The Devil in Detail, page 4
I had never considered it at all unusual that my long-standing addiction to combing the shelves of second-hand bookshops should be reflected in my dreams. Nor had I ever considered it unusual that such dreams should often be attended by the sense of returning to familiar haunts—because that, after all, is the form that the vast majority of my actual book-hunting trips took. It was only to be expected, in 1997, that when I dreamed about bookshops—or, at least, when I became conscious that I was dreaming about a bookshops—I usually felt that they were familiar bookshops. Interestingly, however, they never seemed to be bookshops that really do exist in the everyday world; they were always imaginary bookshops. That meant, of course, that when I had the sense of having visited them before, I knew that I could only have done so in other dreams. It was as if the virtual geography of my private dream-world numbered among its fixtures a series of shops, some fascinating and some not-so-fascinating, which I visited at irregular intervals: a population parallel to that with which the geography of the real world was dotted.
I use the past tense, of course, not merely because I no longer visit second-hand bookshops and no longer dream about them, but because the world has changed decisively in the interim, second-hand bookshops having virtually disappeared from England under the double hit of the uniform business rate and the spread of Oxfam bookshops, whose operators do not have to pay for their stock.
Sometimes, when dreaming about bookshops in the old days, I became conscious that I was dreaming—but I always resisted waking up, because I knew that when I did I would have to leave behind any interesting books I might have found. When my bookshop dreams became lucid in that fashion I often became conscious of the fact—or at least the illusion—that the shop I was in was one of which I had dreamed before.
Just as I had never dreamed about entering a bookshop that actually existed, so I had never previously entered an actual bookshop about which I had dreamed. That I seemed to be doing so at that particular moment was, therefore, more than a cause for astonishment; it seemed, in fact, almost to be a violation of natural law, as threatening in its fashion as any conventional apparition or ominous shadow. I stood transfixed, appalled by the thought that I—a supposedly great and hitherto worthy champion of skepticism—could be assailed in that rude and nasty fashion.
Mercifully, the moment didn’t last. The shock of awful discovery was replaced soon enough by a struggle to remember what, if anything, I had found in the room when it had only been the figment of a dream. The mental reflex of the book-collector was powerful enough to drive away the alarm of revelation; I ceased to worry about the how of the mystery and focused my mind instead on the truly crucial question of what there might be to be found, and whether the illusion of having dreamed about the room—I was already content to dismiss the sensation as an illusion—might somehow assist my search.
As I had promised, I did not begin with the alcove by the window, whose shelves were almost bare, only containing, at present, fewer than thirty aligned books, although half a dozen more-or-less densely-packed cardboard boxes were still piled up in front of them. It seemed far more sensible to start by examining the safer stock, coal-dust-wise.
No sooner had I begun to scan the nearest shelves, however, than the force of reality began to reassert itself upon my senses. The proportion of Welsh texts here was considerably less than on the shelves below—considerably less than half, although not entirely negligible—but that didn’t make the remainder seem significantly more promising. There were several sets of standard authors, more poetry than prose, in horribly shabby pocket editions. My expert eye immediately picked out a number of yellowbacks, but their condition was so awful that it would hardly have mattered had they been more interesting titles than they were. A few bound volumes of old periodicals turned out on closer inspection to be Sunday at Home and Pick-Me-Up, not even Longman’s or Temple Bar, let alone anything more interesting.
In brief, it looked like the kind of stock over which a collector might toil for hours in order to turn up a couple of items whose significance to his collection was marginal at best. Not, of course, that I could contentedly let it alone; I knew that I would indeed have to inspect every single shelf, lifting every volume whose title was not clearly inscribed on its spine, in order to make perfectly certain that nothing evaded me. No matter how laborious the task became, I thought I would have to stick to it come hell or high water—but I had only been at it for half an hour when I was summoned to return downstairs, in answer to Lionel’s urgent call.
Assuming that he or one of his companions had felt something eerie, even though the sun had only just set and the twilight had not faded, or that Penny’s measuring devices had picked up a sharp drop in temperature or some kind of mysterious atmospheric ionization, I hastened down the hazardous stairs—but it turned out to be a false alarm.
All that Lionel wanted, it turned out, was to hand me a cup of tea and ask my opinion as to what kind of pizza he ought to have delivered.
There is nothing like a four-way debate about pizza toppings to bring a ghost-hunting expedition right down to earth; by the time we had settled on two mediums, one with bacon, mushroom and tomato and the other with olives, anchovies and pepperoni, mundanity had such a secure hold on Martin’s bookshop, even with the electric lights now on, that Madame Arcati at her most lunatic would have been hard-pressed to find the least hint of spirit activity.
All the SPR’s apparatus was lying idle. The video camera was on its tripod, ready to be spun around in quest of the kinds of things that one glimpses in the corners of one’s eyes, and a quaint little pointer was ready to inscribe a record of the room’s temperature on a slowly-rotating drum, but they were inactive. Although I still wasn’t sure what the ammeter was hooked up to, whatever it was had not yet succeeded in generating a flicker of current. All of it gave the impression of having already given up rather than being eager to begin.
