Part 2...
‘To fuck with the circumlocutions, then. You should move in here, stay as long as you like. Plenty of room. Good plumbing. Place smells nice. Good neighbourhood, no crack whores. And I offer this not just for your benefit but for mine. Two years now have I been here, in the fuck end of bitch nowhere. Is cute, don’t get me wrong. Hill is very hilly, houses very housey. Decent pub, many antiques. Much nicer than starving to death in gutter full of horse piss in Cleveland. But...’ Josef spread his hands, like a deck of cards he was fanning out for a hapless mark to pick one, any one. ‘Is dull. Very dull. Nothing happens. Other faculty are good old boys (and girls), born here, go elsewhere a time, come back, die here. Pillars of community. And who else lives in place like this? Married couples, selling insurance, watching television, breeding children. Ha. Children are like wolves, as soon rip your throat out as look at you. And one thousand students, too; but have you tried having conversations with 19-year-olds? Don’t get me wrong, many are good kids, but can’t even remember Cold War. I mean really. I mention Listopadove udalosti, Velvet Revolution, and they look at me like aquatic salamander. Worst part is they can’t even confuse it with Velvet Underground, because they have never heard of Lou Reed. Occasionally Velvet Goldmine, but I did not like that film much. When I go home to Prague, is so intoxicating being somewhere with people again...In short, I would very much appreciate the company.’
Titus considered another moment.
‘Thank you. That would be wonderful.’
Josef smiled. ‘Good. Let us preach to our unwashed masses, and then this evening we find you furniture.’
They checked in on the television before they went; it was curled up in its corner of the cellar, sullenly. Neither of them were quite sure what it ate, if it ate anything, and so they left some bread, half a grapefruit, and a can of paint within easy reach before they left, just in case. Josef’s day consisted of calculus lectures, in which he derived a sick pleasure from exposing his students to real proofs; no student with a serious interest in mathematics, he knew, would ever wind up at his college. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were calculus, far too much calculus. Tuesdays and Thursdays he taught linear algebra, which he loved, and a course in axiomatic geometry for potential high school teachers, which he hated. Which was okay, because so did his students. They communicated through a haze of mutual loathing, as he desperately tried to throw in projective geometry, symmetry groups, anything he found remotely interesting, and his students told him to stick to the damn syllabus already. As the School of Education basically owned the course, he had little choice. The Education faculty had him badly outnumbered, and probably could take him in a fair fight. But linear algebra...Linear algebra was his baby. He’d feed his students proofs, and make them love it. He’d fact them ‘til they farted. The axiomatics of vector spaces. Invariance of dimension. Quotient spaces. The action of subgroups of the general linear group on a space. He was, as you may have guessed, primarily an algebraist; the thought of bringing in enough module theory to instroduce the rational and Jordan canonical forms, and possibly a brief intoduction to representation theory...It was the stuff orgasms were made of. But of course it was not to be. Titus, on the other hand, had an introductory class in Latin and then one in Greek every single day of the week, then his Silver Age seminar Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Classical Mythology Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. He had considerable latitude with those courses, since very few people ever took them, and the ones who did never expected to actually use them for anything ever again. Titus didn’t quite see why the college bothered with a Classics Department at all, though of course he’d never voice that for fear of giving them ideas. He suspected it was mianly as a status symbol, to make the institution look legitimate, respectable. It was a small school that dreamed of seeming big. Though not too big, of course. Sufficiently not-big that when they spoke of the Classics Department, what they really meant was Titus, because he was it. He was the department chairman. He was every single member of the Classics faculty. Also the librarian, secretary, and receptionist. He didn’t get paid any extra for that, naturally. But so far he didn’t mind too much. There were worse things to spend a day doing than teaching young Americans to swear in dead languages. Like smoking crack.
Nothing useful was accomplished that day. His students, Titus was sorry to see, seemed vastly more interested in telling him they’d seen his house or lack thereof on TV or in the papers, or heard about it on the radio, which was awfully popular with them because they could listen in their cars, in which they spent really large fractions of their young lives not in the hopes of getting somewhere in particular but because driving, unlike the alternative of sitting still, gave them something to do, and, as you may have gathered, things to do are at something of a premium throughout most of Iowa. They all asked essentially the same questions: what was it like? how did you escape? how can we get into the lead mines too? Titus didn’t really feel like answering them, so he made things up instead. Unfortunately, he is intrinsically a poor liar, and nobody was at all convinced, and the other faculty grew suspicious and began lurking near his office to find out what he was hiding. By the time Titus returned for his office hours word had spread, and he could hardly have swung a dead cat by the tail (if he’d had one, which he didn’t, and if he’d wanted to, which he hadn’t) without hitting a brace of professors. They were practically lurking in each other’s pockets. Honoria Warfield had landed a prime spot beside the water fountain through judicious use of her walking-stick, and Titus saw her give him a significant look as he entered his office. Several reporters turned up and attempted to interview him; Titus spoke at them in dead languages until they gave up and went away. He noticed then a certain excited milling amid the lurkers; Warfield looked as if she was preparing to give up her spot, and already there was feuding amongst her potential successors. She seemed to desire some congress with him, but before she could sally forth like a dreadnought from its wharf to fire her discursive salvoes Titus found his door filled with undergraduate.
It was Hugh Capet.
What Titus had noticed about Hugh on the very first day of class was the way he looked like a hamster. A Russian dwarf hamster. Hugh had large, round, dark eyes, whose irises were almost utterly black. He also had perky ears and sort of roundish cheeks which aunts most likely loved to pinch and which Titus felt a passing impulse to stuff with sunflower seeds. Capet’s simulacrum or avatar in the Memory Library was a hamster wearing a little golden crown, reigning over Dark Age France from within a clear plastic ball. Hugh was in Latin. He looked earnest, though possibly he couldn’t help it.
‘Dr Brown?’
‘Ah, Capet. What can I do for you?’
As soon as the question had escaped Titus’s lips he knew it had been a mistake, and he felt the urge to try swallowing it back down again, but it was too late. Hugh was a man with a purpose. He looked terribly grave and burdened with it, and Titus just knew it would be something pointless. Capet closed the door and stood before Titus’s desk, drawing a slip of paper from his pocket.
‘I have a message for you,’ he whispered. He handed the slip over.
It read: O TITE TVTE TATI TIBI TANTA TYRANNE TVLISTI.
‘This is a message?’ Titus phrased his answer in the form of a question.
‘Yes.’
‘What does it mean, then?’
‘You know what it means.’ Capet regarded him levelly.
‘”O Titus Tatius, thou tyrant, what a lot you brought upon thyself.” Ennius, from his Annales. Terrible, yet wonderful. That’s what it says. But what does it mean? You did not, I suspect, bring it in merely to eulogise dead Roman monarchs.’
Hugh shrugged.
