The Thing in the Manuscript

Turner Vanderbook Page—simply “Turner” to his friends, whose number, though small, considerably exceeded their variety, they being chiefly, like Turner himself, of that wing of the middle-aged unmarried well-to-do minor landed gentry lightly yet persistently inclined to dilettantish esoteric experimentation—had just permitted himself the faintest of self-satisfied smiles, along with a slight gesture, or rather a slight resettling of his posture, reminiscent of a bird’s fluffing its feathers, and an almost-imperceptible Lagavulin-flavored eructation as he gazed in satisfaction, in the most complete complacent contented satisfaction imaginable, around his large high-ceilinged dimly-lighted library, replete with connoisseurs’ desiderata and enfarcted with delectable rarities purchased with the legacy he had inherited from his great-uncle Eustace Borlsover through the intermediary agency of his uncle, Eustace’s nephew Adrian Borlsover, by the latter’s will upon his untimely death in the conflagration (a loss entirely reimbursed, Turner remembered with no small satisfaction, not unattended with malicious glee at their discomfiture, by the insurance company) of his commodious home attendant upon the extirpation of a most extraordinary phenomenon, perhaps not entirely natural to this physical word (a thought that gave Turner, who would never think of allowing his appreciation of such things to languish unnurtured, a feeling akin to that of a horticulturalist contemplating a photograph of a rare phalaenopsis orchid), to wit the severed undead hand of his uncle Eustace, which retained a life, natural or unnatural, and a vigor incontestably unnatural, after great-uncle Eustace’s physician-attended and certificate-attested demise, a vigor that expressed itself in interminable writing, writing, writing, as if it were the daemon hand of a Henry James improbably galvanized by the onwonted presence of Ephedra sinica among the herbs in the herbal tea (served together with ladyfingers, which James, out of innate delicacy, would not have touched, as well as some curiously memory-prompting madeleines) he had drunk with the vicar that afternoon, determined to demonstrate in elegant script the entire contents of his compendious vocabulary, complete with all the variations of declension and conjugation appertaining thereunto—including, most assuredly including, the strong verbs, their whalebone consonants flexibly restraining sinuous sinewy vowels as they acted out their contemptuous independence of mere bourgeois convention—in a dehiscent efflorescence of the rarefied tender bud of his soul (English to its very core in both language and culture, as he was at no end of pains to prove), until, rudely resentful of the ineffectuality of its words, it embarked upon a career of increasingly frightfully objectionable attempts to coerce compliance with its raging thirst for attention that ended in madness, fire and death, and had begun to surrender himself to the further delicious self-indulgence of contemplating the extrapolation of the conceivable consequences of the—surely impossible!—theoretical escape of such a creature from even so utter a holocaust, when he started with petulant displeasure at the ring of the doorbell, a sound Turner detested with every fiber of his being merely for its importunate clangor but even more so for the inexorable electrical officiousness of its demand upon his attention, portending a mendicant tract-monger, a meddlesome functionary, or, most to be deplored for its po-faced paper irresponsiveness and the murky, even caliginous curtness of its phrasing, yet withal to be grudgingly admired for that same overall compactness as well as for the inspissate brevity of each of the sentences that composed it, a telegram. It read FOUND BOOK STOP.

For once the telegram was welcome as his search agent had finally found that elusive book that had been the object of Turner’s desire for at least ten years. He remembered that day—ten years ago—when he knew he had to have that book. For such was the uncomfortably protracted period of time that had passed since, as a relatively new member of that rather exclusive institution, he had first encountered a brief but tantalizing reference to this elusive tome in one of the battered handwritten catalogues of the voluminous private members’ library of the Bibliophile Club, which crouched inconspicuously in the corner of one of the city’s shadier and more lichen-encrusted neighbourhoods, and had found to his disappointment that the final entry in that monument to the more obsessive aspects of the librarian’s art, bound in a smooth and slightly acrid half-leather of faded butterscotch hue, was a curt note in spidery copperplate to the effect that the book in question—the sole copy ever to have appeared in the catalogue’s accessions list—had been borrowed by the Professor of Circumlocution at the nearby subfaculty of Obscure Studies on a wet Tuesday afternoon in late September, 1959, and despite the entreaties of the collection’s guardians, at first obsequious and later increasingly exasperated, rising through a crescendo of polite but ever firmer and more subtly threatening letters to the final posting of a dire imprecation on the noticeboard in the Club’s hallowed bar (still held there, dog-eared and yellowing, by a rusting thumb tack), had never been returned. Eureka!

Thought destroyed, or irretrievably lost, until near the end of the War, the book in question had only briefly resurfaced when the unmistakable tantric bookplate of Aleister Crowley was recognized by Bharat Mookerjee, whose studies at Stonyhurst (where he had earned the sobriquet “Bumpo,” owing ultimately to mistakes at the court of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, but proximately to a saturnine Canadian Jesuit Father Anthony, the English Master, whose silent critique of his labyrinthine unfledged literary efforts consisted solely of a bound reprint of Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” — Chingachgook, though more accurately matching the intention, would have been no more flattering, he consoled himself) had been cut short by his father’s ill-timed dalliance with an Irish stage actress named Kathleen O’Toole, his maternal uncle’s Lee-Enfield rifle, and Azad Hind — forcing him to take a job as a clerk in a particularly grimy Cecil Court shop while he struggled to write the definitive biography of Madame Blavatsky’s guru Kuthumi Baba in his flat at night. Titled Cogito ergo possum, the book itself was a thoroughly mediocre specimen of obsolete nature study, written in indifferent Latin and dealing with the mental functions of North American marsupials, that was not worth the trouble of pursuing it across a room but it acquired enormous adventitious value due to the the copious notes entered into its margins by its original owner. These marginalia, taking full use of the superfluous white space that the fashion for accompanying the main text with glosses at the time of it original printing afforded, were first remarked upon by the editorial team of “Marginalia and bookmarks: when the ephemeral achieves permanence” but this in turn had become little perused, famous only for the murder and suicides that the team’s inability to decide whose name their work should be cataloged under had engendered, since subsequent printings had omitted most of the brief summary this had offered, including,thankfully, the infamous reproduction of page xiii of the original dealing itself with reproduction, and the marginalia had finally sunk back into obscurity.

Maintaining as much of his customary dignity as he could muster, Turner Page hastily donned his navy blue overcoat and a black fedora, took up his cane (the one with the ivory and gilt horse’s head for a handle), and hurried into the street to hail a cab, whose fleet passage carried him without delay to Morocco Street, where he was cordially greeted (“Good morning, Mr Page: your espresso is coming right up...”) by the genial proprietor of the cosy if slightly dilapidated bistro which was the customary venue for his meetings with his indefatigable search agent, Miss Clio Palimpsest, whom he found, as usual, perched primly in the left-hand corner by the window and exuding that air of unimpeachable discretion combined with shrewd intelligence which he had come to associate with that most indispensable of the many employees, collaborators, and assistants upon whose talents he called in his unending quest to, as it were, squander his inheritance in the pursuit of his own peculiar Holy Grail, encased as she was, almost to the point of mummification, in a greenish tweed suit and several silk scarves bearing curious Oriental patterns, toying with a cup of gently steaming Earl Grey tea—no milk, no sugar—and at intervals making hieroglyphic notes with a short pencil in a small spiral-bound notebook with a manila-brown cover, which, as Page approached her table, removing his hat and dragging out a chair, she turned and held out towards him with a barely concealed glance of quiet triumph, so that he could discern there in her elegant italic script, below a sketch of intricate design involving many symbols, some perhaps heraldic, some perhaps alchemical or astrological, the single word “Zugzwang”: the name, as well he knew, of Count Alois Zugzwang, one of the most pathologically acquisitive of all collectors of rare and exotic books, the owner of a castle containing a mysterious library of almost legendary size and impenetrability, and a former member, along with “Bumpo” Mookerjee’s unfortunate father, of a sinister and highly secretive Occidento-Asiatic occult society of whose existence Page would have been entirely ignorant, save that he had, one rainy afternoon during a tedious house party hosted by the late Adrian Borlsover, amused himself by reading through some of the disjointed but suggestive writings which had been produced by Great-uncle Eustace’s supernaturally vivified hand before its fiery destruction, and which had been carelessly heaped on one of the tables in the billiard room by his host, unaware of the mass of curious occult information which the crumpled pages penned by his relative’s disarticulated member could convey to the reader with enough training in the hidden arts to recognize the meaning of the more arcane terminology of that branch of study known to its adepts by the concealing pseudonym of “Advanced Circumlocution.”

Outside the bistro window, a cold hazy rain begin to fall, the temperature dropped suddenly, urging a stiff breeze to kick up the tired leaves and beat them against the sidewalk, while a thin, shadowy women, slightly bent and smelling of camphor, slipped into the shop and tumbled into a booth gasping.As everyone rushed over, Turner hastily put away his cheque book from which he was about to write a payment to Clio with his signature flourish — which Freddy Seebohm, after a larger than average Armagnac following a smaller than average quail, had told him was the cause of some tittering at Barclays — but not before he was again stung by the sight of the fluttering payment stub for £5 Sterling for a television Broadcasting Receiving Licence for the present year 1968, the surcharge from previous years’ 1/5/- being one of several related difficulties involving his aunt Tess — Christian name Terpsichore, widow of his late uncle Reginald “Recto” Page, who had served with Lord Mountbatten in the Subcontinent and died rather mysteriously amid hushed allegations around Harold Wilson, whom Turner, never previously showing any interest in politics, had taken to calling “a socialist” aloud after devaluation interfered significantly with his acquisition of a prized volume from Geneva — who, having briefly returned for Christmas from New York, where she had gone after a dignified but short mourning and was now working in some manner of factory with an Italian model, insisted that Turner purchase a machine in order to view four androgynes from Lancashire on Boxing Day, only to then berate him that it was not colour, as though a knowledge of matters electrical was somehow implied by his masterful esoteric treatise On the Principles of Tele-vision. He recognized the gasping woman as his late uncle Reginald’s mysterious mistress, the notorious Russian Anarcho-Trotskyite agitator, rumor-monger, gossip-spreader, propagandist and agent of inluence Nora Balzoff.

Her little black dress was stunning. Her matching shoes, gloves, and handbag were a throwback to more genteel times when fashion had rules and women obeyed.

Clio, watching him with a quizzical air, finished her tea and her one small pastry. “Turner, dear, do sit down,” she whispered in her cigarette-roughened contralto, “and desist from devouring Miss Balzoff with your eyes—it does make me feel so minuscule, and so neglected.”

