The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (10 page)

SO WHEN
did I begin to suspect that I was going mad? When the first of those creatures appeared in the bathtub, perhaps, or when that entity made from exploded, frozen darkness appeared to me in the night? Yes, I came close to doubting my sanity then, although they were real to me, of that I was convinced. Was it when I met Fawnsley, and he told me that a week, not a day, had passed since his telegram to me? Possibly then. Yes, perhaps that really was the start of it. The presence of two more of those strange segmented crustaceans in Maggs's rooms was simply further proof that, if I was being tormented by my imagination, then it was in a most profound way, and my grip on reality was weakening so much that eventually all doubt would cease, and I would be well advised to end it all with a bullet while some clarity of thought still remained.

But I truly began to fear for my sanity when I returned to Maggs's quarters, buoyed with Dutch courage and ready to throw his body into the Thames, and found that Maggs was gone. His body no longer lay on the kitchen floor.

And that was not the worst of it. The very rooms themselves had changed: the position of his furniture, the distribution of his books, even the arrangement of his lodgings—all were different. The kitchen was now to the left as one entered, not to the right. The bed was near the doorway, not on the other side of the room. The bookshelves were gone, and the books were now arranged in
neat formal piles, like the beads on an abacus.

“No,” I said aloud. “This is not possible.”

But it was. It had happened. I could see it with my own eyes.

I checked the pocket of my coat. The envelope was still there. I looked at the palms of my hands and saw the marks left upon them by the broom handle. I felt giddy, and the whisky was curdling something in my stomach. There was a chair by the window, and I sat down on it and tried to compose myself.

I had been seated for only a few seconds when I observed movement in the shadows of the laneway below. I stayed very still, hidden by Maggs's filthy, flyspecked lace curtains, and watched as Dunwidge, adrift from his daughter's anchorage, slipped away into the night.

SO THIS,
I think, is how it transpired.

Eliza Dunwidge was woken by a noise from the rooms below, the rooms that housed those wonderful books. Many of the most valuable were now packed in boxes, safely stored for transportation, and she and her father would have the rest ready to be moved within the next twenty-four hours. Well, they would if, and when, her father returned. He should have been back by now, but he was a man of nocturnal habits, and she was not about to begin worrying about him at this stage of her life.

The sound came again: the faint shifting of a weight against leather, the creaking of wood. Perhaps her father had come home unbeknownst to her, but he always made a point of telling her that he was back, whatever the hour.

No, there was someone else downstairs.

She removed a baton from beneath her bed. It had once belonged to a Liverpool policeman who was dismissed from the force during the 1919 police strike and died soon after. His uniform he had surrendered; his baton he had not. Eliza Dunwidge had acquired it from his widow, along with a small library of occult volumes that had been bequeathed to the officer by his grandfather, and of whose value he and his family were ignorant. Eliza had made the widow a more than fair offer for the books, given that she could have bought the lot for a fraction of what she paid. Eliza was
not in the habit of cheating people, though. She knew the nature of books better than most. Books had histories, and history was a form of remembering.

And occult books were better at remembering than most.

Carefully she descended the stairs. She heard the crackle of logs burning and saw the light from the flames reflected upon the walls. She panicked then, fearing that the house was on fire and the books in danger. She entered the room quickly, her thoughts only on saving her volumes.

“Hello, Miss Dunwidge,” I said. “I was wondering when you might join me. I have a nice little blaze going here, for it's a cold night out.”

I tore another handful of pages from the book I was holding and added them to the fire in the grate. The volume was entitled
The Book of Ceremonial Magic
by Arthur Edward Waite, originally published in London in 1913, although this was apparently a later, private printing, according to the introduction. I had chosen it because the pages were large and of good-quality paper. They burned very well.

Eliza Dunwidge let out a shriek and prepared to descend on me with the baton, but the screech and the advance died simultaneously when I showed her the gun: a Luger with a four-inch barrel that I'd taken from a German corpse at Crucifix Corner. I had never had cause to use it, but I'd returned to my rooms to collect it following my talk with old Dunwidge. I'd caught up with him on Commercial Street and encouraged him to return to Maggs's rooms with me. He had proved less cooperative at first than I might have hoped, but I had found ways of convincing him to help me with my inquiries.

“I don't know,” he had said, over and over. “I don't know. Don't ask me.”

But he did know something, just not enough.

“It's the
Atlas
,” he said at last, after I'd been forced to rough him up a little. “It's the
Atlas
. The world is no longer the same.”

Which was why I was back at the premises of Dunwidge & Daughter. I placed the police baton by the side of my chair: it seemed safer for both Eliza Dunwidge and me if I had it. I told her to sit down and she did so, wrapping her dressing gown around her in case a glimpse of her flesh might sire lascivious thoughts in me. I asked her about the baton, mainly out of some concern that she or her father had some connection with the police, which would not have been helpful. Her description of its history put my mind at ease on that score.

Keeping the gun trained loosely on her, I used my left foot to shift a box of books nearer to me. I examined a couple while Eliza watched me anxiously. They looked much older than the Waite volume, and were carefully wrapped.

“You seem to be leaving,” I said. “Relocating to bigger premises, perhaps, thanks to Lionel Maulding's money.”

“We're moving to the country.”

“May I ask why?”

