The Matrix (4 page)

That night, climbing the stairs in that dark building, I felt myself more than usually apprehensive of the silent rooms all round me. For the first time in months, I had spent an extended period with people like myself, students and academics, young people who did not spend their spare time dressing up in operatic costumes or discussing the esoteric intricacies of the Kabbala and Sanskrit lore. Returning to these cold, gloomy rooms was like re-entering an underground cave after a spell in the sunshine.

As I reached the first landing, I half turned, as if I had heard or sensed something in the shadows behind me. But there was nothing there. I glanced up the staircase that led to the empty flat above. All seemed still. I walked on to the library and went inside.

There was no central light, only green-shaded desk-lamps at the four tables and individual lights above each stack of shelves. I switched on the light of the stack nearest me and made my way to the nearest desk.

I cannot be sure – it is a memory so overlaid by later impressions – but I believe that, as I stretched out my hand to put on the desk-lamp, I heard a sound. It was as though someone on the other side of the table had drawn a deep, sighing breath. The next moment, the lamp was lit and I could see no one. I shook myself and all but said out loud, ‘Pull yourself together; there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

I sat down and opened my briefcase, arranging my notebooks and papers on the desk, as usual. Gradually, the familiarity of what I was doing began to take effect, calming me, returning me to a sense of safe, undramatic routine. I stood and went to a stack on my right, where I guessed that several of the volumes I needed would be located. They were all there, and I quickly became engrossed in the pursuit of the answers I sought.

Back at the table, I buried myself in my work, leafing through book after book, scribbling notes, consulting my index cards. From time to time I would get up and go across to a stack for a book I needed, switching on a light and extinguishing it again; sometimes I would consult the catalogue. The pile of books on my desk grew quite high.

The work went better than I had hoped, and I became wholly absorbed in it, shutting out all impressions beyond the pale circle of light that the lamp cast over the table-top and my papers. It must have been midnight or later when I went back to the shelves for the last time.

As I bent to pick up a book from the bottom shelf of a stack I had not been to before, I noticed the edge of a small volume jutting out from behind the wooden back of the bookcase, at a spot where the carpenter had left a space. With difficulty, I succeeded in catching a firm enough grip on it to draw it out through the gap. It seemed old, older than the majority of volumes I had seen there before. Curious, I took it over to my table and sat down.

The little book was bound in hard brown leather. It had no title on the spine or the front cover. In size, it was little more than ten by seven inches, and I guessed it held around two hundred pages. The binding suggested a date at least before 1700, possibly much older. Taking care not to bend the spine unduly – the general state of the volume suggested that it had not been opened for a very long time – I gently lifted the cover. Unlike all the other books I had seen in the library, this had no label to identify it as the property of the Fraternity.

The flyleaf bore a faded inscription in brownish ink, written in an archaic and, to me, illegible hand. I turned it and came straight away to the title page. This read as follows:

It astonished me to find a book printed as early as 1598 lying here gathering dust behind some shelves, unopened and unread. I had never come across the title in my reading, but that was hardly surprising. All the same, I knew at once that it was an early example of printed occult literature, possibly a treatise on astrology. This first impression was confirmed as soon as I opened the book and began to leaf through it.

The left-hand pages carried text that I guessed to be Arabic, printed in large letters. Facing these were pages set in double columns, one in Latin, the other in English. The main text consisted of short verses, which I then took to be spells, interspersed with what appeared to be commentary or instructions. Of these, one in particular struck me at the time. I still have it by heart.

Hee that shal come shal come quickly
And hee shal bring with him many
For that there are now with him many
And hee with them always untill hee come.
Call on him thus and bee not afraide:
Ya maloon, ya shaytoon, ya rabb al-mawt
Bismika, bismika, ya rabb al-mawt.

Every five pages or so, a reproduction of a talismanic device – a circle or a star filled with geometrical shapes and more Arabic writing – was printed opposite a page of instructions on its use.

I continued reading, fascinated by the curiosity of the language and the strange, oracular quality of the spells. The author, I learned from Ockley’s foreword, had been a Moroccan scholar, known to medieval Europe by the Latin name Avimetus (or Avimetus Africanus). His treatise was a little-known classic of ritual magic that had exercised a profound influence on authors such as Trithemius and Cornelius Agrippa and had been condemned by Johann Wier for its ‘diabolic incantations’ and its advocacy of ‘consort with all manner of demons’.

Tired from my hours of note-taking, my mind turned readily enough to the relatively undemanding task of poring over a book not directly connected with my paper. I read on, lulled by the lateness of the hour, the silence, the dim lighting, and my own fatigue, entranced by the weird lilting verses and their haunting tone. I understood very little.

As I turned a page towards the end, I saw, not a pentagram or a talisman as I had expected, but a wood-cut illustration. It took me about half a minute to disentangle the subject and composition of the drawing, but to this day I wish I had never done so. Printed on my mind’s eye were shapes and figures of unspeakable horror. It had been no more than a glimpse, but in that moment of recognition I had seen forms that I will never forget as long as I live.

The woodcut depicted not an Eastern scene as might have been expected, but one set in Europe, the interior of a large church, huge and vaulted, with shadows on both sides of a wide nave. Thick carved pillars divided the nave from the side aisles, and a heavy curtain hung in front of the chancel, blocking all the eastern end of the church from view.

