Lionel had recently achieved a measure of celebrity by virtue of being appointed the presenter of Fortean TV, a magazine programme devoted to the not-entirely-earnest investigation of weird events and individuals. This had caused a certain amount of controversy in the broadsheet press, some of whose columnists had thought it unbecoming of a minister of the Church of Wales to lend his dog-collar to such irreverence.
‘It’s marvellous,’ he assured me. ‘Actually, that’s what I’m ringing about.’
‘You want me to appear onFortean TV?’ If I sounded sceptical, it’s because I am - and it’s because I’m universally renowned for my scepticism that I have every right to be sceptical about the possibility of ever being invited to appear on Fortean TV.
‘Oh no, we’re full up for the next series. It’s just that ever since the first series I’ve been deluged with calls from all kinds of people clamouring to get on. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories they tell.’
‘Actually, Lionel,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t believe any of the stories they tell - but I do believe that you’ve been deluged with calls. What do you expect if you set yourself up as the front man for rent-a-crank?’
‘That’s exactly why I thought you might be a valuable addition to our team,’ he told me, refusing to take the slightest offence. Lionel’s geniality knows no bounds.
‘You want me to be Fortean TV’s resident sceptic?’
‘No, no. Forget Fortean TV. It’s because Martin watched the show that he got in touch, but he doesn’t want to be on it. He wants me to exorcise a supernatural presence in his bookshop.’
If it had been anyone else on the other end of the line I’d have been perfectly certain that the word was ‘exercise’, no matter how nonsensical the containing sentence might have become, but this was Lionel.
‘Do you do exorcisms?’ I asked.
‘It’s not something I do lightly,’ he assured me, ‘but if I’m convinced that it will do some good, I’m prepared to employ any of the Church’s rituals. I believe that exorcism is a legitimate weapon in the war against evil.’ Lionel is what the Victorians would have described as a muscular Christian - not so much because he has a black belt in judo as because he believes that the power of active evil has to be countered by an equal and opposite reaction. He is the only man I know who could say ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!’ with perfect sincerity.
‘Why do you need me?’ I said. ‘The presence of a strident atheist is hardly likely to help the party go with a bang. Assuming, of course, that departing demons do go with a bang, as well as the obligatory whiff of brimstone.’
‘I don’t need you for the exorcism, even if there is one,’ said Lionel, cheerily. ‘I just thought you might be interested to sit in on a preliminary investigation - an all-night sitting - so that we can try to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. I read your thing in Steve’s anthology.’
‘Ah,’ I said, as enlightenment dawned. Steve Jones had edited an anthology for Gollancz which consisted of famous horror writers’ true encounters with the supernatural. Not wishing to miss out on the opportunity I had supplied a piece entitled ‘Chacun sa goule’ which offered a scrupulously accurate account of a real event: the coincidental discovery of a rare book by Maurice Maeterlinck, of whose existence I had been unaware until a few days earlier, at an antiquarian book fair I had stumbled across by chance. Typically, I had supplemented my record of the bare facts with a philosophical rhapsody about the existential significance of the continued permeation of the world by the carbonaceous matter which once made up the bodies of the dead. I had observed that the carbon dioxide in every breath we take contains atoms which might once have been part of the people of the past, whose minds also echo in the pages of their writings, so that the dead do indeed retain a ‘ghostly’ presence in the present. Although graveyards were doubtless replete with such ghosts, I had said, the most significant of my own ghostly encounters invariably took place in bookshops. It was perhaps not unnatural, therefore, that on being told about a haunted bookshop - a bookshop whose resident supernatural presence was so discomfiting as perhaps to require exorcism - Lionel would think of me.
‘Well?’ said Lionel. ‘Are you interested?’
‘What bookshop?’ I parried. ‘Where?’
‘It’s a second-hand place - just down the coast, in Barry.’
