The Bookman

by Lavie Tidhar

  The Inspector, unexpectedly, smiled. "You still don't understand, do you?" she said. "Did your friend Gilgamesh not try to tell you?" She saw his startled expression and shook her head. "Oh, Orphan. Why is it that everyone you touch seems to die? You are like Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, wandering the halls of your mind, not daring to act until all is lost. This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth. Would you bring her back if you could?"

  The question again, flung at him like a hook on a fishing line. Ready to reel him in.

  And Orphan, caught, said, "Tell me how."

  He walked away from Guy's Hospital through the maze of Southwark's streets. "Not here," Irene Adler had said. She had glanced about her, and Orphan, following the direction of her eyes, saw they were focused on an ancient-looking bible that rested by his bedside. "Here." She handed him a piece of paper. Orphan opened it, read an address and a time.

  "Get well," Irene Adler said, and then she was gone, closing the door softly behind her.

  It had taken Orphan two more days before the doctor released him. The waves of darkness came and went, grief washing over him, Lucy's burning image waking him in the night with screams that echoed only inside his head.

  Yet overlaying the grief was Irene Adler's question. Would you bring her back? she had asked – and the question, with its implication, its insane promise, had consumed Orphan until he could think of little else.

  He did examine the bible that rested by his bedside. It was an old volume, printed the previous century, rebound in contemporary cloth. Grubby and worn, it had the look of a bible that had rested, over the decades, in the hands of more than one dying patient. It was a King James bible, of the translation sanctioned, for his own mysterious reasons, by that greatest of all Lizard Kings, yet it was not published by the King's printer: it was an illegal publication. Orphan turned the book in his hands, intrigued. The publisher's name was given as Thomas Guy. Orphan seemed to remember, vaguely, that the founder of the hospital had indeed begun his career in the printing and selling of illegal bibles. That must be, therefore, one of them, he thought. But why had Irene Adler looked to it before falling quiet? What was it about the book (if that was indeed what had concerned her) to prevent her from speaking further? It was just a book.

  Restless, alone with his dark thoughts in his room, Orphan began paging through Thomas Guy's bible. First he shook the book, edges down, but nothing had fallen from within its pages. Next he thumbed through the book, seeking to see where it would open: it should, he knew, come to the place that had been most used. And so it did, and the old bible opened in his lap onto the eighth chapter of the first book of Samuel. It was the part where the elders of Israel come to Samuel, an old man now, and ask him to make them a king. Orphan read Samuel's reply to the elders, and felt a strange apprehension reach out to wrap cold fingers around his chest, as if the ancient, anonymous writer of the text was addressing him, replying to an unanswered question.

  And he said, This will be the manner of the King that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

  And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

  And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.

  And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.

  He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.

  And ye shall be his servants. Something was crystallising in Orphan's head, the beginning of understanding; that in the maze of texts there was hidden a message, an interpretation of a past like a thread that aimed to lead him onwards, to traverse the filthy streets of history. Numbly, he wondered how King James, and all his get who came after, had allowed passages like this to be printed. And then, at the bottom left corner of the page, in a pencil mark so faint that he almost missed it, he saw the inscription that waited there, almost as if it had been waiting for him, just him, through all the patient years: The Bookman Cometh.

  SEVEN

  Body-Snatchers

  The body-snatchers, they have come

  And made a snatch at me.

  It's very hard them kind of men

  Won't let a body be.

  You thought that I was buried deep

  Quite decent like and chary;

  But from her grave in Mary-bone

  They've come and bon'd your Mary!

  The arm that us'd to take your arm Is took to Dr Vyse,

  And both my legs are gone to walk The Hospital at Guy's.

  – Thomas Hood, Whims and Oddities

  Away from Guy's, through the narrow maze of Southwark streets. Dusk was falling, and on the other side of the river, through the fog, the great city lit up in thousands of moth-like flames, in hundreds and hundreds of lit butterflies, their wings beating against the stillness of dark, fighting the night with their simple existence. A week before, and Orphan would have stopped, taken out his small notepad and his pen, scribbled a few lines, composed a minor poem, recorded the motion of the light in dark air.

  Not now.

  Away from the hospital, away from the echoing corridors and the hushed expectant silence punctuated by dying screams. Away from the cold stone and the musty watching bibles in every room, and away from the food that churned the stomach, and the sharp stench of industrial cleaning fluids. He walked through the fog and felt the presence of the Bookman like a ghostly outline, a shapeless, formless thing, a disembodied entity that hid in the foul air and watched him from the rooftops and the drains.

