by Jeff Noon
“Are we going down there?”
It was Dreylock. He was standing in the doorway of the room, his eyes moving from Lewis’s body to the hole in the floor.
“You’re liable to get hurt,” Nyquist answered.
Dreylock laughed out loud at this. “Any more than I am?”
Nyquist climbed down the steps, reaching a corridor that stretched away into darkness. He groped along it using his hands, one on each wall to guide his way. Turning one corner and then another he soon lost all sense of direction. He was somewhere on the ground floor of the building, that’s all he could know. He still felt many miles away from the outside world, and escape, if such a thing was ever possible. He moved on, further down the corridor. A set of stone steps took him down to a lower level. He was now in the basement of the building. He could hear footfalls behind him, the dragging gait of Dreylock.
The walls were closer together and the ceiling lower, and water dripped from cracks in the concrete and brickwork; or perhaps not water, but some darker substance. It might well be ink. Not a trace of light to be seen, yet Nyquist’s eyes were slowly adjusting and ahead he could see an open doorway. A heavier blackness lay within it, a blackness that seemed to be breathing, and Nyquist stopped where he was and reached out a hand in trepidation, expecting to feel the warm skin of a beast sitting in the dark. But there was nothing; only space, empty black space. He was about to step through when he heard again the sound of footsteps at his back. He waited for Dreylock to catch up. Somewhere along the way he had lost his walking stick and was now moving forward by will power alone, or just sheer madness. In fact, he looked stronger than ever, empowered by some final hope. The two men looked at each other in the tunnel. Dreylock’s face was a mess: the stitches on his face had snapped and his wounds had opened. The blood travelled down the channels of his scars, dripping onto his neck and clothes. Yet his eyes glinted with life.
“Let me go first,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”
“Very well. But be careful.”
Thomas Dreylock nodded his thanks and then walked ahead along the darkness of the passage. Nyquist waited a few moments and then he too set off, entering the next room. He was now standing at the edge of a large chamber, roughly circular, lit from above with a soft light. It must’ve been some kind of storage room at one point, or a wine cellar. There was no sign of Dreylock, but there were three other doorways set in the walls at regular intervals, so he assumed the other man had already moved ahead through one of those. But Nyquist had reached his destination, he saw that straight away. A continuous scraping could be heard. Scratch, scratch, scratch. He stepped forward cautiously and spoke in a hushed tone:
“Zelda? Is that you?”
The woman sitting at a small desk at the room’s center didn’t respond in any way. She carried on with her writing, putting marks on paper. That ancient ritual.
“Zelda? Can you hear me?”
The pen scratched away. Her head was bent down, her hair falling forward to hide the face. The lace blouse she was dressed in, once white, was spotted all over with black marks. Nyquist called to her again and this time she reacted, making a slight movement of her head, setting the long strands of blonde hair swinging. He saw that this too was stained black in many places. It was ink, he saw that now. Zelda bent down and filled her pen from a kind of church font at her side; it was filled to the brim with midnight’s ink. He saw that the font was fed by a series of pipes that ran across the floor, each flowing with the same black substance, an endless supply. And she needed such quantity, she really did, for the entire floor at her feet was filled with discarded sheets of paper, hundreds of them, or thousands – Nyquist could not possibly estimate how many – and every single one of them filled to the margins with tiny scrawled handwriting, the lines of script so close together that hardly any white surface could be seen.
Zelda finished the page she was working on and let it slide to the floor. The papers whispered against each other as this new arrival settled into place. Many of them had fallen into the channels and were soaking up the ink, becoming eclipsed. It mattered little, the words were being written one by one and what happened to the pages after they were filled up was of little or no importance.
Zelda lived only for that point where the pen’s metal nib bit into the paper.
Scratch, scratch, scratch.
Nyquist walked over to the desk, where he read the lines of text that were currently being written:
He looks at the words that Zelda is writing and he touches her on the shoulder and she stops her work and turns and look at him…
Nyquist did exactly that; he had no choice. He touched Zelda Courtland on the shoulder and she stopped her action and looked up at him. They were, the both of them, described and rendered and brought to life by the words as written, each the subject and each the object of the same sentence.
Black ink dripped from the end of the nib, forming a small pool on the paper.
Not a sound was heard in the chamber.
Zelda’s hands were raw from the act of writing, and her lips were parched, her skin pallid, her demeanor weak and her breathing shallow and drawn. Every visible part of her body and clothes was speckled with the ink. Nyquist’s heart almost broke from the pain of seeing her like this. Yet her eyes were still lively, still bright. And she spoke to him in a quiet voice: “On the edge of town where the stories flow away, they stand alone…” At first he didn’t understand what she was saying, and then entirely unbidden he started to join in, speaking the verse with her although he had neither heard it nor read it before this night, he was sure of that. They spoke as one.
They stand alone,
a man and a woman
covered in silence.
They spoke with one voice, and each word triggered a memory.
They walk alone
with only one word
left unspoken between them
one word unwritten.
In his mind a story was forming: another life, another world.
Until, on the border
where one breath meets another
a story begins in a kiss –
here, on the edge of town
where the words flow away.
