Tales from the Folly

by Ben Aaronovitch

  It certainly wasn’t manifesting itself to me.

  I noted down all the details, thanked Ms Winstanley for the tour and headed back to the Folly. There I planned to fill in one of our brand spanking new Falcon Incident Report forms and file it, until Nightingale came back from hunting big cats in Norfolk.

  Only I got back to find our archivist, Professor Harold Postmartin, DPhil, FRS, enjoying tea in the atrium. I made the mistake of telling him about the alleged poltergeist in the library, because he might find it of interest, and his face lit up. I know that look of enthusiasm and the last time I saw it I ended up covered in pesticide and wrestling with a tree.

  ‘Not “Hatbox” Winstanley?’ said Postmartin.

  I described her as best as I could, and Postmartin confirmed that it was the woman he was thinking of. So called because she was said to have travelled down the Amazon in a hatbox, swam the English Channel wearing nothing but goose fat and ran a library in Kolwezi until she was forcibly evacuated by the French Foreign Legion.

  ‘I’m almost certain that the last two are true,’ said Postmartin. ‘And if old Hatbox says there’s something supernatural in her stacks, then I for one would take her very seriously indeed.’

  So back we both went to the British Library, where Ms Winstanley, upon hearing that Postmartin was staying the night, insisted that she join us in our ghost hunting exploits.

  ‘Not only am I intensely curious to see what you boys actually get up to,’ she said, ‘but also you cannot leave these university types unsupervised amongst your stacks. They’re famously light fingered and they don’t call Harold “Postmartin the Pirate” for nothing.’

  When I asked who called Postmartin a pirate, and why, she merely winked and said that while she’d love to tell me it was still subject to the Thirty Year Rule.

  ‘Official Secrets Act and all that,’ she said.

  As revenge I popped back and fetched Toby. When Ms Winstanley objected, I told her that Toby was a highly trained police dog.

  She gave Toby a sceptical look.

  ‘Trained in what?’ she asked.

  ‘Many strange things,’ I said. ‘Of which the uninitiated is not meant to know.’

  ‘Are,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘“Are not meant to know”, not “is”.’

  And that is why I don’t normally argue with librarians.

  So me and one of the security staff carried gear down to the basement while Ms Winstanley and Postmartin compared Ninja Librarian notes.

  We were making camp in one of the central workrooms on Basement 2. Underground, the workspaces and stacks were as generously proportioned as a billionaire’s basement, with high ceilings and wide corridors. Everything that wasn’t painted 1970s sci-fi white was a brilliant red or blue, causing me to have an almost irresistible urge to tattoo my eyeball and parkour my way up the walls.

  The ceilings had to be high, because not only did the bookshelves go up over two metres but above them ran the Paternoster book delivery system. Essentially the same as the baggage handling system in a major airport, only designed not to destroy the packages they were carrying. Ms Winstanley had explained how it worked on the first tour. Readers, upstairs in one of the many reading rooms, order a book on the computer, the book gets pulled off one of the 625 kilometres of shelf, put in a box, the box goes on the patented Paternoster book delivery system and is carried upstairs where… you can guess the rest.

  By law the British Library gets two copies of every book published in the UK and Ireland. Which adds up to a lot of books—over fourteen million so far.

  ‘Although the vast majority of the Mills and Boons collection is kept at Boston Spa,’ said Ms Winstanley.

  And that wasn’t counting the 260 thousand journals, four million maps and sixty million patents.

  ‘Sixty million?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘People are extraordinarily inventive.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I said.

  ‘Most of them are complete tosh of course,’ she said.

  There were specialist bookcases for old, rare and strangely shaped books, but most of the stock was kept in huge ranks of mechanical bookcases, the kind that close together to minimise floor space. When you wanted a book you found the right section and turned a handle which drove a series of gears that prised two of the shelves apart to form a temporary aisle. The gearing was high and the shelves were heavy. Ms Winstanley must have spotted me testing the weight with my shoulder.