I was glad to note, however, having consulted one of the thermometers, that since we had entered the shop our combined body-heat had contrived to raise the temperature by a whole degree Celsius to sixteen, perfectly comfortable even with my shirt off.
Lionel asked Penny to tell him a little more about luckmen and their role in the mines of yore, but Penny had already run to the limit of her information on the subject. As I confessed that I had not yet touched the legacy of Glofeydd Diafol, that topic lay fallow too, at least in the specific sense. Penny did endeavor to pump Martin about residual superstitions in the modern industry in general—apparently thinking more as a sociologist than a paranormal researcher—but it was a subject on which he was not particularly forthcoming.
“I was always above ground, see,” he said. “The boys at the face had their own little community—they’d tell you tales for a laugh, like, but they’d never let on that they took any of it seriously.”
“What kind of tales?” Penny wanted to know. Lionel was obviously interested too, and I was always ready to hear anything that I could appropriate for use in a story.
“You know,” said Martin, although we really didn’t. “Not a pit in the valley has a clean sheet mortality-wise—not any that’s still working has been open much longer than twenty years. Even so, the oldest ones are full of worked-out shafts and old rock falls, an’ there’s always talk of voices—voices of men killed by gas or crushed, you see. Offering warnings as often as not; I’ve heard far more tales of men being saved than men being lost. Nobody goes down a pit needs scaring, see; work’s dangerous enough without that.”
“Judging by the dust on some of the books upstairs, even those that didn’t come from the Devil’s pit,” I said, “one or two of them must have made a good number of trips down into the shafts.”
“I doubt that,” Martin said. “No time to read down there, nor any light good enough to read by. The dust on the bindings even of the books from the hard anthracite pits is the kind that gets in everywhere—the fine stuff that hangs about in the air and never quite washes out. Almost like a liquid, it is—a miasma, as I said before—tends to smear and cling and blacken even if you never set foot in the cage or put a hand on a hopper. You can imagine how much worse it is when it comes from soft stuff like the coal from Pwllmerys.”
I had to admire the way he pronounced “miasma”, lingering over the vowels as only a Welshman could.
“The dark spirit of the pit,” said Penny, softly. It would almost have been enough to make us look over our shoulders if we hadn’t heard the delivery boy’s moped rattling over the potholes in the street. We fell upon the pizza-slices with the kind of eager rapacity that only competition can generate, even though we all knew perfectly well that we were only entitled to four apiece.
While we ate, darkness fell—and shadows crept upon us in spite of the electric light. Martin, born and bred to the economy of the valleys, had only fitted sixty-watt bulbs.
Martin was watching us now, alert for any sign of tension or unease. As with many Celts, his eyes were pale even though his hair was dark, but they weren’t blue; they were as grey as slate. Although Penny was a very different physical type—ectomorphic rather than endomorphic—she had very similar coloring. Her eyes did retain a slight hint of blue but her complexion lacked the hint of rosy pink that Martin’s had. Lionel must have been at least twenty years older than Martin and thirty years older than Penny but he looked more robust than either of them. Being from a long line of East Anglians didn’t necessarily make him an Angle by ancestry; like me, he could just as easily be a descendant of Viking settlers. At any rate, our ancestors had never been bards or druids; our family trees were as devoid of luckmen as of mistletoe.
I was prepared to feel a slight pang of regret about that; I knew that if I were going to find any real treasure in that dust-caked morass upstairs I was going to need some luck. Even while we ate, my restless eyes were checking and rechecking the downstairs shelves, unable to find anything worth lingering over.
The pizza was as mediocre as could be expected, but the tea was better. It seemed much better until I got to the dregs, when I began to notice an odd aftertaste. I noticed, too, that the air in the shop had a peculiar texture to it.
All bookshops are dusty, of course, and when books that have been a long time in storage are first set on shelves they often release a little dampness into the air, faintly polluted with fungal spores and bits of dead silverfish. Book-lovers learn to savor that kind of atmosphere, or at least to ignore it—but this texture was slightly different from any I’d encountered before. It gave the impression of being vintage dust—a real grand cru. Martin’s pronunciation of the word “miasma” echoed in my mind as I tried to measure the dust’s quality more precisely, but it didn’t seem dismissable simply as coal-dust any more than it warranted elevation to the status of “the dark spirit of the pit”. It was something more teasing than either.
I couldn’t help thinking of the skeptical kind of occult detective stories, where the intrepid investigators eventually find that alleged hauntings are merely noxious vapors released from bad drains or unusual chemical reactions. Was it possible, I wondered, that the redistribution of books kept so long in close confinement really had set free some disturbing vapor that had been patiently building up in the inner recesses of the boxes for decades?
Perhaps it wasn’t impossible, I thought, that even the coal dust might contain some exotic organic compound among the pollutants that still remained alongside the pure metamorphosed carbon. Coal was, after all, the ultimate residue of dead plant matter, which presumably included not merely giant ferns, horsetails and cycads, but all manner of fungi. What sort of coal, I wondered, might magic mushrooms make after a few tens of millions of years of patient squeezing?
