The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

Berger’s dedication to the process of an investigation was absurd, but it really did seem to be the only path to take—the rapidly disappearing path of some tidal causeway.

  Taryn said, ‘Khalef and Tahan are two men from a company called Dynamic Systems who are building a server farm in Pakistan. They came to speak to me about my book.’ She duly proffered her book to the wounded stranger.

  He took it in one hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said, grateful and reverent. He looked at its cover and registered deep, delighted surprise. ‘Taryn Cornick of the Northovers,’ he said.

  Taryn had just noticed the teetering piles of books on and around all the hut’s furniture. Hardback and paperback books, all recent editions. ‘It’s you,’ she said in baffled wonder. ‘Barefoot-with-books. Seven years ago. On the road between Princes Gate Magna and St Cynog’s Cross.’ Then, ‘But it can’t be you.’

  He smiled at her. But his arm was quaking. He had to lay her book down.

  ‘He’s going into shock,’ Berger said. He got up, his hair brushing the roof. He grabbed the bearskin blanket and dragged blanket and man off the bundles of sleek, fresh bracken. Berger hauled him outside, into the twilight. He got on his knees, pushed Taryn’s book aside, untied the bandaging cardigan and peeled away the gore-gummed compress of index and bibliography. ‘I need water. Wet a cloth.’

  Taryn ducked back into the hut and scrambled about opening the boxes and peering in at clinking bottles, and smaller boxes, and jumbled objects made of copper and wood, gold and silver. The sight of so much gold made the hair on the back of her neck bristle, almost painfully, as if someone were plucking it. She found a stack of neatly folded shirts. She bunched one in her hands and helplessly showed it to Berger.

  ‘It’ll have to be the lake,’ he said, and jerked his head at the water visible behind him.

  Taryn hurried that way. The turf at the water’s edge yielded, wheezing under her feet. Reeds sprouted through pale green moss. Where the water began the shore was so thickly fenced with sedges that Taryn could only get at the lake in one place, a slim border of fawn sand perhaps three metres wide and out of line with the door to the hut, as if the hut’s occupant never took the straight route from hut to lake. The beach was as askew as the fence of tufted trees along the brow of the hill above the far shore. It wasn’t an ugly asymmetry of disproportion, just unsettling, the sort of oddity that after a time conjures a kind of wonderment. Beyond the ridge was only sky, the palest blue shading to soft lemon at the ridgeline. The ridge was a good way off, but looked like a garden wall rather than a steep hill. Abrupt, knife-edge thin, slightly crenellated. Perhaps it was the rim of an extinct volcano, and this was a crater lake.

  ‘Taryn!’ Berger shouted.

  Taryn thrust the shirt under the water. The cloth silvered, and bubbled, but wouldn’t soak through. Taryn massaged it, squeezing and wringing until the fabric darkened. Then she lifted it above her head and ran back to the hut. Water poured down her arms and under her clothes.

  Berger took the shirt and swabbed the shot holes. Blood and water mixed and ran in rivulets over the young man’s dark skin. Berger kept wiping and peering. He said he was checking for the skin discolouration that was a sign of internal bleeding. He didn’t think any of the shot had gone deep; most of it was up in the guy’s pectoral muscles and shoulder. ‘It’ll have to be removed but . . .’

  Berger paused and bent over. He subsided until his hair was dabbling in the welling blood. Taryn thought he was taking a very close look. Then she realised he’d simply folded over mid-sentence.

  ‘Berger!’ she yelled. Her shout didn’t echo. It should have, given the bowl-like enclosure of the hills. She heard her own cry, its isolate perfection, as if she were in a studio lined with acoustic panels.

  The wounded man put his hand in Berger’s hair. It wasn’t the wondering touch of someone feeling their way back to consciousness. It was a caress or a blessing. ‘Is this the same man?’

  ‘The same as what?’

  His face was drained, his pupils huge, but he wasn’t trembling anymore. ‘The Valravn,’ he said. Then looked irritated. ‘The man standing with you at the edge of the wood.’

  Taryn shook her head. She wanted to ask, ‘What’s a Valravn?’ The word was vaguely familiar. And the way the stranger used it sounded informed. Flat on his back and bleeding, his whole manner was that of someone who knew many things.

