“What is it?” he said, once the call was answered.
The voice of Armitage competed with the noise of Amsterdam’s traffic.
“We lost them on the way from the airport,” she said. “They’ve gone to ground.”
“That’s unfortunate,” said the Principal Backer, his tone indicating that this news was significantly more troubling than the word suggested.
“It seems that one of them may be familiar with a local fixer named De Jaager,” said Armitage. “The driver that picked them up at the airport was one of De Jaager’s people. I’ve noticed him around. The Dutch security services keep tabs on De Jaager, just to see what he might be up to, and I requested a status report. They’re under the impression that De Jaager may recently have begun shadowing a book dealer named Cornelie Gruner.”
“What do you know about this Gruner?”
“I’m working on acquiring that information now. I thought you might prefer if I went through backdoor sources.”
“Send it on as soon as you have it,” said the Principal Backer. “And thank you.”
He hung up, and returned to the meeting room. The film had come to an end, and the author was now signing copies of the book for those in attendance, his blood-patron having purchased enough copies for all. The Principal Backer took one, and even asked for it to be dedicated, although he had no intention of ever reading it.
After all, it was important to maintain appearances, and keep one’s mask in place.
CHAPTER LXV
Cornelie Gruner stopped for dinner and a carafe of wine at a bar on the Rembrandtplein. He was curious to see if the young women were continuing to stalk him, and was gratified to discover they were not. Neither could he find any sign of De Jaager, or the black man who had been with him at the Rijksmuseum, and no one else appeared to be taking any particular notice of him as he ate. Nonetheless, De Jaager’s surveillance remained impolite. He knew where Gruner lived and worked, and a gentleman would have made his inquiries in person. Gruner would have declined to answer, of course, but the courtesy would have been appreciated.
Gruner bit into his bread, crumbs falling from it to be lost in the filthy strata of his clothing, where they would join in the ongoing slow molder of fabric and flesh. He regarded the fading light, and began to eat more quickly. Gruner no longer liked to be on the streets after dark, and made sure that the door to his rooms above the Oak was always locked behind him by nightfall. If he were forced by unusual circumstances to work late in his bookshop, a connecting door opened into a short, low hallway, to which only he retained access, and thus to the rear of the bar.
Because Cornelie Gruner was frightened.
The old bookseller had long worked with occult materials, including rare grimoires and manuscripts. He had even sold such works to the Vatican itself, back in the days when that institution remained committed to sourcing volumes for the Black Shelves of the Archivo Segreto Vaticano, housed in the sixteenth-century Tower of the Winds: fifty miles of rare and curious books and documents, including the Papal Bulls excommunicating Martin Luther, the account of the trials of the Knights Templar in Chinon in 1308, and the records of Galileo’s trial before the Inquisition in 1633. Gruner’s efforts had involved finding, or replacing, some of the Archive’s collection missing since Napoleon Bonaparte ordered it to be relocated to Paris as part of his desire to consolidate all European knowledge at the heart of his empire.
Even now, Gruner regarded his efforts to replenish the Archive as the crowning glory of his life as a bibliophile. Between 1810 and 1813, Napoleon’s convoys had transported more than 100,000 individual items on poor roads from Rome to Turin, crossing the Mont Cenis pass into France before proceeding to the Archive’s new home in the Hôtel de Soubise. The majority arrived safely, but a flood washed away the contents of two wagons at Borgo San Donnino, and more items were lost when crates fell from a wagon at Susa. Further depletions occurred following Napoleon’s return from Elba, and his final defeat at Waterloo. Books and documents were mislaid, stolen, or destroyed, and the Vatican’s quibbling over the cost of the Archive’s return resulted in rare items being removed from carts to lighten the load. The Archive that left Rome in 3,249 crates was sent back in 2,450; more than a quarter of the original collection would never again be seen in Rome.
