It was on one of these occasions, a romantic dinner that had turned into a two-hour and bitter-fought debate, that Dan had first fantasized about the possibility of some kind of independent adjudication. That there might be some agency to which he could appeal, not with ill-will, but just so he could be proved right—so that it could be established, once and for all, that she hogged discussions, cheated in arguments, and got mini-colds twice a month. He loved his wife and wouldn’t want her any different. But just once in a while he wished there was some way of proving he was right.
No-one was more surprised than him to find out there was.
The bookstore was in a side street halfway down Charring Cross Road. When they’d last been to London, back in the early nineties, the area had been wall-to-wall books. Like everywhere else in the world, it was now feeling the dual pinch of the megastores and on-line auction sites. The speciality shops were still in place, just, but the secondhand and antiquarian had closed or gone to seed. Having left Marcia back at the hotel in the health spa for the morning, Dan was mildly ticked to find he had done the street with an hour and a half to spare. He didn’t want to go back early, kick his heels in the hotel. Marcia had been her most jetlagged yet that morning, and very down about the weather. He’d been unsympathetic on two subjects he considered himself powerless over, and words had been spoken.
On a whim he started poking around the uncharted streets just behind the main road, and it was here he found Pandora’s Books. A little wooden shop front, the name appropriately picked out in faded gold paint. A random selection of ancient-looking volumes littered the window, none of which he’d heard of. Perfect. Especially as it was beginning to drizzle. Again.
The smell made him smile as soon as he was inside. Old, forgotten paper, books foxed and creased and bumped. The scent of old bookcases and venerable dust added their own welcome notes. It was the way these places should smell, the smell of peace and quiet and your own thoughts.
The room wasn’t too big—probably only twenty feet by fifteen—but the high shelves packed into it, along with the dim light, made it seem larger. In the back there were wooden staircases leading up and down, neither marked ‘Private’, promising more of the same. There was a little desk over on the right, piled high with books waiting categorisation, but nobody in sight. Dan dithered, then propped his bag against the desk. Usually bookstores preferred it that way, and it would leave both hands free.
He worked his way down from the top. They had a whole lot of books, that was for sure. Most of the stuff on the upper level was modern and of no interest, though he did find a pulp paperback worth keeping in his hand. He thought he heard someone coming up the stairs while he turned this book over, debating the couple of pounds, but when he looked up no-one was there. By the time he got back to street level they’d evidently headed down to the basement.
He took his time around the shelves, as many were dedicated to local history. In the end he found one thing he thought was a definite, plus a couple of maybes. Depended on whether they shipped. The book he wanted was heavy—a Victorian facsimile of an older history of London—and he went over to prop it up against his bag. As he did so he thought he heard someone coming into the room from the back, but when he turned there was no-one. Evidently just a noise from upstairs. Booksellers creep in mysterious ways, their filing to perform.
It was in the basement that he found the book. At first he thought there was nothing there for him: the room was only half the size of those on the higher floors, and had none of their sense of order. Books of all ages and conditions were piled onto cases in danger of imminent collapse. There was a strong smell of damp too, doubtless caused or at least enhanced by the grim-looking patches on the walls. The plaster had come away in many places, revealing seeping brickwork behind. He poked around for a while, shoving aside piles of bashed-up book-length ephemera (do your own accounts, learn Spanish in twenty seconds, find your inner you and dream your inner dream), finding and rejecting a few older tomes.
He was about to give up and go pay for what he’d already put aside when a bookcase at the end caught his eye. He went and had a look. There was no hurry, after all. At first he’d thought these books were much older than the rest, but he soon saw they were not. A little, but not much. Most were Everyman Editions, leather-bound and quite attractive but not worth the carrying. He had already turned away when something told him to turn back, and look again.
He stood square onto the case and ran his eyes over the case. He’d evidently seen something without really seeing it. He wasn’t expecting much, but it would be mildly interesting to see what had caught his eye. Eventually he found it. A book whose spine was much more scuffed up than the rest. He gently eased it out.
