CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
TWO WEEKS LATER
The nearest port is Kepesake and it's not worth trying. From what childhood memories I can recall- seagulls carrying away the scraps of beach picnics, pier cafes with tattered striped awnings, kites on poles with advertisements printed across them- I know better. There's nothing there; just scurfy beaches and shouting and windblown sandwich wrappers.
Where I need to look is where I am heading. The few passengers on this train all seem as preoccupied as I. They aren't tourists, I don't think; they'd all be headed in towards the countryside, not the other way round. Everyone I passed on the way to my seat had the closed, inward expressions of people with agendas. I suppose, were there a mirror in sight, I would too.
The steward's hatchet face hovers over the seats as he moves down the aisle, his voice calling the station passing over us, muffled by the scrapings of passengers digging around in their bags. I haven't brought a bag myself. Really this is only an errand. Really this trip isn't necessary at all. I already know what I will find. It's more so that I might have confirmation, can give the stubborn center in my mind proof enough to end its tension. These past weeks the cave has done its work on me, but even so, my time in the house is permeated by an anticipatory silence- a waiting for the voice which is now absent. I can't continue it; Seamus is not coming back; I need to extinguish in myself the idea that he might.
In my coat pocket I'm carrying a notebook, pencil, and enough money to pay for an answer, even provided the answer is expensive. The other pocket holds a single ivory die which I found left behind in the kitchen. He'd been trying to inveigle Rosalind into gambling. I know this, having heard them through the wall; I heard his wicked laugh after he won, I heard her crooning as he returned the pennies to her. At the time I decided that was gallantry. It wasn't till I picked up the die myself, later, that I realized it was weighted. He'd cheated. Even now in my pocket it's probably sixth-side up. I can't say why I've brought it along.
Stepping onto the platform I experience again that incredible reassurance that the city always brings me: though I might feel isolated at home, the isolation of this metropolis is astounding- thousands of people and each in their own armor. I am only forty minutes by rail from the dark heart of the countryside but I've arrived in bedlam. The air here is much hotter, the sky much thicker, the assault of smells breathtaking. People everywhere, jostling, washed and not, a miasma of perfumes and old fruit and rotting fish, dirty hair, saltwater, tar, the harsh stink of hot machinery, a steady ripe undercurrent of shit, and everywhere and saturating every thing: coal, coal, coal. I raise my head and breathe through my mouth and wade gingerly through hats and valises until I'm on the pavement.
It only takes a half-hour. All I had to do is aim for the smell of fish. Around me the narrow streets and thousand voices turn in on each other like tunnels and the closer I get to the smell the more comfortable I am, because here are the people who are living claws-out, by their own determination. No more furs and violet powder. These men in greasy coveralls who have come to work the docks are shouting at one another in a tangle of languages. All around are brick warehouses, wool and tea, tall enough to block the sun from the alleys, and a current of slime runs alongside me in the dark gutter. The noise is unbelievable. On my left looms an icehouse, a gigantic crude Norwegian flag painted across its brick and several men in violent argument in the gangway. I turn left again toward the quay. And here I pick up the trail- a short thick man in a red wool sweater shrunken like a sausage casing, with the neck and jaw and beady almond eyes of a bull terrier, with a gait almost comically bowlegged and carrying a canvas sack. It's him who I need to follow.
I do so unobtrusively, almost a block behind. It's not difficult even when he turns a corner. A powerful stench of fried onions is issuing from him. We stroll together through a succession of ripe alleys, through a small courtyard in which a garbage fire has very recently occurred, and emerge right on the edge of the water, along a narrow planked alley that leads straight to the sunlit facade of my target.
My target is a wooden building attached by stilts to a monstrous brick warehouse at the edge of the pier. Men mill around it with their bags. Beside it, almost as an apology, someone has built a similar wreck, also on stilts, with a sign designating it a Christian ministry and which appears to be ignored but for the stairs, which are full of men sleeping with their heads resting on their folded arms.
My heart is beating even as I know I'm too late. All of these men are strangers. Still, I scan each face. And the ones who look back scan mine, most with lazy curiosity, some with truculence, and one with a smile of such blatant proposition that I am flustered and lower my eyes.
Red Sweater is reading a wall of tattered notices tacked to the board beside the doors, his hands on his hips, and barely parts the way for me as I enter the doorway. Mingled with his cloud of onions, now that we are close, is a woman's artificial-gardenia perfume. Closed indoors, this combination proves so virulent my eyes tear, and as I'm wiping them, entering the dark doorway, I nearly run into the railed wooden barrier, about four feet high, which separates the human masses from the chaos of the registry office.
