The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (7 page)

I waited to be called on the lie, but Dunwidge buckled.

“I might be mistaken, of course,” he said. “We get all sorts of people through here, at all sorts of hours. I might have missed him. My daughter, she deals with most of the customers. I'm more of a backroom boy myself. Always have been.”

“Is your daughter here, Mr. Dunwidge?”

“Oh, she's about, right enough. I expect she'll be along in her own good time.”

He fussed with some books, straightening their spines so that they were aligned with the edge of their shelf. It was clear he now regretted being the one who had answered the door to me.

“Do you recall what books Mr. Maulding might have purchased?”

“Not off the top of my head. You'd be surprised how many books we sell. Lot of interest in our area, lot of interest.”

More fussing, more aligning, the tension knotting in his shoulders.

“But you keep records, I'm sure?”

“My daughter does. I'm a numbers man. I add up the takings at the end of the day and see it all safely to the bank in the morning.”

“A backroom boy
and
a numbers man,” I said. “The only limit to your talents appears to be your memory.”

He didn't let the sarcasm bite but merely smiled bashfully.

“I'm not as young as I used to be,” he said, and the smile twisted just slightly so that it became a thing more unpleasant, more knowing. “My memory does tend to come and go, I'll admit, but that can be a blessing, you know, and a convenience, too.”

He glanced over my right shoulder, and I saw relief and, perhaps, a hint of fear on his face.

“Ah, here she is,” he said. “I was wondering where you'd got to, my dear. Gentleman here has some questions about Mr. Maulding.”

There came that sly grin again. “You'll forgive me, sir, but your name has already slipped my mind.”

“It's Soter,” I said, as I turned to face his daughter.

What struck me first about her was her solidity. She was certainly not thin, but neither was she fat. She had the bulk of one who had engaged in heavy physical labor for much of her life, and I felt that, if I were to poke her with a finger, there would be only a little give to her flesh before I encountered hard muscle. She was tall for a woman—five-eight or a fraction more—and might have been any age from thirty to fifty. Her hair was a muddy brown, pulled
tight in a bun and fixed with pins. Her face was largely unadorned, apart from a slash of lipstick that was rather too pale for her complexion and lent her an aspect of bloodlessness that belied her bulk. She wore a black dress with mother-of-pearl buttons, and, although it was relatively tight, it showed few curves. I might almost have said she had a sexlessness about her, but that would not have been right. She was clearly a woman, but I would no more have considered seducing her than I would have considered seducing a statue of Queen Victoria herself. The unattractiveness in her emanated from inside. I had met plain women, even ugly women, whose physical shortcomings had been remedied by the spirit within, their decency and kindness even effecting a kind of transformation upon them, softening the bluntness of their features. This was not such a woman. The blight was inside her, and no restyling of her hair, no careful use of cosmetics, no pretty dresses could have made her any less unsettling than she was.

“I'm Eliza Dunwidge,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Soter.”

And something in the way she said my name made me believe she already knew of me, although I had not perceived a similar response in her father when first we met. That benighted man seemed to take courage in his daughter's presence and was now looking at me with his arms folded and an expression of satisfaction on his face, as if to say, “Now, here's the thing, and a pretty thing it is. She'll set you right, oh yes. She'll scatter the pigeons and come back with feathers in her mouth . . . ”

As if in response to such imagined thoughts, Eliza Dunwidge's hands emerged from behind her back, as though ready to wring the neck of the nearest bird. They were thin and delicate, and entirely without lines or blemishes. They resembled the hands of a mannequin that had been fused to human limbs. Their nails were perfect and gleamed as they caught the light in the room.

“Mr. Maulding is a good customer,” she said. “We always look
forward to seeing him here.”

“Did he visit you often?”

“May I ask why you're inquiring after him? We maintain the utmost discretion when it comes to our clients. As you may have gathered already, we offer a very specialized service. There are those who frown upon what we sell, which is why we choose not to display our wares in a shop window on Charing Cross Road.”

“Mr. Maulding is missing,” I said. “He has not been seen for a week—” I thought of the calendar on Fawnsley's desk, and added, “or more. I've been employed by his lawyer to inquire into his condition.”

Eliza Dunwidge did not seem at all taken aback by this announcement. Perhaps people disappeared around her on a regular basis. There might even be a section in the shop containing works alluding to such practices: People, Disembodiment of. Still, she found it in herself to say the appropriate words under the circumstances, even if she gave no sign that she meant them.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” she said. “I hope no harm has come to him.”

“As you say, he was a good customer. Wouldn't want to go losing too many of those, would you?”

Her head tilted slightly. She was examining me in a new light, although it wasn't clear if she liked what she saw.

“No, Mr. Soter, I would not.”

I
, not
we
. Interesting. It was easy to see who was the principal partner in this particular firm. They would have been better off naming their business Daughter & Dunwidge.

I moved away from her and paused in front of the locked cabinets.

“Are these valuable?”

She joined me. She did not use perfume, and her body gave off a musky odor that was not unpleasant.

“Every book is potentially valuable. It depends upon the
person who wants it, as much as the book itself. Value is linked to age, rarity, condition, and, of course, affection for the book in question—or simply the desire to acquire it. Eventually, of course, some books acquire an agreed value. The books in that cabinet are among them.”

“Do you sell many books with an agreed value that might be higher than most?”

“Some.”

“What is the most expensive book that you have in stock?”

“Off the top of my head, there are some sixteenth-century occult volumes that we would price in the high hundreds, but the demand for them is low.”

“And the thousands? Do you have books that cost more than a thousand pounds?”

She shook her head.

“Oh no, not here. To sell a book worth that much, one would need to have a buyer to hand. We would not be in a position to make a speculative purchase of a book worth so much simply in the hope that we might be able to sell it on at a later date. It would bankrupt us.”

