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 It’s a perfectly respectable arrangement, albeit outdated and—this being Harticle’s—staunchly analogue.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.