“You seem to be leaving,” I said. “Relocating to bigger premises, perhaps, thanks to Lionel Maulding’s money.”
“We’re moving to the country.”
“May I ask why?”
“The city isn’t safe anymore.”
“It certainly wasn’t safe for Mr. Maggs. In fact, it had a very bad effect on him at the end.”
She didn’t blink, but her father’s presence at Princelet Street left little doubt about her involvement in whatever had led Maggs to his fate. The old man claimed not to know what had become of Maggs. He had not entered the rooms, he said. He had not moved the body. He said that he did not even know there was a body until I told him of it. Strangely, I believed him.
“You paid Maggs five hundred pounds, a huge sum of money for a man like him,” I said to Eliza now. “Why?”
Still she said nothing.
I picked up the first book from the box at my feet and tossed it on the fire.
“No!”
She rose from her seat, and even when I raised the gun from my lap, it was all she could do not to attempt to rescue the book from the flames.
“I will shoot you, Miss Dunwidge,” I warned. “I’ll shoot you in the foot, or the knee, because I don’t want to kill you. But it will hurt. It will hurt a lot. You should also know that I have your father. His continued good health, recently undermined, is in your hands.”
In truth, I had only had to slap the old man twice on the face before he became more amenable to conversation, and he had made me feel ashamed of my behavior when he started to cry, but his daughter didn’t need to know that. I had learned, though, that he was his daughter’s creature, and he had been privy to few of her recent dealings with Maggs. She had simply dispatched him to inform Maggs of my interest in Lionel Maulding and encourage him to leave London for a time, for fear that my inquiries would eventually lead me to his door.
“He’s an old man,” she said.
“If you start cooperating with me, he’ll live to be older still.”
She swallowed hard.
“Please don’t burn any more books,” she said.
“I won’t if you’ll talk to me, Miss Dunwidge. Just tell me about the five hundred pounds. Tell me the truth about the Atlas.”
And in the light and heat of the burning volumes, she did.
XII
SHE SPOKE to me as if to a child.
“The book is rewriting the world,” she said.
Under other circumstances I might almost have laughed in her face, but her expression brooked no such mockery and, truth be told, I was already inclined to believe her. After all, I had seen the change in Maggs’s rooms and had listened to the pained, desperate testament of her father.
“How? How can a book rewrite the world?”
“Look around you, Mr. Soter. Books are constantly changing the world. If you’re a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don’t you see? This world is constantly being altered by books. The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, less than a century ago, and Das Kapital is younger still, yet already Russia has fallen to them, and other nations will soon fall, too.”
“But those are ideas,” I said. “The books communicate them, and the ideas take hold in the minds of men. The books themselves are not responsible, no more than a gun can be culpable for the bullet that it fires, or a blade for the wound that it inflicts. It is men who fire bullets and wield knives, and men who change the world. Books may inspire them, but they are passive objects, not active ones.”
She shook her head.
“You’re a fool if that is what you truly believe. A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.”
“No, that’s—”
She leaned over and placed her hand upon my arm. Though we were seated in the warmth of the fire, her touch chilled me to the bone. I felt a physical pain, and it was all I could do not to recoil. This woman was unnatural.
“I can see that you believe me,” she said. “You are altered in aspect since last we met. Tell me of Maggs. Tell me what you saw.”
How could she know of Maggs? I wondered. Yet somehow she did.
“There were holes burned in his skull through the sockets in his eyes,” I said. “There were creatures, insects or crustaceans, but not like anything I have seen or heard of in this world. I believe it was these creatures that bored their way out of Maggs’s head, emerging through his eyes. I destroyed them both.”
“Maggs,” she said, with a hint of sorrow to her voice. “He hated books, you know. He saw them only as a source of wealth. He loved only the hunt and not the object of it, but he had not always been that way. He had come to fear them. It happens, sometimes, to those in our particular trade: not all the books that we handle are beautiful inside and out. We breathe in the dust of the worst of them, fragments of their venom, and we poison ourselves. I think that is what happened to Maggs. He sourced books, and the stranger the better, but he would not read them. Yet I believe his curiosity about the Atlas overcame his fear: he looked upon it, and something in it took root in his brain.”
“How did he find it?”
“He had always been seeking it, hunting rumors and whispers. Maggs was a scout unlike any other, and he wanted to achieve what others before him had failed to do. Then Maulding came to me. I tried to dissuade him from looking for the Atlas, but Maulding had begun to lust after it, too. If Maggs was a scout unlike any other, then Maulding was a unique collector. It was a combination of forces, a perfect conjunction of circumstances: it was the book’s opportunity, and it chose to reveal itself.”
“You speak of it as though it were alive,” I said.
“You still don’t understand,” she said. “Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You saw Maggs. You saw what might happen to a man who underestimates a book, especially a book like the Atlas.”
