The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (10 page)

And in their beady, black, unblinking eyes were reflected the hundreds of screens displaying binary code, scrolling across and downwards at a fantastic rate. The typists seemed to be trying to transmit information that would lurk
behind
the endless sequence of zeroes and ones, like thoughts behind words.

“
My hackers…” said Yaanek, as he motioned his aides to restrain the horrified and staggered Glickman, “have also been extremely successful in eradicating knowledge. We cannot have text existing in cyberspace, eluding oblivion. Millions of our agents around the world, mimic their acts of annihilation. Of course physical books and manuscripts such as your own we may destroy more easily.”

•

Afterwards Glickman was taken down to the basement where he was imprisoned in a small room that served as a cell. It was only seven square feet across with a folding bed and a bucket in one corner and seemed to have formerly been a storage room. It had no windows and a lightbulb provided the only illumination, being screwed into a socket on the wooden-slatted walls. He paced the cell for a time and then sat down on the bed. There was nothing to do except await whatever fate the Nemesis Press had planned for him.

Some hours later, though Glickman had no way of measuring time, two nameless clerks entered the cell. They said nothing to him, but simply leant back on the wall facing Glickman and stared at him intensely without blinking. A horrible smile played about both their faces.

Glickman turned away from them. After a few minutes he began to discover that his thoughts were being invaded. The fear he felt was evaporating and instead he experienced a sensation not unlike madness. Voices were speaking inside his head. Although initially this consisted of a dialogue with the invaders it was not long before the alien voices drowned out his attempts to resist them. The source of this intrusion was undoubtedly the clerks who were using some morbid form of telepathy.

Glickman’s brain reeled with the waves of thought that were directed at him. He learnt of the falsity of literature and, at first to avoid the pain of resistance but later with dawning enlightenment, shared in this vision. Glickman, who had made the dissemination of books his passion, now understood the necessity of their destruction. Books were utterly worthless. He understood that no one ever wrote without the result being warped by his or her own prejudices and ego. Ninety-nine per cent of books sat on shelves and in bookcases and were unread, unnoticed and untouched. For the vast majority of people, books were simply ornaments to a room, advertising their owners’ intellectual vanity. One in a million books was ever re-read and the so-called classics were mostly dipped into and unadmittedly discarded or force-read. Not though by academics, who canonised these “classics” and lived like parasites on the obscurity they generated. The masses were as vile in their own way. They read drivel churned out by illiterates. These illiterate authors had allowed themselves to become “product”. And then there was the worst of all: books that instructed us on how to live, when to turn to such books was a symptom of the disease, not its cure.

The Nemesis Press was the latest experiment of the Bibliophobos Collective.

Had the dying Franz Kafka known of the existence of the Collective that author certainly would have alerted them to his writings and not have entrusted the obliteration of his novels and stories to the unwilling Max Brod. The activities of these secret book-exterminators were not confined to the destruction of published works. They were invariably ready to obliterate manuscripts of all types that came into their possession willingly or unwillingly. The merits of a writer’s work were of no interest to them and they viewed the existence of literary work as a proliferation of vermin, being only too willing to act as pest controllers in this regard. All texts were without a centre of meaning. Their interpretation rested with the reader, not the author. There could be no agreed purpose to a text. All was chaos. The text was an autonomous entity. In short, without the reader the text did not even exist save as a cipher.

The organisation was of extremely ancient origin and related the legend of their descent from a papyrus-burning sect in ancient Khem. There were even outrageous hints that the destruction of the library at Alexandria had been their work: the consequence of an eager operative taking no chances after failing to locate a palimpsest he had sought within its walls. Certainly there were some parallels with freemasonry, though the book-exterminators had no leanings of an altruistic nature.

The creed: All books are exits from life. Books must be destroyed.

The Collective was putting tenets into action that few dared even to consider. Unlike the book-burning Nazis or the censorious communists, it was not selective. It did not destroy because it thought works corrupt or dangerous. It destroyed works because it believed none had meaning or significance, because words only mean other words and chase each other, in a linguistic game of tag, to a void. The Collective’s operatives were terrorists, empty visionaries, who, in a perverse fashion, could be said to have collaborated with an author, even if only through destruction. And in fact they found that the most effective operatives were authors who had been turned to their cause: poachers turned gamekeepers.

•

By the time the clerks left the cell Glickman’s mind was in chaos. To him had been vouchsafed the mission of the Bibliophobos Collective, but it required several more sessions of telepathic indoctrination before he came close to finally embracing their cause. Any resistance to the brainwashing drove him closer to total mental collapse.

Yaanek personally visited Glickman in his cell. The Magister of the Collective sat at the edge of the bed and advised him to submit to the indoctrination. His fate, he told him, was sealed anyway. The last shreds of resistance in Glickman rose to the surface when he thought back over the long years of collecting, of his former career at the British Library; at the boundless pleasure reading of literature and the sciences had brought him. But he knew that an appeal on these grounds would be meaningless to Yaanek. So he asked how the Collective could justify the destruction of his very identity, as only this measure would rid him of his bibliophilia for good.

And Yaanek told him frankly that any notion of individual identity was a lie. There is no “self” to destroy. Once Glickman had grasped the final truth that the “I” does not exist, that his past life was illusory, then he would be free. All perception is a series of mental states, unfixed, fluid; like text, devoid of central meaning. The destruction of books was simply the first stage of a greater purpose: the gradual elimination of human consciousness.

“
We are anti-publishers,” said Yaanek, “and ultimately, anti-thinkers.”

Yaanek left him and the nameless clerks entered the cell again. Glickman almost screamed when he saw them, for he knew then that it was not required of him to agree to merely cooperate with the Collective. As the waves of telepathic thought hit his brain, ruthlessly moulding it to their design, he knew that he was required to adore its aims.

