Author Bio

STEVE AYLETT

HIDDEN INK

(chapter 1 of The Book Lovers)

‘A book is like you and me – glued to a spine and doing its best.’
       When Sophie spoke the secret phrase and was led down the corkscrew skeleton of a hidden staircase, she realised she had found fathom gold, the delicious contraband of the spirit.
       And how poorly she had treated Lieutenant Lukas who had directed her here an hour ago! They had sat on a floral iron bench near the automatic bandstand in Lovelace Park and she had all but snipped him in half like a playing card. ‘How goes the war?’ she had asked. In the chill summer sun the candy-coloured affluent of Thousand Tower City promenaded at the approved pace to distance them promptly from their own nose steam. Flamboyantly accelerating and decelerating was forbidden; so was yelping and bounding vertically in the atmosphere. Anything could lead to scandal and everybody smiled. Some gazed into objects which looked like books but were actually mirrors.
       ‘The natives are ungrateful. Our ballistic airframes are very effective, and quite beautiful in their way. There are rumours of new artillery based upon voltaics.’ He glanced casually aside at her. ‘Have you heard?’
       ‘I have heard,’ she said, ‘that their land is still alive and their skin of a colour that allows us to pretend they are not quite human. While at the same time you, Frank, are purporting to be scarlet, with a yellow striped chest and’ – she looked askance at his tall battle hat – ‘a furry black head?’ He was a handsome fellow but, wishing the world to know him as a man, he had put on a costume which made him resemble a toy.
       He smiled. ‘It’s the uniform of my guard, Sophie – it’s meant to be fierce.’
       ‘Surely you are either fierce or you are not. Why wear this? But I admit I’m just as swayed by fashion – look at the nonsense I’m in. Am I a woman or an orchid?’
       Nearby a couple ambled and posed according to the dictates of the season. They were like the clockwork newlyweds on a cake. It made her uneasy to see people acting like machines. Someone might get the idea to scrap them. Any excuse. ‘Well I am a man, for all that,’ Lukas was saying.
       ‘Perhaps, Lieutenant, but I shall never know because you refuse to show me. In all the weeks of our acquaintance, you have never expressed an idea of your own. Without that you are just a manshape skinned of detail. They belittle you by telling you to die for something bigger than yourself. And what’s worse, you would only be dying for them.’
       Over at the tea pavilion, several swells were practicing the new fad of competitive laughter. A gentleman propped a penny farthing bicycle against a topiary cannon and stood there, seemingly wondering what he was about.
       ‘If you were a man and got the call,’ Lukas asked her, ‘would you run away in fear?’
       ‘Fear wouldn’t be the decider – after all, many young men go to war in a state of abject terror.’ Absently she twirled a pink parasol which housed a ten-inch retractable blade. ‘Rather I would take that view which combines individuality and the larger picture – this tends to exclude the compulsion of current events.’
       ‘Current events? It’s war, woman.’
       She gave him a wily look. ‘Sometimes, Lieutenant Lukas, I think you’re fooling me. Are you fooling me? Are you a clock pretending to be slower than it is?’
       The question has been asked, Could any exasperation equal that of Lazarus? Sophie began to suspect that Frank was in the running. He gasped, ‘In the name of god, Sophie, why did you request this meeting?’
       ‘You’re right, I’ve wasted time.’ Reaching into a half-moon clutch she fetched out a book with a pink pearlescent cover and a knobby spine. ‘You kindly gifted me this a week ago. I need to know where you found it.’
       He looked vaguely away as if embarrassed. ‘Oh that? A squalid little book cellar, under a looking-glass shop in Drood Street. Should I have bought you a compact?’
       ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘You were good to give me this. And to dare the terrible risk!’
       ‘Though I don’t understand your passion for such things. And that place! So many words unattached to substance. Too thin for my blood.’ 
       ‘Then how can you ever give your word and mean it, if words have no meaning for you? That sort of promise blossoms and withers in a moment. You know how I feel.’
