The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (11 page)

“So you paid Maggs a finder's fee and passed the book to Maulding.”

“Yes.”

“You didn't cheat him?”

“No. I am scrupulous about such matters.”

“You are moral about such things?”

“Not moral. Afraid.”

I let that go.

“Did you look at it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Again, because I was afraid.”

“Did you even see it?”

“Briefly, when Maulding came to collect it.”

“What did it look like?”

“It was perhaps two feet by a foot and a half, the bindings a deep red, the spine ringed with gold loops. Two words had been burned into the cover:
Terrae Incognitae
. Unknown Lands.”

“What was the binding? Leather?”

“No. I believe it was skin.”

“Animal?”

For the second time, she shook her head.

“Not . . . human?”

“Again, no. I don't believe that the binding was of this world, and the book
pulsed
beneath my hand. I could feel the warmth of it, the sense of something like blood pumping through it. It did not want to be held by me, though, only by Maulding. He was meant to have it. In a way, the book was always his.”

It seemed extraordinary. I did believe that she had acquired the book and sold it to Maulding, but the rest I found harder to accept: a living book, a book with intent, a book that had hidden itself away until the right moment, and the right owner, came along.

“If what you say is true, then why now? What changed to cause the book to act?”

“The world,” she said. “The world has altered itself without the book's impetus. Evil calls to evil, and the circumstances are right. You more than anyone should know this to be true.”

And I understood.

“The war,” I said.

“The war,” she echoed. “ ‘The war to end war,' isn't that how
Wells put it? He was wrong, of course; it was the war to end worlds, to end this world. The fabric of existence was torn: the world was made ready for the book, and the book was ready for the world.”

I closed my eyes. I heard the wet, heavy sound of bodies being dropped into a crater, and my own screams as they brought me the news of my dead wife and children. I saw twisted remains being carried from the ruins of a farmhouse, a whole family killed by a single shell, children born and yet to be born brought to an end in fire and rubble. She is right, I thought: if this is all true, then let the book take the world, for whatever emerged in its aftermath could be no worse than what I had already seen. The landlord's wife had been right: I did not believe that the war had purged the earth of poisoned seeds. Instead, they had germinated in spilled blood.

“Who wrote this book?” I asked. “Who made it?”

She looked away.

“The Not-God,” she said.

“The Devil?”

She laughed: a hoarse, unlovely sound.

“There is no Devil,” she said. “All this”—she waved a hand at the occult books, boxed and unboxed, and she might as well have been consigning every one of them to the flames—“is so much smoke and mirrors, mere amusements for the ignorant. They have as much bearing on reality as does an actor capering on a stage, dressed in a cloak and horns and waving a pitchfork. The thing that created the book is greater and more terrible than any three-headed Christian god. It has a million heads and each head a million more. Every entity that rages against the light is part of it and is born of it. It is a universe unto itself. It is the great Unknown Realm.”

“What are you saying—that, through this book, some entity wants to transform this world into a version of its own?”

“No,” she said, and now the sternness left her face, and it glowed with a zealot's light, making her appear more ugly than before. “Don't you grasp it? This world ceased to exist as soon as
the book was opened. It was already dying, but the
Atlas
disposed of its remains and substituted its lands for ours. This is already the Unknown Realm. It is as though a distorting mirror has become not the reflection of the thing but the reality of it.”

“Then why can't we see the changes?”

“You
have
seen the changes. Why, I do not know, but soon others will, too. Somewhere deep in their psyches, down in the dirt of their consciousness, they probably sense it already, but they refuse to recognize what has occurred. To recognize it will be to submit to the truth of it, and that truth will eat them alive.”

“No,” I said. “Something can still be done. I'll find the book. I'll destroy it.”

“You can't destroy what has always been.”

“I can try.”

“It's too late. It's too late for us all. The damage has been done. This is no longer our world.”

I stood, and she rose with me.

“I have one more question,” I said. “One more, and then I'll leave you.”

“I know what it is,” she said.

“Do you?”

“It is the first and last question, the only question that matters. It is ‘Why?' Why did I do it? Why did I collude with the book? Why, why, why?”

She was right, of course. I could do no more than nod my assent.

“Because I was curious,” she said. “Because I wanted to see what might occur. But like Maggs, like Maulding, I think that I was merely serving the will of the
Atlas
whether I knew it or not.”

If “why” was the first and last question, then “because I was curious to see what would happen” was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was always destined to be the reason for the end of
things at the hands of men.

“I tell you,” I said, “that I will find a way to stop this.”

“And I tell you,” she replied, “that you should kill yourself before the worst of it comes to pass.”

She retreated from me until she was against the fireplace, the mantel at her shoulders. Her dressing gown ignited behind her, the material blooming red and orange around her legs. Then she turned her back to me, revealing her naked body already blistering in the heat, the material adhering to her skin, and before I could move she threw herself face-first into the blaze. By the time I dragged her from the hearth her head was a charred mess, and she was already dying. Her body trembled in its final agonies as the books around her burned in sympathy.

I left them all to the flames.

AS I
walked away from the Dunwidge home, I heard the sound of screaming and shouting, and windows breaking. Before I had gone barely half a mile, the noise of the fire engines was ringing in the distance.

I had no cause to return to my lodgings. I had a gun, and I had left some spare clothing at Maulding's house. My business in the city was concluded. There was only one more task to be accomplished before I returned to Norfolk, and so I made my way on foot to Chancery and the chambers of the lawyer Quayle.