At that moment her request made her seem quite skelfy, engrossed, as he was in histudy of this disciple of Dariaux, a picture of elegance in black, it seemed fitting that the Russian was accesorized in a colour out of space, but dutifully Turner turned his attention from Miss Balzoff to his companion. “Well,” said Miss Palimpsest, with a slight compression of the lips, turning her gaze a little dismissively from the languorously fashionable Miss Balzoff as Turner returned to his interrupted task, handing her a cheque and returning his silver Conway Stewart fountain pen to an inner pocket, “following the hints that you gave me at our last meeting, I conducted some discreet enquiries at the premises of various book-dealers whom you suspected of doing business with members of the ... (she glanced quickly around the bistro to ascertain that they were not being overheard, but everyone else was still apparently engaged in calming the flutterings of the elegantly distrait Miss Balzoff) ... the Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle, but I could find no leads until I happened to be in Bumblethorpe’s off the Charing Cross Road on a Wednesday afternoon, when that elderly assistant with the white beard and the waistcoat covered in biscuit crumbs keeps the shop, and when I mentioned “Cogito ergo Possum”, he was silent for a good while (other than making some rather unpleasant noises involving two Garibaldis and a mug of instant coffee), and then rather shiftily suggested that I seek a private word with Mr Fortescue of Sedbergh, who, I then recalled, had had a hand in the private auction of the esoteric library of that retired Anglo-Indian academic who died in such mysterious circumstances in the cellar of a theosophical bookshop in Carlisle; which is why I diverted some of my expenses into a pleasant journey into the North of England, and managed to corner the reclusive Mr Fortescue, who said very little, but dropped enough hints about an important and wealthy customer that I began to suspect that we had a definite lead, and when I noticed the corner of the Liechtenstein railway timetable tucked under the cushion of his chair, it became quite clear who he had been dealing with, so I made as if to leave the shop, and said casually ‘Do give my regards to Count Alois’, at which he went very pale and asked if I knew the Count...”; just as Turner was beginning to wonder whether Miss Palimpsest was availing herself of some secret supply of oxygen—piped, perhaps, from the depths of her capacious imitation crocodile-leather handbag—she paused for breath and poured herself another cup of Earl Grey, while he found himself beginning to plan in his head what equipment he would need if a visit to Zugzwang’s library was to be engaged upon, whether by engineering an invitation from its suavely polite but reputedly dangerous owner, or clandestinely, at the risk of meeting one of the dark guardians said to roam the terraces and passages of the castle in which, in a tower at the very heart, was said to lie the most comprehensive collection of Crowley memorabilia that had ever been acquired, amassed by means of the Count’s considerable wealth, his persuasive powers, and perhaps (it was rumoured) his mastery of those arts for which Crowley was so infamous, and of which, in the guise of an unfinished commentary on the natural philosophy of marsupials, he was believed to have left a significant record in that very book the thought of which had begun to intrude not only into Turner’s waking thoughts but, increasingly, into his nightly dreams. And then, all of a sudden, the thought of Madame Blavatsky intruded in my Crowleyan musings...

My mind wondering, I lost the gist of Clio’s remaining commentary on her detective wonderings until her contralto summoned me back in a definite command to pay attention to our next steps on the road to my possessing that most desired tome currently residing in the Count’s library. “Since you don’t or rather won’t fly,” she said briskly,”I have booked us both on the boat train leaving at mid-night to Paris, where we will change for a train to Liechetenstein, where we will be met by a driver to convey us to the Count’s chateau, where with any luck he will offer us a night lodgings, and we won’t need to use the rooms I have booked as a fallback at the rather dreadful little inn, which appears to be the only nearby accomodation.”

Turner signalled for Alice “Could we have some more of Brion’s fudge” he asked, although not precisely addictive the pleasantly scented nutty sweetmeat was certainly very enticing, and it was perhaps not surprising that he failed to notice that the woman in black, having now joined the Luncheoning patrons of the Toklas Bistro along with her spindly brown companion, was addressed not as Miss Balzoff but rather as Mrs. Hill By the staff, however he did rouse himself slightly when he overheard her dining companion calling her Susan.

As he slowly chewed his fudge, while Miss Palimpsest lit another of her asphyxiating Egyptian cigarettes and the bistro’s transistor radio yet again crackled out the interminable ballad unaccountably favoured that season by popular music enthusiasts, a dim memory suddenly came to Turner of a telephone call that he had received from an anonymous stranger, who had warned him that a woman known to him only as “Susan” was in league with that sinister cabal of occult librarians and renegade freemasons known as the Unsquared Circle, and was trying to work her way into the affections of various noted collectors of esoterica, having been seen in dubious circumstances with two of his uncles - attempting to seduce Uncle Recto at a bar near the Victoria and Albert Museum after his triumphant success at Christie’s auction of the library of Azad Hind, and persuading Uncle Adrian, while dispensing slightly narcotic tisanes at one of his turgid house parties, to unlock the writing cabinet in which Great-uncle Eustace’s undead hand was confined until its presumed destruction by fire shortly thereafter; but he could not yet guess whether “Mrs Hill” might be a pseudonym by which his uncle’s ex-mistress Nora Balzoff sought to evade recognition in London, or whether the flamboyant persona of the revolutionary Trotskyite “Nora Balzoff” was merely a theatrical disguise adopted by the mysterious Mrs Susan Hill, perhaps in order to fascinate and entrap Reginald Page, who, although one of the last colonial admistrators of the old school, and a staunch anti-socialist, had a soft spot for ladies of radical left-wing opinion and a bohemian disposition which had, in the gay abandon of the 1920s, attracted him to Turner’s now increasingly aged and eccentric Aunt Terpsichore, and in the ensuing decades to a string of exotic mistresses, of which Nora Balzoff had been the last and the most conspicuous. Clearing her throat, Miss Palimpsest reminded Turner of their projected journey and set him off on another trail of musings about his numerous correspondents with similar aversions to various forms of travel, most notably New York’s Nero Wolfe (whose library was well-known to Turner through their correspondence concerning certain obscure volumes on Montenegran history) and also that indefatigible raconteur Asimov with his inexplicable dislike of air travel.

At the castle of Count Alois Zugzwang, in a limestone crypt deep below the lowest levels of the man-made stucture, sat a miserable creature whose stench was a mixture of bog and camphor, and, sullenly she caressed repeatedly the charred, withered, leathery hand of Eustace Borlsover. She mused over the hand that had once caressed her face and thighs - Oh! How supple her flesh had been in those halcyon days! - yet soon became less tender as the transformation (the same that so raised the ire of the Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle and move their collective invisible hand to burn the proto-marsupial monstrosity from their ranks) induced by study of esoteric works overcame Eustace’s humanity, and the gentle rain of kisses that had bathed her body was replaced with a gale force storm of violence. Even as the hand spasmed then stretched and relaxed under the womans firm stroking Turner, realising that his Uncle’s old, no that was unfair, former Mistress was likely to see him raised a copy of the antiquarian’s Journal to cover his face and muttered urgently to Miss Palimpsest, “ Midnight, The boat train,” but on the other side of a perennial advert from a private collector seeking someone to fill a permanent position as an historian and archivist maintaining the Tepes families record Mrs Hill, if that was her name, smiled her satisfaction. and silently echoed his next words, “I will be there!”

Chapter Two

As the boat-train rattled in the wet darkness through the gently falling drizzle and the quiet Kent countryside towards the coast and the Channel ferry ports, at least three of its passengers fidgeted uneasily in their seats: Turner Page, a small red-bound copy of Baedeker’s guide to Paris lying unregarded in his lap, gazing with a certain vacant distraction at the passing oast-houses crouched in the gloomy hop-fields like giant gnomes in their obliquely pointed hats, and fretting alternately, first about the condition of silk smoking jacket (packed carefully in layers of tissue in his capacious travelling-case but nevertheless, he felt, vulnerable to those creases which could be so tiresome to remove), and then about the unpredictable journey which lay ahead, hastening through the morning streets of Paris and subjecting himself to the tender mercies of European railway employees and border officials, to the distant principality of Liechtenstein and the unwelcoming castle of Zugzwang, high in its eastern mountains close to the Austrian border, where he might be greeted by who knows what unpleasantries at the hands of the unscrupulous Count or his various human or (for so the rumours ran) partly or formerly human associates, members and servants of that unsavoury Brotherhood who, it seemed, had fixed its attention on the very book that he was so desperate to possess; Clio Palimpsest, on the other side of the compartment, bundled in scarves, sporadically adding letters to a partly-finished “Daily Telegraph” crossword and trying to pin down the vague sense of foreboding she had felt at the unexpected precipitation of Nora Balzoff into the Toklas Bistro, a sense not diminished by her conviction that she had, from the corner of her eye in the press at Victoria Station, caught a glimpse of the woman again, dressed as always in black, but more subtly, as if for concealment rather than allurement; and in another carriage further back in the train, the woman known to Page and his agent as Nora Balzoff, but to some of her acquaintances as Susan Hill, filing the edges of her long red-enamelled nails and passing her eyes with little interest over the drably unexciting propaganda on the inner pages of latest issue of “Soviet Weekly”, snatched from a stand in Eccleston Square, and ruminating on the difficult choices that would face her as she planned her next moves in that complex game in which she, and others in the shadows, had engaged the fastidious book-collector and his ruthlessly efficient assistant; but no such unease assailed the fourth passenger of interest to this tale, the spindly brown figure who had slipped scarcely noticed into the bistro behind the woman in black, and who had, unbeknown to all, slipped on to the train just as the whistle sounded: for that elusive player in our little drama, the journey through the small hours of the black night passed in silent slumber, as the lights of Dover began to glimmer in the distance.

Unaware that most of Europe slept, for she had been imprisoned now in the crypt far from any light, save the most unnatural, for nigh on seven years, the wretched thing that had once in truth been Mrs Susan Hill, looked up at the sound of scratching, and gentle roused the hand, that even in its sleep jelously clasped her bosom, for the rats in the wall had grown scares lately, and if she wished to feed she would require is assistance, and dared not offend it.
Meanwhile, in Turner’s chilled house—he had turned the heat off when he left as an obviously prudent precaution—the ageless ancient elemental that had been in his library all these many years, since it had arrived in a consignment of rare occult books dispatched to Turner from Dar-es-Salaam by Auslander Buchstab, a fly-by-night book hunter who was to be found now in Kuala Lumpur, now in Valladolid, now in Tashkent, Greenland, Zembla or the Lord knew where, having concealed itself among some old, old volumes Turner had never opened and would probably have never opened, they being in Arabic, a language Turner did not read and had no intention of learning to read, and having been patiently unthinkingly waiting, waiting, muttering and mumbling inaudibly to itself all unaware like some senile old priest telling his beads who could no longer remember anything except “Pray for us sinners, pray for us sinners...” or like some monstrously aged fakir who had constricted his limbs into an inextricable position immemorial decades ago, now only able to rock back and forth and murmur “Om...om...,” chanting its unspeakable litany of “Possum...I will have you...possum...,” now found itself, for the first time since it had been conjured into immobility by Haroun al-Raschid, goaded by the chill, the penetrating painful lowering of temperature it had never before encountered in all its existence, moved to action to ease its discomfort, and much to the surprise and delight of its awakening evil consciousness, discovered that the enchantment that had been placed upon it centuries ago, binding it to immobility, to which it had simply numbly surrendered itself, was no longer operative—nullified, without the drowsing elemental’s having at the time noticed the fact, by Turner’s reading, lacking the faintest premonition or glimmer of awareness that he might be doing a thing that could turn out to have been very injudicious indeed, of a spell of unbinding from an ancient grimoire that Buchstab had sent him from Worms the previous year. And as the ancient elemental began to discern the nature of the hideous crime committed by forces stronger and older then itself, images of a brutal mission by agents of uncertainty began to crawl like leeches in its mind, visions of a small giddy, mercurial man; large of hand and small of mind, naked except for a tattered pair of Lee relaxed fit dungarees and purple flip-flops, infiltrate the dim vault of S’zawn’s lair; he had used a small red door clearly marked “Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch’ intrate”, after descending a labyrnth of hand-hewn limestone steps as coiled as mammalian entrails, into a small antechamber; lined with copper panels etched with symbols of the Thon, next to , but slightly above, the lair/prison of the hungry and restive creature who eyed him; the eyes were milky white, nearly frosted, opalescent, and as stern as alabaster, with prudent distrust contaminated by the brutish passions awakened by the sight, even as slight as this, of another being; by which we all, human or otherwise feel a roaring within the gut as if some tsunamic wave of anxiety were to drown us in isolative loneliness, and begin to hiss and moan the name, Pierre, at first as if cursing some flagitious malignant incubus, and then as a heaving wail and a gnashing of blunt teeth as if in an attempt at allurement, for she wished of him a small favor. Malign entities stirring at both ends of Turner’s path, he traveled on through the night unaware, toward the ferry and the crossing into France.

