The Wanderer in Unknown Realms (12 page)

The Sessions House was the name commonly given to the Inner London Crown Court in Southwark. It was some distance from Quayle's offices, and it would take time and effort for Fawnsley to travel there and return with Quayle. The Fawnsley I knew would go to no such lengths for me. He would barely have troubled himself to cross a street to help me if I stumbled.

I showed him the gun, and a dark stain appeared on his trousers.

“No,” he said. “Please don't.”

“Tell me,” I said, “and tell me true.”

I poked the gun hard into his ribs in case he still had any doubts about the gravity of his situation.

“The police,” said Fawnsley. “They're looking for you. They say that you killed a man in Whitechapel. They found the body in the basement of a tenement, and a woman, a whore, said that she remembered you. They wish to talk to you about other matters,
too: a fire, and . . . ”

The words caught in his throat, and he could not go on.

“Speak!” I said.

Fawnsley began to weep. “Children,” he said. “There are dead children.”

“They were not children,” I said. “Am I the kind of man who would kill a child?”

Fawnsley shook his head, but he kept his eyes from mine.

“No, sir,” he said. “No, you are not.”

“Inside,” I said.

He managed at last to turn the key in the lock and open the door. I followed him inside.

“Don't kill me,” he said. “I won't tell.”

“Just do as I say,” I told him, “and I'll see that you're unharmed.”

“Anything. Whatever you require: money, food. Only ask.”

I forced him up the stairs, recalling the last time I had been there, when the world was fractured but had not yet come apart entirely.

“I need neither,” I said. “I just want to look at your files on the Maulding house.”

I LEFT
with that which I had sought. The business of the Maulding family had been in the hands of Quayle and his predecessors for generations, and Quayle's grandfather had supervised the purchase of Bromdun Hall at the beginning of the last century. It was good fortune that the meticulous records of the firm included a detailed drawing of Maulding's house, but I thought I was due a little good fortune at last.

I bought a copy of
The Times
on High Holborn. It was dated 12 November. Fawnsley had not been lying. I had never really thought he was.

The city seemed to close in on me as I walked, so that only the will of God prevented its buildings from toppling down and burying the populace in rubble. It might have been a blessing for some, for the men and women on the streets struck me as particularly restive and churlish, oppressed by a lowering sky and an unseasonable heat that had arisen in the early hours.

Some way past Chancery Lane, an omnibus had misjudged the corner and struck a deliveryman's cart, seriously injuring his horse so that the poor animal lay whinnying miserably on the ground, one of its back legs twisted so badly that the femur had erupted through its coat. The omnibus was a B-type, similar to the hundreds that were requisitioned for battlefield use as troop carriers and mobile gun emplacements, even pigeon lofts to house the birds
used for communication on the front. The Omnibus Company had begun to phase out the old B-types in favor of the K and the S, and it was a wonder that this old vehicle was still functioning, so battered did it appear. I had not come across one in a year. It was already an anachronism.

An old man smoked a cigarette by the scene, a large suitcase by his side.

“Been traveling this route for most of my life, and I never seen the like,” he said. “You'd believe the man had never been behind a wheel before, but he's been working the buses since Tilling sent the first one out of Peckham, and that's neither today nor yesterday.”

“1904,” I said.

“That's right.”

“I grew up there. I remember.”

The driver did indeed have the look of experience about him, but he was clearly badly shaken by what had occurred. He was speaking softly with the carter while a policeman took notes. I pulled my hat low on my face and looked to the pavement.

The old man took a long puff on his cigarette and inclined his head disdainfully.

“I heard him say that he'd swear the road had narrowed. I think he's been drinking.”

More policemen were approaching now at a run. With them was a young gentleman in a stained tweed suit. In one hand he carried a black bag, in the other a crude-looking gun.

“That'll be the police veterinary,” said the old man. “About time, too. If I'd had a gun, I'd have put the creature out of its misery myself.”