I looked at the fire. Books were still burning in it. I smelled their leather bindings charring in the heat. Their pages curled inward as they took flame, as though in agony.
“You were speaking of the Atlas,” I said.
“Maggs found it at last in the most unlikely of places: in the collection of a widow in Glasgow, a God-fearing woman who did not even seem aware of its existence and could not tell him how she had come by it. It had hidden itself away amid worthless reprints. It would not allow itself to be read, not until its time had come. Then Maggs found it and knew it for what it was, and he contacted me. He asked if I could find a buyer for it, not knowing that the buyer, too, had revealed himself. But the Atlas knew. The Atlas was ready for them both.”
“So you paid Maggs a finder’s fee and passed the book to Maulding.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t cheat him?”
“No. I am scrupulous about such matters.”
“You are moral about such things?”
“Not moral. Afraid.”
I let that go.
“Did you look at it?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Again, because I was afraid.”
“Did you even see it?”
“Briefly, when Maulding came to collect it.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was perhaps two feet by a foot and a half, the bindings a deep red, the spine ringed with gold loops. Two words had been burned into the cover: Terrae Incognitae. Unknown Lands.”
“What was the binding? Leather?”
“No. I believe it was skin.”
“Animal?”
For the second time, she shook her head.
“Not . . . hum
an?”
“Again, no. I don’t believe that the binding was of this world, and the book pulsed beneath my hand. I could feel the warmth of it, the sense of something like blood pumping through it. It did not want to be held by me, though, only by Maulding. He was meant to have it. In a way, the book was always his.”
It seemed extraordinary. I did believe that she had acquired the book and sold it to Maulding, but the rest I found harder to accept: a living book, a book with intent, a book that had hidden itself away until the right moment, and the right owner, came along.
“If what you say is true, then why now? What changed to cause the book to act?”
“The world,” she said. “The world has altered itself without the book’s impetus. Evil calls to evil, and the circumstances are right. You more than anyone should know this to be true.”
And I understood.
“The war,” I said.
“The war,” she echoed. “ ‘The war to end war,’ isn’t that how Wells put it? He was wrong, of course; it was the war to end worlds, to end this world. The fabric of existence was torn: the world was made ready for the book, and the book was ready for the world.”
I closed my eyes. I heard the wet, heavy sound of bodies being dropped into a crater, and my own screams as they brought me the news of my dead wife and children. I saw twisted remains being carried from the ruins of a farmhouse, a whole family killed by a single shell, children born and yet to be born brought to an end in fire and rubble. She is right, I thought: if this is all true, then let the book take the world, for whatever emerged in its aftermath could be no worse than what I had already seen. The landlord’s wife had been right: I did not believe that the war had purged the earth of poisoned seeds. Instead, they had germinated in spilled blood.
“Who wrote this book?” I asked. “Who made it?”
She looked away.
“The Not-God,” she said.
“The Devil?”
She laughed: a hoarse, unlovely sound.
“There is no Devil,” she said. “All this”—she waved a hand at the occult books, boxed and unboxed, and she might as well have been consigning every one of them to the flames—“is so much smoke and mirrors, mere amusements for the ignorant. They have as much bearing on reality as does an actor capering on a stage, dressed in a cloak and horns and waving a pitchfork. The thing that created the book is greater and more terrible than any three-headed Christian god. It has a million heads and each head a million more. Every entity that rages against the light is part of it and is born of it. It is a universe unto itself. It is the great Unknown Realm.”
“What are you saying—that, through this book, some entity wants to transform this world into a version of its own?”
“No,” she said, and now the sternness left her face, and it glowed with a zealot’s light, making her appear more ugly than before. “Don’t you grasp it? This world ceased to exist as soon as the book was opened. It was already dying, but the Atlas disposed of its remains and substituted its lands for ours. This is already the Unknown Realm. It is as though a distorting mirror has become not the reflection of the thing but the reality of it.”
“Then why can’t we see the changes?”
“You have seen the changes. Why, I do not know, but soon others will, too. Somewhere deep in their psyches, down in the dirt of their consciousness, they probably sense it already, but they refuse to recognize what has occurred. To recognize it will be to submit to the truth of it, and that truth will eat them alive.”
“No,” I said. “Something can still be done. I’ll find the book. I’ll destroy it.”
“You can’t destroy what has always been.”
“I can try.”
“It’s too late. It’s too late for us all. The damage has been done. This is no longer our world.”
I stood, and she rose with me.
“I have one more question,” I said. “One more, and then I’ll leave you.”
“I know what it is,” she said.
“Do you?”
“It is the first and last question, the only question that matters. It is ‘Why?’ Why did I do it? Why did I collude with the book? Why, why, why?”
She was right, of course. I could do no more than nod my assent.
“Because I was curious,” she said. “Because I wanted to see what might occur. But like Maggs, like Maulding, I think that I was merely serving the will of the Atlas whether I knew it or not.”
