Vellum: The Book of All Hours: 1

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HAL DUNCAN

VELLUM

The Book of All Hours: 1

To my Dad, for the quirks and convictions

To my Mum, for the food parcels and forbearance

And above all else, to Ewan

Forever

VOLUME ONE

The Lost Deus of Sumer

PROLOGUE

The Road of All Dust

The Journals of Reynard Carter – Day Zero

– A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that’s the best thing about all those old films, he said – when you see this old parchment map just . . . getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling until suddenly it just . . . fwoom.

That was Jack for you; if you asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he’d tell you he wanted an explosion. Jack was crazy, but as I flicked forward through the Book, faster and faster as each page fed in me a growing sense of horror and awe, I thought of what he’d said. I thought of gods and tragedies, legends and histories, and movies that opened with scrolling tales of ancient times. The vellum pages beneath my hand flickered under a light that wasn’t fire, however, but rather the pale blue of the underground vault’s fluorescent lights; and if there was a burning it was in my head, a fire of realisation, of revelation. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that at any second the world around me would be torn away in flames and ashes, stripped back to reveal a scene of carnage choreographed as in some lurid Hollywood flick, and soundtracked with a crashing, clashing music over screams and sounds of war.

The Book. I slammed the thing closed, checking a suspicion. Its outward, leather, cracked and weathered carapace was thick and dark, embossed with strange sigils – an eye-like design, a circle within an ellipse, but with four smaller semicircles on its outer edge at three o’clock and nine o’clock, and at five and eleven; overlapping this but offset was a rectangle. The framework of embossing around it looked, for all the world, like the stolen architectural plans that lay abandoned on the floor, and with a glance around the vault my suspicion was confirmed – it matched. The long, rectangular room with the doorway in the bottom right-hand corner; the left-hand wall thicker, as it should be, a supporting wall for the building above; the two blocks of wall on either side jutting out a foot or so into the room two-thirds of the way up, as if the original end wall had been knocked through at some point, extended into a forgotten recess; the tiny alcove at the far end which I’d found hidden behind a tall glass-panelled bookcase and which was barely legible on the stolen plans, drawn in pencil where the rest was marked in ink.

I felt a bit guilty, looking at the piles of Aristotle and Nostradamus and Molie`re and who knows what else, lying on the floor where I’d put them so I could heave the solid bookcase out from its place. Fragile, priceless artefacts of the university’s Special Collection, books a student would sign for, with his tutor’s name and research subject, and have brought to him by the curator, in the Reading Room upstairs, lain gently on the desk before him on foam supports, their brittle pages to be turned so delicately, so tentatively in case they crumbled to dust between unthinking fingers. And I’d treated them like paperbacks dumped on the floor by someone rearranging furniture. But they were worthless in comparison to the Book; they were already dust.

I wiped away some of the blood that ran down from my forehead and opened the book again, to its first page.

The Book of All Hours

The Book of All Hours, the Benedictines called it, in the Middle Ages, believing it to be the Deus’s own version of some grand duke’s book of hours – those hour-by-hour and day-by-day, week-by-week and month-by-month tomes of ceremony and meditation inked by monks in lamplight, drawn in brilliant colours on vellum, pale but rich in tone, not bleached pure white but yellowed, brown, the colour of skin, of earth, of wood, old bone, of things that were all once alive. Princes and kings would commission these books and they’d take years of hunched backs and cramped hands and fading eyesight to produce by hand. It was said by the Benedictines that God himself commissioned such a tome from the one angel allowed to step beyond the veil and see his face and listen to his words, and write them down. The patriarch Enoch, who walked with God and rose to Heaven to become the angel Metatron, had made this book at his master’s command, they said, and it held God’s own word on every instant of eternity, the ultimate instruction manual for he who dared to live what He commanded, fully, absolutely. But no man was perfect enough to live in such devotion; so they denied the Book existed in this world at all; said it could be found only in Eternity, where the spirit was freed of the weakness of the flesh.

– The Book of All Hours, my father had said. Your grandfather went looking for it, but he never found it. He couldn’t find it; it’s a myth, a pipe-dream. It doesn’t exist.

I remember the quiet smile on his face, the look all parents have at some time, I suspect, when they see their children repeating their own folly, a look that says, yes, we all think like that when we’re your age, but when you’re older, believe me, you’ll understand, the world doesn’t work that way. I’d come to ask him about these fanciful stories I’d been told, about the Carter family having ancient secrets, not just skeletons in the closet, but skeletons with bones engraved with mystic runes, in closets with false walls that hid dark tunnels leading deep, deep underground.

– But Uncle Reynard said that when grandfather was in the Middle East—

– Uncle Reynard is an incorrigible old fox, said my father. He tells a good tale, but you really have to . . . take what he says with a pinch of salt.

