Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

  You want me to work for you? That’s my price. Give me Stella.

  But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this is my price being paid, and Nikolaos Megalos exists purely in order to deliver my fee.

  Stella, and a phone. I want a phone.

  Ahead of me in the narrow street, she makes an impatient noise. ‘You have a question. Ask it.’

  Are you her?

  I blurt: ‘Do you love me?’

  She laughs, unconcerned. ‘Not that one, Constantine. I will answer that one later.’

  She looks away again. ‘Ask me about something difficult.’

  I don’t know where it comes from: ‘What’s the Chamber of Isis?’ Because I swear, I’ve heard of it before.

  ‘It is the place the mother goddess set aside from the mortal world; the womb of the new. Perhaps it is one of the Pentemychos, the five secret recesses of the gods, or perhaps they are all the one Chamber viewed from different angles. It is hope, and atemporality. It is the holiest of temples, the most mysterious.’

  The next question pops out before I can stop it, because suddenly I think she might know. ‘What is happening to me?’

  Between two houses with carpets hanging out to air on the step, she indicates a particular door. She lays her hand on the wood, then shrugs and steps back. ‘You are the promise of our coming dawn.’

  I don’t know what that means. Stella laughs, and her hand reaches out to touch my forehead, just as it always did when her mind found a pathway which mine could not. Did I not make it clear? Stella is much, much cleverer than I am.

  Stella was.

  The same cool fingers, sure and knowing. The same thumb against my temple, the quick blessing of pressure. The old Stella would kiss me. This new one is still cautious. She hesitates and then retreats, the omission a cool absence, the ghost touch of an intimacy missed. Instead, she explains.

  ‘Megalos leads us to a new world, and that world is reached through a gateway of understanding. The transition is hard. We have been trained against it by the Cartesian method that underpins modernity. We see as shadows all that is real, and as gold all that is dross. We must work to change what we understand. Only willingly can we enter the new Greece, by study and by deep commitment. But you, Constantine: you are ineluctable. You are infused with a god, as if our world has already arrived. Your mind is modern – and yet in you is the ancient, hale and vibrant and consuming. You are the Orpheus, gone into the underworld and retrieved not Eurydice but Persephone, or her dam. And yet, she waits. She has brought chaos to the world and our cause is advanced, but she remains with you. Perhaps she is content. Perhaps she is trapped. Perhaps you hold her back. You are a puzzle box, and you contain that which Nikolaos Megalos greatly desires. In that, he is a danger to you. You are not holy, so perhaps any man would do and you might cede the god to him. Or he might take it by force, rip it from you in the Chamber. That seems more appropriate. The pathways of old Greece were drenched in blood, after all.’

  What a totally fucking appealing idea. ‘He wants it.’

  She shrugs. ‘He believes he is called to it.’

  He believes. Not she believes. Not we. He.

  ‘And if he is not?’

  ‘That is heresy.’ She sounds as if I have made an improper suggestion at dinner – one that is not without some appeal.

  ‘If I’m the Hierophant, I must understand even heresy.’

  ‘The second does not follow from the first.’

  ‘Please.’

  She tuts. ‘Then he is wrong, and the god is not for him. You are the Hierophant. One way or another, you will go to the Chamber. This cannot be avoided. One cannot posit a model of the universe in which it does not occur. If Megalos is wrong, then that visit serves another purpose, or none at all, and what he attempts will either be futile or more dramatically it will derail the flow of that which is and is to come. In the last case, I suppose the resulting sidetrack will not be stable. Most likely the entirety of space and time will dissipate like steam and we will cease. You know as well as I do, Constantine, that saying these things in words expresses only nonsense.’

  We should say them in numbers. Yes.

  ‘So how am I supposed to find it?’

  ‘You need only live. You go to your meeting, inevitably.’

  ‘I like to think there’s a choice.’

  ‘Of course there is a choice, and this is what you choose. Otherwise what has already happened cannot have happened, and that is impossible.’