The various transfers from train to ferry and back again, not mention encounters with Customs and Immigration, accomplished with a nearly miraculous minimum of fuss, Miss Palimpsest stood frowning in the midst of the bustle of the Gare du Nord, Turner’s excessive pile of luggage the object of her unhappy attention, when out of the corner of her eye, skulking about a pillar, she caught a glimpse again of “Susan Hill,” and perhaps something or someone else, which set off a ripple of uneasiness up her spine and triggered the dark thought that something more was going on here than just the simple tracking down of an obscure book, even one with the marginalia of that idiot Aleister Crowley. Her attention to the ebony-attired shadow was diverted suddenly by a small man, lemur-like both in stature and in facial appearance, who insinuated himself before her kneecaps, his chatter - est-ce que vous voudriez un peu d’aide avec les bagages, madame? - needling her brain like some Gallic water torture (Clio bring of the well-considered opinion that English was the world’s mother tongue, and all other languages its greasy, crippled, cacophonous, bastard offspring), his hands clutching at the handles of Turner’s portmanteaux with such insistence that she impulsively slapped him atop his beret with her ink-stained Telegraph and hissed, “Bugger off, Pierre.” This small incident served to divert Turner’s attention from his Baedeker momentarily, and Clio moved closer to him and murmured in his ear, “Turner, I think we should break a journey here for a night or two after all, as before we continue on to the next stage of your little quest, there are some things I would like to check at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France regarding a few unfamiliar references that seem to be connected to this book you seek.”

Whatever the author of Mysteriorum Libri Quinque may claim there are those that claim that demonology is a lesser sin, that angelology the is greater, it is , they argue a greater perversion to commandeer god’s messengers for ones own purposes, to command demons is they would insist merely foolish. to deal no worse than dealing with a corrupt human a Hitler, a Mengele or in earlier times, Alexander the great, whose subjects so happily sent him forth to conquer the world that they need not suffer his drunken monstrosities at home, all that is required after all is is an ability to resist the blandishments of power and influence to sup, as the saying goes, with a long spoon, how then do those spirits deemed neutral fit into the scheme, if it has one, of the universe, the Twylyth Teg, the elemental, the Djinn, not demon but daemon fit into the universe, a good Mohammedan will tell you that the prophet was sent to convert both man and djinn, the Christian tradition is strangely silent and many a pagan of this, so called, new age, will tell that such spirits are older than the new creator gods who claim omnipotence, older, yes, but could it be, darker?

Oblivious of the powerful incorporeal entity, unangelic yet undemonic, which his dabbling in counter-charms had unwittingly released, and whose chill consciousness was already beginning to feel its way through the astral planes, tracing the tenuous gossamer tendrils created by the movements of those mortal beings whose actions have disturbed the praeternatural ether of that invisible realm, Turner Page, feeling in need of a little fresh air after his long confinement in trains, boat cabins, and taxis, purchased a blisteringly strong black coffee and two croissants from a kiosk close to the glowering hulk of the Madeleine (that vast neo-classical edifice dedicated to the archetype of the demon-possessed and exorcized, Mary Magdalen, then deconsecrated by the insane rabble of the Revolution, who in overthrowing the church and denying both the angels and the devils whose existence it proclaimed, had cut itself off from the benevolent ministrations of the former order of beings, and had come to resemble the latter so closely that the boundary between the blood-soaked Paris streets and the upper reaches of Hell became perilously thin), and trusting to his companion to deal with the luggage and the hotel before proceeding (or so she had said, and Turner had no reason to suspect her of subterfuge) to the Bibliotheque Nationale, strolled as far as a convenient bench from which to observe the upper reaches of the Eiffel Tower emerging from the grey mists of the autumn morning, and to muse upon his best approach to the unpredictable Count, who, he thought, would probably soon be alerted to his departure from London by the ubiquitous agents of the Brotherhood, some of whom, judging to certain obscure notes in Great Uncle Eustace’s papers, were possessed of unnatural skills and powers owing to the unspeakable experiments conducted by the less morally inhibited members of that occult fraternity, experiments said to be detailed in the marginalia of “Cogito ergo possum” and which, Turner had begun to suspect, Eustace Borlsover and his associates had not only been engaged in, but had attempted to combine with more hideous manipulations only indistinctly adumbrated in the most allegorical of texts—the Second Sublimation of Seth, perhaps, or the Liturgy of the Unsanctified, or even (could the thought be entertained in the light of day?) the Hidden Rites of the Thon...; rapt as he was in concentrated cogitation, Turner remained unaware of the close observation to which he was subjected by the small, lemuroid man who, after his curt dismissal by Miss Palimpsest in the Gare du Nord while Page was preoccupied with retaining possession of his gloves and pocket watch against the efforts of the local pickpockets, had concealed himself around the portals of the station, and then, streetlamp by streetlamp, from alley entrance to shop doorway, had quietly followed Page on his perambulation through the waking streets of the city, and was now crouched below the grandiose statue of some Gallic military hero of old, with only a dark beret and a pair of large, scarcely blinking eyes remaining unconcealed by its monumental stone base.

Meanwhile Miss Palimpsest, finishing her business with the desk clerk and overseeing the removal of their luggage (wondering if some of Turner’s could be convincingly ‘lost’ before the next stage of their journey), decided to take Turner along to the Biblioteque Nationale in order to keep an eye on him as he had displayed a distinct tendency to wander off into trouble on previous book seeking expeditions. But Turner Page- who for narrative purposes, was born in 1923 at Welwyn Hartfield, Hertfordshire, England, of an acutely intelligent father, Booker T. Page, who graduated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1916; he had been an intimate of Aldous Huxley, and had mysteriously vanished during a fly fishing trip on the Rappahannock River with Herbert Hoover in 1931, and Sardjini Bihar, a beautiful woman of East Indian Descent; who J. Edgar Hoover once said stood out like a ruby in a blackman’s ear, and was not only a scholar of the Awadhi and Bundeli dialects but a watercolorist of note; she died in Nov. 1963, some say from a broken heart after hearing of the assassination of JFK- found himself chilled to the bone; colder then he had ever been as a wireless officer for the Royal Navy in World War Two on a ship (The HMS Glowworm?) that patrolled the waters off the Vestmanna Islands, and as uneasy as Ceaser listening to his wife’s pleas on the day of his impending death, for he could sense that the foul little creature that Miss Palimpset had called ‘Pierre’ wished to kill them; he did not, for he was interested in living bodies, and their warm souls with which to invigorate the inert crystals of the Thon, and that in his agitated state he began to wonder if the brief incantation of protection from the Incantatio Ritus of 1570, “Ipskay the Ointjay”, could actually work in this situaution.

Turner scanning about him for the utterance of that feeling of of being stalked by some solitary beast, that has determined to end the life of a greater and nobler creature, even as a cougar might in the desperation of its old age attack a bull ,found his gaze alighting at last on the individual concealing himself behind the statute, as Parisians fair and foul have always done when the call has gone up to man the barricades and with a start recognised those water glazed eyes, not from earlier that day but as a frequenter of the special collections room at monastery dedicated to St Cecilia in Cardiff. At once he knew what had happened, for well he understood the dangers of binding spirits to books, and well he knew the consequences of unbinding them improperly, for often had he too transgressed, wittingly or no, that highest of rules of the grimoire, that deepest of Circumlocutory secrets — when just then, his surprise, no his shock, no his horror increased a hundredfold as those very words lay before him, written sloppily upon a placard, held aloft by a woman perhaps half his age marching up the Rue de Richelieu, “Lisez moins, vivez plus.” As he stood frozen in horror, he suddenly found himself grasped by elbow, while Miss Pilimpsest exclaimed “Turner, there you are, so come now we are off to the Bibliotheque,” and he found himself being hurried along the street breathless, frantically trying to indicate to Clio that all was not right, as she ignored his choked whimpers and simply pulled him along faster.

On reaching their destination, Turner found that the quietness, the wonderfulness, the libraryness, of this temple of knowledge, soothed his spirit and calmed his nerves and he was able to address Clio in words rather than sputters.

A great library of any antiquity is invariably protected by runes of power which remain entirely unobserved by the casual passer by, and is a sure refuge in which the adepts of circumlocution are frequently obliged to seek comfort and consolation: the more so when they plumb the more arcane levels of that sinister art and make the disconcerting discovery that one of its deepest secrets—pithily crystallized in the slogan so rudely thrust into Turner’s sight by some quirk of fate (or was it the mischievous interference of a renegade initiate?) which had inspired some of the current swarm of rebellious Parisian students with a fragment of that higher wisdom so unwelcome to the dedicated bibliophile: “Read Less, Live More”—one of its deepest secrets, I say, threatens to undermine the entire discipline of cloistered study which has enabled them to reach that pinnacle of learning even as it has denied them the pleasures of human contact and social exchange; so it was that as Clio Palimpsest began briskly to check certain hieroglyphic scrawls in her notebook against entries in one of the large card catalogues in the main library, Turner found himself recovering from the several shocks of the past few minutes, and was able to gather his thoughts and announce to his agent not only that he had encountered the small man known to both of them from various chance meetings as a library researcher and minor functionary of the Brotherhood by the name of Pierre (which itself was no surprise to her, as she had recognized the man at the Gard du Nord and dismissed him without, at that time, pausing to consider what might be portended by his unwelcome and unexpected appearance so soon upon their arrival in the city, and by his abortive attempt to assist, or tamper, with their luggage) but also that he had, in meeting the eyes of that somewhat bestial individual, received an unexpected intimation of a dark and chthonic force unleashed, feeling, he explained with some diffidence, “that sudden, overwhelming sense of vastness which engulfs any mortal who tangles with an elemental, and a deep chill in the bones, so great that I perceived instantly that the little man could not himself have generated such astral power, but was a conduit for one of a higher order that my carelessly recited spell of unbinding must have loosed into the world; on reflection”, he said, following Clio towards a group of antiquated lifts with black metal criss-cross grille doors, “it was that greater being, that elemental force focused through Pierre’s gaze which called forth in me the feeling of the hunted in the face of the hunter, but I am now not at all sure that it was me that was being hunted; I felt the consciousness looking past me, or through me, projecting an urge to seek revenge for some ancient wrong; it is an echo of death which lingers with me still, in fact”, he paused, and Clio glanced at him with increasing concern as they stepped into the lift, “it seems to be getting stronger...” but his last word was partly drowned by the harsh grating sound of the lift grille being drawn behind them, and somehow they were both unsurprised when the squat lift attendant pressed the button not for the third floor—where reside, in a silent and irremediably dusty side-room, the tomes of alchemy, astrology, divination and conjuration, the almanacs and grimoires—but for the basement, and then turned to face them, revealing below the peak of his uniform cap the large, greenish-yellow, watery and unblinking eyes of Pierre.