I remember being shocked, confused; I was young, still young enough that it had never occurred to me that two adults whom I trusted absolutely might believe entirely different things. My father and his brother, Reynard – my namesake uncle – they knew every- thing after all, didn’t they? They were grown-ups. It had never occurred to me that the answers they gave to my questions might be entirely incompatible.

– Of course, you should listen to your father, Uncle Reynard had said. Honestly, you shouldn’t believe a word I say. I am utterly untrustworthy when it comes to the Book.

And he held my gaze with complete sincerity . . . and winked.

– Almost as bad as the Cistercians, he said.

The Cistercians called the Benedictines fools. They were quite convinced that the Book existed in his world, but they feared it as they feared the Devil himself. They damned the manuscript as the most diabolical of grimoires, a Book of the Names of the Dead, of every being that had ever lived or ever would live – human, angel, devil. They made reference to the Bible, to the Torah and the Koran, to Christian apocrypha and Jewish and Islamic legend . . . Didn’t the Revelations of St John talk of a book made by God’s scribe, a Book of Life containing names that were no mere christenings but the true and secret names, names which the owners could not refuse to answer when called before the Throne of God? But if this was to be carried out into the world only in the End Days, where then did Solomon learn the names of all the djinn? They were burning old maids at the stake in those days, herbalists and midwives; they believed the world was riven with darkness; they feared the evils of knowledge. So they said there had to be a copy of the Book of Life, a dark counterpart made by Lucifer himself before he fell, when he was God’s right hand. And they said that perhaps he’d written into it the very name of God. Perhaps this was why he fell. If so, they whispered, it was a book that might be used to summon and bind even the Almighty to an audacious mortal’s will.

The only binding that concerned me right now, though, was the makeshift bandage of torn sleeve stemming the bloodflow from my wounded hand. If I’d been thoughtless with the other books of the Special Collection, if I’d been rough-handed as I heaved the bookcase out to reveal the dust-smeared glass that fronted the alcove – like a painted-over window, or an inset museum display of a priest’s hole, or a smuggler’s secret cellar – I had been careful with the suction grip and diamond-tipped cutter as I carved the circle in the glass panel that fronted the alcove. The last thing I’d expected, though, was for it to shatter with a blast that threw me back across the room. I had been lucky. Only one of the shards had been large enough to do more than surface damage, embedding itself deep in the palm of my right hand when I’d thrown it up to cover my face. The rest of the shards had left me with only minor cuts, plenty of them, but most nomore than skin deep. It was a mystery to me, why the case had been so pressurised as to shatter the very moment the seal was broken; it was a trivial mystery, though, in comparison with the book itself, sitting there inside its circle of salt.

The Legends of a Lifetime

– A book of hours, I said. Or a book of names. Nobody knows.

– Bullshit, said Joey. You’re making it up.

– Shut up, said Jack. I’m listening to this.

He slid the G’n’T across the table to me, handed Joey his Guinness and sat down in his own seat with his ouzo, sniffed it with a wrinkle-nosed grin.

– Go on, he said.

– Right, I said, voice hoarse from trying to talk over the thumping bass of the juke-box in the Student Union. So there’s a Jesuit scholar in the seventeenth century, and he says that both these ideas are heresy. According to him this is the book from which everyone’s sins will be read out before the Throne of God. The Judgement of All Accounts, or the Account of All Judgements, he calls it. Not so much a book of the names of the dead, but of everything that anyone’s ever done, or ever will do, every deed, past, present and future.

– It’d have to be one fucking huge book, said Joey.

I shrugged, smiled, took a sip of my drink.

– Maybe the language it’s written in is more . . . concise. I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. Nobody knows exactly what it is. But where it is . . . that’s another matter.

– You read too much, said Joey. Man, I bet if you look on their library database every university has a copy of—

*

– The Macromimicon, said Uncle Reynard. You know, you do have to wonder where Liebkraft got his ideas from. Elder gods; a book written by a mad Arab; a translation of an even older text. Where did you get this?

He turned the battered paperback over in his hands. Yellowed pages, broken spines, bent corners, lurid cover – this wasn’t ancient mystery, just modern pulp, not truth, but trash. And it was everything my uncle had been telling me since I was a child.

– Second-hand bookshop, I said. Fifty pence. You . . . you . . . I don’t believe you strung me along for . . .

I was lost for words. The legends of a lifetime, told over glasses of milk or – these days – beer, and all of it just an elaborate fiction. And a stolen one at that. He just sat there in his armchair, smoking his cigarette.

– You know, this has been out of print for decades, he said, handing it back to me. You should read it. Honestly. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.

He had that old smile of mischief on his face.

– Sure, I’ve read Liebkraft, I said to Joey. Everyone in the Carter family has to read Liebkraft at some point or another. You especially, Jack.