Along one side were ranged several stone tombs, topped with monuments. One near the chancel end had been opened, a great iron door swung back. On the ground lay what I took to be corpses, as though they had been dragged from their resting-places and scattered in the aisle. That was sufficiently revolting in itself to make me shudder, but it was not the real horror of the drawing.

Just visible in the opening of the tomb were several indistinct figures, stooped over the remains of the dead. They had short, stumpy bodies, naked bodies the colour of parchment, white meat, bloodless, eternally pale. They were bent over the corpses, sucking and nibbling. And one . . . Dear God, I cannot forget this – one was turning its head to look directly at the viewer. It did not have a face exactly, and it was shrouded in a piece of rotting cloth, but I could tell that it had no eyes. It had no eyes, but I knew that it could see.

I slammed the book shut and sat back, stupefied by the obscenity of the woodcut I had happened on. One thing I knew with absolute certainty, and I know it now without any hint of doubt – whoever the artist was who had penned that loathsome scene had not imagined it, but drawn it from life.

As I sat there, glancing nervously about me, I became aware for the first time that there were noises in the room above me. Something told me that they had been there for some time, but, engrossed as I had been in my reading, I had failed to notice them. I strove to make out what they could be. A sort of flapping and scraping that moved slowly across the floor above my head. At first I thought it must be a member of the Fraternity come to investigate the lights, or that, perhaps, the apartment upstairs had been rented without my knowledge.

But even as I listened, something in the quality of the sounds told me that, whatever was making them, it was not human. My heart seemed to freeze as the noises moved across the room in the direction of the door that led to the second-floor landing. I heard the door opening, and the sound moving across a wooden floor. Terrified, I went to the door of the library. Somewhere above me, I could hear it, very soft, like seaweed on damp rocks, flapping and wriggling across the landing.

As I stood listening, it reached the first step and started down the stairs.

I can scarcely remember how I got out of the building. I gathered my books and papers together in any order, rammed them into my briefcase, and made for the door, leaving library books scattered across my desk and lights burning. I did not pause to listen to the sounds that were audible from the staircase now, but dashed down to the ground floor and through the front door, all but falling down the steps onto the pavement.

I did not halt for breath or thought until I was back in my rooms in Canongate. The journey there, made on foot, was a constant terror. I half walked, half ran through the streets of the New Town, through Charlotte Square to the West End, then along the more dimly lit stretches of the Old Town, below the Castle, then up into Lawnmarket and so back at last to Canongate and Bakehouse Close. Each time I passed the unlit entrance to a close or court, I would hurry past, as though fearful that something lurked there unseen.

By the time I reached my rooms I was exhausted. I turned on all the lights and sat for half an hour, shaking, slowly collecting myself. I put a record on my stereo and played it softly, Bach violin concertos, the most soothing music I could find. Gradually, the music and the familiar surroundings began to restore me to a sense of normality. Two cups of coffee revived my nerves and mind, and I was soon able to take stock of what had happened. It seemed obvious enough. I had overworked myself recently, buried myself in matters likely to lend themselves to morbid brooding, spent too little time in normal company, or going to concerts, or visiting the theatre. The lateness of the hour and the eeriness of my surroundings had combined to produce in my overwrought and exhausted brain an abnormal reaction to a perfectly ordinary sixteenth-century woodcut. That reaction had itself brought on an aural hallucination, and I had panicked and fled. Or so I reasoned at the time.

It was about three in the morning when I finally went to bed, tired out both physically and mentally. I fell asleep at once. I remember nothing of my dreams, nor do I know precisely what it was that woke me. All I recall is that I started out of sleep with an indefinable yet powerful sense of dread, a feeling that the darkened room around me was alive with something even darker. It must have been about four-thirty, with dawn still some time away. Gradually, the first feelings of panic started to subside, but, even as they did so, I became conscious of sounds above the ceiling of my room.

These were not the flapping and scraping noises I had heard in the rooms above the library, but seemed more like footsteps. At first I thought it must be someone in the room above me pacing his floor, unable to sleep. Then I remembered that there was no room above mine.

When the building had been reconstructed in the early eighties, on account of the curious shape of the roof, the sixth floor – the one just above mine – was too small to allow for a full-size apartment. Instead, there were a couple of single rooms let out to students and a long section where the roof came to within three feet or less of the floor. I knew that this section stretched across my apartment. I also knew that it had been bricked up and closed for good. There was no way in or out.

I lay in bed in the dark, sweating as I listened to the forwards and backwards movement of the sounds above me. I could make them out more clearly now and, with a feeling of the most intense horror, I realized that they could not have been made by human feet. They possessed a quality that reminded me somehow of the creatures I had seen in the woodcut, sucking the corpses on the church floor. The image of that scene came back to me then with renewed vividness, and nothing I could do would expunge from my mind the sight of that eyeless thing, half turned, with its mouth set at an abnormal angle.

I do not know how long I lay there listening, paralysed, unable to reach out for the light or otherwise break the horrified trance into which I had fallen. Dawn came at last, pale and weak at first, the light gradually strengthening as it filtered through my curtains. As the darkness was gradually dispelled, the sounds seemed to grow weaker until they finally faded completely. I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

I slept through all of the next day, a Saturday, and neither dreams nor sounds disturbed me. My appointment with Professor Craigie was forgotten. I did not wake, not that day, not that night. Yet one faint memory has remained at the back of my mind. Whenever I clutch at it and try to drag it into the full light of consciousness, it evaporates and is gone. But at unguarded moments it returns.