The Wise Friend, page 18
“More like light of knowledge, of all knowledge. That’s what he imagined he had or was going to get.” A hint of disapproval lingered while she said “Lumen Scientiae, His Life and Explorations. That was your book.”
“Thank you very much for tracking it down. Can I come in for another look?”
“By all means, but you’ll need to send us a new application.”
“Where—” I needed to seem to have known that, and I said almost too fast to separate the syllables “I mean, when can I see it? Tomorrow?”
“The earliest would be the day after tomorrow. Apply online as you did last time.”
At least that would be Julia’s day off. In my nervous eagerness I’d nearly booked a visit when she would have been at the archive. On my phone the application form was microscopic, and I brought up the archive on my computer. The Sutton Witchcraft Collection contained twenty-six items, and the one I wanted was the last, a number I refused to find ominous. 26: Lumen Scientiae, His Life and Explorations. Handwritten journal of “Lumen Scientiae” (identity unknown)¸n. d., poss. C 17th. I ticked its box and saved the selection, and a button let me reserve the book. I was feeling in charge of the situation until the form asked for my borrower number.
It would be on my Manchester library card, except I didn’t have one. On the horizon twitching windmills mimed the antics of my nerves while I tried to think. Eventually, though not entirely confidently, I retrieved my phone and called the library again. This time it was a male voice that said “Archive.”
“I was speaking to a lady there before. I wonder—”
“The archive’s actually closed now. Can you call back tomorrow after nine?”
“I just need help with reserving a book. Can you put me through to someone who’ll advise me?”
A silence let me think he had, unless he was unprepared to comply, until he said “What seems to be the problem?”
“The form wants the number from my card, and I haven’t got one.”
“Are you the gentleman who was asking about the Lumen Scientiae item?”
“That was me,” I said despite a sudden sense that I ought to have been warier.
“But you had your number when you viewed the book.”
I tried and failed to find a response other than “That wasn’t me.”
“I think you’ll need to explain that, Mr—” Just as suspiciously he added “You said your name was Semple.”
“It is, and his was too. He’s my son.”
By no means signifying comprehension, the man said “Yes?”
“He’s quite a young chap if you’ve seen him. Young enough that we need to keep an eye on what he reads.”
“I’m afraid that’s not part of our job, Mr Semple. If you’re asking us to ban him from the library—”
“I’m just saying we may need to look at the kind of thing he reads, me and his—” Before I could stray into perilous territory I said “I’d like to take a look at it, that’s all.”
“We can’t prevent you from doing that.”
“Your system is. How do I get round it?”
“Just email us asking for the item to be made available.”
“I will right now.” My eagerness had already brought me trouble, and I was anxious that it shouldn’t twice. “I’ll email you personally, shall I?”
“If you wish. Address it to Derek Lister.”
“And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention all this to anybody else.”
I had Julia more in mind than Roy, but couldn’t say. “Not necessary,” Lister said.
Did he mean informing anyone, or had my request offended him? Asking might antagonise him, and I ended the call so hastily that I almost neglected to obtain his email address. It took me some time to compose a wary message. Further to our phone discussion, this is to confirm my request to consult Lumen Scientiae in your archive on Thursday. Sincerely, and I had to tell myself there was no reason why Julia should see the email. Pa, I typed, which expanded into my stored name at once. I stared at the message in case there was a less explicit way of conveying the information, and then I sent the email.
Waiting a night and a day and its night as well before I could discover what Bella had wanted to learn felt like frustration rendered ponderously solid. By dawn I knew I couldn’t spend the day without involving myself somehow. Since I had no idea which site she and Roy planned to explore, I couldn’t risk visiting anywhere on Thelma’s list in case I encountered them. I thought of inspecting somewhere they’d already been – hadn’t Roy named a place? – and then I saw they were giving me the chance to carry out a different investigation. After a shower and an equally swift breakfast I made for my car.
In less than an hour I was leaving the motorway, and in a few minutes I was at the short cut Bella used. I parked outside a capacious Victorian house whose doorframe was buttoned with bellpushes next to handwritten tags. The deserted street was quiet except for the barking of a dog in an upstairs room. Fragments of brick clinked together as I stepped through the gap in the tottering wall.
The sharp shrill sound might have been displacing birdsong from the trees. A thin path elaborately patterned with dead leaves wound between them from the opening in the wall. Otherwise the trees grew so close together that it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. A solitary beer can lay just inside the wall, a token of an adventurer. I’d advanced several hundred yards through the greenish gloom when I caught sight of a house.
At least, it was a red-brick building. By the time I reached the end of the path, which led onto an overgrown expanse of gravel, I’d seen it was a derelict hotel. Every window was boarded up. From the remnants of the sign above the awning, a wrought-iron structure barbed with shards of glass, I gathered that the small hotel had been the Little Imperial, though at first I misread some of the remaining letters as IMP REAL. On the far side of the gravel the path continued through another mass of trees, and I made for Bella’s house.
