•
Travelling into work on the same bus route the next day, Barclay again scanned the tacky tabloid newspaper that was provided free of charge each morning. He told himself that he would only complete the crossword and would not, on this journey, allow himself to be annoyed by the celebrity gossip that infested its pages. But as he leafed through it, in search of the crossword, he stopped at an article that caught his eye. Unusually, it had no accompanying photo of a drunken reality TV star, a scantily clad footballer’s wife or even a pop singer with tell-tale traces of a white powder around their nostrils. But more unusually, it was written in an obscure language. Barclay could not be entirely certain, but strongly suspected that it was the language of the billboard advertisement he’d seen yesterday. He carefully tore around the article and put the piece of paper into his pocket. He had no wish to carry the whole tabloid around with him for the rest of the day and run the risk of being mistaken for someone who had an interest in its drivelling contents. He wished, however, to retain a copy of the article itself since he realised that the significance of this new language’s appearance was not confined to a cheap marketing gimmick. Now that he had more than half a dozen words from which to make a comparison, he might even be able to find out more about it.
When the bus reached the corner where stood the billboard advertisement for canned beans, he saw that the one adjacent to it now sported a new ad for a brand of pills delivering its message in the same mysterious language. Was it aimed, he thought, at some freshly arrived wave of immigrant workers from a cryptic corner of the European Union? During the last thirty years Barclay had seen the steady increase, from almost zero, of Turkish, Bangladeshi, Ethiopian, Polish, Jordanian and many other shop signs in London. But ads in a foreign language were rarer. He recalled a few in Spanish and French, but those had been for imported beers.
He had no luck with the crossword. The clues appeared to make no sense to him and he could scarcely comprehend what answers they were supposed to suggest. It was the first time that he had been defeated by one of them.
Later that day, in the office, as Barclay again tried to avoid looking at his computer screen, and during which gradually all correspondence on paper filled him with nausea, he noticed the t-shirt of one of his work colleagues as he passed by Barclay’s desk. This employee, James Monck, had recently been on holiday abroad, but had come back pale and sickly as if he’d actually spent a few weeks in a windowless room shooting up heroin. The garment he wore was an ill-fitting brown t-shirt, about a size too small, and it clung to his emaciated torso like a tight second skin. But it was the circular blue lettering at the centre of the t-shirt that drew Barclay’s attention. It wound around the silhouette of a town with a clustered multitude of steeples and domes. The lettering was in the obscure language that was appearing in his life on all sides.
“You picked that up on your holiday, did you?” Barclay asked him, pointing to his chest.
“That’s right,” Monck replied. “I hated to come back.”
“Where did you go?” Barclay said.
“Just over the edge.”
“Where did you buy the souvenir t-shirt? I don’t recognise the language or the silhouette of the town.”
“What, this?” Monck said. “Oh I got it in Qxwthyyothl.”
Barclay’s expression turned quizzical at the last word.
“Which is where?” he asked.
“Qxwthyyothl is the capital city of Thyxxolqu.”
Barclay took the article from his pocket that he’d torn out of the tabloid newspaper. He flattened out its crumpled surface and passed it over to Monck.
“Do you recognise this language?” he said, waiting as Monck examined the text.
“This is uxwqol in Thyxxolqus,” Monck finally replied.
Barclay stared at him blankly.
“I said,” Monck repeated, “this is written in Thyxxolqus, which is the language spoken in Thyxxolqu.”
“What type of script is this? I’ve not seen anything like it before. It doesn’t even look Indo-European in origin.”
“I’m not an expert, and I wouldn’t know.”
Monck handed back the fragment from the newspaper.
“Are there many people from this country you visited in London, do you know?”
Monck grinned at the remark. His teeth appeared to be in the first stages of rot.
“Thyxxolqu yho quoxlu,” he said, in a strangely guttural tone before abruptly turning on his heels and walking away.
