Clarkesworld Issue 36 Read online

  He gave me a look of mingled shock and reproach and said, “Oh! That commonplace book. I gave it to Mr. Lucent because it was holograph. Was that wrong?”

  It was now obvious that he did not like me. I was glad he was a naturalist by training; once he had finished his probationary period, I was unlikely to have to deal with him again.

  “No,” I said. “That’s fine.” I was as pleased to leave as he was to have me go.

  I spent the rest of the morning in a treasure hunt that was simultaneously ridiculous and nightmarish, pursuing the trail of the commonplace book from Mr. Ferrick to Mr. Lucent; from Mr. Lucent — who was miffed at me, he said, for rushing away in the middle of things and leaving him “holding the baby,” although whether he meant by that the hole in the plaster, or Mr. Vanderhoef, or possibly Major Galbraith, I could not determine and did not like to ask — to Mr. Roxham; from Mr. Roxham, after a protracted and egregiously dusty search, to Miss Atterbury; from Miss Atterbury to Mr. Vine; and finally from Mr. Vine to Mr. Horton, who said, “Oh, I haven’t gotten to it yet,” and reached unerringly into the middle of one of the stacks of books waiting to be catalogued that surrounded his desk.

  I retreated to my office with my prize and locked the door. The first few pages of the commonplace book told me that its owner was strongly antiquarian in his tastes, largely self-educated, and with an unhealthy penchant for the occult. Judging by the authors he quoted, he must have had quite the collection; the coup of the 1588 Albinus paled in comparison.

  I flipped steadily through the pages, trying not to inhale too deeply, for the book reeked of smoke and secondarily of tobacco, and there was another scent, too faint for me to identify but sharply unpleasant. I was looking for quotes from Carolus Albinus or one of the other books that had been in the crate, and I found them starting about three-quarters of the way through. Albinus; Mundy; a lengthy passage from de Winter on golems; a passage from an even more unpleasant author on the abomination called a Hand of Glory, although I had never seen these particular virtues ascribed to it before; and then the quotes began to be interspersed with dated entries such as one might find in a diary. These were written in a highly elliptical style, using an idiosyncratic set of abbreviations, and I could make neither heads nor tails of them, except for repeated references to “cllg” — ”calling”? — someone or something called White Charles — the literal translation, of course, of Carolus Albinus, but the referent was decidedly not a book. And I did recognize the diagram drawn painstakingly on one verso page.

  He had summoned something he called White Charles — presumably because he was using Carolus Albinus as his principal text, which ought to mean I could use my own knowledge of Carolus Albinus at least to make a guess at what he had been trying to do and what that white scuttling thing was.

  So. He had summoned something, following — or improvising on — the rites of Carolus Albinus. Albinus had been a necromancer who dabbled in alchemy; White Charles was probably a revenant of some kind. The passage about the Hand of Glory suggested several further hypotheses; I was selfishly, squeamishly grateful that he had not discussed that matter in any greater detail. He had wanted power, no doubt, imagining it was something one could acquire like a new umbrella.

  Whatever he had summoned, its actions indicated clearly that it had self-volition, unlike what very little I knew of golems. It had preserved itself from the fire, stowed away with the books — its books? I wondered. Did it know that those particular books were relevant to its existence, or was it mere coincidence? On reaching the museum, it had acted to preserve itself again, scavenged paper, made a nest. It had not, so far as I knew, harmed anyone, although it had greatly perturbed Fiske and Hobden — and Mingus — and had scared the lights and liver out of me. I certainly did not like the idea of a necromantic spider scuttling around the museum, but I could not immediately see any way of either catching or destroying it, and I quailed from the thought of explaining my theory to Dr. Starkweather — or even Mr. Lucent.

  I would watch, I told myself. Probably before long, the thing would die or de-animate or whatever the correct term was, and it would not be necessary to take any action at all.

  But over the next week, it became apparent that if I had decided to watch White Charles, White Charles had also decided to watch me. Any time I was in the museum after dark, the scuttling dogged my footsteps, and I could sit in my office and track the thing’s loathsome progress from wall to ceiling and back to wall. The plaster under the mail room stairs had been patched, but that clearly hadn’t caused White Charles more than a momentary inconvenience.