I hadn’t struggled far through the tangle of trees when I was rewarded by the glint of a window ahead – indeed, several. The effort of advancing further prevented me at first from seeing my mistake. The light was reflecting not from glass but from water, and the choked path led to a viewing platform above the river. The handrails had mostly rotted away, and sections were strewn down a slope twice the height of the three-storey hotel. I could see both ways along the riverbank without venturing onto the decayed platform. I took some time to peer in each direction, shading my eyes and then straining them until they stung, but it made no difference. The only building on this side of the road was the abandoned hotel.
While I made my way back through the trees I stared about as though a house might be persuaded to appear among them or take shape from them or otherwise prove to have been overlooked, but nothing like a fairy tale took place. I emerged from the silent gloom onto the gravel, to be confronted by the uselessly unhelpful hotel, which was as long as several of the nearby houses stuck together. Beneath a steep slate roof sprouting four enormous chimneys, the boarded windows left the frontage so anonymous that the remnants of the sign suggested at best a failed attempt to lend it an identity. The door under the awning was covered up as well, and I was making for the road without a coherent idea in my head when I saw those boards weren’t entirely secured. The door was furtively ajar.
Only frustration and aimlessness made me go closer. Glass crunched underfoot as I stepped on the concrete threshold, and one of the slates that had smashed the panes of the awning splintered as I trod on it. Though the boards had been prised away from the doorframe, where the nails had left rusty stains, the door wasn’t open wide enough for even a child to slip through. I made a token bid to shove it wider, but it didn’t budge. I was about to turn away when I noticed a faint trail leading into the darkness inside the hotel.
Switching on my flashlight, I poked the phone through the gap. The marks were footprints, leading across a carpet that looked imbued with soot, and ending at a staircase. They were significantly larger than a child’s. Though I hardly knew what the sight meant to me – perhaps I wasn’t anxious to know – I pocketed the phone so as to grab the edge of the door with both hands and exert all my strength. It juddered inwards, hindered by an obstruction that felt soft but resolute. As soon as I’d made enough of a gap I retrieved the flashlight and edged in.
Darkness swooped at me as I turned the beam on the obstruction. The door had rucked the carpet up, tearing it loose from the boards. Massive shadows dodged into rooms as I shone the light around the lobby. Beyond a doorway on my left, long rectangular shapes were draped with pallid cloths – tables in a dining-room – while to my right a faint roundish glow rose out of the dimness to greet if not entice me like a will-o’-the-wisp from a marsh, the reflection of the flashlight in a grubby mirror behind a bar, where inverted bottles glimmered without visible support. The ceiling loomed over me, untouched by the light, and the carpet underfoot yielded like moist earth. I was heading for the stairs beside the reception counter when I noticed the visitors’ book.
It lay open on the counter, displaying several entries. At first I was sure I’d misread the dates. I leaned closer to look without touching the counter, which was encrusted with grime. Although all the entries were in the same old-fashioned script, every one was dated this month, and the names were dismayingly familiar, though they weren’t the kind anyone would expect to see in a hotel register. Crux Inverso, Aqua Sacramenti, Magister Stellarum…
I came close to grabbing the blackened scabby counter as I tried to understand what I was seeing. The entries suggested some kind of secret joke nobody was meant to appreciate, unless logging them was a gesture of defiance or triumph. My mind felt unable to struggle beyond knowing who must have written them, and the names clamoured in my head as if they were importuning me to pronounce them aloud. I had a fearful sense that speaking any of them might summon its owner. Perhaps a face would sprout from one of the pigeonholes at the back of the reception recess, if not from all of them. Or might a piecemeal figure make itself apparent in the chair behind the counter, an occupant in the process of putting on some kind of flesh? Unwelcome as these notions were, they were trying to distract me from an unenviable task. I had to see where the tracks on the carpet led.
As I swung the flashlight beam towards the stairs a shape leapt up from the chair – an enlivened shadow. I didn’t know how much longer I could bear to stay in the building, and to prevent myself from fleeing I climbed the stairs at once. Many of them gave way, some with a creak like a tree in a gale, some with a squelch of the carpet. I felt as if the narrow passage had extinguished the summer day, draining all the heat. Shadows mimed the instability of the handrails, which I refrained from touching once I’d nearly dragged the left-hand rail free of the wall with a crunch of sodden plaster. The passage turned back on itself at a boxed-in landing, and a second flight of stairs brought me to the middle floor. Corridors gaped on both sides of me, but the flashlight beam didn’t reach even halfway down either. There was no point in wondering what the darkness further down might hide. The footprints led to the top floor of the hotel.
I was at the enclosed bend at the foot of the last flight of stairs when I realised what I’d somehow failed to appreciate – that there was just one set of prints. Had their maker trodden in them more than once? More grotesquely still, had she walked backwards in them? The idea of someone moving in reverse put me in mind of witchcraft, a similarity I would rather not reflect upon just now. Or did the prints mean she was still upstairs? I held my breath, which had begun to taste of grime, but all I could hear was emptiness or its pretence. “Bella, are you here?” I shouted, and my voice came back flattened, reminding me how shut in I was. Only silence responded, and though it made me feel awaited I followed the tracks and my nervously unsteady light to the top of the hotel.