‘Who is it a message from?’
‘I think you know that already.’
‘Can’t you just tell me anyhow?’
‘This is no time to play games, Dr Brown.’
‘That’s a shame; I’m partial to Mao.’
‘Mao?’
‘You’d like it; it’s cryptic.’
‘Laugh while you can,’ Capet declaimed.
‘Very well.’ And so Titus Tatius Brown did, repeatedly. The melodrama hung in the air thick as shitty jam.
‘Would you like to make your reply?’
‘Yes,’ Titus decided. ‘Yes, I would.’ He fished around in his desk for a sheet of paper, then dug through one of his drawers for an ancient fountain pen he’d been awarded by the university to commemorate his arrival, which he saved for special occasions because it gave him a toothache to chew, and in a neat copperplate hand inked his reply.
It read: SCORTVM GALLICVM SVM. Which meant, though of course Hugh Capet did not know this, and neither did his unseen masters, ‘I am a French whore.’
Hugh regarded it gravely. ‘Is this your final answer?’ Titus felt as if he were on a game show. Were there fabulous prizes to be won? Possibly including piles of cash, bedroom suites, and a lifetime supply of microwavable popcorn? Were Paul Lynde and Peter Marshall (born Pierre LaCock) trading jibes elsewhere in the studio? He suspected not.
Just then the door flew open, and Josef Kroll came bounding in, all a-quiver with excitement.
‘Titus! Come quick!’
‘What is it?’
‘A sale...’
And what a sale it was! Twenty-five percent reductions across the board (or so they interpreted it; the ad itself wasn’t in any Indo-European language) at the most exotic store in all of eastern Iowa: FÜRB, the home of affordable solutions for better modern living through wood. It was, like all truly interesting things in Iowa, located in Iowa City, about an hour and a half’s drive through cornfields and surprisingly unflat little rolling hillscapes westish, which may seem at first like a really long ways to go for a hatstand, but not if you truly loved your hats. No-one was quite sure where the company was headquartered, or what language their catalogues, advertisements, or price tags were meant to be in, though there was suspicion in some quarters that it was Finnish, not because it resembled Finnish necessarily but because it didn’t resemble anything at all. Beds, armoires, wardrobes, sofas, chairs, desks, tables, cabinets...If you could make it of wood, they had it. Even if you couldn’t, they’d give it a try. Their wooden lamps never failed to amuse, and the wooden can openers...A visit to FÜRB was not unlike a waking dream, if one’s dreams involved massive quantities of pine, spruce, and beech, in easy-to-assemble kits. One walked along a Yellow Brick Road of sorts, past cheery displays of furniture ergonomically arranged for maximum efficiency and ideal Feng Shui, past massive bookcases or tiny yet darling nightstands or amazingly blue chests of eight little drawers and all manner of other cabinets, surfaces, and lounging solutions which would look absolutely perfect, one was sure, in just about any room one cared to name, all of them labelled with names like REDRUM and TOGO and FFFFFFF (which Josef suspected was a typo) and affixed with three coordinates, two informing one where one could collect the kit for this particular bit of domestic bliss in the self-serve warehouse when the journey into the fairy-lands of interior decorating was at an end, and the third informing one of the price, though as none of these three were in characters belonging to any language Titus or Josef knew (and between them they knew quite a few, and so should you) one never knew quite what one had in fact bought, or how much one was in fact paying for it, until the very end. The suspense made it better than Christmas. Everywhere the two looked, they saw something massively useful. NEDEL, a free-standing compact disk shelving unit inspired by Egyptian obelisks (‘How fine that would look in my library!’); FROTAG, the honeycombed cedar tea containment vessel (‘It would be a source of unimaginable power. Over tea.’); a retro-futuristic ultra-asymmetrical roll-top writing desk named SODOF (‘Almost I could sleep in that monster...’); wood to sit on, wood to sleep on, wood to put things atop, wood to put things inside, wood to put inside other things. Wood in every imaginable shape, size, and geometrical configuration. Wood to meet every household need Titus had not even known he possessed. It was every beaver’s dream come true. The two were so dazzled by the panoramas of optimised lumber-centric living set out before them that they very nearly failed to notice, tucked away in the back of the warehouse while they were hunting for BÄTMÄN (a chest of drawers), BALSAC (a bed), and BILLY (quite a fetching bookcase system), a small and inconspicuous alcove filled with televisions, radios, toasters, stereos, computers, and the like. None of them were made of wood. Curious, the pair investigated; they seemed so out-of-place, so unFÜRBish, so lacking in stark yet organic optimisation. They were all labelled MAMMON. They came in a variety of styles and models, no two quite alike, but no two quite unalike, either. They were ordinary, almost relentlessly so; they looked like every single television or radio or toaster anyone had ever seen, so archetypically televisual and radionic and toasterrific that one could see them a million times over and never think to connect them with FÜRB or with one another. They could turn up in pawn shops and second-hand stores with complete nonchalance, slip unnoticed into any entertainment system. They could go anywhere and do anything and no-one would ever suspect. And they were all, Titus and Josef couldn’t help but notice, all holding their breath and doing their best not to blink their tiny glowing eyes. An espresso machine accidentally met their horrified stare, and did its best to look inanimate. A toaster coughed, like an electric oboe.
They were alive.
The two backed slowly away, and turned, and began heaving their wood-laden dolly towards the register.
‘Act casual,’ they both whispered at once. Titus began to whistle; Josef hummed. They made a point of ooh-ing and aah-ing at every single display they passed. At one point they paused to carry out an a cappella performance of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters,’ to show off exactly how suspicious and alarmed they weren’t. At last they made it to the register, cold sweats building up on their brows, after half-paranoid glimpses of video cassette recorders behind every display. They didn’t notice what the price actually came to, Josef because he wasn’t paying and Titus because it was only going on a credit card so it wasn’t like he was spending actual money anyhow, and as soon as the receipt was signed accelerated casually for the Home Delivery office, arranging for Titus’s treasures to be transported the following day via friendly FÜRB haulers, and then made a mad dash for the parking lot, leapt into the Beetle, and screeched off leaving a trail of rubber behind them.
‘Mother of ass,’ Josef gasped. They had found the source of the infernal engines. Which raised the disturbing possibility that the infernal engines had taken notice of them. Was the television in Josef’s basement still in contact somehow with its fellows? Had the phonograph been reporting to its superiors? Were even now the cohorts of home entertainment chaos watching, and drawing up naughty, naughty plans? What connexion could there be, they wondered, between homicidal media-related technologies and incomprehensible foreign showrooms of wood-based home environmental reconfiguration? What connexion could there be between anything and the strange message Titus had received? What was the significance of MAMMON? Who had delivered Titus’s chair the day before, and what did they know, and how, and why? And would there be enough screws in with the packages to put all of the furniture together when it arrived the next day?