Pierre, finding the psychic strands that he had used to trace Turner rent by the symbolic walls that surrounded the Bibliotheque as they must surround any centre of secret learning, paused and no longer distracted by the demands of maintaining those threads linking him to Turner's silver cigarette case heard at last the ethereal voice of the spirit he had seven long years ago attempted to make his familiar, only to be interrupted by Auslander Buchstab's inopportune appearance,as it alternately wailed and coaxed, wanting as it did the physical body he had promised it. but dreading also the chains of binding that he would require in recompense.

The elevator stopped, and Pierre ushered his two reluctant companions through doors, down a series of corridors, up and then down several short staircases, and finally to a small room, the entrance of which was blocked a female closely resembling a Gorgon, who sat behind a small desk, with a pince nez perched upon her face, the discreet signage behind her indicating (to those who could read French, as of course both Clio and Turner could, if pressed) that the room held a collection of works brought back by Napoleon from his adventures in Egypt.

Whilst hunting rats Mrs Hill was once again a joyous child with hair the colour of sunlight through honey, beating the nettles to drive her lawful prey towards her fathers barely restrained terriers, but as soon as she had trapped one in her nylon petticoat to swung it mightily against the wall on which runes, stated in an eldritch tongue, could she but read them "place no human name upon my resting place, for human am I no more", the rest to disolving into into rotting stonework,she was a very different creature,one that could look at such a meal and regret only that it was so small, but still one human enough to feel dread when the noise of the rat's death was echoed by two more thumps from the other side, the side that was supposed to house S’zawn the undying. Susan Hill thought distraughtly of S'zawn, her doppelganger, her wraith-double, the creature that had been separated from her; Susan often thought of her as her Id thing, by the incantations and conjurings of Zugzwang, and even worse the attempts at re-unification; both of them had returned less human, more...monstrous, and while S'zawn degenerated more quickly and was placed under the care of Pierre (who had been conjured up by the Elizabethan John Dee and then passed from adept to adept untill he was given to Aleister Crowley around 1916 by Aldous Huxley) so that between Pierre and S'zawn a covenant was formed, a pledge, a deep binding, and even now deep within the Rhatikon Massif, not far from the headwaters of the Samina River, Susan could feel the pair devolving; only the crystal powers of the Thon could overpower the cosmic breach which had allowed creatures that had long slumbered to cross over, and the dull thumping that Mrs. Hill (or what remained of her) heard in the crypt adjacent to hers, were the tumblers of the locks falling into place that would restrain S'zawn, and control her through her next feral metamorphosis.

Those tumblers falling in place clicked simultaneously one by one with the second set of tumblers clicking loudly in the basement of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, as the Madame Gorgon, at a gesture from Pierre, unlocked the crypt-like room that held Napoleon's Egyptiana, a collection which apparently, by the glimpse afforded to Turner and Clio as they peered around the ample contours of the guardienne, consisted not only of written material, but also of several small artifacts that had somehow wound up in the library rather than a museum; her task done, she gestured the visitors inside and resumed her position at the entrance desk picking up her knitting.
Once they grew accustomed to the room's dim lighting, Clio found herself entranced by a collection of animal figurines - particularly by the cat-like form of the goddess Bastet - and stroked her warm hand over the cool, smooth alabaster surface.

Meanwhile, in the Paris streets far above, students and workers surged in discontent through the grey light of the morning, and as a small cluster of protesters passed along a narrow alley behind the high monumental bulk of the Bibliotheque, a slight figure handed a placard to a nearby comrade, discarded a hammer and sickle banner with which its head and shoulders had been swathed, revealing itself to be dressed otherwise entirely in black, discreetly detached itself from the other members of the group and, swiftly darting into an even narrower passageway to one side, performed some unobtrusive manipulation of the lock of a small, partly concealed grey door, and stepped quickly inside, closing it softly so that the quiet of the corridor within -- a little-used connecting link between administrative offices -- remained undisturbed, and the security guard snoozing gently at the far end slumbered on; though had he woken, he may have been little perturbed by the sight of a handsome woman in black reaching into a shoulder bag in order to remove a small powder compact and a lipstick, which she wielded with an evidently practised hand, transforming herself from an inconspicuous political activist, who might have come from any of the city's small factories or offices, into the distinctly more stylish figure of Nora Balzoff -- for it was she -- though he might have given some more pause for thought had he noticed, when the compact returned to the bag, the faint clink of metal against metal, and glimpsed in its shadowy depths the dull gleam of old and tarnished silver, as a beam from the light overhead struck momentarily down on what would have appeared, to even a casual observer, to be a small knife or dagger of curious design, with a hilt plain in shape, but wound with many fine wires: of copper, of gold, and of other, less familiar metals; and with a narrow blade down which ran intricate chasings of knotwork interlaced with runes; and in the pommel, a single stone of indeterminate colour, clouded as if for the present it shared the guard's gentle repose, but with a faint aura of power detectable by those attuned to such things; but without looking at the dagger, Nora Balzoff fastened the bag and headed off into the maze of corridors, and with a hasty backward glance, vanished down a half-lit flight of stairs into the gloom below.

While Clio examined the various figurines and other small artifacts, Turner found himself drawn to the shelves holding papyri, both rolled and unrolled. He brushed aside a layer of dust on one unrolled papyrus and was shocked to see the hieroglyphs moving , squirming, like black worms forming new letters, first in what appeared to be an archaic Greek, then in a most unlikely Arabic or Persian script before solidifying into modern English of an absolutely stunning caligraphic design!

Nora Balzoff strolled up to the desk of the knitter blocking the entrance to the Napoleon room and raised her left eyebrow in enquiry; receiving a nod in return that in no way interrupted the arcane record being inscribed in the yarn, she proceeded through the door of chamber and promptly tripped over Pierre, crashing into Turner, who was just turning to call out to Clio the news of his discovery when instead he found himself forced to drop the papyrus in order to catch the sleek and fragrant creature falling neatly into his arms.
"Nora", gasped Turner, as Clio's eyes narrowed, turning crimson in anger, the slim Russian seeming to melt in Turner's grasp, her radiant charms overwhelming his senses, the dull ache in his chest, the palpitations, the sudden rushing of blood away from his brain, while Pierre, recovering, began to jump up and down yelling, "You, you, you scoundrel, you pompous twit, you, you, strumpet, you common...", just as Clio, having picked up a basalt bust of some 12th dynasty pharaonic queen, promptly knocked the little imp out cold and was about to do likewise to Miss Balzoff, when suddenly a rune-carved, smallish dagger was deftly placed against the pulsing neck of the flushed Turner Page.
"Please feel free to continue," Nora's erstwhile companion still dressed in the same worn brown linen remiscent of cheap book bindings kept the silvered blade close to the Ren Ying, even a letter opener applied here would stop the heart, so although she spoke softly her voice fluttering with the urgency of a trapped moth. all had paused even Miss Balzoff, less than gracefull for once as she struggled to regain her freedom from Turner's confused protective grasp, "I want only the scroll," she looked, not at it but a Clio, "Susan is worthless to me now."

As Rhys Bedortha, magister templi, assassin, the only human to have witnessed the Thon Ceremony of the Knife, the woman known to some as 'The Walrus', looked at Clio with cold grey eyes, and speaking in a voice that haltingly and sloppily battered her words; this due to a botched surgery of her fraenum linguae to relieve tongue-tiedness, which led to infection and abscess and a partial removal of her lower jaw, said "Dora, please remove the manuscript and give it to me" and none of them noticed a green exudate leaking from Pierre's left ear, a viscous, camphor smelling ooze that solidified into tendrils that coiled easily around the feet of the Walrus, silently and swiftly, as well as a tendril that gracefully snared the wrist of the hand that held the runic blade. The assassin gasped as the green tendril suddenly tightened around her wrist in a firm loop, pulling the dagger away from Turner's neck as he stood tense and motionless, and reaching with her free hand into a deep pocket, she brought out a small object resembling a pepper pot, from which she sprinkled a deep reddish-orange powder over the parts that she could reach of the green tentacular manifestation which had emerged from the body of the unconscious Pierre, causing it to darken and shrink, loosening its grip; but the distraction was enough to permit Nora Balzoff to regain her balance and her grasp on her shoulder bag, and for Clio to reach over and, pretending to retrieve the fallen papyrus, substitute for it another which had by chance been close to her hand at the time of the unexpected interruptions, so that it was this, and not the scroll with the curiously mobile inscription, which Nora seized from her hand and thrust with an impatient snort at the brown-clad intruder, who, barely glancing at it, rolled it and thrust it into a cylindrical container which she concealed somewhere about her, before retiring through the the door of the chamber, stepping agilely over the recumbent body of Pierre, around which a mass of green filaments squirmed uncomfortably like tagliatelle verde with a light dusting of paprika, and brushing past the desk beyond, where the doorkeeper slumped in a drugged stupor, a ball of knitting wool still rolling gently beneath her chair.

Turner felt nearly paralyzed with astonishment at the rapid train of events that had taken place and which seemed to have caused a chaotic traffic jam of questions in his mind each fighting to be the first to actually make it to his tongue, and yet he was surprised to himself ask, of all things,
"Who is Dora?"
causing Clio to sigh and answer
"I am, Turner. My full name is Cliodora, which was my father's not entirely successful attempt at rendering "glorious gift" into Greek," leaving Turner not much enlightened.

"How did she know that, and what is happening to Pierre?", asked Turner as he toed the recumbent form of that not quite human being.

He was more than slightly surprised as the woman in black, straightening herself with a resumption of her accustomed dignity and tucking a wisp of dark hair back behind her ear, gave the book-agent a markedly cold look and said: "I think Miss Palimpsest will not give a very straight answer to your first question, Turner, since were it not for my presence here I think she would not be persuaded to admit to you how deep she really is in the counsels of the Unsquared Circle, nor to utter the names of those dark and hidden places in which she has for many years had private dealings with the assassin who calls herself Rhys Bedortha -- places in which I myself have had to tread, much against my will, as my own path has overlapped with the devious plottings of that unfortunate and ever-faithless woman -- nor to confess that your present journey is a trap laid by her secret master and confidant, Baron Zugzwang, to lure you to the caverns beneath his secret library, in which lies the ultimate object of the quest which has obsessed me for the last seven years; but Cliodora need not waste her breath or her affected jealousy on me, for I have studied long in those books of lore from Eustace Bolsover's library which she has so long coveted -- the grimoires of advanced circumlocution and the almanacs of the hidden temple -- to which I could gain access only by assuming the persona of Nora Balzoff and enduring the philandering attentions of your late Uncle Reginald, and in desperation I have now even subjected myself to the unsavoury ceremonial of the Outer Rites of Thon and here..." she broke off, reached into her bag, and with a flourish drew out the mysteriously inscribed and entwined silver knife, a counterpart, it seemed, of the dagger so recently pressed against one of Turner's more vital bodily meridians, at the sight of which both he and Clio audibly drew breath, "here is the blade that I earned by that unspeakable ordeal, and by which I mean to fulfil my destiny"; and with these portentous words, she stepped away from Turner, still gaping in bewilderment and adjusting his cravat, and pointed the weapon warningly towards the half-crouching figure of Clio Palimpsest, who was surreptitiously attempting to shift her grip on the heavy basalt bust while trying not to let go of the curling papyrus which she still held in her left hand, the symbols on its surface moving ominously under her fingers.
"Yes Turner," said Cliodora in a leaden, dark, fibrous tone he had never before heard in her voice, "There are more things in heaven and earth, my dear, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," and as she lifted her right hand, tossing the ancient bust high in the air, she barked out a guttural and primal command that sent chills down Turner's spine, an incantation that caused the walls of the room to weep a cerulean fluid, while Turner, gasping in a sudden suffocating decompression, watched in horror as Clio and Pierre both seemed to collapse in upon themselves leaving only a greenish, camphor smelling pile of dust where they once had been.