  The second night at Guy's, unable to sleep, uneasy with the presence of the pirate bible by his bedside, he stood from his bed. The floor was cold under his feet but he welcomed the sensation. He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.

  He walked through empty corridors and listened to the sick behind their doors. No one stopped him, no one challenged him to return to his bed. He was alone as a wraith, haunting the hospital as if he were already dead.

  The cold wrapped itself around him, rising like the shoots of a flower from the ground and into his feet and up, entombing him. He passed through ill-lit wards and looked out of the windows and saw nothing but black night draped across the hospital.

  His footsteps led him, by twists and turns, downwards, so that he passed floor after floor in this fashion, his bare feet padding silently in his journey through the endless corridors.

  He pushed open a door marked MEDICAL SCHOOL, and descended a flight of stairs, and the air grew even colder, and was filled with a chemical tang that burned the back of his throat. I should wake, he thought. I should not be walking here. But he could not stop; he was trapped in a dream and could not rouse.

  And yet, now that he was here he could go no further. The basement, he realised. A long corridor stretched before him. Electric lights hummed and flared and dimmed in naked bulbs suspended from the ceiling like grotesque blinking eyes. A row of doors stood shut like the flooded mouths of underwater caves. He heard voices, approaching, and turned back, and hid against the wall, his head turned to observe the happenings in the corridor he had just vacated.

  There was the sound of something heavy being dragged against the floor, and the laboured breathing of two or more men. Orphan looked, and saw that there were indeed two men there, and that each was dragging behind him a sack. Both had clean-shaven faces of ordinary features, almost pleasant. They stopped
before a door in the middle of the corridor and the one on the left knocked twice.

  The door opened and a man came out. He looked from side to side furtively, and on his face was a nervous, almost frightened expression. Orphan recognised him – it was the doctor who had first examined him.

  "What ho, Dr W.?" the man on the left said. "We got you a good one, on my word of honour." He looked at his companion and smiled. "Two good ones, and fresh."

  "Shut up, fool," the doctor growled. He raised his hand and touched his moustache nervously, then motioned the two men. "Bring the Things in. Quickly." As the door opened Orphan saw there were other men in the room, though he could not see them clearly.

  As the two men walked through the door they struggled with their sacks, and the one on the right momentarily came loose; and Orphan watched with horror as a slender, white leg protruded from its opening.

  The doctor halted when he saw this.

  "I did not ask you for a female, Bishop," he said. "I will not pay for a Thing I do not need."

  "It is not a woman but a big small," the man – Bishop – said in a wounded tone. "Look." And he opened the sack fully as it lay on the threshold of the room.

  The corpse that sprawled out was indeed not that of a woman. It was a boy, aged, Orphan thought, around fifteen or sixteen. His face were strangely peaceful, as if he were only asleep and would soon wake up and demand his tea, and his features were strong but delicate, a face that had once known comfortable living.

  The doctor looked with distaste at the two men. "What did he die of, Bishop?" He turned to look at the other man, who was standing grinning with his sack held securely in his hand, "May?"

  "I neither know nor care," Bishop said, and his companion, May, nodded and said, "It is quite indifferent what he died of, for here he is, stiff enough."

  "Get in, damn it!" The voice that came from within the room had the tone of command in it, and the doctor and the two body-snatchers (for that, Orphan realised, was what they must be, two resurrection men plying their trade) hurried through the door, the doctor shutting it behind him in a hurry.

  Orphan, for whom the whole gruesome scene still seemed no more than a part of his nightmare, padded around the corner into the corridor, and peered through the keyhole.

  Inside, the argument was continuing.

  "This subject is too fresh," the doctor said, and the two men laughed. "The fact is," Bishop said, "you are not in the habit of seeing fresh subjects and you don't know anything about it!"

  The same commanding voice Orphan heard before now growled, "We need the Thing fresh, so stop arguing about it and get to work!"

  But the doctor did not easily give up. "I don't think it was ever buried," he said. "Where had it come from?"

  "You know nothing about raising bodies!" Bishop said. He seemed truly exasperated.

  "Enough," the man who seemed to be in charge said, and all fell quiet. Orphan, peering through, could not make out his face: all he could discern was a remarkable bulk, coupled with power.

  Orphan squirmed against the door, trying for a better angle.

  For a moment, the whole room spread out before him: there were the two resurrection men, standing to one side with their gruesome merchandise; the doctor, hovering nervously beside what appeared to be a huge coffin; the fat man, sitting in an armchair, himself surveying the room; two more men, strangely similar in appearance, dressed in white medical smocks, standing next to a vast array of machinery pulsating with lights.