  ‘Even inside the Chamber?’

  She hesitates, then grins. ‘I don’t know, Constantine. Isn’t that marvellous?’

  She goes into the house, and I don’t have time to stop and worry, because the last thing I want now is to be the first Hierophant ever to get lost on his way to a mystical revelation.

  *

  The house, I realise, is not a house, but a facade masking the entrance into a sequence of caves in the upper part of the cliff. I can hear the sound of the sea a long way below, but only distantly because the caves are huge and they are full of people. The congregation – army? – of Nikolaos Megalos is here. This is where the pilgrims were going, and there are two more centipedes making their way across the cavern, pressing their faces to the rock in the formalised rhythm of adulation or pornography. As I enter there is a kind of ripple, and every face turns in my direction like the head of a compass needle. There must be more than a thousand, and even the children are looking, as if I’m an ice cream or a film star. At first there is quiet, and the noise of the water on the rocks pulses around us. Then somewhere a woman begins to murmur and stamp her foot, and then another follows suit, and the men too, and then the kids. The sound swells around us, bouncing off the rocks and shaping the air into a drum. I cannot hear the words, but I know what’s happening. These people are singing, raising up a chant of gratitude and exhortation. In fact, they are praying.

  It takes a moment longer to realise that they are praying to me.

  Somewhere, there’s a child with a high, sweet voice, a true soprano. Somewhere there’s a bass with just the right mix of depth and power to make the rock hum.

  They are praying to me.

  For a moment I feel dizzy, and my vision is in two places at once: in my own head, and somewhere up above me, passing through the sound like a bird, or like a shark in the water.

  ‘They are pleased to see you,’ Stella chides me, ‘but you should not let them distract you.’

  Right. Worship is something to be taken lightly.

  She leads me away on to a side passage. As soon as I have gone, the music stops. It’s like the first touch of anaesthesia. Stella leads me along the corridor, and I can see a sequence of doors and then finally a stairway leading down into the deeper caves beneath, and there’s a slow vibration in the column of air around the spiral steps, a breath of water and salt. ‘In here,’ Stella says.

  The room is disappointingly ordinary, full of trestle tables covered in paper and people reading. Megalos has arranged for electricity down here – a cable hangs from the ceiling in the middle, smaller wires spliced off it so that the whole thing is an inverted tree. No doubt Cosmatos would see some significance in that, but to me it’s just an electrical botch job and a fire risk.

  The people are more interesting when I look closer. They are reading not only old tomes and scrolls, which I was expecting, but new books and even electronic devices. To make the whole thing just a little bit creepy, there’s a dais where someone is repeating a single word in an endless monotone. I don’t know what the word is because it’s quite long and he never stops saying it, so the syllables are blending together and creating a mash of sound: a very small glossolalia, like a portable version. The light is dim and the reading lamps are a warm yellow. The whole place smells of stone and dust and paper. Megalos, reading glasses precariously resting on the end of his nose, looks up from a desk as we enter.

  ‘Torn no longer, Constantine Kyriakos.’

  *

  The
words are a greeting, and not true. I’m still torn. I still don’t believe in Stella. I squeeze her hand briefly, by way of apology. I don’t know if she understands, because she squeezes back.

  I wonder who I’m trying to persuade. I wonder how many participants in how many ghastly events have told themselves the same thing.

  ‘Torn no longer, Nikolaos Megalos,’ I say in my best Hierophant voice. It’s the one I used to use for talking to fraud investigators. The whole room – excepting the chanting man – murmurs quietly: ‘Torn no longer.’ People smile, and then, formalities concluded, get on with their work.

  ‘Anaximander of Miletos,’ Megalos says, pointing. ‘Pherecydes. Socrates and Plato, Archimedes …’ I wonder if he’s asking for recommendations. ‘This room is full of scholars.’

  Oh. Yes. He means that those names belong to these men, that that is who they are.

