The Devil in Detail, page 19
It really wasn’t my fault, but I felt responsible anyway.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Axel, meekly. There was nothing really to add to that, but he didn’t reply, so I had no alternative but to fill the silence with levity. “I guess that bliss simply isn’t for me,” I said. “As for what might lie beyond bliss…well, we’ll just have to leave that to the lap-dancers and members of the SPR, won’t we? Let’s hope that your other subjects come up with the goods.”
“There’s only one lap-dancer,” he told me, slightly absent-mindedly, “and it’s just a hobby.” He didn’t specify the number of members of the SPR they had lined up, although I knew that there was at least one.
“Why could I smell blood?” I asked, looking round and suddenly remembered why I’d called a sudden halt to my communion with the Cosmic Mind. I looked suspiciously at the olfactory synthesizer, as anyone would.
“What do you mean?” asked Claire. “When?”
I was already fairly sure that it hadn’t been them or their machine that had fed me the sensation, but I was grateful nevertheless for the confirmation. Perhaps, I thought, it had been the Devil, or the ghost of Fred West—it certainly wasn’t the sort of thing that the Cosmic Mind would do—but I knew, even as I formed the thought, that it was my own cravat.
I picked up a scalpel from the bench and split Axel’s skull in two like a fractured ping pong ball, with a single dexterous sweep of my right hand. There was blood everywhere, and the blood was green. As the mask of flesh dissolved, I saw the alien creature within the human shell: the unspeakable compound of all things loathsome. It could have been a shoggoth, but how was I to know? Claire screamed, and then dropped dead, the life having been frightened right out of her. Psychologists are so impressionable.
Well, no, I made that bit up, because I felt that the story might benefit from a little melodramatic violence. In reality, I’m not the violent type. I wasn’t straining under the awful yoke of sober reportage and longing to be free; I just thought that the story might gain from a hint of a flamboyant climax, and a surprise ending. As the actual pattern of happenstance had failed dismally to provide one, as it so often does, I felt that I ought to step in. Some readers like that sort of thing. If you’re one of them, you might as well stop now, forget that you started reading the present paragraph and don’t read any more. Hold on to the idea of the shoggoth, and everything going to hell, or to the image of the hero bravely gripping his deus ex machina, having saved the world from the invention that food science was not meant to know…whichever suits you best.
The rest of the actual story is, I fear, far too plausible for its own good.
“So I didn’t make the team for the long haul,” I said to the world-weary experimentalist. “There’ll be no recall for the skiffy writer.”
“Don’t be too disappointed,” Axel said. “We’ll find a skeptic somewhere whose brain isn’t quite as set in its ways as yours. Lionel gave us a few more names. I’ll write you a check for your fee, but you’ll have to give me a receipt.”
It wasn’t quite as dispiriting as the time I got invited to dinner with the government’s chief scientific adviser and had to turn him down because I was teaching in Winchester on the evening in question, but it was close. It shouldn’t have been; after all, not having to take part in the long-term program would save me a lot of time and a certain amount of hassle, and might even guarantee that I would never see Pontypridd again as long as I lived….
But even so.…
“Given another hour or so,” I told the terrible two, while Claire drove me back to the station and I sat in the back on my own because Alex had taken the front seat, in Lionel’s absence, “I think I might have come up with a few usable plot ideas. Which reminds me—if you’re not going to use the Dictaphone tape, can I have it, or at least get a copy? Even if there’s nothing in it you can use, there might be something I can reprocess.”
“Of course,” said Axel. “I’ll send you a copy.”
“I don’t think there’s anything useful on it, though,” Claire told me, witheringly. “It’s just drivel. You must have been very bored.”
“I don’t get bored,” I told her, severely. “I’m a writer.” I looked out of the side window to emphasize my ability to transcend unpromising circumstance.
Somehow, the abandoned pitheads seemed more poignant now than they had before, and the thought of those lonely seams of unappreciated anthracite, buried deeper than bliss, was almost too much to bear.
“Maybe that’s the problem, Dr. Stableford,” Axel chirped up from the back of the Hyundai. “Your mind just stays busy, even when it’s locked away on its own.”
Claire Louchon had to have the last word. She looked at me through her blue-tinted spectacles as my train came in and said: “The trouble with you, Dr. Stableford, is that you’re too self-contained. You need to learn to let go.”
“Amen to that,” I said, insincerely, while thinking precisely the opposite.
CHAPTER XVI
It couldn’t end there, of course. Even if that had been the sum total of what happened, the story couldn’t end there, because then it would simply be an instance of exactly the kind of story that runs counter to my principles: the kind where some disruptive element of fantasy comes along to interfere with the course of normal life, and then is simply canceled out and annihilated, so that the world can return to its tedious course, undisturbed in any meaningful or significant way.
Except, of course, that there’s a sense in which it did have to end that way, because all of this happened in 1997, and nearly twenty years of history have happened since then, and nothing has been disrupted in any meaningful or significant way, in the general way of the world or in the pattern of my own personal existence. So, there’s a sense in which the present story isn’t able to escape its normalizing ending, no matter how much I might want to avoid it, for esthetic reasons—unless, of course, there’s some ingenious method of having it both ways, of having the appearance of normality restored, while at least dropping heavy hints that the annihilation of the disturbing factor wasn’t complete, that behind the apparent restoration, behind that thin crust of reality on which we all skate, safely contained and nurtured by the limitations of everyday consciousness, something actually had changed, permanently.