I was perhaps a mile from my destination when I had the sensation of being followed. I turned and saw a little girl wearing a blue-and-white dress on the opposite side of the road from me but about thirty feet behind. She had her back turned to me, so I could not see her face. Then, from the shadows between the streetlamps, again a similar distance but this time on the same side as me, a boy emerged, walking backward. He wore short trousers and a white shirt. His movements were jerky and unnatural, and I was reminded of a moving image slowly being projected and simultaneously rewound.

Somehow the boy, like the girl, seemed to realize that he had been spotted, and he ceased all movement with one leg still suspended in the air. It was only then that I noticed his feet were bare and strangely deformed. I was reminded of limbs I had seen
in the trenches, swollen by gangrene or distorted by broken bones. The girl's feet were also bare, but she was splayfooted, giving her the aspect of a large, pale penguin.

“Go away,” I said, then, louder: “Go away! Go home. This is no hour for children to be abroad.”

But even as I spoke, I felt that any home they had was far, far from this place; or, if Eliza Dunwidge had spoken true, this was now their home, and had always been, and I was the stranger, the intruder.

I did not want to give my back to them, so I, too, began to walk backward, and a peculiar sight we would have presented had there been anyone to see us, but there was no one. And as I moved, so, too, did the boy and the girl, and I heard their joints crack as they came, as though in that short time ice had formed on their limbs. The boy advanced with his irregular, loping gait, his feet twisting beneath him, while the girl waddled, her knees at an angle from the side of her body, and now she was not so much a penguin as a toad that had somehow managed the feat of walking upright, an impression reinforced by her girth, for she was a swollen child.

Eventually I ran. I confess it. I turned tail and fled. I could hear them coming after me, their feet slapping faster on the ground, and I prayed that someone might appear, a fellow night traveler who would force them to leave me be, or confirm, at least, that I was not yet completely mad. But I saw nobody: no people, no cars, not even a horse and cart. The city slumbered, or perhaps there was no city left, and the London that I had once known was entirely gone, replaced by a shadow of itself in which dwelt only deformed children and eyeless men.

I was still running when I recognized the silence. They were gone. I stopped, my hands on my knees, and gasped deep, painful breaths. My lungs were not as they once were. I had gone to France a young man, but now I was old in all but years. Ahead of me was the West End: there, at least, would be people, even at this hour,
and dawn could not be far away. I cast one final glance behind me to ascertain that I was alone, then turned to be on my way.

They were there, of course. I should have known it. I had read enough ghost stories in my time, and passed an hour or two with the penny dreadfuls. The children, if that was what they were, had circled me just as troops in wartime will do, seeking the advantage in coming at the enemy from an unexpected direction. They were now only ten feet ahead, their backs still to me, but slowly they began to revolve—yes, revolve, as a weight suspended on a line will revolve—until I saw their faces at last.

Monstrous children, foul things: a random scattering of small black eyes cast over the upper part of their features, a dozen or more, like raisins in dough; no nose on either, but twin slits divided by a thin stretch of septum; and their mouths were lipless grimaces drawn back over jagged, rodentlike teeth, with sharp protuberances at either side like the venomous jaws of a spider.

I did not pause. I did not think. An elemental fear had overcome me. I pointed the gun at the girl's face and pulled the trigger. The bullet took her in the forehead and exited in a stream of fluid that was not red but yellow, like the innards of an insect. She fell back without a sound, but the boy let out a shriek from somewhere in his maw. He sprang at me, and I shot him, too, but the fury of his reaction took me by surprise, and the first bullet hit him in the shoulder, twisting him and sending him to the ground, so that I was forced to finish him off as he writhed beneath me, his jaws clicking as though, even in his dying, he desired to consume me.

When I was done with them, I dragged their remains into an alley and hid them behind overflowing bins that stank of rotting meat. There was no time for police, no time for explanations. I had to find the book: to find it, and destroy it.

FAWNSLEY ARRIVED
first, as he always did. It was shortly after eight. I had spent hours waiting, curled up in a corner of that dreary courtyard, the closed doors surrounded by their dark, shuttered windows seeming to me like the faces of great sleepers. I had tried to break into Quayle's offices, but the lock had resisted my ministrations. Quayle, I now knew, was miserly in all things but his own security.

I approached Fawnsley from behind as he searched for his keys, but the shadow on the door revealed me to him. He turned to face me, and his already pale features grew suddenly grayer.

“You,” he said. “Why are you here?”

His voice trembled, and the keys jangled in his hand as he tried to find the lock without taking his eyes from me.

“I came to see Quayle. There is something I need from him.”

“You have no business in this place.”

“You are wrong. I have
important
business, more important than you can realize. I know what happened to Maulding, or think I know. I am close now. I can stop this. The world is changing, but I can make it right again.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” said Fawnsley. “It's been weeks, man, weeks! We gave you money, and then you vanished. Not a word, not a single word. I warned you when last you came to me. I told you what was expected of you.”

His bullish note struck false with me. There was something else here, something that I didn't understand, but I was distracted by his words. I did not want them to be true.

“What do you mean ‘weeks'? I came to you not days ago.”

“Nonsense. It's the twelfth of November. You're raving. Look at yourself, man. Look what you've become.”

I tried not to let my fear show.

“It is not me,” I told him. “It is the world. Look at what the world has become, and then see what it has done to me.”

I watched Fawnsley regain some degree of control, as though the mere pretense of bravery had been enough to fool even himself. His hand stopped shaking, and his fear was moderated by his instinctive cunning.

“Perhaps you should come inside,” he said. “Warm yourself. You know where the pot is. Make yourself some tea, and take your rest. I will go and find Mr. Quayle. He is at the Sessions House today, but he will come if I tell him of your, um, agitation.” He swallowed hard. “He is most fond of you, despite all that has transpired.”