She took a stepstool from a shadow, climbed it, and switched on a light that extended over one of the drawers. She squinted and adjusted the glasses on her nose. “This is what you are here for, no doubt.”
Unwin perused the titles quickly. There they were, in chronological order—all the work he had done in his twenty years, seven months, and some-odd days at the Agency, every word of every case file, the great works and the lesser-known, the grand capers and the minor mysteries. They barely filled the single drawer.
Miss Burgrave watched attentively as Unwin drew out the file for The Oldest Murdered Man. A long card was fixed to the back of the file, covered with typed references to files elsewhere in the archives. Here was the original mystery, upstairs with Miss Benjamin, here the case files of other detectives overlapping with this one. And below them references to another archive, a third.
He said to Miss Burgrave, “These refer to files kept by Miss Palsgrave. What are they?”
Miss Burgrave winced. “For a Chief Clerk of Mysteries,” she said, “that Miss Benjamin has a great deal to say. How I long for the days of Miss Margrave, who preceded her in the position. Now, there was a woman who knew how to keep a thing to herself. She died just a few days after she retired. Nothing unusual in that. Some people have little in them except the work. But it’s something of a syndrome here at the Agency. Clerks and underclerks are immune, mind you. But anyone who knows anything about anything is granted a very short retirement. I will have my own before long, I suppose. And if laws of proportion apply, then my retirement shall be very short indeed. And your own watcher—which is to say your detective’s watcher—is due to retire soon. A nice man, Ed Lamech. I’ll miss him.”
Unwin understood then that Miss Burgrave knew nothing about his recent promotion. And why would she? His promotion was a mystery even to him, and Miss Burgrave knew only the solutions. So she had not heard of Lamech’s murder either.
“You hesitate to speak,” Miss Burgrave said, “and I warned you once about our tolerance for mysteriousness on this floor.”
He chose his words carefully. “It was the discovery of Lamech’s death, among other mysteries, Miss Burgrave, that brought me here.”
She covered her mouth with one small hand, steadying herself against the file drawer with the other. After a moment she said, “Now, Ed Lamech, he and I used to play cards together. That was before all this, of course. Miss Margrave and I shared a desk, and the archive was just two cardboard boxes at the back of the room: one for mysteries, one for solutions. Edwin Moore kept the files in order. There was a big table at the center of the room where the detectives would lay out mug shots and maps of the city. They smoked and talked big and planned stings; Ed was the loudest of the bunch, but he always had something nice to say. He knew how to make a person feel a little taller. Some nights we’d clear off the table and play a few hands, all of us together. Yes, I always thought Ed Lamech and I might sit down and play cards again, when we found the time.”
She switched off the light and said, “Help me down the stepladder, Mr. Unwin,” and he did, but when she reached the floor, she did not let go of his hand. “This way.”
Unwin’s eyes did not have time to adjust as Miss Burgrave pulled him more and more quickly through the darkness between the walls. When a drawer opened or closed, a band of light from the archive swept momentarily across the floor, but that was all, and Unwin knew he would not find his way back on his own. They came to a corridor that was almost entirely dark, from the walls of which no file drawers extended.
“You go that way,” Miss Burgrave said, “and you tell Miss Palsgrave that I sent you, though I doubt she cares anymore about what I have to say.”
She took her hand back and added, “She works here, but she’s never been like the rest of us; not really. Her curriculum vitae is a curious one, to say the least. Be wary of her. Be polite.”
Unwin said, “I will, Miss Burgrave. But please, tell me one thing. If you know your underclerks only by their coughs, how did you know me?”
“Oh, Mr. Unwin, don’t you know you’re one of my own children? Your work has given me some pleasure through the years. When you leave a thing, you leave it where no doubt can touch it. I will not wish you luck. Of your success or failure I will hear in due course.”
Unwin heard her footsteps receding, glimpsed the silver of her hair as it passed an open file drawer. And then Miss Burgrave was gone.
He went alone into the dark. The passage sloped downward and curved to the left, tracing a spiral through the earth. Sometimes he kept his eyes open and sometimes he shut them; it made little difference. Miss Burgrave had been right about him: he left matters where no doubt could touch them. But that had been his flaw, to bind mystery so tightly, to obscure his detective’s missteps with perfect files. Somehow Unwin had made false things true.
At last his hands found something solid. He felt around the wall, found there the cool roundness of a doorknob and beneath it the gap of a keyhole. He knelt and peered through.
At the center of a vast, dark room were two velvet chairs set on a round blue rug. A blue-shaded floor lamp was set between them, and in its light a phonograph was playing. The music was all drowsy strings and horns, and then a woman began to sing. He knew the melody.
It may be a crime,
But I’m sure that you’re mine
In my dream of your dream of me.
The doorknob turned in his hand, and Unwin entered the third archive of the Agency offices.
THIRTEEN
On Cryptography
The coded message is a lifeless thing, mummified and
entombed. To the would-be cryptologist we must
offer the same advice we would give the grave
robber, the spelunker, and the sorcerer of legend:
beware what you dig up; it is yours.