Barclay wrote down the words he’d heard from Monck in phonetics, and managed to conquer his revulsion with the computer screen long enough to punch the characters into an internet search engine. He tried as many different combinations of the rendering he’d made as he could think of, but none yielded results. The article itself, written in the Thyxxolqus script, was of no assistance to him, since it could not be rendered by any of the keyboard language options available on the computer.
•
After he had finished doing nothing in the office, Barclay stopped off at the British Library. He did not care much for the hard angled building on the Euston Road that had replaced the old reading room beneath the mighty dome in the British Museum. His objections were not only architectural, for students who regarded it with, in Barclay’s view, much less reverence than the former space, constantly filled the new one. They treated it like a café, or meeting place, and he was concerned that proper research had given way to its being used to spend time searching online via laptop computers or else to improve one’s social circle on cyberspace. Barclay’s reader pass was of long-standing, and he was known by sight amongst the assistants and the security personnel, who waved him through with no more than a token glance at his card.
He consulted with the staff as to the correct volumes that might enable him to identify the script used in the article from the tabloid newspaper and was grateful for their assistance in seeking references to the language that Monck referred to phonetically as “Thyxxolqus”. However, they were only able to suggest a number of indices from antique and almost-forgotten encyclopaedias that proved, after consultation, to be of no value. There was a single reference to Thyxxolqus (rendered as “Tyxxollqus”) in a cross-reference to an obscure article reprinted in the 1862 edition of The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey. It came from the October 1821 edition of The London Magazine and was written under the pseudonym “XYZ”. The book contained this article (which was entitled “Voices from the Grave”) but was kept off-site and could only be delivered the next day. Barclay requested the item anyway and resolved to return.
•
On the bus back home from the British Library, Barclay noticed a new development. Above the windows, on the curved angle of the wall before the ceiling, it was usual for the bus company to display advertisements. On this particular bus, they were all in what appeared to be Thyxxolqus. Moreover, someone sitting directly in front of Barclay was conducting, via his mobile phone, a staccato buzzing conversation in the same language. Once the conversation was over, Barclay could not refrain from lightly tapping the passenger on the shoulder, and enquiring whether he could translate the advertisements since he appeared to be a speaker of Thyxxolqus.
The man appeared a little confused by Barclay’s interest and gaped at him momentarily as if he did not quite comprehend the request made to him in English.
Finally he responded.
“Do you mean to say huxxkl nyzzzt for yourself? Are you krhjxjk?”
“Where did you learn this language? Are you English?” Barclay replied, conscious that the two of them had drawn the surreptitious attention of all the other silent passengers.
“English? Of course I’m ghxcllu English! Hxchxc joke nyzzzt hythxxu off,” he barked back.
An elderly Indian lady, dressed in a patterned sari, sitting alongside the passenger in front then joined in the conversation.
“Please,” she said, “let’s not jhjkzz, there’s no juxxchu fzzzghal and I’m ru
nning chjuzzcu yho fghgrxx.”
Behind him, Barclay heard more words spoken in Thyxxolqus and turned to see a teenage Spanish couple chattering to one another.
“Qué divertido mi amor. Nxhzzz uglaghk no habla jkgqixx.”
Someone else said something in Thyxxolqus. Pure, undiluted Thyxxolqus. It was a small Japanese man clad in a pin-striped business suit. His beetling eyebrows were raised and a look of loathing crossed his face.
As Barclay watched his mouth open and close, forming the strange, guttural words, he saw that the Easterner’s teeth were blackened stumps housed in yellow, rotting gums. This Japanese man with a decayed mouth then got to his feet and appeared intent on grabbing hold of Barclay. But after his first unsuccessful lunge, Barclay was already on his feet and hurtling down the steps to the ground floor of the bus. He pushed the emergency exit release button above the doors and jumped clear of the vehicle. Barclay had planned to take to his heels, losing himself in the crowds in the ticket hall of nearby Camden Town Underground Station. But he landed awkwardly, his head thumped against the cold concrete of the pavement and he blacked out.
