The Ghost Writer (12 page)

All of Julia's hair stood on end; or such was the sensation. The "click" of those eyes snapping open seemed to lodge in her own body with a visceral jolt of terror such as she would not have believed a human being could endure. If the smiling doll-creature touched her, she knew she would die; she could not cry out, for the fear was choking her. Its satin shoes touched the floor; Julia sprang up, knocking over her own chair, and backed away into the wall of fog. Blundering from chair to chair, with still no sign of another human being, she retreated until she collided painfully with what felt like the circular bookcase which housed the catalogue, groped her way along its edge, and lurched into what she hoped was another alleyway of desks, where she stopped and tried to hold her breath and still her pulse enough to listen for the rustle of her pursuers dress.

From the moment Julia left her seat, the fog had closed impermeably about her. If she held her hand so close that her fingers actually touched her face, she could see the outline of it, but beyond that distance she might as well have been immersed in cotton wool, through which filtered a dim, uniform, yellow-grey light. Even in normal circumstances, the Reading Room has a labyrinthine aspect; some have compared it to a spiders web; but because it is possible to see over the tops of the rows of desks and across the central bookcases, these sinister possibilities lie mostly dormant. If all light were to be extinguished, one might imagine that the regularity of its construction, with the rows of desks radiating out from the centre like the spokes of a wheel, would still render escape relatively straightforward. But in fact, merely by pausing to listen, Julia found that she had lost all sense of direction. The strange sea-creature smell confused her senses, and the blood would not stop ringing in her ears. She could not hear, yet she knew that to run blindly would be fatal; the noise of her flight would give her away. Besides—she tried to suppress the realisation, but could not—the creature had found her in spite of the fog. Julia began to tremble uncontrollably.

Noise might be fatal, but to remain waiting for a porcelain hand to insinuate itself into hers was quite unbearable. She took a slow step backwards and bumped against a chair, which scraped; set off in what she thought was the right direction and encountered a cold, vertical surface which she could not identify at all, and from there veered into empty space, losing even her sense of up and down. She felt herself falling; reached out to save herself and clutched at a narrow ledge or flange, which seemed at first solid but suddenly gave way with a rasp, shot from her hand and fell at her feet with a dreadful smash. The creature would be upon her any second; Julia stumbled back into the void, and this time managed to hand herself from chair to chair along the entire length of a row. The noise was frightful, despite the muffling effect of the fog several chairs fell behind her, but she kept on, and when nothing met her hand after the expected interval, threw herself forward with both arms outstretched until she collided with what, she prayed, was the bookcase that ran right around the circumference of the Reading Room. Instinct told her that if she were to follow the curve around to her left, she would eventually arrive at the main entrance, where help must surely be at hand.

Julia stopped again to listen, but her breathing would not slow. Terror had left no room for any thought beyond the desire for escape; she set off again, as fast as she dared, with her right hand brushing along the curved bookcase and her left stretched out before her. In a surprisingly short time she came to an opening, which, she told herself, must be the entrance; she felt her way through, stumbled for some distance in another void, and collided with a wall. No, a door, for it swung away under her weight, and she went on through, quite unable to visualise the foyer in sufficient detail to tell whether she was in it or not. She took a few steps forward, but the floor did not feel right underfoot; it had a hollow, skeletal quality about it; then she brushed against a cold, vertical metal surface, which certainly did not match her recollection of anything in the foyer. Running her hand across the metal surface beside her, Julia realised that it was the end of a bookshelf. Reaching around it, she disturbed a volume which fell over with a thud, and all at once understood where she must be. This was the Iron Library, a maze of shelves crammed with books in their numberless thousands. If she could not regain the door through which she had entered, she would be utterly lost.

But perhaps help was closer at hand than she had thought, for was that not the faint sound of voices? And quite close by; perhaps it was only the muffling effect of the fog that made it sound like whispering. She took a step forward, keeping one hand on the metal surface to her left, and now the sound was even clearer, though oddly repetitive in its cadence, as if someone were whispering the same word over and over. Her hand slid off into space and across to the end of another shelf: and yes, the voice was coming from the aisle between the shelves; it seemed to be rising up from the floor as the fog once more lifted to reveal the doll-child's upturned porcelain smile, the shoe-button eyes opening wide, painted fingers reaching towards the hem of Julia's dress, and the rosebud mouth opening and closing mechanically, whispering "Julia ... Julia ... Julia..."

