by Jeff Noon
Nyquist sank down to the floor.
His body gave in at last. The end was near, the final page.
The blank page.
A phrase came to mind: “As one story ends…”
Nyquist completed the sentence in his head: another story begins. It was a saying much favored in Storyville, especially by the old.
All around on the shelves of the library the books were falling open, one book after another, allowing the words to escape the pages. Now the air was filled with the letters, with a cloud of scattered words, and the alphabugs swarmed among them, lighting the way. The library was alive with language, with scripture, text, and Nyquist was at the very center of it. He felt the letters landing on his skin, more and more of them, his whole body crawling with words, commas, full stops, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, a narrative, a novel. He was the story. It was that simple: he was the story. And this was where it ended, here in the ruins of a library.
Darkness clouded over his eyes, his breathing slowed.
The pain left him and in these fading seconds he thought only of Zelda.
And then she too was gone.
The Untold Told
BEGIN. Begin again.
The author begins again.
He begins again to build.
He begins again to build from a mark on the paper or a fleck of ink, a dot, a line, a bar, a curve, a gap, marks and squiggles.
He begins again to build on the paper the life of a letter, a single letter.
He begins again to build from one letter to another, these marks, these letters, lines and bars and curves and commas and stops and dots and dashes.
The author begins again to build a letter, one more, one more, one more until at last a word is spelled out in the dark. In the darkness, yes a word.
Begin again to build a word and one more, another word in the darkness, word after word, begin again to build from word after word after word until at last a sentence forms, one more, one more, the first flicker of a story.
Begin. Begin again.
Nyquist felt it all from the inside. The words of his body keeping him alive, feeding and forming and reforming in his flesh.
He saw the world. Two people approaching, watching him, discussing his face, his body, his life, his death. The words he was carrying. He heard them and saw them, he heard the names they called each other, Andrea and Marcus. He even remembered seeing them on the opposite roof, before he had fallen. Yet he could make no connection to them. He called to them, he called their names, he screamed their names, but his lips would not move, nor would his eyes. The message would not leave his body. No signals could get through to the world outside his skin. He could only lie there on the floor of the library, helpless, helpless, caught in the silence, the stillness. So this is what it’s like, he said to himself, this is what it’s like when you step outside of all stories. Nothing happens. Nothing at all.
He saw it all, he heard it all. He felt his body being examined and prodded, he saw ambulance men, a doctor, and police officers clustered around. Talking, endlessly talking. He was their subject matter, nothing more than that, one more element in the long night’s narrative. The lamps were bright now, shining down on him, many of them, yet still his eyes would not react. The light was blinding. If only he could close his eyes!
And then his body was lifted up and carried away. He saw only the ceiling of the ambulance directly above and the medical orderly leaning over him now and then, adjusting equipment, or checking his condition. But there was no pain, no physical pain; his body was numb, perfectly adrift within its own universe, self-contained.
He looked out through the two holes in his skull and he saw the world.
The world he could not touch or speak to, or drag closer.
He felt the vibrations from beneath the vehicle as it moved along the road. A journey. And for a dreadful moment he felt sure that they would take him to the morgue and cut into him with their scalpels and saws. And the thought of this was too much to bear and thankfully the darkness took him over completely.
He was dreaming.
He saw Oberon. He saw Oberon’s face. An old, old man, an ancient being.
The face was upside down for some reason.
Nyquist tried to speak to the wise one, the leader, to ask for forgiveness, to ask that his life be given back to him just this one last time, that he might have another chance, another few days would do it, or a single hour in the sunlight.
Oberon was silent. Silent in the darkness.
And then a voice called to Nyquist from far away. A woman’s voice. This was his compass, his lodestar – he would reach upwards toward the voice, he would find the voice, he would speak aloud, yes, he would speak, speak…
The face of Bella Monroe hovered over him.
He cried. Nyquist couldn’t help it. He cried out loud.
She did not hear him.
His tears were caught inside his eyes, they could not find their way out through the ducts at each corner. Rather they gathered in a small lake and lingered there, forever on the edge of brimming over.
Monroe did not see him crying.
But she spoke to him, nevertheless. And he could hear her voice. It was a balm from heaven.
“John. Can you hear me? I hope you can. We’re doing everything we can to help you.”
He nodded his head in reply, he replied to her.
Yes, yes, I hear you, Bella. I can hear you!
But nothing got through. No movements, no words. The walls of the skull were too thick and there were no doors, no windows. Still, she attended to him, wiping his brow and his mouth, and tidying his bedclothes for him, and talking incessantly. He could see a patch of curtain, a number of hospital monitors at the edge of his vision: small colored lights blinking, a constant and steady bleeping sound. His heartbeat. There it was. The simple proof that he needed so much: he was alive.