“But there are such books?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Occult books?”

She paused before answering.

“A few. Not many.”

“Was Lionel Maulding looking for such a book?”

She was staring at me intently now. Her face didn't give much away, but I knew she was considering how much I might know, and how much she could give away, if anything, before she was obliged to start lying or clam up entirely. I understood, too, that she was a strong woman but also a vain one. I had felt her dislike of me from the moment we set eyes on each other. To be caught in a lie would humiliate her and wound her pride. To remain silent would be little
better, for it would be a tacit admission that I was on the right track, and any further inquiries on my part would catch her on the back foot. Either result would also mean that I had won the first stage of whatever game was being played here.

So she went for the truth, or some of it.

“Yes, he was seeking a very rare book,” she said.

“What was it?”

“It's a work so unusual that it doesn't have a fixed title, or rather, it's known by a number of names, none of which quite captures the essence of it, which is apt under the circumstances. Mr. Maulding wasn't sure at first that it even existed, but the nature of his researches meant that he had begun consulting books that were more and more obscure, and each obscurity led to further obscurities, like the branches of a tree growing thinner and thinner. Eventually, he was destined to find references to works that were more whispers than actual volumes, to books that contained within them the myths of books.”

I waited. She was enjoying herself now. Experts love a captive audience.

“The title by which he knew it, and one by which I had heard it described in the past, was the
Atlas Regnorum Incognitorum
, usually translated as the
Atlas of Unknown Realms
, although it has also been called the
Atlas of Geographical Impossibilities
, and the
Fractured Atlas
. It has no known author and no confirmed genesis. It is mentioned in other texts, but without any specific references to its contents. It is a book of which only a handful have any knowledge, but which none have actually seen.”

“And what does it contain?”

“Maps of worlds, it seems. Worlds other than this one.”

“You mean planets? Mars and suchlike?”

“No, I mean realms of existence, universes beyond our own.”

“The multiverse,” I said, recalling something of what the young man at Stanford's had mentioned.

Again, I saw her reappraising me, although I felt that I was operating under false pretenses, as I couldn't recall the name of the chap who had come up with the word to begin with, and I wasn't sure that I could explain the concept in any depth if a gun was put to my head.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose you could call it that.”

“And how much would this book be worth, should a copy of it come on the market?”

“Ah, but that's the thing,” she said. “There are no copies. There is only the original, and that, if it ever existed, has long been lost.”

“No copies? Why not?”

I could almost see the twists of her thoughts reflected in the tense movements of her body. We were reaching the limits of what she was prepared to share, for now. She settled for her first lie, but I smelled it on her. Even her body odor changed, growing more bitter.

“One can't duplicate what one cannot see,” she said. “To create a copy would require the presence of the original. Despite some lengthy searches, we were unable to meet Mr. Maulding's needs.”

I inhaled the scent of the untruth and touched my tongue to my lips to test its flavor. It stank of nettles and tasted of copper.

“And if someone found out where this atlas was, and there was a buyer to hand, would ten thousand pounds cover the cost of it?”

“Ten thousand pounds would cover the cost of many things, Mr. Soter,” she said, and she followed it with a strange remark, if one could ascribe degrees of strangeness to a conversation that had been peculiar as soon as it had begun.

“Ten thousand pounds,” she said, “may even buy a soul.”

She excused herself, informing me that her father would see me to the door. She stamped her way slowly up the stairs. A door opened and closed again above our heads, and then the house was quiet.

But I could hear her listening.

“Hope that was helpful to you,” said Mr. Dunwidge.

“Somewhat,” I replied. “Tell me, are there other booksellers in London who deal in similar material?”

“None like us,” he said, “but I can give you some names. I don't see why we should be the only ones to have the pleasure of your company.”

He scribbled the relevant information on a sheet of notepaper, but he insisted on escorting me to the door before he handed over the list.

“Bye, now,” said Mr. Dunwidge as he released me back into the night. “Mind how you go.”

“I'll be seeing you again, I think,” I said.

“I'll let my daughter know,” said Mr. Dunwidge. “She
will
be pleased.”

And he closed the door in my face.

I SPENT
much of the following day working through the names on Dunwidge's list, but I gained little from the experience. I was familiar with some of the businesses already, having seen their receipts among Maulding's records, but in every case it appeared that Maulding's dealings with them had been relatively minor and involved few volumes of significant value. When I raised the title of the
Atlas of Unknown Realms
, I was met variously with blank stares or denials of its possible existence. Meanwhile, any mention of Dunwidge & Daughter elicited largely negative responses, underpinned by what I thought might have been a degree of unease.

Stanford's was still doing business when I arrived, for it stayed open later than most stores of its kind in order to cater to the students whose formal studies absorbed all the hours of daylight. I asked after Young Mr. Blair and was told that he was fetching his hat and coat and would be leaving by the front door. I waited for him there, night now fully descended, the fog embracing the city. I blew my nose to clear it of some of the filth, and wondered, not for the first time, what the air in the city was doing to my lungs. Those I could not purge so easily.

Young Mr. Blair emerged from the shop like an infant being pushed from the womb, forced from a warm, familiar place into the cold, hostile world without. He took a final, fond glance back at the
interior before placing a cloth cap on his head, carefully adjusting it so that as much of his ears as possible might be covered. His brown leather briefcase, weathered but not worn, rested by his right leg, his umbrella by his left. I could see him wrestling with the apparent familiarity of my face as I approached him, before the light of recognition illuminated his features. He had a benignity about him that I liked, a happy disengagement from the futilities and ugliness of life's toil that one encountered in those who had discovered a way to take something for which they had only love and gratitude, and make it their means of support.