I lit a cigarette and took a long draw, milking their attention. I’d fallen in with Jack and Joey in our first year at the university – Jack, the flame-haired wild boy with a tendency to climb out onto window-ledges while drunk . . . another Carter, strangely enough, but no relation to the best of my knowledge; Joey Pechorin, the dark-voiced nihilist who struck you at first as someone trying too hard to be cool until you got to know him and realised, no, he really was that sullen and dismissive. Fire and ice, they’d been friends since school, inseparable until Jack hooked up with flighty, flutter-eyed Thomas. Thomas Messenger, so full-on a fairy that we couldn’t help but call him Puck. Puck, who was, as usual, late. I saw Jack check his watch, look towards the door.

– Why do you think he has his character called Carter? I said.

– Bullshit, Jack coughed into his hand.

But I could see how the idea intrigued him.

– God’s honest truth, I said. He knew my grandfather when—

– Oh, fuck off, said Joey. Fuck right off.

I shook my head, gave him a sad, resigned look. Your loss.

– Don’t believe me. Doesn’t bother me. I know the Book exists. I know where it is.

The legends of a lifetime, a lifetime of legends, of interest piqued, of curiosity sharpened, honed into a tool – I hadn’t come to study at this university because of its academic reputation. I didn’t give a damn for the mock-gothic tower and the quadrangles, for the droning lectures about Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, for the pomp and ceremony of this or that professor still stuck in a previous century with his black robe and solemn voice. My three years of study in the library here were three years of research into its corridors, not its books. I knew the building now, inside and out, like I’d lived there all my life, every floor, every corner, every doorway. I’d studied the architect’s plans. I’d struck up friendships with security guards, librarians. I’d worked there part-time for the last year and a half. I knew where the cameras were, what times the guards did their rounds at night, who manufactured the security system, how it worked, how it could be disabled. And I was finally ready.

– I know where it is, I said.

– I’ll believe it when I see it, said Joey.

So will I, I thought. So will I.

Between Kabala and Calculus

Three years for me, and as many generations for my family – maybe more if my uncle was right. In the Middle Ages, he’d told me, every guild, every craft or trade had their own mystery play based on a story from the Bible or from the apocrypha. The Masons would put on a play about the Tower of Babel. The Wine-merchants would put on a play about the drunkenness of Noah. And there was a play he’d heard of, he told me, about the angels who fought neither for God nor Lucifer, but instead fled from the War in Heaven, down to Earth, and carried with them the Book of Life, so that it should be safe from the destruction. They carried it across the earth, from one hiding place to another, always on the move. The play, of course, was performed by the Carters.

– Well, of course, my father said, that’s where the whole story comes from. The Carters travelled all over the place. The mystery plays were performed all over Britain, and on the Continent. And everywhere they went, you get these stories appearing about this ancient book. Myths based on a play cobbled together from a legend written in the margins of scripture. Stories created from stories created from stories. None of it’s true, but eventually people start to forget what’s fiction and what’s fact. The Masons don’t have a monopoly on spurious mythology, you know. But it’s ridiculous. The idea that the last of the earth-bound angels hired a young carter to take a secret book across Europe to . . .

He went suddenly quiet; he must have realised from the confused expression on my face that I’d never heard this part of the story before. He sighed.

– That’s what your grandfather believed, he said. That the Carters had taken over from the angels as guardians of the Book. But they lost it. And they’ve been looking for it ever since.

– Your grandfather was a sick man, he said, quietly, sadly. He was in the Great War, you know. He wanted to believe in . . . something greater. War changes people. Death . . . changes people.

Death changes people.

I remembered Jack and Joey fighting; I remembered watching as Jack self-destructed; Joey pulling a bottle of ouzo out of his hand and shouting at him; Jack screaming at him over and over again – fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

You describe people as crazy – you say, that Jack, he’s crazy – and it doesn’t mean anything until you see them really, truly, going crazy.

There was a Jewish scholar, Isaac ben Joshua, in Moorish Spain who said that the Book drove everyone who saw it crazy. He said that it held not deeds but laws, that it was, in fact, the original Book of the Law – not the Mosaic Torah but an even older covenant known only in the most marginal of apocrypha, dating from the antediluvian time of Enoch and the rebel angels, binding the physical world in principles somewhere between kabala and calculus. He referenced an Islamic source, a story saying that all but one solitary page were blank, and on that page there was only a single simple sentence, an equation which captured the very essence of existence. This, he said, was why all those who’d ever looked upon the Book had gone insane, unable to comprehend, unable to accept, the meaning of life laid out in a few words of mathematical purity.

After what happened to Thomas, I remember thinking that I knew what that sentence was. Two words.

People die.

