The Devil in Detail, page 5
Once, at the University of Reading, I had attended an open lecture give by A. N. Wilson, shortly after having completed his life of Jesus, in which he had argued that the rich inner life of thought and feeling, which we now take completely for granted, is largely a product of books, and most especially of novels. Men who lived and died confined by oral culture, Wilson had argued, had not the mental resources to build a robust inner monologue, a pressurized stream of consciousness. I hadn’t believed him at the time, but I thought while I was standing in Martin’s bookshop that if it had been true, such men could hardly be in any position to leave ghosts behind when they died and decayed. If dust really could retain some kind of spirit, it would, of necessity, be the spirit of readers—in which case, book-dust ought to be the most enspirited of all.
As I formed that strange thought, the sensation of having been in that room before returned in full force, swiftly and irresistibly.
I didn’t pause in my routine of plucking the books off the shelves, inspecting their title-pages and returning them, but the automatism of that routine suddenly became oppressive and seemingly unnatural. Before, when the sensation had come over me, I had thought it an anomaly: a sensation that I should only have been capable of feeling in a dream—but now it didn’t feel anomalous at all, because it seemed now that I really was in a dream, where I was perfectly entitled to remember bookshops visited in other dreams, and to dwell in the curious nostalgia of discoveries barely made before that had been lost in previous moments of awakening.
As in all such episodes of lucidity, I had not the slightest desire to wake up; indeed, I had the strongest possible desire to remain as I was, potentially able to grasp and hold any treasure that wishful thinking might deliver into my horridly pitch-black hand.
The light of the sixty-watt bulb seemed to grow dimmer, and the walls of the room seemed to draw closer. The spines of the books seemed to grow darker, and the air seemed to become thicker and heavier. Because I knew, or imagined, that I was in a dream-state, I wasn’t unduly worried—on the contrary, I was intent on preserving a state in which the power of desire might be adequate to lead me to a precious find. It occurred to me that the room had become uncannily like a pit, both literally and metaphorically. The dross on the shelves was the mere stone matrix of the imagination, inert and useless, while the texts for which I was searching were pregnant with mental energy that only needed to be read in order to warm and illuminate my inner being.
Because my collection already possessed twenty thousand volumes in 1997, my want list had been shrinking for years, and the works that I yearned most desperately to find at that time were so rare that it would have require a veritable miracle of luck to locate affordable copies. Without any magical ritual to aid me in my search through Martin’s stock I had only honest toil to bring to my task: a simple, straightforward determination to make certain that nothing would escape my notice. I searched with relentless efficiency. I worked methodically along the shelves, ignoring the miasmic dust, in the frail hope that somewhere beneath its obscuring cloak a treasure trove might be waiting: a copy of Gyphantia, or Omegarus and Syderia, or The Mummy!, or The Old Maid’s Talisman, in any edition and any condition, provided only that the text was complete.
It eventually became so difficult to draw breath that I felt slightly dizzy, and it seemed to have become so dark that I had no alternative but to pause in my work. By then I had found a handful of books that I actually wanted to acquire, although there was nothing particularly valuable. I laid them carefully on the floor, in the cleanest corner of the room before I moved in to the final phase of my search: the alcove by the window.
The lighting in the covert was peculiar, because of the combination of the shadow of the corner of the alcove, which blocked some of the light from the sixty-watt bulb, and the light of a street-lamp coming in obliquely through the window. The sum of the two effects would have provided enough light to read titles on spines had any titles still been visible, but none were. Although I had thought that matters had got so bad, dust-wise, that there was not much margin for getting worse, I had been seriously mistaken. The books from Glofeydd Diafol were an order of magnitude worse than those from the other pits and Workingmen’s Institutes. Black is black, you might think, and so it is, but there are nevertheless intensities in blackness, and, as I had already found out, there was the question of texture to be taken into account, and the potential not merely for thickening the surrounding atmosphere but transforming it, into a miasma that was not merely steeped in shadow, but a particular species of shadow.