And by the time the last line of the poem had faded, Nyquist knew the truth. He knew that his other self was lying in a bed, desperately ill, perhaps dying, damaged from a fall, infected by a virus of words, his mind and body taken over by the novel known as The Body Library. He knew also that Bella Monroe was sitting at his bedside, his narrative officer, talking to him, nursing him.
“I sent you a message,” Zelda asked. “But I wasn’t sure if it got through.”
“Yes. I saw it on my typewriter.”
“I wanted to put an X in the end, but I couldn’t manage it.”
“I know. That letter’s broken.”
Yes, down to the last detail he saw the truth as it was written, as it was lived.
Zelda’s eyes closed and opened again and she looked at him and a smile came to her, and she said, “Johnny”, and his heart leapt. She stood up from her seat and he took her in his arms, and for a moment they held each other’s gaze. And in that moment Nyquist received another truth, a truth from the other side: this woman was dead. He had seen Zelda Courtland’s body lying on a slab in the morgue. He had identified her for the police, and yet here she was, or a semblance of her. Alive. Yes, alive. Not fully, but as much as he was. Two equals. He struggled to speak, to express his feelings for her. But Zelda’s attention was already drifting away, back to the task she’d been set: the pen, the paper, and the endless stream of words.
He held onto her. “Zelda, come away with me.”
“I can’t leave this room, I can’t. He would kill me.”
“Who would? Tell me.”
“Oberon.”
It seemed as though she might carry on from there and explain the spell she was under, but her writing hand started to twitch. She sat down and applied pen to paper
.
“Zelda?”
She paid him no mind, but carried on with her work, the ink splashing on the paper as the lines of text appeared. Nyquist tried to get her to stop, but every action only caused the pen to dig deeper into the page, until the words almost broke the surface. He dared to look at the page, expecting to see Zelda locked in a description of the meeting that had just taken place between them, but she had already moved on, recording every single thing that was happening in the building.
And again Sebastian Vaughn walks out into the corridor to feed his cat, every night the same, the same cat every night, several times, or a different cat of identical stripe and coloring, it’s impossible to tell. One cat many times, feeding. Or many cats each fed once only, an infinitude of cats, who can tell? But Sebastian loves this animal. The cat is his only friend. Sebastian lives alone in apartment 44. Sebastian lives alone except for the cat, Mr Peterson Smythe the Third, who lives in the corridor. This is the cat’s name, Peterson Smythe the…
This is the job that Theodore Lewis used to do; now Zelda had taken over.
It was too painful to witness.
“Zelda! Stop!”
He reached for her but she shrugged him off and pushed his hand away violently. Her head was bowed down, her eyes fixed on the moving nib, her fingers flexed tight around the barrel of the pen. Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch. Nyquist could do very little, without inflicting damage on her. The nib ran dry once again. Zelda dipped the barrel of the pen into the font to refill it. Nyquist used this small respite to make one last try; he whispered to her, cajoling her to come away with him. Zelda ignored him. The pen was now refilled and she started to write once more, the words flowing out endlessly across the page. In this way life in the tower block was recorded, each moment as it passed, each thought, each feeling, each and every action and reaction, the various characters moving here and there. The cat was fed and Mr Vaughn went back into his apartment, and so it went on, and Nyquist stood there, helpless, helpless.
A shadow moved in the chamber.
It was the boy, Calvin. He stepped forward. “Zelda won’t leave here,” he said. “How can she? Like yourself and all others brought here, she is under orders. There is no escaping it, I’m afraid.”
“Why is she doing this?” Nyquist asked.
“All things must be chronicled. All the changes to the different stories, as they happen. Or else they vanish forever.”
“But there’s no meaning to it.”
“None that you might understand.” The boy smiled and tilted his head slightly. “But my grandfather has his needs. He desires people, characters, his players as he calls them, to move around, to keep him occupied in his long sleep.” Calvin pointed towards Zelda. “The game is played, each with their parts.”
“For what purpose?”
“Why, for the greatest purpose. Life, itself.”
Nyquist thought about what this might mean. “Your grandfather is dying?”
“Oh, long dead, I’m afraid. Long, long dead.” The boy’s smile turned to a frown. “I call him grandfather only as a courtesy. His real lineage would bore you. You see, in reality he’s my great great, great, great…”
“Save your words for later, kid, you might need them.”
Calvin paused in mid-sentence.
Zelda wrote on and on. Ink dripped from the pen.
Scratch, scratch…
The boy’s lips came together in a sullen pout. “There’s no need to be so…”
“So what?”
“There’s no need to tell me off.” And suddenly the boy looked like a child, nothing more, all of his precociousness gone. He was small and alone and more than a little afraid.
“I need to see your grandfather.”
“That can happen,” Calvin replied. “Yes, why not.” And here the smile returned in glee at such prospects. “After all, that’s why you’re here.”
He guided the way to one of the doorways. A short passage led to the main part of the apartment block’s basement, a much larger chamber. It only took one step into the lighted space for Nyquist to know immediately: he had been here before. The memories returned with a shock of anguish. In this room he had first fallen into the book’s embrace.