The man who looks up at me from the chair closes his mouth and frowns. I am not what he usually encounters. But it is precisely my dissonance- my suit, my height, the card I hand him which informs him in ornate blackletter that I am LORD HARTHOME - (accurate, though the card itself is Row's, there being a quantity of them left over and me not feeling any especial desire to have my own printed up) - which gains me the upper hand.
He blinks at me. I've never seen a man who looks more fit for his occupation; he is almost perfectly a barnacle. I keep my voice low as though I am ashamed to be seen here, which I am, but not for the reason he would assume.
"My apologies. I must see the registry. There has been a theft, and I believe the man involved has passed through here." The truth, if inverted: in my pocket is Seamus' ivory die, which I did take.
Normally, I assume, the registry is off-limits, but my card wins the Barnacle over. After some back-and-forth of dates and flipping through stacks I am handed a folio of lists, names in varied illiterate hands, the majority ink-spattered due to holding the pen incorrectly, some merely an X. And then, in a familiar broad, tilted script, down at the end of the page: Tulloch Seamus ORKNEY. To the East Indies.
The dark, stuffy room grows darker, everything a touch darker. I feel suddenly very tired, and wish I were closer to home. The Barnacle purses his lips.
On inspiration I flip backwards through the months. Names, all nationalities, most Scandinavian, Irish. Some repeated. And there it is, under Arrivals on the steamer Gen'vieve. A day before answering my notice. Only one day.
He must've looked at the board outside the door behind me, saw nothing worth taking on, bought a paper. Saw my notice. Boarded the train I've just left. Plausible. Perhaps.
The Barnacle's hand closes around the notes I place in it so quickly it might be a mousetrap. We nod at one another, and I turn back outside to the midday sunlight. Red Sweater has gone, of course. Replacing him is a man with such a similar, bull-pup build that I stare in spite of myself, but this one's sweater is white Scottish wool, or at least, it once was. And I am struck by the rootlessness, the anonymity, the interchangeability of these men. On one hand this is poignant, but on the other, it offers a them freedom I can't imagine.
.
There is another thing I came here to do, although I am embarrassed of even entertaining it, and have told myself I wouldn't. But here I find myself, walking fast. Unfortunately the library is not all that far from the station, or I might've managed to talk myself out of it. My knees ache- I'm not accustomed to pavement- and sweat is collecting between my shoulderblades. None of this concerns me as I face the glassed Jacobethan facade of the library.
What I want is up a stairwell and inside a midden of stacks suspended on a balcony of scrolled iron grilles. Beneath my feet the shadows of bodies pass back and forth. The hushed echo of their footsteps sounds almost like breathing. Across the narrow passage from me a woman sits in an armchair. I keep my back to her.
The cover- Beasts and Spirits of Folklore- depicts, in embossed gold foil, grinning elves holding hands in a meadow. This could be humorous were it less disgusting. Also disgusting is to find our incredible complexity, all our otherworldly histories, condensed into cursory summation and pressed into this narrow little green book.
It's old enough that the paper has the bready softness of decay, only a few years away from disintegration. I'm careful with it although I don't approve of its existence. Opening it at random, here is Familiars; it's written in alphabetical order and I'm in F, just after Fairyland.
An etching, a black cat- the Familiar, of course- standing beside a woman with a toad leaping from her mouth. I flip near the end, gently.
Troll. A bumpy little man in torn pants. I lick my thumb. A few pages backwards and here it is, the flesh of the story whose bones I found in my own book at home. I was right. There exists, then, a name for what Seamus is. I say it aloud, under my breath, and find that even the name itself is beautiful. I can imagine how it sounds in his own tongue. The etching under the name is ridiculous, a sailor standing on a rock beside a scribbled pelt, a naked young woman bobbing in the sea before him. It looks like an advertisement for cigars.
If I were anyone else but myself, these three pages would be an archaic joke. But in them- between the histrionics and obvious inventions- is the unmistakeable razor of a truth. I read the entry quickly- and then over again, slowly. It is exactly what I wanted to know. My hands tremble a little. I'd like to pull the pages out and keep them. Instead I copy down the text and put it in my breast pocket.
Before I slide the book back to its crevice in the shelf I find I can't help myself. Turn to the very end of the book. The etching, a moonlit field, a ruin on the hillside in the background. Moonlight glints on the stones of the path, as well as on the figure of the hapless farmer running, hands covering his head. On his back, a huge and shadowed figure, etched black but for teeth and eyes, has attached itself. A bristle of fur at the nape of the neck. No reasoning nor prayer can change him from his form, nor any action but the coming of the Dawn, it reads, beneath.
I look closely at the etching. Clearly it's a work of imagination. Then I scan the text. Too much of it is true.
This time I feel no compunction tearing out the pages. They pull out silently and crumble to shards in my fist. The attendant doesn't look up as I replace the book on the shelf.