Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  I was prepared to feel a slight pang of regret about that; I knew that if I were going to find any real treasure in that dust-caked morass upstairs I was going to need some luck. Even while we ate, my restless eyes were checking and rechecking the downstairs shelves, unable to find anything worth lingering over.

  The pizza was as mediocre as could be expected, but the tea was better. It seemed much better until I got to the dregs, when I began to notice an odd aftertaste. I noticed, too, that the air in the shop had a peculiar texture to it. All bookshops are dusty, of course, and when books that have been a long time in storage are first set on shelves they often release a little dampness into the air, faintly polluted with fungal spores and bits of dead silverfish. Book-lovers learn to savour that kind of atmosphere, or at least to ignore it - but this texture was slightly different from any I’d encountered before. This gave the impression of being vintage dust - a real grand cru. Martin’s pronunciation of the word ‘miasma’ echoed in my mind as I tried to measure the dust’s quality more precisely, but it didn’t seem dismissable simply as coal dust any more than it warranted elevation to the status of ‘the dark spirit of the pit’. It was something more teasing than either.

  I couldn’t help thinking of the sceptical kind of occult detective stories, where the intrepid investigators eventually find that alleged hauntings are merely noxious vapours released from bad drains or unusual chemical reactions. Was it possible, I wondered, that the redistribution of books kept so long in close confinement really had set free some disturbing vapour that had been patiently building up in the inner recesses of the boxes for decades? I didn’t like to suggest to the others that perhaps we should have brought a canary.

  ‘Well,’ I said, as soon as I had bolted my last allotted slice of bacon, mushroom and tomato. ‘I’m going to get started on the upstairs stock. If you need me, just scream.’

  ‘Will you be all right up there on your own?’ Martin asked, as if he sincerely believed that I might not be.

  ‘If I’m not,’ I assured him, ‘I’ll scream.’

  ‘If you find any of mine,’ said Lionel, ‘let me know.’ Long before he got religion Lionel was the most prolific writer of science fiction and supernatural fiction in Britain, producing over a hundred and eighty volumes for the late unlamented Badger Books at the princely sum of £22 10s a time. His one longrunning series had consisted of occult detective stories starring the redoubtable Val Stearman and his lovely female associate La Noire. Stearman had, of course, been modelled on the young Lionel, and his spirit was doubtless still active even though the containing flesh had suffered a little. It required an extremely optimistic eye, alas, to find the slightest hint of La Noire in Penny-from-the-SPR.

  ‘I will,’ I promised.

  * * * *

  This time, I had to use the electric lights. I made a mental note to bring my own hundred-watt bulbs if I ever got involved in a similar vigil in future. I started my search in the top left-hand corner of the shelf-unit to the left of the door and began to work methodically across and down, across and down.

  If you’ve ever browsed the less popular shelves in the London Library you’ll know how dust from the red leather bindings that are gradually rotting down will stain your hands and your shirt, so that a long session in French Fiction can leave you looking suspiciously like Jack the Ripper. Exploring these shelves was not dissimilar, but it was an order of magnitude worse. Within ten minutes my hands were absolutely filthy and my green corduroy jacket was beginning to turn black. My shirt and my jeans had started out black, but that didn’t spare them any manifest effect, because the dust was so fine as to be slick and it soon made itself felt in their texture. If the dust had been pure carbon it would, I suppose, have been graphite, but even the best Welsh anthracite isn’t anywhere near pure carbon. This was impure carbon, and its impurities were enhancing its ability to form a miasma.

  I couldn’t help wiping my hands periodically on my jeans even though I knew that it wasn’t helping the situation. Nor could I help occasionally touching my hand to my face, my forehead and my hair, even though I knew that such touches would leave smudges. By the time I’d done twenty feet of shelves - without finding a single book that I’d have been happy to pay more than 50P for - I knew that I must be a real sight, and what Martin had said about the woeful inadequacy of the bathroom facilities suddenly began to seem more relevant.

  Despite the aforementioned inadequacy, my companions stumped up the staircase one by one to use the facilities. Lionel was the only one who looked in to see how I was doing. When I stopped for a break myself I took the opportunity to inspect my features in the mirror, and I managed to scrub off the worst of the stains with toilet paper, but even a thorough soaping failed to shift the worst of the grime from my fingers.

  As I resumed my labours I remembered what I’d written in ‘Chacun sa goule’ about our breathing in the carbon dioxide relics of the dead every time we fill our lungs. To the extent that the dust-particles on the books were coal they were presumably the relics of creatures that had roamed the earth in the Carboniferous Era: the flesh of early dinosaurs compounded with the mass of gymnosperm tree-trunks and the chitin of giant insects. That ancient carbon must, however, be mingled with echoes of more recent lives and deaths: the lives and to deaths of the men who hewed the coal, or that minority amongst them who had tried, valiantly, to improve their minds with the aid of the written word.

  Once, at the university of Reading, I had attended an open lecture in which A. N. Wilson had argued that the rich inner life of thought and feeling, which we now take completely for granted, is largely a product of books, and most especially of novels. Men who lived and died confined by oral culture, Wilson argued, had not the mental resources to build a robust inner monologue, a pressurised stream of consciousness. If that were true, I thought, such men could hardly be in any position to leave ghosts behind when they died and decayed. If dust really could retain some kind of spirit, it would, of necessity, be the spirit of readers - in which case, book-dust ought to be the most enspirited of all.