And among those missing items were eight pages of the Atlas Regnorum Incognitorum, the Atlas of Unknown Realms, also known as the Fractured Atlas.
Gruner finished his food and threw back what was left of his wine. He felt the evening grow colder, even through his many layers, but few others showed signs of being troubled by this perceived fall in temperature. At Vijzelstraat, a shape broke the waters of Herengracht before submerging again. Gruner detected a presence in the murk, as though a statue or carving in its depths had briefly been made visible. He saw features distorted by weeds, and a tongue that resembled the inverted trunk of a young tree, its roots protruding from between the figure’s lips so that they splayed over its face. A sightseeing boat went by, churning the waters, and by the time it had passed, the vision was gone.
Gruner had tracked down six of the Atlas’s missing pages. It took him almost three decades to do so, involving the expenditure of a great deal of effort and money. When the pages were finally in his possession, he passed them not to the Vatican, but to the lawyer Atol Quayle. It was not just a matter of price, even if Quayle was willing to pay more for them than the Vatican, which had a habit of pleading penury when it came to market values. Neither was his decision to aid Quayle entirely a consequence of Gruner’s fear of the lawyer’s vengeance, although by the time Gruner had obtained the final leaves, Mors had entered Quayle’s service, which did, admittedly, help to focus Gruner’s mind on making the correct decision. No, Gruner loved books, and the pages of the Fractured Atlas belonged together. What was important was the integrity of the volume. Gruner knew enough about the history of the Atlas to recognize its importance to occultists of a specific stripe, and had learned more during the many years in which he had known, and assisted, Quayle. Only gradually had he come to understand the queerness of the lawyer himself, but by then it was too late for him to disengage himself from this strangest of clients.
Finally, he had touched the pages of the Atlas, and his understanding was complete. He watched as they turned from blank vellum to representations of the room in which he sat; to maps of continents that did not exist, nor had ever existed, on this earth; and to images of faces that seemed to gaze out from the leaves as though through glass. By then he wished he had worn gloves before handling the book, but the damage was done. The Atlas had infected him, and he would never be the same again.
Gruner gathered his change from the table and added the coins to the little purse he kept in the deepest recesses of his coat, anchored to his belt by a chain that ran through a small hole in a pocket. The waiter didn’t bother to thank him for his custom. In his many years of eating at the restaurant, Gruner had yet to order an additional drink, or leave anything resembling a tip, even by the modest standards of Dutch service, which required no more effort than rounding up the bill to the nearest euro or two. Gruner picked up his bag, and looked around him once more, but this time he was not concerned about De Jaager or his acolytes. The light was dying even faster than he had anticipated, and he divined the imminent thickening of shadows. The face in the water was a warning to him that he should seek some well-lit place, there to sequester himself until dawn, lest he be forced to glimpse something far worse.
The Atlas was close to completion—Quayle had told him so—and as its consummation drew nearer, so its influence on this world increased. Fissures were opening, holes punched between one reality and another. Few perceived them, but Gruner could, because he had been in contact with pages from the Atlas. Now he no longer slept as well as before, and feared the dark.
He shuffled along the canal bank, his head down. The first of the visitations had come to him only weeks earlier, causing him to worry that he
might be suffering some form of breakdown, or incubating a tumor in the brain. He began experiencing apparitions reminiscent of the horrors in the Last Judgments of Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, Fra Angelico, and, most particularly, Lucas van Leyden, whose altarpiece was currently residing in the very museum Gruner had so recently vacated. Some of these nightmares seemed to have stepped directly from the artworks in question, and a few were hybrids—a head by one painter, a body by another—but most bore no resemblance to anything he had ever seen, and appeared to be conjured solely from his own subconscious.
It took Gruner only a few days to realize that the emergence of the waking nightmares had coincided with the latest communication from Quayle, requesting his assistance in rechecking previous sources for errors: any references that might have gone unnoticed, any mistranslations or misinterpretations pointing to the existence of further pages missing from the Atlas. It was as though contact with the lawyer had activated some contamination buried deep in Gruner’s system, in the form of those atoms transferred from the Atlas to his fingers years earlier. He, like Quayle, was now of the Atlas, and the Atlas was of him.
