by Rhys Hughes
Parched parchments, eager to drink his mind! That’s what Horace now thought, and he resolved to return to the library at night, for he hoped to make rapid progress toward sainthood, to lull the memory of the nasal death, both barrels of which still blasted his dreams, to eternal sleep, and he knew he wouldn’t get it by the conventional route. Virtue was too boring a discipline to hold his whole attention. It would take him years to apprehend the godhead that way. He wanted peace from the Zanzibar War now. His obsession with it would eat his brain before he graduated if he didn’t find a swifter path out. He still had some gunpowder, stolen from his ship, as if playing with it, feeling the grains, would enable him to finally fathom Billy’s idiotic suicide.
It didn’t by itself, of course, but he realised it might indirectly serve that purpose, and he conveyed it to the library after midnight. He declined to break down the door, for that ingress would be discovered, and he dare not risk expulsion. Instead, he ascended the spiral stairway inside the relevant tower as far as the highest window and climbed through it onto the ivy which choked the turret. This wasn’t as dangerous as it may sound, for the exterior stonework was eroded from decades of ceaseless drizzle and offered plenty of footholds. Horace was able to scale up to the summit of the tower and attempted to enter through one of the library chimneys. The fit was tight but possible, and the student lowered himself down a sooty shaft.
He crawled out of a chill hearth, disused for a century, with ashes not of wood or coal sticking to both elbows. Whatever was burned in this chamber before it became a library wasn’t fuel. It was probably the evidence of a forgotten, mysterious crime. It hardly mattered. He had emerged at the back of the room and found himself abruptly among the most abhorred missals, like a diver who leaps over a continental shelf into the watery abyss with weights on his boots instead of encasing himself in a bathysphere and familiarising himself with the depths a fathom at a time. And this simile is pertinent in more ways than one, for every shelf requires a certain volume unknown to booklists, like the hold of a shipwreck with anachronistic cargo, or a tale which seemingly writes itself.
There was no moral diving bell for Horace. Anomalies can happen. An ancient galley with a store of mechanical calculators had been discovered, and here appeared a book of blank pages which filled up as he blinked. It was the first tome he had picked, the only one to guess his name correctly. With a pinch of gunpowder and a match he opened the lock. The detonation was louder than anticipated in the cramped library, and audible in the quadrangle below, where the fastidious porter strolled the dark cobbles, listening for the giggles of smuggled girls. But he later attributed the minor blast to an unsecured door slamming in the wind and so did nothing. Horace was quite free to continue reading his soul away, which he promptly did, until dawn pulled him out and down to lessons.
He slept through a lecture on the proofs of God’s existence. His dreams were reviews of his damnable study.
At the end of class he woke full of insight.
But it was foul erudition, too compelling to regard just as shading around the profile of virtue, charity and love. His attention was fixed, as the tutor of metaphysics had warned, outside the circumference, in an infinite realm of darker sagacity. He returned to the library that night with a flask of brandy to steady his trembling hands and gloves to catch the volume as it hurled itself off the shelf in its eagerness to corrupt him. He knew it only as the bad book, for it had no proper title, a grim contrast to the more quoted manuals of hellish bent, which delude misers and impotent lovers with elaborate names, often terming themselves keys or touchstones or open doors, generally pretending to be the works of magicians from Hebrew and Egyptian mythology.
The bad book was thoughtful, for when he read by starlight it wrote its letters large, a word to a page. But when he remembered to bring a candle on his subsequent visits, it reduced the girth of its fonts. Even when the porter noted this pallid flame moving across the highest oriel, he made no effort to investigate or raise the alarm, deciding that it must be the body of a trapped firefly magnified by the glass. Plainly he didn’t care to enter the library, preferring to collect his pay for tackling natural violations, and those chiefly in the shape of intruding females, whom he enjoyed restraining with his bare hands, rather than adopting a positive stance against ineffable evil. I won’t censure him for that, and nor did Horace, who was unaware of the spy.
In time, it occurred to our student that if he simply took the book back to his own rooms and concealed it under his mattress he might study it without these acrobatics. Because nobody ever ventured to the rear of the library, its disappearance couldn’t be noticed, and provided none of the neighbours, who occasionally called on him to borrow soap or etchings of nudes, both of which he kept to disguise his real desires, caught him in mid-sentence, he should have no trouble with the authorities. Even if they did, soon he would possess the power to dislocate their pious bones for the best part of eternity, without mentioning the lyres to be strung with their spinal cords. Not that he cared to lumber, or lumbar, himself with too many backfalls in his melodies, aching appoggiaturas and stuff.
Now Horace gave up climbing and became more malign as the days flew past on wings of paper stretched over a vastly extended third finger, an insult and a bat’s anatomy in parallel. See how my mouth has been ruined by eldritch, necromantic, crepuscular, thaumaturgical experiences? I try to speak simply, but the elaborate metaphors won’t let me. Don’t listen. But, sick, here’s the rest: he learned, after finally reaching the exact midpoint of the mighty tome, using the lashes which fell off his eyelids as markers, for already he was suffering from some scorbutic ailment, an absence of vitamins in his diet, which itself was minimal or nonexistent compared with the recommended daily calorific intake for scholars of his size and weight, because he preferred to skip meals and devote more time for study, he learned, I repeat, how to communicate with the dead, in an unconventional and ghastly fashion.