Most of all he remembered the large, circular pool of ink that lay at the room’s center. He remembered the shine of its surface, its texture and its pull on his eyes. He remembered the stones that lined it, set in the packed earth of the basement floor. Even now he felt drawn to the edge, and felt an intense desire to submerge himself within its black, unseeable depths. It drew him forth. It was a mirror in which he saw himself truly, both as he was a week or so ago – a man lost in a city that he could barely understand, chasing stories that never included him – and as he was now, changed utterly, a man not of the world, but of a book, a man of papery skin, of words in the blood, a man of fiction.
He remembered most of all the moment of change.
Once Upon A Time
NYQUIST LAY in his bed, perfectly still, incapable of a single movement, both asleep and not asleep. He saw almost everything that took place in the Melville Tower; he heard most of what was being said by his fictional self and the various people he met on his way. He saw that Zelda was alive, and he longed to reach out for her, he longed for her to become real once more. He longed to be joined to her story once more, and for that story to carry on.
Once upon a time…
Now he remembered. He saw clearly the story of the last week, all the events that had brought him to this point. He saw clearly his first visit to Melville Five. He saw himself standing at the edge of the pool of ink, led there by the boy, Calvin. Zelda stood nearby, likewise hypnotized, bound by the spell. Nyquist looked around, taking in each detail: the rough stone walls, the patches of damp, the water dripping down from the ceiling pipes, the terrible smell of decay, of rotten flesh, of mildew, the alphabugs buzzing around their clay and twig nest in the lower trunk of the tree.
The tree. The one tree, the world tree. The word tree.
Once upon a time a man called Nyquist was led into an underground chamber. Here he saw the great tree of words, and the old king who ruled this realm.
Here the vast tangled roots of the building’s tree grew up from the earth floor. Nyquist felt he was looking into the heart of the world itself: the fungal growths, the peeling bark, the wood rotting away, the roots, knotted together like some magical diagram, a mathematical equation of such complexity it was impossible to unravel, each tendril dark and clotted with further darkness in between, the absolute absence of light, yet filled with innumerable insects sparkling as they slithered: worms, bugs, flies, caterpillars, moths, all moving constantly like the thoughts in a brain. So that was it, the tree was the living brain of the tower, the root of all stories. Nyquist felt his own mind was entangled with the tree’s nature: like Odin witnessing the letters of the runic alphabet in the roots of Yggdrasil, he too saw language at work, being formed and unformed amid the triple states of plant, insect and human.
A man was hanging from the tree.
His feet were held in leather straps nailed to the trunk high up near the cellar’s ceiling, and his body was suspended upside down so that his head lay a few feet above the pool of ink. His arms hung down further, actually entering the pool, with both hands dipping into the ink completely, up to the forearms. The man’s hair was yards long: Nyquist imagined it had been left to grow untamed for many years or decades or centuries, it was impossible to tell. Yet the thick insect-riddled strands of hair were black, jet black, the same color as the ink into which they sank at their lowest reach.
Once upon a time a man called Nyquist looked into a pool of ink, and fell into it, drawn by forces he could barely understand.
Nyquist moved a little closer, skimming the curved edge of the pool. Some of the tree roots, like the man’s arms and his hair, also dipped into the liquid. Everything in this place was feeding or being fed by the ink. Yet the upside-down man himself
was rotten to the core: his skin shriveled and grey and his face and upper chest lined with folds of desiccated flesh. The clothes he wore were as old as he was and seemed to have fused with his skin; skin and cloth were made of the same leathery material. Where tree, flesh, clothes began and ended was impossible to discern. In fact, Oberon looked to be long dead. Yet his eyes were open and young and vibrant in their aspect, and they looked at Nyquist from the depths of the old man’s ancient face, and they sparkled with life’s central pulse. And from those eyes Nyquist received a message, not of words, but of impulse, the urge to obey, to follow the single pathway chosen for him. He did so, by turning back to the edge of the pool. Without a single thought he walked down a series of stone steps, into the ink, until his body was covered up to the neck. Zelda joined him, compelled by the same magic. There was a gentle pulling motion from below, from the liquid itself, and now his head sank beneath the surface. He was floating quite peacefully, suspended, still conscious, still breathing easily. He wasn’t drowning. No, in fact the opposite: the ink was in some way giving him life, adding something to him, even as it took away an equal amount. Here was the story in its perfect moment; the long, tangled plot of his life up to then was held in the balance. Everything slowed. Everything was silence. He was aware of Zelda’s body floating alongside his own, some few feet away. She too was at peace. He was aware of long strands of human hair waving slowly like fronds in the ink not too far away. He saw the old man’s two hands submerged up to the wrists, glowing a spectral white, and he saw the deep cuts on each wrist. He saw the blood flowing continuously from the wound in the right hand, into the pool; and in exchange the ink entering the old man’s body at the left-hand wound. Nyquist was aware, intensely, of the beauty of this system, how the story gave blood to life, and how life gave ink to story, and so it was and so it would ever be. At which point the book took hold of him. He was now inside the Library of Bodies. He was being read, and written upon, simultaneously. Words were given to him, words taken away. His own story taken, the ink’s story given to him, infecting him.
