The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales (5 page)

I think of the Man Who Collected Machen, doubtless now gloating over my signed copy of
The House of Souls
and I pity him. Although, in our differing fashions, we both belong to the Lost Club, for him it is the end. For me it is merely the
beginning
. For now I dwell amidst visions splendid, and count myself blessed to be an inhabitant of the City of Transmutations, of eternal London, of Avalon. For I have become the Man who Believed Machen.

THYXXOLQU

Owen Barclay’s first encounter with the mystery occurred on the top deck of a number 134 bus as he travelled into work. He had been looking over one of the free London morning tabloids with mounting disgust, when the bus turned a corner and he caught sight of a roadside advertising hoarding opposite. He glanced up from the paper’s photograph of pop star Julia Carnage falling out of a limousine drunk at four in the morning, and saw, through the rain-scarred window, the ad for a new brand of canned beans. It depicted a smiling young woman with a well-toned physique holding up a tin. There was nothing out of the ordinary about this, but what puzzled Barclay were the logo and the words above the image. They were in some foreign language, but the characters were not in Western, Arabic, Cyrillic, Mandarin, Japanese nor any other type of alphabet that he recognised. He supposed that it was some new kind of marketing gimmick, but the script intrigued him. Although he didn’t recognise the language, it seemed somehow distantly familiar, and he had a strong sense of déjà vu, as if he’d once known it and had forgotten it until now.

The recollection bothered him during the day, and he thought of the ad when he should have been concentrating on the emails arriving from clients on his office computer. He stared at the screen in a dead fashion, not absorbing the information in front of him, his eyes glazing over, until he brought on a headache. He tried to clear the backlog of filing that had built up on his desk, but the sight of all the correspondence and having to go through it carefully made him nauseous. Something about the sight of words written in English was making him ill. It was only later in the day that he discovered the effect was not confined to English. A French client had sent him an email and, although Barclay was fluent in French (as well as in German, Spanish and Russian) he could scarcely bring himself to go through the whole communication, although it was a matter of contractual importance to the company. Somehow, by shuffling papers aimlessly around his desk, Barclay got through the day, and he left the building harbouring a sense of resentment at the canned beans ad for having succeeded in embedding itself in his mind.

On the bus home, he took a window seat and readied his mobile phone to take a photo of the ad as he passed it by. He was determined to try and find some clue as to the meaning of the words in the unknown language. The bus slowed down in rush hour traffic as it passed the roadside hoarding and he captured a clear crisp image. He scrutinised it during the whole of the journey, almost missing his stop.

Barclay prepared himself a light dinner and ate idly as he transcribed the words from the image stored in his mobile phone onto paper, and then rifled through his reference books in order to identify the language and decipher the meaning. He could find no trace of information about it.

After three hours of fruitless labour he was so angry at himself for dedicating time to what he now considered a worthless hoax and a definite marketing gimmick that he deleted the image from the phone, tore up the paper upon which he’d written down the mysterious characters and gave up on the whole investigation. He couldn’t bear to read any more of the novel he’d started a week before, since he suffered from a sudden return of the same word sickness he’d experienced earlier in the day, and instead watched television until sleep crept up on him.

•

Travelling into work on the same bus route the next day, Barclay again scanned the tacky tabloid newspaper that was provided free of charge each morning. He told himself that he would only complete the crossword and would not, on this journey, allow himself to be annoyed by the celebrity gossip that infested its pages. But as he leafed through it, in search of the crossword, he stopped at an article that caught his eye. Unusually, it had no accompanying photo of a drunken reality TV star, a scantily clad footballer’s wife or even a pop singer with tell-tale traces of a white powder around their nostrils. But more unusually, it was written in an obscure language. Barclay could not be entirely certain, but strongly suspected that it was the language of the billboard advertisement he’d seen yesterday. He carefully tore around the article and put the piece of paper into his pocket. He had no wish to carry the whole tabloid around with him for the rest of the day and run the risk of being mistaken for someone who had an interest in its drivelling contents. He wished, however, to retain a copy of the article itself since he realised that the significance of this new language’s appearance was not confined to a cheap marketing gimmick. Now that he had more than half a dozen words from which to make a comparison, he might even be able to find out more about it.

When the bus reached the corner where stood the billboard advertisement for canned beans, he saw that the one adjacent to it now sported a new ad for a brand of pills delivering its message in the same mysterious language. Was it aimed, he thought, at some freshly arrived wave of immigrant workers from a cryptic corner of the European Union? During the last thirty years Barclay had seen the steady increase, from almost zero, of Turkish, Bangladeshi, Ethiopian, Polish, Jordanian and many other shop signs in London. But ads in a foreign language were rarer. He recalled a few in Spanish and French, but those had been for imported beers.

He had no luck with the crossword. The clues appeared to make no sense to him and he could scarcely comprehend what answers they were supposed to suggest. It was the first time that he had been defeated by one of them.

Later that day, in the office, as Barclay again tried to avoid looking at his computer screen, and during which gradually all correspondence on paper filled him with nausea, he noticed the t-shirt of one of his work colleagues as he passed by Barclay’s desk. This employee, James Monck, had recently been on holiday abroad, but had come back pale and sickly as if he’d actually spent a few weeks in a windowless room shooting up heroin. The garment he wore was an ill-fitting brown t-shirt, about a size too small, and it clung to his emaciated torso like a tight second skin. But it was the circular blue lettering at the centre of the t-shirt that drew Barclay’s attention. It wound around the silhouette of a town with a clustered multitude of steeples and domes. The lettering was in the obscure language that was appearing in his life on all sides.

“
You picked that up on your holiday, did you?” Barclay asked him, pointing to his chest.