•
Barclay had a splitting headache and his vision was slightly distorted. He rose swiftly into consciousness, adrenaline surging into his veins as the memory of what had happened flooded over him. He was lying on a trolley in what seemed to be a small room that smelt of antiseptic. Someone in a white coat was leaning over him and taking his pulse.
“No sudden movements, please,” he said, “you’ve taken a nasty bump to the head. Concussion is quite likely.”
Barclay’s mind raced. He wanted to believe that the horrific images that assailed him were a nightmare brought on by the damage he’d sustained. He longed to believe that none of what he’d seen had been real. His blurred vision denied him a clear view of the face of the doctor who was close at hand. He could not make out the man’s mouth as being anything but vague black smear, too indistinct to be discerned as either normal or monstrously decayed.
“I’m Doctor Pearce,” he said, “you’re in University College Hospital. Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”
Barclay squinted. It looked like three to him. The fingers swam in and out of focus. Three, well, maybe four.
“Swallow these tablets,” the doctor said, “they’ll put you to sleep for a while and we’ll talk again in the morning. I want you to stay in overnight for observation. Just to be on the safe side.”
He lifted Barclay’s head, put a couple of pills into his mouth and then brought a paper cup half full of water with which to wash them down.
Barclay gurgled, swallowed the tablets and fell into a deep sleep shortly afterwards.
•
When he awoke, his head felt clearer and his vision had cleared substantially. He found himself in a deserted hospital ward. The beds were unmade and had been slept in and then abandoned only recently. He got up, clutched the white gown in which he was clad tightly to his body, and wandered barefoot across the cold linoleum on the floor. There was no-one behind the nurse’s desk in the middle of the ward. The only noise he could hear was coming from the corridor. As he approached the source, he recognised it as the sound of a television programme, and it seeped through the windowed door of a patients’ recreation room. He opened the door and found himself inside a dingy space with several chairs and their occupants, all facing a television set mounted two-thirds of the way up the far wall.
The occupants, all patients in hospital gowns, were staring at the screen and miming along to the words being spoken by a newsreader. This broadcaster was talking, Barclay was certain, in Thyxxolqus. His mouth was deformed as if eaten away by decay. Moreover, the mouths of the patients listening were the same; like a soggy hole in a crumpled sheet of paper. Now he realised what the Thyxxolqu language reminded him of, as he listened to the swarm of people speaking it all at once. It was like the buzzing of infuriated bluebottle flies.
Barclay felt a hand grasp his shoulder. He turned around and the man in the white coat who stood behind him leant forward and whispered into his ear. It was Doctor Pearce.
“Let’s get out of here and find somewhere where we can talk.”
They exited, took a couple of turns, and then Pearce let Barclay into an office. Once they were inside, he locked the door after him and slumped down into a wing-backed chair behind a desk. He drew out a packet of cigarettes from a drawer, offered Barclay one (who refused it) and then lit up. His hands were trembling and he coughed after the first drag. It looked as if he’d not smoked for a very long time.
“What do you think is going on?” the doctor said.
“What do I think is going on?” Barclay replied, suddenly feeling, given the circumstances, ridiculously self-conscious in his patient’s gown. He was arrested by the thought that this might be an examination of his own mental state. Had the doctor seen what he had seen?
“I’ve known nothing like it. The disease, or whatever it is, appears to be airborne, attacks orally and causes rapid and massive cellular degeneration,” Pearce said.
Barclay exhaled, letting out an audible sigh of relief.
“I’m not even sure,” Pearce continued, “that it’s a disease at all. I’ve been up all night, taking blood samples from patients afflicted with it. There’s no trace of invading bacteria, no trace of a virus. And yet the symptoms point towards leprosy or something of that ilk. It’s like the ghost of a disease possessing people.”
