Vellum (3 page)

“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.

Again the scale moved out and, on this map, the world I knew could have taken up no more than a sixteenth of the area shown. The northeast coastline of that Greater Antarctica curved up to meet the strange land in the east, which itself carried on to meet the coast that curved around and down from China; pincered by its own Gibraltar Strait formed by the tip of South America, the bump of Antarctica, this
Eastern Pacific
was no more than a landlocked sea here, like a larger Mediterranean, dwarfed by the lands surrounding it on three sides. Hyperborea to the north, I thought, the Subantarctic to the south, and an Orient beyond the farthest Orient we've ever known.

Another page, and another, and the world I knew was only a minuscule part of an impossibly vast landscape. I'm no physicist, but I know enough about matter and gravity to know when I'm looking at the surface of a world that couldn't possibly support human existence. This was a world on the scale of Jupiter and Saturn. I turned more pages, two or three at a time, and still each map was at a larger magnitude than the one before, and still the world revealed was only a quarter of the world mapped out on the page to follow. Continents became islands off of coastlines that became continents. Ten pages, twenty. The world I knew wasn't even visible at this scale, but there was still a world to be marked out, a fractured collision of earth and water, in areas so vast that terms like “continent” or “ocean” now seemed meaningless.

I kept turning the pages.

The Silent World

And as my heart pounded in my chest and my head swam, I realized that the alarm bell I'd been hearing was only a vague and distant ringing in my ears now. No one was coming. No one would ever come. I knew it with the certainty of dream knowledge. I knew it with the same certainty that told me that this archaic text before me was no piece of whimsy, that it was real, it was true, truer than reality.

I knew it even before turning to the very last page of the Book, to the very last map in which this ancient cartographer had laid out the edges of his known universe, a blank and featureless plain extending in all directions at the center of which, tiny and intricate, the world of worlds was only an oasis, with a dotted track leading out of it to the north as if to mark some unimaginably long road to the inconceivably distant.

I knew it even before I staggered out through the deep corridors of the library and out into the silent world, as I wandered through a campus entirely empty of human life, and out into streets of sandstone tenements and tarmac roads, traffic lights that still cycled through their sequences of red, amber and green although the empty cars just sat there, oblivious to their commands. I knew it even if I couldn't find the words to shape my tongue around in order to express that vague, disturbing certainty.

I shouted, but there was no one to hear me.

I didn't know at what point I had crossed over into this, my new reality: whether it had been my blood upon the Book that had somehow, like some magical anointment, released its power; or whether it had been simply my opening of the tome that had opened a gateway around me; whether that blast of shattering glass from the Book's cabinet had thrown me clear out of my own world and into the next; whether the case itself had held not air under pressure but something even less substantial, some etheric force unbound by my meddling which even now might be traveling in a shock wave outward from its focus, transforming everything it touched.

Transformations

We stood there at the back of the church, Jack and Joey and I. He had a lot of family, a lot of friends, Puck did, and the church was full. I've heard it's often like that when someone young dies. Young lives leave a lot of mourners. But we'd almost had to drag Jack there; he wouldn't come at first, said he wouldn't sit and listen to a minister reciting platitudes and singing fucking hymns, fucking praising fucking God in fucking Heaven. That's how he put it.

I glanced at the two of them, Jack and Joey standing by my side, silent in black—black suits, black mood. And I had this absurd thought, this stupid, crazy idea, that the two of them looked like some kind of clichéd bloody Hollywood vision of secret agents, or Rat Pack gangsters, assassins, men in black. Angels of death, waiting patiently to collect.