Night Music (19 page)

Van Agteren placed the book in a sack, added bricks to it, then walked to the canal and threw it in the water. He watched it sink before returning to the Schuyler home.

•  •  •

The smell remained in the house, and the servants were burning sage to get rid of it. Van Agteren sat with Eliene, and their only visitor was a militiaman who came to confirm that Schuyler had not returned. He told them that a search would be organized at first light.

Van Agteren did not sleep with Eliene that night. She wanted to be alone. He smelled nutmeg, which he knew she used during her time of flowers.

Van Agteren went to his room and worked by candlelight, transcribing some of Schuyler's untidy notes. He only ceased his labors when his eyes began to ache. He dipped his quill in water to clean it and watched the ink spread through the liquid, turning it from clear to dark.

He lay on his narrow cot and thought of the book.

•  •  •

It was still dark when he woke. A sound had pulled him out of sleep. He heard a creak, and saw his door closing, although it remained sufficiently ajar to enable him to discern a figure in the shadows beyond.

“Eliene?” he said.

There was no reply.

He climbed from his cot and went to the hall. He looked to his left and saw Eliene enter her father's study. He followed her. A light burned inside the study. He could see it under the bottom of the door.

He put his hand on the handle. It was warm. He pushed, and the door opened.

Eliene stood naked, her back to the door. It took Van Agteren a moment to realize that her feet were not touching the floor, and she was instead hanging suspended. In the shadows behind her was a greater darkness, a thing of substance like a statue made from black glass, and within it Van Agteren glimpsed an infinite number of angles, and the lights of multitudinous stars. And while the being before him was physically present, it also appeared hollow, for there was embryonic movement inside it, and a cluster of eyes peered back at Van Agteren from within.

On Schuyler's reading stand lay the book, the same one he had last seen sinking into the dank waters of the canal.

Eliene's body rotated in the air. She turned—or was turned—to face him. Her eyes were gone, and her face was cracked around their empty sockets like a child's doll to which a hammer had been taken in a fit of rage. It seemed as though an unseen blade were being used upon her flesh, for her body began to bleed: her belly, her breasts, her thighs. Van Agteren glimpsed patterns forming on her skin, and he thought that they resembled the coastlines of unfamiliar continents and maps of unknown constellations.

And all the time the glass being, the obsidian man, stood unmoving behind her.

Eliene spoke.

“Maarten,” she said. “The book contains worlds.”

She stretched out her arms, then her legs. From behind her came a sound like the grinding and shattering of glass.

The entity exploded, sending shards of darkness splintering through Eliene before freezing them in place, so that for just an instant she was a being of both flesh and mineral, her body petrified at the moment that her soul departed. Then once again all was movement, and Van Agteren instinctively shielded his face with his arms and waited for the fragments to pierce him, but nothing happened.

He opened his eyes, and there was only blood.

•  •  •

The jenever was gone. Van Agteren's story was nearly complete.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

And Couvret heard himself answer yes before the word even formed in his head.

“What did you do?”

“I fled,” said Van Agteren. “They would think me a murderer, or a sorcerer, after what had befallen Eliene. Even now, they are at my heels, but they will never take me.”

“Why? Will you leave the country?”

“No, I will never leave here. Another comes. Wherever Eliene may be, there too shall I also be before this night is out. I feel it.”

“That figure I saw outside . . .”

“Yes.”

“What is it? What do you believe it to be?”

“You served Henry of Navarre, did you not?”

“I did.”

“Did you fear him?”

“Sometimes.”

“And Henry is not even a great king,” said Van Agteren. “Perhaps someday he may be, but not now. He was forced to run from Paris or be annihilated by a more powerful force. Every king, if he looks, will see another who threatens him—a king in name, or a king in waiting. Only God has no fear of kings, or so I once believed.