  Something about my face must leak bewilderment and non-belief. I understand his world. I just don’t inhabit it. Megalos smiles, and claps me on the shoulder: a man recognising hard work. ‘The prophetess Cassandra was cursed that she should see the future and never be believed. The goddess Athena was beyond such restriction because belief was not in her nature. She either knew or she did not. The fascination with faith is a Christian invention, of course. When your god simply never shows up, faith becomes quite necessary. In any case, long before the Nazarene carpenter, when King Agamemnon took Cassandra as a concubine after the Trojan War, Athena visited the sleeping woman in the shape of an owl and drank the tears from her cheeks as she dreamed. In this way, Cassandra’s visions passed to one who could understand and profit by them.

  ‘Athena saw this future: this godless world where Greece is fallen into poverty and the city that bears her name is flooded with the world’s detritus. And weeping in her turn she prepared against this day. She made a magic room where time does not flow and where the great Universal Solvent can be created by one of the wise, that Alkahest which can loose any prisoner, unshackle the mind of man. Wisdom is the tip of her spear, and with it she slays the serpent of lies.’

  He has his hands in the air, his eyes closed, and although he has not raised his voice the whole room has gone quiet. But once again, the silence into which he speaks is not a silence of fear or awe, but a kind of hunger. The movements of his body and the notes of his voice are signs, and their forcefulness satisfies something in his followers, an ongoing need to shore up the wall they are building around themselves, around their ability to believe they are particular instances of eternal symbols first, and people with memories of another life a distant second.

  He doesn’t seem to notice. ‘So we look for the Chamber, as you know. Here we look in books. There are many books of the legends of Greece, countless stories of Lost Atlantis and accounts of journeys to mystical kingdoms. We read them all. We do textual analysis with computers. We sing them, cut them up, acrosticise them and decipher them seeking hidden meanings.’

  ‘And you find?’

  ‘That it is remarkable how many academics choose to include libellous allegations as cryptext in their indices, or boast of their extramarital affairs in the footnotes. Stella’s uncle suggested this journey, years ago when we first met, and in the same breath he told me it would not work. But he was right: it must be attempted.’

  I really wish he hadn’t told me that. I was pretending Cosmatos wasn’t in this. When I get out of here, I’m going to punch him until he looks like an alloy hubcap. Except that I’m beginning to suspect I won’t have to wait.

  Megalos shrugs, and we pass into the corridor with him leading the way. Stella has somehow become almost invisible, stepping into the space behind our backs as we go. I wonder if she is afraid of Megalos because he is turning her into something she is not, or because he holds the key to her resuming what she is.

  He opens the door to the next room. It is silent and very beautiful. The walls are decorated with mosaics – I think they may be original – and there are marble sculptures of the gods of Olympus in little alcoves and on plinths. A young man sits in the very centre on a wooden chair. He has his eyes open, but something in the tilt of his head says that he sees nothing.

  Megalos closes the door. ‘He’s blind,’ I murmur.

  ‘Yes,’ Megalos says. ‘So he listens. Every morning, he sits and listens to the sound of the gods.’

  Because, in this new or old construction of the world, the symbol is the thing. The gods are present in those sculptures, in those mosaic tiles, if not entirely at least in some small way. The boy is literally listening for their voices. ‘And in the afternoons?’

  ‘A woman. A skilled artist. She watches them. There was a man we wanted, but he would not come. And then, too, he is a degenerate African – yet he has remarkable eyes. Still: devotion must suffice, if genius is tainted with licence.’

  I have to ask. ‘And … does it work?’

  Megalos smiles. ‘Yes.’

  That sheer, mountainous certainty again: flat-iron certainty. I can smell the metal in it, feel the heat. He is either right, or mad. Although I’m not sure what madness looks like on someone who has a complete and coherent variant understanding of the world. At a certain point the issue becomes political, not medical. Megalos is like one of the Fifteen Hundred: he defines his own reality.

  He hesitates now. ‘Are you wearing good shoes?’

  I look down. Trainers. Not expensive, but solid. Stella is wearing sandals.