And Bella talked on and on and he was glad to listen. This was all he wanted. He learned that he was lying in a bed in a ward deep inside Kafka Court, his case taken over by the Narrative Council. He learned also that Overseer K had pulled rank on Inspector Molloy. He knew that his entire body was covered in words, in living words that moved through his flesh, keeping him alive. He knew all this from Bella’s explanation of what had happened, of how he’d been found in the old library in Lower Shakespeare. Of how he was now in a coma.
He cried out that he was conscious, that he could hear her. He cried out.
Bella didn’t respond in any way.
Her face appeared once more, her eyes looking deep into his; her eyes so dark and beautiful and glistening and ever-moving; and his own, black and still, incapable of passing on any emotion at all.
Yet they stared at each other, this man, this woman. Two beings. One fully alive, the other caught in a strange realm where life and death hovered close together, where life was stitched in place only by the words that travelled through the body.
He could feel them moving. He could sense them, he had such knowledge of them as creatures, as living entities building a new kind of language.
He could read the stories they were telling inside his body.
He was the story.
Word by word, thread by thread, the tiny writers at work, hundreds of them, thousands, millions, multiplying all the time.
He was the story and the book. And one name alone, one character, drew his attention.
Zelda.
He experienced her story as it mingled with his. And he saw far beyond the bed he was lying in, all across the city, and he saw again the fifth tower of Melville Estate. Once again in his mind he walked those corridors. He saw the people who lived in the tower and he knew how they lived there, and why they lived there. He knew the truth at last and it was shocking to him, and also perfectly logical at the same time. Also he knew the truth of The Body Library, he knew the secret contained within its chaotic, nightmarish pages. Most of all he knew that another life was being lived, another
version of himself was alive in the tower, a life away from the bed and this stillness. Yet he could tell nobody about this; the truth remained trapped inside his head.
He might stay like this forever, or until the doctors turned off the machines.
Or until the words gave up on him.
One thing mattered to him, one question.
Who murdered Zelda?
As the spell of darkness kept hold of him, he would use this question, this quest, this night quest, as a fixed point, a single lamp above a crooked pathway. And he thought of the knowledge he’d gained, just before Wellborn had pushed him off the roof.
Apartment 14. That’s where it all starts.
Yet he felt helpless, unable to act. Trapped.
But he couldn’t give up, not now.
Stick to the task. Keep going. Don’t surrender.
Begin.
Begin again.
Begin again to build.
He kept saying the phrase to himself, over and over. Begin again to build, word by word by word. Find the answer.
Bella’s voice had fallen silent at last. He could see a portion of her head and shoulders in the dimmed light, where they rested on the bed sheet. She’d fallen asleep. Good, good. Let her rest. There was much to do.
Nyquist lay awake and stared at the ceiling and read the endless, tangled stories of his own flesh, and he saw what he had to do. It was simple. He could still find Zelda’s murderer. He could still do it, even as he was lying here wrapped in the sheets, his physical body helpless. He could still work the case. He was certain by now that the key to her death lay hidden somewhere inside the Melville Tower. All he had to do was send a message to his other self. No, not a message. An object, he had to build an object. He would place this object in Melville, yes, that was it. And so he began. In the dark he put together his thoughts, fragment by fragment, and in this way he fashioned his object. It was a photograph. It took him more than an hour to do this, concentrating all the time, and his body was weakened by the effort. The words inside were darting here and there, repairing his flesh wherever a break or fissure occurred. They kept him alive.
Now it was done. He had created a photograph in his mind. He held it there, suspended at the center of his coma. He spun it around slowly with his thoughts. The image was blurred, but it would have to do. And he sent it across the city as best he could, across the city of his mind into Melville Five and he placed it inside a grey folder in a filing cabinet in apartment 49. The action exhausted him completely; he could feel himself surrendering to sleep. Perhaps this time he would never awaken from this realm he was caught inside. Perhaps he would die before morning’s light came to the streets. But he had done what he could.
He had left a clue.
Part Four
APARTMENT 49, MELVILLE FIVE
Page Zero
NYQUIST WOKE up in the middle of the night. It was a simple fact. One moment he was dreaming and the next he was awake. The room was familiar to him, his own bedroom, his apartment, all things in their place as they should be, the clock on the bedside cabinet, clothes strewn around the floor, a packet of Player’s Navy Cut nearby, a paperback novel lying on the sheets. And yet everything felt different somehow, as though he were a stranger here in his own home, a traveler, someone passing through. It was unnerving, but the feeling lasted only a moment or two, and then he was up and coughing from the angry ghosts of last night’s cigarettes. He headed for the tiny bathroom and stood under the shower for ten minutes, first as hot as he could stand, and then as cold, using the extremes to jolt himself back to some kind of life. He shaved and combed Royal Crown pomade through his hair and splashed on some Bay Rum aftershave. He was ready, ready for anything.
The dream. Now he remembered it. He’d been submerged in a deep pool of black ink, struggling, drowning and then he’d risen up from the water, gasping for air…
It had scared him.