“But does God fear the Devil? Does he fear the King Below? This I now wonder. Because if He could, would God not wipe from existence the creature that took Eliene? Would He not have destroyed that book, or prevented it from ever being found? Is God cruel, or careless, or are there beings that threaten even His rule?”

“That is heresy,” said Couvret.

“And you are an expert on that, Huguenot,” said Van Agteren.

“Perhaps I am. And what of the book?”

“Gone,” said Van Agteren.

“Where?”

“You saw what is coming for me,” said Van Agteren. “Do you really wish to know?”

Couvret did not answer. There was no need.

Van Agteren stood.

“Where will you go now?” asked Couvret.

“I will walk, and I will breathe the air while I still can. Thank you for listening to my tale.”

“I still do not understand why you chose to share it with me,” said Couvret.

“I think you do,” said Van Agteren. “I chose you because you smell of the hunted, just like me. And maybe,” he added, “I chose you because you are unlucky.”

Couvret watched him leave. A flurry of snowflakes entered in his stead and melted on the floor.

He never heard of Van Agteren again.

•  •  •

Early the next morning, word reached Couvret that his ship would depart for England at noon. He repacked what little he had removed from his trunk and paid the innkeeper to have it taken in a cart to the port. Couvret ate a good breakfast and arrived at the quayside an hour before the ship was due to depart. The vessel was a crayer, a single-masted merchant ship designed not for speed but to carry the maximum amount of cargo in its hold. Couvret's berth was a board and pillow against the hull, sectioned off from the rest of the hold by a piece of sacking hung from nails. He was the only passenger. He stood on the deck as he left the Continent behind, never to return.

The crossing was long and slow. Fully loaded, the crayer was capable of making about two miles an hour, and the distance from Amsterdam to London was almost three hundred miles. Couvret spent much of the voyage sleeping and reading. The food was poor, but filling. He was a good traveler, which helped.

On the last night of the crossing, just as darkness was falling, he woke from a nap to see that the sacking on the empty berth across from his own had fallen, obscuring the interior. Previously he had been able to see its hard pillow and narrow board from his own. Now he could not, and he thought that he detected signs of movement behind the sacking.

He stood, holding on to the edge of his bunk for support until he was certain that he had his sea legs. He moved toward the other berth, and black smoke began to rise from behind it. No, not smoke: oil, or ink, spreading from behind the sacking, adhering to the ceiling and hull and bulkhead, smothering all, darkness upon darkness . . .

Couvret woke for a second time, emerging so suddenly from his nightmare that he banged his head painfully on the deck above his head. When he had stopped seeing stars, he sat on the edge of his board and looked at the opposite berth.

Its sacking hung in tattered ribbons, as though torn apart by gunshot.

Or splinters.

•  •  •

Couvret found the book at the bottom of his trunk, wrapped in a shirt that was not his. It was, as Van Agteren had noted, warm to the touch. Through the white muslin it resembled meat from a butcher's block.

When had he passed it on, Couvret wondered? Before they had even met, while Couvret was eating alone at the inn? When he went to make water? It didn't matter. Getting rid of it hadn't saved him, because when Couvret unwrapped the book it would open only at one page. It showed Van Agteren, his mouth agape, with flames emerging from his throat. Wherever he now was, Van Agteren was burning.

Destroying the book would do no good. Van Agteren had tried fire and water, both to no avail. But Couvret had something that Van Agteren did not.

Couvret had faith.

He took his Bible and placed it on top of the book. Then he wrapped both in the muslin shirt, and tied the parcel with rope from the hold. He examined the ship's cargo until he found a Dutch oak chest with a second baseboard laid within it for extra strength. He ascended to the main deck and managed to remove some tools from the rigger's box without being seen. Then he went to work, and when he was done the book and Bible were safely hidden in the chest. It was not a perfect job, but would pass a cursory inspection.

Couvret left the hold and spent the rest of the voyage on the main deck with the captain. He was cold and wet by the time the crayer entered the Thames, but he did not care. When he disembarked, his letters of introduction in hand, no shadow followed him from the ship.