And, unsurprisingly, for anyone who believes that the He, or the Cosmic Mind, has an atom of esthetic sensibility—and how can we not, when we consider seriously the beauty, strangeness and charm of the world as it is, let alone the gorgeous multiplicity of imagined worlds that we can invent?—that’s the way it actually worked out in 1997, and how it has worked out today.
When the train from Pontypridd got into Cardiff, where I was due to catch a connection back to Reading, home, normality and the everyday labor of making up fanciful stories, I decided, instead, to hope on a train to Barry, to go and visit Martin’s bookshop again, since I had Lionel’s assurance that he hadn’t actually burned the books from Glofeydd Diafol—at least, not yet.
I didn’t have any fully-formed intention of exposing myself for a second time to the mysterious fungus, not because I didn’t want to meet the Devil again or renew my slight acquaintance with Him, in the hope of getting to know Him a little bit better, but because I didn’t want to spend another two days in bed feeling like shit in the purgatorial interim between the two. But what I did have a firm intention of doing was to fill the two plastic bags that I always carried with me in those days for routine book-hunting purposes with books: books whose printed contents might be devoid of all interest, but might still have the Devil between the lines.
I hadn’t really thought the matter through beyond the acquisition of the books. I didn’t have any plan for taking them to the microbiology or biochemistry labs at Reading University and asking someone to mount a search for the relevant spores and a chemical assay of any psychotropic alkaloids they might contain. I certainly hadn’t thought of contacting any pharmaceutical company with a view to any kind of eventual economic development, whether as a “legal” high or for some medical purpose yet to be discovered. My first instinct was basically that of the book-accumulator, wanting to make sure that something unusual was preserved, even if it simply continued to exist, in the way it had while the remnants of the library had been sitting in the boxes that Martin had eventually bought.
I had no intention of disturbing my normality more than that. I just wanted to exclude the possibility of going through the rest of my life regretting the fact that I’d missed an opportunity to fill a hole in my collection. I didn’t want Martin’s bookshop to become akin to the bookshops of my dreams, its potential lost forever no matter how many times I returned to it in sleep, with all the nostalgia of déjà-vu.
When I got to the shop, however, I found that I was too late.
Two men in brown overalls, wearing heavy-duty smog masks, were just loading the last of a brand new set of hermetically-sealed boxes into the back of an unmarked white van, under the watchful eye of Penny from the SPR—or, I immediately deduced, in his particular instance, Penny from the Awdurdod Datblygu Cymru.
She seemed a trifle surprised, and not by any means delighted, to see me, but there was a sight gleam of triumph in her eye as she took note of my evident disappointment at having been forestalled.
“Mr. Stableford,” he said, in her musical Welsh lilt. “I didn’t expect to see you here. Martin didn’t mention that you’d be coming back.”
“It was a spur of the moment thing,” I said. “I was in Cardiff changing trains and I thought, why not? It’s a common book collector thing—you visit a shop, and you hesitate over something, decide to leave it, and then spend the next week wishing you hadn’t, until you simply have to go back and get it…if you can.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding in the least sorry, “but you’re too late. Nothing I can do about it, if fear. It’s out of my hands: a health and safety issue. Martin contacted us, you see, after he’s spent another two days feeling ill, having deciding that you were right all along: that his shop wasn’t haunted and didn’t need exorcising, but that it did need a very thorough cleaning.”
While she was speaking, the first white van drew away, and a second drew up to park in exactly the same spot, with quasi-military precision. Two more men dressed in identical overalls, wearing identical heavy-duty smog-masks, leapt out, opened up the back and started unloading equally heavy-duty industrial cleaning equipment.
“And this is a service that the ADC provides, is it?” I asked, skeptically.
She actually linked arms with me then, and drew me away down the street, in the direction of the sea—or, to be strictly accurate, the Bristol Channel.
“I don’t know you very well, Mr. Stableford,” she said, “but I have a shrewd suspicion of the kind of thinking that might be going on in your highly imaginative brain at the moment. Did Lionel tell you that I spent the weekend up the valleys, looking for ghosts on behalf of the SPR?”
“Yes, he did,” I said. “And until approximately three minutes ago, I believed him.”
“But now you suspect that I was there on ADC business?”
“Health and Safey issues, perhaps,” I suggested. I had already decided that I ought not, on any account, to mention the dreaded word Taffia.
“That’s what it is,” she said, blandly, “as I think you know very well. After all, you got an even bigger dose of the stuff than poor Martin, even though you tried hard to minimize your account of the effects when I phoned you. I could tell that you were hiding something, you know.”
“How?” I asked curiously. She hadn’t got a larger dose than Lionel, so far as I know. Even though she’d felt queasy enough to phone me—or so she’d said—she couldn’t have absorbed enough to cause hallucinations. She shouldn’t have had any reason to think that I was hiding anything.
