Barron slept more easily that night. His fever abated slightly, as if confirming that he had made the right decision.
•
The following day could not have been a greater contrast with the one before. The wind and rain had disappeared, and hot sunshine, brilliant in its intensity, took their place. Xapalpa was transformed into a magic town that had reached up into the pure blue sky.
Barron wandered through the narrow dusty streets for hours in the sun, glad to have the opportunity to be outside and away from the decayed confines of La Casa De Fuente. He sat on benches when he tired, drawing curious looks from passers-by, for in his expression was a strange co-mixture of dread and vacancy brought on by his continued delirium. He would stare up at the naked sun, as if trying to blind himself. He seemed to be desirous of drawing some portion of its energy into his enervated frame, and thereby driving out the shadows within.
It was in the plaza of claustrophobic dimensions that he came across the children playing the game. They formed a circle around a piñata hoisted high up by a rope. The ones who took turns at hitting the star-shaped object were blindfolded. But this piñata was not brightly coloured. It was a mottled grey, and stinking of decomposition. Its cone limbs flapped desperately in the air. Barron watched with fascination as child after child battered the thing, squealing with excitement, and cheering as it was beaten into a state of ruin. Finally, one of them struck a blow that cracked open the core, the rope was released, and the piñata fell onto the dusty street below. They descended upon it as if ravenous with hunger, and from amidst the scrum, a single boy emerged carrying the prize. It was a soil-blackened human skull with a hole in the centre of its cranium.
Barron never returned to La Casa De Fuente. After dark, and having spent all of the afternoon under the burning sun, he was last seen in a cantina on Obregon, where he drank a great deal of mezcal. He babbled deliriously about piñatas, of the secret of the cemetery on Quintero, and of the old cult. In short, his talk was about everything of which one does not speak in Xapalpa. When his disappearance was investigated, the local police were satisfied that what the locals said was correct; he had drunk too much mezcal on top of a near-lethal dose of sunstroke. He had said he wished to leave Xapalpa, and had probably wandered off alone that night in his delirium, and got lost in the vast expanses of uncharted woods that cover the mountains all around the town.
•
Mason finished his beer. He did not like the story and he did not like the grin on the face of Paco Maldonado.
“I don’t believe a word of it,” Mason said, in Spanish, “and I don’t scare easily.”
The owner of the cantina had come out from behind the counter. He had taken down and was holding one of the old rifles that decorated the walls. He began polishing the barrel with a rag.
Maldonado sipped nonchalantly at his tumbler of ice and Chivas whiskey.
Mason felt cold sweat on his brow. He could not tell whether it was a result of the fear he denied feeling or of a fever coming on.
Glickman the Bibliophile
For weeks the nation had been suffering from an epidemic of destruction at libraries, bookshops and publishers. Those persons who had been caught and charged with the crimes claimed afterwards to have no knowledge of their actions and acted as if in a trance. Any random individual could, it was claimed, enter this trance-state and begin to destroy books using whatever means they had at their disposal.
The action was apparently motiveless, unplanned and the consequence of a spontaneous, temporary mania. Theories concerning the possible origin of the behaviour were legion but none of them seemed to explain all of the facts. Some proposed that a new chemical had been used in book-production that altered the mental state of those in its vicinity, but this did not account for the destruction of antiquarian bookshops. Another theory advanced concerned an airborne germ released by a foreign power but this seemed unlikely, as reports came in of the same phenomenon striking across the world with no country being immune. One theory that was given credence for a time advanced the idea that some form of evolution had taken place in that area of the human brain concerned with linguistic recognition. It was believed that instead of recognition, this area of the brain now generated an intolerable fear of written signifiers, leading to acts of violence and memory-loss when the sufferer came into contact with text. But this was discredited after the corpses of those persons who perished accidentally in acts of book destruction were examined. Their brains showed no signs of abnormal development or damage. None of the theories advanced could be held with certainty.
•
Henry Glickman was on his way to a meeting with his new publishers, the Nemesis Press. The company that had issued his last collection of stories had recently gone into liquidation and another author who had told Glickman that their remuneration was extremely generous had recommended these new publishers to him. He was not a commercially successful author and had no agent, merely indulging in post-retirement fantasies of authorial fame.
He was in his mid-sixties, thin, with a pinched, aquiline face and a mane of grey hair. Books had been his passion for as long as he could remember and his personal library consisted of well over two thousand volumes. His books were almost his very life, the casements that had opened up magical vistas.
Glickman had never married and had long-since settled into a secluded bachelor mode. Quite honestly, women were not able to compete with the real love of his life. What money he earned he spent almost entirely on books and he had no desire to give up the pursuit of them for the pursuit of companionship. It seemed a logical step for him to begin writing some books of his own. He had the manuscript of his second collection in his briefcase.
After a time Glickman reached his destination. He parked in front of the steps leading up to the main entrance of the building. It was a huge white Art Deco structure with flaking paint and decrepit pilasters. The windows were layered with dust. On a board next to the entrance were marked the names of the companies located there and Glickman saw that the Nemesis Press now occupied the entire building. The names of the previous companies had been covered over with tape. Such expansion seemed to bode well for the financial security of the business.