A distance of perhaps fifty paces separated him from the chairs, one pink, the other pale green. Unwin felt drawn to the warmth of the electric light, to the languid music playing there, to the voice that could only have been Miss Greenwood’s. It looked to him as though a cozy parlor had been set down in the middle of a cavern. He went toward it, feeling alone and insubstantial. He could not see his arms or his legs, could not see his own shoes. All he could see were the chairs, the lamp, and the phonograph. All he could hear was the music.
The floor was flat and smooth. A floor like that should have set his shoes squeaking, but they were muffled—by the darkness itself, Unwin thought. He kept his mouth shut tight. He did not want to let any of the darkness in.
He stopped at the edge of the blue rug and stood very still. Here was a boundary between worlds. In the one were chairs, and music, and light. In the other there were none of these things, nor even the words for chair, or music, or light.
He did not cross over, only observed from the safety of his wordless dark. Phonograph records were stacked in a cabinet near the green chair, and on top of the cabinet stood a row of books. One of the books looked exactly like the red volume that Miss Burgrave had taken from the secret panel in her office. But everything in the parlor was subjugated to that pink chair. It was nearly three times as large as the green one. Anyone sitting in it would seem a child in proportion. It was the most sinister piece of furniture Unwin had ever seen. He could not imagine sitting in it. He could not imagine sitting in the one that faced it.
He took a step back. The chair would spring upon him if he gave it the chance, devour him whole. If only he could call it by name, he thought, then it might be tamed. Or if he had not given his umbrella to Edwin Moore, he could open it and shield himself from the sight.
From the farthest recesses of the room came a flash of light, bright and brief as the death of a little sun, and for the moment in which it burned, Unwin saw the walls in that region of the archive—saw that they were lined, not with filing cabinets but with shelves of phonograph records. The source of the light was a gigantic machine, a labyrinth of valves and pipes and pisto
ns. It hissed and coughed steam into the air, resembling nothing so much as an oversize waffle iron. The light burst from the space between two great plates, pressed together by the machine’s operator. She had wide shoulders and thick forearms, and it might have been a trick of light or perspective, but she appeared impossibly large, a titanic blacksmith at her infernal forge.
Unwin knew that this was the chief clerk Miss Palsgrave. The pink chair could only have been hers.
By the time the vision faded, the song on the phonograph had come to an end. The needle reached the lead-out and rose by itself, and the record stopped turning.
The darkness was no longer oppressive to him, nor was Miss Palsgrave’s colossal chair. Worse was the thought that Miss Palsgrave herself would come closer, to put on a new record.
He retreated farther into the darkness, and the air grew warmer as he walked. There was a stale, burning odor in the air, like electrical discharge or the breath of the oversleeping. From all around came coughing sounds, rasps, weird mumblings. Unwin was not alone. But did those who made the sounds know that he was among them?
Something snagged his foot, nearly tripping him. He knelt and searched with his hand, found a rubberized cord stretched over the floor. This he followed several feet to the leg of a table. The table was knee-high, and there was a lamp on top of it. He found the switch and flipped it.
The shaded bulb cast its dim yellow light over a low, narrow bed. Its occupant was an underclerk—he wore an unfashionable gray suit and lay with his bowler perched on his chest. The bed was made up with drab, olive-colored blankets, but the underclerk slept on top of them rather than beneath. His little mustache trembled with each softly whistled exhalation, and his feet were bare. On the floor beside the bed were a pair of furry brown slippers, like two rabbits.
A little machine whirred softly on the table beside the lamp. It was a phonograph, though of a simpler, more utilitarian design than the one at the center of the archive. A ghost-white record, like the one Unwin had found in Lamech’s office, revolved under the needle. The phonograph produced no sound that he could hear; it had no amplifying bell. Instead it was equipped with a pair of bulbous headphones, which the underclerk wore as he slept.
Other beds nearby were arranged, like the desks of the fourteenth floor, in three long rows. In each of them an underclerk lay sleeping. Some made use of their blankets, some did not. Some slept in their suits, some in pajamas, and some had black sleeping masks strapped over their eyes. All wore identical headphones plugged in to quietly humming phonographs.
Unwin leaned close to the underclerk’s head, gently lifted the earpiece, and listened. All he heard was static, but the static was richly patterned, rising and falling in waves, cresting, breaking, receding. In time other sounds became apparent. He heard a muted honking, like traffic at a distance of several city blocks or birds circling over the sea. He heard animals calling from the depths of that sea and smaller animals scuttling over the sand at its bottom. He heard someone turning the pages of a book.
The underclerk opened his eyes and looked at him. “They’ve sent extra help, have they? Not a moment too soon.”
Unwin let go of the earpiece and stood straight.
The underclerk’s eyes closed, and for a moment it seemed he might fall asleep again, but then he shook his head and removed the headphones. “It’s unprecedented,” he said. “What is it, almost two in the afternoon? And they’re still sending fresh recordings.”
He sat up and rubbed his face with both hands. “It’s as though no one is waking up. But the subjects lack culpability modulations of any kind, and the delineations are too vivid to be self-generated. And then there’s the smaller bunch, all sharing the same image array—a whole subset with nearly identical eidetic representations, and it’s a juvenile construct to boot.” He raised the arm of the phonograph and switched off the machine.