Resolutely, I inspected the books that Martin had already set out on the shelves, and then I began on the boxes, methodically completing the work of shelving that Martin had begun, inspecting the title-page of each volume before lining it up neatly, in a file that soon filled the upper shelves and moved steadily downwards.
They were, alas, the most boring books imaginable. The hopes raised by the involvement to Émile de Girardin’s society or one of it branches were soon dashed. Thirty per cent of the books were Welsh, and thirty per cent of those in English were familiar religious tracts. The volumes of philosophy and history were all cheap reprints of commonplace texts, and the poetry and fiction consisted of broken sets of standard authors. Nevertheless, I kept going.
If you’re going to be obsessed, you have to take it seriously. If you start a search, you have to finish it, and you have to take what comfort you can from the fact that there really will come a time, eventually, where your skin really can’t absorb any more coal-dust, even of the softest and silkiest kind imaginable.
By the time I began to feel ill I was already kneeling down, inspecting the lowest shelves in the unit, so I was in no danger of falling over, but I had to put out a hand nevertheless to support myself against the shelves. My eyes had begun to play tricks on me; phosphenes lit up the black air like a cluster of stars, and the darkness itself had begun to flow and shift, as if it were alive with a host of bustling shades like the ones that must have clustered around Orpheus in the Underworld, eager to hear his nourishing music: a host so vast and so crowded that its individual parts seemed to jostling for presence in a narrow corridor that was growing narrower and more suffocating by the instant.
The dust that saturated the atmosphere around my head now seemed so dense that the air gave the impression of being liquid rather than gaseous. My trachea had closed reflexively, and I found myself gulping, swallowing the air and the intoxicating spirit that possessed and saturated it. It seemed to be seeping into my being through my gut, my lungs and my every pore, reaching for my heart.
I told myself sternly, however, that it was all illusion, that I’d just got slightly carried away in my search for printed arcana, and that any symptoms I felt were merely psychotropic.
It’s just muck, I told myself. All I need is a wash. Ten minutes with the flannel, and I’ll be fine.
I wasn’t afraid. I was strangely secure in my lurking conviction that an instant of effort would be enough to bring me out of the apparent dream-state and back to wakefulness, whenever I wanted to emerge, and I had dreamed far too many dreams of that frail kind to allow panic any moment of opportunity. So I drank the spirits of the dead in dream-like fashion, and drank them gladly. I even drank them thirstily, because I knew that they were closer to me than any mere kin. What was my own spirit, after all, but a compound of all that I had read and inwardly digested?
Even if A. N. Wilson had been as direly mistaken in his estimate of the majority of men as I suspected, I thought, he was surely right about himself and he was right about me. My inner life, my pressurized stream of consciousness, was the product of texts and the love of texts. I had been a ghoul all my life; of what had I to be afraid, in that dark room full of clamorous spirits? The greater part of my life, and the greater part of my emotion, had been spent and generated by intercourse with the dead; what need had I to feel threatened, or even to suspect the presence of maleficent evil, in the dust of books?
Except, of course, that it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the dust of books: it was coal-dust, the residue of life far older than any thinking life…or at least, any thinking life of which we are aware, or capable of envisaging.
At any rate, I seemed, in my dream-like state of consciousness, to be drinking deeply, avid for further intoxication. And why not? The dust was, after all, a previously-untasted vintage.
I felt slightly stirred, as if a moist wind and a cloying warmth were washing over me but leaving no impression. I felt as if the fading ruddy gleams of the Celtic twilight were in my lungs and in my heart. I felt as if the heritage of Merlin and Taliesin, and the force of Druid magic, were in my brain and in my groin. I thought I could hear the musical voices of luckmen intoning their spells, mingled with the strangled cries of hewers of coal choked by firedamp or crushed by falling stone, all echoing together in the empty spaces of my mind.