  Megalos frowns at her. ‘You may wish to remain outside.’

  ‘Outside what?’ I ask.

  But he has already opened the next door on to a room full of blood.

  *

  In all my life, I have never seen so much blood, let alone smelled so much blood. It washes away sense and thought, a thick white scent of catastrophe and fear, of extreme danger and extreme injury.

  The sense of smell is the sense of touch at a most intimate and cellular level: a form of digestion and consumption. The smell is the thing, the smell of blood is blood aerosolised, and there is blood, everywhere about this room, and in the blood: people.

  The people wade and they dabble, unappalled as ducks in a pond. Sometimes they stoop and sniff, even sample the mess, or plunge their hands in and let it fall, finding bits of tube and organ. Their contact is no different from mine in kind, only in degree and ease. I, too, am washed in this stench.

  One man finds something unnameable and spreads it like a paperback on a handy ledge, leafs through the membranes as if reading a book. He calls out instructions to a sort of secretary standing off to one side with a spiral jotter. The secretary makes careful notes.

  The man with the organ in his hands is a haruspex. They all are: soothsayers reading the truth of the world from the bodies of dead things. Fish, sometimes. Cattle, often. Occasionally a man. I look down into the pool and hope that the human corpses come from accidents and natural deaths, that Megalos controls a hospital or has raided a mortuary. That he has not sent reivers out into the countryside to kidnap and murder.

  But why wouldn’t he? The true Greek can be resurrected. The foreigner does not deserve to be.

  Behind me, Stella’s face is warm in the reflected pink light. She meets my eyes and I can see her screaming.

  Megalos, in the corridor a moment later and still unmoved, regrets that he has been unable to obtain pythons as yet for a truly Delphic oracle. Will I, personally, require pythons? He has a line to some, but they will need to be liberated. Do I feel an absence of snakes in my spiritual environment?

  I tell him I do not. I wonder what he would do if I told him to get rid of the blood room, if I said it was a barrier to the knowledge of the god inside me. I wonder what the shark would do. Sharks are supposed to be frenzied by blood. Is she surging behind my eyes, longing to break through the lenses and bathe? I don’t think so. But then I’m always bewildered by what she will and will not do.

  This is when I realise how dangerous he is, not because he is evil, but because he is oth
er. We tend to assume people are in most ways like us, and in most cases there is an element of truth in that, but Megalos is on another order of different. He literally does not understand why blood should trouble him. The skull in the blood pool was a cow’s, but he would have no difficulty putting a man’s body to that use, or a woman’s, if he thought it would be more effective in securing his goals. I imagine that he has, already, and found the results no more lucid than with cattle, and since cattle have more blood and are easy to come by he hasn’t bothered with people again.

  No, I tell him. No need for pythons.

  He opens the last door, and it is actually worse. I remember where I’ve heard the expression ‘Chamber of Isis’ before.

  *

  Looking at the room, I can almost taste the booze and the lipstick. I can remember her face, feel the muscles in her hips. The party, the game. Witnessed. The Easter egg I found, stumbled on to with one hand covertly working its way between her shirt and her shoulder blades, eliciting wriggles and laughter. The gamer, the one with the most beautiful laugh.

  There are twenty very expensive computers in here, and every single one of them is playing Witnessed. There’s even a two-metre plasma-screen TV hanging on the wall, showing random slices of different games for a few seconds at a time. Witnessed. Not so long ago just the fad of the moment, and now a going concern. There’s been quite a ruckus about it, I gather, the British right wing all in an uproar and the usual suspects online calling it an Afro-communist feminazi plot or whatever. Come to think of it, I would have thought of Megalos as being one of those people – except that I wouldn’t really have pegged him as playing video games or even being aware of their existence. Perhaps he ran across it when he was looking for modern things of which to disapprove.

  I can hear the chanting again, the perfect Gregorian moan of male bass and female alto, something between an organ and a didgeridoo: prayer wheel gaming.