Angelmaker (5 page)

Mr. Cummerbund closes his book, and glances at his partner.

“I’m quite sure,” Mr. Titwhistle murmurs, “that some accommodation could be reached for the full collection.”

“I’m so glad. Your good fortune, of course, is that I’ve begun to assemble it all. Mine is that now I have someone suitable to sell it to.”

“We should greatly prefer to avoid anything like an auction.”

You don’t care in the slightest. This is another test. Why is everyone testing me? I don’t have anything you want. Except, somehow, I clearly do.

Mathew is bubbling in Joe’s brain, commenting and advising:

Don’t sell. Not yet. If you make it easy, they’ll see through you
.

To what?

To whatever you’re actually going to do
.

Am I not selling, then?

Apparently not
.

Cover. Conceal. Hide. Deceive.

A day of ghosts, most unwelcome and unawaited.

“Then I shall expect your pre-emptive offer to be quite striking. I’m sure it would have been anyway! And if you’ll be so kind as to
excuse me, gentlemen, I have another client appointment—on an unrelated matter, I assure you—at ten-thirty, and I really need to go. Shall we say, same time on Monday?”

There is a long pause. Jesus, Joe thinks, are they actually going to jump me? And then:

“Ideal,” Mr. Titwhistle says. He reaches into his jacket and produces, between two meagre fingers, a crisp white business card. “Do call if you have any trouble—the Museum has a good many friends. We can help in all sorts of ways.”

Yes. I’m sure you can.

Joe watches them walk away down the road. Neither one looks back. No car stops to pick them up. They seem entirely rapt in conversation, and yet somehow he feels observed, spied upon.

Fine. Then I’m very boring, aren’t I? I do boring things. I live a boring life and no one can say I don’t. I deal in antiques and curiosities, and I don’t do surprises. I’m recently single and I’m about to leave the 25–34 demographic for evermore. I like Chelsea buns the way they don’t make them these days and I fall in love with waifish, angry women who don’t think I’m funny.

I wind clocks like Daniel.

And I won’t turn into Mathew.

“Billy, it’s Joe. Call me, please. We’ve got something to discuss.”

He sighs, feeling the need for some consolation and knowing that he has no one from whom he can easily require a hug, and goes back to work.

Joe winds the clocks every day after lunch. He does not, as is the practice of many in his trade, set them all to different times so that there is always one about to chime. He gets his clients by appointment, by referral. Spork & Co. is what is known in these days when everything is studied and taxonomised as a “destination business.” His customers, for the most part, already know what they want when they come, and they are unlikely to be soothed or cozened into buying something else just because it goes
bong
while they’re having a quiet cup of tea and a jam tart with the owner. What they want is splendour and authenticity and a sense of craft. They are buying perhaps most of all a handshake with the past.

And the past is here, caught by the crook of the Thames and the
endless whispering of ratchets and pendulums, the busy susurrus of oiled mechanical technology. If he is lucky, or when he can schedule an appointment with reference to the tide chart and the radio set he keeps against the waterside wall, the fog will come in and waves will lap against the brick, and some mournful barge will creak down the river or even hoot into the mist, and as the whole place slips loose in time, his client will tumble nose-first into the magic of it and buy that item they came for even though, inevitably, they came expecting to get it at half the asking price. He sometimes has to turn down considerable offers on the building itself. He jokes on such occasions that if one of them owns the other, it is almost certainly the warehouse, with his grandfather’s patient ghost and his father’s restless, relentless magnanimity, which holds the freehold to the man.

Joe winds the clocks. The winders are on a small trolley—a keychain would rattle and scratch against the casements, a bag would mean rummaging through each time for the right key. He pushes it around and tries not to feel like the nurse who wheels the gurney of the dead.
Clink, clank, I’m so sorry, it was his time
.

In the last year or so he has taken to playing BBC Radio 4 while he winds. The gentle burble of news and artistic wrangling makes a pleasant backdrop, and every so often there’s the forecast for shipping, with its soothing litany of places he need never go. Flemish Cap, seven, gusting nine. Recently, Radio 4 has betrayed him somewhat, because current affairs are a bit tense. Alongside assorted climatic woes, the world is even now passing what is apparently called “peak oil”—the moment after which oil will only ever be harder to get hold of and hence more expensive and ultimately unavailable—and in consequence the latest meeting of the G-whatever-it-is has become tense. Joe hopes this does not mean the sort of tense which prefigures bombing someone. He does not find angry South American diplomats, resentful Irish aviation bosses and fatuously confident Canadian oilmen very restful, so today the radio is silent on its shelf.

And really, that’s the most important thing he does with his days. It’s a small, measurable success, in the face of diminishing sales and an empty double bed and a set of skills which were marketable one hundred years ago, but now look quaint and even sad. Every afternoon for the last six months he has been fighting an uneven battle with himself not to overturn the trolley with its many keys, and scatter them across the room. His better nature has won only because the image
of himself on his knees, remorsefully gathering them again, repairing scratched case clocks and whispering apologies to the ghost of his grandfather—and for strange and different reasons also his father—is more than he can bear.

The chimes clink over the door, and he glances up.

The figure in the doorway is tall. It must be, because the top of its head is not so far short of the frame. It is silhouetted by the day outside, but even allowing for that, it must be wearing black. It has long arms and long legs, and wears a strange, cumbersome garment like a dress or robe.
Miss Havisham
. He wonders if the wearer is unpleasantly scarred. He cannot tell. Over its head, the visitor wears a piece of black gauze or linen, so that the face is quite invisible. The cloth is not cinched; it hangs down over the wearer’s head, so that the top is a smooth curve. There’s just the barest bulge of a nose. Other than that, the head is as blank and featureless as an egg.
Vampire. Alien
. And then, more shamefully,
suicide bomber
.