The page I looked at now, though, the first page of the Book, had no words on it, only a blueprint of the maze of concrete tunnels and chambers that surrounded me, here in the bunkered depths of the old building. Gold illumination traced out conduits, ventilation and wiring, heating ducts, while the same eye-like logo on the cover of the book was inked in black here, smaller though, more cursive; I felt that burning feeling rising in my head again. There was something wrong about an artefact as ancient as this with content that was so . . . modern. This wasn’t some doggerel prophecy before me, not a vague prediction but a precise plan, a schema. And, flicking forward to the next page I recognised the library as I’d seen it on the architectural plans I’d been studying for so long. Again that symbol in the centre of it. Pages two and three together mapped out the building in its context, the network of roads and footpaths, the buildings and grassed areas of the campus around the library. I recognised it; I had recognised it instantly and it was that recognition that had made me close the Book and reopen it, as if the act might change it, as if looking at it again, I might this time see something more rational, more sensible.

Instead it seemed even less rational. Now that I studied it more closely, it worried me even more because, in the tiniest of places – only here and there, mind you – the location of this pathway, the outline of this building – it seemed just a little different from my memory.

A Cool White Pillow

– What time is it? asked Jack. I checkedmy watch, but Puck answered before me.

– Summer, he said. It was April, actually, but there was time and there was Puck Time, where hours and minutes were described as quarter past a freckle and any day sunny enough to lie out on the grass and smoke cigarettes was summer. It was glorious that day, sunlight pouring down on us where Puck and Jack lazed like dogs on the slope of walled-in grass between the library and the reading room, the squat block of the campus cafeteria lowering behind us where we couldn’t see it and the tower of the university reaching up into the blue, too solid and archaic to be quite a dreaming spire but still, in the fluted intricacy of its anachronistic design, denying the reality of its Victorian construction for a fantasy of antiquity. It was glorious that day, so it was summer.

The sunlight slanted off the glass exterior of the library to my right, and painted the white pebble-dashed areas of the walls with Moorish or Mediterranean warmth, flashed on the glass doors into the Hunterian Museum as they revolved, students passing in and out. At the ground level the library and the museum fused into one building, blockish and modern, all cuboids and cylinders, an abstract iron sculpture nestling in curved simplicity on the flagstones outside the doors, before the low steps that led down onto cobbles running down towards University Avenue. Following them down you passed the Mackintosh House, a museum-piece replica of a tenement home filled with furniture and fittings designed by one of Glasgow’s most famous sons; built onto the Hunterian and accessed from inside the museum, its false front-door perched absurdly in mid-air with no steps to reach it. To my left there was the reading room, built in the Twenties, low and circular with tall slender windows and a domed roof – Art Nouveau, I thought, though I was never sure of the distinction between Nouveau and Deco. And though the Sixties brown-brick, smoked-glass block monstrosity of the Hub at my back, with its cafeteria and student shops, deserved a bomb for its sheer ugliness, I never loved any little corner of the world so much as that slope of grass walled in with rough-hewn sandstone between the reading room and the library, never loved anywhere so much as there and then.

I sat on a wooden block that was a recent addition to the slope. The university had hired a modern artist to commemorate their 550th anniversary by turning that green slope into a sort of art installation and I’d watched with some trepidation as they’d fenced off the area and torn up the grass. But when it was finished, I had to admit, it made that little area even more serene. The artist had laid ten of these long wooden blocks in pairs, each pair of blocks offset as if to mark out diagonal corners of a long, thin rectangle, the other corners marked out by low shrubs, five of these thin rectangles dividing up the space of the slope. Each of the dark wooden blocks had a white porcelain pillow at one end of it, and thin panels of glass text, buried in the ground running along either side of the blocks – lit up at night – told the story of the piece in ten sections. The shrubs were all herbs with medicinal properties, a reference to the university’s first physic garden, a record that had only recently been turned up by some academic burrowing through archives. The blocks were replicas of old-style anatomist’s dissection slabs, in memory of the oldest faculty of the university.

I lay on one of them, that day, head resting on the cool white pillow, or swivelled round and sat upright on it to slug back beer out of the cans we’d brought with us because, of course, you couldn’t study for exams on such a day without refreshments.

– It’s half two, I said.

– Fuck, said Jack. How long have we been here?

– A couple of hours, I said. Not long.

I picked up the Norton’s Anthology of Poetry splayed face-down beside me on the block, glanced at it and closed it, lay it down beside Jack’s biography of John Maclean.

– John Maclean. What? As in Die Hard? Puck had said.

– As in the founder of Scottish Socialism, scrag.

Jack had shaken his head.

Of all the students lounging and laughing on the slope, sat on the grass in circles, cross-legged on the blocks with sandwiches, cans, packets of cigarettes or tobacco scattered around them, nobody was really doing any work. It was the Easter break; we had exams coming up soon, so soon, but it just felt like we had all the time in the world.

I looked down at Jack and Puck, Jack with his hands under his head, Puck at right angles, using Jack’s stomach as a headrest, one arm flopped across his chest – a scritch of fingers at his ribs – and the other stretched out to the side with a cigarette between his fingers, smoke rising from its tower of ash like slow, solemn incense, rising up into the still cerulean air.

