by Jeff Noon
Two beginnings, two endings.
Once upon a time a man stepped into a pool of black ink and his body was written and written again, over and over, until he became little more than the words that told his story.
And he rose up from the pool, suddenly gasping for air, for a good clean breath, knowing that he’d nearly drowned, nearly died. Zelda was there as well, as distressed as he was. The two of them floundered in the liquid, seeking a foothold on the steps. They climbed out, both shivering, holding each other for comfort. The man in the tree watched them through his unblinking eyes. Nyquist felt dizzy. The world belonged not to himself, but to the spirit of the building. The ink flowed off his body and clothes as mercury might off a looking glass, until he was perfectly dry. He separated from Zelda a little and turned back to gaze at the pool’s surface. It lay perfectly still, poised, shining black, as flat and seemingly as solid as a slab of basalt. He couldn’t believe that he’d been submerged there. He stared at the ink, and the ink spoke in silence to him. The liquid moved slightly. The smallest possible tide affected it, the moon’s power almost lost down here in the basement of this strange tower. The ink shimmered. It glowed. Nyquist’s eyes were drawn to it, held by it. The ink stared back at him and within its black depths he saw a figure and then one more, two bodies floating just beneath the surface, as he and Zelda had been, just a minute or so before. The two figures took on form and shape and features, even as he watched, even as Zelda came to stand at his side, to watch with him, as the two figures rose and broke through the ink’s surface and floated there suspended: two bodies, male and female perfectly formed. In mirror-fashion he watched his own face take shape on this other body, as Zelda’s features took over the female counterpart.
Fiction, Non-Fiction. He now occupied both states, simultaneously.
Nyquist felt himself weakened as he watched his reflection take on solid flesh and rise from the ink. He backed away from his living image in terror.
The boy Calvin approached. “It’s time to go. The city awaits you.”
Nyquist and Zelda had no option but to follow him, caught as they were in his charms. The last of the binding spell took them back up the stairs to the ground floor and from there to the tower’s entranceway, and the very last traces of the spell got them as far as the limit of the tower’s light, where Nyquist came to his senses and he fell and kept on falling and landed easily on a patch of dried glass and rolled over to break his fall. Confused, he struggled to his feet, only just keeping his balance, and wondering how on earth he had gotten here. His mind was a blank. He looked across the circle of towers and saw a woman walking away, her back to him. She was the only other person in sight. A single word entered his mind; the woman’s name: Zelda. She glanced back and made a gesture, a signal of some kind, a wave. And then she turned and moved further on, into the shadows.
He was alone. It was like this sometimes, he thought: two people have walked the same story path for a short while, and then parted. That should be enough. Surely, that was enough. Let it be enough…
Nyquist lay in the darkness of his coma and thought of these events, these feelings, at last with full knowledge of what had taken place in the tower at Melville, and his lips parted slightly. A single word escaped the silence.
Once…
The rest of his body was still paralyzed; only his lips were moving. But for the first time in all that long night he had spoken, a gasp more than a word, a primitive utterance wrenched from deep within, from that veiled, sultry part of the mind where words are born. He tried it again, a little louder this time, even though it pained him.
Once upon…
He took in the world he could see, the tiny portion of the ward, the ceiling above, the lights blinking on the monitors. He was lying in a bed in a room in Kafka Court with Bella Monroe at his side. And he saw Monroe move towards him, towards his face. He saw her startled eyes, the movement of her lips: she was speaking to him.
“Nyquist! What is it? What did you say?”
Once upon a time…
Four words. It was all he could manage. A beginning.
He saw Monroe’s hand moving on his face. Her touch. For the barest moment he could feel her touch on his skin, and then it drifted away once more. He tried to move his own hand in response, a single finger. It was no good. He tried to blink. He couldn’t do it. Not yet. But he had to keep trying.
“John, I’m here. I’m listening.”
He heard Bella Monroe calling to him, this simple admittance. A promise. I’m listening. It gave him hope. Here in the dark, in the stillness, someone is listening. It gave him hope and strength and he sank back into his mind and saw the world once more through his other self’s eyes. He saw the basement of Melville Five. He gazed once more into midnight’s ink.
Words Unwritten
NYQUIST DREW his sight away from the ink. Within these depths he had split apart from his purely physical self and become a separate entity, a fictional form given body and blood and heat and life and soul by the power of the book. Everything he thought of as life had started here, just a few days ago.
Once upon a time: this was his place of birth.
Thomas Dreylock was kneeling on the ground on the other side of the pool, with his head lowered and his hands raised to cup his face. It was a pitiful gesture; all the anger had left him, leaving only this need, this wordless prayer. It did little good. The blood from his face dribbled through his fingers, quickly soaking into the earth floor.
Nyquist walked over to the giant tangled roots of the word tree and to the man who hung upside down within them, the dead man. It was their second meeting. Yet the sight still shocked him: the dried-up flesh, the exposed bones, the tattered and mummified clothing. By far the eyes were the worst, the only living thing in the entire body.