       ‘Yes, in fact I remember precisely: “The average fusilier is born as a jigsaw, happy to be put together by someone else.” When you said it you seemed very happy and unable to restrain yourself. I believe you delight in rejecting me one piece at a time.’
       ‘I’m sorry, Frank.’ She stood. ‘Whether you are this, or are pretending to be so, I fear we have no meaningful connection. Sadly it seems we lack the will to understand each other. It’s a hard wrench I know, leaving altered parameters. I wish you had just been yourself with me. Goodbye.’ She gave him a polite nod, and set off toward the street. 
        ‘You mistake me, madam!’ he shouted after her. ‘Reality is at every door and window!’
       A ride across Tower Bridge in a kettle cab and Sophie located the mirror shop opposite Dahl’s Chickens. The usual passphrase admitted her to a hidden basement beneath Robeck’s Reflectives.
       The bookherd leading her down the iron stairs was a sickle-faced and stark young man, but coming into view beyond him was the richest cache of ignored treasure she had ever seen. She stepped down to a hexagonal cellar surrounding her with shelved and heaped books lit by Talion lamps. Ingots of colour glinted as though she stood in the stilled drum of a child’s kaleidoscope. There was a glutinous pull in her heart and mind. At that moment the cellar seemed to cradle books bound in flagskin, sharkskin, birdskin, saintskin, snakescale, starhide and sari silk. Books smuggled in from Samarkand and Zanzibar. Foreign packets of data and flavour. Taboo books of prohibited clarities. Flood-damaged books blemished differently on every page. Leechbooks and grimoires, lush as mud. Books with buckles, clasps, locks, tails and babyteeth. Books printed in seven colours, books with pictures and conversations, books with covers worn to a shine like chair seats and others whose skin was getting wrinkled. A book of keyholes, a book of beginnings, a book illustrating ominous curse medals, a book in which every word is a reminder. A book to ruin your summer, gleaming like a scarab. A book bitten down like a sandwich, a book of thorns, a book of page thirteens, a book which confides if your heart is heavy and entertains if it is light. A book written in self-defence, a book of last resort, a book written execution-style. Russian books which cough when opened and close like a rifle shot. A book so unremarkable it must have a secret. A book like the head of a sledgehammer. A book big enough to creak, with pages like geological layers. A book explicating a tarot no-one had ever seen. A book transmitted from one world to another, a book repaired by those who did not understand it, a book complicated as sixteen sisters, a book in which everything is true.
       It was all promise and potential.
       At the back of her throat Sophie felt the gluey ache she had first felt as a child. Shrinking from the doll-like stares of her playmates, she had devoured the books in her father’s collection. In a box of sunlight by the window she tasted a vibratory honeychain of ideas confirming that human beings think and feel, a fact unacknowledged by the real people in her young life. Today her father pretended those books had never existed, home had armoured itself and people were behaving more like dolls than ever. 
       ‘Can I be of service?’ asked the bookherd.
       She retrieved the volume from her half-moon purse. ‘A man gave me this. He acquired it here.’
       ‘Are you returning it? Does it displease you?’ He took the book and scrutinised it.
       ‘No. It happens to be something I read when I was very small, and it struck me that this time the story is quite different.’
       ‘Darkle the Wise by Hugo Carpstein! A flabbergasting feast of invented information! May I ask, have you visited a cellar before?’
       ‘Do I look too proper? I’ve been to Prospero’s, Syme’s and the Fortsas. Nothing like this.’
       ‘Well, those were bookshops once upon a time. This is my collection, everything I’ve read. I opened only a fortnight ago.’
       ‘It’s extraordinary. How on Earth did Frank know about it?’
       ‘Your beau – a soldier wasn’t he? – may be more lively than you think. The nearest I have to a military section is the zeppelin shelf over here, a boyhood interest of mine. And one or two bibles.’ With thin limbs like a grasshopper, the bookherd stalked here and there in a metallic-blue swallowtail coat.
       ‘Did you hear what I said about the book changing?’
       ‘Yes, I’m still thinking about it. I have a hypothesis but it’s preliminary and stupid. If you don’t mind, I’ll present a few alternatives. Sit down.’
