The Library of Forgotten Books (10 page)

“No,” said Anton.

Eliana ran to Anton and threw her arms around him. “Let me go,” she said.

“We should have run away.” He shook his head in disbelief. How did things reach this point? He could barely trace the events in his mind, so fickle and fast they seemed to have come.

She whispered in his ear. “In our next lives we’ll live in that little fishing village south of Caeli-Amur, won’t we? Won’t we?”

But Anton could not speak; he knew the words would not be “Yes.” He could not say them. That wasn’t the truth.

Eliana tried to step back, but Anton held her close. “Stay with me.”

“No,” she said.

“We can fight. We can–” He tried to say “run” but the word would not come. He knew it to be false.

She shoved him and broke free from his grasp. “No.”

Eliana walked back to the Director, who stood to greet her. There she threw her arms around him. “I will love you, husband. Love is an act, not just a feeling. I will come to feel the feeling. I will bring myself to it, through my actions.”

“Take her home.” Lefebvre gently pushed Eliana towards Jean-Paul. The adjutant led her through the door, and Eliana did not look back, at the room or Anton.

“Liar,” said Anton beneath his breath at her. “You’re a liar.”

Lefebvre and Anton stared at each other. The Director spoke quietly. “I trusted you for years, and now this. The truth is a hard thing to accept, is it not? To look things in the face, as they really are.”

Anton closed his eyes. He too spoke quietly. “You know she will always love me.”

“That is where you are wrong. It seems she possesses greater willpower than either of us believed. I have no doubt that she will come to love me. Do you?” Lefebvre looked at Anton severely.

“No.” Anton looked down at the floor as if there he might find something with which to make sense of events.

Lefebvre walked to the door. “I could have you killed, but I prefer to leave you alone—to face the truth.”

In the darkness of the night Anton made his way into the House Technis complex—that massive sprawling structure, constantly growing like some brick-and-mortar cancer. He passed through the warren-like corridors. Overhead,
pneumatiques
carried messages on criss-crossing wires. Anton entered the office of Officiate Ijem, who seemed to spend much of his time laughing—one of the qualities that made Anton like him.

“Ah, Anton, it is good to see you,” said Ijem happily. “I trust you’ve been well.”

“I have a Truth-Mould within me,” said Anton. “And everything has come apart.”

Ijem looked at Anton with a curious half-smile. “Ah, one of House Arbor’s experiments...how fascinating.”

Anton rubbed his face with his hands. “There’s no pleasure left for me in this world.”

Ijem broke into a grin. “Don’t worry, the House will look after you. You’ve served us well for a long time now. Not just anyone is able to steal papers from Director Lefebvre’s very study in the midst of a ball! What a story that makes! Don’t worry, our physicians will heal your arm, our thaumaturgists will get the Truth-Mould out of you and we’ll get you back on your feet. Obviously you’ll have to hide here for a while, but there’s always hope. Tomorrow’s another day, eh?”

“I don’t want the Truth-Mould out of me. I don’t want to live this life of deceit anymore.” The image of Eliana with her arms around Lefebvre rose in Anton’s mind.

Ijem looked at him questioningly, and then matter-of-factly said, “Well tomorrow’s another day. Who knows what pleasures it might bring?”

With one hand, Anton spun his labyrinth ring around his index finger and closed his eyes.

Twilight in Caeli-Amur

The front of the house is overgrown with weeds, allowed to grow wild and free as they do on the hills behind Caeli-Amur. It’s a grand old façade: pillars to the side of the double doors, which stand open; windows high on the second floor overlooking the street. In this part of Caeli-Amur, furnace trees line the sides of the road, their round bulbs overhead like lanterns in the night, collecting the heat in summer, emitting it in soft warm glows during winter. Now the sun’s light has softened, so the cobblestoned streets, the other grand houses with their balconies and domed roofs, the horse and carriage that I’ve just left by the side of the road, seem faded.

With trepidation, one foot after the other, stopping and then again advancing, I enter Director Didion’s house.

“Madame Didion, Madame Didion?” My voice echoes strangely around the entry hall with its two staircases that rise along each wall and join on the balcony above. Half-dead vines crawl from immense pots along the staircase rails, their brown leaves drooping, once-yellow candle-flowers trying desperately to pierce the gloom. They would have been magnificent once, befitting Director Didion’s house, but now their withered trunks, knobbly and dry, remind me of dead bodies found high in the mountains. Candle-flowers are not among the plants that Didion created, but grow wild in certain marshes south of Caeli-Amur where at night, if you can bear the swarms of airborne insects and avoid falling into one of the treacherous bogs, the flowers light the air like a thousand magical flames scattered by some romantic god. The plants Didion designed always had a more dangerous beauty.

Rumours come to mind that I have not thought of for fifteen years, since I was a student following in his dark shadow at House Arbor, where jealous inferiors had concocted all kinds of spiteful stories: of Didion’s hidden secrets and sexual depredations, of how he had taken other thaumaturgists’ works and pretended they were his own, of how he favoured those students loyal to him, and excluded the brightest and the best.

