The Body Library

by Jeff Noon

  “It looks that way.”

  She was as quietly spoken as he was, two people living in a place of whispers.

  “What’s really going on?” Nyquist asked.

  “Patrick… Patrick Wellborn went crazy. We’re trying to find him, that’s all.”

  A car drove by along the road. The lamp above a nearby bar flickered a welcome in blue and gold. But there was too far to go before Nyquist could get to such a place.

  “I’m scared, Bella.”

  “I know.”

  And then at last he said the words he should have said a long time ago: “Wellborn’s dead.”

  Monroe froze. He saw her shoulders hunch forward and her head bow. A single sob escaped her throat.

  “It’s the truth, I’m afraid.”

  She turned in her seat. Pain moved across her face, from one expression to another. Her emotions would not settle: fear, doubt, despair, and the faint glimmer of hope clinging on.

  “You’re wrong. He’s still missing…”

  “I saw his body.”

  Her eyes glistened as another car passed by: teardrops in the headlights.

  Nyquist asked, “Did Patrick mean something to you? He was more than a colleague?”

  She nodded in response. A tiny move that he only just noticed. “We were engaged. We were going… we were meant to get married, next year.”

  “Bella, I’m sorry.”

  She turned back to face the windscreen, hiding her face. “Where was he found?”

  “Melville. Tower five.”

  All Nyquist could see was the mass of her hair, the grey streaks, the clip that held it all in place. The trembling of her body with each breath. He felt the need to confess, to help her along, but wondered how far he could go. But she turned to face him again and said, “I don’t understand. Melville is one of the city’s blind spots. We never hear of any stories that happen there.” She frowned. “What was Patrick doing in such a place?”

  “The same thing I was: looking for something.”

  Her voice rose, panic taking over. “It’s out of bounds for officers. There’s no control there! No beginnings, no endings, things just happen at random.”

  “And the tower is tied up with the novel, The Body Library. The two go hand in hand. But how? What’s the connection?”

  “Nobody on the council knows.”

  “Haven’t you been inside the building?”

  “Not lately. A few expeditions were made, but officers were attacked. One almost died. And now it’s seen as a no-go area.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “Secrets take you over, don’t they?”

  “What do you mean, Bella?”

  She didn’t answer him. Grief overwhelmed her in a sudden wave of anger. She hit at the steering wheel with the flat of her hands and she cried out in such despair that Nyquist could only let her be, to let her feelings write themselves aloud.

  And he waited.

  A young couple walked by along the pavement, hand in hand, two stories that he hoped would never be disentwined.

  Monroe was breathing in heavily, her emotions still raw, but contained for now.

  He waited another moment and then said, “Bella, I need to know everything about Wellborn, all you can tell me.”

  She settled back in her seat. Nyquist couldn’t see her face, but he could imagine her expression, the brave smile. “You know, despite the name, Patrick wasn’t at all well born. He came from the lowest of circumstances, and he worked very hard to climb out of them. He was kindly, polite beyond measure, at least in the beginning. And yet very committed, and quite passionate.” She paused to gather herself. “Sadly, that commitment didn’t last long. Not after he became addicted to that horrible stuff.”

  “Midnight’s ink?”

  “Yes. Oh God…” Her body heaved. She sobbed, choking on her next words. “He said something to me once. He said, ‘What if there was a way in which a person could become fictional? Fictional, Bella! Would you welcome such a thing, such a journey?’” She brought a hand up to wipe a tear away. “He asked me to go on that journey with him. But of course…”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  “How could I? It was madness talking. Or the drugs.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m not so sure. Maybe he did find something. Maybe.”

  Nyquist made his decision. He said, “I helped him along the way.”

  Monroe turned to look fully at him. He leaned forward in his seat so their faces were just inches apart.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “You helped him?”

  “I helped him to die. I defended myself.”

  She stared at him, without any comprehension on her features. “You mean… you mean he attacked you?”

  “He had a knife. He was going to kill me.”

  “But why would he do that? He was a good man.”

  “Good or bad, he came for me.”

  “And you fought back?”

  Their eyes locked. “Bella, listen to me, he was drugged up, that’s all I can imagine. He took too much of the story. I had no choice.”

  In a hush she repeated his phrase. “No choice…”

  “None. None at all. It was kill or be killed.” He paused and then said, “Not even the overseer knows this. Not as far as I know, anyway. Only you, Bella. Only you.”

  She didn’t respond.

  Nyquist said, “Now it’s up to you, Bella, what happens next. You can call the police, or tell your boss. Or you can let me go, let me carry on, and I swear to you on everything that’s good and proper that I’ll find out what Patrick was doing there, at Melville Five, what made him so desperate that he was hooked on the ink, and so messed up that he tried to kill me. I’ll look for the cause, the root.”

  She kept on staring at him. Her eyes held such darkness, he could hardly look at her.

  “Bella, something pushed him over the edge. Something drove him mad. And someone put that knife in his hand.”

  At last she spoke. “You think you can find out?”

  “I hope so. But I’ll need your help.”