“The city isn't safe anymore.”

“It certainly wasn't safe for Mr. Maggs. In fact, it had a very bad effect on him at the end.”

She didn't blink, but her father's presence at Princelet Street left little doubt about her involvement in whatever had led Maggs to his fate. The old man claimed not to know what had become of Maggs. He had not entered the rooms, he said. He had not moved the body. He said that he did not even know there was a body until I told him of it. Strangely, I believed him.

“You paid Maggs five hundred pounds, a huge sum of money for a man like him,” I said to Eliza now. “Why?”

Still she said nothing.

I picked up the first book from the box at my feet and tossed it on the fire.

“No!”

She rose from her seat, and even when I raised the gun from my
lap, it was all she could do not to attempt to rescue the book from the flames.

“I will shoot you, Miss Dunwidge,” I warned. “I'll shoot you in the foot, or the knee, because I don't want to kill you. But it will hurt. It will hurt a lot. You should also know that I have your father. His continued good health, recently undermined, is in your hands.”

In truth, I had only had to slap the old man twice on the face before he became more amenable to conversation, and he had made me feel ashamed of my behavior when he started to cry, but his daughter didn't need to know that. I had learned, though, that he was his daughter's creature, and he had been privy to few of her recent dealings with Maggs. She had simply dispatched him to inform Maggs of my interest in Lionel Maulding and encourage him to leave London for a time, for fear that my inquiries would eventually lead me to his door.

“He's an old man,” she said.

“If you start cooperating with me, he'll live to be older still.”

She swallowed hard.

“Please don't burn any more books,” she said.

“I won't if you'll talk to me, Miss Dunwidge. Just tell me about the five hundred pounds. Tell me the truth about the
Atlas
.”

And in the light and heat of the burning volumes, she did.

SHE SPOKE
to me as if to a child.

“The book is rewriting the world,” she said.

Under other circumstances I might almost have laughed in her face, but her expression brooked no such mockery and, truth be told, I was already inclined to believe her. After all, I had seen the change in Maggs's rooms and had listened to the pained, desperate testament of her father.

“How? How can a book rewrite the world?”

“Look around you, Mr. Soter. Books are constantly changing the world. If you're a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don't you see? This world is constantly being altered by books.
The Communist Manifesto
was published in 1848, less than a century ago, and
Das Kapital
is younger still, yet already Russia has fallen to them, and other nations will soon fall, too.”

“But those are ideas,” I said. “The books communicate them, and the ideas take hold in the minds of men. The books themselves are not responsible, no more than a gun can be culpable for the bullet that it fires, or a blade for the wound that it inflicts. It is men who fire bullets and wield knives, and men who change the world. Books may inspire them, but they are passive objects, not active ones.”

She shook her head.

“You're a fool if that is what you truly believe. A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.”

“No, that's—”

She leaned over and placed her hand upon my arm. Though we were seated in the warmth of the fire, her touch chilled me to the bone. I felt a physical pain, and it was all I could do not to recoil. This woman was unnatural.

“I can see that you believe me,” she said. “You are altered in aspect since last we met. Tell me of Maggs. Tell me what you saw.”

How could she know of Maggs? I wondered. Yet somehow she did.

“There were holes burned in his skull through the sockets in his eyes,” I said. “There were creatures, insects or crustaceans, but not like anything I have seen or heard of in this world. I believe it was these creatures that bored their way out of Maggs's head, emerging through his eyes. I destroyed them both.”

“Maggs,” she said, with a hint of sorrow to her voice. “He hated books, you know. He saw them only as a source of wealth. He loved only the hunt and not the object of it, but he had not always been that way. He had come to fear them. It happens, sometimes, to those in our particular trade: not all the books that we handle are beautiful inside and out. We breathe in the dust of the worst of them, fragments of their venom, and we poison ourselves. I think that is what happened to Maggs. He sourced books, and the stranger the better, but he would not read them. Yet I believe his curiosity about the
Atlas
overcame his fear: he looked upon it, and something in it took root in his brain.”

“How did he find it?”

“He had always been seeking it, hunting rumors and whispers.
Maggs was a scout unlike any other, and he wanted to achieve what others before him had failed to do. Then Maulding came to me. I tried to dissuade him from looking for the
Atlas
, but Maulding had begun to lust after it, too. If Maggs was a scout unlike any other, then Maulding was a unique collector. It was a combination of forces, a perfect conjunction of circumstances: it was the book's opportunity, and it chose to reveal itself.”

“You speak of it as though it were alive,” I said.

“You still don't understand,” she said. “Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You saw Maggs. You saw what might happen to a man who underestimates a book, especially a book like the
Atlas
.”

I looked at the fire. Books were still burning in it. I smelled their leather bindings charring in the heat. Their pages curled inward as they took flame, as though in agony.

“You were speaking of the
Atlas
,” I said.

“Maggs found it at last in the most unlikely of places: in the collection of a widow in Glasgow, a God-fearing woman who did not even seem aware of its existence and could not tell him how she had come by it. It had hidden itself away amid worthless reprints. It would not allow itself to be read, not until its time had come. Then Maggs found it and knew it for what it was, and he contacted me. He asked if I could find a buyer for it, not knowing that the buyer, too, had revealed himself. But the
Atlas
knew. The
Atlas
was ready for them both.”