Well, don’t bother asking me. I don’t know either. What do you think I am, omniscient? We’ll just have to wait and see, that’s all. Watch, and wait.
As other forces, both naughty and nice, too, were watching and waiting, their thoughts fixed immovably upon the speeding Beetle and its swearing crew.
This would be a good time to go and get some popcorn. For you, at least. Josef and Titus were, at this point, too shaken even to stop by Iowa City’s own Java House for crappy service and amusingly-flavoured lattes in an atmosphere of faux sophistication. They sped back homewards, in an anxious silence, apart from occasional random obscenities from Kroll. Only when they were safely sealed away in what was now home to them both did they begin to unwind. Televisions and toasters could hardly wait in ambush for them on the streets, after all, or creep in their windows as they slept While the examples they had seen so far had been amazingly mobile by the standards of ordinary consumer electro-mechanical apparati, they couldn’t imagine them making it up stairs. And what sort of a threat can’t even climb stairs?
They sat up baking apricot marijuana hazelnut scones until late into the night, from a recipe an acquaintance of Josef’s in Oregon had sent on the occasion of Josef’s last birthday. The homey cosiness of the activity soothed them. So did the marijuana. The house was filled with sweet and savory scents, and they both felt certain of sound sleep, and if and when they woke in the morning with what some call the munchies, there were plenty of scones left...
Some of you, perhaps, may be alarmed by the ease and frequency with which these two academics, who by rights ought to be pillars of the community and setting a good example for young people, have been indulging in strong drink and THC-bearing compounds. The reason for this is simple: it was fun. They were also godless socialists who engaged in sexual intercourse out of wedlock.
‘Josef?’ The two were degenerately dunking their THC-laden scones into a couple of gin and tonics (or gins and tonic, or is it gins and tonics?) before bedtime.
‘Yes, Titus?’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Right here? About five minutes.’
‘Generally speaking. Here in Iowa.’
‘Let me see. This is the start of my third year teaching great loads of bugger-all, to use the vernacular. So two years and some change. Two years of uttermost tedium.’
‘Funny, but it’s only just now struck me how curious it is, that a junior faculty member like yourself, who presumably is in the same financial circumstances as myself, could acquire a rather splendid and fetching old house here in the oldest and most desirable neighbourhood in town.’
‘Very funny. Hilarious. Like this joke: what, I ask you, is the contour integral around the boundary of Western Europe?’
‘Give in.’
‘Zero, because all the Poles in the interior are removable. Most droll!’
‘Indeed. Now, perhaps it’s the lemon talking, but it seems a bit too convenient, doesn’t it?’
‘Why did the mathematician name his dog “Cauchy”?’
‘Why?’
‘Because he left residues at all the poles.’
‘You’re changing the subject.’
‘Who, me?’ Josef put down his scone, and gestured sweepingly with palms outstretched, much in the fashion of Christ in Grunewald’s Resurrection. ‘You suspect me of such diabolical cunning? I am but a simple Pole in this complex plane!’
‘You’re a Czech.’
‘Great-grandfather Oswald was from Silesia.’
‘That’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Would be amazingly funny if you knew complex analysis. Poles, you see, are non-essential singularities of a complex function: some point z0 in the complex plane is a pole of a function f if for some positive integer n, the quantity of z minus z0, to the nth power, times the function f, has as its limit as z approaches z0 some finite value, while if we have any more powers of z minus z0 our limit is zero, and if we have any fewer, it is infinite. This is a pole of order n. A simple pole is a pole of order 1. Also, and here is the clever part, a Pole is also a person from Poland, or a large tall thing sticking up from the ground, or occasionally someone’s penis, which is a most witty pun indeed, is it not?’
‘You’re forgetting to talk in an endearingly foreign fashion.’
‘Oh! Most apologies. Is not knowing what is what. Go shit-sod-bugger all day long.’
‘You’re overdoing it.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘My suspicions are aroused.’
‘Arousal: I know it well. For in one of my classes I have a student—‘
‘You’re changing the subject again.’
‘But I do it so engagingly.’
‘You are not what you seem.’
‘Neither are you.’
Titus was at last surprised. He always thought he was exactly what he seemed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You are a traveller in time and space.’
‘No I’m not!’
‘You said yourself that in the mines you found a portal to another world.’
‘Well, maybe just that once. One portal to an alien world hardly makes me into a traveller in time and space. No more than strapping on ice skates makes me into a sled.’
‘Ah yes. Just one portal. Which you very coincidentally happen to stumble upon, while very coincidentally wandering lost through long-forgotten mineshafts, into which very coincidentally your house happens to plunge while you sleep.’
‘What are you implying?’ His head was already abuzz with pot, so there was no room left for paranoia, just a sort of vague bewildered suspicion.
‘I think the facts speak for themselves.’
‘I think they don’t.’
‘Do too.’
‘Do not.’
‘Do too!’
‘Do not!’
Then they broke up into hysterical fits of giggling for a few minutes.
‘I will bet,’ Josef gasped at last, ‘you are not even of this earth! You have two hearts, confess it! And you change shape. And like to run around with English girls who scream.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘What a shame. I share name with amusing giant squid monster on old television show of which I speak.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m as human as you are. If you are human, that is. How do I know you aren’t a phonograph?’ Titus accused.
‘I have no turntable, and cannot play records. QED.’
‘All right, perhaps not a phonograph in particular, but of its foul ilk. What are the odds that you, of all people, would have encountered one of the Infernal Engines,’ which seemed to be the name they’d unofficially given their legion of mechanical foes, ‘just when I needed to talk about them?’
‘Probability is for ass clowns, I say!’
(Which reminds me of a little joke: a Statistician once refused to fly, knowing that the odds of being blown up by a bomb during his flight were one in a million; it was his life on the line, after all, and the probability was just too high to hazard. Then one day, a colleague bumped into him at a conference on the other side of the country. ‘Why, good show, old bean! However did you get here?’ ‘I flew,’ replied the Statistician. ‘But what about the odds, man? How could you risk it?’ ‘Well, I knew the odds of a bomb on the plane were one in a million. So the odds of having two bombs on the plane must be one in a million squared: those are odds I can accept. So now I always make sure to bring my own bomb along with me.’ Josef would have told this joke at this juncture, had he not been locked in heated conversation, to which we now return.)
‘Are you in league with the Infernal Engines? What did you hope to accomplish at FÜRB?’
‘I need a hatstand.’
‘But you never wear a hat.’
‘I can hang scarves from it, too.’
‘A likely story.’
Josef shot up. ‘Silence, knave! Let us put an end to your vile slanders!’ Grasping Titus by the arm, Josef pulled him off down the hallway, to a closet near the cellar door. It was full, Titus discovered, of scarves. Blue scarves, green scarves, black scarves, white scarves. Striped scarves, checkered scarves, paisley scarves. Especially paisley scarves. ‘I also have many boots. I need many, so I do not have to wear any pair too often: I am saving their soles.’