The insects made a constant buzzing and chittering sound as they slithered and crawled over the bark of the tree and the skin of Oberon.
Nyquist spoke aloud his first thought: “Will you let Zelda go?”
There was no visible reaction, not even a flicker of the eyelids, and his tongue lay dead in the silence of his closed mouth.
Nyquist turned to the boy. “What does he want? Tell me what he wants.”
Calvin answered simply: “My grandfather needs your story.”
“I’ve given it to him, already. He’s stolen it.”
“No. Not quite.”
“He’s taken everything!”
“One tiny thing remains.”
“One thing?”
“You kept it hidden away.”
“There’s nothing else. I promise you.”
“One thing. One tiny thing only.”
Nyquist looked at Calvin. He looked at the man in the tree, at the pool of ink, at poor Dreylock. The whole chamber – with its stench of damp and rot, its haze of dust, the swarms of insects, and the constant rustling papery noise of the building, even the reader’s faraway voice bringing it all to life, even the haze and hum of his own head – all conspired against him. He cried out, “There is nothing!”
Calvin looked at him with kindness. “You left something behind in the shadows. One part of your story. Oberon can sense it, hidden away. Something your father said to you.”
“My father?” The word surprised Nyquist. “I can’t remember.” He was desperate now. He turned to the man in the tree and cried out, “There’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
But Calvin persisted. “One thing.”
“No.”
“Hidden away.”
“Stop it! Be quiet.”
But Calvin would not be silenced. He sulked and whimpered, “I only want to please Oberon, can’t you see that?” His eyes sparkled with need. “I want him to look kindly on me, and to treat me as his favorite.”
Nyquist saw the truth of this, but didn’t know how to respond. He could only say again, so quiet as to not be heard:
There is nothing.
Calvin’s expression darkened and his voice
took on its older aspect. “Speak only of the missing story, and whatever you want is yours.”
Nyquist stepped away from the tree, the pool, the boy. He saw the entranceway that led to the smaller chamber: he pictured Zelda at her neverending task, still caught in the spell that forced her to write down and record all of the tower’s happenings, including this one, his struggle to find that part of himself that was hidden, hidden, hidden away – and in the space of a single thought he was back there again, a child of eight years, back in his home after his father had walked away into the mist, lost forever…
Nyquist hesitated. The pool of darkness glimmered at his feet.
“What is it?” Calvin asked. “Can you remember something?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s clear now.”
“Are you sure? Look closer. What do you see?”
Nyquist dismissed the boy with a wave, but the thought remained, sharp, in focus. He knew what was needed. He saw it plainly.
Calvin clung to the hope. “Speak. Speak again,” he pleaded. “Speak on. More, more of the story, all of it. Speak!”
Nyquist could hear the rustling of the leaves from the whole of the tree as it reached up through the seventeen storeys of the building, up to the penthouse, the roof, where it blossomed into the night sky.
“I don’t know how to say it.”
“Not in words. Speak direct!”
The dead man in the tree stared at Nyquist with his dead eyes, the pool glistened, and Dreylock moaned from where he knelt on the packed earth, his ravaged face reflected in the pitch-black ink. Seeing these things as though for the first time, a change came over Nyquist, a calmness. He knew now what he had to do. And it wasn’t about escaping, not at all.
He said at last, “In exchange then, but not for Zelda.”
Calvin swayed back and forth. “No? What then, what do you want? Say it.”
Nyquist skirted the pool’s edge until he reached Dreylock and he held out his arms, taking the other man’s hands in his, raising him to his feet. He didn’t need to speak, not now. Everyone there knew what he wanted. He led Dreylock into the pool and allowed the ink to take the other man’s body into its hold: Dreylock was floating easily, as Nyquist stood upright with his feet planted firmly on the bottom of the pool. And then he ducked down, taking Dreylock with him. The ink covered his clothes, his body, his face. Once more, for the second time in his life, Nyquist was submerged in this liquid, but this time he was fully aware of where he was and what he was doing, or at least trying to do. Dreylock struggled in his arms, but Nyquist calmed him and the ink washed over them both equally as they moved into a deeper part of the pool, and now Nyquist was floating too, alongside the other man.
All was darkness, all silence. All stillness.
Dreylock’s body glowed with a soft, silvery blue light within the blackness.
Nyquist could hardly feel himself breathing. Not a thing in the world existed but for the two of them, in this place and this time. No more stories, no tales to tell, no consequences of action on plot or character. Only the ink itself, midnight’s blood, as it made its circular route from the sliced wrists of the old man in his tree, down into the pool and around, through Dreylock’s body, across his damaged face and flesh. And suddenly Dreylock tensed, and then relaxed, and Nyquist saw the ink at work, he saw the curing of the wounds, the skin patching itself together. Slowly, slowly, the scars merging into new flesh, the face reforming. Here and only here, on this one particular page of The Body Library, was the story remade, the pieces bound back together. With a shock, Dreylock lurched upwards, breaking the surface of the ink pool, reaching for breath and life with every fiber of his being.
