The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

‘She’s injured because I underestimated the demon. But now it’s trapped in my gate, which means I have to take Taryn to another gate so she can get to her speaking engagements. That suits me. I can try to catch and question one of the demons entering the Sidh through Hell’s Gate. So, after the springs, I’ll take Taryn there.’

  ‘Is there a Heaven’s Gate—like the movie?’

  ‘I don’t know the movie. Heaven is closed. The Great God of the Deserts, the God from the Void, sequestered himself many hundreds of years ago. His worshippers had too many competing views of his nature, and it unsettled his mind. That’s a thing that can happen to gods. They’re very impressionable.’

  Jacob sat with his mouth open.

  Price came back through the swing doors, pocketing his wallet. He slowed as he came to the table, then took up a position directly between Shift and Jacob, as if he were a tennis umpire. He put his car keys on the table. ‘Jacob, I have just secured myself a room at this establishment. Their only available room, I’m afraid. You can go to the Holiday Inn at Monmouth. But we’ll want an early start.’

  Jacob put his hand over the keys.

  ‘A local?’ Price asked Jacob, while examining Shift.

  ‘Your friend asked to borrow my phone,’ Shift said, then produced his phone and set it on the table. The phone was, of course, in an OtterBox, along with its charging cord and a portable power bank.

  Jacob and Price just stared at the phone. Shift prodded the box with his forefinger, pushing it closer to Jacob.

  ‘Is that an OtterBox?’ Price’s question was blithe, peaceable.

  Shift twisted his neck to read the brand mark on the box. ‘That’s what it says on its catch,’ he said.

  ‘And where did you find such a useful thing?’

  ‘Amazon,’ said Shift. ‘Same place as I get my books.’

  ‘Do you reside in these parts?’

  Shift gazed at Price, frowned and gave an answer that followed on from the last thing he’d been saying. ‘I’d support local custom, but the nearest booksellers these days are the two antiquarians in Tintern.’ He looked behind him at the nearest of the old men, perhaps a native of Tintern. The man, at once grave and wide awake, met Shift’s gaze, gave a slight bow and said, ‘Ap Fian.’

  ‘Price’ was a Welsh name. Was Price a Welsh national and a product of the Welsh education system’s endorsement of the language?

  He was. ‘Son of the fairy,’ Price said. ‘That’s fighting talk.’

  ‘But the gentleman was very polite about it,’ Shift said. ‘So I don’t think I need to feel that my father has been maligned.’ Then, frowning at Jacob, ‘Why is it a problem that my phone is in a plastic box?’

  Jacob opened the box and removed the phone. ‘It isn’t a problem. Thank you for the loan. I only want to check on a friend who is in hospital.’

  Shift, equally smooth: ‘I’ll give you your privacy. Return it when you’re done.’ He picked up the OtterBox and went back to his booth.

  Jacob opened the contacts list and deleted his own number. Then he tried to connect in order to find the number for Norwich Hospital.

  ‘Phones aren’t working,’ Price said. Then, ‘Agreed?’ to the fidgeting wwoofers in the booth.

  They nodded. Jacob could see they didn’t like the look of Price, which made him notice the lethal malice beneath the man’s waspishness.

  Price said, ‘Take the phone outside, Jacob, and its owner will follow you.’

  ‘What are you planning?’

  ‘I’d like to get him on his own so I can pat him down.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Whatever kills phones and CCTV.’

  ‘You’re joking.’ Jacob managed to sound sceptical and astonished.

  ‘Take that call outside—colleague.’ And, softer, ‘I’ll need those car keys back.’

  ‘You’re going to abduct the guy because his phone is in an OtterBox?’

  ‘And because no phones are working. And the television is on the fritz.’

  ‘And he has a bit of an Arab look to him,’ said Jacob. ‘Let’s not forget that.’

  ‘Just do what I tell you, Berger.’

  Jacob got up and ducked under the pub’s low lintel. It was pouring outside. The streetlight across from the pub also seemed to have a troubled signal, shining as it was through a static of rain.

  Jacob huddled in under the eaves. Nothing happened. No one followed him out.

  He waited a good ten minutes.

  Through the beaded curtain of water coming down from the thatch Jacob saw the lit blue square of a phone booth along the road, outside what once had been a village post office and was now a grocer, newsagent, post shop.