‘Was that a pun?’
‘Possibly.’
‘What did we come out here for?’
‘It is hard to say.’
Just then, there came a thump from the front porch.
‘What the shit?’
The two attempted to hide behind one another, while sidling over to a window. This involved much pushing and shoving. At last they made it, more or less side by side, and pulled aside the curtains. Out on the lawn, a ring of tiny, luminescent red, green, and blue eyes surrounded the house. They saw steroes, and televisions, and DVD players, toasters, and waffle irons, and digital clock radios, standing in a still silence, staring. They were surrounded. At some unseen signal, the Infernal Engines advanced. The thump came again, and again; with it now came a mournful howl, a bleak and desolate cry of static as might be heard from a lonely and forgotten television at four in the morning, when all the channels are off the air. Josef and Titus leapt to the door, tripping over one another in their haste to lock it. From all around came the whine of static, and the rattle and thump of small appliances, electrical cords scrabbling for purchase on the walls. They were besieged by an enemy that never stopped, or slept, or gave up.
Who couldn’t climb stairs.
This thought filtered through to the two at last. Peering out a front window, with the outside light on, they discovered that the thumping was the sound of Engines attempting to scale the stairs to the patio, and falling over, since the things they used for legs were never more than an inch long, and sort of flopping about pathetically like dying fish until they slid back down. They were similarly unable to reach the back door, or, indeed, any of the windows, since there were none to the cellar, nor an exterior door. Being remorseless machine creatures devoid of fear or pity, of course, they would always keep trying. They kept trying, in fact, until shortly before dawn, when as one they withdrew into the dwindling darkness, leaving no trace but some odd impressions on the lawn and some scratches on the paint. But Titus and Josef were both long asleep by then; after watching the assault for a time, their panic abating rapidly, they gave up and had another scone, and thought to check the television chained up in the cellar.
‘What would happen,’ Titus wondered, ‘if we switched it on?’
Gingerly he pressed the POWER button beneath the sullen thing’s screen, as it lurked in its corner. It burst into a grey light, which resolved itself into shifting patterns of light and shadow, coalescing slowly into anthropomorphic forms. Details crept out from the chaos; they began to recognise...
What they saw was a charred and mummified husk, dry cracked flesh in a thin patina over bone. Its face was turned away from them; tendons stood out exposed on its throat as slowly its head began to turn, and its jaw creaked open. Something poured from within, a fire burning inside the dead thing, filling its empty places, pouring out in hungry gouts from its mouth and empty eyes, searching tendrils of morbid light.
They turned off the television before it could look at them. They left the cellar, and locked it behind. They got themselves some nice rehydrating glasses of water, and went upstairs, and tried very hard to stop thinking and be jolly until they felt prepared for sleep. Titus bunked down on the divan in the library.
When morning came, neither of them felt quite ready for it. They were groggy, and grumpy, and did one another the courtesy of pretending they were each unaware of the other’s existence until they’d both had a chance to shower and get themselves properly together. As soon as they each felt up to it, they gravitated back to the kitchen, like stars circling into a black hole.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good, as you say, morning.’
‘Sleep well?’
‘Unspeakably.’
‘Ah yes.’ Thus did they exhaust their small talk. Uncomfortably, they got to the point.
‘About last night...’
‘Ah yes?’
‘I don’t really think you’re in league with electro-mechanical horrors. It was uncalled-for on my part.’
‘Do not worry; I understand.’
They waited a few moments.
‘I, too, am sorry, that I called you a time traveller.’
‘No hard feelings, I hope?’
‘It is over and forgotten.’
‘Good.’
They helped themselves to scones.
‘But don’t you think,’ Titus continued at last, ‘that it’s rather suspicious, all of this happening to us, all at once? All these coincidences? And you never did explain how you got this house...’
Josef sighed, and twiddled with his queue. ‘Perhaps I have not been altogether honest with you on every particular point...’
‘You are a phonograph?’
‘I might perhaps know more than I have let on about Mammon, and potentially I may shed some light on cryptic Latin warning you were issued.’
Titus regarded him levelly. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, is like this...’ Josef stood, and began pacing, alternately clasping his hands behind his back and letting them dart about like naughty hamsters. ‘Even ten years after the Communists fell, it was not easy to break into mathematics in Czech Republic. Few posts, none of them for me. Little money. American colleague of mine finds for me this piddly little job here, and so I pack up and ship out thinking grass may be greener on other side of the bong. Two years ago and some, I arrive, and move into sterile apartment in same neighbourhood where your house once stood. I begin to teach, and explore, a bit. I find, as you did, rotten awful Macphinney Building, which was built by a man who I think hated himself a great deal. In this Gothic parody I find, attracting no particular attention or fuss, the Shrine to Mammon. I ask people, “What the hell? What is all this pagan idolatry in God-fearing Iowa?” They shrug, and say that compared to the Mormons, it is positively mundane. I am not so sure, so I start to dig.
‘Collegiate records from the time of its construction are all in deep storage, somewhere in library vaults no-one has managed to catalogue, and impossible to find. Very sad. I ask around; no-one seems to know much, no oral traditions passed along from generation to generation of faculty. Students, it seems, have all manner of quaint superstition regarding it. Frequently they dare one another to lick the cow’s teats. Gosh only knows what else. No reliable data to work with, you see; I am stumped. And then I go to the newspaper, the Telegraph. Editor there, a very nice woman named Diane Warfield, niece of Dr Honoria Warfield of the History Department as luck would have it, saved me much bother, by showing me collection of clippings she had herself amassed over the years. Local colour, you would say. I will continue in proper English to save time.
‘In 1902, Leviticus A. Macphinney was riding high on the proverbial hog: he had made a fortune in swine, building up a mighty empire of pork that stretched across the Midwest. He was a rich and powerful man; and, as are many rich and powerful men, he was rather vain, and decided to endow this little university as a living tribute to himself. Twenty years pass; Leviticus feels the clammy finger of death wriggling its way up his rectum. The old goat starts losing his grip. Enter then, of all things, a countryman of mine, calling himself Orá?. Ploughman, in English. Though possibly he had a pun in mind. This Orá? was a spiritualist, a Theosophist, and an astrologer. He made all manner of claims to ancient and secret wisdom, revelations from On High, a hotline to the Powers That Be, and so on, and he had a sidekick to back him up, a Mr Wight, an Englishman. They claimed, among other things, to have secrets brought out of Prague: the Philosopher’s Stone, and the manufacture of golems, and something they called the Highest Science, which could only be shared, of course, with the initiated. They had a fascinating grasp on Renaissance mysticism, centering around the Emperor Rudolf II and his parade of alchemists around the turning of the Sixteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries. The point is, Leviticus fell for it. Orá? invented this Cult of Mammon to milk the old boy of every penny he could, which was awfully funny, though Leviticus never caught on. To make a long story short, Leviticus in his last years invested heavily in Orá?’s schemes, including of all things a wooden observatory outside of town to watch for signals from the heavens, and some sort of clock, though no-one was too clear on what sort; he bought up all the lead mines he could get title to, and built his Cathedral to Commerce along with the Shrine to Mammon to Orá?’s specifications, out of, so the story went, lead he had transmuted into gold. Philosophical gold, of course. Then very suddenly he died, and his heirs were rather less indulgent; they rode Orá? out of town on a big fat rail, closed down all the boondogglery,and left the Shrine to Mammon standing as a permanent monument to the mind-numbing foolishness of Leviticus A. Macphinney.’
