Vellum Read online

  After what happened to Thomas, I remember thinking that I knew what that sentence was. Two words.

  People die.

  The page I looked at now, though, the first page of the Book, had no words on it, only a blueprint of the maze of concrete tunnels and chambers that surrounded me, here in the bunkered depths of the old building. Gold illumination traced out conduits, ventilation and wiring, heating ducts, while the same eye-like logo on the cover of the book was inked in black here, smaller though, more cursive; I felt that burning feeling rising in my head again. There was something wrong about an artifact as ancient as this with content that was so…modern. This wasn’t some doggerel prophecy before me, not a vague prediction but a precise plan, a schema. And, flicking forward to the next page, I recognized the library as I’d seen it on the architectural plans I’d been studying for so long. Again that symbol in the center of it. Pages two and three together mapped out the building in its context, the network of roads and footpaths, the buildings and grassed areas of the campus around the library. I recognized it; I had recognized it instantly and it was that recognition that had made me close the Book and reopen it, as if the act might change it, as if looking at it again, I might this time see something more rational, more sensible.

  Instead it seemed even less rational. Now that I studied it more closely, it worried me even more because, in the tiniest of places—only here and there, mind you—the location of this pathway, the outline of this building—it seemed just a little different from my memory.

  A Cool White Pillow

  “What time is it?” asked Jack. I checked my watch, but Puck answered before me.

  “Summer,” he said. It was April, actually, but there was time and there was Puck Time, where hours and minutes were described as quarter past a freckle and any day sunny enough to lie out on the grass and smoke cigarettes was summer. It was glorious that day, sunlight pouring down on us where Puck and Jack lazed like dogs on the slope of walled-in grass between the library and the reading room, the squat block of the campus cafeteria lowering behind us where we couldn’t see it and the tower of the university reaching up into the blue, too solid and archaic to be quite a dreaming spire but still, in the fluted intricacy of its anachronistic design, denying the reality of its Victorian construction for a fantasy of antiquity. It was glorious that day, so it was summer.

  The sunlight slanted off the glass exterior of the library to my right, and painted the white pebble-dashed areas of the walls with Moorish or Mediterranean warmth, flashed on the glass doors into the Hunterian Museum as they revolved, students passing in and out. At the ground level the library and the museum fused into one building, blockish and modern, all cuboids and cylinders, an abstract iron sculpture nestling in curved simplicity on the flagstones outside the doors, before the low steps that led down onto cobbles running down toward University Avenue. Following them down you passed the Mackintosh House, a museum-piece replica of a tenement home filled with furniture and fittings designed by one of Glasgow’s most famous sons; built onto the Hunterian and accessed from inside the museum, its false front door perched absurdly in midair with no steps to reach it. To my left there was the reading room, built in the twenties, low and circular with tall slender windows and a domed roof—Art Nouveau, I thought, though I was never sure of the distinction between Nouveau and Deco. And though the sixties brown-brick, smoked-glass block monstrosity of the Hub at my back, with its cafeteria and student shops, deserved a bomb for its sheer ugliness, I never loved any little corner of the world so much as that slope of grass walled in with rough-hewn sandstone between the reading room and the library, never loved anywhere so much as there and then.

  I sat on a wooden block that was a recent addition to the slope. The university had hired a modern artist to commemorate their 550th anniversary by turning that green slope into a sort of art installation, and I’d watched with some trepidation as they’d fenced off the area and torn up the grass. But when it was finished, I had to admit, it made that little area even more serene. The artist had laid ten of these long wooden blocks in pairs, each pair of blocks offset as if to mark out diagonal corners of a long, thin rectangle, the other corners marked out by low shrubs, five of these thin rectangles dividing up the space of the slope. Each of the dark wooden blocks had a white porcelain pillow at one end of it, and thin panels of glass text, buried in the ground running along either side of the blocks—lit up at night—told the story of the piece in ten sections. The shrubs were all herbs with medicinal properties, a reference to the university’s first physic garden, a record that had only recently been turned up by some academic burrowing through archives. The blocks were replicas of old-style anatomist’s dissection slabs, in memory of the oldest faculty of the university.