  It unnerved me, but it still was not doing any harm, and surely it would disintegrate soon. Surely I would not have to . . . to hunt it down, or any of the other melodramatic imaginings that plagued me when I tried to sleep. I wanted desperately to avoid seeing it again, and most especially to avoid seeing it more clearly. This way, at least I could pretend I believed it was some sort of albino spider.

  I was very carefully not thinking about Hands of Glory.

  It was a Wednesday night when I finally finished my article for American Antiquities. I tidied the manuscript into an envelope and started for the mail room to leave it in the box for Miss Rivers the typist, but as I turned into the hallway leading to the mail room, I stopped so abruptly I nearly stumbled over my own feet. There was someone standing in the middle of the hall, a strange slouched figure who was certainly neither Hobden nor Fiske.

  I had thought I was the only person left in the building save the watchmen. “Wh . . . who’s there?” I said, my voice wobbling and squeaking embarrassingly, and groped toward the light switch.

  “Noli facere.”

  It was not a human voice; it crackled and shirred like paper. And it spoke in Latin. I think I knew then, although I did not want to.

  “Who are you? How did you get in here?”

  “In a box,” it said, in Latin. It understood English, even if it would not, or could not, speak it. “Full of smoke and straw and lies.” It took a step toward me, rustling and crackling. I took a step back.

  “What are you?” I said, although I did not expect an answer. I only wanted to distract it while I gathered myself to run for the front entrance and Fiske and Hobden.

  But even as I began to turn, shifting my weight, it said, “I am the ghost of a Hand of Glory.” This time I did fall, sprawling my full ungainly length on the marble; before I could pick myself up, before I could even roll over, it was on top of me, paper scratching and scuffling, pinning me flat, holding my wrists in the small of my back. It should not have been able to hold me — even at the time I knew that, but I could not move, could not free myself.

  “He called me White Charles,” it said, the English words gratingly incongruous, and though it spoke in my ear, there was no breath, only the rustling and sighing of paper. “But he did not know me to name me truly. You do.“

  “No, I don’t!” I said vehemently.

  “You lie,” it said, and I shuddered and cringed into the floor, because it should not have known that, no matter how closely it had observed me.

  And what served it for eyes? Had it fashioned those out of paper, too?

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  It pressed even closer. I had often wondered morbidly what it would be like to be buried under one of the teetering stacks of paper that rose in my office like the topless towers of Ilium; now I knew that I did not want to know. It said, in the soft susurration of paper, “I want freedom.“

  I tried to scream, but there was paper blocking my mouth. I heaved desperately against the — truly, almost negligible — weight on my back, bucking like a wild horse in a dime novel. I could not dislodge it; it seemed to have molded itself to me and merely waited until I was lying still again.

  “It must be you,” it said. “No one else knows what I am.“

  No one else was a threat to it, it meant, but dear God, neither was I! I had no idea how to banish it or to bind it — I did n
ot even know how that foolish antiquarian had managed to summon it. Carolus Albinus alone could never have given him the idea of making a golem from a Hand of Glory, and I could not begin to imagine what mishmash of experiment and tradition and insanity he must ultimately have used.

  The paper crinkled as the thing settled lower. I strained away from the paper covering my mouth and now also my nose, and realized that I did know one thing. The antiquarian had tried to fight his creature by burning his books; he had failed, but he had hurt it. It had taken White Charles several weeks in the museum to reach the point where it could be a danger to anyone. Moreover, it had stayed with the books when that was surely the most inconvenient and dangerous course of action. And although it said he had not known it, perhaps there was nevertheless a reason he had called it White Charles.

  It was the ghost of a Hand of Glory, it said, yet it clothed itself first in paper.

  Perhaps it was merely panic and lack of oxygen that made me so certain I was correct, but I twisted my head, freeing my mouth, and said, “White Charles,” as loudly and clearly as I could. I felt the thing flinch.