‘What happened then?’
‘The official story ended there. The paper made no further reference to Orá? or his Mammon cult. We tried to find maps of the mine workings, or traces of the observatory, or anything; quite impossible. We attempted to find the university’s records; hopeless. Dead end after dead end. Except for one tiny little thing. Among the many projects of the famous Orá? were a theological seminary, established to boot the Mammonites along on the road to gnosis, and a Department of Alchemy, both at the university. Diane, using her editorial wiles and probably pointy boots applied to crotches, got us a copy of the University’s official budget for that year, and do you know what? The Seminary and the Alchemy Department are still getting funded. They even have offices, which do not appear to exist. They requisition office supplies, and purchased that year some new office furniture of FÜRB. All itemised. But we cannot find them anywhere. So, what else could we do, but write anonymous note to the Theological Alchemists threatening to expose them all unless quantities of money were passed along to us at regular intervals?
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘You’re a blackmailer!’
‘It sounds so illegal when you say it like that.’
‘It is.’
‘Is that a problem?’
Titus pondered.
‘I suppose not as such, no...’
‘This is America. Everyone does it here.’
‘It is the Land of Opportunity.’
‘We were not the first, either.’
‘Not the first?’
‘Substantial fraction of the Alchemy budget was earmarked for blackmail already. Is not the best-kept secret in the whole wide world, if we could root it out in our spare time. I have theory, actually, that almost everyone on University faculty and staff is blackmailing them by now, but we never talk about it. Can never tell when someone will be one of Them, after all. And if people we are blackmailing find out who it is blackmailing them...’ Josef raised his eyebrows significantly. ‘Well, I would not like to be in their shorts. Diane too had theory on this. That members of the Alchemy Department had been first to think up the swindle, anonymously blackmailing themselves. Went on and on until they required so much funding to pay themselves off that ordinary souls like ourselves began to find them tucked away in budget.’
‘That’s silly.’
‘Yes.’
‘And this Mammon cult, you believe, is responsible for sending me that warning?’
‘Unless you can think of another shadowy underground organisation in Eastern Iowa.’
‘And this Mammon cult, you further believe, is somehow connected to the Infernal Engines?’
‘Unless you can think of anyone else using the name “Mammon” in Eastern Iowa.’
‘How does FÜRB fit in? Or the portal I discovered?’
‘Please, I do not like this word, “portal”. Might we call it a gate, instead?’
‘If you insist.’
‘Then I do not know.’
‘I think,’ Titus resolved, ‘that we ought to investigate.’
And so they did. In Titus’s case, this involved plumbing the depths of the library. He was good with libraries. After, of course, slogging through a day’s lecturing. Hugh Capet kept casting baleful glances at him through Latin, giving much the same effect as an angry rabbit. Titus felt the urge to pinch his cheeks. Apart from that, there seemed to be no sign of Mammonite wrath about. No parties of cowled figures stepped from the shadows to rend and tear his flesh. No time-travelling robot ninjas met him in single combat. Dark and terrible gods failed to smite. It was, in fact, a quiet day, all things considered. The media never turned up, and fewer professors were lurking outside his office. Interest, it seemed, had waned. Sinking houses were so passé. Very Wednesday.
When in the course of human events Titus was at last free of instructional obligations, he set off for the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library, directly opposite the Albert Hall on the Hexagon. Like all the other buildings on the Hexagon, it was designed by a famous alcoholic who dreamed all his life of building cathedrals, and had done his best to echo in brick, limestone, and ornamental concrete the pointed arches, buttresses and stained glass he so loved. And the random mysterious pointy bits. He had a total fixation on mysterious pointy bits. He had visited London in his youth and seen Westminster Palace, and it make a lasting impression. A very sharp one. The walls, gutters, peaks, turrets, and buttresses of the Library were all encrusted with bits of ornamental conrcrete cunningly worked into forms guaranteed to impale anything unfortunate enough to fall atop them. The building now was old, and ivy clung to its sides, but still the mysterious pointy bits jutted forth from the softening greenery like the teeth of an ancient, yellowed skull lost in a primaeval jungle. There were also an incomprehensible number of weathervanes; either they were all broken, or the wind blew over the building in sixteen different directions at once. Given the erratic character of Iowan weather, either explanation is possible. Titus went inside.
Before him, a central hall, stark and sterile compared to the Gothic facade, stretched the length of the building, housing Circulation, Information, Media Services, the card catalogue, and a warren of tiny rooms serving undefined administrative purposes. There was also, he was sure, a map. Somewhere. It was standard equipment for a library, displaying where, in fact, they kept all their books. For university libraries seemed invariably to consider it their duty to conceal their books from the casual observer, on upper storeys, behind closed doors, as if the actual books themselves were untidy, or unsightly, or possibly obscene. If he was intent on finding Deep Storage, the map seemed a logical first place to look. Titus went the length of the hall; he inspected the walls, read notices on overdue fees and reminders to faculty to renew their books at the end of the semester. He found photocopiers, a pair of amazingly old dot-matrix printers, an exhibit of local art (pottery, mainly), fun facts about the presidents, a drinking fountain, and a quarter in the change-return hopper of the pay phone. But nowhere did he find a map. Inquisitively, he approached the Assistant Librarian manning the Information Desk. He was a fat and hog-faced man with bushy whiskers who would have looked quite at home in a Dickens novel.
‘Excuse me, could you direct me to a map of the library?’
The Assistant Librarian fixed him with a stare of irritation, briefly.
‘Maps are information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the Library.’
‘And where would that be?’
The Assistant Librarian fixed him with a stare of equal irritation, somewhat more briefly.
‘Please consult the card catalogue and attempt to answer all questions yourself before imposing them on Information.’
So Titus turned to the card catalogue, an antiquated phalanx of pine cabinets. The University had never quite gotten around to computerising things, for, the administration claimed, budgetary reasons. He started in the obvious place, opening the first drawer of the M’s, and flipping through in search of MAP. Under that subject heading there were in fact quite a lot of maps listed, a bewildering number. Topographical maps, hydrographical maps, population maps, resource maps, historical maps. There was also, he found, something called the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library Map. All the call numbers were in another language, the same, he suspected, as he’d seen at FÜRB. He still couldn’t read it.