‘There isn’t a second-hand bookshop in Barry,’ I said, confidently. I once lived in Swansea for several years and I still visit my children there on occasion. If there had been a second-hand bookshop in Barry, I would have found mention of it in drif’s guide and made the effort to visit it.
‘It’s not been there long,’ Lionel told me.
‘And it’s haunted already? Who by?’
‘Martin’s not sure that it’s the premises. He thinks it might be the books.’
I nearly came out with some crack about Martin presumably having picked up a copy of Abdul Alhazred’sNecronomicon at a jumble sale in Tiger Bay but I hesitated. The idea of haunted books was not without a certain appeal - in fact, the mere mention ofbooks was inevitably appealing to a man of my kind. Even the newest second-hand bookshop needs old books to dress its shelves. Most people anxious to move into the trade use their own collections as bases, but hardened collectors are usually so reluctant to put out their old favourites that they shop around for anything that can be bought in bulk at a reasonable price. I knew that there had been a time in the nineteenth century when the coal industry was booming and Cardiff was a busy port. The middle class had had aspirations in those days - C. D. Pamely’s father had been a mining engineer in Pontypridd but he’d harboured greater ambitions for his sons - and it was possible that there were some nice caches of good antiquarian stock lurking in a place like Barry, which had been a haven for the South Wales gentry before slipping way downmarket to become a third-rate holiday resort.
Haunted or not, there was just a slim possibility that the mysterious Martin’s shop might have some interesting contents - and if it had opened too late to obtain an entry in the latest issue of drif the professional vultures might not have had the chance to strip the shelves clean of tasty meat.
There is nothing that gladdens the heart of a book-collector like the thought of virgin stock. ‘It sounds interesting,’ I said to Lionel, effortlessly switching into earnest mode. ‘When do you propose to hold this investigative vigil?’
‘Monday,’ said Lionel.
It was short notice, but I assumed that it would have been even shorter if Lionel hadn’t been otherwise occupied on Sundays.
‘Suits me,’ I said, firmly hooked and avid to be reeled in. ‘Name your time and place.’
* * * *
Lionel picked me up from Cardiff Station in an old Cortina whose funereal paint job seemed appropriate to the occasion. He already had two passengers in place so I had no choice but to take a back seat. There wasn’t a lot of space for me, let alone my overnight bag, but I squeezed myself in.
‘This is Martin,’ Lionel said, indicating the middle-aged man whose claim to the front seat had obviously been secured by reason of dimension as well as opportunity, ‘and this is Penny, from the Society for Psychical Research.’
‘Is that still going?’ I asked, nodding politely to a thin, thirtyish woman with spectacles whose lenses were almost as powerful as mine. My relentlessly antiquarian mind inevitably associated the SPR with its late Victorian heyday, and the investigations of Katie King and D. D. Home mounted by the likes of William Crookes and Oliver Lodge. The woman seemed slightly resentful of my ignorance.
‘Yes it is,’ she said, in a severe manner which suggested that she’d been warned about my sceptical tendencies - and also, perhaps, that she thought that taking a back seat to a man who presented Fortean TV was slumming it a bit.
‘Penny’s done postgrad research at Duke,’ said Lionel, proudly, as the car pulled way into the last remnants of the rush-hour traffic. ‘In the selfsame labs where J. B. Rhine once worke
d.’
‘I thought you could do that sort of thing in the UK now,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Arthur Koestler leave a bequest to set up an established chair in paranormal studies? Somebody took the money in the end, didn’t they?’
‘There isn’t a course here,’ the woman explained. ‘I wanted to do a proper course.’
I didn’t want to offend her further by challenging her use of the word ‘proper’. Instead I cast an appraising eye over the equipment with which she had surrounded herself. I recognised the fancy temperature tracking-gauge and the video camera easily enough, but most of the rest was in leather cases, and it wasn’t obvious what the ammeter on her knee was supposed to be connected to.
‘Are we the whole squad?’ I asked.
