Travis hopped from one leg to another, his nerves getting the better of him. “You’re not from the Narrative Council, are you?”
Nyquist didn’t reply; he let his silence speak for him.
“Bloody hell! You’re a story cop! I knew you had a stink about you. Now listen, I run a pure house. I do. Good clean stories only, no funny business. Nothing non-linear, nothing experimental. Just good old-fashioned narrative, do you hear me?”
Nyquist got down on his hands and knees to look under the bed. “Did Wellborn ever tell you anything about his life, before he came here?”
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Mister, this ain’t the Hilton or the Mayfair. Plenty of fellows come here to get lost in a tale of their own choosing, and that’s their God-given right as a citizen of this fair and lovely city of ours, and we here at Gilly’s Home From Home are happy to offer them that service at a fair price.”
Nyquist reached under the bed with an outstretched arm and pulled loose a cloth bag that was taped to the metal strut of the bed frame. He stood back up and peeped inside the bag.
“What’ve you got there?” Travis was genuinely intrigued. “Nothing illicit, I hope?”
“This is all I need, thank you.”
“Hey, come on. That’s my treasure trove.”
“Payment was made.”
“That’s not fair. What if Mr Wellborn returns? What do I say to him?”
Nyquist stared at the manager. “He won’t be coming back, not any time soon.”
“Now what does that mean? Mister? Just what does it mean? Is Wellborn’s story done? Is it finished? I have to know!”
Nyquist was already heading down the stairs to the lobby. He exited the building and kept on walking until he’d put at least three streets between himself and the rooming house. Only then did he stop to sit down on a motorbus shelter’s bench and to look inside the bag. It contained a bundle of paper. Eleven sheets in all, each one covered in words and images, and each page with a number at the bottom, none of them in sequence. He knew that he held in his hands a portion of a lost manuscript. There was also an extra sheet of paper, wrapped sideways around the others. It served as a makeshift folder. Someone, Wellborn presumably, had handwritten on this: The Body Library. And below that the name of the author: A novel by Lewis Beaumont. One more item fell out of the bag: a council worker’s identity card. Patrick Wellborn’s face was seen in a photograph attached to the card. Nyquist studied the information: date of birth, status, current employment.
At the time of his death Wellborn was working for the Storyville Narrative Council as a narrative officer.
Reading Matter
A MUCH dented, second-hand Smith-Corona typewriter. A pile of foolscap paper, the title page of the manuscript uppermost: A Man of Shadows by John H. Nyquist. Anyone reading this work would see that the author has avoided as much as he can the letter X. An ashtray holding seven stubs, and one cigarette resting on the rim, still burning. A cup of black coffee, a packet of Woodbines, a fountain pen. The blades of a fan were slowly turning, sending waves of cool air across the face of the man who sat at the desk reading a few sheets of paper, his hands sliding one sheet behind another as he moved on, his eyes scanning each line and image as though for clues to buried treasure. A frown line etched his forehead as he concentrated.
Nyquist reached the last page. He’d read through them all four times up to now and was still puzzled at their meaning. Judging from this selection alone, The Body Library was barely a narrative by any normal account, hardly a story, more a series of fragments taken from other stories and glued together in some haphazard arrangement. Some of the pages were stitched with red or blue thread, others had smaller, torn pieces of paper glued onto them: pages taken from novels, a picture of a canary, a portion of a street map, two lines from a cookery recipe, a portion of musical notation, a section taken from the Storyville Reporter. One page even had splatters of blood on it. He started to read once more from the beginning of the first sheet, labelled page thirteen.
Abigail fired at once the poetry gun, scattering metaphors without remorse or moonlight. One hit after another until the wallpaper peels away showing Margaret’s face alone in the mirror. We are the gatherers, we are scavengers. At the pool of language we deliver unto the machine what is the machine’s, and live with the consequences. How the moon weeps for the dead! A magic spell is cast. Paradise Lily is selling her wounds on the high street, easy prices and fully guaranteed. Beware of shadows creeping over the land, through the lanes, across the hoardings, dancing like dying whore poets in the fading red light. Alas, alas, in the kingdom of birds, I am the man without wings…
It was enough to make Nyquist’s head spin. His usual method of working cases – moving from one lead or clue to another, to seek out the hidden truth – could not be applied here. He was adrift in the words, holding on to one story, then another, one character, then another, one style of writing and then another. And this was just eleven pages, he couldn’t imagine how it would feel to have to read the whole book, however many pages it might be in total. Where would the pleasure reside? Yet certain themes and objects turned up more than once, and these intrigued him: prostitutes, guns, a magic spell, a dying poet, even a private eye. He felt that a pathway might be available, in the fog, in the night, with himself blindfolded, stumbling forward with his hands outstretched, seeking the next landmark, the next fragment of sense.
He rubbed at his tired eyes. His lips were dry and cracked and he dreamed of whisky. But he fought back the urge, and read on a little way further. This was his fifth attempt but it did no good; now the words were dancing on the page, losing whatever meaning he had so carefully put together. It was all too fragile, too tentative. He threw the pages down onto the desk in disgust.