On the third night of his researches, as he worked late and alone above the Oak, the building sealed and otherwise empty, Gruner heard someone trying to gain access to his quarters through the locked door. He detected a hissing from without, and footsteps on the floorboards—then moving up the wall, and across the ceiling, as though whatever was outside was capable of crawling like a lizard or spider. The following morning, he discovered deep scratches in the wood around the handle and hinges of the door, and marks on the walls and ceiling: sharp indentations, as of claws or chitinous limbs. Deeply unsettled, Gruner called Quayle in London.
“What is happening?” he asked.
And Quayle replied, “The beginning of the end.”
CHAPTER LXVI
Rosanna Bellingham took up position in the open doorway of the living room, perhaps in case she felt the need to retire to the safety of the hall. Bob Johnston stayed where he was, being reluctant to cede space to something he could not see and that, as yet, posed no threat to him.
Until he’d become involved with the Atlas, Johnston had never experienced anything remotely resembling an encounter with the otherworldly, and regarded those who made such claims as either fraudulent or soft in the head. Oddly, he continued to maintain that position, but was prepared to make an exception for himself because he knew he was neither fraud nor lunatic.
The air hadn’t grown colder, the furniture hadn’t started to move about of its own volition, and nothing was making woo-woo noises in his ear, but Johnston would not have attempted to deny that the atmosphere in the room had changed, and the smell of burned meat was now stronger than before. And while he was not about to flee, neither was he particularly inclined to venture closer to the fireplace. He did reach out a hand, though, like a man testing for a static charge. The analogy was not inapt, because the hairs on his right arm slowly stood on end. With as much dignity as he could muster, he withdrew the hand as quickly as possible.
“Does it… do anything?” he asked. He noticed that he had instinctively lowered his voice, which seemed unnecessary, but this was alien territory for him. Also, his question implied an acceptance of some form of agency, which caused him to become irritated at himself.
“No,” said Bellingham, “but sometimes the stink gets worse. It permeates the house, and it’s impossible to stay inside. I’ve started to eat out more, for obvious reasons.”
Johnston was surprised to hear that she could muster any appetite at all.
“How do you sleep?” he said.
“Pills, when booze won’t suffice. It may sound peculiar, but one almost begins to get used to it. Most of the time I find it more annoying than anything else. I just wish it would stop.”
“Have you consulted anyone?”
“You mean a priest? I’m not religious.”
“And this hasn’t caused you to reconsider?” He had to admire her commitment to agnosticism, if not outright atheism, in the face of apparent evidence of life beyond the grave.
“I don’t believe this has anything to do with religion,” said Bellingham. “And when I said this house was haunted, I didn’t mean by a ghost.”
Johnston tried his best not to look confused.
“I may not entirely be following you,” he said.
Bellingham used her glass to gesture at the fireplace.
“Whatever that is, it’s not some remnant of a person returned to visit its former home. It’s not a spectral presence, with a consciousness, or a purpose. That’s the stuff of stories. I think it’s more like a bubble of memory that has suddenly burst, releasing all the stale air inside. It was always there. It was just that no one was aware of it until now.”
Johnston considered this to be an interesting, if flawed, approach to rationalizing the problem.
“If you’re right,” he said, “it should fade away in time.”
“That’s easy for you to say, but how long will it take? Have you ever had a rat die under your floorboards?”
He admitted that he had, and it was not a pleasant experience—or a short one.
“Well,” said Bellingham, “there you are.”
Johnston was prepared to buy into a certain amount of what Bellingham was suggesting, but not the entirety of it. The presence in the room might only have been a manifestation of a memory given sensory form, but there was badness to it—and it wasn’t just the smell, even as he tried to ignore all he knew about the particulate nature of odors, and therefore whatever he might be inhaling as long as he remained in proximity to it. No, whatever this was, it was malevolent in its intent.