       They sat on either side of a small round table covered in arcane bric-a-brac. A green oil lamp lit the bookherd’s cueball eyes. His slicked black hair seemed painted on like tar. ‘To start with the obvious there’s the example of Miss Landon’s Disgrace and Liberty, a mannered romance printed in three different editions.’
       ‘That’s right, in each the heroine ends up marrying a different dullard.’
       ‘Probably meant as a satire, but the characters’ very interchangeability meant it was years before anyone noticed the prank. Then there’s the tradition of fairytale books you can shake like a parcel and the story re-arranges. The phenomenon of expecting a certain word or idea and seeing it, though a different thing is in front of you. Or how the curvature of an idea might slingshot a person in the opposite direction. Also the strange circumstance that when a book is closed, opposite pages touch – sometimes entirely different scenes are pressed against each other, or characters touch a part of their future. What else… Well, we can see how dissatisfaction with scripture as given, and the conclusion that it must be in code, has led to the Maximudic practice of distilling and re-administering a text until every permutation is presented, a process lasting for eternity. The endless re-flourishing is supposed to express the daydreams of creation. No surprise we shut our eyes to such madness. In any case that system was wrecked when someone suggested that the big Word in the Beginning was a reply. It’s called the Zeroth Pickle, I think.’
       When it came to books the young man had the eagerness of a clever boy.
       ‘But maybe what we have here is a forked book,’ he added thoughtfully.
       ‘Forked book? What does that mean?’
       ‘Shelley pioneered it after someone told her they’d seen a man eating shark at a local restaurant. She placed a spinning engine at the heart of a book called Open Fire. From around the halfway point, different readers would perceive the story quite differently, depending on their turn of mind.’
       ‘Isn’t that true of all books?’ 
       ‘This was a very deliberate mechanism. The split occurs when Inspector Veblen says these words: “And who do you think they’ll believe – you or the police?” From that point on, the story can be perceived in two precisely different ways.’
       ‘Depending on what the reader knows of the police?’
       ‘It’s a case of everything in the second half of the book being written to consistently mean two things, according to which groove the reader enters. It’s very difficult to do, without getting all abstract and strange. Whichever version you perceive, you shouldn’t be especially conscious of anything clever being done.’
       ‘How does this apply to Darkle?’
       ‘If Darkle the Wise is a forked book and you yourself have changed markedly since childhood, you might read a different version of it today, with no change to the text.’
       ‘Most things have been clear to me from the start,’ said Sophie with a rueful sadness. ‘I feel certain it’s the text which is changed.’
       ‘Well, this is our copy – we need another for comparison.’
       ‘Syme’s is closest.’
       ‘I’ll go. May Saint Nonnatus clear a path through pesky parades and the Troy Fool save me from clowns.’
       When he had disappeared up the metal steps she fell to browsing the cellar’s cargo. Here was Amnesia and the Match-Strike Devil, in which a family of lighthouse cats declare independence for their small island but are not understood. She found a book of volvelles, its card dials appointing space and time. Airship manuals, a treatise on voltaics, a discourse on etherics, and Ludo Pepper’s celebrated book on Grudge Equations, This Explanation Has Come Too Late. Sophie ran her finger clicking down the knurls of its backbone. There were other items in this strange inventory. A picture of a sneering badger in a triangular frame. An ancient unsent letter. A pilot’s sextant the colour of brandy. A typing device with a tongue of paper. There were no looking-glasses. 
       The little round table was also cluttered with erstwhile goblin junk. Laid open next to a thing which could have been a roc egg was a copy of The Hammertail, the story of a captain who falls in love with a whale and pursues it, transforming his crew. She was reading one of the Captain’s sea-sprayed tirades which concluded ‘Blessed be the ignorance that separates our minds from an exterminating universe, men!’ when the bookherd tapped down the stairs, flicking confetti off his shoulders. ‘Parade on Needle Street, with Albion tanks. Syme’s is as good for cultivating mushrooms as storing books. Some of those volumes are growing beards. And Syme is a crude fellow. Tried selling me Valentine’s book of doggerel The Owl Cannon, then as I was leaving whispered into my eye “Let’s pretend we’re not the unremarkable details of this larger confusion, Benji.” A quote perhaps?’