It was a strangely delicious fantasy, a poignantly haunting dream: a fantasy so delicious and a dream so haunting that there was a moment when I would dearly have liked to maintain it against the cruel penetration of lucidity—but it is exactly that moment of yearning, in a real dream, that precipitates the return of normal consciousness. Because I became all too conscious that I was dreaming, I could not maintain the altered state of mind. My innate skepticism reminded me that, at the end of the day, the black stuff that I had released while descending the shelves was really just muck.
My supporting hand moved along the wooden shelf and my senses reeled. It was only the slightest of adjustments but my little finger picked a thin splinter out of the distressed wood, and the tiny stab of pain made me gasp. The gasp turned to a cough, and then to a fit of coughing—and a cataract of black dust cascaded out of my open mouth into the palm of my hand.
The sixty-watt bulb buzzed and flickered, and its light became noticeably brighter. I hauled myself to my feet, blinked away the moment of narcotic drowsiness, breathed in cleaner and cooler air, pulled myself together, and then went directly to the bathroom in order to rinse my hands before picking up the flannel and starting the serious business of cleaning myself up.
At first, when I looked in the mirror, my face was reminiscent of an infernal imp, but that impression could not prevail, in the fullness of time, against the pressure of soap and hot water. Methodically, I cleaned myself up, washing away the sin of obsessive book-lust, the cardinal vice of the Faustian Age.
I didn’t curse myself for having lost my grip on the dream-state. Once full consciousness had reasserted itself, ir easily regained its privileges and its hegemony. Dreams are by nature fragile and fugitive, and only death can free us, in the end, from the everpresent duty of waking from their toils. Until then, I told myself, as the flannel did its work, it is probably best to put their temporary hauntings away in the coverts of forgetfulness, and be glad.
Always assuming of course, that you can.
CHAPTER VI
In the short term, that didn’t seem to be a problem. The careful washing of my face, hair, chest and arms not only freed me of almost all the dust that had stuck to me externally, but also seemed to scrub away any vestiges of malaise or hallucination. I had a slight aftertaste in my mouth, understandably, and when I blew my nose the handkerchief developed an ugly black stain, but I didn’t go into full-blown allergic rhinitis. By the time I was ready to go back downstairs I felt as steady as a rock.
Eventually, I made my way back to my fellow investigators, clutching my meager booty. The best items I had found were a couple of bound volumes of Reynolds’ Miscellany, including the serial version of G. W. M. Reynolds’ Faust, and battered copies of Eugène Sue’s Martin the Foundling, George Griffith’s A Criminal Croesus, and Mrs. Riddell’s Fairy Water. They were all in mediocre condition, but they were all titles that I’d be glad to add to my collection. Considering that the hunt had started and finished so unpromisingly it didn’t seem to be a bad haul, and there was still a slight possibility that I could add to it from the ground floor stock.
Lionel, Martin, and Penny were sitting downstairs, as quiet as church mice. I thought at first that they might be asleep, even though the light was on, and I took care to tiptoe down the last few steps, but Lionel looked around as I reached the floor and said: “There’s more tea in the pot. We’ve all had a second cup.” His voice was slower than usual and a little thicker.
“I’m okay,” I assured him. “Seen any sign of the presence?”
“Not seen, exactly,” he told me, “but we’ve definitely felt something, haven’t we?”
“It’s not as bad as it has been,” Martin said, perhaps slightly disgruntled by the failure of his shop to come up with the supernatural goods, “but I can definitely feel it.”
“How about you?” I said to Penny.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything objective,” she said, looking sadly at her various instruments. “But I can certainly feel something. It’s faint, but it’s there.” I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was disappointed. It’s hard to impress people with subjective feelings; she knew that unless she could carry away some kind of tangible record—a clip of film, a trace on her rotating chart or a leaping needle on the ammeter—she’d have nothing to interest the punctilious inquisitors of the Society for Psychical Research.