The interior was a mass of activity. It seemed that attempts were being made to complete cataloguing of their stock but these were evidently well behind schedule. Passing along a corridor Glickman found himself in a vast warehouse. Books lay scattered and piled up in crates on the bare floorboards, being checked by clerks in shirtsleeves. They were too intent upon their work to pay any attention to Glickman as he mingled with them.
Glickman wandered around for a brief time, along the aisles, checking the stock more carefully. He was somewhat surprised to discover that the books here were not only Nemesis Press publications, but came from a wide variety of sources.
The editorial offices of the company were located on the third floor of the building and Glickman had to make his way up a tiled stairwell to reach them. He passed more clerks, all carrying piles of books up and down the steps. These men were all pallid and zombie-like as if they had long withdrawn from the world into the refuge of their duties.
Upon arrival at the third floor, Glickman found the editorial offices at the end of a half-lit corridor. He was shown into an adjacent interview room by one of the staff.
After he had waited a few moments a middle-aged and quite small man with an uncommonly large head and piercing green eyes entered the room. He was almost bald, with his white hair shaved close to the scalp. There was an air of quiet fatalism about him.
“My name is Janus Yaanek. I am the Chief Editor of Nemesis Press,” he said, “and you must be Mr Glickman.”
“I am. It’s good to meet you at last. I’ve brought the manuscript with me in which you expressed interest,” Glickman took an envelope from his briefcase containing a 200-page document; “it’s a collection of weird horror tales called The Rotting Brain and Other Stories.”
�
�I shall be sure to give it my full attention. But first let me show you around our little empire. We take such pride in our activities that we subject all our authors to the grand tour.”
“Of course,” Glickman replied.
The two men left the interview room and, with Yaanek leading the way, passed along the corridor and through a series of locked doors and gloomy and interminable back-and-forth stairways, worthy of Escher, until they came to a vast chamber which, in turn, could have sprung from a nightmare of a Piranesi. It was a gigantic operations centre located deep inside the building.
There were hundreds of people working in the chamber. They all seemed to share that pallid, withdrawn aspect he had noted amongst the other employees, and shuffled reports and examined the huge piles of books that lay on their desks. Some would consume the pages of the books, and then vomit the regurgitated pulp into huge bins. Every few minutes a servitor would wheel these bins away, presumably to another part of the building.
The chamber was filled with banks of decayed computer terminals. They were machines the likes of which Glickman had not previously seen or even imagined might exist: half-mechanical, half-organic structures that seemed to operate on a basis of mutual degeneracy. The clerks were wholly absorbed in their tasks. In fact, as he drew closer, Glickman very clearly saw that their limbs seemed to have moulded with the flesh-like apparatus of the keyboards. One could not determine where one began and the other ended. It was only when total exhaustion overcame one of the operatives that he was taken away to recuperate, his limbs disengaging from the apparatus like melting plastic.
And in their beady, black, unblinking eyes were reflected the hundreds of screens displaying binary code, scrolling across and downwards at a fantastic rate. The typists seemed to be trying to transmit information that would lurk behind the endless sequence of zeroes and ones, like thoughts behind words.
“My hackers…” said Yaanek, as he motioned his aides to restrain the horrified and staggered Glickman, “have also been extremely successful in eradicating knowledge. We cannot have text existing in cyberspace, eluding oblivion. Millions of our agents around the world, mimic their acts of annihilation. Of course physical books and manuscripts such as your own we may destroy more easily.”
•
Afterwards Glickman was taken down to the basement where he was imprisoned in a small room that served as a cell. It was only seven square feet across with a folding bed and a bucket in one corner and seemed to have formerly been a storage room. It had no windows and a lightbulb provided the only illumination, being screwed into a socket on the wooden-slatted walls. He paced the cell for a time and then sat down on the bed. There was nothing to do except await whatever fate the Nemesis Press had planned for him.
Some hours later, though Glickman had no way of measuring time, two nameless clerks entered the cell. They said nothing to him, but simply leant back on the wall facing Glickman and stared at him intensely without blinking. A horrible smile played about both their faces.
Glickman turned away from them. After a few minutes he began to discover that his thoughts were being invaded. The fear he felt was evaporating and instead he experienced a sensation not unlike madness. Voices were speaking inside his head. Although initially this consisted of a dialogue with the invaders it was not long before the alien voices drowned out his attempts to resist them. The source of this intrusion was undoubtedly the clerks who were using some morbid form of telepathy.