Thus began a fearful game of hide-and-seek which drove Julia ever further into the gloomy depths of the Iron Library. The fog had thinned somewhat, so that she could see from one end of an aisle to the other, but that only worsened the terror of seeing the painted smile appearing from around a stack or worse, coming up behind her as she paused, wondering which way to flee. Though the creatures head came no higher than Julia's waist, the thought of turning upon it, or trying to kick it out of her way, only prompted a further spasm of horror; she knew she could not endure its slightest touch, and so could only retreat until she ran up against an iron staircase spiralling up into the foggy darkness overhead.

Her pursuer was not at that moment in sight, but there was no other way back. Shuddering at the image of the doll-child lurking in wait for her, Julia began to climb. But she could not keep the staircase from sounding beneath her feet; her footsteps rang out over the fog-bank which now rolled back below her, so that she could neither see nor hear whether the creature was following. She passed an exit onto a narrow metal gallery and kept climbing higher and higher, with the fog still rising so that it swirled continuously just below her hurrying feet.

Soon she could go no higher; the last turn brought her out onto another gallery, whose floor, like the others in the Iron Library, was a sort of grid, so that one could see through it to the fog drifting just beneath. On one side of her was a sheer dark wall, on the other a handrail, through which, as she paused wondering which direction to take, she could feel a faint rhythmic drumming, as of footsteps coming lightly and rapidly up from below. Julia began to retreat along the gallery as fast as she dared, glancing frequently over her shoulder. There was no sign of the doll-child yet; but she saw that she was coming to a dead end; there was nothing ahead of her but an end-rail, and no more stairs.

A cold gust of air rose about her; the wall of fog rolled back and seemed to dissolve upon the instant, and Julia found herself looking down from a great height, at row upon row of skeletal iron floors plummeting away into darkness. Vertigo seized her as it had on the brink of Frederick's balcony. Simultaneously, the doll-child emerged onto the gallery and trotted purposefully towards her, the painted smile broadening, its tread sounding heavier with every step. Caught between the terror of falling and dread at the creature's approach, Julia pressed herself against the wall. The porcelain arms reached out; the eyes clicked wide open. As a cry of repulsion rose ungovernably in Julia's throat, her fingers found a handle. Part of the wall gave way with a crash, flinging her out upon another gallery, beneath a vast, win-dowed hemisphere which took up her cry and sent it ringing and reverberating across the Reading Room, high above a sea of upturned faces.

***

T
HE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON FOUND
J
ULIA, SOMEWHAT
to her own surprise, back in the library. Her interview with the Chief Attendant had been long and humiliating: he had looked at her so strangely when she first mentioned the fog that she spoke, thereafter, only of taking a wrong turn and finding herself lost in the Iron Library. When asked why she had climbed the stair, she could only reply that she had mistaken it for the way out. But he was plainly not satisfied: she had, he said sternly, broken several regulations, ignored numerous notices, created a disturbance in the Reading Room, and placed herself in serious danger. The Trustees would have to be informed, and might well decide to suspend her ticket.

What had actually occurred remained unfathomable. Julia had been followed onto the Reading Room gallery, not by the doll-child, but by an attendant who had noticed a woman ascending the staircase in the Iron Library. The only rational explanation she could conceive of was sleep-walking, but she could not quite believe it. There was, of course, the darker possibility that her mind had given way under the strain of prolonged grief. Yet she could not shake off the sense that the anonymous black book and the terrifying encounter in the fog were in some way connected. Besides which she had discovered, in the course of another troubled night, that fear of the doll-child's renewed attentions had followed her home. Until she could discover the meaning of these events, she would not feel secure, and instinct told her that the answer must be sought in the Reading Room, to which she accordingly returned, heavily veiled and in other ways disguised as far as possible.