  I lay on one of them, that day, head resting on the cool white pillow, or swiveled round and sat upright on it to slug back beer out of the cans we’d brought with us because, of course, you couldn’t study for exams on such a day without refreshments.

  “It’s half two,” I said.

  “Fuck,” said Jack. “How long have we been here?”

  “A couple of hours,” I said. “Not long.”

  I picked up the Norton’s Anthology of Poetry splayed facedown beside me on the block, glanced at it and closed it, lay it down beside Jack’s biography of John Maclean.

  “John Maclean. What? As in Die Hard?” Puck had said.

  “As in the founder of Scottish Socialism, scrag.”

  Jack had shaken his head.

  Of all the students lounging and laughing on the slope, sitting on the grass in circles, cross-legged on the blocks with sandwiches, cans, packets of cigarettes or tobacco scattered around them, nobody was really doing any work. It was the Easter break; we had exams coming up soon, so soon, but it just felt like we had all the time in the world.

  I looked down at Jack and Puck, Jack with his hands under his head, Puck at right angles, using Jack’s stomach as a headrest, one arm flopped across his chest—a scritch of fingers at his ribs—and the other stretched out to the side with a cigarette between his fingers, smoke rising from its tower of ash like slow, solemn incense, rising up into the still cerulean air.

  Angularities and Curves

  I flicked forward to pages four and five. A map. Again the scale had changed, zoomed out by another magnitude. Now all the streets and roads of the whole bohemian district in and around the university were clear, with the river and the park marked off, the museum and art galleries, all drawn with the precision of a modern cartographer. But all altered alarmingly, if only subtly, from the bohemian district I knew so well. Christ, my Bank Street house should have been on the map at this scale—I lived less than five minutes’ walk from the old cloistered quadrangles at the very heart of the campus—but instead the street wasn’t even marked. The river seemed to twist to flow over where it should have been, and the rough gridwork of streets and tenement buildings was shifted to accommodate it. Two main roads that should have crossed at right angles met and merged instead in a Y-shaped junction. It was as if the smallest changes at the lowest level cascaded upward.

  The map of the city on pages six and seven was completely unfamiliar.

  I remember, as a child, looking at an architectural model of my school and its surroundings that stood on display in the main hallway of the school itself, where the principal, the deputy principal and suchlike had their offices. One tiny discrepancy—a set of stone steps leading down from the raised car park of a block of flats, steps that had never been built but were shown on the model—and, as a child, I could not grasp the idea that the model was wrong. It wasn’t that I thought the steps should be there in reality if they were on the model, or vice versa—I was too young to understand exactly why it bothered me—but I remember the vague unease, the confusion at the inconsistency. I felt that same disquiet now, but more profound, so many years later.

  I turned another page and there I saw the city in its environs, the coastline a
nd the countryside around it. Now it was definitely not the city that I knew; the city that I knew sat on a river, but not at its mouth. The whole geography was wrong, but, at the same time, I did recognize it. I knew the shape of the coastline well enough, and I recognized the island sitting out a short ferry ride from the city’s docks; I even recognized those docks as being where, in reality, a small seaside town of ice cream parlors and amusement arcades sat, gathering retired old folks and families on Sunday outings. It was as if the city of my own experience had been picked up and dropped some thirty miles to the southwest of its natural location, and had to warp and weave itself into a slightly different shape as it settled, to accommodate its new surroundings. Where the city should have been, on the map, was only a small village in the midst of farmland.