  ‘Oh, you have to make sure people know you’re in there,’ she said. ‘Otherwise somebody might close it and you’d be squished.’

  ‘Whoever knew this job was so dangerous?’ I said

  ‘Ah, yes, librarianship,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘It’s not for the faint hearted.’

  By eleven o’clock that evening we were all set up, so we cracked open one of the industrial sized thermoses I’d brought from the Folly while we waited for the last of the staff to vacate the basement. Even the security staff were leaving, so we wouldn’t mistake them for a marauding poltergeist.

  Since neither our phones or my airwave or my, now patent pending, magic detectors would work in the basement our strategy was to leave at least one person at the base camp while the others went out as a single group and didn’t split up under any circumstances. Team Folly was not at home for Mr Scooby Doo.

  ‘Particularly since I am, in fact, the only one of us who knows their way around,’ said Ms Winstanley.

  So a little bit before twelve me, Toby and Ms Winstanley went for our first patrol leaving Postmartin to hold the fort.

  What with the sloppy procedure, the size of the basement, the lack of any detection equipment and the newness of the building, I thought it was pretty unlikely that we were going to discover anything during this or any subsequent night’s searching.

  So of course, less than half an hour later, we practically tripped over the bloody thing.

  There’s a particular kind of spookiness about being brightly lit and underground. The constant fluorescent light pushes at your peripheral vision and the absence of shadows flattens out your perspective. It also doesn’t help that the climate control system is prone to random ticks and hums.

  We started with the closest of the caged-in areas set aside for holding rare, valuable or classified parts of the collection.

  ‘Or more likely because these are the last empty shelves available,’ said Ms Winstanley as she unlocked the gate and let us into the first one. The stacks inside had large shelves holding big leather-bound books that looked like props for a fantasy film. The tan and brown of the covers were brilliant against the sterile grey-white of the shelves. I wanted to reach out and run my fingers along their spines to see if some of the history would rub off—but I’m better trained than that.

  I caught Toby eyeing up the corner of the stack, so I tugged on his lead to make him behave.

  ‘This is mainly—’ started Ms Winstanley, but before she could finish her sentence something shot past our feet and scuttled out the open gate. I didn’t get much beyond the impression that it was bigger than Toby, angular, brown and had lots of legs.

  By the time I’d activated enough neurons to run to the cage door, the thing had gone.

  ‘Tell me that wasn’t a spider?’ said Ms Winstanley in a deceptively calm tone.

  ‘Can’t have been,’ I said.

  ‘Thank god for that,’ she said. ‘Can’t stand spiders.’

  ‘It was too big,’ I said. ‘You can’t scale an exoskeleton up that far.’ The inverse square law can be such a comfort sometimes. Plus I definitely remembered something about gas diffusion and box lungs or something like that.

  ‘So magic can’t make things bigger?’ asked Ms Winstanley, and I really wished she hadn’t.

  ‘It definitely wasn’t a poltergeist,’ I said. ‘That much is certain.’

  I looked at Toby who hadn’t reacted until the thing, whatever it was, ran past him. And I hadn’t registered a hint of vestigia either. Perhap
s it wasn’t magical at all—could it be mechanical, electronic—a machine? The spider configuration was considered a good shape for autonomous robots.

  ‘I brought the wrong gear,’ I said.

  We should have had cameras, motion detectors and infrared sensors—isn’t that always the way? You set out to hunt a ghost and you trip over a robot instead.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go after it?’ asked Ms Winstanley.

  ‘Let’s see if we can’t find out what it was doing in here,’ I said.

  I found marks on the sides of the stacks, and more on one of the posts that supported the wire metal cage on the opposite side. The shelves were full of exactly the books Ms Winstanley said she expected to be there, some hugely valuable, some historically significant.

  ‘All of them priceless,’ she said.

  ‘Anything missing?’

  Ms Winstanley said she couldn’t tell without checking the catalogue on a terminal back at base camp. So we trooped back and I briefed Postmartin and suggested that we call it a night.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Postmartin. ‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’

  I said it was back at the Folly with my forensic collection kit, motion sensors and Taser. He literally said ‘pish’, which I’d never heard a real person say in my life.