I sneeze. Dust. Dust everywhere, a thin layer coating the floors, a powdery sea.

“Madame Didion?”
Where is she?

Advancing beneath the staircases I pass into a corridor. Along the walls stand statues of bizarre creatures or gods, trunks sprouting from their faces, strange implements in hand. There are doors between the statues, and everywhere dead plants: once writhing silk-vines frozen and stiff, baby furnace trees in alcoves, their bulbs collapsed like empty bladders, desolate sticks emerging from dry pots. I try not to sneeze. Already my nose is becoming blocked.

“Madame Didion?”

I look through the door to my left, and there she is, seated on an intricately patterned couch. A table has been pushed up against the wall and fruit sits in a bowl, small orange and grey balls merging with each other. The smell of something rotting hovers in the air. A fat black cat scuttles beneath my feet and bolts down the hallway.

“Oh,” says Madame Didion, looking up towards me, her eyes tiny in her cadaverous face. “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“The door was open.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, “I leave it open. I don’t care.”

“But people might come in.” Images of thieves flash into my mind, with old Madame Didion helpless and frail on the couch.

“They don’t,” she says.

“I suppose it’s not the area for it.”

There’s an uncomfortable silence for a moment and I shift my weight from one foot to another.

“Well, sit down,” she says irritably, as she would to a servant.

She has an extraordinary face, so old that it resembles a skull. The terribly thin skin has shrunk around the bones beneath. Red splotches dot her face and her hat casts a faint shadow, as if she’s hiding herself from view.

I sit in a chair opposite her and neither of us speaks. She rubs one bony hand with the thumb of the other, purple veins running beneath the white skin. She doesn't look at me, but stares away at an angle towards the middle of the room. Another cat, this one with splotches of white and black and ginger, pokes its head around the corner of the doorway, examines the scene for a moment and disappears.

I want to ask her about the notebooks, to have her collect them so I can get out of the house, but it is too soon and it would be rude. I shift in my seat, unable to find a comfortable position. I have been warned: she does not want to give up the notebooks.

“Have you seen the house?” she asks eventually.

“No.”

“Of course not. I keep thinking you were one of his colleagues. But I suppose you’re much too young.” She says
his
as if he were here, as if he were still alive.

“I’m thirty-six,” I say in my defence.

“Yes,” she says, “too young. He’s been gone a long time you know.”

Neither of us speaks. I search for something to say but only remember the reports of his affairs and his domineering temper: of how he struck his students with a knotted rope as he paced behind their chairs, leaving them stammering and red-faced and all the more likely to forget his formulae; and of how, as if to make up for these cruelties, he lavished them with opulent gifts of rare spices and pieces of ancient or lost technology.

“But even so,” she says in an unusually reserved manner, each word measured to reduce its effect, “I remember him like it was yesterday. He was considered quite handsome in those days. A dashing figure, really.”

“I’ve heard only the best things about him,” I say, “stories of his brilliance.”

“Everyone liked him,” she says.

“Well, his achievements were enormous. We’ve all studied his theorems. His
Formulae for the Merging of Plant Species
is still the basic text in the House. And the stories of the new species—well,
Toxicodendron
Didion
still protects the outer walls of House Arbor’s palace.”

She sits up straighter as I speak and the edges of a satisfied smile play on her face. She must have basked in his triumphs for all those years and I thank the gods I’m not a woman. I couldn’t bear to be excluded from House Arbor’s laboratories, or from intrigues between the Houses. But then I’m a thaumaturgist and a man. One day I may even become Director.

“Come,” she says. “Let me show you the house.” She stands and she seems smaller than I had first thought.

The house has vast expanses, great empty sitting rooms filled with coffee tables surrounded by delightfully embroidered chairs, now colourless beneath the dust, and some visibly mouse-eaten. Despite these holes the chairs are still arranged just so.

“He liked
order
,” she says definitely. “He liked things to be in their place.”

The dust overwhelms me again and I sneeze.

“You’re sick,” she says.

“Oh, it’s nothing.”

We pass through a ballroom, the walls lost in the gloom. Outside, the sun must be descending fast. “We danced here. You should have seen the dances!” She leads me along grey corridors. “We had many servants, you know. How the house was abuzz!” Kitchens lie off to the side. Somehow we end up in a wild and overgrown garden.

We follow a path that runs up along the middle of the garden, which lies silently in the twilight. To both sides the weeds and grasses and bushes are so thick as to be impenetrable, their colours taking on an extra shade of blue-grey, an intimation of the approaching night. Some lean over us, green turning to brown as the year moves on, leaves dropping and mounding up on the side of the path.

We come out into a central patio, two long lines of tear-flowers, fully five feet tall with heads like bloodied plates, running parallel to each other on its sides. Around them there are no weeds and the earth looks freshly turned and fertilised.

“Here are my flowers,” she says. As we approach, the flowers lean towards us and emit that faint wailing, like the cries of faraway children, and nectar slowly runs from their heads and down their petals. They recognise my thaumaturgical power—that is what they are designed to do. I stop and Madame Didion walks on. I note, with some surprise, that the flowers turn away from me and follow her, as she passes. Perhaps they have grown accustomed to her.