Angularities and Curves

I flicked forward to pages four and five. A map. Again the scale had changed, zoomed out by another magnitude. Now all the streets and roads of the whole bohemian district in and around the university were clear, with the river and the park marked off, the museum and art galleries, all drawn with the precision of a modern cartographer. But all altered alarmingly, if only subtly, from the bohemian district I knew so well. Christ, my Bank Street house should have been on the map at this scale – I lived less than five minutes walk from the old cloistered quadrangles at the very heart of the campus – but instead the street wasn’t even marked. The river seemed to twist to flow over where it should have been, and the rough grid-work of streets and tenement buildings was shifted to accommodate it. Two main roads that should have crossed at right angles met and merged instead in a Y-shaped junction. It was as if the smallest changes at the lowest level cascaded upwards.

The map of the city on pages six and seven was completely unfamiliar.

I remember, as a child, looking at an architectural model of my school and its surroundings that stood on display in the main hallway of the school itself, where the principal, the deputy principal and suchlike had their offices. One tiny discrepancy – a set of stone steps leading down from the raised car park of a block of flats, steps that had never been built but were shown on the model – and, as a child, I could not grasp the idea that the model was wrong. It wasn’t that I thought the steps should be there in reality if they were on the model, or vice versa – I was too young to understand exactly why it bothered me – but I remember the vague unease, the confusion at the inconsistency. I felt that same disquiet now, but more profound, so many years later.

I turned another page and there I saw the city in its environs, the coastline and the countryside around it. Now it was definitely not the city that I knew; the city that I knew sat on a river, but not at its mouth. The whole geography was wrong, but, at the same time, I did recognise it. I knew the shape of the coastline well enough, and I recognised the island sitting out a short ferry-ride from the city’s docks; I even recognised those docks as being where, in reality, a small seaside town of ice cream parlours and amusement arcades sat, gathering retired old folks and families on Sunday outings. It was as if the city of my own experience had been picked up and dropped some thirty miles to the south-west of its natural location, and had to warp and weave itself into a slightly different shape as it settled, to accommodate its new surroundings. Where the city should have been, on the map, was only a small village in the midst of farmland.

The Macromimicon. Was it then a book of maps, not of what was, but of what might have been, of a world that had taken a different course, with this village growing into a town instead of that one, this town burgeoning into a city instead of another? I turned another page. Even the language that marked out the streets and roads, the cities, towns and villages, seemed the product of some parallel development, composed of angularities and curves, bearing a similarity to the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, but again not quite the same. Strangely – in retrospect – it never occurred to me that this book might actually be nothing more than mere invention, a work of fancy: perhaps the accuracy of the blueprint of the library held that idea from my mind; perhaps it was the power of the old family legends engrained so deep within me. All I know is what I felt: a growing conviction that this book spoke somehow of a larger truth.

The Tower of Bible

– Jack.

He didn’t answer.

– Jack, I said again.

– For fuck’s sake, Jack, called Joey. Let us in.

– Come on. Please, I said.

We’d been there for maybe half an hour and all we’d got from the other side of the door was silence. I was worried myself, but I could hear from the fury in Joey’s voice, the way he swore at Jack, insulted him, told him again and again how stupid and pointless all this was, that he was really terrified. If you didn’t know him you’d have thought that he was more concerned about this . . . waste of time he had to suffer, more bothered about his own inconvenience than anything else. But I could hear the edges and points in his voice, the tightness in his throat. Joey was coming to hate Jack because he couldn’t stand what he was doing to himself; it hurt too much.

– Open the fucking door, ya fucking bastard. Just fucking open the fucking door, fucking . . . fucker !

And he exploded at the door, kicking, snarling, spitting.

After a while, after a long while, when Joey had fallen silent, there was a click, and the door opened.

Jack sat back down on the floor, a Gideon’s Bible in front of him together with a print-out of – I looked closer – columns of numbers, letters, other characters – colons, semi-colons, question marks – each with a numeric value beside it. It was the ASCII values for the keys on a computer keyboard, I realised, the set of numbers between zero and 255, used, in a computer to represent text in the binary form that a computer could work with, language boiled down to zeros and ones, to a series of electronic on and off values. Text was stored as bytes, each byte made up of eight bits, eight binary places representing 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and so on up to 128, the same way decimal places represent 1s, 10s, 100s and so on . . . 00000000 to 11111111, zero to 255. Jack was using it as reference.

*

On one side of him, he had a stack of paper, reams still wrapped or torn open, sheets scattered, piled on top of each other. I watched as he took a fresh sheet, from the top of the pile, looked at the Gideon’s, finding his place with the point of his pen, then found the character in the print-out of ASCII values and started working out, on the fresh sheet, what its binary representation was. There were sheets of these workings scattered behind him where he’d discarded them and I crouched down to pick one of them up. He’d scrawled out columns for the places, scribbled numbers – 45, 37, 56 – down the left-hand margin and then ticked off places in the columns. 37, that was 1 plus 4 plus 32 . . . 10100100 in binary. Looking at other sheets, I realised that he’d worked out some of these numbers over and over again. He could have just put together another reference sheet of all the binary values for the letters and numbers he needed, but instead he was working them out each time. Every letter, every colon, every full stop, he was looking up on the sheet of ASCII values and calculating the binary for it, even when he’d worked it out just moments before.