  ‘We should at least give deduction a chance,’ he said. ‘Is it possible it was a book?’

  ‘It had legs,’ I said.

  ‘There’s a long history of extraordinary things being hidden in books,’ said Postmartin. ‘Alcohol, keys, letters, very small heirs to a throne…’

  ‘Hand grenades,’ said Ms Winstanley without looking up from her terminal.

  ‘When was that?’ asked Postmartin.

  ‘Bulawayo,’ she said. ‘In ’75.’

  ‘Hand grenades, pistols, radios,’ said Postmartin. ‘Why not a robot?’

  A book robot seemed a bit Despicable Me to me, but why not?

  Once Ms Winstanley had her list it took us less than five minutes to locate the space on the shelves, above head height of course, where a book was missing.

  ‘A Book of Cunning Device,’ said Ms Winstanley, reading the details off her tablet. ‘Attributed to Salman ibn Jabir al Rasheed, a tenth century scholar from Bagdad.’

  ‘Why attributed?’ I asked.

  There was a theory, explained Ms Winstanley, that the book didn’t originate in the Islamic Near East at all, that it had been manufactured in the West, probably Venice, in imitation of the works that were being brought home from the Holy Land by pilgrims and crusaders.

  ‘Like a cargo cult object,’ she said. ‘Because if you look at the so called ‘writing’, and you have any Arabic or Farsi at all, it’s clear that it’s nothing like real Arabic. Not even close.’

  She showed me pictures—lines of squiggly text running across a page. The images were poor and, judging by the colour saturation, derived from mid-twentieth century photography. But it looked to me like the writing had been done in gold ink.

  ‘Last catalogued in 1972,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘And poorly done at that. We were waiting for our Persian specialist to get back from holiday and have a look.’

  Another image showed what looked like a musical instrument built into the body of the book. Like a horizontal harp with pegs to adjust tension—a horizontal dulcimer, what they called a santur in Iran and Iraq. I recognised it from an album my dad had by the bloke from Deep Forest.

  ‘Or perhaps a musical instrument disguised as a book,’ said Ms Winstanley. ‘Intriguing, no?’

  I asked why, if it was so intriguing, it hadn’t been catalogued yet which caused Ms Winstanley to snort.

  ‘There’s never enough people to get through your backlog,’ said Postmartin. ‘That’s the curse of librarianship. If your library is of any quality at all, then its collection is going to outpace your manpower.’

  I spotted Toby sniffing around another corner of the stacks and moved smartly to stop him marking his territory. But I saw he was sniffing at something at his head height. It looked like the sort of scuff mark left behind by the foot of a tripod or the stud of a football boot.

  There was a second further up the stack and a third and a fourth making a trail to an empty shelf far enough up for me to need to use a kick stool to reach it.

  ‘And that’s where the book was kept,’ said Ms Winstanley.

  I put my gloves on, just in case, and reached gingerly into the empty shelf.

  And there it was; a vibration like the wind breathing through the strings of a harp and a cascade of notes like running water. It was magical, then, which was a bit of a relief, given that the alternative was super-science—and I really didn’t want to have to explain that to Nightingale.

  ‘That globe that was moved,’ I said. ‘Where exactly did you find it?’

  * * *

  The uppermost basement was much larger than the ones below and most of the space was taken up with the kind of heavy engineering required to keep 165 kilometres of shelving at just the right temperature and humidity. Plus the humans using the building above, of course, but that was pretty much an afterthought. Unlike the book storage areas below, which had been mainly grey and white with red trimming, the plant rooms were silver with huge cylinders painted blue, connected with yellow pipes.

  Definitely the boss level, I thought as we crept through it.

  Both Ms Winstanley and Postmartin followed me in because neither wanted to be left behind. Ms Winstanley was carrying Toby because he most definitely had wanted to be left behind. But fortunately I had a stash of Molly’s home cooked sausages on hand to bribe him with.

