The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [18]
And ye shall be his servants. Something was crystallising in Orphan's head, the beginning of understanding; that in the maze of texts there was hidden a message, an interpretation of a past like a thread that aimed to lead him onwards, to traverse the filthy streets of history. Numbly, he wondered how King James, and all his get who came after, had allowed passages like this to be printed. And then, at the bottom left corner of the page, in a pencil mark so faint that he almost missed it, he saw the inscription that waited there, almost as if it had been waiting for him, just him, through all the patient years: The Bookman Cometh.
SEVEN
Body-Snatchers
The body-snatchers, they have come
And made a snatch at me.
It's very hard them kind of men
Won't let a body be.
You thought that I was buried deep
Quite decent like and chary;
But from her grave in Mary-bone
They've come and bon'd your Mary!
The arm that us'd to take your arm Is took to Dr Vyse,
And both my legs are gone to walk The Hospital at Guy's.
– Thomas Hood, Whims and Oddities
Away from Guy's, through the narrow maze of Southwark streets. Dusk was falling, and on the other side of the river, through the fog, the great city lit up in thousands of moth-like flames, in hundreds and hundreds of lit butterflies, their wings beating against the stillness of dark, fighting the night with their simple existence. A week before, and Orphan would have stopped, taken out his small notepad and his pen, scribbled a few lines, composed a minor poem, recorded the motion of the light in dark air.
Not now.
Away from the hospital, away from the echoing corridors and the hushed expectant silence punctuated by dying screams. Away from the cold stone and the musty watching bibles in every room, and away from the food that churned the stomach, and the sharp stench of industrial cleaning fluids. He walked through the fog and felt the presence of the Bookman like a ghostly outline, a shapeless, formless thing, a disembodied entity that hid in the foul air and watched him from the rooftops and the drains.
The second night at Guy's, unable to sleep, uneasy with the presence of the pirate bible by his bedside, he stood from his bed. The floor was cold under his feet but he welcomed the sensation. He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.
He walked through empty corridors and listened to the sick behind their doors. No one stopped him, no one challenged him to return to his bed. He was alone as a wraith, haunting the hospital as if he were already dead.
The cold wrapped itself around him, rising like the shoots of a flower from the ground and into his feet and up, entombing him. He passed through ill-lit wards and looked out of the windows and saw nothing but black night draped across the hospital.
His footsteps led him, by twists and turns, downwards, so that he passed floor after floor in this fashion, his bare feet padding silently in his journey through the endless corridors.
He pushed open a door marked MEDICAL SCHOOL, and descended a flight of stairs, and the air grew even colder, and was filled with a chemical tang that burned the back of his throat. I should wake, he thought. I should not be walking here. But he could not stop; he was trapped in a dream and could not rouse.
And yet, now that he was here he could go no further. The basement, he realised. A long corridor stretched before him. Electric lights hummed and flared and dimmed in naked bulbs suspended from the ceiling like grotesque blinking eyes. A row of doors stood shut like the flooded mouths of underwater caves. He heard voices, approaching, and turned back, and hid against the wall, his head turned to observe the happenings in the corridor he had just vacated.
There was the sound of something heavy being dragged against the floor, and the laboured breathing of two or more men. Orphan looked, and saw that there were indeed two men there, and that each was dragging behind him a sack. Both had clean-shaven faces of ordinary