But Nyquist waited. He waited until the pool had settled again and the surface reformed into its perfect mirror, upwards and below. His eyes closed, and he lay perfectly still, at rest, suspended within the blackness. He had no way of knowing which direction he was facing; all that mattered was the act of being, of being written, and of being read, one word feeding another. His whole life story was happening, happening again in the present, and there he was suddenly, back again, eight years and ten months old, coming home to the cold and empty house after his father had walked away, leaving young Nyquist entirely alone in life.
He saw the letter on the mantelpiece, the words inscribed on the envelope.
For my son.
He reached out and opened the envelope and read again for the second time in his life those first lines, written by his father all those many years ago.
Dear child, I don’t expect you to understand this.
And this time he carried on.
In the endless night of stories, in the tower of stories, in the basement where stories are made and unmade, in the pool of ink from which all the stories flower, within the blood of Oberon himself, where stories flow back and forth from the heart, John Henry Nyquist carried on reading. He moved on from those first lines and the entire letter was seen by him, read by him, those words he had never dared to read, a father’s final message to his son, the words he had torn into pieces and eaten and swallowed – he saw them clearly, these hidden lines that lay inside his body, never lost, never faded, not quite. The words that had always rested inside him in wait perhaps for this very moment.
He breathed in.
He breathed out.
The ink entered his mouth and coated his tongue.
He breathed in and he breathed out and those faraway words were conjured from his body and spoken aloud.
Ever since your mother died I have lived in such pain that I can hardly move without thinking of her. I no longer have any true understanding of life. Everything is darkened by her loss. My son, I know you won’t understand this, not yet, not in your tender years, but I fear for my life. I fear that I may do something terrible, taking a step I can never come back from. I cannot say the words, they would hurt you so. All I can do is search for your mother’s ghost. Nothing else will comfort me.
Please, John, please forgive me.
I will come back for you one day, and we shall all be as one again, a family.
I promise.
Your loving father, George.
Now the words left Nyquist’s body and he watched with fascination as they issued from his parted lips, each separate word like a creature in the black ink, each letter illuminated in yellow or electric blue. They swam around his body and then formed into a pattern, and moved off together seeking out the open wounds in the white hands that held themselves in the pool a few feet away, the old man’s hands. Nyquist saw his father’s words entering at both wounds. It was that simple: the words were being read by Oberon’s body.
And suddenly Nyquist was drowning, he couldn’t breathe, the ink was in his mouth, his throat, his lungs, and his hands splashed and reached out desperately for purchase, for a ridge or a ledge to cling to. In the end it was a tree root that saved him, and he clambered up hand over hand until the clean black surface of the pool parted all around him, and he dragged in air, biting cold clean air, glad to his soul for the life it held.
He collapsed onto the packed earth beside the pool and lay there, breathing heavily. He could see the ceiling of the chamber, the patches of moss and mold on the stonework, the swarms of bugs that flew around. His heart raced and lights pulsed in his eyes.
After a moment he sat up and saw that Dreylock was leaning against the wall, at peace now, his hands touching at the scars that were still bonding and healing on his face. His eyes took in Nyquist and his expression hardly changed, but Nyquist could sense things beyond words, about all they had been through together: Dreylock was grateful. And Nyquist shared the feeling, because of the things he had learned about himself this night. He felt lighter on his feet as he stood up. Calvin was standing near the tree, looking up at his great ancestor, the man who stirred now in the roots and branches. The insects were making merry, the leaves rustled and murmured and the bark cracked and crackled and shudder
ed with new growth, with tiny stems of green wood. Already a red flower was seen amid the rot. And the old man stirred as well, his eyes brimming with tears and his hands and legs twitching, as the roots split open to let him free.
Nyquist had no desire to see the outcome of this process. He made his way back down the corridor to find Zelda. But the smaller chamber was empty, the desk and chair vacant. Sheets of paper were strewn all around. The ink overflowed the font and ran freely across the stone floor, seeking new words to write – but there were none. Zelda had vanished.
Nyquist made his way back through the underground tunnels, following the traces of ink on the walls. He pictured Zelda’s hands leaving these marks as she steadied herself, seeking direction in the gloom. Ahead, a grey light shone. He walked towards it and came to the metal steps that led upwards into Theodore Lewis’s apartment. The author’s body still lay on the floor, another victim of this tower and its endless stories. The sliced and scattered pieces of page number nine were useless now.
Nyquist called out Zelda’s name, but there was no answer.
He walked out into the first floor corridor. This too was empty. But as he made his way towards the elevator he could hear whispers from behind every door. These sounds grew louder as he walked along, until a tumult of voices reached him. He realized that the voices were not only coming from behind these doors, but from every apartment in the building, top to bottom, and from the air itself, from all around him. The building was speaking aloud. The voices followed him into the elevator car. It was quite easy now, easy to reach the ground floor. The spell was weakening. He walked out through the front entranceway.