The Map was in Deep Storage.
Titus returned to the Information Desk. ‘Could you direct me to Deep Storage, please?’
The Assistant Librarian raised one bushy eyebrow in disdain.
‘I suggest you check the map.’
‘According to your card catalogue, the map is in Deep Storage.’
‘Well, then I suggest you consult it there.’
‘How do I get to Deep Storage?’
The Assitant Librarian raised his other eyebrow in disgust.
‘I suggest you consult the map.’
‘But the map,’ Titus explained patiently, ‘is in Deep Storage.’
‘Then why don’t you try,’ the Assistant Librarian hissed through clenched teeth, ‘pestering the Sub-Librarian down in Deep Storage instead of me?’
‘I don’t know how to get to Deep Storage.’
The Assistant Librarian threw up his hands, and looked to be on the verge of doing the same to his lunch.
‘Then consult the map.’
Titus felt his head swimming. Even in the American Midwest, stupidity of that calibre had to be rare; surely no-one would think recursion was a very original gag this far into the digital age. Perhaps he ought to call in someone, to have the Assistant Librarian stuffed and mounted for a natural history museum somewhere, to show children what really blithering idiots look like. But then again, they probably knew that already; children watched a lot of television.
‘Can you give me a hint, at least?’
Malice dripped from the Assistant Librarian’s tongue like melted butter from an ear of corn.
‘Hints are information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the Library.’
‘Do you actually give out any information, or are you just here to annoy people?’
‘The latter.’
‘Aha!’ Titus thrust an impudent finger upwards. His index finger. He was making a point. He has manners, after all. He’s not about to go flipping a librarian, even an Assistant Librarian, the bird. He’s not Josef. ‘Caught you. You just gave out information.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘I say!’
‘You’d better believe I fucked your mother, too.’
‘Can’t you go back to being unhelpful, rather than obscene?’
‘And I told your sister to smile like a doughnut.’
‘Now what does that mean?’
‘That’s information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the library.’
‘Are we back to that again?’
‘That’s information. All information is stored in its appropriate section of the library.’
‘Fine.’
There was a pause.
Titus returned to the card catalogue. Just for kicks, he decided to look up CARD CATALOGUE in the card catalogue. He found, to his surprise, an entry: ‘See CATALOGUE, CARD’. It would be wrong to say he was wholly surprised thereafter when the entry for CATALOGUE, CARD read ‘See CARD CATALOGUE’. It was that sort of place. He looked up DEEP STORAGE. All the entries under that subject heading were, as one might expect, located in Deep Storage. He checked for ALCHEMY, and for MAMMON, and ORAC; none of them were listed. He returned to the Information Desk, where the Assistant Librarian looked at him like a dead ferret. By which I mean the Assistant Librarian, like a dead ferret, looked at him.
‘Excuse me,’ Titus said perfectly reasonably, ‘but there don’t appear to be listings in your card catalogue for Alchemy.’
‘That subject,’ the Assistant Librarian hissed, ‘is catalogued in the Special Index.’ He crinkled up his face and farted emphatically to reinforce his point.
‘I didn’t think you gave out information.’
There was silence.
Perhaps, Titus speculated, he only gave out information that wasn’t referenced in the card catalogue? He thought he’d test his hypothesis.
‘What in God’s name did you eat for lunch?’
‘Cheese.’ Never had that word been infused with such bitter loathing.
Titus went back to the card catalogue, and looked up SPECIAL INDEX. Its card read: ‘Please consult the Information Desk.’ He went back to the Information Desk. ‘Where can I find the Special Index?’
‘I suggest,’ the Assistant Librarian shouted, his ruddy face growing ruddier still, ‘you consult the card catalogue.’
So Titus did the sensible thing and gave up, and wandered off to find Deep Storage or the Special Index on his own.
‘I hate you,’ the Assistant Librarian called out after him.
Titus roamed through the three upper storeys of the Library; each one consisted of two long chambers decorated in an extremely bland cream, separated by a central hallway capped by stairwells and an elevator. There were, he found, Periodicals and Reserves on the first storey; Maps, Government Pulications, Theses, and Special Collections on the second; and books, at long last, on the third. Special Collections was of course closed to browsing; without much hope he inspected Maps, in search of something vaguely useful. The maps were all contained, laid out, in a series of drawer-like trays, slotted into a vast wall of cabinetry, labelled in tiny and almost-illegible handwriting. He pulled out one at random; pinned to the tray, like a butterfly in a collection, was an old map of Prague, circa 1602. What an odd coincidence, Titus thought. He pulled out others, but found nothing more interesting than a highly detailed map of the men’s restroom, and a map displaying the distribution of the ash tree population worldwide. As he expected; whatever dark, terrible, or silly things might lurk in its depths, the Library was a Library, filled with, primarily, the sorts of things people would go to a library to look up. Not nearly as colourful as his own. Especially now; when he peeked into the recesses of his Memory, he found great swathes of hexagons emptied of their icons, filled instead with shining masses of pipe in bold, solid colours, growing like kudzu...
Titus suddenly understood that the real danger in thinking of memories as things, giving them concrete representations as he did in his Library, was that things could be lost. Data demanded a medium, his brain, in which to be stored. It couldn’t escape. A thing, on the other hand, had an existence of its own; it could slip from one’s grasp, like car keys, and roll away under a sofa, or down a drain. And also a thing could be found. Was he losing his mind, or at least mislaying it temporarily? Did he leave a trail of lost thoughts behind him like breadcrumbs?
It was a silly thought, and he immediately forgot it as he went down the stairs in search of Deep Storage. It slipped from his head, a little dumbbell-shaped thing about the length of his thumb, made, to some eyes perhaps, of a faint crystallised mauve light. It dropped to the stairs, and rolled down ahead of Titus to the next landing, where it bounced into a corner and was lost. Titus didn’t realise it was gone.
Titus descended. The Library had, he found, a warren of basements and subbasements, none of them labelled, or when they were, labelled as something they manifestly were not. Something labelled ‘Custodial’ was actually full of pornography; the Rare Books alcove was really a lavatory. They were decoys, Titus felt sure. He continued to descend. There seemed no limit to the number of storeys he could descend. How far down did it go? As deep as the steam tunnels? As deep as the lead mines? The walls had gone featureless and grey, concrete everywhere lit by tiny bulbs. Corridors bent at random, folding back on themselves; staircases occasionally led up or down to blank walls. It was impossible, a mess, incomprehensible; yet Titus had the invariant sensation that he knew which way to go. A path seemed to stretch out before him, through the warren of identical hallways and meaningless turns.