There was nothing psychic about the process, no trances, ectoplasm, ouija boards or assistants hidden in cupboards. It was a straightforward case of meddling with bodies, sawing them up, selecting parts, stitching them together into an abominable composite cadaver, and reanimating this nightmare by tugging the chosen spirit out of the aether and forcing its wispy limbs into the decaying trousers and sleeves of its wormy arms and legs. The problem is that most ghosts fit their own bodies perfectly. It is rare that an alternative suits them, unless it’s a twin. Horace had a scorching need to understand why his shipmate had detonated his own nose. No amount of philosophy would provide a solution. He had to get it explicitly from the corpse’s mouth.
And to do this, he had to recreate the physical form of the fellow. His memory for dimensions was good and he felt confident he really would be able to fashion a fleshy model capable of entrapping the spectre without having it flapping around inside or constraining its misty molecules too tightly and compressing it to a strange fluid, a particularly unpleasant and unhelpful possibility. No, he was a skilled butcher. Lampeter has no big cemeteries, but the villages in the vicinity, some of them abandoned centuries ago, have their share. He wandered and violated them at night. The base physical nature of this work combined with chronic malnutrition turned him paler and more dissolute in appearance than before. Together frailty and horror shaped his face.
He became a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
That’s the best way of describing him, and it didn’t fully slip the attention of his tutors and colleagues that he was up to something relevant to this phrase, but they couldn’t say exactly what. Only Mr Mock guessed the nature of his folly, but he had no hard proof to justify an official expulsion, for the library seemed to be untouched and his surprise raids on Horace’s rooms failed to net any grimoires. Indeed, his suspicions in this respect were severely curtailed by the discovery of the volume that was hidden under the mattress. Nudes on every page, innocent if truth be told, and Mr Mock himself was fatally attracted to the pretty nun, wh
o retained only her wimple, on page 69. So he was powerless to do anything other than await gory developments.
Which didn’t take too long. For the whole of a midsummer night, too humid for sleep, too bright to smuggle girls, with a buttery elephantine moon scraping the gables of Lampeter’s houses, and other more aggressive roofs jabbing their neighbours in the eyes, the highest windows in other words, on such a night, while the students chewed their pillows, strange noises emanated from the locked rooms of Horace Gripp. The men who tried to force the door, Dr Mock among them, were repelled by the curious echo of their fists and feet on the oak doors, as if the rhythmic thunder was bouncing off not the hard angular student but being absorbed by a much softer form, partly fluid perhaps. Before they splintered the wood, a terrible voice suddenly screamed:
“Enter this corpse, curse you! Enter it now, Billy Broom, you salty buffoon! I must know the secret of your despair! What is it? Hurry into this cadaver, sluggard! Check it out now, towheaded brother! A languid Elagabalus of the tombs, they call me; but you are an inept Baudelaire of nasal experimentation! Come to me quick or else! Wait there! Not you! I don’t want you inside my work! Fly back to the Pit! Leave me alone, you melodramatic example! Slither away, you grotesque something! Harken to my overdone exclamations of utter but unfashionable panic. Aiyeee!”
Then there was a deafening roar and the door blew off its hinges. A powerful blast had been directed outward from the source of the shrieks. Dr Mock was the first to recover his senses. He stood and warily entered the smoking room. Now he realised that Horace’s reluctance to touch food in the college canteen had been an elaborate pose, probably for the sake of making him appear mysterious, for he had plainly been secretly dining on smuggled meat. The walls and ceiling were spattered with bacon, hunks of beef and green hams, projected thither by the energy of the student’s suicide. Gunpowder was later found in the chamber and a book beneath his mattress which was a personal journal, with entries charting his mental decline and subsequent decision to end it all. Oddly enough, this volume resembled the book of nudes, which had vanished. The warty covers and milky parchment were identical.
Dr Mock began reading the journal. Standard depressed stuff, hardly anything supernatural about it, the sort of text any student might write when pressures and frustrations become too great. Frankly it was boring. Reading between the lines of pathetic verse and the rhetorical questions about the purpose of the universe, the favoured fake worry of youth, the true meaning roared as loudly as the detonation: I need a girlfriend! It was an easy case for the authorities to deal with. Horace Gripp had done away with himself in a fit of lunacy occasioned by involuntary celibacy. That’s always a peril when hoping to graduate in theology. But snorting gunpowder and igniting it wasn’t as symbolic an act as it appeared. More likely, it was the only instant suicidal technique he knew, which explains why he used it.
The cleaners weren’t pleased to be roused from their beds to scrape the victim from the walls. Shreds of flesh and splinters of bone tend to stick in the baroque flourishes of elaborate wood-panelling. But the job was finished before dawn, and Horace was shovelled up, bagged and hauled down to the university crypt. Because of his mortal sin he had to be interred in the unconsecrated sector, where the buckets and stepladders were stored, for suicide is an abuse of the Creator. But they treated him kindly enough, considering the condition he was in. The oddest thing about this affair was the fact his remains weighed twice his living self. Also, no powder burns were noted on any of the individual cubes which had once belonged to his face. Nor was a charred match found at the scene. But it had to be gunpowder. The clouds of sulphur which tumbled out of the room when Dr Mock forced entry, choking the nervous mass of tutors, precluded any other alternative, didn’t they?