Instinctively my hand went to the gun in the pocket of my coat. The old man looked at me peculiarly.

“Are you feeling all right?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “It's . . . it's the horse, that's all. I don't like hearing an animal in pain.”

“It'll end soon enough,” said the old man, and as if in answer to him I heard the report of the gun, unnatural in the still London air. I closed my eyes. I thought I could smell the horse's blood.

“You ought to sit down before you fall down,” said the old man.

“No,” I said. “I think I'll be on my way.”

“Please yourself.”

I lost myself in the crowd, but I was dizzy and ill, and I feared the streets. I took the Twopenny Tube to Liverpool Street, and there boarded a train. By late afternoon I was back in Norfolk. Bromdun Hall was silent and locked. I tried my key in the door, but it would not open. I broke a pane in a window of the study and thus gained access. I did not go upstairs, for I felt safer in the ground-floor rooms. I found some stale bread in the kitchen and ate it with black tea.

I almost started work there and then, but the depredations of the preceding hours had begun to tell on me. I lay on the couch in the study with my coat as a blanket. I do not know for how long I slept, only that the texture of the light had altered when I woke. The night was the color of molasses, and the dark had substance. I could feel it as I raised my hand against it, as though the nature of gravity had changed and the atmosphere was conspiring to keep me down.

I heard an unpleasant scraping sound coming from nearby, like nails on a blackboard. It was that which had roused me. I searched for its source and saw a shape move against the window. The scraping sound came again. Slowly, my movements still hampered by the very air, I approached the window. I had my gun in my hand, three bullets left in its chambers.

There were parallel scratches on two of the panes, and the glass was stained with a black fluid like squid ink. I looked out at the grounds beyond, but there was no moon visible in the sky, and no stars shone. The blackness was so thick that I might as well have been underwater, and it would not have surprised me had a liquid
darkness begun to pour through the broken pane and fill the room, slowly drowning me.

The broken pane: if I had gained access to the house by slipping my hand through the gap and opening the latch, then whatever was out there could have done the same. Why, then, scrape and scratch?

The answer came first as sound, then as form. I discerned a single deep inhalation from without, quickly followed by smaller, faster sniffs as something in the darkness caught my scent. A gray wrinkled form pressed itself against the glass in a gesture of dreadful longing, its thin limbs splayed, the loose skin that hung from them cracked and oozing, its fingers like sharp, jointed needles. It was about the size of a man, but hairless and eyeless, its flat nose twitching as it smelled me. And then its mouth, indiscernible until now, slowly opened, toothless and red, and from deep in its jaws an appendage shot forth, less a tongue than a fleshy tube, its sucking opening ringed with tiny barbs. It struck the glass hard, leaving more of that black residue.

The sniffing came again, and the creature changed position, lowering itself to the shattered pane, its left hand blindly exploring the window until it found the gap and pushed its way through, blocking it entirely.

I prepared to shoot it, then paused. What else might be out there? I thought. What horrors might I draw to me with the noise? And the bullets: so few left, and no chance of securing more.

I searched for another weapon, finding a letter opener on Lionel Maulding's desk. The blade was dull, but the end was sharp. I stabbed hard at the creature's arm and, although no blood or viscera came forth from the wound, I saw its mouth widen in soundless agony. I jabbed at it again and again as it struggled to pull its hand back, tearing its flesh still further against the sharp edges that clung to the frame, until at last it was free. It retreated into the dark and was gone.

The windows had wooden shutters. It was clear from the dust
and dead insects upon them that they had not been used in some time, but I pulled them closed and secured them, and did the same with the other windows. I did not sleep again but waited for the coming of the dawn. When at last light began to appear I came close to weeping, for I had begun to fear that I might never see a dawn again, so black was the night. I opened the shutters. Mist lay upon the grass, and the sun washed the dark clouds with red.

I thought that I had never seen anything so beautiful.