Chapter Three

Sitting snugly in the window of a bistro, watching Parisians stroll by in the settling dusk, Turner sipping a red wine while Nora toyed with a Campari and soda, both thinking their separate thoughts; in Nora's case she was trying decide to whether to get shed of Turner or if perhaps he actually might be useful and whether there was more to be gained by staying in Paris or heading to Liechtenstein, and Turner was wondering where his luggage was, what he was going to do without Clio to handle such details, and really what on earth was going on anyway, but whatever it was it clearly wasn't good, all the while increasingly aware that his companion was a very distracting woman.

The waiter approached: before Turner had a chance to speak his uncle's mistress had ordered Foi-Gras de Canard Aux Raisins for him and the last of the ortalans for herself then before finally addressing Page directly. "I am searching " she said "for S'zawn the undying who, long ages ago made the mistake of Tithonus, and thus lost all humanity, not realising that to be immortal was of necessity to be inhuman." Turner looked tired, unstrung, as Nora continued,
"It seems that now you are a pawn in this cosmic game, of which I understand little of your part, but if you could tell me what you know of your parents, I think I might be able to fill in...gaps, perhaps even enlighten us both in the direction this play of power may be going".

As Turner contemplated how best to lay out the complications of his parentage as concisely as possible, he was startled by the squeaking scrape of a chair and was further startled to find Clio joining their table; as he watched her warily, she said
"I hope you were not taken in by the rather implausible lies that Nora has been telling you, Turner," to which he stuttered in reply, "but I saw you.... Pierre... green dust," at which she sighed and said "It is true that when I discovered that the Brotherhood of the Unsquared Circle was interested in our search, I took the precaution of finding about more about them and also picked up a few useful skills, since I find that sometimes it is best to fight fire with fire;" at this last she looked meaningfully at Nora, and Turner noticed that Clio seemed somehow different--her coiffure a bit more flattering, her tweeds more stylishly cut, her lips, her eyes, more, more there somehow; frankly he did not know who to believe or what to think, which brought him full circle to the question of his parents.

"I find myself without a reason to trust either of you;" he spoke bluntly avoiding both womens eyes observing instead the tiny fragile wing of an ortolan, falling to the plate,"Why should I then say anything to either of you, rather you should be revealing yourselves to me?" A fleeting mental image made him smile: " If you wish me to trust either of you, then answer my questions."

Although in fact he had not got so far as to frame any of his numerous questions in words, or even - with his brain labouring in a fog of stupefaction engendered both by Clio's calm reappearance and Nora's apparent unconcern at it - even to organize his thoughts in his own mind, yet when he eventually raised his eyes, it was on Clio that his glance fell - Clio, whom he had taken to be merely an indefatigable book researcher with a somewhat remarkable list of
contacts in that esoteric world whose literature so intrigued him, but who, as revealed by her conjuration in the Bibliotheque, was an adept of no little skill in the arts in which he had dabbled, and to the power of which his unfortunate great-uncle had succumbed; and to the suspicious angling of his eyebrows that lady delicately laid a finger on his wrist and said: "I assure you, Turner, that it was not with any malice that I hid from you two things which my..." she hesitated slightly, and shot an uninterpretable look at their companion, who was toying amusedly with her ortolans, "my colleague, Nora, has brought to your attention: first, my acquaintance with certain magical techniques which I had hoped I would not need to resort to so early in our journey, and, secondly, the fact that I have been endeavouring to engineer your presence in the Castle of Zugzwang for reasons other than mere bargaining over a book, though that does remain one of them; I had intended to reveal these in due time, but the situation was somewhat altered by the unexpected intervention of that despicable assassin Rhys Bedortha, whom Nora was, I believe, attempting to distract in London (and whose blade, incidentally, you were very lucky to see unsheathed without being required to feed it with a drop or more of your own blood), but who had nevertheless clearly decided to seek the scroll for herself alone, or perhaps for Count Alois - no," she raised her hand as that name caused Turner to turn slightly in his chair and open his mouth, "no, I am not secretly working for the Count - that little untruth I assume..." again she cast a slightly cryptic glance at Nora, "was prompted by the need to deceive Bledortha as far as possible as to our true allegiances, for as a trained initiate of the New Temple of Bastet that woman has preternaturally acute hearing, and dealt far more quickly than I thought possible with the manifestation of the Viridian Kraken which I managed to evoke using Pierre (how fortunate that the little chap had stayed in the chamber with us); now, for a short time, we have outmanoeuvred her, for in her haste she has gone off with only a minor papyrus, and though she will very soon discover her mistake, by her action she has let us know that, as some had suspected, there is an important role to be played in this matter by the scroll of the Claws of Bastet (which I now have in my handbag), as well as by yourself...though Nora and I have different opinions on what your role may be, but we shall try to answer whatever questions you have - to the extent that it is safe to do so in the open - seeking in return for our answers your continued cooperation (which may yet lead you to the book you have been wanting so long), and in particular some background information on your parentage which our long and - er - arduous researches" (Clio coughed slightly at this point, and Nora smiled wistfully, and murmured "Ah, yes, poor dear Reginald") "have been unable to uncover, but about which you may be able to enlighten us."

Nora, unable to resist further, took up the Ortolans and devoured it with a voraciousness that made it all to apparent why the waiter had attempted to conceal both her and the dish with a carefully draped and voluminous napkin, the sound of crunching bones and the dribbles of fat overwhelming her make-up hearkening as they did to a primitive more vigorous past, finally replacing the beak that was all that survived of the poor creature on her plate and smiled:
"Drowned in Armagnac..." she dabbed efficiently with the napkin, "What a poetic way to die".

Turner looked at his two companions, sighed, and said," As much as I dislike traveling, I think I am quite ready to put Paris behind me, so shall we continue our journey first things in the morning and I can tell you both what I know of my parents along the way, which reminds me, Clio, what on earth have you done with my luggage?"

Outside the Paris cafe, a cold February wind that was icy, stiff, irascible, buffeted brick and beam, and the distant city sounds became twisted and metamorphed into an eerie sputter, as Turner tried to find a foothold, a point of reference, a schema that would explain the rapidly evolving events around him, to try to get a grip on a thin veil of reality, to understand how his involvement with these two women, one with extraordinary powers and who untill a few hours ago had been a shy devoted friend, and a beautifully seductive woman who may or may not be an ally, could have resulted from his search for a rare manuscript that had once been owned by Crowley, and how it was possible that a father whose 'hobbies' had involved a "sphere of pyramidal honeycombs" and a vast correspondence with Tesla on Radar, weather control and a so-called death ray, who vanished in America a few weeks before his eighth birthday, and a mother he had never known except for a journal she had sent him just before her death containing what he thought were nothing more than mystical symbols and stream of conciousness writings telling of ancient Hindu gods and goddesses, of ancient primal powers, speaking to her, even possesing her, and should these things be shared, forgotten, investigated; should he play along, or silently watch before leaping to a reckless, possibly dangerous conclusion; should he even be considering traveling with one or both of these women on a 'quest' that involves mystery cults and powers beyond imagining, a journey that could lead to... god knows what, destruction, enlightenment..." Ah, Clio, stammered Turner, snapping himself out of his numbness, you say you have the scroll in your purse, the one with the gliphs that moved, why is it important, what does it mean, what does it say, and, and... is Pierre dead, or in some other place, is he a friend, and Nora, who is S'zawn the Undying?"

"Let's collect all the luggage and find a way out of Paris, then I'll try to satisfy some of your wonderings," said Clio, as she looked about for a taxi. Once the were safely ensconced in a taxi Clio unwound enough to talk and so while Nora attempted to peruse the manuscript, which out of some perversity seemed to have adopted Carolingian minuscule in a half hearted effort avoid translation, began "Many ages ago in a land now forgotten and lost beneath the waves that which is now known as S'zawn the Undying was mortal, this mad" she seemed oddly hesitant for a moment "man", she continued, "abjured or cajoled an elemental being to do his bidding, to make him immortal, not realising what he would lose thereby: for many thousands of years it may be he was content or at least unable to do anything about that loss but gradually that thing which had become known S'zawn began to seek for a return to mortality, but eternity by its very nature cannot be ended instead it must be pushed aside, given away exchanged maybe with another, who know mayhap that is how S'zawn obtained it, exchanged his own mortality with the empty and never-ending life of that first elemental, but however he first obtained it this was not any easy 'gift' to let go of: somehow he needed to find another who could accept or be forced to accept this gift, deeding him with their own mortality in return; some say that he succeeded and has seceded many times each new possessor of eternal life seeking to pass on the hated gift that they may find rest, others that S'zawn has always failed for how else could a being have drifted so far from human unless aeons had passed, " she paused to draw on the aniseed flavoured cigarette she had been rolling as she talked then continued, "The last attempt was initiated in the time of Hārūn when an elemental was found or bound and placed in manuscript now secured in your library for such great magics take longer than a single lifetime to enact. The Undying started to search for or breed one sufficiently similar in ka, in spirit, that by contagion and the intervention of that elemental he could regain what, "again she paused, "he had lost."
"If I might take us up to more recent times," Nora took over, "with the help of his cohorts in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Crowley learned something of this history and toyed with the idea of himself attempting to trade his mortality for S'zawn's immortality, and he wrote what he knew of the matter in the margins of Cogito Ergo Possum, but when it came into the possession of the Unsquared Circle crowd, they eventually learned that it was useless without also controlling the elemental bound in your library: hence their intense interest in you, Turner."

And while the trio spoke of this and that regarding the roles they might be playing in the near future, Pierre was anxious to return to S'zawn's lair, for he had done what she had asked, "a favor", she had rasped, and he had gathered several hairs from each of the heads of Turner, Clio and Nora, and in his thoughts he recalled her anxiety, her bewilderment, the raw grating chant of "peodcyninga... prym gefrunon, feasceaft funden...he paes frofre gebad...slithy toves...slithy toves", and each time her white watery eyes would lurch in panic, "Pierre, they bebother, me flummoxed...oh goggle and puff, huff-huff, the fane of chalcedony be cloven, they close the aforetime, they..." and the Walrus; scary, scary, thought Pierre, how she could have known of the "claws of Bastet, of the rhyme of Murther, of the role of the Thon, of the time of Bourach... does the Count suspect; can he too know of S'zwan's true origins, of the metamorphosis long ago, of the mortal turned immortal, of S'zawn's "fluey mullish", her long dread of night, her containment... and the foolish Count thinks he had birthed her and dredged her out of Susan Hill, poor poor Susan- S'zwan, their shared pain not from 'the accident', but from the contamination of the crystals of Thon- and now we have allies, 'share-crafters', yes, Dr. Dee was correct in anticipating the renewal... he would be proud, proud of Pierre, yes, we shall be rejoined, nurtured by the dark nightwing, oh S'zawn I come to worship at your feet Queen of the All, Priestess of Murther."
Alas. it seemed Pierre had finally lost all contact with sanity.