Glickman’s brain reeled with the waves of thought that were directed at him. He learnt of the falsity of literature and, at first to avoid the pain of resistance but later with dawning enlightenment, shared in this vision. Glickman, who had made the dissemination of books his passion, now understood the necessity of their destruction. Books were utterly worthless. He understood that no one ever wrote without the result being warped by his or her own prejudices and ego. Ninety-nine per cent of books sat on shelves and in bookcases and were unread, unnoticed and untouched. For the vast majority of people, books were simply ornaments to a room, advertising their owners’ intellectual vanity. One in a million books was ever re-read and the so-called classics were mostly dipped into and unadmittedly discarded or force-read. Not though by academics, who canonised these “classics” and lived like parasites on the obscurity they generated. The masses were as vile in their own way. They read drivel churned out by illiterates. These illiterate authors had allowed themselves to become “product”. And then there was the worst of all: books that instructed us on how to live, when to turn to such books was a symptom of the disease, not its cure.
The Nemesis Press was the latest experiment of the Bibliophobos Collective.
Had the dying Franz Kafka known of the existence of the Collective that author certainly would have alerted them to his writings and not have entrusted the obliteration of his novels and stories to the unwilling Max Brod. The activities of these secret book-exterminators were not confined to the destruction of published works. They were invariably ready to obliterate manuscripts of all types that came into their possession willingly or unwillingly. The merits of a writer’s work were of no interest to them and they viewed the existence of literary work as a proliferation of vermin, being only too willing to act as pest controllers in this regard. All texts were without a centre of meaning. Their interpretation rested with the reader, not the author. There could be no agreed purpose to a text. All was chaos. The text was an autonomous entity. In short, without the reader the text did not even exist save as a cipher.
The organisation was of extremely ancient origin and related the legend of their descent from a papyrus-burning sect in ancient Khem. There were even outrageous hints that the destruction of the library at Alexandria had been their work: the consequence of an eager operative taking no chances after failing to locate a palimpsest he had sought within its walls. Certainly there were some parallels with freemasonry, though the book-exterminators had no leanings of an altruistic nature.
The creed: All books are exits from life. Books must be destroyed.
The Collective was putting tenets into action that few dared even to consider. Unlike the book-burning Nazis or the censorious communists, it was not selective. It did not destroy because it thought works corrupt or dangerous. It destroyed works because it believed none had meaning or significance, because words only mean other words and chase each other, in a linguistic game of tag, to a void. The Collective’s operatives were terrorists, empty visionaries, who, in a perverse fashion, could be said to have collaborated with an author, even if only through destruction. And in fact they found that the most effective operatives were authors who had been turned to their cause: poachers turned gamekeepers.
•
By the time the clerks left the cell Glickman’s mind was in chaos. To him had been vouchsafed the mission of the Bibliophobos Collective, but it required several more sessions of telepathic indoctrination before he came close to finally embracing their cause. Any resistance to the brainwashing drove him closer to total mental collapse.
Yaanek personally visited Glickman in his cell. The Magister of the Collective sat at the edge of the bed and advised him to submit to the indoctrination. His fate, he told him, was sealed anyway. The last shreds of resistance in Glickman rose to the surface when he thought back over the long years of collecting, of his former career at the British Library; at the boundless pleasure reading of literature and the sciences had brought him. But he knew that an appeal on these grounds would be meaningless to Yaanek. So he asked how the Collective could justify the destruction of his very identity, as only this measure would rid him of his bibliophilia for good.
And Yaanek told him frankly that any notion of individual identity was a lie. There is no “self” to destroy. Once Glickman had grasped the final truth that the “I” does not exist, that his past life was illusory, then he would be free. All perception is a series of mental states, unfixed, fluid; like text, devoid of central meaning. The destruction of books was si
mply the first stage of a greater purpose: the gradual elimination of human consciousness.
“We are anti-publishers,” said Yaanek, “and ultimately, anti-thinkers.”
Yaanek left him and the nameless clerks entered the cell again. Glickman almost screamed when he saw them, for he knew then that it was not required of him to agree to merely cooperate with the Collective. As the waves of telepathic thought hit his brain, ruthlessly moulding it to their design, he knew that he was required to adore its aims.
Whilst receiving the mental transmissions Glickman learnt more: close proximity was required for the telepathic remoulding of his thought patterns to be completely successful. Over a distance the agents of the Collective could only inspire thoughts within groups of individuals for a short space of time and then only at random. The clerks would gather together in an upper chamber of the building and send out the impulses to destroy books across the world using their telepathic ability.
And for the first time, Glickman found that he was taking pleasure from such a prospect. As the telepathic revelations bore deeper into his brain, he found that he could no longer, or rather would no longer, resist its implications. Something snapped in his mind for good. And when the two clerks desisted from bombarding his brain with their thoughts his mind at last felt crystalline and untroubled, like the clear waters of a stream, avoiding all obstacles in its path.
•
When Glickman was taken from the cell, he begged to be allowed to join in the work of the Collective and they led him upstairs to the offices. He proved himself assiduous in his new duties as a book destructor and was even offered the chance to be freed, as a test, which offer was met with extreme horror on Glickman’s part. But in order to test his loyalty further Yaanek sent him back to his home so that Glickman might lay waste to his own collection of books.
•
The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales Page 7