  But then, ‘I can’t make any sense of this,’ he said, and pushed his fingers into Berger’s hair and pulled them through, combing it. ‘It’s the iron. It’s messing with my head. You are going to have to go get help. The nearest house is three miles downhill, along the stream that passes out of the low place in the crater wall.’ He pointed west.

  Taryn saw that it was west because that was the darkest place in a sky that was growing lighter by the minute. Birds were singing—a thick, chiming, burring, complicated music of bird calls she’d never heard before in actuality or on a soundtrack. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

  He let go of Berger and put his hand on hers. ‘Don’t you feel better?’

  Taryn consulted her body. She was chilled from giving up her cardigan, from fear and confusion and cold lakewater. Her hands were red from being immersed. She felt very alone. But as soon as she registered that, she realised she hadn’t felt alone for weeks. She’d felt occupied, spied on, contaminated by some poisonous personality, not her own.

  She began to cry. Throughout all the terrors and alarms and humiliations of those weeks she hadn’t shed a single tear. These tears were like grace. Her throat was full and thick with sobbing. She gazed into the stranger’s eyes and cried her own out. Because she was a rational adult, she was waiting for an explanation. But on some level that didn’t matter at all—something had happened to her, and she understood that her life had been saved.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  She nodded.

  ‘As soon as I saw you I knew something had you. I decided to bring you here. But I was shot. You and your friend carried me through the gate. I didn’t decide to admit your friend. It just happened.’

  He had been momentarily unconscious. He’d been tugging at her, then he was falling. She and Berger picked him up between them and hauled him, feet dragging, towards the library atrium. Berger was a little behind her. He’d put his body between them and the man who was maybe reloading his gun. And then they found themselves on a grassy hillside.

  ‘You had to come here,’ the stranger said. ‘It was an emergency.’ He gazed at her, his eyes wide. He was apologising for something, but she couldn’t see what.

  ‘I’m here on purpose and Berger by accident?’ Taryn said, to help him.

  The rim of the sun had cleared the hidden horizon. The sky above the lake filled with light. Taryn looked up. She had never seen such a clear, lucent blue. The slopes around the wall were rich pasture, and along the rim of the crater heath grew in softer colours, thyme yellow, sage green. There were flowers through all of it, blue, yellow, red and white, pink and purple. It looked by turns intensely cultivated, and profoundly wild.

  Taryn wiped her eyes with her blood-stiffened cardigan and returned her gaze to the stranger. She remembered his eyes—a clear hazel, shy, curious, very warm. She said, inanely, ‘You’re just a person.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, that’s the thing. We are all just people. Even my goats and silly hens are persons.’ He looked around. ‘My silly hens who are hiding.’

  The warm sawing noise of a clutch of broody hens was coming from a thicket of fuchsia bushes by the wall of the hut. The hut really was wattle and daub, like the replica of a traditional Irish bothy in the National Museum in Dublin.

  Both the shirt Taryn had soaked and the torn one the stranger wore were handwoven and hand-stitched, a wool cloth, she thought. The hut and his clothes were weathered, and thrown together, but he and the landscape seemed somehow polished to the point of perfection.

  ‘I’m really scared,’ Taryn said—whispering confidingly. ‘But the dr
ead has gone. It was like I was trapped deep inside myself and, at the same time, exiled to my very edges.’

  ‘It doesn’t usually work that way,’ he said. He sounded baffled and concerned. Then, ‘Hello,’ to Berger, who had regained consciousness. ‘I think you caught some shot too.’ Again apologetic.

  Berger lifted his head off the stranger’s stomach and sat back on his haunches. He raised his arm. His leather jacket was perforated from his elbow to his armpit. ‘I shoved the barrel down. It would have been better if I had knocked it up again, but I was levering off an elbow to his face. A shotgun ricochet only has force at close quarters. Most of the first blast came off the metal sculpture and got you only because you covered Ms Cornick. We’d be a lot worse off if it wasn’t all ricochet. But, yes, I seem to have caught some.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Taryn said. ‘Both of you.’ Then, ‘Jacob . . .’ She decided that, under the circumstances, she was going to use his first name and adopt him as an ally, for now at least. ‘I think this character was about to explain what was wrong with me.’ She looked at the stranger. ‘Before I go to get help I need to know. I need to understand.’