  What was in the coffin? Vapours rose from it, icy white tendrils that turned the room into a still, cold space like the inside of a slaughterhouse. A mortuary, Orphan thought. The coffin was long, metallic, over six feet long. It must have held a tall person, he thought. But who?

  He blinked, took a slow, quiet breath. Yes. He could discern a face, thin, with a hawkish nose and a square, prominent chin. The eyes were open and stared into nothing, as if the man was not quite dead but rather drugged to an extreme, until he had taken on the semblance of death.

  The fat man stirred in his armchair. "Pay them and get rid of them," he said to the doctor. "You must try the procedure again."

  Then he turned his head towards the door. He seemed to be looking directly at Orphan.

  Orphan froze. Then the fat man shook his head, minutely, as if saying, "This is not for you," and he lifted a cane that rested by his side and made a motion with it, and one of the men moved against the door and blocked Orphan's view. Orphan ran from the door, but it remained unopened. No one was pursuing him.

  Did the fat man know that he was there? He had warned him away. Hadn't he? Did he know him? He shuddered, suddenly feeling the cold. He felt entirely awake now. The body-snatchers will come out any minute, he thought. He did not want to be there. The cold overwhelmed him, made his teeth chatter. Everywhere he turned there was death.

  He turned and ran away the way he had come, his feet noiseless on the stone floor.

  Away from Guy's, away from its ghoulish dreams, its baroque mysteries. Away from the hospital with the falling of night, through the cobblestone streets and onto the south bank. The fog intensified around him, became a thick screen that blotted out the stars and erased the city as if it had never existed. Orphan hurried, shivering despite his coat. The lonely sound of his footsteps was muffled by the fog.

  He walked past streetlamps that bled a wet yellow light, making his way by memory rather than sight. A chill wind rose from the Thames and pummelled him, and he drew the coat tighter around himself and turned away from the river bank, until at last he reached the great edifice of Waterloo Station, jutting out of the fog like a dark citadel. It seemed to him a living thing then, a grotesque, giant face that breathed loudly, the sound of its inhaling and exhaling composed of the steady rhythm of trains. He skirted the station, encountering few people. Those who were out in this foul weather hurried past him without glancing his way, and Orphan had the sudden feeling that he was invisible, a ghost wandering in an unreal world.

  He stopped by one of the great stone arches. A lonely figure lay huddled on the floor, wrapped in grey blankets. Orphan crouched down, and the figure stirred. A mane of shaggy hair emerged and two large eyes, milky-white and unseeing, stared up at Orphan. "Spare some change?" the beggar said hopefully.

  Orphan was startled. He had almost, for a moment, believed it was Gilgamesh, returned. "What is your name?" he asked, and he reached into his pocket for what money he had.

  He dropped the meagre coins he found into the beggar's bowl. The man raised his face further; his blind eyes seemed to search Orphan's face, to study them. Then the unblinking eyes grew wider, and his pale face turned paler still, and his breath caught in his throat; and Orphan, worried for the man's health, grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "What ails you, my friend?"

  The beggar moved away, as if the touch of Orphan's hand was more than he could bear. "Not so much noise, my lord!" he hissed. "Sweet prince, speak low: the King your father is disposed to sleep."

  Was the man a failed Shakespearean actor? Orphan wondered. He said, gently, "My name is Orphan."

  The beggar did a thing that startled Orphan. He laughed. It was a curious sound, hoarse and weak like a failing engine. Then he said, "Sweet prince, the untainted virtue of your years hath not yet dived into the world's deceit, nor more can you distinguish of a man than of his outward show."

  He spoke, it seemed to Orphan, with great intensity, as if his words carried a meaning far beyond their stageuse. But, "I'm sorry," Orphan said, "I don't understand."

  Sighing, he rose to leave. He was already late for his meeting with the Inspector.

  The beggar bowed his head. Then he said, half-muttering before retreating back into his blankets, "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

  "Thank you," Orphan said, "I think." And he walked onwards, as the beggar under his arch was swallowed in the fog.

  He walked around the great edifice of the
station; and it was not long before he reached another arch where, underneath, small glass windows glowed with an internal warmth, and a small door stood waiting like a welcoming embrace, and a small sign hanging above the door said, The Lizard's Head.

  EIGHT

  Lord Byron's Simulacrum

  The beings of the mind are not of clay;

  Essentially immortal, they create

  And multiply in us a brighter ray.

  – Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage"

  He pushed the door open and went inside. Heat assailed him, a cloud of tobacco smoke engulfed him, and with them came the sizzle of frying sausages, and the smell of beer that had, over the years, seeped into the very foundations of the pub.