It was called Hopes of a Lesser Demon, Part II, which was odd, for a start. It was a small, chunky thing with battered boards and old leather; about an inch thick, six high, and four deep. The title on the spine seemed to have been handwritten in ink. When Dan turned to the front the frontispiece claimed the book had been published in Rome in 1641, but that couldn’t be right. For a start, it should have been in Latin, or Italian at the very least. It wasn’t. It was in English, for the most part. Secondly, as he leafed through the book, it seemed clear that it could never have been published in this form at all. Chunks of it did look old, the paper spotted and towelly, the text in languages he didn’t understand and typefaces that were hard to read. Others had been printed far more recently; the paper fresh and glossy, the subjects contemporary. English predominantly, though there were sections in French and German too— and something he guessed was Korean from its similarity to the signs on a food market he sometimes walked by back home.
It was also far from clear what the book was about. There was a sermon on chastity, a few pages on deciduous trees. Part seemed to be a travel guide to Bavaria, with spotty black and white plates that must have been taken before the First World War. A polemic on some obscure Middle-Eastern sect was followed by a stretch of love poetry, and proceeded by two handwritten pages of what looked like the accounts of a sugar plantation in the eighteen century.
There was no sense to it whatsoever, and yet at the bottom of each page was a folio—a page number—and the ordering of these numerals was consistent from front to back, regardless of subject change or whether they were printed in decaying hand-plated gothic type or super-crisp computer-generated Gill Sans.
Dan flipped back to the front, and saw that the price had been written there in pencil. Five pounds. Eight bucks, more or less. Hmm.
He already wanted the book, without really knowing why. He looked through the pages a little further, looking for an excuse, finding further pockets of unrelated non-information. A handful of reproductions of watercolours, none by artists he recognised and few of them any good. A list of popular meadows in Armenia. A section on what seemed to be electronic engineering, a Da Vinci-like sketch of a man holding an axe, and a long portion of a children’s book about a happy dog.
And then there were the invocations. At first Dan couldn’t make out what this section was about. The paper was very, very old, and the writing had been entered by hand. Portions had faded back to nothing, and those that were strong weren’t very easy to read. The first page seemed to be a kind of index.
Item One read: ‘The Vision of Love’s Arc invocation: for to glimpse what man or woman (or both) shall here come into your life.’
Item Eleven: ‘The Sadness of Cattle invocation: the purpose being to make less gloomy your livestock in the night.’
Item Twenty-Two: ‘The Regeneration of Heat invocation: a most useful gesture engendered for the revitalisation of a time-soured beverage.’
What? A spell to warm up a cup of coffee? That was silly. The whole index was silly, in fact, the most stupid section of what was evidently a very stupid book. Dan had just about changed his mind—five pounds was five pounds, after all, and the book was surprisingly heavy for its size—when he caught sight of the last entry in the
index:
Item Thirty Eight: ‘The Listening Angel invocation: for to prove whether you are right.’
Mouth open, Dan flicked to the indicated page and read just enough to establish that yes, this meant exactly what he thought it did.
He seemed suddenly to hear a rushing noise, quite loud, like the tread of a hundred feet, or the beat of thousands of tiny wings.
He closed the book and hurried up the stairs.
There was still no-one at the desk—though he saw the explanation for the sound he’d heard. It was raining properly now, and raining hard. The store’s dim lamps struggled against the lowering darkness outside. He waited for a few moments, moving impatiently from foot to foot, and then ventured to call out. There was no response, either in the form of reply or noise from above. He waited a little longer, then strode to the back of the store and hiked up the stairs. There was no-one up there. No-one in the basement, either, when he went back down to look. And though there were deep shadows on the street level itself, there was no sign of anyone to pay.
Dan dug in his wallet and took out a five pound note. He put it on the desk and picked up his bag. He left the big Victorian book behind. It no longer seemed very interesting.