“When you suggested that there might be something in the books that was causing Martin’s conviction that the shop was haunted, with the associated physical symptoms, to you it was just one more idea to toy with and thrown out,” she said, “but I took it seriously. That’s why I asked someone to nip round there on Tuesday to collect some samples and get someone in the SCS lab to take a look, in case there was a serious Health and Safety issue.”
“SCS?” I queried.
“Scientific Civil Service,” she told me. Apparently the Cardiff division didn’t make a fetish out of having its own Welsh-language acronym after the fashion if the WDA/ADC.
“And they managed not only to submit a report but to get an actual operation off the ground within a week?” I said. “By Civil Service standards, that’s greased lightning.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Stableford, “she said, when we reached the shore, “I’d appreciate it, since you’re here, if you’d come in for a medical check-up, and I’d also be grateful if you’d be willing to give me a fuller account of any hallucinations that you might have suffered during the last few days.”
I was still mulling that over with regard to my well-developed medical phobias, and thinking about the best way to couch my flat refusal when the truly significant word she’s used, perhaps because of a slip of the tongue but more probably because she wanted me to know that she knew.
“What do you mean, fuller?” I said, sharply.
“Just a manner of speaking,” she said, her lilt still melodious and perfectly even, without the slightest hint of embarrassment. “I meant, any account at all, of any psychotropic symptoms you might have suffered.”
I hadn’t told her, or given her any reason to think, that I might have suffered any hallucinogenic symptoms at all. There was only one person who could have given her any indication that I might, and he’d dismissed the evidence in question as something utterly and completely insignificant. Maybe he’d meant it—but the fact remained that Axel Castle had talked to Penny from the ADC before he’d subjected me to his psyche-diving kit, and he must have phoned her afterwards—immediately afterwards—to tell her what he’d found. So much for the ethics of confidentiality and the necessity of not influencing the expectations of his other subjects.
He wasn’t even Welsh.
That had to be it, I knew, or part of it. From the point of view of the English, Wales is just an eccentric extension of England—or was, back in 1997, before devolution constructed a Welsh Government of sorts—but the stalwarts of the Welsh Development Agency didn’t see it the same way. Almost by definition, they were a competitive organization, looking after specifically Welsh interests, in opposition to English ones.
I actually laughed.
“What’s funny?” she asked.
“You’re actually scared of English biopiracy,” I said. “You’re genuinely worried about the possibility of English biotech buccaneers moving in to usurp the possible Eldorado of Glofeydd Diafol.”
“And you think that’s funny, do you?” she said, mildly. Evidently, she didn’t—and there was a sense, I suppose, in which she was probably right.
“I gather that you’re not going to tell me what your SCS analyst found in the samples you took from Martin’s shop last week?” I said, “let alone what you hope to find in those boxes your white van took away.”
“Of course not,” she said. “It’s really none of your business.”
I couldn’t agree with that, but I could see a certain fairness in it. After all, I wasn’t going to accept her invitation to a free medical check-up, and I wasn’t ready yet to give her a full account of my pact with the Devil.
I had options, of course. I could tip Lionel off about what was going on, given that Penny presumably had to intention of giving him any hard information either, but there was no point. Even if Fortean TV or the Fortean Times decided to do a story on WDA cover-ups and Taffia conspiracy theories, and the possible dark secrets still lurking beneath the slagheaps of Glofeydd Diafol, nobody would believe a word of it. It would just be a joke.
And I knew that if I tried to tell the story myself, to anyone, it would just be a story, just a fantasy, just another item of absurdist science fiction—because that’s what I do. That’s what I am.
And in any case, in the interests of simple justice, wasn’t Penny from the ADC right in wanting to keep the possible rewards of any discovery that might be made in the ruins of Pwllmerys at home, safe from the avid hands of English biopiracy? What right did I, as a Yorkshireman, have to interfere, especially as we tend to look askance at anyone hailing from south of Doncaster or the far side of the Pennines, just as the true Welsh naturally loathe and distrust the English in general?
What I asked myself, would the Devil advise me to do? Or, more pertinently, what would I advise the Devil to do, in pursuance of the terms of our pact?
The answer is pretty obvious, especially to readers of the present narrative, which finally breaks the seal of silence that I put on the affair back in 1997.
But the essential thing is that the story didn’t end with a simple bathetic return to “normality.” Something came of it. Even though the ultimate descendants of the ADC—which no longer exits, of course, all of its functions having been dissolved into the Welsh Government in 2006, although its ghost doubtless still haunts the labyrinthine corridors of the Welsh Assembly—have never broken their own seal of secrecy, the work of exploration chemical analysis and testing for therapeutic effects of the alkaloids of the Glofeydd Diafol fungus must still be going on, quietly and methodically.
Even the experiments pioneered by Axel Castle and Claire Luchon might still be going on somewhere, even though they didn’t get their research grant renewed, because the results of their first experimental run were so dismally unencouraging. After all, it really was an interesting idea, probably worth following up even if it didn’t initially live up to youthful expectations, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that Penny spotted that, perhaps realizing the true value of my unappreciated contribution even from the second-hand account that Axel Castle gave her.
