I closed my eyes. I heard the wet, heavy sound of bodies being dropped into a crater, and my own cries 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 was not mistaken, 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 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 of 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 acknowledge 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. 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, “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.
XIII
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, 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 that I could not see her face. Then, from the shadows between the street lamps, again at a similar distance but this time on the same side as myself, 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 the breaking of bones. The girl’s feet also were bare, but she was splay-footed, 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 sides 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 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 noticed the absence of pursuit. 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 an old one 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 offspring, foul beasts: 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, rodentine 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 deep within. 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 squirmed 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.
XIV
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 my presence 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 explained 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 now November twelfth. You’re raving. Look at yourself, man. Look what you’ve become.”
I tried not to let my fear show. I tried not to let the last of my reason slide away.
“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 pretence of bravery had been enough to fool even himself. His hand stopped shaking, and his unease 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.”
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 effort 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 Cheapside. 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.
“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 entirely apart.
“I need neither,” I said. “I just want to look at your files on the Maulding house.”
XV
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 handled 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, and I thought I was due a little luck at last.
I bought a copy of the Times on High Holborn. It was dated November 12. 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 under 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 broken 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 B-types in favor of the K and the S, and it was a wonder that this relic 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 at 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. He had a nicotine croak. “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.”
There were more policemen 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 seeing 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 believe 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 of glass 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 suffocate me.