She reaches in, touches one and it shivers in delight, its petals undulating, calling her closer. I want to reach in and pull her away from its deadly calls but they are her flowers, and she has no doubt been here a thousand times. The only danger is to me.

As she walks along the rows, the tear-flowers, wailing and weeping, lean in further towards her, their heads beseeching her. A few notice me and turn indecisively before they lean back towards her.

A greenhouse stands on the other side of the courtyard, creeper vines covering it and enclosing it, passing through the broken panes, inside.

She passes along the other side of the patio and reaches out as the flowers there join the crying and weeping. “They have a wonderful sound, don’t they? Almost melodic, like an aria,” she says.

“They do,” I say, even as I resist the pull of that mesmerising call. One does not lie down in a row of tear-flowers. No—
they like their blood and bone
.

“How long have you had them?” I ask.

“The same length of time they’ve had me,” she says, beaming. Her face is alive here—the flesh around her cheekbones suddenly rising, the eyes wider and sparkling. Suddenly she doesn’t look so old.

“So how many notebooks are there?” I ask.

“Notebooks?” She raises both hands, palms upwards as if the notebooks don’t matter and shrugs. “Oh, three or four.”

“Oh,” I say, “I thought there were six.”

She suddenly stops and turns towards the flowers, her back to me. “Oh, yes,” she says almost inaudibly, “six.” She steps closer to the flowers and by instinct I step towards her. The flowers lean in and nestle around her, caressing her face with their petals. Their nectar drips onto her shoulder. I should pull her away, but she is fine. And I don’t wish to get too close to them. Already I feel like walking among them, listening to their mournful music, lying down beneath their flowing tears and closing my eyes, sleeping. There I would never wake, but lie in that strange reverie, that semi-consciousness, as they suck me through their roots and up along their stems such that, even as I lie half-alive, at their base, we will have become one living creature—the flowers and I.

She steps backwards. “Let me show you the rest of the house.”

“But the notebooks...”

“Ah yes,” she says. “Come on then.”

Somehow, retracing our steps, we reach a vast dining room, the table set for a banquet. There are no notebooks to be seen.

“There he is!” she says. “Magnificent, isn’t he?”

The portrait shows a stern man, powerful. He has grey hair, and an angular, harsh face. His eyes stare out, all fire and passion. It is painted in the style of the forties, so there’s something unreal about it: the power and the sternness of the portrait reside simply in its form. House Arbor has always used that style, still does to this day. I try to reconstruct what he would have looked like, to distil the reality of the man from the pompous facade of the painting.

“Yes,” I say, “magnificent.”

“He was a good man. He served House Arbor all his life. He was loyal, to all of us, and look, he built us this house and he gave us three wonderful children. And they gave us grandchildren. What more can you ask for?”

“Your children, they work for the House?”

“No, they are up north, in Varenis.”

“So you never see your grandchildren?”

“Oh no. Anyway, I wouldn’t want them to come here. I’d scare them.”

“Well, you are quite...powerful,” I say.

“I think they’d be scared by how old I am,” she says, ignoring me.

“So what are these notebooks, I mean, are they all about thaumaturgical anabolism and hybridisation?” I ask.

She looks up at the portrait and then away again as she speaks: “He practically invented it, you know. He would retreat into the library, all kinds of philosophy and theory spread out on the desk. You should have seen him. And the delight of discovery! When he first recognised how to augment the speed of plant growth by the connection of previously unrelated thaumaturgical formulae. The way, suddenly a whole new world opened up in his mind and everything seemed wondrous and strange.” There’s something about the way she stares off into the distance as she speaks that takes me aback.

“And then later,” she says, “he found he could use some of the same equations not just to speed up the growth of plants, but animals too. And why not humans?”

“But it was never done,” I say.

“Who knows what the House did? He was a theoretician; he did all the formulation of the initial foundations of that branch of thaumaturgy. He was an innovator. He created new plants, but they were mainly for theoretical research. What Arbor did with that knowledge, it kept to itself. Perhaps you know—you’re a thaumaturgist for the House.”

“I don’t know,” I say, and she smiles, knowing that I could not say even if I wanted to. She nods and looks back up at the portrait.

“Talented...” she says slowly.

She turns suddenly towards me, and leans in, an innocent look on her face, pleading and beckoning, almost siren-like. “Does the house really need them? I mean, after all these years?”

I bet she used that look to seduce many a man when she was young. It’s an unfair thought, but it comes to me just the same.

“Perhaps you could make copies...” I say, but the absurdity of it strikes me. House Arbor takes what it considers its own.

She curls her lip, and again I feel like a servant. “Does a painter make do with duplicates of a painting? A writer with copies of his first manuscript? An original is an original. Anyway, these are in his handwriting, a piece of him. You think a copy can reproduce him?”

Foolishly I stand at attention, like a chastened child, but her voice softens again. “I mean...they’re the last thing I have to remember him by.” Behind those words I hear the entire edifice she has created, the entire world of her life and her place in it, her status defined by her relationship to him, the innovator, the originator.