Mutely he strained to slide it quietly from its place; this act accomplished, he slowly shrunk down to his original stature and looked into the book’s brittle pages.
It seemed to be a chronicle of strange dreams. Yet somehow the passages he examined were less a recollection of unruled visions than a tangible incarnation of them, not mere rhetoric but the thing itself. The use of language in the book was arrantly unnatural and the book’s author unknown. Indeed, the text conveyed the impression of speaking for itself and speaking only to itself, the words flowing together like shadows that were cast by no forms outside the book. But although this volume appeared to be composed in a vernacular of mysteries, its words did inspire a sure understanding and created in their reader a visceral apprehension of the world they described, existing inseparable from it. Could this truly be the invocation of Vastarien, that improbable world to which those gnarled letters on the front of the book alluded? And was it a world at all?
Rather the unreal essence of one, all natural elements purged by an occult process of extraction, all days distilled into dreams and nights into nightmares. Each passage he entered in the book both enchanted and appalled him with images and incidents so freakish and chaotic that his usual sense of these terms disintegrated along with everything else. Rampant oddity seemed to be the rule of the realm; imperfection became the source of the miraculous—wonders of deformity and marvels of miscreation. There was horror, undoubtedly. But it was a horror uncompromised by any feeling of lost joy or thwarted redemption; rather, it was a deliverance by damnation. And if Vastarien was a nightmare, it was a nightmare transformed in spirit by the utter absence of refuge: nightmare made normal.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t see that you had drifted in here,” said the bookseller in a high thin voice. He had just emerged from the inner chamber of the room and was standing with arms folded across his wide chest. “Please don’t touch anything.
And may I take that from you?” The right arm of the bookseller reached out, then returned to its former place when the man with the pale eyes did not relinquish the merchandise.
“I think I would like to purchase it,” said Keirion. “I’m sure I would, if. …”
“Of course, if the price is reasonable,” finished the bookseller. “But who knows, you might not be able to understand how valuable these books can be. That one …,” he said, removing a little pad and pencil from inside his jacket and scribbling briefly. He ripped off the top sheet and held it up for the would-be buyer to see, then confidently put away all writing materials, as if that would be the end of it.
“But there must be some latitude for bargaining,” Keirion protested.
“I’m afraid not,” answered the bookseller. “Not with something that is the only one of its kind, as are many of these volumes. Yet that one book you are holding, that single copy. …”
A hand touched the bookseller’s shoulder and seemed to switch off his voice.
Then the crow-man stepped into the aisleway, his eyes fixed upon the object under discussion, and asked: “Don’t you find that the book is somewhat… difficult?”
“Difficult,” repeated Keirion. “I’m not sure. … If you mean that the language is strange, I would have to agree, but—”
“No,” interjected the bookseller, “that’s not what he means at all.”
“Excuse us for a moment,” said the crow-man.
Then both men went back into the inner room, where they whispered for some time.
When the whispering ceased, the bookseller came forth and announced that there had been a mistake. The book, while something of a curiosity, was worth a good deal less than the price earlier quoted. The revised evaluation, while still costly, was nevertheless within the means of this particular buyer, who agreed at once to pay it.
Thus began Victor Keirion’s preoccupation with a certain book and a certain hallucinated world, though to make a distinction between these two phenomena ultimately seemed an error: the book, indeed, did not merely describe that strange world but, in some obscure fashion, was a true composition of the thing itself, its very form incarnate.
Each day thereafter he studied the hypnotic episodes of the little book; each night, as he dreamed, he carried out shapeless expeditions into its fantastic topography. To all appearances it seemed he had discovered the summit or abyss of the unreal, that paradise of exhaustion, confusion, and debris where reality ends and where one may dwell among its ruins. And it was not long before he found it necessary to revisit that twelve-sided shop, intending to question the obese bookseller on the subject of the book and unintentionally learning the truth of how it came to be sold.
When he arrived at the bookstore, sometime in the middle of a grayish afternoon, Victor Keirion was surprised to find that the door, which had opened so freely on his previous visit, was now firmly locked. It would not even rattle in its frame when he nervously pushed and pulled on the handle. Since the interior of the store was lighted, he took a coin from his pocket and began tapping on the glass. Finally, someone came forward from the shadows of the back room.
“Closed,” the bookseller pantomimed on the other side of the glass.
“But. …” Keirion argued, pointing to his wristwatch.
“Nevertheless,” the wide man shouted. Then, after scrutinizing the disappointed patron, the bookseller unlocked the door and opened it far enough to carry on a brief conversation. “And what is it I can do for you. I’m closed, so you’ll have to come some other time if—”
“I only wanted to ask you something. Do you remember the book that I bought from you not long ago, the one—”
“Yes, I remember,” replied the bookseller, as if quite prepared for the question. “And let me say that I was quite impressed, as of course was … the other man.”
“Impressed?” Keirion repeated.
“Flabbergasted is more the word in his case,” continued the bookseller. “He said to me, ‘The book has found its reader,’ and what could I do but agree with him?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Keirion.
The bookseller blinked and said nothing. After a few moments he reluctantly explained: “I was hoping that by now you would understand. He hasn’t contacted you? The man who was in here that day?”
“No, why should he?”
The bookseller blinked again and said: “Well, I suppose there’s no reason you need to stand out there. It’s getting very cold, don’t you feel it?” Then he closed the door and pulled Keirion a little to one side of it, whispering: “There’s just one thing I would like to tell you. I made no mistake that day about the price of that book. And it was the price—in full—which was paid by the other man, don’t ask me anything else about him. That price, of course, minus the small amount that you yourself contributed. I didn’t cheat anyone, least of all him. He would have been happy to pay even more to get that book into your hands. And although I’m not exactly sure of his reasons, I think you should know that.”
“But why didn’t he simply purchase the book for himself?” asked Keirion.
The bookseller seemed confused. “It was of no use to him. Perhaps it would have been better if you hadn’t given yourself away when he asked you about the book.