  Jacob made a dash for it. He would call a cab, find a hotel in Monmouth, book a room, then phone Norwich Hospital and ask after Rosemary. That was a plan. He would dance attendance on Price until Price was satisfied that he, Jacob, was no more or less mystified than anyone else.

  The stretch of gravel around the phone booth was sodden. But Jacob’s shoes were waterproof high-tops. He climbed into the booth, shook himself and scraped back his dripping hair. Before he consulted the phonebook—which was in one piece, though fattened and yellowed—he checked the phone from the OtterBox. It still had no signal. That glove had quite a range. Unless Shift wasn’t wearing it and had left it outside the pub somewhere.

  Jacob was on the landline to the Holiday Inn, reading out his credit card number, when Price’s car pulled up alongside. Jacob concluded his business, left the phone booth, and got in. ‘I was about to call myself a taxi,’ he said. ‘Might I have the car?’

  ‘That establishment’—Price nodded towards the Pale Lady—‘serves breakfast at seven. Please be there on time.’ Price put out his hand for Shift’s cellphone. Jacob gave it to him and watched Price produce a laptop and connect the phone to it. Price sent Jacob to the boot to find a factory-fresh phone in the collection of models he had there. Price cloned Shift’s phone. And, as he waited for the operation to finish, he said in a conversational tone, ‘This is the post shop from which Khalef and Tahan dispatched their credit cards before asking directions to the holloway.’

  The shop’s interior was lit by a blue security light, an urban colour, antithetical to the wet stonework and minimal signage. Jacob wondered what it would have been like for Taryn to have grown up with all this beauty. He’d grown up in a new housing tract, streets where there was nowhere to walk unobserved and the only interesting variety was supplied by people and cars.

  Price returned the original phone to Jacob and, without further ceremony or instructions, reversed down the road and stopped outside the pub. He bade Jacob goodnight, pulled up his coat collar against the rain and hurried indoors.

  Jacob waited. He understood that Price expected him to return the phone to Shift who, contrary to Price’s wishes, had not followed Jacob out into the night and made himself vulnerable to Price’s boundless—lawless—curiosity.

  Jacob continued to wait, hoping Price wasn’t hovering in the bar but had taken himself off to his nice, dry bed. When Jacob finally decided he’d waited long enough, the pub was preparing to close. There was a crowd of middle-aged locals by the till, in a full flood of brain-freezingly dull conversations about a football game they’d missed because the TV was playing up. The barmaid was at the door handing out umbrellas to the wwoofers. The group of old men were in the porch, peering off into the gleaming darkness, wearing identical expressions of curiosity, pride and soft wonder. Their eyes were fixed on Shift, who had somehow left the pub without being spotted by Price or Jacob and was waiting under the last streetlight by the gate to the churchyard.

  Jacob ducked back into the parlour, put a pound coin on the bar and took a packet from the rack of gum. He stuffed a stick in his mouth and chewed. His inattention to the type he’d grabbed rewarded him with a burning burst of cinnamon.

  Jacob couldn’t turn the phone off. He was suspicious of the power and range of its microphone and of what MI5
could do. He hoped it wouldn’t be able to transmit near to the Gatemaker’s glove, but the wads of gum he pasted over its microphone and cameras were an extra precaution.

  The barmaid offered him an umbrella. He shook his head, thanked her and pointed at Price’s car.

  ‘That was kind of your friend,’ she said, clearly inviting him to tell her more about their high-handed, unpleasant guest. Jacob only wished her goodnight. He felt her eyes on him as he strode off through the rain. He went out under the dripping trees, heading towards the slick green cave where Shift waited.

  Shift produced the OtterBox and held it out. He let Jacob place the phone in the box, but didn’t shut it away. ‘I thought I should let them make their calls,’ he said, tilting his chin at the pub patrons.

  Price would love this admission of culpability.

  Jacob folded Shift’s hands in his own and pressed them together. The OtterBox clicked shut. ‘Keep that phone dry. It’s an electronic instrument.’ He spoke as if to a child.

  Shift pointed his nose at Jacob and scented the air. ‘I’m hungry. You had a pie, and something cinnamon afterwards. I only had a half of cider.’

