-Eastern Corner of the Vestibule – and I weighted it down with a small pebble.
PART 3
THE PROPHET
The Prophet
entry for the twentieth day of the seventh month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls
From the Windows of the First North-Eastern Hall great shafts of Light descended. Within one of the shafts a man was standing with his back to me. He was perfectly still. He was gazing up at the Wall of Statues.
It was not the Other. He was thinner, and not quite so tall.
16!
I had come on him so suddenly. I had entered by one of the Western Doors and there he was.
He turned to look at me. He did not move. He said nothing.
I did not run away. Instead I approached him. (Perhaps I was wrong to do this, but it was already too late to hide, too late to keep my promise to the Other.)
I walked slowly round him, taking him in. He was an old man. His skin was dry and papery, and the veins were thick and clotted in his hands. His eyes were large, dark and liquid, with magnificently hooded eyelids and arched eyebrows. His mouth was long and mobile, red and oddly wet. He wore a suit in a Prince of Wales check. He must have been thin for a long time because, although it was an old suit, it fitted him perfectly – which is to say that it was wrinkled and saggy because the fabric was old and worn, not because the cut was wrong.
I felt oddly disappointed; I had imagined that 16 would be young like me.
‘Hello,’ I said. I was curious to hear what his voice sounded like.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘If, in fact, it is afternoon where we are. I never know.’ He had a haughty, drawling, old-fashioned way of speaking.
‘You are 16,’ I said. ‘You are the Sixteenth Person.’
‘I don’t follow you, young man,’ he said.
‘There exist in the World two Living, thirteen Dead and now you,’ I explained.
‘Thirteen dead? How fascinating! No one ever told me there were human remains here. Who are they, I wonder?’
I described the Biscuit-Box Man, the Fish-Leather Man, the Concealed Person, the People of the Alcove and the Folded-Up Child.
‘You know, it’s the most extraordinary thing,’ he said. ‘But I remember that biscuit box. It used to stand on a little table next to the mugs in the corner of my study at the university. I wonder how it got here? Well, I can tell you this. One of your thirteen dead is almost certainly that dishy young Italian that Stan Ovenden was so keen on. What was his name?’ He looked away, thought for a moment, shrugged. ‘No, it’s gone. And I imagine that another is Ovenden himself. He kept coming here to see the Italian. I told him he was asking for trouble, but he wouldn’t listen. You know, guilt and so forth. And I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the others is Sylvia D’Agostino. I never heard anything of her after the early nineties. As to who I am, young man, I can see how you might conclude that I am “16”. But I am not. Charming as it is here …’ He glanced round. ‘ … I do not intend to stay. I am only passing through. Someone told me you were here. No,’ He checked himself. ‘That is not quite right. Someone told me what they thought had happened to you and I concluded you were here. This person showed me a photograph of you and since you were clearly a bit of a dish, I thought I would come and take a look at you. I’m glad I did. You must have been well worth looking at before, you know … before everything happened. Ah, well! Old age happened to me. And this happened to you. And now look at us! But to return to the matter in
hand. You mentioned two people living. I suppose the other one is Ketterley?’
‘Ketterley?’
‘Val Ketterley. Taller than you. Dark hair and eyes. Beard. Dark complexion. His mother was Spanish, you see.’
‘You mean the Other?’ I said.
‘The other what?’
‘The Other. The Not-Me.’
‘Ha! Yes! I see what you mean. What an excellent name for him! The other. No matter what the situation he is only ever “the other”. Someone else always takes precedence. He is always second fiddle. And he knows it. It eats him up. He was one of my students, you know. Oh, yes. Complete charlatan, of course. For all the grand intellectual manner and the dark, penetrating stare, he hasn’t an original thought in his head. All his ideas are second-hand.’ He paused a moment and then added, ‘Actually all his ideas are mine. I was the greatest scholar of my generation. Perhaps of any generation. I theorised that this …’ He opened his hands in a gesture intended to indicate the Hall, the House, Everything. ‘ … existed. And it does. I theorised that there was a way to get here. And there is. And I came here and I sent others here. I kept everything secret. And I swore the others to secrecy too. I’ve never been very interested in what you might call morality, but I drew the line at bringing about the collapse of civilisation. Perhaps that was wrong. I don’t know. I do have a rather sentimental streak.’
He fixed one bright, hooded, malevolent eye on me.
‘We all paid a terrible price in the end. Mine was prison. Oh, yes. That shocks you, I imagine. I wish I could say that it was all due to a misunderstanding, but I did all the things they said I did. To be perfectly honest I did quite a lot more that they never knew about. Although – do you know? – I rather liked prison. One met such fascinating people.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Did Ketterley tell you how this world was made?’ he asked.
‘No, sir.’
‘Would you like to know?’
‘Very much, sir,’ I said.
He looked gratified by my interest. ‘Then I will tell you. It began when I was young, you see. I was always so much more brilliant than my peers. My first great insight happened when I realised how much humankind had lost. Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible. I pictured it as a sort of energy flowing out of the world and I thought that this energy must be going somewhere. That was when I realised that there must be other places, other worlds. And so I set myself to find them.’
‘And did you find any, sir?’ I asked.
‘I did. I found this one. This is what I call a Distributary World – it was created by ideas flowing out of another world. This world could not have existed unless that other world had existed first. Whether this world is still dependent on the continued existence of the first one, I don’t know. It’s all in the book I wrote. I don’t suppose you happen to have read it?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Pity. It’s terribly good. You’d like it.’