“
That’s right,” Monck replied. “I hated to come back.”

“
Where did you go?” Barclay said.

“
Just over the edge.”

“
Where did you buy the souvenir t-shirt? I don’t recognise the language or the silhouette of the town.”

“
What, this?” Monck said. “Oh I got it in Qxwthyyothl.”

Barclay’s expression turned quizzical at the last word.

“
Which is where?” he asked.

“
Qxwthyyothl is the capital city of Thyxxolqu.”

Barclay took the article from his pocket that he’d torn out of the tabloid newspaper. He flattened out its crumpled surface and passed it over to Monck.

“
Do you recognise this language?” he said, waiting as Monck examined the text.

“
This is uxwqol in Thyxxolqus,” Monck finally replied.

Barclay stared at him blankly.

“
I said,” Monck repeated, “this is written in Thyxxolqus, which is the language spoken in Thyxxolqu.”

“
What type of script is this? I’ve not seen anything like it before. It doesn’t even look Indo-European in origin.”

“
I’m not an expert, and I wouldn’t know.”

Monck handed back the fragment from the newspaper.

“
Are there many people from this country you visited in London, do you know?”

Monck grinned at the remark. His teeth appeared to be in the first stages of rot.

“
Thyxxolqu yho quoxlu,” he said, in a strangely guttural tone before abruptly turning on his heels and walking away.

Barclay wrote down the words he’d heard from Monck in phonetics, and managed to conquer his revulsion with the computer screen long enough to punch the characters into an internet search engine. He tried as many different combinations of the rendering he’d made as he could think of, but none yielded results. The article itself, written in the Thyxxolqus script, was of no assistance to him, since it could not be rendered by any of the keyboard language options available on the computer.

•

After he had finished doing nothing in the office, Barclay stopped off at the British Library. He did not care much for the hard angled building on the Euston Road that had replaced the old reading room beneath the mighty dome in the British Museum. His objections were not only architectural, for students who regarded it with, in Barclay’s view, much less reverence than the former space, constantly filled the new one. They treated it like a café, or meeting place, and he was concerned that proper research had given way to its being used to spend time searching online via laptop computers or else to improve one’s social circle on cyberspace. Barclay’s reader pass was of long-standing, and he was known by sight amongst the assistants and the security personnel, who waved him through with no more than a token glance at his card.

He consulted with the staff as to the correct volumes that might enable him to identify the script used in the article from the tabloid newspaper and was grateful for their assistance in seeking references to the language that Monck referred to phonetically as “Thyxxolqus”. However, they were only able to suggest a number of indices from antique and almost-forgotten encyclopaedias that proved, after consultation, to be of no value. There was a single reference to Thyxxolqus (rendered as “Tyxxollqus”) in a cross-reference to an obscure article reprinted in the 1862 edition of
The Collected Works of Thomas De Quincey
. It came from the October 1821 edition of
The London Magazine
and was written under the pseudonym “XYZ”. The book contained this article (which was entitled “Voices from the Grave”) but was kept off-site and could only be delivered the next day. Barclay requested the item anyway and resolved to return.

•

On the bus back home from the British Library, Barclay noticed a new development. Above the windows, on the curved angle of the wall before the ceiling, it was usual for the bus company to display advertisements. On this particular bus, they were all in what appeared to be Thyxxolqus. Moreover, someone sitting directly in front of Barclay was conducting, via his mobile phone, a staccato buzzing conversation in the same language. Once the conversation was over, Barclay could not refrain from lightly tapping the passenger on the shoulder, and enquiring whether he could translate the advertisements since he appeared to be a speaker of Thyxxolqus.

The man appeared a little confused by Barclay’s interest and gaped at him momentarily as if he did not quite comprehend the request made to him in English.

Finally he responded.

“
Do you mean to say huxxkl nyzzzt for yourself? Are you krhjxjk?”

“
Where did you learn this language? Are you English?” Barclay replied, conscious that the two of them had drawn the surreptitious attention of all the other silent passengers.

“
English? Of course I’m ghxcllu English! Hxchxc joke nyzzzt hythxxu off,” he barked back.

An elderly Indian lady, dressed in a patterned sari, sitting alongside the passenger in front then joined in the conversation.

“
Please,” she said, “let’s not jhjkzz, there’s no juxxchu fzzzghal and I’m running chjuzzcu yho fghgrxx.”

Behind him, Barclay heard more words spoken in Thyxxolqus and turned to see a teenage Spanish couple chattering to one another.

“
Qué divertido mi amor. Nxhzzz uglaghk no habla jkgqixx.”

Someone else said something in Thyxxolqus. Pure, undiluted Thyxxolqus. It was a small Japanese man clad in a pin-striped business suit. His beetling eyebrows were raised and a look of loathing crossed his face.

As Barclay watched his mouth open and close, forming the strange, guttural words, he saw that the Easterner’s teeth were blackened stumps housed in yellow, rotting gums. This Japanese man with a decayed mouth then got to his feet and appeared intent on grabbing hold of Barclay. But after his first unsuccessful lunge, Barclay was already on his feet and hurtling down the steps to the ground floor of the bus. He pushed the emergency exit release button above the doors and jumped clear of the vehicle. Barclay had planned to take to his heels, losing himself in the crowds in the ticket hall of nearby Camden Town Underground Station. But he landed awkwardly, his head thumped against the cold concrete of the pavement and he blacked out.

•

Barclay had a splitting headache and his vision was slightly distorted. He rose swiftly into consciousness, adrenaline surging into his veins as the memory of what had happened flooded over him. He was lying on a trolley in what seemed to be a small room that smelt of antiseptic. Someone in a white coat was leaning over him and taking his pulse.