As the taxi slowed and turned into a narrow street, Clio looked up and said "This is where we get out."
Turner saw the bluish lights and the syrupy red splash of neon twitching like a firefly on a long dusty summer night; a door, soot-blackened and peeling, led into a cluttered room full of discarded books and magazines piled in teetering stacks of varying heights, with a single pathway that led to a small archway covered with canvas that took them into a darker room more cluttered still, untill, passing through another door they entered a bare, brightly lit room with a desk a single chair and a telephone.

Susan dreamt uneasily on hearing the knocking: her only companion had started to climb the wall that separated her from that dark reflection of herself, its usual agility seeming clumsy now as it sought something, a hole, a lever or latch, she had not waited to discover, sudden dread causing her to knock it clear and capture that erstwhile comrade in the same petticoat that had so recently held her writhing lunch; even now exhausted though she was, the incessant tapping, the petticoat-bagged writhings coloured those dreams.

Clio picked up the phone and removed a blue circular magnet from the base, placed this magnet against a slight depression in the wall and turned it clockwise then counter and back several times until finally the desk in the middle of the room slid aside revealing a passageway-- "We must decide", said Clio, "how we can best counteract the forces unleashed by others, and through which level of reality to best accomplish our course of action; this way leads to another layer between the worlds, where we will find enemies, but allies too; yet to stay on this plane we will have only ourselves, and I for one doubt our success alone, but we must decide together to either enter by this path where things are similar and yet variable to our world, or remain here and do what we can"- and poor Turner turned paler while the dazzling Miss Balzoff smiled gleefully.
"B..b...but m..m...my luggage!" stammered Turner when Clio looked at him expectantly.

Clio's expression changed to something more quizzical, and, in a tone which did not sound entirely unsympathetic to the disoriented bachelor--lost as he felt amid shifting allegiances, conspiracies, and machinations far beyond his imagining, and nerving himself deep within against the wholly unguessable demands of that genuine adventure which now beckoned, and for which, though scarcely daring to acknowledge it to himself during his purely literary escapades of the past, he had been secretly yearning through all the long years of his boyhood and early adulthood--she said quietly: "Turner Page, if in the course of the next few days you should find yourself lodged in one of the luxuriously appointed guestrooms of Castle Zugzwang, then you will find that the Count denies no creature comforts to his most honoured guests, even though they may well be virtual prisoners, to be humoured or thwarted at his pleasure and whim; if, on the other hand, you should find yourself accommodated in one of the less pleasantly decorated dungeons in the caves below the castle, then you will find yourself to have more urgent and pressing requirements than tortoiseshell-handled hairbrushes and a supply of fine silk handkerchiefs; your hotel room is no doubt being assiduously watched, and since we do not, as yet, know on which side of the present struggle Pierre's habitual double game will eventually bring him, we dare not let you return there without certain occult precautions which would be somewhat troublesome and time-consuming to prepare, so we must require your decision now: will you accept what guidance and support that I and Miss Balzoff can offer against any malign forces that may assail you, and will you accompany us on hidden pathways which few uninitiated mortals have trod, to seek redress for ancient wrongs and to amend some of the follies and wickednesses of your forebears?" -- and at his weak nod, she took him firmly by the right elbow, Nora placing her hand on his left shoulder, and in a loud voice both women pronounced in unison the word Transeamus, and together they all stepped forward through the opening into what appeared a plain stone-walled passage; but as they did so, in an instant, with a shock that, though utterly soundless, seemed to reverberate inside Turner's head like the harsh clang of some huge bell swinging within a vast and hollow chamber of metal and living rock, the stone walls vanished amid bright coruscations of unearthly light and the pungently lingering scent of camphor, and the three of them were cast into that strange region behind this world of appearances, where the singing winds blow eternally between astral and ethereal planes, and the silver threads of wanderers' lives like spider-silk cross and recross the half-glimpsed trackways and bridges, shining as twilit gossamer amid the clouds and shadows of those places which are, and yet are not, a part of the world at all.

Suddenly Turner found himself hammered, beaten down almost, by heavy driving rain: "Sticks and witches" he heard one of his companions mutter as he struggled to orientate himself; he succeeded, but only momentarily, for even as his numbed brain discerned the unexpected outlines of the Rollright Stones, he heard a sharp exclamation from the right and the Stones faded from his senses along with the rain, to be replaced, after an second, or an eternity, for time seemed to have no meaning in this... otherspace, with large tinder dry coniferous trees standing amidst Mediterranean shrubs all scented with the last breath of summer;
"Sorry about that" said Clio as they stood there sodden, "we took a wrong turning."

"In a drizzled hall of dank moss and silent stones," spoke Nora, "a supposed hypothesis- the facts more inaccurate than obvious even though the 'contents of the papers' remained resident at Oxford untill the 1940s and could be studied ad nauseum by any novice- was developed by a writer of unique talent (although totally lacking in genius) by the name of Alois Zugzwang, whose belief that the Thon, an ancient race of 'quasi-spiritual beings', whose faces were embroiderd with filaments of alabaster silicone and whose satiny blue-inky skin exuded a camphorous smelling sweat, breached the boundries of this world; for they were from another reality, and by breeding with the indigenous race of this planet created a 'freak' of nature, the sterile beings known as Tooks, who, by contemplating deeply upon their conciousness could create an alternate reality where time could be slowed to a near standstill, (Zugzwang was not of the Einsteinian persuasion), and that the human mind, if properly trained, could do likewise, allowing the traveler to 'nap between the planes' and so extend ones life for centuries by popping in and out of this existence: Zugzwang had even tried some experiments on a Susan Hill; a women he had decieved in love and knowledge, succeeding in bringing to this plane a 'Took' known as S'zwan the Undying", and as Nora continued her tale, her wide green eyes radiant; the clarity of her gaze was astonishing, while pushing back the rain soaked ringlets of her black hair with fingers slim and graceful; unlike Turner whose dry fermented skin (a pale icy grey) was a sign of the waves of sickness passing over him, they both heard the exquiste musical voice of Clio exclaim "Ah, at last... the Eleusian Fields; here we may find an ally... let us look for a Took."

His nausea beginning to subside, Turner at last had the strength to gasp "Tooks are real?" before staggering over to a tree and leaning against it.
"They are real, but very shy and hard to catch; however, fortunately for us, they find Marmite completely irresistible," said Clio, producing a small jar.
"At least that is what Zugzwang believes, though he also thinks this is ichor of the chtorr", She rotated the jar to show that the label had been steamed off," a forbidden food of the old ones, actually marmite is much worse and so we would not dare this deception if we did not know the elemental is firmly bound within the book in your library."
Although still queasy, Turner took in this new information, mulling it over a bit before responding, "How sure are you that the binding is still in place and still strong?"

And as Turner spoke, the ageless, ancient, evil elemental that had been unknowingly unbound by Turner's reading of the Buchstab grimoire, sought warmth in the belly of the building, and near the furnace, in an attempt to communicate fire to fire; for this was an elemental of fire, a conflagration began that destroyed the entire contents of Turner's library (an echo of a previous disaster): and in Susan hills prison cell within the Rhatikon Massif, the severed hand of Eustace Borsolver spasmed uncontrollably.

Nora smiled tightly, "If it were not bound S'zawn would have used its power to complete the ritual that Buchstab and Susan so bravely interrupted when they managed at the cost of my dear Sister's life to steal the book away, such an event would nessecarilly have shattered zugzwang's illusions just as a mortal S'zwan woud shatter a million other lives, atlantis sank to make him immortal, to restore mortality would have required as great a sacrifice, Bound then it must be or all is lost."
"What I wouldn't do for a wormwood ale, Pepys' 'purl', a whiff of the bitter waters", sighed Clio, "the dancing of my mind over things cthonic, has my dander up."

"Never mind the wormwood ale", said Turner, apprehensively, "I think your Marmite may have got someone else's dander up...", and he gesticulated in the direction of a nearby clump of tall evergreen trees, reminiscent of elegant cypresses in their long-feathered branches which oscillated irregularly with a gentle swaying motion and launched upon the zephyrous air an almost insensible coolth and a faintly resinous scent, slightly calming the storm of Turner's roiling mind with a faint, subliminal memory of the long, warm summer days spent in languorous repose in some Aegean bower, a glass of retsina in his hand, a bowl of almonds or lustrous Kalamata olives by his elbow, and a volume of the "Greek Anthology" half-forgotten in his lap as the breeze ruffled its pages; yet in the semi-Stygian darkness beneath their soft boughs a figure could be vaguely discerned: indistinct yet clearly animate, anthropoid in form, yet with some uncertainty of proportion, some curious asymmetry of form, which proclaimed it no ordinary human wanderer like themselves, but perhaps indeed one of that fortunate yet unfortunate race known as Tooks, which, until a few moments previously, Turner had supposed to be merely the fictional invention of certain writers of a flamboyant turn of fancy, whose identification of the Rite of Thon as a corrupted liturgy of evocation addressed to an ancient race was at least a matter of valid scholarly speculation, but whose claims of miscegenation between the indigenes of two worlds had always struck Turner as the wild imaginings of a fevered brain, and whose tales of time-distortion had seemed to him most probably the result of over-indulgence in those exotic herbs and ergotic tinctures that have brought many a bright young student of high grammary and circumlocution to the brink of destruction or of self-destruction, and as the others turned to look in the direction he indicated, a sense of unease came upon Turner, and he wondered why his companions should be intent upon attracting one of these uncanny creatures, tales of whose mythical mental or quasi-spiritual properties -- as varied and unpredictable as their mutant and often protean bodily form -- had betrayed more than one occultist into what seemed to Turner and his instructors in the arts (in the face of a lack of scientific or even credibly subjective evidence) a wholly futile attempt, by one means or another, to acquire preternatural longevity by bending such a creature to their will; and what obstruction on their purposes might be engendered by the act of injudicious counter-sorcery, as yet unrevealed to his comrades, by which, as he had now become aware, he had inadvertently and unwittingly unleashed into the world between worlds an elemental of considerable power and entirely unknown purposes, whose unbinding had not only precipitated, unbeknown to its owner, the destruction of his library (a loss which would pale ito insignificance beneath the weight of ensuing events) but also given a new hope to one of whose existence he could not previously have guessed (and whose grim and bestial aspect, if he had ever but glimpsed it, would have filled him with even greater apprehension at the imminent prospect of encountering a Took, live and unbound), who had detected the shifting balance in the astral planes as the elemental broke its millennial immobility, and for whom the pale-eyed Pierre was even now bearing certain tokens to her secret prison beneath the limestone crags. Nora and Clio stared at Turner and then, almost reluctantly, they slowly turned and gazed at the shadows beneath the evergreens.

Under a shimmering jelly-blue sky, like the color of enameled Phonecian whelks and Tyrian mollusks, and amongst a field of explosively dark crimson roses and erupting fountains of yellow St. John's Wort, Clio and Nora, after tucking the still perplexed Turner in a hollow of stunted stones and groping vines, approached the copse of trees which shaded what Clio was certain was a Took; its body was somewhat soda-bottle shaped, with a birdlike face, all white eyes (without a trace of iris or pupil), and a beakish nose and jaw, who was manipulating with slender tree-frog like fingers a collection of cerulean stones and orbs - "Thon crystals", gasped Nora - on a cleared circular space of sandy gravel, when Clio noticed a worn metal collar around its neck;
"This Took is claimed by someone" sneered Clio, as out of the shadows a bulge-headed man, limp legged and with ears like a water-rat barked,
"Yes, by me",
and whose smile seemed to have nothing behind it, no emotion, no clues as to intent; yet it appeared that from vice grew his deformities, and upon seeing the Marmite in Clio's hand he sputtered
"Clever...but I'll make it easy for you...it's for sale."