It was, he realised, just like the lead mines; how had he been lost down in their bowels to begin with? And how had he found his way the second time? Somehow it all seemed to unfold itself in his mind, crowding out everything else; the directions to a bed&breakfast in Vancouver plopped from his head, a little nodule of solidified teal light, and shattered on the floor, but he failed to notice, as his goal resolved itself, his compass pointing the way.
He was there. At the bottom of the last staircase, at the centre of the maze, there was a nondescript door labelled in big block letters: DEEP STORAGE. Titus went inside. It was a large, vaulted room, lined with cinderblocks. It was full of shelves and crates, watched over, he saw, by the Sub-Librarian, a severely ageing woman with grey hair piled atop her head frosted, for some unfathomable reason, blue. She sat behind a desk with old-woman glasses on a chain, and regarded him with some surprise.
‘I’m sorry,’ she informed him, ‘but the Deep Storage archives are not open for browsing. If you wish to view a document, please request it here via call number.’
‘You’re informative!’ Titus exclaimed.
‘Of course.’ The Sub-Librarian gave a little titter into her hand. ‘What do you take me for? An Assistant Librarian? I am here to oversee and safeguard the Deep Storage archives. Nothing more and nothing less.’
‘So if I ask for a document I’d like to see, you’ll actually get it for me?’
‘Naturally.’ She quivered with a brief chuckle, much like certain vending machines quiver when delivering up a can of soda.
‘I’d like to see the Ecclesiastes P. Quagmire Library Map, please.’ Perhaps it could help to make sense of things.
‘Very good.’ The Sub-Librarian looked on impassively.
‘Do you have it here?’ Titus asked her at last.
‘Of course,’ she tittered.
‘Then I’d like to see it.’
‘Very good.’ Again she sat on, waiting.
‘Will you fetch it for me, then? So I can see it? And all?’
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Do you have the call number?’
‘Yes, in a manner of speaking.’ He remembered it well: a string of meaningless symbols he’d etched into the walls of one of his rapidly-dwindling store of memory hexagons. ‘I don’t know how to say it.’
‘Oh dear,’ the Sub-Librarian clucked her tongue. ‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to release documents without a call number.’
‘Can I write it down?’
‘Certainly.’
Titus had, he realised, no paper, and no pencils. He’d chewed the eraser off his last one between Latin and Greek, and had thrown it away.
‘Do you have a pencil I could borrow?’ he asked.
‘Pencil?’ The Sub-Librarian chuckled. ‘I’m afraid everything’s computerised down here.’
Titus looked over the desk; something vaguely computer-like certainly crouched beside the Sub-Librarian, a cube of what seemed to be mahogany, carved with a pattern of interlocking gears and wheels. Set into the top of the thing was some sort of cathode ray tube, its image reflected off of what seemed to be an old shaving mirror on a pivot above, into the Sub-Librarian’s field of vision. Jutting from the front of the thing was a brisk metal keyboard, like a very old-fashioned typewriter’s. It was in Czech.
‘How do you enter call numbers on this?’
‘I transcribe them all into Czech, of course, silly.’ The Sub-Librarian seemed poised to titter again at any moment.
‘Can you tell me what each character used in the call numbers corresponds to on the keyboard?’
‘Certainly! Atye, that’s one; and menye, that’s two; and...’
‘Could you show me what they look like?’
The Sub-Librarian looked up at him, covering her mouth while another spastic giggle struggled free. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have a pencil.’
‘Can we go into the stacks so I can show you the call number I want?’
The Sub-Librarian considered for a moment, sucking her teeth.
‘I’m afraid that would count as browsing, and the Deep Storage archives are not open for browsing. It is the strict policy of this Library to prohibit browsing through Deep Storage. For fear of damaging our materials, you understand.’
‘Oh god.’ He could see the call number he wanted so clearly. It would only take a moment to copy it down...Titus brought his left index finger to his mouth, and bit down, hard. He tasted blood, sickeningly salt, a mouthful of rusted iron. The pain was sharp, all the sharper for being self-inflicted. He could hear his body scolding him. Titus felt a wave of disgust. He brought his bleeding finger to the blond wooden desk, and carefully drew in little whorls of blood every character he could remember seeing in the catalogue. He had to bite his finger again to get enough blood; it was more difficult the second time.
‘Can you tell me what these characters are, and what they correspond to?’
The Sub-Librarian was unfazed. ‘Certainly. Atye,’ she pointed, ‘one. Menye, two. Telye, three. Ulye, four. Orye, five. Korye, six. Nonye, seven...’ There were twelve numerals, zero through eleven, with ten mapping to A, and eleven to B. Titus memorised them all immediately.
Closing his eyes, more to avoid looking at his finger, which he simultaneously wanted and feared to suck until the pain left it, than out of mnemonic effort, Titus rattled off the call numbers for the Map, and for every volume he’d seen on Deep Storage itself. The Special Index would have to be in one of them.
‘Very good, very good,’ the Sub-Librarian clucked. ‘I’ll have these for you in a jiffy.’ And off she went into the stacks, clucking to herself like an old hen or an alarm clock, seeming to glide without effort beneath her long skirt. She returned at last with an armful of books and papers, which she set upon her desk, next to Titus’s dried blood. He reached for them, and to his surprise was allowed to pick one up, a fat old tome. He began to open it, when the Sub-Librarian’s shrill call dropped it from his hands.
‘I’m,’ she screamed. ‘Afraid,’ continuing in her usual tone of voice, ‘that lingering is not permitted in Deep Storage. Please go to the Reading Room if you wish to view the materials.’
‘Where is the Reading Room?’
‘Oh, I can’t recall, exactly,’ she giggled. ‘It gets so confusing down here, as I’m sure you’re aware. I suggest you check the Map.’
Titus reached for it, only to be brought up short by another cry.
‘If!’ she shrieked. ‘You wish to view the materials, please go to the Reading Room,’ she concluded, unperturbed.
‘Very well,’ Titus bluffed, ‘I will.’ He scooped up the books and papers and set off for the door. Suddenly the Sub-Librarian appeared in his path.
No!’ she howled, ‘patrons are allowed to remove materials from Deep Storage.’ The Sub-Librarian seemed to find this unspeakably amusing, rocking back and forth with suppressed laughter. And from a certain perspective, Titus thought, it was. Just not from his.
‘Well, then,’ and he pushed his stack into her arms, ‘ why don’t you remove them for me? We’ll find the Reading Room together.’
‘Oh!’ The Sub-Librarian seethed with mirth. ‘I can’t leave Deep Storage while I’m on duty, you silly goose.’
The Sub-Librarian, Titus suddenly realised, had no legs. Whatever was underneath her skirt, he saw, was not touching the floor.
‘What if I asked the Assistant Librarian to remove them for me?’