But then, there was also the other component of dust that I’d mentioned in Chacun sa goule. Recent household dust is mostly the residue of human skin, and that skin has been compounded while alive out of the residues of older carbonaceous matter, because there are fragments of past lives in the very air we breathe…lives that had once been mindful, inhabited by the stuff of dreams and souls. If, as had been suggested by some physicists, subatomic particles once paired retain a strange kind of association even when separated, the particles making up our bodies might still be in arcane contact with the fugitive substance of all manner of past lives, all manner of ghostly echoes….
On the other hand, as Martin said, maybe whatever was causing the tea’s funny aftertaste was just unromanticized “muck.” And it might be worth remembering, too, I thought at the time, that coalmines produce methane as well as coal.
I didn’t like to suggest to the others that perhaps we should have brought a canary.
“Well,” I said, as soon as I had bolted my last allotted slice of bacon, mushroom and tomato. “I’m going to get back to the upstairs stock—hundreds of volumes to go even before I get to the sinister corner where the darkest spirit of all is lurking. If you need me, just scream.”
“Will you be all right up there on your own now that it’s dark?” Martin asked, as if he sincerely believed that I might not be, even with the support of electric light.
“If I’m not,” I assured him, “I’ll scream.”
“If you find any of mine,” said Lionel, “let me know.” Long before he got religion Lionel was the most prolific writer of science fiction and supernatural fiction in Britain, producing over a hundred and eighty volumes for the late unlamented Badger Books for the princely fee of £22 10s a time. His one long-running series had consisted of occult detective stories starring the redoubtable Val Stearman and his lovely female associate La Noire. Stearman had, of course, been modeled on the young Lionel, and his spirit was doubtless still active even though the containing flesh had suffered a little. It would have required an extremely optimistic eye, alas, to find the slightest hint of La Noire in Penny-from-the-SPR at that moment in time.
“I will,” I promised.
CHAPTER V
The electric lights turned out to be less bright than I could have hoped. I made a mental note to bring my own hundred-watt bulbs if I ever got involved in a similar vigil in future. I had started my search in the top left-hand corner of the shelf-unit to the left of the door and had begun to work methodically across and down, across and down. I had completed approximately half of one wall, and I had no difficulty in finding the exact spot where I’d left off.
If you’ve ever browsed the less popular shelves in the London Library, as I often did in those days and still do on occasion, you’ll know how dust from red leather bindings that are gradually rotting down will stain your hands and your shirt, so that a long session in French Fiction can leave you looking suspiciously like Jack the Ripper, or Fred West on a busy day. Exploring those shelves was not dissimilar, although any red dye in the older bindings had been blackened long ago—and I was still exploring the books that had come from the more respectable pits. I began to feel very glad that the awful warnings abut the legacy of Glofeydd Diafol had caused me to take precautions in my mode of undress, although I soon began to look down at my arms and chest with definite pangs of regret regarding the absence of a shower from the shop’s bathroom. I had noticed a flannel dangling over the edge of the sink, but I figured that I was going to have to make abundant use of it, and I was beginning to suspect that my face might have begun to look like the flank of a blurred zebra.
I tried to look on the bright side, reminding myself that my corduroy jacket and T-short were safely downstairs and that my jeans were at least partly-protected by the bubble-wrap. I also told myself that at least it couldn’t get any worse when I finally got to the corner I was saving for last. I thought that at the time because, as Martin had suggested, even the dust from the vicinity of the more orthodox pits was so fine as to be slick and it soon made itself evident in its texture as well as color. If the dust had been pure carbon it might, I suppose, have been reminiscent of graphite, but even the dust of the best Welsh anthracite was still sufficiently impure to enhance its ability to form a miasma.
I couldn’t help wiping my hands periodically on the bubble-wrap, even though I knew that it wasn’t helping the situation. Nor could I help occasionally touching my hand to my face, my forehead and my hair, even though I knew that such touches would make the smudges worse. By the time I’d done a further thirty feet of shelves—without finding a single book that I’d have been happy to pay more than 50p for—I knew that I must be a real sight, and what Martin had said in the car about the woeful inadequacy of the bathroom facilities suddenly began to seem like a prophetic cry of woe.
Despite the aforementioned inadequacy, my companions stumped up the staircase one by one to use the facilities. Lionel was the only one who took the risk of looking into the front room to see how I was doing, and he hardly stepped across the threshold, although he had no reason at all to fear supernatural presences, being a fully-armed exorcist. When I stopped for a break myself I took the opportunity to inspect my features in the mirror, and I managed to scrub off the worst of the stains with toilet paper, but even a thorough soaping failed to shift the worst of the grime from my fingers.
As I resumed my labors I remembered yet again what I’d written in “Chacun sa goule” about our breathing in the carbon dioxide relics of the dead every time we fill our lungs, and this time I thought about the lives and deaths of the men who had hewed the coal, and that minority among them who had tried, valiantly, to improve their minds with the aid of the written word, poring over the pages I was now turning, probably ashamed of the residual dust on their fingers that no amount of washing had been able to remove.