“The unearthly language they’re speaking,” Barclay replied, “that seems to be the key.”
“Do you know,” said Pearce, “I believe that the corruption allows the infected to articulate the language more clearly than uncorrupted mouths. I wonder if it doesn’t go right down into the throat, affecting the larynx and the voice box. What if the language is the disease itself?”
“I can’t follow what you’re saying. How can a disease be a ghost, how can language affect the material world?” Barclay, having felt a surge of relief at the fact that Pearce was able to share his comprehension that something had gone horribly wrong with the world, now felt disorientated at the bizarre explanation Pearce had formulated.
“I think the process begins in the mind. And then it goes on to alter the brain. You see? If one is able to recognise what’s happening, it is the first sign xxghixh of one’s having been infected. One is first only aware that the language exists, and only later does one begin to comprehend its meaning. You and I must be in the first stages of the disease.”
“But what of Thyxxolqu and Qxwthyyothl?”
“They are the xxtghzz names for death and disease. Xxguxxh familiar, we are on the edge of a great revelation one that dfgxx immaterialism in an insane mind gzzzh...”
Pearce’s mouth hung open. His tongue bubbled with a mixture of saliva and blood. One side of his mouth then drooped fantastically, all the way to his jawline. His lower teeth and gums were visible, and had become brownish fragments set in rotting flesh. He put his hand up and rested it over the deformity, covering the awful sight, in an act of denial and self-consciousness. He tried to smoke from the other side of his mouth, and carry on as if nothing were amiss. Barclay was pained by the horror and absurdity of it.
Pearce got up from behind the desk, walked past Barclay, unlocked the door and opened it wide. He acted silently, and his eyes flashed towards the aperture, indicating that Barclay should leave.
Once Barclay had returned to the still-deserted ward, he took his clothes from the locker adjacent to the bed he had occupied, dressed, and made his way out of the hospital.
•
It was not far from University College Hospital to the British Library, just a six minute walk along the Euston Road. Barclay tried hard to retain his composure as he set off for his destination, and clung to the idea that if he acted normally, then he might keep absolute terror at bay. He told himself it was vital that he consulted the article by De Quincey as he had planned.
All around him, however, the evide
nce of unearthly intrusion intensified. The adverts on the side of taxis and buses, the road signs, the foreign restaurants and the language that people spoke into their mobile phones was undiluted Thyxxolqus. It had completely replaced all other languages. He tried to avoid looking at the faces of people, but despite this, was conscious, out of the corner of his eye, that nine in ten of them suffered from deformed mouths.
He crossed the plaza outside the British Library, with its titanic statue modelled upon William Blake’s drawing of Newton, and entered through the heavy glass doors. He took the escalator up to the first floor Humanities reading rooms and went inside. The attendants at the desk, with mouths like caves, waved him through as usual, casting the merest glance at his pass and it was only as he returned it to his wallet that Barclay noticed that its lettering was no longer in English.
He collected the book, volume four of the Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey that he’d ordered, and took his place at one of the long rows of the readers’ desks. He looked left and right over the shoulders of the other readers between whom he sat and saw that the volumes they were consulting were written in Thyxxolqus. The language had spread into the books, transforming the texts, working its way like a virus through them all.
Barclay turned to the section of the De Quincey tome containing the article “Voices from the Grave” and read the following passage:
Of the origins of language itself we can give no authoritative account, for speech predates writing and is lost in the period antediluvian. The academies are silent on the matter. And yet, is not language the most incredible aspect of humanity? Is it not the most suggestive of a great mystery? The written forms of antiquity do not suffer in comparison with modernity. They are in no wise inferior, even unto the earliest. They sprang, fully formed and with equal complexity, from the mysterious source whereof I assert. Words then, savour of the ineffable, and are proof that this cosmos is not easily explained. In this instance we, all benighted, continually regard what is miraculous as merely commonplace by virtue of its extreme familiarity.
The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales Page 4