“Do you think it’s her?”
“Eliza? I told you: it’s not a person, or the ghost of one. It’s a memory, a persistence—but yes, I’ll accept that it may be some remnant of her; it’s her persistence, as though time has become tangled, and we’re smelling something from long ago.”
Seeing it too, Johnston thought, because the area around the fireplace was warped ever so slightly, like an image viewed through a smear on glass.
“Then what’s caused it?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
“Have you changed anything: knocked down a wall, maybe?”
“Or held a séance, or sacrificed a goat in the basement? Isn’t that how it works in films?”
Johnston acknowledged the obviousness of his question with a grimace.
“Have you ever held a séance?” he asked. “Just wondering.”
“No, and I’m not about to start now. Perhaps it’s all down to the same business that led you here.”
The Atlas: that, at least, made some kind of sense. Soter had been searching for Lionel Maulding, and Maulding had been seeking the Atlas, which led both of them to Eliza Dunwidge, a dealer in occult volumes. Now Quayle—either a descendant of Soter’s original employer, or someone with an odd sense of historical humor—was also hunting for the Atlas, which meant poking around in the past.
And pop: a bubble had burst.
“Have you seen enough?” Bellingham asked.
“I haven’t really seen anything at all,” said Johnston, “but I’ve smelled a sufficiency.”
He followed Bellingham from the room, and waited as she closed the door behind them. This cut off the worst of the odor, although more than a hint of it remained in the hallway. They returned to the kitchen, where Bellingham retrieved a plastic carrier bag from a shelf and placed it before Johnston. Inside was a thin photo album: black cover, black pages, like a memorial volume.
“My grandfather’s collection of murder memorabilia,” said Bellingham.
Johnston flicked through it, finding newspaper clippings, old photographs of the house in which they now sat, both before and after the fire, and a few charred pieces of stationery from Dunwidge & Daughter, including invoices, compliment slips, and a letter signed by Eliza Dunwidge to a collector in Warwick, itemizing new acq
uisitions that might be of interest to him. The handwriting was ornate, the language equally so. This, thought Johnston, was an educated, intelligent woman; an odd one, and with esoteric fascinations that bordered on the satanic, but undeniably interesting. He would have been curious to meet her. In a way, given that his skin and clothing were sullied by their exposure to whatever was in the living room, he supposed he already had.
He found the picture of Soter with which he was familiar, and beside it one of Eliza Dunwidge with an older man, whom he guessed to be her father. Whatever Eliza’s intellectual gifts, they had not been matched by any similar degree of pulchritude. She was unpleasantly plain, like cheap wallpaper.
Johnston moved on, then paused. Before him lay two halves of the same story from the Daily Graphic, an illustrated journal with which he was unfamiliar, pasted on adjoining pages. It consisted of reports on a number of legal matters, including two murder trials, a handful of larcenies, and an interesting case of blackmail that might otherwise have absorbed Johnston’s attention had it not been for the illustrations above the next-to-last story, which marked the passing of a year since the last sighting of the “suspected murderer, John Sotere.” The first illustration was a version of Soter’s photograph from the previous page, but drawn in profile, while the second was of a man depicted full face, his features familiar to Johnston, but only from a passport photograph taken almost a century later. He had not come across these Daily Graphic pages in his researches because, just as Soter’s name had been misspelled, so also had the second man’s. He was referred to as “Mr. Atol Quail, Lawyer.”
Johnston looked closer. The similarity was remarkable.
“Someone you know?” asked Rosanna Bellingham.
She came around the table to join him, leaning in to view the pages. He caught her scent, and felt one of her breasts against his back. He tried to recall the last time a woman’s breast had rested against his back, but it was so long ago as to be lost to him.
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