In the last year or so he has taken to playing BBC Radio 4 while he winds. The gentle burble of news and artistic wrangling makes a pleasant backdrop, and every so often there’s the forecast for shipping, with its soothing litany of places he need never go. Flemish Cap, seven, gusting nine. Recently, Radio 4 has betrayed him somewhat, because current affairs are a bit tense. Alongside assorted climatic woes, the world is even now passing what is apparently called “peak oil”—the moment after which oil will only ever be harder to get hold of and hence more expensive and ultimately unavailable—and in consequence the latest meeting of the G-whatever-it-is has become tense. Joe hopes this does not mean the sort of tense which prefigures bombing someone. He does not find angry South American diplomats, resentful Irish aviation bosses and fatuously confident Canadian oilmen very restful, so today the radio is silent on its shelf.
And really, that’s the most important thing he does with his days. It’s a small, measurable success, in the face of diminishing sales and an empty double bed and a set of skills which were marketable one hundred years ago, but now look quaint and even sad. Every afternoon for the last six months he has been fighting an uneven battle with himself not to overturn the trolley with its many keys, and scatter them across the room. His better nature has won only because the image of himself on his knees, remorsefully gathering them again, repairing scratched case clocks and whispering apologies to the ghost of his grandfather—and for strange and different reasons also his father—is more than he can bear.
The chimes clink over the door, and he glances up.
The figure in the doorway is tall. It must be, because the top of its head is not so far short of the frame. It is silhouetted by the day outside, but even allowing for that, it must be wearing black. It has long arms and long legs, and wears a strange, cumbersome garment like a dress or robe. Miss Havisham. He wonders if the wearer is unpleasantly scarred. He cannot tell. Over its head, the visitor wears a piece of black gauze or linen, so that the face is quite invisible. The cloth is not cinched; it hangs down over the wearer’s head, so that the top is a smooth curve. There’s just the barest bulge of a nose. Other than that, the head is as blank and featureless as an egg. Vampire. Alien. And then, more shamefully, suicide bomber.
The last makes him feel guilty, and ridiculous, and the feeling propels him to his feet. Clearly, if suicide bomber is unlikely, it has to be conceded that the others are more so.
“Hello,” Joe says. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing for the moment, thank you.” The voice is deep and scratched, but muffled. It sounds like a recording played through one of the old wood-horn gramophones Joe has in the back. The metal-horns are powerful, they make everything sound like old-time radio. The wood-horns are rounder, but lack belt. Joe automatically leans in to hear, and then away again when the blank linen face follows him, ducks down as if to kiss his cheek, coming too close too quickly. “May I look around?”
“Oh, well, please. Browse away. Let me know if you want anything in particular. I have some very fine gramophones with quite special horns. And a really good fob watch. I’m quite proud of the clean-up. It’s a lovely thing.” Joe lets his tone suggest that anyone who is just browsing should almost certainly conclude their visit with a tour of the smaller items which might have failed to attract attention.
The shrouded head dips in assent, once, and then deeper a second time, like a swan’s.
“Forgive me for asking,” Joe says, when his visitor does not move away, “but I’ve never seen anyone dressed like that before.”
“I am on a journey of the soul,” the other replies, without rancour. “My clothing reminds me that the face of God is turned away from us. From the world. It is worn by members of the Order of John the Maker, who are called Ruskinites.” He waits, to see if this elicits a reaction. Since Joe doesn’t know what reaction would be considered appropriate, he allows himself none.
“Thank you,” he says instead, by way of concluding the conversation. The man moves away with a curious, boneless lurching.
Glancing warily after the eerie, absent face, Joe goes back to work.
The visitor wanders towards a row of music boxes. One of them plays something light and perky, and the man looks down at it like a bird wondering whether it is something to eat. A moment later, he speaks again.
“Mr. Spork?”
“Yes, what can I do for you?”
