The Devil in Detail, page 3
Alas, many of the books he’d picked up for “next to nothing”—perhaps even the majority of them—were in Welsh.
What Martin had managed to acquire probably wasn’t the entire stock of the old libraries, I realized, but merely that fraction of it that had been left behind when the readily-saleable stuff had gone. Even at first glance, it was obvious that it mostly consisted of texts whose utilitarian worth had been severely compromised by the fact that they were printed in a language falling swiftly into disuse south of Gwynedd, in spite of the heroic efforts of Cymdeithas yr laith Gymraeg.
If the bookshop really is haunted, I thought, bitterly, the culprit is more likely to be a dead language than a dead person.
“Do you get many Welsh speakers in Barry?” I asked, mournfully.
“Welsh is taught in all the schools,” Martin said, proudly. “Legal requirement, see. Not so many speak it at home nowadays, of course, except up north—but people from Gwynedd and Clwyd go on holiday like anyone else. Can’t keep a language alive without books, can you?”
By this time I had quick-scanned all eight of the shelves against the back wall and had turned my attention to the books behind the desk where the ancient cash-register stood. Most dealers keep their best stock—or what they think of as their best stock—behind their own station, in order to minimize the risk of theft. Not all the books behind the cash-register were in Welsh, but sixty per cent of them were, and the rest were evenly divided between books on mining and religious texts. That seemed to me to be a sad comment on Martin’s judgment of saleability as well as his stock.
“Didn’t the library stock include any English literature?” I asked him, plaintively. “Or any illustrated books, perhaps?”
“Some,” Martin conceded. “I put the old fiction upstairs. That’s standard practice, isn’t it?” He’d obviously done a little market research and observed that most second-hand book dealers relegated the dross of ancient best-sellers and book club editions to the remotest corner they had. My spirits recovered a little; it was in such neglected corners that I always found my best bargains: rare works of nineteenth or early twentieth-century fantasy whose specialist significance was unappreciated by run-of-the-mill bookfairies or dealers whose own particular expertise was in railway books, natural history or whatever.
“The luckmen would have been Welsh speakers, of course,” observed Penny, who was bringing in her second load of equipment and supplies while Lionel went back to the car for the remainder. “All their spells and incantations would have been handed down from time immemorial.”
“They must have been true descendants of Myrddin Wyllt and Owain Glyndwr, mustn’t they?” I put in, insouciantly, imagining the correct spelling in my head although I made no attempt to pronounce the names with an authentic Welsh diction. “The last custodians of the great Druidic tradition.”
She looked at me as if I were half a caterpillar that she’d just discovered in a salad sandwich, evidently suspecting that I was being sarcastic. “Yes,” she said, simply. “That’s exactly what they were.”
Diplomacy compelled me to refrain from making any clever remarks about Taliesin, the Bardic motto, Eisteddfods or male voice choirs, let alone the Taffia. I also refrained from making any observations about the apparent lack of any uncanny presence, for the moment, although I glanced at Martin while Penny went back outside to check that Lionel had ferried all of her kit inside.
Martin looked a trifle uncomfortable, but I suspected that it was because he found the situation directly embarrassing. I was now fully convinced that he’d approached Lionel in the hope of getting a quick, discreet and effective exorcism carried out without anyone else finding out about it. Not knowing Lionel, he had failed to calculate the abundance of enthusiasm that had not only brought in the reinforcement of the Society for Psychical Research but some skeptical smartarse who was probably immune to all supernatural malaise.
Dutifully, I resumed scanning the supposed cream of the books, just in case something interesting to me had somehow crept in there, but all I could see was row upon row of unadulterated dullness. If there were such things as haunted books, I thought, tracts on engineering and the dutiful produce of the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge were surely the least vulnerable of all imaginable texts to such a curse.
“Are you’re sure it’s the stock that’s the cause of the…problem?” I asked him. “Hauntings are traditionally associated with locations rather than the objects in them—usually with nasty events of some kind.”
Lionel could probably have intervened with a dozen contradictory anecdotes, and Penny might well have had an entire dossier of SPR research to quote, but they were still unpacking equipment from cases, so Martin’s embarrassment was able to increase without the immediate possibility of relief.
“I’m sure there’s no connection with…the other thing,” he said, hurriedly.
“What other thing?” I asked, unable to pick up the cryptic reference.
“Fred West,” he mumbled.
It was then only then that I remembered the serial killer’s ashes had been scattered on Barry Island a couple of years earlier, following his suicide. It occurred to me that if Martin’s wife had fond memories of the resort, she might have thought that a trifle sinister. If she was now refusing to step into the shop, it might be because s he was thinking more in terms of Nightmare on Elm Street than luckmen’s grimoires, and that Martin’s determination to put the blame on the books might have a certain defensive logic to it.
“Right,” I said, figuring that the kindest thing to do was at least try to help him out with that. “Do you have any suspicion as to which particular books might be involved?”
“Not really,” he said—but I noticed that his eyes reflectively looked up toward the first floor: the section where he’d put the fiction, and other material he thought not worth distributing in his principal display space. It occurred to me then that he hadn’t offered to show me, or Penny round the premises, and I couldn’t help wondering because he was reluctant, if only unconsciously, to go upstairs.