Whilst receiving the mental transmissions Glickman learnt more: close proximity was required for the telepathic remoulding of his thought patterns to be completely successful. Over a distance the agents of the Collective could only inspire thoughts within groups of individuals for a short space of time and then only at random. The clerks would gather together in an upper chamber of the building and send out the impulses to destroy books across the world using their telepathic ability.

And for the first time, Glickman found that he was taking pleasure from such a prospect. As the telepathic revelations bore deeper into his brain, he found that he could no longer, or rather would no longer, resist its implications. Something snapped in his mind for good. And when the two clerks desisted from bombarding his brain with their thoughts his mind at last felt crystalline and untroubled, like the clear waters of a stream, avoiding all obstacles in its path.

•

When Glickman was taken from the cell, he begged to be allowed to join in the work of the Collective and they led him upstairs to the offices. He proved himself assiduous in his new duties as a book destructor and was even offered the chance to be freed, as a test, which offer was met with extreme horror on Glickman’s part. But in order to test his loyalty further Yaanek sent him back to his home so that Glickman might lay waste to his own collection of books.

•

Glickman reached home and began to set about his work eagerly. He tore joyously into the first shelf of books, slashing at the pages with a Stanley knife and gnawing them between his teeth. But as this method was far too inefficient he made a brazier in the back garden into which he could fling his volumes. His heart leapt as book after book was incinerated in the flames and black clouds of smoke billowed into the sky.

•

It was a number of days later when Glickman returned to the offices of the Nemesis Press. During this period of time the epidemic of book destruction had intensified. Such was the increasing power of the telepathic commands issued by the Collective that those who tried to prevent their destruction were torn apart by angry mobs. The general populace overran all the army bases and police stations. The only computer systems now operating were those essential ones that might further the aims of the Collective.

The final stage was the elimination of all writers. They were rounded up and shot without compunction. It was recognised by the public that they were the greatest danger to the new order. It was a pleasing development, for the Collective had not yet telepathically instructed the populace to perform these acts.

Yaanek was in the offices alone at night when Glickman arrived. The building was deserted, its long corridors occupied only by shadows and darkness. The work of the Collective was almost done and the other operatives walked abroad in the city, relishing the chaos they had wrought. Yaanek sat at a bank of computer terminals in the dark central chamber, surrounded by the machines that confirmed the end was near and that the world was finished. The glow of the monitors reflected on his pale, moon-like face. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the emergence of a figure from the shadows and he turned to face the visitor.

It was the expression on Glickman’s face that so filled Yaanek with a horrible wonder. It seemed to hint at another form of consciousness: one that included madness in some unique arrangement of the human thought processes. Yaanek recalled images of similar expressions he had seen in photographs: in the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype of Poe, in the faces of the doomed Scott Antarctic expedition just after they reached the South Pole, and in the awful desolation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s visage during his final decade of insanity.

Yaanek laughed as he stared at the former bibliophile, with tears of mad joy streaming down his cheeks. Here was the accomplishment of all of their dreams: an individual who could generate anti-thought! Yaanek found it all intolerably funny.

And afterwards, so did all the other clerks and operatives of the collective whom the two summoned to the building.

Then Glickman merged his limbs with the great computer and transferred his anti-thoughts into the machine’s memory banks, uploading them as anti-code to satellites and broadcasting into outer space: a ritual of pure darkness.

Yaanek laughed as he worked.

So too did all the other zombies of the collective. They tore at each other in wild abandon; their deranged thoughts transmitted across the cosmos with even greater intensity, rending the veil between existence and the void. Soon the cannibalism began and a myriad of red laughs echoed throughout the corridors of the Nemesis Press.

And information was drained out of everything.

A Question of Obeying Orders

Hanns Kugel cursed his luck. He’d lost his map and compass six hours ago in a muddy ditch and had to rely on the position of the sun in the sky in order to navigate through the forest in an easterly direction. It was now obvious to him that he’d missed his destination by some miles, and would have to decide between pressing on in the hope of coming across another village by accident or taking his chances by camping in the forest overnight. He recalled that timber wolves roamed this area and the weight of the rifle slung across his shoulders was a comforting burden.

He sat down on the fallen trunk of a tree, rummaged in the bulging pockets of his grey greatcoat and pulled out a slab of bread and cured sausage. Both had turned rotten and he cast them aside with disgust. The blood-orange sun had now dipped below the tops of the trees to his back, behind the leaves, casting long shadows. As soon as the sun had gone down, Kugel realised, the twilight would not last for more than a few minutes and then he would have to contend with utter darkness. He would press on, he decided, for another half hour and take his chances.

It would be ironic, he thought, if he were to perish out here in the wilderness after having deserted from the ranks of the Imperial German army. He had expected to meet his end when first he had fled from his comrades, accompanied by the startled cry of Kapitan Von Drost and a volley of rifle fire at this back. He had dodged and weaved like a rabbit until he was inside the cover of the forest, leaping, sprinting and hurling himself forward deeper and deeper into its depths until the pursuit had faltered.

Four months killing for the Kaiser at the Eastern Front had ended when the Russians had begun shooting their own officers and decided to return home. At this news he and his comrades had celebrated, certain that they would return to their own homes in return. They were all sick of blood, death and the thunder of artillery. But when Von Drost informed them that their company was to be honoured by redeployment on the Western Front, in order to crush the British pig-dogs, Kugel decided to desert and follow the example the Russians had set. It was soon apparent to him that he was alone in his resolve. Although just as sick of war, his fellow soldiers had no stomach for revolution and would, like all good Germans, follow the orders of their superiors. And so he had fled alone.