There was no truth here, no secret.
He was as lost as ever.
Perhaps after all Zelda had killed herself? It was perfectly possible, and she might have discarded the locket herself on her walk across Marlowe’s Field. Yet the way she’d talked about it, and the portrait of her mother inside – surely it had value. It was a precious object, something to take with her on the final journey.
No, it made more sense that someone had murdered her, and staged it as a suicide. He thought of Dreylock as the most obvious candidate, helped by his cronies. But then the name Oberon came to mind; this character had been mentioned by a few of the Melville residents, as some kind of overlord or governor of the building. In fact, Dreylock had called him, “Evil, through and through”. But the thought of returning for a third time to Melville Tower Five filled Nyquist with dread.
And there was another mystery, surely connected to Zelda’s death in some way: the words that that taken over her body. It looked like Patrick Wellborn also had writing on his skin, according to the maid’s story. And he remembered Detective Molloy mentioning that other such cases had turned up in the city. Was it a drug epidemic, as more and more people were burning pages from The Body Library manuscript?
And why had his own name turned up on the page found on Zelda’s body?
It felt like a story was being played out right in front of him and all Nyquist could read were these hidden glimpses.
He stood up and started to pace the room, repeating phrases from The Body Library out loud to himself:
…in the mind’s eye a room of secrets…
…broken on the stones, broken on the pavements, broken on the walls…
…her life a poem in the darkness of daylight…
The words seemed to inhabit his brain. The text was written on the inside of his skull, all eleven pages. He imagined himself walking around the circular chamber of bone, using a lantern to illuminate the walls, his voice echoing as he read one line after another, seeking connections. God help him, he even imagined setting fire to a page from the manuscript and breathing in the smoke. Where would that take him?
…trouble followed him everywhere…
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…he was the eye, the dark eye of privacy opened up to the moon…
…on the borders where one breath meets another, a kiss…
Nyquist stood still. He stopped talking to himself.
That last line… yes, now he remembered.
Zelda’s poem.
He tried to picture himself, back in the living room of an apartment in Melville Five: Zelda reciting her work for him, her words in the air so quiet, and even quieter now in memory, as he tried to recall them.
They walk alone…
Yes, two people, walking alone. That was it. But where?
On the edge of the city where the…
Where what?
Where the stories flow… where the stories flow away…
The words appeared, one by one, conjured up before him as surely as if Zelda were in the room with him, alive and well, reciting her poetry.
One word unspoken, one word unwritten… until…
Until? Until? It came complete, the line he needed the most to remember.
Until, on the border where one breath meets another, a story begins in a kiss…
That was it.
He went back to his desk and skimmed through the collection of pages from The Body Library until he’d found the passage:
…there is no other route, said the rainbow man, only this: on the borders where one breath meets another, a kiss moves across without papers or passport, a refugee from the steel towns to the north…
He was certain now: that particular phrase about borders and breath and a kiss, it had been stolen from Zelda’s poem – stolen, sliced into pieces and rearranged and placed back into the flow of the novel as whole, lost or almost lost, until Nyquist’s eyes and his memory had found it again, allowing it to rise to the surface.
It could only mean one thing: Zelda’s poetry had been used as one of the elements in The Body Library. He remembered her tale of how her notebook had been stolen along with her bag. Yes, it made sense. She was connected, intimately, to the strange novel.
Was that why she’d been murdered?
He didn’t know. He just didn’t know! The story always slipped away.
Nyquist sat at his desk and read through the eleven pages one more time, looking for further clues, any other lines he might recognize, from books he had read, or things overheard. But there was nothing, only that one phrase of Zelda’s. He clung to it – those ten words. And every so often during the rest of the day, as dusk fell and then darkness, he found himself repeating the phrase aloud.
on the borders
where one breath meets another
a kiss…
His neck started to itch. He was getting tired of it. He stripped off his shirt and stood in front of the mirror, trying to twist round far enough to see his own back. He couldn’t quite make it – the painful area was always out of view no matter which way he turned. He looked in his bathroom cabinet for a salve or ointment, but there was nothing suitable. Another sort of medicine was available however, and he found it in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet: a half bottle of Dewar’s. He no longer hesitated and within an hour he’d finished it off. That night he lay awake in bed for a while, thinking about his next steps. The drink had brought him clarity, and some kind of temporary relief from his guilt over Zelda’s death. He reached across for the copy of Deadly Nightshade he had found in Antonia Linden’s office. The book must be important in some way; it had also turned up in two different rooms in Melville Five. Nyquist read the first few paragraphs of chapter one, even as his eyes started to close.
The young woman ran down the street, keeping to the shadows whenever she could. She darted into an alleyway and kept on moving. The footsteps echoed behind her. She reached the end of the alley and found herself on the main street of the town. There were too many lights! One of her heels was broken, and she was out of breath. She stopped under a street lamp and her figure was bathed in the yellow glow. Her face was fear-stricken. Her dress was torn at the shoulder. Her wild dirty blonde hair was in disarray.