Penny was still busy setting up her apparatus, including thermometers, voice recorders and other measuring devices, presumably more sophisticated than those with which Harry Price had fitted out his famous laboratory, but Lionel was unoccupied again, seemingly giving full attention to the conversation. He had obviously noticed Martin’s glance because he too looked up at the ceiling, speculatively—but he didn’t immediately head for the stairs.
“You didn’t pick up the libraries from any haunted pits, then,” I suggested to Martin, thinking of it as a joke, but also thinking that if his wife was subtly haunted by the notion that Fred West’s evil spirit might have been transported to Barry with his ashes, Martin, as a career mining man, might have older narratives at the back of his mind: narratives that he had never permitted himself to believe, for professional as well as philosophical reasons, but still retained in the darker depths of his consciousness.
“Well,” he said, a trifle sheepishly, “I did pick up a couple of hundred from the old Glofeydd Diafol.” While married to the Ex I had managed to pick up a very slight smattering of Welsh terminology, and had been struck by her assurance that, much as Eskimos are reputed to have a dozen different words for snow, the southern Welsh have at least eight different terms for coalmine. I guessed readily enough that glofeydd was probably one of them, and it didn’t take a genius to work out what diafol meant.
“It’s just a nickname, like,” Martin added. “Its name on the maps is Pwllmerys. Old mine, not very big, remote—but unusual.”
“Unusual how?” asked Lionel, who was all ears now. He was from Norfolk originally, but he knew as well as I did, given his professional interest, that diafol meant “devil.”
Martin, of course, had a mining engineer’s notion of unusual. “You probably think all coal is the same,” he said, “but you’d be wrong, partly because of the different degrees of metamorphosis, which determine the carbon content, and partly because of variations in the impurities mingled with the carbon in the coarser varieties—sulfur and the like. Even high-grade coal—anthracite, that is—which is more than 92% carbon, can vary quite significantly in the composition of the remaining few per cent, especially in terms of complex organic molecules that haven’t been broken down completely. Anthracite is typically very hard, but it’s not necessarily the case that all coal with a high carbon content is rocky, and there are some anomalous seams that are surprisingly soft even though they’re 95% carbon, and relatively deep-lying. Pwyllmerys is one of those. In terms of its carbon content it’s akin to high-grade anthracite, but it’s uncommonly friable, which means that it produces a hell of a lot of dust when it’s hewn.
“Pwllmerys used to be notorious in the valleys as the filthiest pit in Wales, an’ the villagers were foisted, perhaps unkindly, with the reputation of being the filthiest people. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the shacks that grew up around the pithead as the enterprise became industrialized never became a proper village, because they never built a chapel. That and the dust earned the pit the nickname of Glofeydd Diafol …and once they had it, naturally, stories were made up about the pitmen being visited by and on friendly terms with the Devil…and maybe some of them began to believe it themselves. Not difficult to see things when you’re working a seam in the dark, believe me, with the dangers of collapse, flooding and firedamp everpresent.”
“And you got the remnants of the old pithead library?” I said.
“Someone up there heard I was shopping around,” Marrtin said, defensively. “He rang me up and offered it. Said no one in the village was interested any more but that in the old days, the pitmen had been as proud as anyone else of their work, and as keen as anyone to improve their minds—resentful, I guess, of way the anthracite miners regarded them. Precisely because it was reputed to be the shittiest pit in Wales, stuck up the arse end of nowhere, some weird educational organization made it a point to donate them a library of sorts, way back in the 1840s, although I can’t imagine that any books from that period actually survived into the twentieth century.”
Lionel and I had both pricked up our eras at that news. “What was weird about it?” Lionel demanded.
“Not supernatural weird,” Martin was quick to say. “French.”
That increased my interest rather than diminishing it. “You mean the Societé des Connaissances Utiles?” I asked “Émile de Girardin’s organization, of one of its branches?”
Martin shrugged his shoulders, never having heard of Émile de Girardin. “The books they supplied weren’t French, of course,” he added. “Probably acquired locally.”
At any rate, I thought, they were perhaps more likely to be in English than in Welsh, and, more to the point, the members of the Societé in question, being closely associated with the French Romantic Movement, were likely to have a much broader notion of what constituted useful knowledge and uplifting reading material than the S.P.C.K.
“And those books are upstairs, right?” I said.
“In the alcove by the window,” Martin confirmed, “but I should never have taken them up there, or even accepted them in the first place, no matter how reluctant I was to have made such a long trip for nothing….”
“Because you think they’re the haunted ones?” Lionel hypothesized, looking upwards again.
“God, no,” Martin retorted. “Because they’re absolutely bloody filthy. Like I said, I can’t imagine than any go back to the early nineteenth century, but I can’t say I’ve examined them closely, because you can’t open them up without releasing a cloud of fine black dust. It was okay while they were still in the boxes, but as soon as I started transferring them to shelves—even as far as I got, which wasn’t far—the dust started coming out, and I realized that it had been a really bad idea even to accept them as a gift.”
