The Bookman - Lavie Tidhar [52]
He peered into the hole in Jack's chest. Sparks were still flying, but they were diminishing. Inside… he could not comprehend it. Perhaps, he thought, he was expecting gears and cogs. But the inside of Jack's body resembled no machine he had ever seen. It was like a vast, strangely beautiful painting of incomprehensible, miniature elements, not human, not machine, but some sort of unknowable technology that was, perhaps, a little of both. Jack, he thought, numb. Why? Who?
But he already knew the answer. He rose from his crouching position and looked around the room. Books lay everywhere, like wounded soldiers on a battlefield. The desk, the Tesla set. Nothing else. He began scanning the shelves, pressing his hand against the wall as he moved around the room. Searching.
"I know you're here," he said into the silence. "I know you can hear me."
The books, he thought. He needed a key. He began riffling through the ones still left on the shelves, pick ing each for the brief moment it took him to read the title, then tossing the book on the floor. Jack, he thought. That's where he would hide things. In books. Jo March's A Phantom Hand. William Ashbless's Accounts of London Scientists. Hawthorne Abendsen's The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The Encyclopedia Donkaniara. The Book of Three. Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Captain Eustacio Binky's Coffee Making as a Fine Art. Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis. Gulliver Fairborn's A Talent for Sacrifice. Colonel Sebastian Moran's Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas. Gottfried Mulder's Secret Mysteries of Asia, with Commentary on the Ghorl Nigral. Cosmo Cowperthwait's Sexual Dimorphism Among The Echinoderms, Focusing Particularly Upon the Asteroidea and Holothuroidea. George Edward Challenger's Some Observations Upon a Series of Kalmuk Skulls.
What were those books? Orphan thought, exasperated. Most of these titles were completely unknown to him. He almost wanted to stop, to take his time, browse through the titles at leisure, leaf through the enigmatic books, study their contents. Instead, he pulled each book, opened it and shook it upside down, searching for something hidden inside. Some things did fall out – a pressed flower here, its startling blue preserved amidst the pages of Josephine M. Bettany's Mystery at Heron Lake; a folded currency note there, bearing an unknown script, that fluttered to the ground from within Flashman's Twixt Cossack and Cannon – but nothing to give him a clue, a hint as to his next move. Yet as he continued ransacking the shelves he became more and more convinced that what he was doing was right, that the books were the twine that could lead him across the floor of the maze to the minotaur who waited at its centre.
Gossip Gone Wild by Dr Jubal Harshaw. In My Father's House by Princess Irulan. Burlesdon on Ancient Theories and Modern Facts by James Rassendyll, Lord Burlesdon. The Truth of Alchemy by Mr. Karswell. Stud City by Gordon Lachance. Boxing the Compass by Bobbi Anderson. The Relationship of Extradigitalism to Genius, by Zubarin. Megapolisomancy by Thibaut de Castries. De Impossibilitate Prognoscendi by Cezar Kouska. Eustace Clarence Scrubb's Diary. Azathoth and Other Horrors by Edward Pickman Derby.
More things fell from the books. A coin, so blackened that its face could no longer be discerned. A map of an island drawn in a child's hand. A butterfly, the wings black save for two emerald spots. A newspaper cutting from the Daily Journal, that read:
12 June 1730.
Seven Kings or Chiefs of the Chirakee Indians, bordering upon the area called Croatoan, are come over in the Fox Man of War, Capt. Arnold, in order to pay their duty to his Majesty, and assure him of their attachment to his person and Government, &c.
Aunt Susan's Compendium of Pleasant Knowledge. Broomstick or the Midnight Practice. R. Blastem's Sea Gunner's Practice, with Description of Captain Shotgun's Murdering Piece.