The footprints led beyond the light into the left-hand corridor. All the doors were open, revealing rooms where objects more shapeless than they ought to be crouched in the dark – beds with disarranged drooping quilts, unless the beds themselves were sagging. Beyond them a face peered out of the lightless depths at me, the same blurred face in every room. When the beam caught the first of them it flinched back before the light erased it. My reflection had recoiled because I had. I shone the beam into each room, where it roused shadows to dance a greeting. Perhaps I was searching for a reason why the corridor was growing so much colder as I advanced. A framed print hung between each pair of rooms, but the images were so obscured by stains that I saw just my own faint image, as though they were parodying Thelma’s portraits of me. The glimpses paced me to the end of the corridor, where the footprints disappeared into the furthest left-hand room.
They ended at a double bed. For a moment I thought it was occupied, but so far as I could see from the corridor the quilt was emptily humped up. When I ventured into the room a face swelled at me like a worm out of the darkness. It was mine once more, faintly illuminated by the beam. Something pale reared up much closer to me – my breath. A shiver travelled through me to the flashlight, and as shadows swarmed up the walls to nest beneath the ceiling, I made for the bed.
The footprints ended near the headboard, where the pillows looked as if they’d been kicked out of shape. From beside them I could see under the quilt, which was raised like the entrance to a burrow. When I shone the beam under the grubby stained material, the hollow it revealed put me more than ever in mind of a lair. It was empty apart from a collection of objects at the far end. I leaned reluctantly closer while shadows leaned closer to me. The glinting items were jars that housed samples of earth.
The sight brought me near to a kind of uncomprehending panic. From the position the quilt retained, I could tell that the jars had been stored there by someone crawling head first into the burrow, and I couldn’t help fancying that she slept there in that fashion. Discovering the jars had revived the clamour of names in my skull. I pressed my lips together so hard that they ached, but perhaps I didn’t need to utter any syllables, because I glimpsed movements at the cornices around me – a suggestion of several scattered objects fluttering like masks in a wind. When I peered up without raising the beam, I had the impression that they resembled tethered balloons, imperfectly inflated and nodding as though windblown, unless they were repeatedly attempting inflation only to deflate afresh, not least their eyes. I was about to shine the beam at them in the hope that it might banish them when I wondered if it could attract them instead, drawing them to cluster around me if not on me. The prospect almost made me drop the phone as I fled.
Grime caught in my throat, and my breaths grew unhealthily harsh while they kept appearing in front of my face. Darkness lurched at me from every room I passed. I would have taken several stairs at a time if I hadn’t been afraid of falling. Even running down them one by one meant I had to keep thumping the unstable wall with my free hand. I dashed across the lobby, to find that the door wasn’t open nearly as wide as I’d left it. I had to drag at it, bunching up the carpet that must have settled into place, before I could struggle past. Once I was outside I didn’t immediately think to switch the flashlight off, because the sunshine felt like a pretence that I’d escaped the dark. I stumbled across the gravel into the trees and dodged doggedly along the path to the gap in the wall. There was my car outside the houses, and surely this ought to reassure me that some of my life remained normal, but even having reached the driver’s seat and locked myself in, I couldn’t drive by any means at once. I was desperate to think how I could use what I’d learned at the hotel – desperate to understand what I’d seen.
Chapter Twenty-One
A Disappearance
“Semple.”
“Mr Semple.”
The librarian said my name a good deal louder than I had. He might almost have been announcing my arrival. Remembering when you were expected to be quiet in libraries, I glanced about the long white room. None of the readers at the tables appeared to have been disturbed, but I was looking for Julia too, although it was her day off. As I turned back to the desk beside the glass door in a wall of the same material, the librarian said “You were worried about your son.”
I took this for a means of identification, but perhaps his long tanned extravagantly hirsute face was offering sympathy as well. “You’ll be Mr Lister,” I said.
“Mister Lister, that’s my cross.” Having acknowledged with a pout how the name sounded like a joke, he said “If you could put yourself in the book.”
He meant the ledger lying on the nearest table. I added my name and date and place of residence and the reason for my visit – research. The process reminded me of the visitors’ book at the derelict yet inhabited hotel, and I turned the pages until I found Roy’s entry and Bella’s. I didn’t realise how much I’d been hoping to be proved wrong until I saw her handwriting, the same old-fashioned script I’d found in the hotel register. She and Roy had given research as the excuse for their visit too. I was nowhere near dealing with my thoughts as I asked Lister “Were you here when my son came?”
“Mr Semple, as I told you on the phone, we had no authority to deny him access to the item.”
“I was only wondering what your impressions might have been.”
“I’d say he was a fine young specimen.”
“And the person with him?”
Lister rubbed his chin as if to conjure up the memory, producing a noise like a mouse scrabbling in litter. “I can’t really recall.”
“Anything you can bring to mind.” Unease beyond defining made me urge “Anything at all.”
“I think they did most of the reading.” Lister raised a forefinger, signifying inspiration. “So perhaps you needn’t be too worried for your son,” he said.
“What difference does that make? He’s still with someone who’s mixed up with that stuff.”