  The Macromimicon. Was it then a book of maps, not of what was, but of what might have been, of a world that had taken a different course, with this village growing into a town instead of that one, this town burgeoning into a city instead of another? I turned another page. Even the language that marked out the streets and roads, the cities, towns and villages, seemed the product of some parallel development, composed of angularities and curves, bearing a similarity to the Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, but again not quite the same. Strangely—in retrospect—it never occurred to me that this book might actually be nothing more than mere invention, a work of fancy: perhaps the accuracy of the blueprint of the library held that idea from my mind; perhaps it was the power of the old family legends engrained so deep within me. All I know is what I felt: a growing conviction that this book spoke somehow of a larger truth.

  The Tower of Bible

  “Jack.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Jack,” I said again.

  “For fuck’s sake, Jack,” called Joey. “Let us in.”

  “Come on. Please,” I said.

  We’d been there for maybe half an hour and all we’d got from the other side of the door was silence. I was worried myself, but I could hear from the fury in Joey’s voice, the way he swore at Jack, insulted him, told him again and again how stupid and pointless all this was, that he was really terrified. If you didn’t know him you’d have thought that he was more concerned about this…waste of time he had to suffer, more bothered about his own inconvenience than anything else. But I could hear the edges and points in his voice, the tightness in his throat. Joey was coming to hate Jack because he couldn’t stand what he was doing to himself; it hurt too much.

  “Open the fucking door, ya fucking bastard. Just fucking open the fucking door, fucking…fucker!”

  And he exploded at the door, kicking, snarling, spitting.

  After a while, after a long while, when Joey had fallen silent, there was a click, and the door opened.

  Jack sat back down on the floor, a Gideon’s Bible in front of him together with a printout of—I looked closer—columns of numbers, letters, other characters—colons, semicolons, question marks—each with a numeric value beside it. It was the ASCII values for the keys on a computer keyboard, I realized, the set of numbers between zero and 255, used in a computer to represent text in the binary form that a machine could work with, language boiled down to zeros and ones, to a series of electronic on and off values. Text was stored as bytes, each byte made up of eight bits, eight binary places representing 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s and so on up to 128, the same way decimal places represent 1s, 10s, 100s and so on…00000000 to 11111111, zero to 255. Jack was using it as reference.

  On one side of him, he had a stack of paper, reams still wrapped or torn open, sheets scattered, piled on top of each other. I watched as he took a fresh sheet from the top of the pile, looked at the Gideon’s, finding his place with the point of his pen, then found the character in the printout of ASCII values and started working out, on the fresh sheet, what its binary representation was. There were sheets of these workings scattered behind him where he’d discarded them and I crouched down to pick one of them up. He’d scrawled out columns for the places, scribbled numbers—45, 37, 56—down the left-hand margin and then ticked off places in the columns: 37, that was 1 plus 4 plus 32…10100100 in binary. Looking at other sheets, I realized that he’d worked out some of these numbers over and over again. He could have just put together another reference sheet of all the binary values for the letters and numbers he needed, but instead he was working them out each time. Every letter, every colon, every full stop, he was looking up on the sheet of ASCII values and calculating the binary for it, even when he’d worked it out just moments before.

  As I watched, he took another sheet, already almost full of ones and zeros, each byte of eight places separated by a dash, and transferred a number from his workings to this page. And then went back to the Bible, back to the sheet of ASCII, back to his scraps of workings, to find the next value. When the page was full, he stood up and walked over to the corner of the room. He was barefoot.

  In the corner of the room, the tower of finished sheets, piled facedown one on top of another, was up to his chest.

  “What the fuck is…”

  Joey was walking over to the corner. I just knew that he was going to pull the first sheet off the top of the pile, hold it up in Jack’s face, demand to know what the fuck was going on. And I could hear the creak of the loose floorboards of Jack’s cheap rented room as Joey stamped across them, catching one of the piles of reams as he stepped over it; and I could see the white of his knuckles, the set of his shoulders, and I knew the tower was unsteady. Christ, it was a pile of loose paper up to Jack’s chest and it was in the corner but it wasn’t even leaning on the walls for support. It was a wonder Jack had managed to get it this high without…

  And I watched as the tower of translated Bible quivered with the floorboards under it, and leaned, and fell, pages scattering out into the air and avalanching out and down, sheets sliding across sheets and catching air and flipping and crashing like paper airplanes coming down.