  ‘But I might be about to succumb to my injuries,’ said the stranger.

  ‘I don’t think the buckshot hit anything vital,’ Berger said. ‘But if I’m wrong, perhaps, before you expire, you might explain what was the matter with her. We had her doctors investigating experimental neurotoxins. Various people were getting ghoulishly excited.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’ asked the stranger.

  Berger said, ‘I asked you the same question earlier and you didn’t answer.’

  ‘The police,’ said Taryn. ‘And MI5.’

  The beautiful eyes lit up. ‘Like George Smiley?’

  ‘I think he gets everything from novels,’ Taryn explained to Berger.

  Berger was exasperated. ‘Everyone gets everything from novels.’

  ‘I do know that most fiction has things a little wrong,’ said the stranger.

  ‘You changed the subject,’ Berger said. ‘Again. And you’re still bleeding.’

  ‘It’s the iron that’s the problem, not the bleeding. The gun looked like an old fowling piece, so I expected lead.’

  ‘It was an old fowling piece. Antique, a double-barrelled front loader.’ Berger scowled. ‘You know your guns.’

  ‘Not like you do, and just the old ones. Everything else only from novels.’

  ‘He’s changed the subject again,’ Taryn said. She was worried he’d pass out. Or that Berger would—though looking at him now she was sure that the detective was used to a bit of action and danger, and was probably very fit. He had only fainted from the shock of finding himself somewhere very far away from Aix-en-Provence.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asked again.

  ‘The Island of Apples. In the Land of the Pact. And before you do anything else—like collapse again, or go for help, can you take off my glove?’ The young man lifted the hand buried in the thick brown fur of the bearskin. Covering his fingers and thumb were gleaming, rose gold claws with finely interlocked plating. The glove left the back of his hand exposed, a bit like a driving glove. It wasn’t armour, or if it was it wouldn’t be very effective.

  ‘See, it’s just a pin and chain.’ He showed them the underside of his wrist and the clasp.

  Taryn picked the clasp apart and pulled the glove off. The gold was warm and heavy and for a moment she imagined the object was radioactive because she could feel pressure emanating from it, as if it were shining through her flesh. She placed it beside him on the bearskin. Berger picked it up, weighed it, cupped the clawed fingers to close them, then shook them open again. The stranger watched this with an expression of cool assessment. ‘And this is not that man?’ he said again.

  ‘No. That man was fair-haired and freckled—don’t you remember?’

  ‘It wasn’t me who noticed him, and judged him. I saw only you.’

  ‘Because Taryn is beautiful,’ Berger said.

  Taryn started with surprise. That he should say it. Was he trying to draw something out of the stranger, who had after all moved himself between her and a gun? Was Berger trying to divine the stranger’s motivations regarding her? But why would he start with something so unremarkable as her appearance? And how did Berger know she was beautiful? She had been oily and bloated and bruised and stinky and demented for weeks.

  The stranger was blushing—so he couldn’t be in any danger of bleeding out. The blush seemed to please Berger. Surely the detective wasn’t performing triage by embarrassment?

  ‘Answer Taryn’s question,’ Berger said. ‘What was wrong with her?’

  ‘She was possessed. Occupied by a considerable, intelligent, self-controlled demon. I’ve never encountered anything like it. Demons possess people to appal the faithful. They worm their way in and imprison the demoniac’s soul, and put on a big, flagrant, vile show to frighten loving families and ministers of religion. They are doing their duty in a war. And they’re doing what they like to do. But as far as I could tell this one was being as quiet and covert and subtle as it possibly could.’

  ‘People don’t get possessed,’ Berger said, indignant.

  ‘No. Not often,’ the stranger conceded mildly.

  Berger made an abortive gesture of disgust—threw up his hands—and pulled his wounds. He subsided onto his back on the grass, gasping in pain.

  ‘Some demons are bodies and some are spirits,’ the stranger said to Taryn, ignoring Berger. ‘They are either. As opposed to you—who are both. Demons are a species of many different breeds. But they are the only indigenous fauna of their world and their intelligence and characters are of a very narrow spectrum compared to the fauna of your world and mine, where there is, for example, a great difference between my intelligence and character and the intelligence and character of my hens.’

