I undid the triple locks, swung open the iron door, switched on the lights, closed the door behind me and descended into the restricted section.
It smelled bad. It always did. These books weren’t like the ones upstairs. Some of these books were deathly cold to the touch. Some of them had to be forcibly dragged from the bookshelves and prised open. They actually resisted you reading them. It was hard to concentrate upon a single sentence. Your thoughts kept wandering. There was one tiny green book with a lumpy binding that I never managed to get down from the shelf. I always wondered just what might be in that one.
On this particular Thursday afternoon I didn’t bother with my usual assault upon it. I hastened to the voodoo section. Mr Seabrook had referred in his book to a tome called Voodoo in Theory and Practice, which had apparently contained the complete instructions for reanimating the dead, and I felt certain that a copy of this would be found somewhere here.
It was.
A greasy little black book with complicated symbols wrought in silver upon its spine. It gave itself up to me without a fight. It seemed almost eager to fall into my hands.
I leafed through it. The actual ceremony involved seemed straightforward enough. But, and there was a big but, it required a great many herbs and difficult-to-acquire items all being stewed up in a human skull and fed to the corpse. This, I considered, might be problematic. This was Brentford, after all, not Haiti. Where, for instance, was I going to find powdered Mandragora? Not at the chemist in the high street. But, and this reduced the big but to a smaller but, I was the bestest friend of Dave and if anything could be found and nicked, then Dave would be the boy to find and nick it.
It would have taken me ages to copy out the list of ingredients and all the details of the ceremony, so I slipped the copy of Voodoo in Theory and Practice into my pocket and prepared to take my leave.
I was almost at the top of the stairs when I heard the noise. It was the noise of the rear and secluded door being unlocked.
The noise caught me somewhat off-guard, because I was sure that the captain slept. So, who might this be? Well, whoever it was, I wouldn’t let them find me. I would wait, very quietly, until they had passed by the iron door and then I would slip out and be away smartly on my toes.
“The restricted section is just down there,” I heard a voice say.
I fled back down the stairs and ducked under them, bunched myself up in a corner and waited.
“The door’s unlocked,” I heard another voice say. “Security around here is a joke. And look, the light’s on too.”
“Hello,” the first voice called down the stairs. “Is someone down there? Captain Runstone, is that you?”
“Of course it isn’t him,” said the other voice. “He’s drunk in his bed. He’s always drunk in his bed at this time on a Thursday. I’ve done my research.”
“Hello,” called the first voice again. “Hello, down there.”
“Stop all that. Come on, follow me.”
“I’ll wait here. You go down.”
“Don’t be such a sissy.”
I heard a scuffle and the first voice saying, “All right, I’m going. There’s no need to push.”
Down the stairs the two of them came. I saw the heels of their shoes through a crack. Shiny and black, those shoes. Then the trousers. They were black as well. And then, when they were both at the foot of the stairs and standing under the light, I could see all of them. Two young men in black suits, with short-cropped hair and pasty pale faces. They looked rather ill and I wondered whether perchance they were suffering from the curly worms that worried from within. I certainly felt as if I was.
“It smells horrible down here,” said the owner of the first voice, the taller – and also the thinner – of the two young men.
The other man said, “Shut up, Ralph.”
The thinner man’s name was Ralph.
“Don’t tell me to shut up, Nigel.”
The other man’s name was Nigel.
“Smells like something’s died in here,” said Ralph.
“It’s the smell of magic,” said Nigel. “Magic always smells like this. It smells a lot worse when it’s being worked; this stuff’s only idling.”
“I should never have taken this job,” said Ralph. “I should have stayed in the drawing office.”
“You wanted action and adventure and now you’ve got it.”
Nigel was nosing about the bookshelves. “There’s some great stuff here. I think I might take one or two of these home to add to my private collection.”
“Mr Boothy would know if you did. He knows everything, you know that.”
“It’s tempting, though, isn’t it?”
“It doesn’t tempt me at all.”
“Well, let’s just get what we’ve come here for and then we’ll leave.”
“Yes, please, let’s do that. What have we come here for anyway?”
Nigel rooted about in his jacket pockets and brought out a slip of paper. “Alondriel’s Trajectories,” he said, “Arkham, 1705.”
“Bound, no doubt, in human skin.”
“Just red cloth. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“I’m not disappointed at all. So what is to be found in Alondriel’s Trajectories and what does the old man want it for?”
“Old man Boothy doesn’t confide in me. Perhaps it’s something to do with the communications project.”
“Oh, that,” said Ralph, scuffing his heels and hunching his shoulders. “I don’t think I believe in all that.”
“No?” Nigel asked, as he ran his fingers over book spines and peeped and peered and poked. “You know better, do you? You know better than the experts? All the boffins? All the ministers? All the brains behind these projects? You know better than all of them?”
“I’m not saying that I know better. I just said that I don’t think I believe in it.”
“It’s only a theory so far, but I think it makes a lot of sense,” said Nigel, still peering and prodding and poking. “And if it’s true, then it answers a whole lot of big questions and opens up a lot of opportunities.”
“Receivers,” said Ralph, with contempt in his voice. “That we’re all just, what? Radio receivers?”
Nigel turned upon him. “Receivers and communicators,” he said. “But what we really are is not up here.” He tapped at his temple. “It’s out there somewhere.” He pointed towards out there generally. “It works through us, but it’s bigger than us.”
“All right,” said Ralph. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the theory in essence. The theory is that human beings – that’s you and me and everybody else – are not really thinking, sentient life forms. We are alive – we eat, we breathe, we reproduce – but we don’t actually think.”
“In essence,” said Nigel. “It’s a bit like television sets. You sit and watch them, you see the pictures, you hear the sounds, but they’re being broadcast from somewhere else. The TVs are only receivers that pass on information.
“And the theory is that human beings are like that. Our brains don’t actually do our thinking. Our thinking is done somewhere else, by something other than us, then broadcast to our brains.
“And the brains send messages to our muscles and make our bodies function. Move our eyes about, make our voices work, make our willies get a stiffy when we want a shag.”
“So I’m not actually me,” said Ralph. “I’m a sort of puppet being moved by invisible strings by something that I have no knowledge of?”
“That’s the theory.”
“Well, it’s a duff theory. If it were true, then I’d know, wouldn’t I? The ‘I’ that is pulling the invisible strings, I’d be aware that I was doing it. I’d know where I really was.”
“The theory is just a theory, so far. That something that is nonhuman is experiencing life on Earth through us. How can you actually prove that the thinking you do really goes on in your head and not somewhere else?”
“Oh, don’t talk daft. Hit yourself on the head with a hammer, you’ll feel the pain.”
“The sensory apparatus housed in my body will feel the pain. Look, Ralph, you can’t actually feel with your brain, can you? You see through your eyes, but where is the actual image you’re seeing? The image is being projected through the lenses of your eyes into your head and processed in your brain somehow. And it’s somewhere in your head. Is it? Can you be sure? How would you know if it wasn’t? And the sounds you hear through your ears, where are those sounds? Inside your head somewhere? They could be in your armpit – you wouldn’t know any different, you’d just register that you’re ‘hearing’ sounds. If in fact what you’re hearing is actually what’s really there to be heard. Human ears have a somewhat limited range. There’s a lot more noise going around us than we can actually hear.”