“I am looking for something. I hope you can help me.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I believe you have recently dealt with a book I have an interest in. A very unusual book.”
Oh, crap.
“Oh, dear. I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Music, yes. Books, no.” Joe can feel a sort of prickling on his back. He turns, and sees the figure straighten and turn smoothly away.
“I believe you can. The Book of the Hakote, Mr. Spork.” Laden with significance.
Joe hesitates. On the one hand, he has never specifically heard of the Book of the Hakote (huh-KOH-tay). Like the shroud the visitor is wearing, the word has the flavour of religion, and he takes especial care not to deal in religious items, be they church timepieces or sneaky weeping icons with internal reservoirs and clockwork pumps. They have almost always been pillaged at some time, and in consequence come with aggravation attached. On the other hand, he has recently been in contact with an object of various unusual qualities which might conceivably answer to such an outré name, an object which was brought to him by a moderately nefarious individual by the name of William “Billy” Friend.
Chief among the unusual qualities aforementioned: a fat man and a thin man turned up in his shop and lied, quaintly and unpersuasively, about how they wanted to buy the Grandpa Spork collection entire, when what they really wanted (see Mr. Titwhistle’s betraying fingers) was anything associated with this same “very unusual book.”
“I’m terribly sorry, you’ve lost me,” Joe replies cheerfully. “I sell and maintain items of clockwork. Curiosities, mostly, things that go bong and so on. Pianolas and automata. But in general not books.”
“There are some texts whose importance is not immediately apparent to the uninitiated. Dangerous books.”
“I’m sure there are.”
“There is no need to condescend.” The Ruskinite’s head turns on his neck, the shroud bunching at the shoulders. Joe wonders if it will turn all the way around, like an owl’s. “I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives. More mundanely, Mr. Spork, the Book and all its paraphernalia are of great value to me personally. I should very much like them back.”
Back. Not: I should very much like to locate a copy, nor even: I have been having some trouble finding the ISBN. This person is seeking an item which at some stage they owned. A singular item. Yes, this has all the hallmarks of a Billy Friend situation, right enough.
“It is not yours, Mr. Spork,” the Ruskinite says with soft finality. “It is mine.”
Joe puts on his most accommodating expression. “Might I take your name? I have, in fact, dealt with a very unusual book recently, but I’m afraid I don’t know the title. It passed through my hands as part of a repair job. I do hope there was no funny business involved.” Oh, I bloody do. But I’m quite sure there was if you say so.
The Ruskinite circles the room in silence as if considering. Joe Spork affects an air of polite, shopkeeper’s dismay, and does not watch. He fusses with his papers and listens, trying to track the other’s progress in the room. Scritch scritch. Is the other man rubbing his chin? Mopping his brow? Clawing at the desk with an iron hook in place of his right hand?
When the man speaks again, his muffled voice is almost a whisper, and alarmingly close. “Very well, Mr. Spork.”
Joe glances around and finds the shrouded face less than a metre away. He jumps slightly, and the head withdraws.
“I am sorry I startled you. If you do not have anything for me, I
will leave.”
“Do take a card and give me a call if there’s anything else I can do. Or any other items I have which might be of interest.”
“I shall consider that, and return.”
Joe clamps down on his subconscious before it can make him say “From the grave?” which would be rude. The shrouded man snakes out of the door and disappears into the street.
Billy. You are in so much trouble right now.
Before going to find Billy Friend wherever he is and shout at him in person, Joe makes a phone call.
Harticle’s—more properly the Boyd Harticle Foundation for Artisanal and Scientific Practice—is an endless lumber room, one hundred and fifty years old and more; a winding mass of shelved corridors and display cases punctuated with reading rooms and collections, inadequately labelled and appallingly dusty, so that to go into the Archives is to risk coughing for days. It is stuffed to bursting with odds and ends, acquired and maintained and stored away, against the day when something may be required for a restoration or a recreation. There are pieces of Charles Babbage’s unfinished machines here, and of Brunel’s steam engines. Instruments designed by Robert Hooke rub shoulders with wooden models produced to drawings by da Vinci. Everything has a story, usually more than one. Boyd Harticle’s ugly red-brick house with its unlikely turreted roof and neo-Gothic arched windows is a refuge for the disregarded children of man’s study and conquest of the natural world.