As I watched, he took another sheet, already almost full of ones and zeros, each byte of eight places separated by a dash, and transferred a number from his workings to this page. And then went back to the Bible, back to the sheet of ASCII, back to his scraps of workings, to find the next value. When the page was full, he stood up and walked over to the corner of the room. He was barefoot.

In the corner of the room, the tower of finished sheets, piled facedown one on top of another, was up to his chest.

– What the fuck is . . .

Joey was walking over to the corner. I just knew that he was going to pull the first sheet off the top of the pile, hold it up in Jack’s face, demand to know what the fuck was going on. And I could hear the creak of the loose floorboards of Jack’s cheap rented room as Joey stamped across them, catching one of the piles of reams as he stepped over it; and I could see the white of his knuckles, the set of his shoulders, and I knew the tower was unsteady. Christ, it was a pile of loose paper up to Jack’s chest and it was in the corner but it wasn’t even leaning on the walls for support. It was a wonder Jack had managed to get it this high without . . .

And I watched as the tower of translated Bible, quivered with the floorboards under it, and leaned, and fell, pages scattering out into the air and avalanching out and down, sheets sliding across sheets and catching air and flipping and crashing like paper aeroplanes coming down.

And Jack was lost to us that day; we were all lost to each other, because Thomas was dead, and Jack was mad, and Joey was closed, and I . . . all I could think of was the Book of All Hours.

The Big Picture

As I turned the pages, taking care not to drip blood from any of my numerous cuts onto its priceless pages, I barely even heard the alarm that had been ringing in my ears ever since the shattering of the glass. I was transfixed by this strange sense of certainty; I just wasn’t sure what I was certain of. A page, another page, and yet another, and Britain lay before me – a Britain without a Glasgow or a London, or any of the major cities I should have been able to point to, or rather with these cities in the wrong places, in the wrong shapes. A map of the past, or of the future, or of an imagined now?

– The Macromimicon. The Big Picture, my uncle had said. Whatever form it takes – and there’s some who say it takes a different form for everyone – I think somehow – I’m not sure how but I think it’s some sort of mirror of the world, or of something greater that includes the world.

Another page – Europe – and then another, and the world lay before me, the globe projected and distorted as it had to be to fit the rectangle of the two pages. The cartographer had elected to sacrifice the inhospitable polar regions, showing the coastline of Antarctica split and splayed to run along the bottom of the page, the tops of the northern continents stretched out and skewed in the transformation from three dimensions to two, running along the top of the page so that the Arctic Ocean was reduced to a mere channel bordering Greenland on either side.

– It’s a fucking good story, Jack had said, as we sat in the Union. I’ll give you that, he said. Don’t believe a word of it, though.

He checked his watch again, glanced at the door.

I felt feverish, and I knew that it was more than lack of blood. I should have been out of there by now. I should have been getting the hell out of there with the book, not browsing its pages as if I was just one more student in the university library – in the university library in the dead of night, tooled-up with glass-cutters and toothpicks and all the other implements of burglary, waiting to be caught quite literally red-handed, with fingerprints in my own blood all over the broken case and the wooden desk where I now studied the Book. I couldn’t leave.

– Who’s coming for a drink, then? Joey had said, one foot up on the wooden bench beside me, leaning on his knee as he looked down at Jack and Puck on the grass.

– Fuck that shit, said Puck. I’m not moving.

The alarm rang on, and no one came, and I found myself reaching out with my bloodied left hand to turn the next page, knowing that I had to leave but stuck there as if caught in a moment of determinism. I knew that I was smearing blood over Siberia, and over an invaluable artefact. I knew that the security guards could be no more than seconds away. I knew I could end up in jail for this. Christ, the Book was real, I had it in my hands, here and now. And still, with blood pounding in my ears, and blood dripping in my eyes, running from my cut hand, blood smearing everything that hand touched, I still turned the page.

New Unfamiliar Terrain

The coastline of a greater world lay before my eyes. It was a world where Antarctica was only the tip of a much larger southern continent. It was a world where Greenland was an island in a river’s mouth, where Baffin Bay on one side and the Greenland Sea on the other stretched north, fused as an enormous estuary. Asia and the Americas were mere . . . promontories, headlands on a Hyperborean expanse, and the Arctic ‘River’ that divided them had its source far north and off the edge of the map.