  And Jack was lost to us that day; we were all lost to each other, because Thomas was dead, and Jack was mad, and Joey was closed, and I…all I could think of was the Book of All Hours.

  The Big Picture

  As I turned the pages, taking care not to drip blood from any of my numerous cuts onto its priceless pages, I barely even heard the alarm that had been ringing in my ears ever since the shattering of the glass. I was transfixed by this strange sense of certainty; I just wasn’t sure what I was certain of. A page, another page, and yet another, and Britain lay before me—a Britain without a Glasgow or a London, or any of the major cities I should have been able to point to, or rather with these cities in the wrong places, in the wrong shapes. A map of the past, or of the future, or of an imagined now?

  “The Macromimicon. The Big Picture,” my uncle had said. “Whatever form it takes—and there’s some who say it takes a different form for everyone—I think somehow—I’m not sure how but I think it’s some sort of mirror of the world, or of something greater that includes the world.”

  Another page—Europe—and then another, and the world lay before me, the globe projected and distorted as it had to be to fit the rectangle of the two pages. The cartographer had elected to sacrifice the inhospitable polar regions, showing the coastline of Antarctica split and splayed to run along the bottom of the page, the tops of the northern continents stretched out and skewed in the transformation from three dimensions to two, running along the top of the page so that the Arctic Ocean was reduced to a mere channel bordering Greenland on either side.

  “It’s a fucking good story,” Jack had said, as we sat in the Union. “I’ll give you that,” he said. “Don’t believe a word of it, though.”

  He checked his watch again, glanced at the door.

  I felt feverish, and I knew that it was more than lack of blood. I should have been out of there by now. I should have been getting the hell out of there with the Book, not browsing its pages as if I was just one more student in the university library—in the university library in
the dead of night, tooled-up with glass-cutters and toothpicks and all the other implements of burglary, waiting to be caught quite literally red-handed, with fingerprints in my own blood all over the broken case and the wooden desk where I now studied the Book. I couldn’t leave.

  “Who’s coming for a drink, then?” Joey had said, one foot up on the wooden bench beside me, leaning on his knee as he looked down at Jack and Puck on the grass.

  “Fuck that shit,” said Puck. “I’m not moving.”

  The alarm rang on, and no one came, and I found myself reaching out with my bloodied left hand to turn the next page, knowing that I had to leave but stuck there as if caught in a moment of determinism. I knew that I was smearing blood over Siberia, and over an invaluable artifact. I knew that the security guards could be no more than seconds away. I knew I could end up in jail for this. Christ, the Book was real, I had it in my hands, here and now. And still, with blood pounding in my ears, and blood dripping in my eyes, running from my cut hand, blood smearing everything that hand touched, I still turned the page.

  New Unfamiliar Terrain

  The coastline of a greater world lay before my eyes. It was a world where Antarctica was only the tip of a much larger southern continent. It was a world where Greenland was an island in a river’s mouth, where Baffin Bay on one side and the Greenland Sea on the other stretched north, fused as an enormous estuary. Asia and the Americas were mere…promontories, headlands on a Hyperborean expanse, and the Arctic “River” that divided them had its source far north and off the edge of the map.

  To east and west the story was the same, a whole new unfamiliar terrain; the western seaboard of America extended up well past Alaska, north and west, while Antarctica continued round and down; the eastern coast of China curved round to a gulf the size of the Baltic where the Bering Strait should be, another massive “river” running north from here. An entirely different landmass jutted in from the east, out at the far edge of—I wasn’t even sure if I should call it the Pacific now—the Eastern Pacific, perhaps, the Western being, on this map, an entirely different body of water. I turned another page.