“What do you think of that then?”
The seven of us exchanged glances and pursed our lips. I decided Dr Mock was a man of icy will, for he hadn’t spilled a drop of sweat during the recounting of his anecdote. It was clear the story contained a profound moral message, one we were now expected to meditate on. I had managed to do this as it was being told, and was ready for debate, so the advantage was mine. Not that I pressed it. I kept silent and waited for the others to assert their opinions.
“It’s a parable about temptation,” they said.
Dr Mock clapped his hands in glee. “Absolutely right! When the college was founded it was deemed necessary to warn freshmen about the risks which accompany scholarship. Only students who seem thirstier than most for knowledge are given this special lecture, for as you progress in theology you’ll have to grapple with notions which can raise doubts in even the purest minds. As well as learning proofs of God’s existence, you’ll have to learn their refutations, in order to understand that faith is more important to priests than logic. But it’s possible for keen intellects to be corrupted very rapidly by ideas which reject those of our calling. Most students are protected by disinterest, but with you it was essential to take precautions.”
“We won’t be seduced now,” they answered.
“Good! Then my story has had the desired effect. Stay away from the love of strange knowledge for its own sake. Keep always the true purpose of your studies before you. Don’t become like Horace Gripp. Don’t become languid Elagabalii of the tombs!”
“We are dissuaded from that predicament.”
Class dismissed, they departed, blinking at the tutor, tugging each other’s chins. But I didn’t follow them. Dr Mock pretended not to notice me until they were out of earshot.
“May I be of help, Mr Delves?”
I smiled. “Your tale wasn’t about temptation, as my colleagues have declared. It was about namelessness.”
He was impressed. “I beg your pardon?”
“Yes, sir, the state of not having a label. I know what you hoped to achieve with your anecdote, but my peers failed your trust. I alone passed your secret test. I am prepared to receive further instruction in how the perversions of the dark arts may be confronted and dispelled. My gratitude toward you is practically boundless, for I now understand that nameless horrors are always the worst.”
He removed his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. “Mr Delves! What I have just related to you was a fiction. None of it really occurred. It was a fable to illustrate a simple point. Be wary of learning. Not all knowledge is good. That’s all I meant. No such person as Horace Gripp ever lived.”
“Ha! Ha! A superb joke, sir! Will you give me a tour of the library in the tower? I am mentally ready.”
“There isn’t one. It was just a background detail to make the piece more traditionally creepy. There isn’t even a tower. Stand by the window and look for yourself. You don’t really believe we would keep a stock of unholy grimoires here in Lampeter?”
I smirked. “I understand your discretion.”
“Do you? In that case, I suggest you search the college at your own leisure. If you do chance on a concealed library containing copies of keys, touchstones or open doors, I’ll be pleased to hear from you. I’ll even bestow a reward!”
“That confirms my belief that magical books with titles are of less spiritual danger to a novice. I won’t bother to look for those. I’m more intrigued by the blank volumes which write themselves and can vary their contents to evade suspicion. Like Horace, I’m fleeing a set of dejecting experiences which require sublimation by the metaphysics of theism, but my spirit is tougher than his.”
“Mr Delves, be calm! I don’t predict a need to tax yourself in this regard during your stay in our institute. There’s a simpler reason why those books remained nameless in my speech. My time is limited and creation of enough minor detail to reassure extreme pedants is currently beyond the requirements of the syllabus.”
I rushed forward and gripped his shoulders. “Your time is limited? How has this happened? Is something after you? Have you also fallen prey to the rotten influence of those innominate tomes? Can it be that you too secrete under your mattress works bound in warty
hides with pages which croon like catamites?”
“Heavens no! Such titles don’t exist!”
“So you admit they don’t have titles! Thus they are nameless, are they not? Is the test still running?”
Dr Mock began to weep. I wondered why he was toying with me in this fashion. Perhaps it was part of my ordination into that secret society of enlightened academics which I now felt sure existed here. He had dropped enough hints to persuade me of this but he clearly wasn’t yet satisfied with my suitability, for he wiped his cheeks and sighed with a caution disguised as weariness:
“No titles? That’s because I can’t be bothered to invent any! They are irrelevant to the plot.”
“Ah yes, the actual message of your anecdote, which is one mystery, serves to distract the listener from the fact that the narrative itself has an inconclusive ending. Another enigma! I mean, what exactly did happen to Horace in his chamber on that fateful night? It wasn’t suicide or accident, but the occult option hasn’t been developed properly. It remains nebulous, the visual equivalent of nameless. I begin to realise what’s expected of me. The terror in the ‘plot’ of your warning resides in its dynamic haziness, its lack of exactitude. When an explanation is found, the fear will mostly evaporate. Definition is the foe of horror! Definition by name or explication!”