To east and west the story was the same, a whole new unfamiliar terrain; the western seaboard of America extended up well past Alaska, north and west, while Antarctica continued round and down; the eastern coast of China curved round to a gulf the size of the Baltic where the Bering Strait should be, another massive ‘river’ running north from here. An entirely different land-mass jutted in from the east, out at the far edge of – I wasn’t even sure if I should call it the Pacific now – the Eastern Pacific, perhaps, the Western being, on this map, an entirely different body of water. I turned another page.

Again the scale moved out and, on this map, the world I knew could have taken up no more than a sixteenth of the area shown. The northeast coastline of that Greater Antarctica curved up to meet the strange land in the east, which itself carried on to meet the coast that curved around and down from China; pincered by its own Gibraltar Strait formed by the tip of South America, the bump of Antarctica, this Eastern Pacific was no more than a landlocked sea here, like a larger Mediterranean, dwarfed by the lands surrounding it on three sides. Hyperborea to the north, I thought, the Subantarctic to the south, and an Orient beyond the furthest Orient we’ve ever known.

Another page, and another, and the world I knew was only a minuscule part of an impossibly vast landscape. I’m no physicist, but I know enough about matter and gravity to know when I’m looking at the surface of a world that couldn’t possibly support human existence. This was a world on the scale of Jupiter and Saturn. I turned more pages, two or three at a time, and still each map was at a larger magnitude than the one before, and still the world revealed was only a quarter of the world mapped out on the page to follow. Continents became islands off of coastlines that became continents. Ten pages, twenty. The world I knew wasn’t even visible at this scale, but there was still a world to be marked out, a fractured collision of earth and water, in areas so vast that terms like ‘continent’ or ‘ocean’ now seemed meaningless.

I kept turning the pages.

The Silent World

And as my heart pounded in my chest and my head swam, I realized that the alarm bell I’d been hearing was only a vague and distant ringing in my ears now. No one was coming. No one would ever come. I knew it with the certainty of dream knowledge. I knew it with the same certainty that told me this archaic text before me was no piece of whimsy, that it was real, it was true, truer than reality.

I knew it even before turning to the very last page of the Book, to the very last map in which this ancient cartographer had laid out the edges of his known universe, a blank and featureless plain extending in all directions at the centre of which, tiny and intricate, the world of worlds was only an oasis, with a dotted track leading out of it to the north as if to mark some unimaginably long road to the inconceivably distant.

I knew it even before I staggered out through the deep corridors of the library and out into the silent world, as I wandered through a campus entirely empty of human life, and out into streets of sandstone tenements and tarmac roads, traffic lights that still cycled through their sequences of red, amber and green although the empty cars just sat there, oblivious to their commands. I knew it even if I couldn’t find the words to shape my tongue around in order to express that vague, disturbing certainty.

I shouted, but there was no one to hear me.

I didn’t know at what point I had crossed over into this, my new reality: whether it had been my blood upon the Book that had somehow, like some magical anointment, released its power; or whether it had been simply my opening of the tome that had opened a gateway around me; whether that blast of shattering glass from the Book’s cabinet had thrown me clear out of my own world and into the next; whether the case itself had held not air under pressure, but something even less substantial, some aetheric force unbound by my meddling which even now might be travelling in a shock wave outward from its focus, transforming everything it touched.

Transformations

We stood there at the back of the church, Jack and Joey and I. He had a lot of family, a lot of friends, Puck did, and the church was full. I’ve heard it’s often like that when someone young dies. Young lives leave a lot of mourners. But we’d almost had to drag Jack there; he wouldn’t come at first, said he wouldn’t sit and listen to a minister reciting platitudes and singing fucking hymns, fucking praising fucking God in fucking Heaven. That’s how he put it.

I glanced at the two of them, Jack and Joey standing by my side, silent in black – black suits, black mood. And I had this absurd thought, this stupid, crazy idea, that the two of them looked like some kind of cliche´d bloody Hollywood vision of secret agents, or Rat Pack gangsters, assassins, men in black. Angels of death, waiting patiently to collect.

They turned to look at me together, precisely in synch, like two parts of the same machine, and their hollow gazes sent a shiver down my spine, because I felt exactly the same emptiness.

I actually wonder now if nothing in this world has changed but me. It occurred to me as I wandered the empty streets of the world, walking down the middle of roads known and unknown – maybe the world was as it had always been and it was me that had been transformed, seeing for the first time the whole scope of it and myself alone within. I knew, as I wandered those streets so subtly familiar, that the whole world around me was abandoned, desolate; it didn’t make sense in any rational way but somehow I knew the world I’d walked into, whatever kind of hell it was, was mine and mine alone. It was like that moment in a dream when you realise you’re dreaming and wake up into the real world . . . and then you realise you’re still dreaming.

*

I don’t know how long I walked aimlessly around my new environment, struck by the surrealism of these buildings in all stages of abandonment, some overgrown ruins, some pristine with lights on in their rooms, child’s toys left sitting on carpets, radios hissing white noise. It was as if the city’s inhabitants had all simply dropped whatever they were doing and left, but over a period of centuries with none of them noticing the others’ departures, even until the very last, who, it seemed, had left mere seconds before my arrival.