  Taryn just gaped at him. He looked collected. But pale. His mouth was the soft peach shade of sard—the dark chalcedony in a cameo brooch. She could see him piecemeal, but the more she looked at him the more he receded, dissolving mysteriously as though the sun were rising everywhere but on his face.

  ‘I still know a little about demons,’ he said, with the same mix of shamelessness and apology. Taryn could hear it now, the shade of pride and power in his contrition.

  ‘You. Are. Both. Fucking. Baked,’ Berger said from his bed of grass and pain.

  Taryn looked at the notch in the crater rim, where the lakewater smoothed out in the tiny current of a very small outlet. ‘Do I go that way?’

  ‘Follow the stream. There is a path and before too long you’ll see my neighbour’s house. Tell the people there I’ve been shot and that it’s iron. If you mention iron they’ll bring someone who can get the shot out.’

  She looked at Berger. ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’ He sounded a bit delirious.

  ‘I’ll take care of him,’ the stranger reassured Taryn.

  She didn’t wait. She set off around the lake, stepping high through the thick pasture.

  The slope was less a wall and more a steep incline once Taryn was climbing. The heath hid tumbled stones and Taryn had to go slowly to avoid turning an ankle. She was watching where she put her feet so didn’t look up until she reached a path that began beside the outlet at the start of the stream. Where the quiet lake let out to the hurrying water, both the lakebed and wall were water-smoothed marble. The water flowed in a hushed wash across the top of the rampart, then broke into song and tumbled away in a white rush.

  Taryn crumpled onto the heath. Though she was now in the sun she started to shiver again.

  The slope faced due west. A moon was at the horizon of what looked like another sky below her, but was a far-off smoky silver sea. A wide bay studded with a succession of islands which stepped away into a barely blue glitter. The horizon was a band of pearly sediment, the most delicate exquisite colour. Above it the sky continued, clear, deepening to dark blue at the zenith, where th
e last stars showed in terrible transparency.

  The stream and goat track went on through gold tussock. A belt of forest girdled the slope maybe half a mile down. Beyond that was a long fall of folded hills and valleys, each hilltop a little lower than the one before, a rolling country with the chalky line of a bare earth trail, visible here and there between copses and limestone escarpments, and not a wall, or hedge, or highway in sight. Not a church tower, or town hanging under an exhalation of car exhaust.

  Taryn gasped for breath. The air was thin, cool and sweet. A soft breeze blew up from the country. A country that was beautiful, unspoilt and alien.

  She stayed on her knees, digging her fingers into the loam under the thyme plants. When she finally looked down at what her hands were doing she saw that her fingers were bleeding. The soil mopped up her blood and fastened itself to her fingertips. The soil was natural and ordinary. She and the soil had made a mess of each other. She had made that little bit of difference to the impervious strangeness and magnificence of the landscape. Taryn thought, The Land of the Pact. Then she picked herself up and followed the goat track down the first of many hills.

  A series of long shallow steps followed the stream, each a slab of green or grey shale. River valley rocks, not indigenous to that hillside. When Taryn was Alan’s wife she had nominally owned a landscape-designed garden. In that garden a non-indigenous rock would be a feature, and there would be only a few of them. Each of these slabs had its own irregularities, but they were all the same size, and spaced so that any adult either descending or ascending would start on a new foot at every step. Just that—the carefully considered ergonomics—told Taryn she was looking at a cultivation of the landscape representing something more than bought and paid for comfort and beauty. What kind of world had the time to build a path like this in such a wild place?

  After a long descent through the belt of forest, and beyond it, she came upon a house. The house was extraordinary in itself, and in its difference to the young man’s low-slung hut, that inverted bird’s nest.

  Three upright stones split the brook above the house and directed its streams to, first, a head-high waterwheel whose sleek, flashing blades provided the only sign of life or activity in the dwelling. Another strand of the stream flowed into a stone channel, which vanished into a notch at the foot of the back wall of the house. The third strand went on beside the house, a much gentler stream. It dropped, making a dulcet music and, further down the slope, curved in close to the building and disappeared from Taryn’s sight. But she could see that all three strands, after performing whatever watery work the dwelling required, joined again to feed a deep green pool directly below the lowest of the house’s five stepped levels. The water filled the pool then spilled in a wide, gentle rill over its lip and continued on again, white and wild beside another stepping-stone staircase.