‘For now,’ Lionel said. ‘If Penny gets anything interesting, she’ll call in some of her associates for a more thorough investigation - with Martin’s permission, of course.’ The way he added the qualifying clause made me wonder whether Martin’s permissiveness might already have been severely tested by Lionel’s insistence that a preliminary investigation would be necessary before deciding whether an exorcism might be required. I could understand why; even though the traditional silly season wouldn’t be under way for another two months, the Fortean Times was hot enough nowadays to have all its best stories followed up by the Sun and the Daily Star, not to mention the Sunday Sport. That kind of coverage might boost the sales of a haunted bookshop for a week or two, but the embarrassment might last a lifetime.
‘I hope the Reverend explained to you, Mr Stableford,’ the bookshop proprietor intoned, in a broad way-up-the-Valleys accent, ‘that this whole business is confidential.’
‘No one will hear a word of it from me,’ I assured him. ‘My lips are sealed.’ I can be very pedantic when giving out promises; while I type this page not a sound is escaping from my lips. I have not, of course, changed any of the names in the interests of protecting the innocent - or even the guilty - but you will doubtless have noticed that I have withheld the surnames of the minor characters.
‘Perhaps you could fill Brian and Penny in while we’re on the road, Martin,’ Lionel suggested. ‘Give them some idea of what to expect.’
Martin did not seem overjoyed by this prospect. In fact, he looked as if he might be having second thoughts about the wisdom of having approached Lionel in the first place - but the incumbent at his local chapel was unlikely to do exorcisms, or to look kindly upon anyone who broached the possibility. The great majority of Welsh Methodists tend to the view that a man who imagines himself to be troubled by ghosts or demons is a man with an unusually guilty conscience, who should look deep into his own soul for the source of his disquiet.
‘Would you rather I did it?’ Lionel asked, his generosity as boundless as his geniality.
‘No,’ said Martin, his mind quickly made up. ‘Best if...well, see, I’m from the Rhondda originally. In the industry till the pits closed - not a faceworker, mind, always above ground. Middle management, I suppose, is the phrase they use nowadays. Anyhow, I was over twenty years in when the axe came down, an’ the redundancy was a nice package. I’m only forty-three, so I knew I had to use the money - start a business, like. Well, I’d always been a reader, an’ it just so happened that I was still in the office, tidying up, when one of the old boys we’d kept on to do the clearing up came in to ask what we wanted done with all the books from the old colliery library.
‘I didn’t even know there’d ever been a colliery library, but when the boys had found all these boxes of books in a storage-loft the old-timer had recognised them - said he’d often seen the like around his house in the old days, when his father and grandfather had been regular borrowers. It had fallen into disuse in the fifties, I suppose, what with paperbacks an’ all, an’ the room it was in had been turned into an office. So I said, it’s all right, boys, I’ll look after those - put what you can into my car, and pile the rest up in the bike-sheds. I’ll ferry the boxes home a few at a time. Well, nobody else wanted them, did they?
‘I thought at first I’d just look through them, like - sort out anything I wanted to read and give the rest to Oxfam - but when I got the old boy to help me stow the second batch he said that if I’d got a good home, he knew where the books from the old Workingmen’s Institute had been put away when they turned it into a club an’ the library was turfed out in favour of a snooker table. That’s when I got the idea. Ours couldn’t have been the only pit in Wales with its own library, nor our village the only one with a Workingmen’s Institute, an’ we’re not the kind of folk tothrow things away. Why not scout around, I thought, see what I could dig up, an’ open a bookshop?’
Why not indeed? I thought, sympathetically.
‘I knew there was no point doing something like that in the Valley, mind,’ Martin continued, ‘or even in Merthyr. I thought of Caerleon first, but the wife wasn’t happy about moving to what’s practically England, an’ I knew Cardiff already had two second-hand bookshops, so I thought of Barry, which the wife has always liked. It turned out that a lot of stuff from the old colliery libraries had been sold years ago to old Ralph in Swansea or that shop that used to be in the Hayes before it all got torn down, but I found four more sizeable lots that I picked up for next to nothing.’