If “why” was the first and last question, then “because I was curious to see what would happen” was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was always destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of men.
“I tell you,” I said, “that I will find a way to stop this.”
“And I tell you,” she replied, “that you should kill yourself before the worst of it comes to pass.”
She retreated from me until she was against the fireplace, the mantel at her shoulders. Her dressing gown ignited behind her, the material blooming red and orange around her legs. Then she turned her back to me, revealing her naked body already blistering in the heat, the material adhering to her skin, and before I could move she threw herself face-first into the blaze. By the time I dragged her from the hearth her head was a charred mess, and she was already dying. Her body trembled in its final agonies as the books around her burned in sympathy.
I left them all to the flames.
XIII
AS I walked away from the Dunwidge home, I heard the sound of screaming and shouting, and windows breaking. Before I had gone barely half a mile, the noise of the fire engines was ringing in the distance.
I had no cause to return to my lodgings. I had a gun, and I had left some spare clothing at Maulding’s house. My business in the city was concluded. There was only one more task to be accomplished before I returned to Norfolk, and so I made my way on foot to Chancery and the chambers of the lawyer Quayle.
I was perhaps a mile from my destination when I had the sensation of being followed. I turned and saw a little girl wearing a blue-and-white dress on the opposite side of the road from me but about thirty feet behind. She had her back turned to me, so I could not see her face. Then, from the shadows between the streetlamps, again a similar distance but this time on the same side as me, a boy emerged, walking backward. He wore short trousers and a white shirt. His movements were jerky and unnatural, and I was reminded of a moving image slowly being projected and simultaneously rewound.
Somehow the boy, like the girl, seemed to realize that he had been spotted, and he ceased all movement with one leg still suspended in the air. It was only then that I noticed his feet were bare and strangely deformed. I was reminded of limbs I had seen in the trenches, swollen by gangrene or distorted by broken bones. The girl’s feet were also bare, but she was splayfooted, giving her the aspect of a large, pale penguin.
“Go away,” I said, then, louder: “Go away! Go home. This is no hour for children to be abroad.”
But even as I spoke, I felt that any home they had was far, far from this place; or, if Eliza Dunwidge had spoken true, this was now their home, and had always been, and I was the stranger, the intruder.
I did not want to give my back to them, so I, too, began to walk backward, and a peculiar sight we would have presented had there been anyone to see us, but there was no one. And as I moved, so, too, did the boy and the girl, and I heard their joints crack as they came, as though in that short time ice had formed on their limbs. The boy advanced with his irregular, loping gait, his feet twisting beneath him, while the girl waddled, her knees at an angle from the side of her body, and now she was not so much a penguin as a toad that had somehow managed the feat of walking upright, an impression reinforced by her girth, for she was a swollen child.
Eventually I ran. I confess it. I turned tail and fled. I could hear them coming after me, their feet slapping faster on the ground, and I prayed that someone migh
t appear, a fellow night traveler who would force them to leave me be, or confirm, at least, that I was not yet completely mad. But I saw nobody: no people, no cars, not even a horse and cart. The city slumbered, or perhaps there was no city left, and the London that I had once known was entirely gone, replaced by a shadow of itself in which dwelt only deformed children and eyeless men.
I was still running when I recognized the silence. They were gone. I stopped, my hands on my knees, and gasped deep, painful breaths. My lungs were not as they once were. I had gone to France a young man, but now I was old in all but years. Ahead of me was the West End: there, at least, would be people, even at this hour, and dawn could not be far away. I cast one final glance behind me to ascertain that I was alone, then turned to be on my way.
They were there, of course. I should have known it. I had read enough ghost stories in my time, and passed an hour or two with the penny dreadfuls. The children, if that was what they were, had circled me just as troops in wartime will do, seeking the advantage in coming at the enemy from an unexpected direction. They were now only ten feet ahead, their backs still to me, but slowly they began to revolve—yes, revolve, as a weight suspended on a line will revolve—until I saw their faces at last.
Monstrous children, foul things: a random scattering of small black eyes cast over the upper part of their features, a dozen or more, like raisins in dough; no nose on either, but twin slits divided by a thin stretch of septum; and their mouths were lipless grimaces drawn back over jagged, rodentlike teeth, with sharp protuberances at either side like the venomous jaws of a spider.
I did not pause. I did not think. An elemental fear had overcome me. I pointed the gun at the girl’s face and pulled the trigger. The bullet took her in the forehead and exited in a stream of fluid that was not red but yellow, like the innards of an insect. She fell back without a sound, but the boy let out a shriek from somewhere in his maw. He sprang at me, and I shot him, too, but the fury of his reaction took me by surprise, and the first bullet hit him in the shoulder, twisting him and sending him to the ground, so that I was forced to finish him off as he writhed beneath me, his jaws clicking as though, even in his dying, he desired to consume me.
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