– You really believe in this Book? Jack had asked me. You really think you can find it?

He finished off his glass of ouzo, loosened his black tie and poured himself another. We were in his room, after the funeral, and the place was scattered with empty beer cans, empty bottles, and plastic bags with more for us to drink. We were going to get wasted. We were all of us going to get completely wasted that night. Fucked out of our minds.

I shook my head, laughed sadly.

– Maybe it is just some fucking old, old hoax. But . . . I just want to know. My whole life, I’ve wanted to know if . . . it’s real.

– Nothing’s real, said Joey.

– Everything’s real, said Jack. Everything is true; nothing is permitted.

I thought, that’s a quote. I thought, I recognise it, but I couldn’t place it and it didn’t sound quite right.

I looked from one to the other, all of us sodden with drink and grief, and felt one of those moments of acid significance, where you’re sure you’ve just realised something important and forgotten it instantly.

No Comfort, No Answers

So I sit in this pub now, writing, and there are pints poured sitting on the bar, packets of cigarettes left with lighters on tables – Christ, when I walked in there was one still burning in an ashtray – but no humanity. Only the remembrance of it. I’ve spent the last few hours turning everything over and over in my head and I’m no closer to making sense of any of this. I can find no comfort, no answers, only that same sense I feel each time I look upon the Book, a mingling of dread and wonder, horror and elation.

It sits before me on the table as a mystery.

I think maybe I’m dead, that this world exists for me alone because it is no more, no less, than my own personal gateway to . . . whatever lies beyond. And the Book? Maybe it’s my own invention, my own creation, placed here, waiting for the moment when I could finally face my own mortality and cross the boundary into the unknown. Was my life before now imagined . . . or reimagined, recreated with a path to lead me to this book of maps, with a family history filled with myths and legends, a drive to know, to grasp some secret, sacred mystery? And friends found and lost. All leading me inexorably to the opening of the Book, to the discovery of my state.

I miss Jack and Joey and Thomas. Nobody ever wonders if the dead grieve for the ones they leave behind, it seems, but I miss them, even if I’m not sure that they ever existed. If my whole world up until I found the Book was just the fantasy of a dead man wishing he was still alive, maybe they were only ever little parts of me that I snipped off and carved into a human shape to keep me company in that dream of life. I think of Jack and Joey, fire and ice, light and dark. And I think of Thomas and I feel cheated, betrayed. I can’t accept that Puck was just a lonely ghost’s imagination. No. I think – I want to think – that they were all real, that I knew them, that that day on the grass outside the library was real, true, even if it happened differently. I think I had a life without the Book, without any of those stories, just a simple life, replayed in death with transformations as a quiet way of bringing me to this point. And when I picture Jack and Joey standing in that church, I picture Thomas standing beside them in my place. Maybe his death was just another signpost of my imagination, pointing the way. I hope that’s the truth. I dearly hope so.

So where do I go from here? It’s a lonely world, this limbo, and I only hope that it’s a borderland. The Book itself is evidence of something out there, surely, something greater than the scope of one man’s memory, of a world beyond the world beyond; and if its opening was my awakening then the content of its pages must be the story of my life – my death – from here on in. I’ve found myself alone within a world that’s only a minute portion of a larger whole. Somewhere out there, surely, other corners of this vast realm hold their own souls, born in death into their own imaginings. And will they know that they are dead, or does it fall to me to wake them? Are there already roads between the worlds, travelled by others? How many will have left their empty worlds in search of company, and what cities have been built where souls met in the great landscape of the afterworld? My God, this book might hold the Maps of Hell, but maybe it also holds the Keys of Heaven in the sigils that inscribe it. I don’t even know if every dead man has such a book to guide him through his death or if I have the only copy. I won’t know until some way into my journey, I imagine. I imagine there are many things that I am yet to know.

The Road of All Dust

I plan to set out tomorrow. I have the Book after all, calling me to this great adventure, and guiding my every step. As it sits on the table of the pub in front of me, I can see now what I did not understand at first. The cover of the Book no longer shows the vault I found it in. I didn’t notice it changing, but it happened; now the embossing of the leather cover maps out the tables and the chairs around me, and the first page shows the architecture of this abandoned pub. The Book changes as its reader moves. The map stays centred on its observer. And the glyph, the strange eye on its exterior that is repeated on the maps inside? A symbol of the reader – the keeper, the maker – himself, an oval of a body seen from above, a circle within it to mark out the head, and four semi-circles to symbolise the limbs. And the rectangle that intersects it is, of course, the Book, the Macromimicon, the Great Copy, which I carry, perhaps as a part of me. Wherever I go, those first few maps, I’m sure, will show the world around me in all the detail I will