  ‘The cinnamon is sugarless gum, and I’m sure aspartame is another of those things you can’t eat.’

  ‘I’ll go into the churchyard and get a mouse,’ Shift said.

  Jacob realised he still had the box and Shift’s strong fingered hands between his own. He let go. ‘Price knows the phone is for Taryn. The note I wrote her was with the OtterBox. It got left behind in the car. I’m not sure whether Price has guessed that it was me who wrote it. Thank God it was Stuart who supplied the phone.’

  ‘Your note must’ve fallen out of Taryn’s pocket.’

  ‘On the drive, rather than the seam-splitting demolition of Stuart’s vehicle?’ Jacob said. He paused, waiting for Shift to explain what had happened. Shift let the pause run on. He turned his head to listen to something behind the sound of rain dripping from the trees.

  Jacob said, ‘I never did get to make my call to Norwich Hospital and ask after Hemms.’

  ‘Let’s walk on and you can do that,’ Shift said. ‘I gave my glove to this tree. The phone won’t work till we’re well away from it.’

  Jacob glanced up at the green ceiling above them. He was glad that Price hadn’t yet heard anything. He wondered what the glove’s range was. It hadn’t used to disrupt phones so dramatically. He’d been able to call Hemms from the back lawn of Palfreyman’s house, but perhaps that was far enough off. The glove had disrupted the cameras around the Bibliothèque Méjanes, and presumably the glove caused the wave of interference that followed Shift from Norfolk. Or was that the demon? Or—and this seemed more likely—the glove roused by the proximity of a demon.

  Jacob then wondered what giving the glove to a tree entailed. What language would a person use to get the attention and compliance of a tree? Did you simply ask the tree, ‘Would you mind holding this for a minute?’

  Jacob longed to ask many things, but was afraid of being overheard (and sounding insane). He looked back at the hotel. The lights in the bar had gone out. There was a taxi beside his car, several people piling into it. Jacob checked for a twitching curtain, for Price, who’d be able to see his car, still parked and not, as it should be, partway to Monmouth.

  ‘No one is walking,’ Jacob said. ‘I think you’re going to be out of luck with your mouse.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wanted a “mouse” for money, right?’

  Shift looked puzzled.

  ‘Money for a meal?’ Jacob prompted.

  ‘The going rate for mice is very low,’ Shift said, solemn.

  Jacob’s ears got hot. He had assumed that ‘mouse’ was some quaint term Shift had for a kerb crawler. He had imagined some very damp fumbling in the churchyard. ‘You mean a real mouse,’ he said.

  Shift laughed. ‘The ways in which you want to think badly of me are interesting.’

  ‘Who eats mice?’ Jacob muttered. He was now pretending not to know what Shift was talking about.

  ‘Owls,’ said Shift.

  The phone in the OtterBox gave a shudder. It could be Hemms. ‘Let me take this,’ Jacob said. You go do whatever you’re planning to do with mice.’

  Shift returned the box to Jacob and walked back towards the splash of green.

  The alert was just the phone connecting to its telco. So Jacob used it to call Norwich Hospital.

  Hemms was recovering well, said the ward sister. She was resting. Jacob said he’d let her sleep and would call again tomorrow. He ended the call and walked back towards the pub and Price’s car. He stopped by the churchyard and waited. By his reckoning he’d have only four hours in bed at the Holiday Inn. Less if he kept standing here.

  Still, he waited.

  Somewhere in the soft welter of rain and night a small animal screamed in pain and terror. Jacob stared into the black air between the tall stone gateposts. He got wet. He ignored his impatience, which was after all childish and unprofessional. He stood there holding the phone, which didn’t vibrate again. And while he waited he changed many of his ideas. If he were a person who made plans he’d have changed those too. But Jacob Berger was someone without any real aims of his own, someone who gave himself over to the better judgement of others and let himself be aimed.

  Eventually Shift reappeared, looking very wet but more lively. His mouth was rosy. He said he’d got a rat, which meant he didn’t have to wait in owl to digest it. ‘A rat is a meal for a man too. So that’s good. I didn’t keep you waiting long.’

  ‘You were an owl?’ Jacob said.

  Shift nodded.