       ‘Your name’s Benji?’
       ‘Jonah. Jonah Robeck. How do you do.’
       ‘Sophie Shafto.’
       ‘No relation I assume. I see you’re looking at Bart’s Hammertail! I find the whole Ship of Fools genre to be a wonderful conceit – so focussed, with a boundary about it. In life there are no boundaries and the fools come and go as they please in perfect chaos.’
       ‘Oh I agree as to the chaos, but a few wise souls may come and go, surely? I confess it takes a determined effort to spot them.’
       ‘Here’s another Darkle,’ Jonah said, producing it from his coat as they sat again at the jumbled table. ‘Ah, you’ve spotted my roc egg. Did you know in different cultures the egg is a symbol of life, sacrifice or cure? This one’s made of papier mache.’
       ‘Shall we read aloud in turns, perhaps two pages each?’
       ‘Agreed. And keep our minds peeled. Those forkers were like watchmakers or miniaturists, and often went mad. Everything is so precisely appointed and has to face two ways. So let’s see.’
       As they read from pages the colour of old rose, Sophie remembered how refreshing it had been, the first time she read it, to find a protagonist who was competent rather than sloshing around like a toy in a bathtub. How the people spent each twilight having crucial, impossible conversations. And how after a while the book cast such a spell that the characters seemed to move within a dream, their every move a miracle of meaning.
       It all began normally. Darkle makes himself conspicuous to a Scythian demon described as a creature with several extra appetites, who acquires him as an indentured serf. Darkle is sent to fetch rare books of conjuration for the fiend and reads each volume himself before passing it on, gradually outstripping the demon’s powers. Having learned the purple alphabet and mastery over a species of shadow called a ‘daunt’, how to sprint through a love maze, hide things in mirrors, build a rock fire, squeeze two words together to get water, ride a marlin horse and other obscure marvels, he sets off on his own. On the road Darkle encounters ogres, strolling meddlers and invisible onions, is mobbed by bullfrogs in an enchanted bog, and visits Unfall, a land made of all the gaps between the rules of other countries. The combination of picaresque wandering and common sense creates the strangest effect. The generals of opposing armies give their men the same rousing speech, with identical motives and grievances. Later a variation of the trick occurs in a heated debate where the reader is allowed to lose track of which character is speaking, making it clear that their points apply both ways.
       Jonah piped up. ‘This scene with the war, where he’s going back and forth between the lines and talks to the armourer:
       “A holy war. Is your god so feeble then, that it needs men to defend it?”
       “Feeble god, big army – feebler god, bigger army.” And he whispered close and sharp as if disclosing a saucy secret. “Our god is a mere stick man with a small head, badly drawn upon a fragile scrap of paper. Thus our army need be large, and mighty.”
       It occurred to Darkle that the next increment was to have no god at all, but he doubted this would be allowed. The persistence of the army under such circumstances would give the game away.
       ‘It says the same thing in my copy,’ Sophie told him. ‘But see what’s next – what animals are used in the fighting?’ 
       ‘Battle hogs.’
       ‘Does it say that?’
       Jonah stopped, frowning at the page. ‘No. This is talking about an animal called a pellicorn, all wings and seashells. It’s peculiar. Despite what I want the text to say, the words are going their own way.’ 
       ‘A pellicorn! I remember them being armoured boar, and one of them, Astorack, joins Darkle in his travels. In the copy I bought here, they become war elephants with little wooden castles on their backs, and now these made-up things.’
       ‘Well, we need to know if Carpstein had different editions printed. I happen to know where he lives, out in the lesser towers. Let’s ask him. If he’s not there we’ll leave the book and a weird note.’
       Sophie’s stomach flipped like an omelette. ‘Oh god!’
       ‘What’s wrong? Is it an episode? Shall I fetch salts?’
       ‘No you idiot. Oh, I’m the idiot! I’ve quite forgotten that this afternoon I am scheduled to be kidnapped!’