All the time that the old man was speaking, I was listening with great attention and trying to understand who he was. He had said that he was not 16, but I was not so naive as to believe him without further evidence. The Other had said that 16 was wicked, so it was possible that 16 would lie about who he was. But as the old man talked, I became more and more certain that he was telling the truth. He was not 16. My reasoning was this: the Other had described 16 as being opposed to Reason and to Scientific Discovery. This description did not fit the old man. The old man was as passionately fond of science as we were. He knew how the World was made and was eager to pass that knowledge on to me.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘does Ketterley still think that the wisdom of the ancients is here?’
‘Do you mean the Great and Secret Knowledge, sir?’
‘Exactly that.’
‘Yes.’
‘And is he still searching for it?’
‘Yes.’
‘How amusing,’ he said. ‘He’ll never find it. It’s not here. It doesn’t exist.’
‘I was beginning to wonder if that might be the case,’ I said.
‘Then you are a good deal brighter than him. The idea that it’s hidden here – I’m afraid he got that from me too. Before I had seen this world, I thought that the knowledge that created it would somehow still be here, lying about, ready to be picked up and claimed. Of course, as soon as I got here, I realised how ridiculous that was. Imagine water flowing underground. It flows through the same cracks year after year and it wears away at the stone. Millennia later you have a cave system. But what you don’t have is the water that originally created it. That’s long gone. Seeped away into the earth. Same thing here. But Ketterley is an egotist. He always thinks in terms of utility. He cannot imagine why anything should exist if he cannot make use of it.’
‘Is that why there are Statues?’ I asked.
‘Is what why there are Statues?’
‘Do the Statues exist because they embody the Ideas and Knowledge that flowed out of the other World into this one?’
‘Oh! I never thought of that!’ he said, pleased. ‘What an intelligent observation. Yes, yes! I think that highly likely! Perhaps in some remote area of the labyrinth, statues of obsolete computers are coming into being as we speak!’ He paused. ‘I must not stay long. I am all too well aware of the consequences of lingering in this place: amnesia, total mental collapse, etcetera, etcetera. Though I must say that you are surprisingly coherent. Poor James Ritter could barely string a sentence together by the end and he wasn’t here half as long as you. No, what I really came here to tell you is this.’ He wrapped his cold, bony, papery hand round my hand; then he jerked me sharply towards him. He smelt of paper and ink, of a finely balanced perfume of violet and aniseed, and, beneath these scents, a faint but unmistakeable trace of something unclean, almost faecal. ‘Someone is looking for you,’ he said.
‘16?’ I asked.
‘Remind me what you mean by that.’
‘The Sixteenth Person.’
He put his head on one side to consider. ‘Yeh-e-es … Yes. Why not? Let us say that it is, in fact, “16”.’
‘But I thought that 16 was looking for the Other,’ I said. ‘16 is the Other’s enemy. That was what the Other said.’
‘The other …? Ah, yes, Ketterley! No, no! 16 is not looking for Ketterley. You see what I mean about him being an egotist? Thinks everything’s about him. No, it’s you 16 is looking for. 16 has asked me how to find you. Now while I have no particular wish to oblige 16 – I have no particular wish to oblige anybody – I’m all in favour of doing Ketterley an ill turn. I hate him. He’s spent the last twenty-five years slandering me to anyone who would listen. So I shall give 16 copious directions to get here. Minute instructions.’
‘Sir, please do not do that,’ I said. ‘The Other says that 16 is a malevolent person.’
‘Malevolent? I wouldn’t say so. No more than most people. No, I’m sorry, but I simply must tell 16 the way. I want to put the cat among the pigeons and there’s no better way to do it than to send 16 here. Of course, there’s always the possibility – a very strong possibility really – that 16 will never get here. Very few people can come here unless someone shows them the way. In fact, the only person I ever knew who managed it – apart from myself – was Sylvia D’Agostino. She seemed to have a talent for slipping in between, if you follow me. Ketterley was absolutely dreadful at it, even after I had shown him numerous times. He could never get here without equipment – candles and uprights to represent a door and a ritual and all sorts of nonsense. Well, you
saw all that when he brought you here, I suppose. Sylvia on the other hand could just slip away at any moment. Now you see her. Now you don’t. Some animals have the facility. Cats. Birds. And I had a capuchin monkey in the early eighties who could find the way any time. I shall tell 16 the way and after that it all depends on how talented 16 is. What you need to remember is that Ketterley is afraid of 16. The closer 16 gets, the more dangerous Ketterley will become. In fact I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he doesn’t resort to violence of some kind. You might like to head off the danger by killing him or something.’ (He pronounced ‘off’ as ‘orrf’.) He smiled at me. ‘I’m going now,’ he said. ‘We shan’t meet again.’
‘Then, sir, may your Paths be safe,’ I said, ‘your Floors unbroken and may the House fill your eyes with Beauty.’
He was silent for a moment. He seemed to contemplate my face and as he did so, a last thought occurred to him. ‘You know I don’t regret refusing to see you when you asked me before. That letter you wrote to me. I thought you sounded an arrogant little shit. You probably were then. But now … Charming. Quite charming.’
He picked up a raincoat that was lying in a heap on the Pavement. Then he walked in an unhurried manner to the Doorway leading to the Second Eastern Hall.
I consider the words of the Prophet
entry for the twenty-first day of the seventh month in the year the albatross came to the south-western halls
Naturally I was very excited about this unexpected meeting. I went immediately and fetched this Journal and wrote it all down. I titled the entry The Prophet, because that is what he must have been. He explained the Creation of the World and told me other things that only a Prophet could have known.
I took time to study his words carefully. There was a great deal I did not understand though this, I expect, is usual with prophets, their minds being very great and their thoughts following strange paths.
I do not intend to stay. I am only passing through.
From this I understood that he inhabited Far Distant Halls and intended to return there immediately.
Piranesi Page 7