  “Of course.”

  “Step out of the car.”

  “What?”

  “Bella. Step out.”

  His voice was suddenly cruel. She climbed out and he did the same and they faced each other in the street, her body in darkness, his lit by a nearby lamp.

  “I need to know everything.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Nyquist! I’ve told you…”

  Now he was close to her, his eyes unblinking. “Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth?” She spoke in a frightened hush. “The truth scares me so. It scares me half to death.”

  “That’s all right. Tell me now.”

  Monroe did so, starting slowly, haltingly, but gaining in certainty as the story went on, as though she was relieved to be telling it.

  “There is a faction working in secret at the Narrative Council, six of us altogether. We were, all of us, pledged to secrecy, which is why I couldn’t tell you any of this before.” A slight pause. “Patrick Wellborn was our leader. Even before he discovered the power of The Body Library, he was plotting and planning the overthrow of the council. He wanted to release the city’s stories from such dreadful human control, to return them to their natural state. We all wanted this, myself included. Others were involved in this rebellion, but we at the council felt we were at the very center of the struggle, working to destroy the institution from within.”

  The headlamps of a passing delivery truck moved across her features. She stayed silent until the vehicle had vanished once more into the night.

  “In reality,” she continued, “it was little more than a pipe dream. But Patrick changed. The novel changed him, that damned book of cut-ups.”

  Nyquist could hear her true pain emerging now.

  “Once he succumbed to the burning of the pages and the terrible delirium they brought on, there was no stopping him. He started pushing The Body
Library as the true way forward, and that we should all work together to realize the book’s ultimate purpose.”

  “Did he say what that purpose was?”

  “No, he didn’t. At least, not in my hearing.”

  “And if someone should get in the way of that purpose, what then?”

  There was no answer. But Nyquist couldn’t help thinking: what if Zelda had in some way fought against the book, and all that it stood for? Perhaps a member of the group had taken action against her?

  Monroe continued, “The thing is, John, by this time it was no longer a political struggle for Patrick, but a personal journey. He was taken over, possessed.” She faltered. “I feared that I’d lost him. Lost his love, his companionship. He was associating with prostitutes, criminals, the low life of the city, seeking a deeper, more powerful experience from more dangerous stories. And always he would return to me, and fling these stories in my face. He sickened me. I demanded that he leave, but he never would, not until the final word had been spat in my face. I could not recognize him anymore. He would not even answer to his given name, demanding that I call him Joseph, or Joe Creed, whenever the mood took him over. He’d become obsessed with one particular character in The Body Library. Someone like you, John.”

  “Like me?”

  “A private eye. But a fictional version. He was staying off work more and more. It got so bad that I considered informing on him. Only by so doing could I possibly save him. But of course I had to think of the others, the other members of the group. I would be betraying them as well. So I let things be. And now… and now he’s gone forever.”

  Monroe had calmed a little. She wiped at her face with a hand.

  Nyquist asked, “Tell me about the Melville Tower.”

  She nodded. “Melville Five is the center of it, the source of the trouble, whatever it might be. I am no longer a part of the group, but I know they still meet up all around the city, gathering members, whispering in basement rooms. Plotting and planning, as such people are wont to do. Some of them are suffering, the words growing under their skin. I have seen it happening before. I saw it with Patrick. They are no longer in charge of their own lives. But it was different with Patrick, worse in a way, because he seemed to have control of the sickness, control of the words that burrowed in his flesh. It was frightening.”

  Her expression hardened.

  “Some great calamity awaits us, I’m certain of it. The group talked incessantly of a day fast approaching when the revolution will take place. They spoke of coming together with one purpose, of being the special ones, the chosen ones. The messengers. Through them the new story will live.”

  Monroe turned away again, hiding her face in the darkness.

  She said in a strained voice, “You’re not far from home. Can I leave you here?”

  “Of course.”

  He thanked her, and watched as she got back into her car. But she had one more thing to say before she drove away: “Be careful, John.”

  He remembered a similar warning from Gabrielle, the prostitute he’d spoken to on Nin and Lawrence. Take care. Take care. The trouble was, just now it seemed like the wrong advice. Zelda’s death was tied in with The Body Library, and with the word sickness that he now shared with her, and possibly with the revolutionary group. And if he was ever to find her murderer he would have to walk into places where care didn’t even exist. It couldn’t be taken, or stolen, or borrowed.

  He would be alone.

  Lily and Joe

  NYQUIST SET off walking towards his block but stopped outside the doorway of The Final Word, a drinking den on De Quincey Lane. It was an easy decision to make. He entered the bar and took his usual seat. The barman, a silent skeleton named Tagget (first name forever unknown) placed a Virgin Mary on the counter. No words necessary. Nyquist held back from temptation: he wasn’t here for a drink, he was here for a story or two, or three, or four, however many it took to get his head cleansed of the dirt of Kafka Court. Matthew Le Skin was currently on stage, regaling the punters with his gory tales of derring-do in the Empire. Jacquie McQueen followed him, rousing the audience even further with her lesbian pirate revenge erotica. And by the time the night’s headliner, Ursula Bloom, had come on, Nyquist and the rest of the listeners, drunk or otherwise, were well on their way to story heaven: beginning, middle and end, all the events following one another in natural consequence, the characters acting like real people do, when real people are exaggerated, and loving, greedy, lustful, crazy, inspired or despairing. And he was reminded of why he’d chosen this city for his second home: after the misadventures of his younger days, he needed a story to settle down with, to fall into, to be comforted by. It was a stupid dream, perhaps, and one that was already falling apart, but this club and this crowd and this night of revelry and narration gave him hope: he was alive, he was listening, he had a role to play.