  As I formed that strange thought the sensation of having been in that room before returned in full force, swiftly and irresistibly.

  I did not pause in my routine of plucking the books off the shelves, inspecting their title-pages and returning them, but the automatism of that routine suddenly became oppressive and seemingly unnatural. Before, when the sensation had come over me, I had thought it an anomaly: a sensation that I should only have been capable of feeling in a dream - but now it did not feel anomalous at all, because it seemed now that I really was in a dream, where I was perfectly entitled to remember bookshops visited in other dreams, and to dwell in the curious nostalgia of discoveries barely made before being lost in the moment of awakening. As in all such episodes of lucidity, I had not the slightest desire to wake; indeed, I had the strongest possible desire to remain as I was, potentially able to grasp and hold any treasure that wishful thinking might deliver into my horrid night-black hand.

  The light of the sixty-watt bulb grew dimmer, and the walls of the room drew closer. The spines of the books grew darker, and the air became thicker and heavier. Because I knew that I was in a dream-state, I wasn’t unduly worried - to the contrary, I was intent on preserving a state in which the power of desire might be adequate to lead me to a precious find. It occurred to me that the room had become uncannily like a pit, both literally and metaphorically. The dross on the shelves was the stone of the imagination, inert and useless, while the texts for which I was searching were pregnant with mental energy that only needed to be read in order to warm and illuminate my inner being.

  Because I already possess twenty thousand volumes, my want list has been shrinking for years, and the works which I yearn most desperately to find nowadays are so rare that it would require a veritable miracle of luck to locate affordable copies. Without any magical ritual to aid me in my search through Martin’s stock I had only honest toil to bring to my task: a si
mple, straightforward determination to make certain that nothing would escape my notice. I searched with relentless efficiency. I worked methodically along the shelves, ignoring the miasmic dust, in the frail hope that somewhere beneath its obscuring cloak a treasure trove might be waiting: a copy of Gyphantia, or Omegarus and Syderia, or The Mummy!, or The Old Maid’s Talisman, in any edition and any condition provided only that the text were complete.

  It soon became so difficult to draw breath that I felt slightly dizzy, and so dark that I had no alternative but to pause in my work. I was already kneeling down, inspecting the lowest shelf in a unit, but I had to put out a hand nevertheless to support myself against the shelves. My eyes began to play tricks on me; phosphenes lit up the black air like a cluster of stars, and the darkness itself began to flow and shift, as if it were alive with a host of bustling shadows: a host so vast and so crowded that its individual parts were jostling for presence in a narrow corridor that was growing narrower by the instant.

  The dust that lay upon the air now seemed so dense that the air was indeed liquid. My trachea closed reflexively and I found myself gulping, swallowing the air and the intoxicating spirit which possessed and saturated it.

  I was not afraid. I was secure in my conviction that an instant of panic would be enough to bring me out of the dream-state and back to wakefulness, and I had dreamed far too many dreams of this frail kind to allow panic its moment of opportunity. I drank the spirits of the dead, and drank them gladly. I drank them thirstily, because I knew that they were closer to me than any mere kin. What was my own spirit, after all, but a compound of all that I had read and inwardly digested? Even if A. N. Wilson were mistaken in his estimate of the majority of men, he was surely right about himself and he was right about me. My inner life, my pressurised stream of consciousness, was the product of texts and the love of texts. I had been a ghoul all my life; what had I to be afraid of in that dark room full of clamorous spirits? The greater part of my life, and the greater part of my emotion, had been spent and generated by intercourse with the dead; what need had I to feel threatened, or to suspect the presence of maleficent evil?

  I drank deeply, avid for further intoxication. The dust was, after all, a previously untasted vintage.

  I felt slightly stirred, as if moist wind and cloying warmth were washing over me but leaving no impression. I felt the fading gleam of the Celtic twilight in my lungs and in my heart. I felt the heritage of Merlin and Taliesin and the force of Druid magic in my brain and in my groin. I heard the musical voices of luckmen intoning their spells, mingled with the strangled cries of hewers choked by gas or crushed by falling stone, all echoing together in the empty spaces of my mind.

  It was a delicious fantasy, a haunting dream: a fantasy so delicious and a dream so haunting that I would dearly have liked to maintain it against the cruel penetration of lucidity - but I could not do it.

  My supporting hand moved along the wooden shelf and my senses reeled. It was only the slightest of adjustments, but the little finger picked a thin splinter out of the distressed wood, and the tiny stab of pain made me gasp. The gasp turned to a cough, and then to a fit of coughing - and a cataract of black dust cascaded out of my mouth into the palm of my hand.

  The sixty-watt bulb buzzed and flickered, and its light became noticeably brighter. I hauled myself to my feet, blinked away the moment of drowsiness and went to the bathroom to rinse my hands again. Having done that, as best I could, I went back to the place at which I had paused and started scanning the top shelf of the next unit

  I didn’t curse myself for losing the dream. Dreams are by nature fragile and fugitive, and only death can free us, in the end, from the everpresent duty of waking from their toils.