“Is there anything upstairs?” Lionel asked, obviously expecting a negative answer, probably because it was me that he was asking rather than a suspicion that whatever was causing his uneasy feeling was limited to the ground floor.
“Just books,” I said, instinctively protecting my reputation for skepticism as well as being what I thought was honest. “Hundreds and hundreds that no one will ever want to read—and a few dozen that someone might. I’ve only found a few, but they won’t just sit on my shelves unread. I feel sorry for the rest, in a way. All the thought that went into their creation! All the mental effort! If they only had voices, they’d be clamoring for attention, don’t you think? They’d be excited, wouldn’t they, at having been taken out of their coffins at last and put on display? The ones from Glofeydd Diafol—which I finished shelving for you, by the way, Martin, albeit not in alphabetical or subject order—will be particularly glad to see the light of day again when dawn breaks, after so long stewing in the dark, in their own miasma.”
Martin didn’t thank me for that effort; I guessed that he hadn’t changed his mind about intending to clear out all the dirtiest items from the upstairs room and storing them in the coal-hole for use as winter fuel when the season changed. Having inspected them, that thought no longer seemed quite as horribly sacrilegious to me as it had before.
In fact, I mused—but didn’t vocalize—the books in question might well have thought, had they been capable of thinking, that the Day of Judgment had come when Martin had first unpacked them. Perhaps some of the more optimistic had thought that, at least in a just world, they might be bound for paradise rather than the inferno, but disillusionment must be setting in, now that I had passed them before my censorious eye and found them wanting.
How long, I wondered, would it take a book to give way to despair? Not long, I expected, if it were a book from a colliery library—a book that had already had a taste of the darkness of the abyss in the eyes and mind of its readers.
“You’re not taking this seriously, are you, Mr. Stableford?” Martin observed, without undue rancor. “It’s all just a joke to you.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m truly sorry if you think that my skeptical presence is somehow inhibiting the paranormal manifestations. I honesty would prefer it if the night turned out to be exciting—even alarming. On the other hand you might have cause to be grateful if skepticism causes the phenomenon to evaporate without even waiting to be exorcized.”
Lionel nodded sympathetically, evidently still feeling that exorcism ought to be reckoned a latest report. Martin, however, seemed to have had enough, and just wanted to get the night over with, whatever the result and its consequences might turn out to be.
“The trouble with skeptics,” Penny added, taking care to couch her remarks in general terms, “is that they’re too enthusiastic to accept their own insensitivity as proof that there’s nothing to be sensitive to. They’re like blind men denying that sight is possible. Not everyone’s the same, you know. Everybody’s different, and some people can feel the presence of things that others can’t.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” I said, mildly. “You don’t mind if I move about, do you? I’ll try not to disturb you.”
“Feel free,” said Lionel, with typical bonhomie. “There’s no need for us to sit still or be quiet. There’s a long night still ahead of us—plenty of time for the presence to make itself felt more keenly, if it cares to.”
“Actually,” said Penny, “it might help to pick something up if we turn the lights out.”
“It probably would,” I agreed. “It would make us more sensitive to the imaginary as well as the real.”
She didn’t persist with the request, and Martin didn’t show the slightest inclination to turn the lights off. It was, after all, his shop, so no one challenged his right to make the decision.
I did a little more shelf-checking, but my heart was no longer in it, and my last faint hopes of finding anything had shriveled way, so I eventually sat down to form a circle of sorts with my three companions.
“What you’re feeling,” I suggested to them, “is more likely to be atmospheric than paranormal. Even if you leave the anomalous coal-dust from Glofeydd Diafol out of account, moving all the books around and shelving them is bound to have stirred up organic debris of some sort. There’s a noticeable odor down here, and odors sometimes have subliminal components that give rise to feelings of slight nausea or unease. Martin’s presumably in a position to judge accurately that it’s not as noticeable now as it was previously, so it’s surely possible that it will disappear completely once the shop’s been aired for a day or two and properly vacuumed.”