Paradise Lily was trapped. She couldn’t move another step.
Joe Creed approached her. He smoked the last drags of a cigarette and threw it to the sidewalk. With a grin he said to her, “There’s nowhere left to run, Lily.”
“Get away from me!” Her voice rose to a scream.
“Either you trust me, or Madame Leclair will find you again. She’ll throw you to the wolves.”
“I don’t care,” she cried. “I don’t trust you, Joe. I never have!”
Creed shook his head. This was always the trouble. Nobody trusted him. There must be something wrong with his face. He looked like a bad case of the shakes trapped inside a bag of skin dressed in a cheap blue serge suit and a battered trilby. But what could he do? The war had messed up many a guy. All he possessed was what he saw in front of him, the things he could grab hold of.
He reached out for Paradise Lily and took her by the arm. “Let’s go. I’ll buy you a drink.”
“But what good will it do, Joe?”
“Very little. The world is made by a cruel god and people like you and me, we’re at the bottom of the pile.”
From one shadow to another they walked on until the night claimed them.
The words blurred into a haze. The book dropped from his hands. Nyquist had one last thought before he succumbed to sleep.
Paradise Lily. Paradise Lily. The same woman. Two books…
A dream arrived.
He was back in Melville Towers. He was staring in the mirror of apartment 67, washing the blood off his hands. He looked up and saw his face in the dirty, cracked glass. He was covered in black marks. They were moving just under his skin like an infection of worms or insects. The letters slithered on his skin, forming words, forming stories.
He tried to read them. He tried to read his own face for a message.
His own face was a cry for help.
His face was a cry for help in the middle of a novel.
His own face was a short story with a sad, sad ending.
His own face was an experimental text without sense or meaning.
His face was written by a mad man.
His face was a gunshot described by a drunk.
His face was a penny dreadful.
His face was a horror story.
His face was a ghost story haunted by his own living self.
His face was a SCREAM written in colored letters ten feet high.
His face was a suicide note.
His face was a cheap romance novel thrown in the gutter on a rainy night, the pages sodden, trampled underfoot by high heels and brogues.
His face was a list of things to buy and keep in storage in case the bomb should ever fall.
His face was an instruction leaflet for a self-destruction device.
His face was a science fiction story about a robot who started to feel emotions.
His face was a racy pulp thriller starring femme fatales and doomed private eyes.
His face was a dialogue between a dead man and a living woman.
His face was a love message written in lipstick on a mirror.
His face was a page torn from an encyclopedia filled with useless information about things that no longer existed.
His face was a screwed-up page from a manuscript tossed in a wastepaper basket.
His face was a fading page of words turning to grey letters, disappearing…
His face was a blank page.
His face was a blank page.
His face was a blank page.
His own face in the mirror was a blank page and he clawed at it with his fingernails, desperate to find the words once more, under the skin, under the flesh, one word, another, any words at all to save himself from reaching the last page, and one by one they reappeared, daubed in blood, the black letters, one by one he read them on his skin:
On the border where one breath meets another, a story begins.
His face was a poem written by a prostit
ute and he loved it, he loved the words on his face, her words, her softly whispered words.
Zelda’s words.
Nyquist opened his eyes in the dark of the bedroom.
He was trembling. Sweat covered his body.
Something had woken him. A noise of some kind, a continuous tapping sound. He sat up in the bed. His movement caused the paperback novel to fall to the floor, but he didn’t notice it. He listened. Yes, there it was again, still going, tap tapping away, insistent, metallic, a clicking sound, a beat, but slightly irregular. The sound a human being makes when activating a machine.
It was the sound of a typewriter.
He got up and padded across the room to the door of his office and he opened the door a crack and peeped through.
The lights were out. Shining through the window, a neon sign’s glow illuminated part of the room, a rectangle of flooring, one side of the filing cabinet, a portion of the desk. The typewriter was silvered by the light, like an object discovered on the moon. Like the ghost of a machine. The sound of the keys stopped as soon as he opened the door fully and walked into the room. All was silent now. The shadows moved away from him as he approached the desk. He looked down at the typewriter. There was a sheet of paper in the grip and a few lines of text visible, the individual letters stark on the page.
He stood there and read the message.
Johnny, I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate, but I need your help. I’m trapped here, under a spell. I have to do what the boy Calvin says, it never stops. The ink never dries. Please, please help me!
Below this, the writer had typed her name.
Zelda
Part Three
NABOKOV, THIRD DOORWAY ALONG
The Muse
THEY CAME for him first thing, the doorbell cutting into his sleep. He woke up bleary-eyed, and it only took the act of sitting upright to bring on a headache. The bell rang on and on, a far higher pitch than normal. At last he got up and pulled a dressing gown over his pajamas. He walked through into the office to let the two people in. The man was a stranger, but the woman was Bella Monroe, and she gave him a weary smile. But he saw something else in her eyes: fear. He’d never seen such an emotion on her before, she was usually calm and quite professional. She told him to get dressed.