The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [11]
The silence lay all around him. He could hear no birds and no traffic. The light had almost disappeared entirely, and the world was one hair's breadth away from true and total darkness.
Frightened, he nevertheless followed the arc of spilled ink from the dead fire to the water's edge. He bent down to the river and washed his hands in the cold, murky water.
It occurred to him that Gilgamesh's fishing-rod, too, was missing. He looked sideways and down, but could see nothing.
Then a curious sound made him turn. It came from the water, to his left, a clinking sound, like champagne glasses touching. Still crouching, he made his way carefully to the left, his fingers running against the side of the embankment. The stones were slimy and cold, unpleasant to the touch – then he found it. His fingers encountered something solid and round, and the sound stopped.
It was a tall round shape made of smooth glass, and it was tied with a fishing line, Orphan discovered, to a rusting hook that protruded underwater from the side of the embankment. His fingers growing numb with cold, he managed to untie it and finally lifted his find from the water. It was a bottle.
Raised voices came suddenly from the river path and Orphan, jolted, withdrew into the darkness of the arches. The final rays of the sun faded and now the streetlamps began to come alive all along the river, winking into existence one by one, casting a comforting yellow haze across the darkened world. His heart beating fast, Orphan waited in the safety of the shadows until the voices, sounding drunk, passed. Then, clutching the bottle in his hands, he hurried away from the bridge, away from the blood-like substance and the dark absence of his friend. For when he withdrew it from the water Orphan recognised two things about the bottle: that it was the one he had brought Gilgamesh only the night before, the stolen bottle of Chateau des Rêves, and that though it had been emptied of wine it was not yet empty: for the bottle was sealed tight, and a dry sheaf of paper rustled inside it, like a caged butterfly the colour of sorrow, waiting to be freed.
He took shelter on the other side of the river, in the welcoming, warm and well-lit halls of Charing Cross Station. He stood alone amidst the constant, hurried movement of people to and from the great waiting trains that stood like giant metal beasts of burden along the platforms, bellowing smoke and steam into the cool night air. His back against the wall, the smell of freshly baked pastries from a nearby stall wafting past him, Orphan broke the crude seal on the bottle and withdrew, with great care, the sheaf of paper that nestled inside.
Gilgamesh's jagged handwriting ran along the page in cramped and hurried lines that left no blank space. It was addressed – and here Orphan stopped, for he felt cold again despite the warmth of the station, and his fingers tingled as if still dipped in the cold water of the Thames – to him.
Alone amidst the masses of humanity at the great station of Charing Cross, his ears full of the short, sharp whistle-blows from the platforms and their accompanying clacking of wheels as trains accelerated away into the dark, and his stomach (despite all that he had found) rumbling quietly at the pervading smells of pastries baking and coffee brewing, he began reading Gilgamesh's letter to him:
My Dear Orphan –
As I write this a hot explosion lights up (I imagine) the skies above the Thames, and rather than worry I am exhilarated – for that ball of fire and heat is a signal, and it tells me of my impending doom. I shall try to post this to you, but already I grow anaesthetised and dull, for I do not believe I will have the time. He is coming back for me, me who had been forgotten for all those centuries. But the Bookman never forgets, and his creations are forever his –
You scoffed when I spoke of the Bookman. You called him nothing