  “That is your name,” I said. “Your name and your nature, and you cannot escape it.”

  Its hold on me loosened; I lunged free, crawled a few awkward paces, then got my feet under me and ran. I did not look back. The single sheets of paper that flew around me and slid under my feet were evidence enough. I had hurt it; worse than that, I had guessed its secret. It would not confront me directly again if it could help it.

  I was not foolish enough to believe that that meant I was safe.

  In the front entrance, behind the long curving counter that separated the coat check from the rotunda with its Foucault’s Pendulum ceaselessly swinging, Mr. Fiske and Mr. Hobden came to their feet in alarm as I burst through the doors.

  “I need your help,” I said between heaving, panting breaths.

  “All right, sir,” said one, after exchanging an unfathomable look with the other. “What is it you need?”

  “The furnace is going, isn’t it?”

  A stupid question, but they took it in good part. “Yes, sir,” one of them said, taking a step forward. “First of October, just like clockwork. Takes a powerful amount of heating, the museum does.”

  “And you have the, er, the keys? To the boiler room?”

  “I do.”

  “Then please, if you’d, er . . . That is, there’s something I need to burn.”

  “All right,” he said equitably, as if he had received stranger requests. Given how long the two of them had worked for the museum, I supposed it was possible that he had.

  “What is it you’re wanting to burn, Mr. Booth?” said the other, and I was appalled by my own inability to remember which of them was Fiske and which was Hobden.

  “Ah,” I said. “As to that, I, um . . .”

  “Fiske, sir,” he said, without any trace of surprise or resentment. I wondered in miserable distracted panic how many times he had faced that blank look from men who saw him every day.

  “Fiske, yes. I, er, I’m going to need your help. I need to get into Dr. Starkweather’s office.”

  “Oh,” said Fiske. “Oh dear.”

  Most of the books from Miss Parrington’s crate were readily accessible to me. The commonplace book was still in my office; the others were languishing in the communal office of the junior archivists. But the valuable one, Carolus Albinus’ De Spiritu et Morte, Prague 1588, was immured in Dr. Starkweather’s office against the alleged depredations of Mr. Browne and the Department of Restoration and Repairs.

  Mr. Fiske had the key to Dr. Starkweather’s office, of course, but he balked at letting me in to appropriate something I had already confessed I intended to burn. His position was entirely reasonable and understandable, and it made me so frustrated that I wanted to sit down and howl at the ceiling. Finally, in desperation, I said, “This will get rid of the, er, the rats that aren’t rats.”

  Fiske’s eyebrows rose. But he said, “Well, nothing else has, true enough. All right. But when he asks, I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Absolutely. I’ll tell him I picked the lock.”

  “Can you?”

  “No, but I doubt Dr. Starkweather will, er, ask for a demonstration.”

  “Fair enough,” Fiske said, and he escorted me — and my increasingly unwieldy stack of books — to Dr. Starkweather’s office. It took me only a moment to find the De Spiritu et Morte, for unlike my own, Dr. Starkweather’s office was immaculately tidy and oppressively well-organized. Fiske watched from the doorway, and he locked the door again when I came out.

  “That it?” he said.

  “Yes. This is all of them.” I thought it likely that the only book it was necessary to destroy was the De Spiritu et Morte, but I was not prepared to gamble.

  Hobden was waiting in the doorway of the boiler room, and he was not alone. For a moment, in bad light and panic, I thought the other person was White Charles, but then he shifted a little, and I realized it was Achitophel Bates, the colored man who maintained the boilers and other machinery of the museum’s infrastructure. I had thought — assumed — hoped — that he had already gone home.

  “Good evening, Mr. Booth,” he said. He was Southern by birth, and spoke with a slow unhurriable dignity even to Dr. Starkweather.

  “Er . . . good evening. I . . . that is . . .” I looked at Hobden, who merely shook his head.

  “Mr. Hobden says you’re wanting to burn some books.” Achitophel Bates was a tall, thin man, as tall as I, and when he looked into my eyes, he did not have to crane to do so. “Seems like a funny thing for an archivist like yourself to want, Mr. Booth.”