I BEGAN
my work as soon as morning had secured its grip on the world. I checked the measurements of the rooms on the plans of the house before pacing those same rooms, checking my own reckoning against the original dimensions. It was my good fortune to have started with the study—that, or the final gasp of logic and rationality in a world that appeared to be coming apart at the seams. Quite simply, the study was not as long as it should have been, and it was clear that the shelves at the western end of the room had been set about seven feet away from the wall. Still, it was the work of an hour or more to determine a means of access to whatever lay behind, and I resorted, in the end, to emptying the shelves to a height of almost six feet before the mechanism revealed itself: a simple lever hidden behind an ornately bound first volume of Gibbon's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
—quarto sections, 1776, I noted, for this book business was, I admit, starting to rub off on me.

I moved the lever, and a section of shelving opened with an audible click. I paused before widening the gap, uncertain of what might be revealed to me: a stink of corruption, another of those foul burrowing creatures, its body burning with an awful heat, or a glimpse of the maelstrom itself, a pathway between universes? Instead, when curiosity inevitably got the better of me, I saw only a lesser version of the room I already occupied, furnished with
a small square table and a single straight chair. A candle stood on the table, unlit. I found my matches and put one to the wick, for the door did not open fully, either by design or a fault in the mechanism, and I had barely been able to squeeze my way inside. In the flickering light of the candle, Lionel Maulding's occult library was revealed to me, volume upon volume, most of them old and having about them, even in appearance, the taint of the forbidden and the unclean.

I paid them little heed, though, for there on the table lay the book that most interested me. It was as Eliza Dunwidge had described it: a large bound work with a lock, now unlocked, covered in a material that was quite clearly skin of some kind. I could see wrinkles and scars upon it and, God help us, what might even have been a tracery of veins. Worse, the book's surface did seem to pulse with life, but that might simply have been a function of the candle's imperfect light combined with the nature of its binding and the tale told to me by the Dunwidge woman. Still, I was reluctant to touch it. With its red covers and its yellowed page edges, it reminded me uncomfortably of a mouth. I recalled, too, the memory of Maggs the book scout, and the channels burned in his head by whatever the book had seeded in his brain.

But the book called to me. I had come so far. I wanted to know. Somewhere in its pages lay the truth: the truth of what had befallen Lionel Maulding, but more important, an answer to what was happening, or had already happened, to my own world.

I opened the book. I looked inside.

It was blank. How could it not be? After all, it had transferred its contents to this world, overwriting all that had once existed, like a palimpsest that slowly, surely overwhelms the original.

And from somewhere both nearby yet immeasurably far away, I swear I heard laughter, but it was the laughter of the damned.

I BURNED
the book. I set fire to it in the fireplace of Maulding's library, laying it flat upon the wood and coals once I was certain that the blaze had reached the required intensity. The book sizzled and hissed and popped, more like meat roasting than paper burning. At one point it emitted a loud, whistling sound almost like a scream, but it ceased as the binding blackened. It stank as it was destroyed. It smelled like decayed flesh finally consigned to the crematorium.

I don't know how long I sat there, using a poker to move the book and stir the fire, but eventually nothing was left of it but the smell. I dozed for a time and dreamed of the book as it might once have been, with detailed maps of worlds unlike this one, its territories marked with the images of beasts and demons, its intricate cartography the work of the Not-God. But those pages were empty, because all they had once contained had been fed into this world like sand falling through an hourglass. Now there was nothing left, and the process of transformation had begun. Where Lionel Maulding was, I could not say. Perhaps, like Maggs, he had begun to die the moment he opened the book, and its ideas had gestated in his head before erupting and, finally, consuming him.

But another narrative occurred to me, too, of course, even if I retreated from it just as assuredly as I desired to turn my back on the possibility of one world's infecting and corrupting another: the book had never existed. It was a fraud perpetrated by the
Dunwidges with the collusion of Maggs, and that unfortunate's death had been carefully staged in order to maintain the pretense and ensure his silence. I, too, had colluded in it. I had played my role. I had allowed myself to be manipulated.