Even before the final syllable left the newcomers lips the unbound elemental that had so recently destroyed Mr Page's library reached out across the planes and the Took's collar flared and vanished in a sudden bright flash of magnesium that was sufficient to cause even a Took granted its freedom tortured agony, for even as it faded from this plane, fleeing it thrummed the deep bass note of its distress, leaving behind - so great was its pain - the Thon crystals prized so much in this thin veil, hiding a greater truth, that is all most humans know of reality.
Turner Page blinked as the after-image from the magnesium flare throbbed in his eyeballs, and as his vision returned, he became aware that the bulge-headed man had reeled back, an expression of such incandescent rage distorting his empurpled features that Turner quailed inwardly at the prospect of violence; but as he watched, the man's visage changed and paled, the signs of fury replaced in turn by amazement, then by a curious calm, and as Clio took a step forward, still clutching her Marmite pot, the man ignored her entirely and, to Turner's stupefaction, hirpled a few hesitant steps towards him and lowered himself awkwardly to one knee with a look of respect, saying in a softened though still grating voice: "Greetings to you, master of spells; I did not know that an unbinder of elementals walked the Fields this day."
As casually as he could the kneeling man retrieved the Thon crystals placing them in in his pocket. With a voice that spat more than articulated, that sounded like it originated between the kneeling man's swampy ears, he introduced himself as Leamus of Thalhimer, magus, mercenary and mendicant. Stealthily, Nora and Clio quickly took up positions to either side and slightly behind the bulge-headed man as he knelt before Turner. Standing once more with a studied casualness Leamus spoke:
"I hope your elemental is well bound, for you do realise that which dwells nearby need an elemental of such power to complete rites that could endanger not just us, but all of western Europe."
His stratagem was in vain, however, as at a nod the two women reached up, each pinching hard on a pendulous earlobe, causing him to crumple to the ground, at which Nora began to rifle his pockets for the crystals as Clio swore softly and then seemed almost to talk to herself: "an unbound elemental is a serious complication, but I don't think it's on this plane, (though Gaia only know where it might be), still we should get off this plane fast, but in the meantime we still need a Took...," Nora interrupted her triumphantly: " I've got the crystals," her voiced dropping on the last syllable as she looked at Turner who was looking slightly green and swaying ever so gently.

Then suddenly, out from under the tunic of the crumpled Leamus, three plump black spider-like creatures scattered out, one each, toward Clio, Nora and Turner, and while Clio managed to evade hers by a quick leap to one side before she dropped to her left knee and plunged her runic blade into the beasts bloated belly, Nora was bitten twice, once on the back of the knee (her short stylish black dress provided no protection), and again on her bare right shoulder (damn high fashion), and felt her body stiffen as paralysis quickly set in; yet her mind was clear and her eyes could move as she watched the creature that had bitten her rapidly begin to weave a thick sticky web around the crystals that had fallen from her hands, and Clio, who had dashed to her side and had dispatched the evil black thing with a flash of her blade (but not before the Thonic treasures were deep within a ball of silk), then turned toward Turner, who, to her amazement and fear, was gone, as was Leamus.

BOOK TWO: A COMPLEX WEB

Chapter Four

As the third spiderish creature was rapidly crawling toward the wrapped crystals, Clio found it necessary to dispatch yet another of Leamus' servants before tending to Nora.

Nora lay strangely motionless upon the ground; an extraordinary number of common spiders could kill someone, if they just possessed mandibles capable of piercing the human tegument, so as purple light and shadow crept chiroscopically across her vision and searing flames seemed to throb into and out of existence in ever expanding waves emanating from the site of the minute punctures it is not surprising that as she watched Clio apply a brutal heel to the already dead creature, Nora's certainty grew that such was the case with the bites of these unworldly beasts, a certainty that faded like all else into blackness.

"Damn!" thought Clio as she stomped unceremoniously on the last spasmodically wriggling corpse, wiped her shoe on one of the curious annular clumps of lusher and darker grass that punctuated the surrounding sward, and then extracted a crumpled plastic bag from the deep recesses of her coat pockets and, carefully turning it inside out over her hand, gingerly picked up the crystals, their glittering coruscations now wholly eclipsed by the densely mummifying threads of greyish silk in which they were enveloped, and wrapped the shapeless and slightly sticky mass into a tight bundle which she secreted in another cavernous pocket - "this I could have done without"; and, not without a certain solicitous care, she raised Nora's limp head gently from the ground and passed back and forth below her nose the open jar of Marmite, which, in the clear zephyrous air of that realm - a sweet balmy air that even now dispelled the unpleasant pyridinous odour emanating from the crushed arachnoids - acted in the manner of a sal volatile of great pungency and power, so that after not many minutes, Nora's eyelids fluttered faintly and she coughed weakly and stirred her left hand, though her right arm remained pale and motionless on the ground beside her; Clio sighed with relief and assisted her companion to a sitting position, interspersing vague words of comfort with distracted murmurs to herself: "That fool Buchstab must have sent Page a grimoire - I don't suppose he thought for a moment that he would be able to read it, let alone use a spell of unbinding; Thalhimer, that wretched mercenary said he was from; but if he has taken Turner there we could have trouble tracking him: the place is a labyrinth..." - she broke off and absent-mindedly patted Nora's hand: "but of course, we have the scroll: with the right manipulations we should be able to reconfigure it as a visitor's guide to Thalhimer". Nora finally had the strength to gesture toward her own pocket and whisper "In there; a vial of anti-magicvenom; put a drop on each puncture before we try to go on."

Turner awoke on a boat; he could sense the gentle sway of the swells and a lapping of water against the hull near his face, and he was cold, a deep bursting cold that emanated from the center of his being, and he could only move his eyes and hear dark rumbling voices, agitated voices, scary voices. One of the voices seemed unhuman, the words clipped, vowels poorly formed, tinged with that huskiness that people associated with whiskey and cigarettes, it was to deep perhaps for a woman, yet it seemed to strive and fail to find just such a lightness of tone, as he lay on what seemed a roughly blanketed bunk he tried to discern meaning; there was a certain familarity...
" Took, familiar and crystals all out of our control... what good is Turner to us now?"
"The venom will wear off in a few more hours" gruffed Leamus, and a shrill squeaky voice of a small hideous riverine creature said "lets throw 'im in the river now and be done with it", but the women in brown, the Walrus, spoke in a blubbering sputter, a weary wet-sounding sigh
"No, he is useful to me now, he has friends...friends who may be willing to compromise, to exchange goods and services, allies who do not yet understand the depth of the darkness overtaking them... those who do not see how Turner's flippant release of the Elemental, his silly bookishness, his inept attempts at the adepts search for the primary power-the folly of all humans who dare to reach beyond the sliver of their existence- for he has helped to... no he alone has twisted the cog of power toward the world that is not to be, and he does not yet know it, but he will, he will" -- and none of them saw the eyes of Pierre wide and observant peering over the hatchway near their feet, nor did they know he had an amulet of protection for Turner, an amulet formed from S'zwan's own saliva and Turner's hair, for she had a need for him alive, alive and healthy. Seeing the others to be fully occupied by this discussion, Pierre carefully made his way to the uncomfortable bunk where Turner lay and put the amulet around the neck of the almost completely paralyzed man, tucking it under his clothing to rest near Turner's heart.

"Besides," Rhys continued her voice the same that first he had heard upon awakening taking on a yearning quality that made Turner want to shudder even as it managed to evoke some strange sympathy "a man's life, as I should know, is a terrible thing to waste; especially," it seemed almost an afterthought "as we may have need of it later."
Turner heard her turn, though he was quite unable to move his head in the direction of the voices and she remained out of his line of sight, and he was suddenly concerned that Pierre might be discovered -- Pierre, whose unblinking gaze had recently caused him such agitation of mind, yet whose faintly familiar presence in that unfamiliar place was strangely comforting, even though he could not, as yet, imagine what the little man's purpose in visiting him could be; but he seemed to have remained unobserved, and Turner glimpsed his disappearing feet as he made his agile exit through a high porthole.

The Walrus, dressed in a thick butternut brown woolish and coarse robe, a robe that hung on her body in chaotic folds, approached Turner (who would have trembled if he could) and seemed to sing this oddly floating melody..."Picture yourself on a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalde skies..ah Turner, the innocence of your eyes are quite like your mother's... astonished, yet shall we say they possess an eagerness, a zeal...a passion for life that is contagious... you must find all this psychic energy, these occult ramifications rather toxic to your well-being...and yet Turner, I wonder what you know...do you know of symbiosis, of parasite and host?...or that these things occur in the psychic planes as well, that there are relationships that are pleasing between entities...that a Thon and a human together are more than the sum of their seperateness...that a bond between Thon and human offspring can never be broken, that a Took is the mirror of the two...and that the three together are a power that none can prevail against", and here, Rhys coughed a choking rattle before wheezing further..."yes Turner, your father knew, as did your mother...they knew of the binding, of the source, but they took advantage, as did your great uncle...brave they were, but foolish...and you Turner, we hope that you can be preserved without contamination, without greed...without the weakness of the flesh for power...you have dabbled my friend, you have awakened others...you have chosen without knowing and without knowledge we die."

Staring out through the porthole at the sunset and colourful maple and sycamore leaves, the song seem so very appropriate: why, even the portions of the boat he could see were orange, albeit a fluorescent emergency orange; he struggled muzzily to remember the name of the modern beat combo whose song it was, but was interrupted before he came to a conclusion by another voice, that of Leamus: "Welcome to Clay's Ark, for it has long been established that an ark is the safest place to be when there is a danger of sudden epeirogenesis."

The severed hand of Eustace Borslover flexed its fingers and pulled itself along the hard stone floor of its and Susan Hill's dungeon cell; having no mind, it was not conscious in the literal sense (as we who are reading this take for granted in an egocentric, 'me as center' paradigm), but its 'awareness' was driven by the--how should it be stated?--the spirit, which animated the bones, the sinews, the musculature (and let it be noted that enough of the forearm remained attached to the ghoulish hand that muscles did indeed work, if not effeciently then at least rudimentally) and this spirit, in the deepest agitation possible was compelling, no, forcing the last physical evidence of the existence of Eustace Borslover to reach out and touch someone; that someone being the poor, wearied, isolated and now somewhat detached Mrs. Hill (who once held this same hand in the thralls of passion; and not to fail to mention, she and he, that is Eustace, had thought of cleverly entrapping the Count in a triangle--the third party being the sordid S'zawn--of deception geared to obtaining knowledge found in several books in the library of, as well as in the mind of the count (whose standing with the elite of The Unsquared Circle was impressive, and who was said to 'personally' have been introduced to a Thonic princess in hopes of creating a dynasty of the tri-polar plexus of Thon, Human,Took, one not seen since the days of Atlantis; but in sacrificing S'zawn, and imprisoning Mrs. Hill and the Hand of E.B. had found himself ostracized by the very community to which he had aspired) and now this spirit wished to awaken within Susan a hope of deliverance, of escape, of revenge, for the powers were moving in all the spheres, the vibrations were everywhere, the thin veneer of this reality was stretching to the breaking point, and mountains were rising, and seas regurgitating and worlds here and there were being reformed, mutated, consolidated, and now if only... yes, if only...!