When he got back to the hotel he was soaked, and surprised to find he was late. Somehow it had become three o’clock. He was half-expecting to see Marcia waiting in the lobby, but she wasn’t there. He took the elevator up to the room, but it was empty. In the end, baffled, he called the spa—and was relieved to find that a woman of his wife’s description was fast asleep on one of the loungers around the pool. Relieved and, of course, irritated. He left the book on the bed and wandered around, drying his hair with a towel. He could go down and wake her, remind her they were supposed to be…what was the point? By the time she was dressed it would be too late. And he would also, he realise, have to account for the fact he’d returned well after he’d said he would. It was not the first time, and ‘looking at books’ never seemed to be a good enough answer.
He set up the room’s coffee machine and waited for it to do its thing. Meanwhile he sat in the chair at the desk, and watched the book on the bed. It wasn’t moving, of course, and there was no danger that it would. But it didn’t feel as if he was just looking at it.
When he had a coffee he went and picked the book up. At first he thought he must have been mistaken, because he couldn’t find the Index of Invocations, however hard he looked. After dipping into the book at random for a while he started at the beginning and rigorously leafed through from front to back. He saw a lot of odd things, but not the index. His heart, which he realised had been beating rather faster than usual, slowly returned to normal. He flicked through the book more slowly, obscurely relieved.
He had imagined it, that was all. Perhaps a form of jetlag fever. Annoyance at the crossed words that morning, a fantasy born of the dust and damp of the shop…
Then he found it. The Invocations, sandwiched between two sections he knew he’d seen on the front-to-back pass, and yet had been missed. Whatever.
He scanned a few of the other entries—
‘Item Twenty-Four: The Strengthening of Bark: a whisper for aiding a tree or bush (of considerable size) that is under attack.’
‘Item Six: The Flattening Stroke: for to redress a planet that has become mistakenly round—use only once.’
But they were just diversions. Very quickly he made it down to Item Thirty-Eight, then flicked through pages until he again found the one the entry referred to.
As he opened the page he heard the sound again, the beating of wings. A glimpse out of the window confirmed that this was, for a second time, merely an increase in the volume of rain outside. Odd how it kept happening, though. And how dark it had become.
The instructions on the page were short, and the ingredients it called for not unduly hard to come by. Marcia still hadn’t returned.
Dan didn’t see how he had much choice.
Half an hour later he was standing on the roof of the hotel. This hadn’t been easy to achieve, but the recipe stipulated that the invoker must be both outside and at the highest place available within one hundred horizontal feet of his or her position when the book had been most recently opened: Dan took the elevator to the highest floor—the twelfth—but knew somehow this wouldn’t be enough. Plus, if something was going to happen, he didn’t want to be interrupted by another guest heading back to their room. A certain amount of poking around led him to a door around a corner, which was marked ‘Stores’. There were indeed stores inside, and Dan helped himself to a bath towel, but at the back was another door. Opening this led to a dark interior staircase which led upwards.
At the top was a metal door. It was locked. Of course. Dan kicked at it, impotently. He could hear the sound of rain beyond it. He kicked again, the lock clicked, and the door swung open a foot.
The sound of rain was suddenly far louder, and Dan saw it was now pelting down outside. Putting aside the question of why the door was now unlocked, he wrapped the towel around his head, left the book on the floor where it wouldn’t get wet, and stepped outside.
A very large area lay in front of him, the roof of the hotel. Various protuberances stuck up here and there, some disgorging steam or smoke. Piles of forgotten wood lay against the low wall which went right around the edges. The grey surface of the roof was hidden here and there by sizable pools of water, pools which reflected a blackening sky which seemed to be getting lower and lower.
Dan walked right out in the centre of the roof and stopped. London was spread around him, albeit obscured by sheets of rain and gathering gloom. The towel was soon soaked, and he took it off. Evidently you just had to take this experience as it came.