And London swallowed him up.

Maggs: no first name, or none that anyone could remember, or cared to use. Maggs: redolent with the whiff of poorly dried clothes and old paper, a parcel of books always to hand. Maggs: ready to buy, readier still to sell.

They said that he did not love books, not really, but this was not true. He simply had few sentimental attachments to them. They were useful for the knowledge that they contained, or the money they might bring him. Some were aesthetically interesting, but most were not. He kept a small library in his rooms, containing volumes of particular rarity or attractiveness, although even these he was not above selling for the right price. But most of the books that passed through his living space did so for only the briefest of periods, for they were on their way to other hands. Those for which a buyer could not be found were of no use to him, and so were offloaded by weight, or, as a last resort, left on the steps of a public lending library. Whatever his other flaws, Maggs could not bring himself to destroy a book.

He kept an eye on the obituary columns, and it was said of him that only flies could beat him to a bibliophile's corpse. He haunted estate sales and preyed on the relatives of collectors who were too numbed by grief to pay close attention to the disposal of assets like books, or had little or no understanding of the worth of a collection to begin with. He was adept at haggling over volumes of minor value in order to distract attention from those that really interested him, and regarded it as a sorry day indeed if he were forced to pay more than half of a book's true price. His every waking moment was consumed by covers and pages, and they haunted his dreams by night.

Maggs specialized in what was often euphemistically described as “esoterica,” a term capable of encompassing everything from the erotic to the occult. He was a sexless being, so the former did not interest him, and also a committed atheist, which meant that the latter did not frighten him. Rather, he regarded the buyers of both as depraved in similar ways, and endeavored to spend as little time as possible in their company. If forced to make a distinction, Maggs might have opined that the collectors of pornography were less inclined to quibble over price, and, although clearly the possessors of polluted minds, were less sinister than the occultists, whose connection to the ordinary tenets of humanity was tentative at best.

There were exceptions, of course, for the ranks of the occultists numbered some for whom money was no object at all, as long as they got what they wanted. Unfortunately for Maggs, they tended to seek volumes of extreme rarity, most of them private printings, or even manuscript copies of otherwise singular works. In addition, some of the books on their wish lists had been consigned to the flames by various clerics over the centuries, and now existed only as smoke-tinged rumors. Still, Maggs was occasionally lucky, although his good fortune was a consequence of his tenacity and perseverance. Twice in recent years he had mined valuable occult gems from otherwise ordinary collections, the relatives of the deceased—and, possibly, the deceased themselves, given the solitary nature of the finds—quite unaware of the uniqueness of the dusty, battered old works in question. At other times, he had been alerted by his network of lesser book scouts and minor informants to the existence of noteworthy assemblages in the estates of gentlemen collectors—for they were almost exclusively gentlemen—who were so discreet in their interests as to have bypassed Maggs's attentions entirely. But he also retained meticulous lists of his own private customers so that, upon their demise, he might be in a position to buy back, for pennies on the pound, the books he had sold them in life.

The bibliophilic possessions of one such customer—Sandton, late of Highbury, interested in illustrated volumes from the Far East, mostly seventeenth and eighteenth century, floral, but occasionally with a mild erotic bent—now lay in boxes on the floor of Maggs's modest rooms. Some he had himself sold to Sandton, and he welcomed them back like old debtors with bankers' notes in their pockets. Others were less familiar to him, but he had been able to make a shrewd estimate of their value based on his knowledge of similar items. Unfortunately, Sandton's son was no fool, and Maggs had been forced to pay more for the choicer items in the collection than he would have liked, even if he were still certain of eventually turning a profit from the whole business.

Maggs carefully examined each book, noting the nicks and tears, checking the binding and the edges, shaking his head over any recent foxing. Sandton had been more careful than most, but a number of volumes betrayed signs of ill use. Maggs was inclined to blame the son.