“What is it?” Unwin asked.
“What is what?”
“The repeated . . . eidetic representation,” Unwin managed.
“Oh. It’s a carnival.” The underclerk smirked and rolled his eyes.
There was another flash of light from Miss Palsgrave’s machine, and both men turned to look at it.
“At first I thought it was a transduction error,” the underclerk said, whispering now. “But try telling that to her.” He removed the phonograph record and slid it into its slipcase, slid his feet into the slippers beside the bed. Then he stood, tightened the blankets over the edges of the mattress, and fluffed the pillow. “Well,” he said, “it’s all yours. Feel free to recycle my report if you get one from the circus crowd. You’ll grow tired of hearing it: ‘Something to do, someplace to go.’ What kind of liminal directive is that?”
The underclerk clapped Unwin on the shoulder, then shuffled away into the dark. A minute later Unwin heard a door open and close, and he was alone again with the sleeping underclerks.
Unwin sat on the edge of the bed. He should have been exhausted, but his brain was moving as quickly as his feet had been. The underclerk had repeated the phrases the taxi driver and his passengers had used to identify one another. They were swimming in the same strange dream—but for what purpose had Hoffmann devised it? Hopefully, Moore had made progress with his investigation.
Unwin looked back toward the center of the archive and saw Miss Palsgrave seated in her pink chair. She wore a lavender dress, and her hair was all soft brown curls. From this distance her eyes appeared as dark hollows. She seemed to be watching him.
Unwin stood and began to speak over the distance. “Miss Palsgrave, I—” but she immediately put a finger to her lips.
The nearest underclerks turned in their beds, and some mumbled in their sleep. One adjusted his headphones and said, “Trying to work here.”
Miss Palsgrave began to turn the crank on her phonograph. When she finished, she set the needle down and Cleo Greenwood’s voice, accompanied by an accordion, filled the archive again. Those underclerks who had been disturbed were perfectly quiet now, and Unwin, too, felt the effects of the music.
He set down his briefcase, switched off the light, and settled back onto the bed. It was comfortable despite its small size. He kicked off his shoes without bothering to untie them and swung his legs up onto the mattress. The pillow was very soft, and the blanket, once he had slipped beneath it, was the finest, most luxurious blanket in the world. It might have been made of silk, he thought.
He took off his hat and dropped it beside his shoes. He would never need any of those things again. He would stay down here where no one knew him and sleep through the rest of his days, and when he died, they could tuck him away into a long file drawer, write his name on the label, and close it up forever. His mind lingered for a time in the hinterlands of sleep, words drifting over the border as though on a warm wind, unfastened from their meanings. He had almost let the wind take him when a few of the words appeared in boldface and he woke himself by speaking aloud.
“Papers and pigeons,” he said, and knew he had forgotten something important.
Fighting the effects of Miss Greenwood’s mesmeric voice, he reached over the side of the bed and undid the clasp on his briefcase, found the record from Lamech’s office, and drew it from its sleeve. He fitted it onto the turntable of the electric phonograph by the bed, fumbled with the machine’s controls, and set it playing. Then he found the headphones and put them on.
Miss Greenwood’s voice faded, and with it the somber strains of the accordion music. He heard the familiar static, the shushing, the cadenced crackling. It was a language of sorts, but Unwin understood none of it. Then he stopped hearing the sounds and began instead to see them. The static had shape to it, dimensions; it rose like a waterfall in reverse and then froze in place. More walls leapt up, and in the one before him was a window, in the one behind him a door, and lining the other two were rows of books with blue and brown spines. The static spilled over the floor and made a carpet, made shadows of chairs and then made chairs. br />
The crackling sound was rain tapping against the window. The shushing was the shushing of secrets in a desk, and on the desk were a green-shaded lamp and a typewriter. A man was seated behind it with his eyes closed, breathing very slowly.
“Hello, Mr. Unwin,” Edward Lamech said.
“Sir,” said Unwin, but Lamech raised his hand.
“Do not bother speaking,” he said. “I cannot hear you. Nor, for that matter, can I be certain that it’s you, Mr. Unwin, to whom I am speaking. In recording this session, I am merely preparing for one of many contingencies. I hope that I’ll have the opportunity to place this file directly into your hands. If I do not, or if it falls instead into the hands of our enemies, then . . .” Lamech wrinkled his considerable brow. “Then they will already have understood my intentions, I think, and none of it will matter anymore.”
Lamech opened his eyes. How different they were from those Unwin saw the previous morning. They were watery and blue, and very much alive. But they were blind to his presence.
Lamech rose from his seat, and a hat appeared in his hand. When he put it on, a matching raincoat fell over his shoulders. “I don’t know whether I’ve been able to explain very much to you,” he said. “But since you’re seeing this, then you’ve likely received my instructions and taken this file to the third archive. So you may understand a great deal. Time moves differently here, and that can be confusing to the uninitiated, but it will work to our advantage. I will tell you what more you need to know while we walk together. I have a few errands to run before I go to my appointment.”
He walked toward the door, and Unwin jumped aside to avoid him.