‘How many books altogether?’ I asked, impatient for hard news.
‘About twelve thousand, give or take.’
It wasn’t as big a total as I’d hoped. Given the educational mission of nineteenth century Workingmen’s Institutes, I guessed that at least half the books would probably be non-fiction and half the rest would probably be religious texts. Even if there were only three thousand volumes of fiction, however - and even if the bulk of those were standard sets of Scott and Dickens, there ought to be something of interest. None of the books had seen the light of day for at least twenty years, and some might not have been inspected for the best part of a century - and the most exciting fact of all was that Martin didn’t seem to have a clue. In a business full of sharks, he was pure whitebait.
‘How long, exactly, has the shop been open for business?’ I asked.
‘Open for business?’ Martin echoed, incredulously. ‘It hasn’t been open at all. Didn’t the Reverend...?’
‘Sorry, Martin,’ Lionel interposed. ‘When I phoned Brian I didn’t realise that you hadn’t got that far.’
My heart was still busy leaping. Not just virgin stock but extra virgin stock, untouched by sharkish fin!
‘Do you think,’ Penny put in, resentfully, ‘that we could get to the paranormal activity?’
I had quite forgotten, in my excitement, that this was supposed to be a haunted bookshop. I remembered J.W. Dunne’s theory that ghosts are images displaced in the fourth dimension from parallel worlds where time might be running ahead of or behind our own. If so, Martin’s as-yet-unopened bookshop might easily be haunted by the shades of dozens of bookdealers, all impatient to get into it.
‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound supportive of our collective mission. ‘Tell us about the ghosts.’
‘I never said ghosts’ said Martin, his voice suddenly infected by a note of pedantic caution. ‘I never saw a person, you understand. Whatever it is, it’s not people.’
‘Poltergeist phenomena, then?’ said Penny, eagerly. ‘Books moving by themselves - pages turning. Or is it a matter of sudden chills, changes in atmosphere?’
‘Bit of that, like,’ Martin conceded. ‘Wouldn’t mind, if it were only that - cold, creaking an’ so on.’
‘So what is it, exactly?’ Penny wanted to know.
‘Don’t know, exactly. You’re the expert, I suppose - you an’ the Reverend. I didn’t notice anything at first - even the wife thought the place was all right, when it was empty. It’s a lock-up, of course; we weren’t planning on living there although it’s got what the estate agent called living accommodation on the first floor. Modem family couldn’t live there, even if their kids had long gone - too small by half, an’ the bathroom f
acilities are woefully inadequate. I decided to use the so-called bedroom as a second stockroom, put shelves in an’ everything. Plan was that when I’d got the shop going steady we’d both move down to a nice house overlooking the sea, but there’s not much chance of that now until it’s properly sorted - by the Reverend, I mean. It’s not so bad in daylight, of course, but even then...well, the wife’s only been in there by day, an’ she swears she’ll never set foot in it again, even at high noon. I’ve been in there past midnight, putting up the shelves - but only the once, since I started putting out the stock. Seems as if the presence came with the stock, like, although it wasn’t there when the books were all in boxes piled up in my hall an’ front room. It’s a real mystery.’
‘If it were a single haunted book,’ Lionel mused, ‘you might be able to solve the problem just by getting rid of that one volume.’
‘If it is,’ said Martin, darkly, ‘an’ you can figure out which one, you can have it for nothing.’
Given his account of how he’d acquired his stock, Martin could probably afford to be generous. Given that his stock had been on the shelves of private lending libraries for many years, though - and stored in various lofts and cupboards for many years more, without anyone complaining about any kind of haunting - it was difficult to see how the problem could be one of the books, or even all of them.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 46
