The three men leaned across the table, speaking quietly. Now and then Malloy boomed out an epithet, to be shhhed by William. The older couple with the dog had left. Birdhouse retreated to the bar and returned with another bottle of Pellegrino. He settled back alongside Malloy, joining the conversation in between bouts of texting and reading on his mobile.
I didn’t hear much other than Malloy’s continued insistence that ISIS was behind Harold’s death. William inevitably rose to the bait, but Birdhouse only regarded Malloy with faint amusement, as though watching the antics of an ill-behaved toddler. I decided I’d give it another fifteen minutes, then split. I’d wasted enough time.
And if Nathan unexpectedly showed up, I didn’t want to be seen. I’d find another bar and kill the next hour or two, till it was time to meet Quinn.
Yet I doubted there was enough whiskey to kill my growing dread. I blinked, trying to dispel the spidery black threads that knit and unraveled across my vision. After a minute I realized I was grinding my teeth—the beginnings of withdrawal. I licked my lips, tasting blood, picked up Dead Girls, and opened it to the leaf from The Book of Lamps and Banners.
I’ve seen reproductions of medieval manuscripts in books. These pictures had the same saturated pigmentation, eerily unfaded by the centuries. Or millennia, if the book was as old as Gryffin claimed it was. Lapis and scarlet; saffron and iridescent green; a delicate lavender that looked like the first flush of spring in a crocus that has yet to fully open.
Most striking was a flame-bright crimson that resembled a screenshot of an actual fire, not something created with ground pigments. Again, I felt a shiver of the same terror that had sickened me when Tindra unleashed her app.
My apprehension wasn’t eased by the illustrations embellishing the unreadable text. One showed a woman with the lower body of a squidlike creature. Her face was that of a lamprey, and her tentacles ended in talons that grasped squirming figures that might have been human.
The illustration was no more than two inches square. Yet its background was meticulously, psychedelically, rendered. Myriad branches grew from a single trunk, each branch crowned with a human head. Multiple suns blazed in the lapis sky, along with swastikas and arrows that, close-up, looked less like arrows than rockets, complete with fins and contrails.
The longer I stared at the page, the less crazy Tindra’s theory seemed. Symbols and images repeated in a manner that seemed commensurate with some kind of code. But I had no idea what, exactly, I was looking at. One moment, it would all be in focus. The next, an image would blur, or even seem to change shape and color: the lamprey now a crimson poppy, the tentacles folds of a long robe.
Same with the picture of a decapitated head with too many eyes to count. First it was a head. Then it was the cratered surface of the moon. Then a head again. Then the moon.
Drugs and booze make me crazy, but not that crazy. I wondered if the papyrus had been impregnated with a hallucinogen, or even a poison. Could a poison still be active after two thousand years? I didn’t think so, but there was definitely something strange and frightening going on, something that seemed to defy the little I knew about medieval illumination, and maybe physics.
And also history: When this book was written, did anyone, even Aristotle, know there were craters on the moon?
This is a very advanced philosophical artifact. And I can guarantee you that some of the people who’ve owned it over the years knew exactly what it was.
I turned the sheet over. Compared with the phantasmagoric images on the other side, the runic lettering here appeared crude and much older—it was easy to imagine someone scratching it onto the page with a sharpened stick.
And Harold had been right. Unlike the other written text, the runes weren’t inscribed in black, but a very faint rusty brown. If it was blood, the effort to write must have been painstaking, each line barely a hair’s breadth. Harold had speculated that this was a formula, or perhaps a spell.
Beware, this is power…
I jumped as someone pounded on the neighboring table.
“Listen to yourself! That’s shite talk and you know it, Malloy!” the fat man shouted. “Gwilym, don’t encourage him!”
“Shite? How many white faces did you see on the Tube getting here?” Malloy stood to yank a windbreaker from a wall peg. “White genocide, that’s what this is.”
He barreled toward the door. William got to his feet and called after him. “That’s right, do a runner.”
“Let him go, Will,” said Birdhouse mildly.
“Go back to your bloody sheep,” William retorted. “All you do is wind him up, and you know it.”
The fat man snatched up his overcoat and stormed out. Birdhouse remained where he was, unfazed by the outburst, sipping Pellegrino as he scrolled through his mobile.
I looked back down at the papyrus sheet. I knew I should put it away, but the images drew me like a drug. If a single page could have such a powerful effect, what would it be like to look through the entire Book of Lamps and Banners?
And if Tindra was right, and it really was an ancient manual for mind control—what would her app be capable of, if she used this to upgrade Ludus Mentis from the beta version?
I glanced up to see Gwilym Birdhouse watching me. I quickly closed Dead Girls, straightened, and stared back at him, trying to appear composed. Birdhouse’s expression betrayed no sign that he’d seen what I’d been looking at. His narrow blue eyes were watchful, slightly amused. Not the gaze of a man in the throes of grief; more like someone waiting to see if a slightly thick friend had finally figured out the punch line of a joke.
“Birdhouse, right? Big fan,” I said, and finished my whiskey. “Your friends there seemed upset.”
Birdhouse nodded. “Yeah. We had some bad news.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“A good friend was killed. Murdered.” He reached to scratch behind one ear, exposing a neck tattoo similar to Malloy’s: a rippling flag, a red cross on a white ground. “It’s quite a shock.”
“That’s horrible. Did they catch who did it?”
“Not yet. Not as far as I know, anyway.” He glanced at his mobile, shook his head. “Metropolitan Police are useless. They’d have to bring in Scotland Yard or Interpol. And they won’t do that, not now. Waste of resources with everything else going on.”
I hesitated, then asked, “Who was he? Your friend?”
“A bookseller.”
Birdhouse’s mobile pinged. He read the incoming text, set down his mobile, and again stared at me. His gaze shifted from my face to the copy of Dead Girls. He picked up the bottle of Pellegrino and stood.
“See you,” he said. As he walked past, I caught a powerful whiff of something redolent of wet dog.
Other than me, the room was empty. After a minute the girl from behind the register entered and cleared away the empty glasses. She returned to wipe the tables down, and the doggy odor dissolved into ammonia and lemon. I tugged on my leather jacket, got my bag, and went outside.
The sulfurous haze had deepened to a bruised green. Spatters of rain struck my face. I pulled up my collar and hurried toward the street.
After a few steps, I remembered the Aran sweater my father used to wear when he was out raking leaves, its strong animal scent when it got wet. Lanolin. Gwilym Birdhouse smelled like that. Unsurprising, given his shearling coat and felted boots, and the fact that he raised sheep. What was it with musicians retreating into country life? Paul and Linda McCartney holed up on Kintyre in Scotland. Ian Anderson overseeing a salmon fishery. Birdhouse and sheep…
Halfway down the cobblestoned alley, I looked up to see a figure blocking my way. Someone put an arm around my throat and yanked me into an abandoned entryway.
“Quiet now,” a voice murmured in my ear.