  * * * *

  It took me a further three-quarters of an hour to finish searching the upstairs room. The best items I found were a couple of bound volumes of Reynolds’ Miscellany, including the serial version of Reynolds’ Faust, and battered copies of Eugene Sue’s Martin the Foundling, George Griffith’s A Criminal Croesus and Mrs Riddell’sFairy Water. They were all in poor condition, but they were all tides that I’d be glad to add to my collection. Considering that the hunt had started so unpromisingly it didn’t seem to be a bad haul, and there was still a slight possibility that I could add to it from the ground floor stock.

  Lionel, Martin and Penny were sitting downstairs, all as quiet as church mice. I thought at first that they might be asleep, and I took care to tiptoe down the last few steps, but Lionel looked around and said: ‘There’s more tea in the pot. We’ve all had a second cup.’ His voice was slower than usual and a little thicker.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I assured him. ‘Seen any sign of the presence?’

  ‘Not seen, exactly,’ he told me, ‘but we definitely felt something, didn’t we?’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it has been,’ Martin said, evidently disgruntled by the failure of his shop to come up with the goods, ‘but I can feel it.’

  ‘How about you?’ I said to Penny.

  ‘Nothing objective,’ she said, looking sadly at her various instruments. ‘But I can feel something. It’s faint, but it’s there.’ I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was disappointed. It’s hard to impress people with subjective feelings; she knew that unless she could carry away some kind of tangible record - a clip of film, a trace on her rotating chart or a leaping needle on the ammeter - she’d have nothing to interest the punctilious inquisitors of the Society for Psychical Research.

  ‘Anything upstairs?’ Lionel asked, obviously expecting a negative answer.

  ‘Just books,’ I said. ‘Hundreds and hundreds that no one will ever want to read - and a few dozen that someone might. I’ve only found a few, but they won’t just sit on my shelves unread. I feel sorry for the rest, in a way. All that thought that went into their creation! All that effort! If they only had voices, they’d be clamouring for attention, don’t you think? They’d be excited, wouldn’t they, at having been taken out of their coffins at last and put on display? They probably thought that the Day of Judgment had come at last when Martin first unpacked them - but disillusionment must be setting in by now. How long do you think it takes a book to give in to despair? Not long, I expect, if it’s a book from a colliery library - a book which has already had a taste of the darkness of the abyss.’

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously, are you?’ Martin said, without undue rancour. ‘It’s all a joke to you.’

  ‘The trouble with sceptics,’ Penny added, taking care to couch her remarks in general terms, ‘is that they’re too enthusiastic to accept their own insensitivity as proof that there’s nothing to be sensitive to. They’re like blind men denying that sight is possible. Not everyone’s the same, you know. Everybody’s different, and some of us can feel the presence of things that others can’t.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said, mildly. ‘You don’t mind if I move about, do you? I’ll try not to disturb you.’

  ‘Feel free,’ said Lionel, with typical bonhomie. ‘There’s no need for us to sit still or be quiet. There’s a long night still ahead of us - plenty of time for the presence to make itself felt more keenly, if it cares to.’

  He was absolutely right, of course - the night that stretched before us was very long indeed. I did my bit, and never closed my eyes for a moment. Once I’d finished checking the downstairs stock I perched on a wooden chair and chatted to Lionel about anything and everything except religion. We remembered a few old times and a few old friends; he told me all about Fortean TV and I told him about all the stories and articles I’d written lately. I expect the others found it more than a little boring, although Lionel kept bringing them into the conversation at every possible opportunity. He likes to be the life and soul of every party, and he sometimes succeeds in that, even when it seems to be an uphill struggle. He was the commanding presence in the bookshop now; his was the personality which filled it.

  All the while, I watched the three of them. I watch
ed them watching, waiting for something that always seemed to be on the brink of arriving but never quite did. They did feel another, darker presence - of that I was sure, although they made no elaborate attempt to describe or discuss it - but they had no idea what it was. They wanted it to become more clamorous, not so much because that would reveal it more fully and more clearly, but because they thought that the clamour might somehow contain its own explanation - but it never did. Its brief hold on the atmosphere of the shop was loosening; it needed no exorcism to persuade it to slip away into oblivion. Hour by hour and inch by inch, Martin’s haunted bookshop became dispirited.

  So far as I could tell, we did nothing to encourage the slow decay of the presence, but we did nothing to prevent it. None of us had the least idea how to encourage it, and none of us would have wanted to had we known how.

  As the time passed I watched my three companions become sleepier and sleepier as habit tested their resolve. I heard their voices slow and slur as dreams reached out for them even while they struggled to stay awake - but wakefulness won the war, and the dreams that might have claimed them had they been alone evaporated into the increasingly empty air. The dust stirred up by Martin’s exertions was already beginning to settle out and to settle down, adsorbed on to the surfaces of wall and window, carpet and ceiling. Even when I first sat down the air was no longer vintage air; as the morning progressed it became flatter and more insipid, increasingly soured by the faint odours of living flesh.