The call is answered on the second ring.
“In this house, only art,” proclaims a woman’s voice, deep and rather forceful.
“Cecily? It’s Joe.”
“Joe? Joe? Joe? What Joe? I know no Joe. The phenomenon known as Joe is an illusion created by my conscious mind to account for the discrepancy between the number of scones I buy and the number I eventually consume. His putative reality has been demonstrated false by empirical testing. In any case, extant or not, he no longer cares. Gone off with some harlot, no doubt, and left me to my lonesome.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And well you might be. How are you, you heartless wretch?”
“I’m fine. How’s Harticle’s?”
“Big and draughty and full of old things no one gives a fig for. Me, among them.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“And you imagine once will get you off the hook, do you? Ask Foalbury how many times he had to apologise for the fiasco with the eggnog. Then try again.” But Cecily’s voice is grudgingly mollified, and a few buttered scones will see her right. The gates of Harticle’s—as Joe well knows, and so does she—are not closed to him.
Part museum, part archive, and part club, Harticle’s occupies one of those weird niches in London’s life, both physical and social, which makes it almost invisible to the wider world and almost inevitable to those in the know. Cecily Foalbury is its librarian and in a way its library. Granted, with a following wind one might find a book or an object via the card-index system. It’s a perfectly respectable arrangement, albeit outdated and—this being Harticle’s—staunchly analogue. It’s also true that Cecily is the codex, the concordance. If you want to find anything within any reasonable time-frame, it’s best to ask her—but very, very politely, and if possible with blandishments. Cecily’s nickname—the Man-eater—is not entirely in jest, and her husband Bob freely confesses himself a serf.
“Cecily, do you know anything about the Loganfield Museum in Edinburgh?”
“Not since it closed. Why?”
Joe Spork nods to himself without surprise. “Just checking. What about dangerous books?”
“Oh! Yes, of course. There are dozens. The churches got in such an uproar after Gutenberg, Joe, because now anyone could print anything and spread it about. Popes got in a bate about all manner of things. Local barons became irate about scurrilous gossip printed in pamphlets—much of it true and I must say almost all of it good reading!” A thunderous laugh down the phone. “There’s even a couple of Bibles with printing errors which make them a bit odd. Thou Shalt Commit Adultery, and all that sort of thing. People collect them, bishops burn them. Silly sods. As if God gives a monkey’s what’s written in botched type.”
“This isn’t one of those. It’s more modern.”
“Come on, then, Joe. What sort of tome,” she hits the word hard, enjoying its kookiness, “what sort of libram are we talking about?”
“He called it the Book of the Hakote.”
There’s a brief cough from the other end of the phone, a muffled bark.
“Cecily?”
“I’m here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Hakote, is what’s wrong.”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Of course I bloody have. Drop this, Joe. Run away from it. It’s poison.”
“I can’t. I think it’s stuck to me.”
“Wash. Fast.”
“How? I don’t know what it is!”
“It’s the ghost in the darkness, Joe. From the tip of Spain to the Black Forest and all the way to bloody Minsk. The Witch Queen at the Crossroads. Bloody Mary. Baba Yaga. It’s a curse.”
“Cecily! Come on!”
She doesn’t. The line is silent. Then she asks sharply: “Who’s ‘he’?”
“What?”
“You said ‘he called it’. Who is this ‘he’? Not the nefarious little lecher, please?”
“No. Someone else. He seems to think I’ve got it.”
“And have you?”
“I … no. I may have had it. Or something which could have been it.”
He hears her sigh, or maybe just breathe out hard, letting it go.