He looked at me with a slightly critical eye, obviously taking note of the fact that I was, as always, dressed completely in black, whereas he was wearing a pale gray jacket and a gleaming white shirt. Lionel’s clothing was also dark, but I noticed Penny looking down at her own tasteful outfit, evidently having belated second thoughts about the wisdom of carrying out a ghost-watch in a shop full of relics of the mining industry.
“You might not show it like I did,” Martin opined, addressing me, “but believe me, if you’re actually thinking of taking the rest out of the boxes an’ looking at the damn things one by one, your jacket will have to go to the dry cleaners an’ you’ll be giving off a miasma until you can put everything else you’re wearing through the washing machine. My advice is to leave them alone. I’ll come back in my overalls before I open the shop, stick them all in sacks to go on the fire, an’ go over the upper room three times over with a good vac.”
The horror was probably legible on my face. “You can’t put them on the fire,” I said, “at least until they’ve been properly checked over, to make sure that there’s nothing interesting among them, however dusty it might be.”
“Well, good luck with that,” he said, “but try to keep them at arm’s length, and don’t come near me when you come back downstairs again. Supernatural presences might set the nerves on edge, but dirt is just muck—and you can’t exorcize muck.”
I thought about that for a moment or two. It was getting late but it was still light and still mild, even though the sky was overcast. I took my jacket off, and then, after testing the air temperature, took my T-shirt off too. I remembered what Martin had said about the bathroom facilities being primitive but he had mentioned a sink, and had presumably laid in soap and towels. There was a roll of bubble-wrap behind the counter, presumably in optimistic items of parceling up any books ordered by mail; I tore off a generous strip and wrapped it around my waist and thighs like a sarong.
Penny, in particular, looked at me as if I had gone completely mad. Bare-chested, I certainly do not have the physique of a body-builder, but needs must, as they day, when the devil drives, and if I was going to have to tussle with the world’s worst coal-dust in order to get a look inside the books from Glofeydd Diafol, I figured that the least I could do was not mind too much about looking ridiculous while I did so.
“If he really is going to sort through those boxes,” Martin said to Penny and Lionel, “you might want to take a quick look upstairs now, and then leave him to it.”
Only Lionel accepted the invitation, and went immediately up to sample the supernatural atmosphere. Penny checked with Martin, who assured her that the “presence” was evident all over the shop, and decided to avoid the top room for the time being.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’ll leave the corner in question until last and check the other shelves first, so there’ll still be plenty of time for you to take a look around up there if you want to.”
“Very kind of you,” I’m sure, said Penny, giving the impression that she had no immediate plans to take advantage of the concession. It was interesting to observe the inroads that a peach blouse and gray skirt could make into the boldness of the hardiest ghost-hunter, especially one who didn’t feel that she had the option, as I had, of stripping to the waist.
“It’s okay,” I said, casting a significant successive glance over Martin’s white shirt, Penny’s blouse and Lionel’ clerical collar, once the last-named had returned from his rapid inspection of the first floor, “I’ll find my own way around up there. I might be gone some time, but I dare say that the dust will have settled before you get round to thinking about sending out a search party.”
CHAPTER IV
Before the ascent I cast a critical eye over the rickety staircase that led up to the first floor, carpeted in what had once been red felt but had probably been almost completely black even before Martin had carried the boxes full of the remnants of the Glofeydd Diafol library upstairs. “Where’s the switch for the upstairs lights?” I asked Martin, for future reference.
“There’s one at the top on the left,” he informed me, “and another just inside the door of the front room. You shouldn’t need them yet, though—the windows up there let in more light than this one.”
As I headed up the stairs I could feel renewed optimism putting a spring in my step. The uncluttered window of the short corridor and the one visible through the open door of the bathroom did indeed let in more light than the window downstairs whose exposure was masked by the houses on the other side of the street, but they were also smaller, so the advantage was not as marked as I could have wished. Even so, I left the electric switch alone as I stepped through the open door into the room directly over the shop-front.
As soon as I had moved into the room the feeling hit me. It took me completely by surprise, and the impact was sufficient to make me catch my breath.
I had been in that room before.
It was at that moment, I think, that my odyssey in the surreal really began. From that first step into the upper room, albeit with a relatively slow start, things got curiouser and curiouser.
I had, of course, experienced the commonplace sensation of déjà-vu before, but never so intensely as to make me doubt the conventional explanation that it arises from an illusion generated when the same sensory information is accidentally duplicated in the brain, having been transmitted there by two distinct neuronal pathways. This was different, not just because of its intensity but because I knew—vaguely, at least—when and where I had had the experience that was being so carefully and so improbably reproduced by the present moment.
Most people, it is said, have recurring dreams. They may dream repeatedly of houses, of sexual encounters, of flying, or of appearing naked in public. When they have such dreams—or, at least, when they become conscious that they’re having such dreams—they know that they’re revisiting scenes already familiar: that the house they’re in is one they have previously visited in dreams, or that their power of flight is something that they are rediscovering. Some such dreams may be enigmatic, perhaps because they’re symbolically-disguised, but others are trivially literal; mine have always been perfectly understandable. My own recurrent dreams, in those days, were almost always of second-hand bookshops.