  I was unaccustomed to have anyone identify my profession correctly, much less a colored mechanic, and my surprise must have shown, for he said, “Not all colored men are ignoramuses, Mr. Booth. Some of us can even read.”

  “I . . . I didn’t mean . . .” But I could not take back words I had not said, words I would never have said aloud.

  Achitophel Bates waved the matter aside with one long hand. “But tell me, why are you burning books at this time of night?”

  I did think of lying, but it was hopeless. Even if I had had any gift for deception, I had no story I could tell. I had nothing but the truth, and so that was what I told Achitophel Bates and the listening Hobden and Fiske. Achitophel Bates’ eyebrows climbed higher and higher as I spoke, and when I had finished — or, at least, had run out of words — there was a long silence. In it I could see Achitophel Bates trying to decide if this was some sort of elaborate and cruel hoax. Certainly, it was a more plausible explanation than my lame and faltering truth.

  “You remember the trouble we had with Mingus,” said Hobden or Fiske.

  “I do,” said Achitophel Bates, and he looked thoughtfully from me to the watchmen and back again. “You think this is part of that same trouble, Hob?”

  “Mr. Booth thinks so,” said the watchman, and therefore he was Hobden and surely I could remember that if I tried. “And he’s a learned man.”

  Achitophel Bates snorted. “Learned men. Haven’t you been working here long enough to know about learned men, Hob?”

  “Mr. Booth ain’t like Dr. Starkweather,” said Fiske mildly. “Or like that crazy man — what was his name? — who came down here and tried to get you to sabotage the boilers.”

  “Mr. Clarence Clyde Blessington,” Achitophel Bates said, rolling the name out with a certain degree of relish.

  “Oh dear,” I said involuntarily. “Mr. Blessington is, er . . .”

  “A committed Marxist and a card-carrying member of the Communist Party,” Achitophel Bates finished. “Yes, I know. He told me. He showed me the card, even, when he was trying to persuade me that he knew what being oppressed by the bourgeoisie was like better than I did. Tell you the truth, I prefer Mr. Vanderhoef. He won’t admit I exist, but at least he doesn’t try to improve me.” His sigh was a mixture of exasperation and contempt. “So just be
cause he’s a learned man, Fiske, doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.”

  “I . . . I wouldn’t . . .” But what was it, exactly, that I would not do? I settled on, “I wouldn’t tell a lie like that,” even though that was not, exactly, the point at issue.

  “I admit,” said Achitophel Bates, “that I would expect a liar to have a better story — and to tell it better, too. And I do remember the trouble you had with your dog, Hob, and that’s not behavior I’ve ever seen out of a ratter. So, all right. Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say there’s some sort of monster wandering around the museum. I still don’t see why you need to burn those books.”

  “I told you,” I said despairingly. Had he not understood? “It’s the only way I can think of to destroy it.”

  “And destroying it has to be the answer?”

  “It tried to kill me!”

  “Well, what choice did it have?” Achitophel Bates said reasonably, and I stared at him, abruptly and utterly bereft of words. “It doesn’t want to be your slave.”

  “I don’t want — ”

  “I know. And I believe you. For one thing, I figure if that’s what you wanted, you could manage it for yourself, you being a learned man and all.” And I winced at the derision in his voice. “But how is White Charles supposed to know that?”

  And when I floundered, he pressed his point: “You’ll forgive me if I have some sympathy for a slave who wants to be free.”

  He was not old enough to have been a slave — but of course, I realized, flushing hot with my own failure to think the matter through, his parents would have been.

  “I . . . I don’t want to enslave anyone. But I also don’t want to be killed so that White Charles can be free of the slavery I’m not trying to . . . that is . . .” I became hopelessly muddled in my own syntax and fell silent.

  “That’s a reasonable position,” Achitophel Bates said, so gravely that I suspected he was mocking me. “So what you need isn’t to burn it. You need to talk to it.”

  “You, er, you are assuming that it is an entity with whom one can have a reasoned conversation.”