  The misplaced globe had been found close to the central air conditioning unit that served the six-storey tower which housed the King’s Collection. The unit itself was a huge blue metal box capped with silver and vanishing upwards into a web of silver struts and pipes at roof level. A row of chunky green boxes, like the lockers at a gym, festooned with yellow and black warning markers housed the power regulators.

  ‘I don’t want to cramp your style,’ shouted Postmartin over the roar of the air conditioners, ‘but I’d be rather careful about using magic just here. A moment of over-enthusiasm and it’s goodbye priceless national treasure.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘I’ll just ask it to come quietly then.’

  ‘Might be worth a try,’ he said.

  Toby growled softly and belched.

  I followed his gaze and saw movement just behind a pillar of silver metal pipes and bracing struts. Judging by the yellow and black hazard flashes, tampering with them could result in electrocution, suffocation and/or freezing.

  Or, more seriously, should you allow books to be damaged, death by librarian.

  I told the librarians to stay where they were and advanced—cautiously.

  I stopped when I had a good view. It was hanging off a junction box by, I estimated, eight of its ten legs. These I saw were cables made from thinner strands twisted together—perhaps a deployment of the dulcimer strings. The book part was open like a pair of wings or a carapace and hid how the cables connected to the main body. It was trembling as it clutched the junction box and occasionally a twitch would ripple along the gripping legs. I had the strange impression that it was feeding, but off what? Electricity? That would be pretty bloody unprecedented, magically speaking, not to mention astonishing in something crafted in 9th-century Bagdad.

  But obviously not impossible.

  It had been the leathery book cover that had put me in mind of a huge insect. But now that it was staying still, I found it a lot less frightening. Right up to the point where it leaped off the box and went for my face.

  I don’t like insects—never have.

  I jumped backwards so hard that I practically landed on my bum and looked up just in time to see the Cunning Device skittering over the concrete floor towards me.

  I ran. And I’m still impressed with the way I managed to flip over and get my legs under me before the bloody thing reached me. I wen
t haring down a corridor of silver pipes and blue tanks towards a chunky looking fire door. I didn’t dare risk looking behind me and I doubted I’d hear the pitter-patter of legs over the industrial noise of the air conditioning.

  Do you know that moment in a film when someone on foot is being chased by a car and, instead of veering onto the pavement and hiding in a doorway or behind a bollard, they keep running straight ahead until they get run down?

  I like to learn from the mistakes of fictional characters, so at the next opportunity I veered left down a corridor formed by rows of storage lockers. There, freed from the risk of committing treasonable levels of property damage, I turned, took a deep breath and prepared an impello. I figured my best bet was to flip it on its back and then pin it down.

  I stood ready, keeping my mind clear and waiting.

  And waiting.

  Now, the thing is, you need a clear mind to do magic properly. And the thing about a clear mind is that it allows you to think rationally about your actions. So when the Cunning Device walked past my position—quite slowly I noticed—and blithely continued on its way, I was slightly insulted to be honest.

  So I stepped out after it had gone past to see what it did next.

  Which turned out to be, bang into the door. It stepped back and tried again—harder this time but the door was designed as a serious fire break and was too heavy. The Cunning Device skipped half a metre to the left and banged against wall on that side and then repeated the manoeuvre a metre to the right. Then it rotated slowly in place as if having a good look round before returning up the corridor towards me.

  Now that it wasn’t chasing me I could see that the Cunning Device didn’t move that fast. The tips of its long spindly legs skittered on the smooth concrete floors. What it needed, I decided, was a set of tiny slippers or, more practically, friction pads on the ends of its legs.

  I considered jumping on it and snapping its covers shut—the way you’re supposed to with an alligator’s jaws—but I was getting a handle on its behaviour, so I stepped smartly out of its way and followed behind.

  Salman ibn Jabir al Rasheed, I thought, you must have been well chuffed with yourself when you built this. And we may only know you through your work, but what a piece of work it is.