He looked through the kitchen cupboards, finding only packets of coffee and tins of corned beef and tins of peaches, so many of them stacked high on the shelves. He made do with this, main meal and dessert. After eating he went through into his office and he sat at the desk and stared at the walls and waited for something to happen, for the telephone to ring or for someone to knock at his door: a client, a stranger or a friend, someone in trouble, in need.
But nobody came, nobody needed his help.
He put his feet up on the desk and smoked his first cigarette of the day and drank his second cup of coffee. He stood up and walked around the office three times, and then twice more. He stared at the wall calendar. Today’s date – August 29, 1959 – was marked with a red star, but all the other squares were vacant for this month and the next. He checked the filing cabinet: the top three drawers were empty, the bottom one contained a single folder, that was all. Could things really be this bad? He cursed the good people of Storyville. Did none of them stray from the marriage bed or pilfer funds from the cash till or find themselves the victim of petty blackmail? There had to be something!
The hours ticked by on the clockface. Yet it was night, always night, no matter what time he awoke, it was always dark outside the window, the city lit up in blue and gold for his viewing pleasure. In this building time had one season only.
He opened his front door a few times and stared up and down the lighted corridor, but there was never any sign of life. Once he took a few steps along, away from his apartment door, but then he started to tremble, his body shook in panic and he had to reach out for the wall for support. The light bulb flickered above in time with his stuttering heartbeat.
He ate more corned beef, and even more peaches. He sat down behind his desk and read a few pages of Deadly Nightshade, the paperback novel he’d found lying on his bed. If only he could have a life like the book’s hero, Joe Creed, a private eye who walked into trouble night after night without a care in the world except for where his next drink was coming from. He reached the end of the chapter, where the hero took a blow to the head from a hammer and was left unconscious in the gutter.
Nyquist couldn’t remember how he’d got to this place, he couldn’t remember any life at all outside of these few rooms, these corridors, outside of this building, this high-rise tower.
Who am I? What am I doing here?
He slid a sheet of paper into the typewriter on his desk and tapped at the keys until he had a line written out, the first thing that came into his head.
There was a crooked man.
Like an automaton he repeated the action.
There was a crooked man.
There was a crooked man.
There was a crooked man.
He sat there with his head in his hands. The silence was too deep, too intense. He rubbed at his face and a great bolt of pain shot from one temple to the other, across his brow. He cried out and his voice echoed around the room.
There was no answer.
In frustration he walked over to the filing cabinet and reached into the bottom drawer to take out the solitary folder. Apparently, this was all he had, the only case he’d ever filed away. It was marked with today’s date, yet he couldn’t remember putting it there.
The folder contained one item only, a photograph.
It showed a woman’s face, her features slightly blurred, out of focus. For a long time he stared at it as a faint memory stirred. He turned the photograph over and saw a name and a location written on the back.
Zelda Courtland
Apartment 14
The woman’s name tormented him.
A bell was ringing, far away, far away: if only he could hear it properly. But no, the knowledge flickered away, time and again.
So why had he opened a file on the case?
Now he stared at the woman’s face, willing the image to become clearer. He knew her, he was sure of it. At some point in the past, in some forgotten moment, he had met and talked to her. And more than that, yes, much more. Some moments of intimacy had taken place between them. They h
ad loved each other, no matter how briefly. Nyquist was certain of this fact, and yet it felt as though the memory belonged to somebody else, another man in another place, another life.
His headache threatened to return.
Nyquist turned the photograph over once more.
Apartment number 14?
A sudden thought came to him: This is where it all starts.
He threw on his jacket and left the office.
Pathways
NYQUIST PRESSED the call button for the elevator and waited and waited, as the indicator light stayed on floor nine. He took the stairs. Not a soul was seen, neither in the stairwell, nor on the first floor corridor. He might well be the only resident. It was deathly quiet until he reached the door of apartment 14, where he heard voices from within, male and female, two or three people talking. Nyquist pressed the bell and immediately the voices quietened. He had no expectations of who might answer, if anyone, or what he might find. Now he heard another voice, an older woman’s, from the other side of the doorway.
“Who is it?”
“John Nyquist. From upstairs, apartment 49.”
“Oh right, just a minute. I can’t get the door open.” An edge of panic crept into the voice. “It’s stuck. Oh. Just let me…”
The door jerked open. He stepped into the hallway where the little old lady was waiting for him in the dimmed light. Her body was almost bent in two, and her grey hair was netted with cobwebs.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I was hoping–”
“Wait, Wait!” She peered out through the open door and checked both sides of the corridor. “Very well, I think we’re alone.” She came back inside, closed the door and walked into the living room without another word.
Nyquist followed her. “I’m looking for Zelda Courtland? Is she here?” He showed her the photograph.
“Oh, of course. Yes. Zelda.”
“She’s here?”