‘He’d tell you to go fuck a duck,’ the Sub-Librarian said sweetly.
Titus took back his armload of books. ‘What would happen,’ he asked quietly, ‘if I told you that the Chief Librarian had given me permission to remove these?’
‘The Chief Librarian,’ she squealed, eyes wide. She brought a hand delicately and melodramatically to her mouth. ‘He never gives permission to anyone. For anything.’
‘Nevertheless.’
‘If the Chief Librarian had given you permission, he would have given you an authorisation code.’
‘He did.’
‘Well, then, what is it?’
‘I’m afraid,’ Titus smiled, ‘I don’t know how to say it.’
‘Then write it down,’ the Sub-Librarian said peevishly.
‘Do you have a pencil?’
‘Of course not, we’re computerised.’
‘Then I can’t give you my authorisation code.’ Titus headed for the door.
‘But no patron can remove materials from Deep Storage without one!’
‘I suggest,’ Titus laughed, ‘you take that up with the Chief Librarian.’
And off he went.
As soon as he was safely out of sight down another pointless, featureless corridor, so basic and spartan in its corridorness as to be quite possibly the very archetype of corridorosity, Titus did the sensible thing and paused to look over the Map, Reading Room or no. It was an ancient and delicate thing, a thick wad of some thin and translucent paper folded over and over again, dry and brittle, smelling like cinnamon or the nicer sort of fallen leaves in autumn. It crackled when Titus unfolded it. Before he could give it a good solid look, however, the floor suddenly dropped out from beneath him, and Titus found himself sliding on, as they say, his butt down a brisk chute with an alarmingly chafed sensation, to land firmly on said posterior after a stomach-churning series of twists and loops. My ass, Titus reflected, is certainly taking a pounding this week.
No, not like that.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the chute had deposited him right before double doors quite clearly labelled ‘READING ROOM’. Titus did the obvious thing, and went inside.
The Reading Room, it transpired, was a vaulted, echoing hall, like the belly of a great whale, ribbed with pointed arches. The ceiling was covered in frescoes he couldn’t quite make out in the uncertain light pouring, or dribbling, from flocks of candles burning on every surface: on the shelves that lined the walls, on the great stepped altars that capped either end of the chamber, on the tables, even on the floor itself. And, of course, in the double row of copper chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The candles set the high, narrow stained glass windows on the walls above to glittering. Who, Titus wondered, puts stained glass windows in a sub-sub-sub-basement?
Nevertheless, it was all very fetching, which is not at all like felching. Majestic, Titus was tempted to say.
Sitting at one table was a wooly-haired old man in tweed with a creased face, by which you are to understand that the man had a creased face and was in tweed, not that the tweed of the man had a creased face. He was the Librarian. He was, Titus saw, beckoning him over silently. Even before Titus could speak, the man held a finger to his lips and passed him a notecard drawn without looking from a valise.
‘There is no talking in the Reading Room,’ it read.
As Titus was digesting this, the Librarian passed him another: ‘For the inconvenience of all our patrons, materials may not be brought into the Reading Room from outside.’
Carefully Titus tore up both notes, and spelled out his own message facetiously on the tabletop, as if he were playing Scrabble: ‘is Reading alloued?’
(In case you were curious, he cannibalised his question mark from one of the Rs (Rs, not arse) and a full stop, by tearing some bits off. Try it yourself; it’s easy and fun.)
The Librarian passed him another note: ‘Don’t be silly.’
The Librarian, Titus had noticed, had not read his message.
‘are you Reading These?’ he spelled.
The Librarian impassively handed him another card: ‘No.’
Titus puzzled over an appropriate response for a moment, before the Librarian pre-empted him with another card: ‘If you are bright enough to be communicating now, there is a 94% probability that these pre-made cards will be appropriate to your responses.’
‘what If i talk?’
The Librarian passed him the next card, choking back a smirk: ‘For the convenience of our other patrons, you would be exterminated.’ And the Librarian drew from his jacket something that looked a bit like a brass herring frolicking in a solenoid, which Titus did not recognise as a compact charged-particle beam weapon far beyond the capabilities of human science. It wasn’t his field. The corners of the Librarian’s mouth twitched spastically as he fondled it. The herring, that is. Not his mouth.
‘why not exterminate me anyhow?’
The Librarian’s eyes shone as he passed the next card: ‘That would be against the rules.’
‘This is silly,’ Titus spelled. He was getting very sick of this place.
‘I don’t think anyone will dispute that,’ the Librarian’s next card read as he bit down on his lower lip to stifle a giggle.
‘If you Don’t wish me to Read These materials, why let me find them at all?’
The Librarian passed over a thick sheaf of cards. ‘An interesting philosophical question,’ they began. ‘When I studied under the great Dr Frottage, a seminal figure in postmodern library science, he voiced support for the Deconstructionist point of view that a Library, sounding as it does so much like ‘Liberty’, comes to represent through its containment of so much text rather a Liberty from Text, and that by abandoning text with its crypto-fascist colonial implications we can get inside of the underlying not-text and synthesise from Text and Not-Text a very Jungian sort of Ur-Text in the act of not-reading, combined with not-not-reading, which is the defabrication of...’ and here Titus stopped reading. He shredded all of these cards as he had the others. Then he scooped up a handful of gibberish, and ate it. He made a point of belching loudly.
‘Where is the Special Index?’ Titus spelled from the leftovers.
‘Behind you, third case from the left, second shelf up.’
Titus rose and inspected said shelf, which was packed mainly with reference works, old editions of the Encyclopædophilia Britannica. But sure enough there was a Special Index too. Amongst many other things, it contained listings for:
The Life and Times of Orac
The Book of Mammon
A Complete Explanation of the Entire Plot and Everything
Introduction to Alchemy
Electronomicon
Magia Siderea
Summa Physica
All of which sounded terribly promising, but when Titus searched the shelves for these books, which were all supposed to be in the Reading Room, he found only a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language and dust. He brought the Dictionary, and as little dust as he could, back to the table, where the Librarian was wiggling his caterpillar eyebrows and holding out a card that read, simply, ‘Ha ha ha.’
Titus opened the Dictionary, and held one single page between thumb and forefinger, and with it very carefully gave the Librarian a nasty paper cut.
‘Ow!’ the Librarian exclaimed. Alarm bells immediately rang, and concealed red lights strobed, and somewhere a klaxon did whatever it is klaxons do at times like these. Someone had dared to speak in the Reading Room. The Librarian looked around gultily; the Sub-Librarian glided in, looking very cross indeed, holding another brass herring.
‘You must be exterminated,’ she told the Librarian sternly.
‘Aha!’ The Librarian jabbed with a bony finger. ‘Now you must be exterminated!’
‘No, you must be exterminated first.’
‘But you admit that you must be exterminated too.’
‘I admit no such thing.’