The afternoon outside was bright and clear, the dome filled with light and entirely free of fog, which at least implied that she would be safe from a renewal of yesterday's terrors. But although an inspection of the upper gallery confirmed that she had been too high above the readers' desks for her features to be easily discerned, Julia felt most conspicuous and ill-at-ease. To inquire any further after the anonymous black book was obviously impossible. But wait: there was, after all, a section of the catalogue devoted to anonymous works, and she might as well look through it as sit uncomfortably wondering whether the voices murmuring on the other side of the partition were murmuring about her.

"Anon", however, proved far more prolific than Julia had anticipated. She had begun her search on the principle of the child's game of "warm or cold", filling out an application for any title which looked remotely promising. But mindful of the notice discouraging readers from requesting numerous books at any one time, and of her already uncertain standing in the Reading Room, she found her progress—or lack of it—so slow that the light was fading from the dome before she had surveyed even a fraction of the tides beginning with "A". It would clearly take weeks or months, with no likelihood of success ... but what was this?

A Full and True Account of the Strange Events leading to the Death of the Poet Frederick Liddell Esq., on the night of Thursday 2nd March, 1899. 8vo.
London. 1899.

The date given was today's, or rather tonights: an impossibility, but there it was, starkly presenting itself to Julia's uncomprehending gaze. The printed entry slip, which looked as if it had only just been pasted in, was set out in the usual fashion, and accompanied by a press-mark which, together with the first few words of the title, Julia had numbly copied onto an application slip and deposited at the issue desk before the import of the words had even begun to sink in. It must be another Frederick Liddell, an inner voice kept repeating, but she knew this to be false; she had looked up his name in the catalogue too often, formerly for the pleasure and latterly for the pain of seeing it printed there. Almost any other reader, confronting the same entry, would have attributed it to clerical error, or at worst an elaborate and distasteful hoax; to Julia, the words emblazoned upon her inward vision seemed like a declaration of the inevitable.

Fifteen minutes crawled by, and then a half-hour. The electric lights came on; the windows in the dome darkened steadily; Julia waited in growing apprehension with her thoughts revolving as upon a treadmill. Should she not go to his rooms and see if he was there, to warn him? But warn him of what? To know exactly where and when the danger lay, she would have to see the book ... but then the rational part of her mind would rise up in protest, only to be subdued in turn by a vivid recollection of the immense woman bearing the coffin-shaped parcel, so that she sat paralysed between these warring inner factions until an attendant came to inform her that no record of any such volume could be found. Julia returned at once to the catalogue; she could visualise the position of the entry quite clearly, in the top right-hand quarter of a right-hand page, but realised, when it did not appear in the expected place, that she had absolutely no recollection of its surroundings. Because new entries were constantly being pasted in, their order was not always precisely alphabetical, but she searched many pages in either direction without finding what she sought. This, however, only heightened her sense of foreboding. It was black night outside; she could delay no longer, no matter what humiliation might follow. But if she were not home soon, even her husband might become anxious enough to initiate a search. Hastily scribbling a note to say that she would be dining with Marianne, Julia gathered up her things and rushed from the Reading Room.

T
HE NIGHT AIR WAS DAMP AND STILL, WITH A HINT OF
mist about the street lamps, as Julia rang the bell at the street door below Frederick's rooms. There was a long wait, made even longer by the combined weight of foreboding and painful recall, before the door was opened by an ancient porter.

Her apprehension increased with every one of the seemingly endless flights of stairs, and she was obliged to pause even longer than was necessary to recover her breath before she could summon the courage to knock at Frederick's door. All had been silent within; at the sound of her tapping the silence seemed only to deepen; then there was a muffled thud, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps and a clatter of locks and bolts being undone. Almost worse than the dread of what she might encounter was the resurgence of a hope so long repressed, a hope that flared wildly at the first sight of his face, so pale and gaunt and worn, suddenly radiant with an answering joy. She had crossed the threshold and flung her arms around him—feeling at once how dreadfully thin he had become—and kissed him with all the passion of her resurrected love, before the name he was so tenderly murmuring resolved itself as, undeniably; "Lydia".