  Ursula finished her act with a story from her childhood, and after the applause had died down she added as an afterthought:

  “There is one simple truth that my mother taught to me. She told me that every woman, man and child on this good earth has two stories, one in their real life, and one fictional. The one in life comes to a natural end, but the fictional story carries on for as long as people will tell it, or read about it.”

  Nyquist thought about this as he walked home.

  Death meant very little in the light of the city’s grand narrative. But for this to be true, Zelda’s story had to be narrated, beginning to end, right down to the reason why she had been killed. The story had to be told, it was that simple.

  He got home around eleven thirty to find his office and living quarters a tip: the council officers had searched through it, leaving the contents of every drawer on the floor, the filing cabinet emptied out, his desk in disarray, his suits and ties scattered on the bed, every pocket turned out for clues.

  He sat at the desk and lit a cigarette and drew some consolation from it.

  It wasn’t enough.

  After the night’s innocent libations, he longed for a slug or two of whisky.

  There wasn’t any. The bottle was empty.

  He yearned for a woman’s comfort.

  There was none.

  He longed for escape, or even more so, a revelation. An answer to his problems.

  None. None. And none.

  He slotted a piece of foolscap into his battered old typewriter and stared at it, willing another communication to appear, for Zelda’s ghost to send him a message from the other side. Or more likely for his own subconscious mind to force his hands to start hitting the keys. It didn’t happen. The paper was blank. But he had to do something, at least to write a word or two, as evidence that he was alive. And so he made his fingers move slowly from key to key, typing out the exact same line three times over:

  The quick brown fo jumps over the lazy dog.

  The quick brown fo jumps over the lazy dog.

  The quick brown fo jumps over the lazy dog.

  And the only letter that mattered was the missing X. He stared at the gap on the paper, falling under its spell, its emptiness, its eternal mystery.

  The unknown, the unknowable.

  He thought of one thing only. He didn’t care about uncovering the source of midnight’s ink, he didn’t care about the cut-up novel, he didn’t care about the death of Patrick Wellborn, he didn’t even care about the words that were infecting his body. No, he only cared about Zelda. Zelda and the kiss, the only good moment in his whole goddamn story.

  He typed again.

  The quick brown fo jumps over the lazy dog.

  And again, over and over.

  Fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo fo…

  There was no such creature, quick, brown or otherwise.

  It was late and he was tired, and the events of the days clouded his memory. As he took off his shirt he thought once more of the writing on his back. His skin was calm, untroubled, but when he angled his shaving mirror just so, opposite the bathroom cabinet’s mirror
, he saw the letters at their play across the nape of his neck and his right shoulder: yes, they were spreading. He went to bed, thinking that he would have to find Lewis Beaumont, the author of the cut-up text – it was his only way forward, and his only way of escaping from Overseer K’s control. But as weary as he was, he struggled to sleep: the nightmare was in the world outside, not inside his head. He turned on the bedside lamp and leaned over to find the paperback book lying on the floor: Deadly Nightshade. He reread the first few paragraphs, and then stopped and sat up in the bed. The female character was called Paradise Lily, and he’d seen that name before, in one of the manuscript pages he’d found hidden in Wellborn’s room. The name of the novel’s private eye also sounded familiar.

  Joe Creed.

  It took Nyquist a moment to recall Bella Monroe’s story: this was the name of the man that Patrick Wellborn had become obsessed with, another character from The Body Library. Yet here was the same name in a very different kind of book, a detective story.

  It set up questions in his mind. And possibilities.

  He would sleep fitfully now.

  A Method of Writing

  CLELAND NORTH began at the far end of the Woolf Housing Estate, where the road straddled the old canal and where every day the neologists shouted their wares: “New words for sale! New words. All the latest creations, get yours here!” It was Nyquist’s first visit to the area. Bella Monroe had given him the address that morning, after he’d telephoned her for information. He parked his car and entered the maze of streets on foot. From every open window and doorway he could hear the tapping of keys and the rapid almost angry return of typewriter carriages, the curse of the authors, the scrunching up of papers as another page was ruined, the clink of wine and whisky glasses, the raging arguments, the lonely monologues, the slammed doors as the latest partner or collaborator stormed out. Gothic romances, adventures in space, cowboy tales of the Old West, pornography of every stripe and persuasion, dramas of everyday life rendered truthfully in unforgiving detail: the city’s incessant hunger was fed in the main from this downtrodden part of town.