He had memorised the invocation. It wasn’t hard. It was so straightforward it was ludicrous to believe it would achieve anything. He unwrapped the hand towel he had brought up from the room. Inside were three things. A small sample of his saliva, in one of the room’s water glasses: a ‘secretion’ had been called for, and saliva was as far as he was prepared to go. A few strands of Marcia’s hair, easily gleaned from her brush, wrapped in a piece of toilet tissue. Rather more trickily, a postcard to Marcia’s sister. The recipe called for a sample of both their words, and didn’t explain it any more than that. This defeated Dan until he had seen the postcard, written the previous evening and now lying on the desk awaiting a stamp. Most of it was in Marcia’s hand, but he’d added a sentence at the bottom. Would it do? Dan supposed he was about to find out.
He gathered the three things in his hands, straightened, and threw his hand up into the air. He was a fool, he knew, and braced himself for the immediate return of the glass.
It didn’t come back down.
After a few second he looked up, and saw that all three things had disappeared. The rain had started falling harder too, and now it really did sound like wings.
Parts of the sky seemed to detach themselves from the rest, pools of darkness gathering as if a cloud was settling over the hotel, wisps of it catching on the buildings across the street like the ghosts of future fires. The sound of traffic seemed to get both louder and further away.
Dan listened to it, and listened to the rain as it fell, until the two noises became one, and entered his head, and disappeared.
‘Seventy-eight percent,’ said a voice.
Dan turned. Behind him, over at the low wall, something had appeared.
It was about twelve feet tall, the white of old, tarnished marble, and difficult to see. It seemed to sit hunched on the wall, huge wings hanging off of the shoulders behind. It appeared a little uncomfortable, as if finding itself in the wrong place, somewhere either too hot or too cold.
‘Are you the angel?’ Dan said.
‘Over the entire length of the marriage, you have spoken twenty-two percent of the time,’ the figure said. Its face was turned away from him, hidden behind long wet hair. Its voice was cold, dry, and seemed to come to Dan both via his ears and up through his
legs. ‘If you limit the enquiry to periods of discussion that could be considered of academic or of purely hypothetical interest, her contribution increases to eighty-six percent. This peaks, under the influence of alcohol or especially pressing concerns, at ninety-four percent.’
‘Then I am right,’ Dan said. ‘I knew it.’
The angel gave no indication it had heard him. ‘If considered in terms of total words uttered, rather than time spent speaking, the breakdown is more or less the same. The shortness and lack of fluidity of your sentences is generally counterbalanced by your attempts to pack them in the short intervals available.’
‘Now hold on,’ Dan said. He started to walk forward, but a loud, heavy movement of the angel’s wings warned him to stop. Somewhere, far away, there was the rumble of thunder. ‘What do you mean, lack of “fluidity”?’
‘Caused merely by the lack of opportunity for you to get into your stride,’ the angel said. ‘Of course.’
Dan nodded, satisfied. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Now. How do I…’
‘Sometimes she even talks when you’re not there,’ the angel said. ‘Quite often, in fact.’
‘And you listen?’
‘Of course. It’s what I do.’
Dan frowned. ‘What kind of things?’
‘She hopes your kids are safe.’
‘So do I.’
‘Yes. But she says it. And people hear.’
‘Right,’ Dan said. He was cold. Unbelievably, it was starting to rain harder, the sky pressing closer down. His hair was plastered to his skull, water running down his face. ‘What else does she say?’
It seemed like the angel was turning to look at him, but when the movement was finished it was still looking another way.
‘She says it makes her sad when they call and you hand the phone to her after just grunting hello. She tries not to resent the fact you make no effort with her friends, though—and these are my figures—you are on average responsible for less than two percent of the conversation when they’re around. She has issues with the fact that you seem to believe that her having a massage once in a while is some huge indulgence, when you spend three times as much every month on books which you’ll mostly never read and often don’t even open again. She feels hurt when you look up at her as if wondering what she is going on about, and why. She also wishes that once in a while you would handle her the way you do some interesting book—and says you used to, once.’
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 6