The last makes him feel guilty, and ridiculous, and the feeling propels him to his feet. Clearly, if suicide bomber is unlikely, it has to be conceded that the others are more so.

“Hello,” Joe says. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing for the moment, thank you.” The voice is deep and scratched, but muffled. It sounds like a recording played through one of the old wood-horn gramophones Joe has in the back. The metal-horns are powerful, they make everything sound like old-time radio. The wood-horns are rounder, but lack belt. Joe automatically leans in to hear, and then away again when the blank linen face follows him, ducks down as if to kiss his cheek, coming too close too quickly. “May I look around?”

“Oh, well, please. Browse away. Let me know if you want anything in particular. I have some very fine gramophones with quite special horns. And a really good fob watch. I’m quite proud of the clean-up. It’s a lovely thing.” Joe lets his tone suggest that anyone who is just browsing should almost certainly conclude their visit with a tour of the smaller items which might have failed to attract attention.

The shrouded head dips in assent, once, and then deeper a second time, like a swan’s.

“Forgive me for asking,” Joe says, when his visitor does not move away, “but I’ve never seen anyone dressed like that before.”

“I am on a journey of the soul,” the other replies, without rancour.
“My clothing reminds me that the face of God is turned away from us. From the world. It is worn by members of the Order of John the Maker, who are called Ruskinites.” He waits, to see if this elicits a reaction. Since Joe doesn’t know what reaction would be considered appropriate, he allows himself none.

“Thank you,” he says instead, by way of concluding the conversation. The man moves away with a curious, boneless lurching.

Glancing warily after the eerie, absent face, Joe goes back to work.

The visitor wanders towards a row of music boxes. One of them plays something light and perky, and the man looks down at it like a bird wondering whether it is something to eat. A moment later, he speaks again.

“Mr. Spork?”

“Yes, what can I do for you?”

“I am looking for something. I hope you can help me.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I believe you have recently dealt with a book I have an interest in. A very unusual book.”

Oh, crap
.

“Oh, dear. I can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Music, yes. Books, no.” Joe can feel a sort of prickling on his back. He turns, and sees the figure straighten and turn smoothly away.

“I believe you can. The Book of the Hakote, Mr. Spork.” Laden with significance.

Joe hesitates. On the one hand, he has never specifically heard of the Book of the Hakote (huh-KOH-tay). Like the shroud the visitor is wearing, the word has the flavour of religion, and he takes especial care not to deal in religious items, be they church timepieces or sneaky weeping icons with internal reservoirs and clockwork pumps. They have almost always been pillaged at some time, and in consequence come with aggravation attached. On the other hand, he has recently been in contact with an object of various unusual qualities which might conceivably answer to such an outré name, an object which was brought to him by a moderately nefarious individual by the name of William “Billy” Friend.

Chief among the unusual qualities aforementioned: a fat man and a thin man turned up in his shop and lied, quaintly and unpersuasively, about how they wanted to buy the Grandpa Spork collection entire, when what they really wanted (see Mr. Titwhistle’s betraying fingers) was anything associated with this same “very unusual book.”

“I’m terribly sorry, you’ve lost me,” Joe replies cheerfully. “I sell and maintain items of clockwork. Curiosities, mostly, things that go
bong
and so on. Pianolas and automata. But in general not books.”

“There are some texts whose importance is not immediately apparent to the uninitiated. Dangerous books.”

“I’m sure there are.”

“There is no need to condescend.” The Ruskinite’s head turns on his neck, the shroud bunching at the shoulders. Joe wonders if it will turn all the way around, like an owl’s. “I mean that the escape of knowledge into the realm of wider society irretrievably alters the nature of our lives. More mundanely, Mr. Spork, the Book and all its paraphernalia are of great value to me personally. I should very much like them back.”

Back
. Not:
I should very much like to locate a copy
, nor even:
I have been having some trouble finding the ISBN
. This person is seeking an item which at some stage they owned. A singular item. Yes, this has all the hallmarks of a Billy Friend situation, right enough.

“It is not yours, Mr. Spork,” the Ruskinite says with soft finality. “It is mine.”

Joe puts on his most accommodating expression. “Might I take your name? I have, in fact, dealt with a very unusual book recently, but I’m afraid I don’t know the title. It passed through my hands as part of a repair job. I do hope there was no funny business involved.”
Oh, I bloody do. But I’m quite sure there was if you say so
.

The Ruskinite circles the room in silence as if considering. Joe Spork affects an air of polite, shopkeeper’s dismay, and does not watch. He fusses with his papers and listens, trying to track the other’s progress in the room. Scritch scritch. Is the other man rubbing his chin? Mopping his brow? Clawing at the desk with an iron hook in place of his right hand?

When the man speaks again, his muffled voice is almost a whisper, and alarmingly close. “Very well, Mr. Spork.”

Joe glances around and finds the shrouded face less than a metre away. He jumps slightly, and the head withdraws.

“I am sorry I startled you. If you do not have anything for me, I will leave.”

“Do take a card and give me a call if there’s anything else I can do. Or any other items I have which might be of interest.”

“I shall consider that, and return.”

Joe clamps down on his subconscious before it can make him say
“From the grave?” which would be rude. The shrouded man snakes out of the door and disappears into the street.

Billy. You are in so much trouble right now
.