“Hakote, Joe. It’s … it’s a bogeyman. All right? It’s a leper or a … a banshee. Like Grendel’s mother. You can die of it. She’s supposed to have built a castle in a village, and one night the sea came up and swallowed the whole thing.”
Joe Spork is trying to laugh. It is, after all, rather silly. Ghost stories are absurd, here and now, under the faint but reassuring sun—but Cecily Foalbury is a tough old bird and not given to fantasy or superstition. On the other hand: this morning, the strange, birdlike man in a linen wrap—a hood? A cowl? A bandage?—which hid his face.
“Leprosy is curable,” he says firmly. Revolting, but curable and natural and not easily caught.
“Joe, they’re not just sick. It’s more than that. The lepers and the Hakote were both outcast groups, all right? So they got lumped together. People started to think of them as the same thing, but they weren’t. And the lepers, Joe, they were more scared of the Hakote than the other way around. This is modern people, not medieval peasants. And … well, I don’t know. It’s like the tomb of the Pharaohs, isn’t it? There’s a long record of people dying from being too close.”
“To what?”
“I think knowing that is what you’re supposed to die of.”
“Cecily …”
“Oh, don’t be so bloody dense, Joe! Of course it’s all hogwash, but it’s hogwash with dead people attached and I don’t want you to be one of them!”
“Nor do I. Well, fine. They’re bad. Pirates, murderers, whatever. I don’t have the book, but someone thinks I do, and that could be a problem.” He can hear her pursing her lips to argue, pushes on. “I need to know more. If it’s dangerous, that makes it more important. I’m in this somewhere. I think it might have something to do with Daniel. Can you check that, too?” He wants to get off the phone. He’s irrationally angry with Cecily for turning his day into an emergency.
“Daniel Spork? Your grandfather Daniel? Why would you think that? Who have you been talking to?”
But Joe doesn’t want to answer that one, not yet, so he mumbles something and repeats his request. Cecily, after a moment to make it clear she has noticed that she’s being fobbed off, doesn’t press.
“I’ll check the file. You’ve got most of his things there, though. What there is.”
“Just some old clothes and his jazz collection.”
There’s a brief silence, then: “His what?”
“Jazz. Music.”
“I am aware, you young pup, that jazz is music—and one of the highest forms thereof. All right, then, start with that.”
“Why?”
“Because unless I’ve gone completely mad, Joe, your grandfather hated jazz. Loathed it. Apparently there was a jazz band playing in the ship he came over from France in during the war. They came down into the hold and played for the refugees when the convoy was under attack. Bombs falling, the whole iron tub clanging and banging, and they danced their way to Blighty. Daniel couldn’t listen to it afterwards. He said all he could hear was shells falling and men screaming.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
“Well, no. It’s not a story for children, I dare say.”
No. Apparently his day is going to be rather dark.
“I need anything you can find out.”
“Be careful, Joe. Please.”
“I will. I am.”
“Yes. You are. All right. Give me a day or so, and bring me a pork pie.”
Joe laughs for the first time, brief respite. Cecily is strictly forbidden pork pies by her doctor, but the Rippon Pie, which she regards as the Platonic form, is her absolute favourite and she will brook no denay. For a Rippon Pie, Cecily Foalbury, at twelve stone, five foot two and seventy-one years old, would gladly walk naked through Piccadilly in winter.
He puts down the phone and leans back, staring at the warehouse ceiling and listening to the Thames.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
Oh, sure. It’s easy to say that now.
“Tell you what,” Billy Friend says, three days ago and cab-driver confidential, “I’ve got something which might be useful to you in your professional capacity, not to say your artisanal practice. And a bit of actual paid work, a commission, so to speak, for a reputable client, all above board and squared away. Right? So, what say you do something for me in exchange and call it a finder’s fee? Mutual courtesy, no paperwork, no VAT, everyone’s a winner.” He waggles his eyebrows over the rim of his teacup.