  ‘And no one else but me knows you can be an owl?’

  ‘They think I can’t right now, because of the iron.’

  ‘And why am I in on your secret?’

  ‘Because you can keep secrets.’

  ‘I’m paid to keep the details of investigations I’m working on close to my chest. I’m not paid to keep your secrets, Shift.’

  ‘You don’t keep secrets because you’re paid to, Jacob. The secrets are your coin. If you ran out of them you’d feel impoverished.’

  Jacob thought he’d been seeing Shift as an obscure, fey being. Whimsical, because of the things he’d say. But it was bluntness. Each bit of poetry was a statement of fact. He was sharing, and showing himself. A tree was holding his glove for him, and he could eat as an owl, and digest as a man. And he wanted Jacob to know what he could do, because they had an alliance.

  But, because Jacob didn’t quite believe the owl part without seeing it, and because he was far too frightened to want to witness it, he asked the kind of question one earnest fantasy fan might ask another. The goal of such a question would be oneupmanship—one nerd wanting to demonstrate that the other hadn’t thought through whatever marvel they meant to convince their listeners of. There’d been boys like that at Jacob’s school. He’d sometimes eavesdrop on them with fascinated contempt. Everything they were interested in was immaterial; the content of their thoughts was, to Jacob’s mind, a waste of time. But the structure of their thinking was another matter, and Jacob had listened because he was attracted by their relentless logic, even if it was only ever applied to nonsense.

  What he said to Shift was: ‘So—do you leave your clothes puddled on the ground, and flap up into the boughs of a tree?’

  ‘I would if these weren’t my clothes.’ Shift passed a hand over his lumpy woollen jersey and baggy tweed trousers. ‘I made these myself. And out of myself. Someone else has to help me—shear the sheep who is me, clip the goat who is me. And, if I’m very determined, which I sometimes must be, skin alive the hindquarters of the bull who is me—for leather, for shoes. It can’t be so much skinning that I die. I have to change once I feel myself in danger of dying. Whenever I change I’m not injured anymore, which is why I’m not wearing Taryn’s scratches now.

  ‘Anyway—once I’ve got the raw materials I have to cure and tan, or wash, card, dye, spin, w
eave, knit everything myself. Only then will my clothes change when I change. And none of the others—sheep, goat, bull, owl, eel—is any less me than this body, this mix of several species who is speaking to you now. I chose to be human. When I was little my mother had to coax me back out of the marsh—its water and air—with her love, and with berries dipped in honey, and with stories. I wanted her touch, her smell, her voice, her view of things more than I wanted to live in scales or fur or feathers. I had her long enough and loved her well enough to learn to be human, and remain human.’

  Shift stopped talking and gazed at Jacob with an expression of mild expectation.

  Jacob had a stone in his throat.

  Shift added, ‘I wish I could make a better job of my clothes. My mother taught me about weather and tides, she taught me eight languages and how to make various medicines, but she never thought to teach me to spin and weave and sew, because I was a boy. It seems silly now. There were many days I’d be reluctant to stop being a falcon or a fish, but to my mother I was still a boy and not a girl.’

  Jacob laughed because he was startled, but also in a kind of delighted pride at being party to something so strange and wonderful, and in belonging to a world where modern medical science might not be able to transform a man into a chimpanzee, despite their fractional chromosomal differences, but could turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man.

  Also he found it funny that Shift the owl wasn’t on a strict diet. ‘You do eat red meat,’ Jacob said, still laughing.

  ‘Yes. I do, and I’m not allergic to iron, or not very. I’m just maintaining a fiction. I want the sidhe to consider me one of them, and overlook my other ancestry. Though I should say that grain does not agree with me, which is why I didn’t have a pie.’ Shift clasped Jacob’s arm, adjusting his grip so his hand slid up Jacob’s sleeve and his wet fingers found dry skin. He came over all brisk. ‘You’re going to drive your—master’s—car away, and I’m going to retrieve my glove and return to Taryn.’

  ‘Raymond Price is not my master,’ Jacob said, deeply indignant, but let himself be led.

  They reached the pub. Jacob paused with his hand on the driver’s door handle and, quickly, tried to think what Shift should know. Because Shift was his partner too, someone with whom he was working on an investigation.