Brooding and drooling in its dark prison, the hulking figure of S'zawn also twitched, spasmodically, intermittently, like a cat sensing an approaching thunderstorm, as faint oscillations in the astral currents tugged at tendrils of its clouded mind, but the moving of the monstrous head suddenly ceased at a distant sound, and the light from a high slit-window found itself trapped in the fiery depths of S'zawn's eyes as they moved with slow deliberation to watch the door, which, as if at a signal, emitted a faint and muffled clang and opened a few inches to admit the slight figure of Pierre, who chuckled throatily to himself as he passed his long-fingered hands in intricate patterns over certain of the bronze inscriptions hanging by the portal, and in answer to an inarticulate hiss from the dungeon's great denizen, the little man spoke in a torrent of words: "He has it...he has it...but the thin one, she plots, she plots, and she will try to get the scroll again...and they all try to control Tooks, they do...what should Pierre do..."; and below, in the stone chamber, the monstrous lips parted painfully to form words, half-crushed in that misshapen mouth, but clear enough to the creature's companion -- "crystals, bring crystals".

In her cell, Susan stirred restlestly in her sleep and dreamed of Tooks and crystals and, finally, of those happy days before Eustace became obsessed with arcane powers. Yet unseen and unknown forces were at work, for in the center of the stone floor of Susan's cell a faint golden glow (the color of honey and amber) began as a coin-sized disturbance in the fabric of this world, and then, enlarging slowly like the concentric waves on a ponds surface, doubled, then seemed to exponentially increase in size; and in her sleep, Susan took up the hand of Eustace and clasped it to her breast, while a golden tentacle emerged from the now gaping chasm and with pythonic coils began to wrap gently, protectively around the slowly awakening Mrs. Hill (still grasping the severed hand) who subconciously knew that she was being freed from her seven year imprisonment not by love, not by death, but by transformation... and as the saviour limb retracted through the portal, she could hear the whispering of her protectors as she felt the enhancing power of the Thon liberate her on all planes of existence, while the echo of frightened rats, their claws clicking on cold stones, filled the now empty chamber with the nervous and agitated noise of chaos, the smell of camphor being all that remained of the passing event.

Above the baroque pinnacles and ramparts of Schloss Zugzwang, a swathe of the midnight sky, arching with its myriad stars across the shoulders of the Grauspitz, was blocked from view by the huge and foursquare bulk of the castle's ancient and impregnable keep, yet the blackness of that lowering mass was not complete, for even from the woods beyond the castle walls, a faint light could be discerned in one high, narrow window, oscillating fitfully with the movement of some invisible curtain; and behind it, across deep carpets patterned with crimson curlicues of that curious design which, though originating among the silk merchants of Safavid Persia, was long ago taken as their own by the wool-weavers of Renfrewshire, paced a short, dark man with a narrow moustache and sleek, greasily-combed hair, dressed from head to toe in sable velvet into which vanished all the coruscations of light which were endlessly reflected by the bewildering kaleidoscope of mirrors, glasses, crystals, and gems which hung on every wall and stood on every piece of furniture and horizontal shelf, and in whose variously bright or tarnished surfaces could be glimpsed eyes and faces, clear skies and close-walled rooms, all picked out in perfect miniature; here, in the polygonal facets of a pale crystal half hidden beneath heaped papers, an amber glow was fading across the floor of a stone cell; here, in a sphere of heavy glass, though clouded by some misty obscurity, a man rose from a narrow bunk to peer through a high porthole; and in a dull, square-framed mirror, two women picked their way through what appeared to be a vast and crowded department store; but the attention of the room's occupant was focused on the small octagonal looking-glass which he held in his left hand, in which a thin brown woman gesticulated angrily to a squat man with bestial ears; but no sound issued from the tiny mouth, and the Count (for he it was) banged the glass roughly down on a shelf and choked off an angry oath: "Verdammt...! a free elemental: this must be Buchstaub's doing, the meddlesome fool."

"It says in the scroll", spoke Nora with her gleefully cheery voice, melodious like the sound of a flute in a still forest, "that Thalhimer is the premier commercial center in the Three Spheres": all about her were pathways, byways, alleyways, with a labyrinth of specialty shops, huge corporation conglomerate department stores, junk hide-aways, stalls, street vendors, kiosks, (and of course an agressive and vigorous black market), while Clio, her well trimmed companion, looked eagerly at a book stall named The Unsquared Circle, and she nudged Nora from her reading and pointed saying, "Do you suppose", and Miss Balzoff, nodding, sighed sensuously, as she rolled the scroll up tightly and entered the shop with an air of femininity that was as gushing as it was revealing; the shop keeper, a man whose skin looked like burnt toast and whose eyes turned nearly liquid at the sight of Nora's saturation (such an ambrosial creature he had not seen in some time), as she said, warmly, oozingly and quite seductively, "I am looking for a man named Leamus", as the stunned book trader, lost in some amourous fantasy, erratically pointed to a door partially screened by paisley drapes, and upon entering, the dashing duo were elated at the sight of Turner Page; sitting crosslegged smoking a Hoya de Monterrey, sipping on a glass of Palo Cortado (a plate of smoked mussels on a walnut rocco side table with carvings of cupids and nymphs in various stages of erotic embrace); and when he saw the women, Turner exclaimed, "By god, Miss Balzoff, Miss Palimpset, Rhys said you would be here in a few days, and here you are apparently none the worse for wear", while the two ladies smiled blithely until out of the corner of her eye, Clio, startled yet remaining composed, spotted The Walrus; dressed in brown tweeds, thin and reedy, who with a lardaceous voice burbled, "At last, the trio of ignorance is once again united... just as the terror is about to begin...please ladies, we have much to discuss, and time is fleeting."
Nora and Clio looked at one another and then slowly sat upon the sofa that Rhys indicated, while Turner got out a cigar and proceeded to light it.
Clio eyed Rhys (of the Silver Spoon) as she began to burble; at the same time she became aware of a slight tremble: a combination of a soft rumble and boom, deep below the room; as if the earth (if that was where they still were) was on the verge of eructation, and she could hear the Walrus..."professor of circumlocution, I.E. Binder, borrowed the volume...", but tuned her out in order to concentrate on the strange oscillation, the slight delicate swaying of the room that now Nora could sense as well; Miss Balzoff in fact stood up emphatically and began to lean towards Turner (who had fallen asleep when Rhys began to ramble about Crowley and Bharat Mookerjee, although he did teeter back toward consciousness at the mention of "Cogito ergo possum", before dropping off again at her exegesis on the Triads of Gysin and the True essence of Camphor) as the escalating shaking; which now had brought the descant of Rhys to an impasse, surged and buckled, while a slight crack widened to a fissure and then to a threatening breach, and Nora, not once relinquishing her grace and magnetism, reached her arms toward the now blanched Turner.

Turner, alertness restored, leaped toward the sofa and grabbed Clio's hand just as Nora took hold of his other arm and the three of them watched, horrified, as the fissure quickly widened and deepened.
"Follow me, quickly, all of you", cried Leamus in his grating voice, springing suddenly into the room with a small chest under his arm, "we must leave this plane: the imbalance has become too strong here - "; and rushing across in front of the sofa, perilously close to the edge of the chasm and treading on both of Turner's feet in his haste, he swept aside a rich hanging of gold and crimson to reveal a small wooden door of irregular shape, bound with strips of black iron and bearing several round plates of dull greenish metal.
"A Thon portal", gurgled Rhys, the first one through, as Turner, Nora, Clio and Leamus quickly followed, leaving a heaving, distorting, violently convulsive world behind.

Szawn having put forth his... her... no... its strength to regain what was lost reclined again while the hand, Suzan's ever untrustworthy companion and the link that had been used, scampered eagerly to the wall and started once more to dig ignoring her weeping as she contemplated her briefly won freedom.
As the hand of Eustace dug; ceaselessly, like a canine dancing over bones, 'round and about as if sniffing out prey, Pierre watched (he'd grown tired of cleaning his purple flip-flops) and remembered when the man had been attached to that now troubled appendage; he could see the elder Borslover hunched over Thon crystals, his high whinny voice stuttering over some newly acquired incantation, eyes sunken, skin cursed by sores and abrasions caused by the grievous torment of trans-temporal demons and multidimensional riff-raff; soaring between dimensions is a traumatizing, albeit soul engorging experience, and Pierre wondered if the hand of Eustace knew of its severed state, or worse, knew that its freedom to move about the time-planes was one of the greatest fears of the Count, although the wide eyed imp knew not the reasoning behind Zugwang's agitation, nor his urgency to find a fire elemental that was lurking, hovering, hiding in the dark places of London.

Chapter Five

Staggering from the lurching room through the darkened portal, Turner Page felt a physical and mental shock as he passed from that close, tense atmosphere, lit by a warm interior glow, into a cold, dim space which was (he saw as his eyes adjusted to the gloom) open to the night sky and lit only by a hazy moonlight, where the breath of his companions formed a pale mist in front of their faces as they stood in an uncertain huddle, Nora engaged in adjusting her shoes, Clio and Rhys, tense and wary, attending to Leamus, who gestured incoherently towards the solid vertical wall which confronted them, reaching apparently without limit into the sky and fashioned of huge rectangular stones, one of which bore a faint and rapidly fading patch of glowing light, the colour of honey and amber, which, as Turner watched, vanished silently; and as he turned to Clio in confusion, she drew him and the others under the eaves of what appeared to be a small outbuilding, and addressed him in hasty whispers: "Something extremely powerful is manipulating the portals: Leamus clearly was not expecting us to arrive here..." (the little man shook his head vigorously) "...and we must make our next move with extreme caution, as this place has many guards, both mortal and ethereal"; and to the unspoken question which Turner indicated with a mere inclination of his left eyebrow, she glanced hastily at the others as if for confirmation, and then said in a low tone which caused something deep in his stomach to flutter uncontrollably: "we are somewhere on the lower ramparts of Castle Zugzwang, and I don't think it is the Count who has invited us here".
In the silence following Clio's pronouncement, Turner heard the sound of scampering rats and, more distantly, a woman sobbing inconsolably. Turner felt the talisman near his throat begin to glow; it too a golden amber hue, as a cold misty drizzle, driven by a spastic wind gripped at their light apparel, as he squirmed closer to Nora, who looking at the scroll said shivering, "it states here there is a hidden pathway to our right, about 60 yards I'd say, that leads up to a ledge near a doorway of some sort."

"Is that our only choice?" Turner asked, after looking all around.

"Not at all," came a deep rich voice of vaguely middle European intonation, as a tall, austere-looking man in impeccable evening dress in a timeless cut stepped forward from a passage that opened from what had appeared to have been a solid wall, "allow me please to welcome you and conduct you to more, shall we say, conducive, quarters of my home."

Deep within its lair, S'zawn could sense the disturbance in the time stream; "at last", the creature hissed, "the moment comes, yes the cure of uncertainty arrives encrusted with deception...Pierre", the spattered voice continued, "please keep watch... and attend the movements of the foul one, clever he thinks he is," at this the bloated S'zawn did expell a laugh of sorts, a guffaw of spittle and slime, of bubbles and foam, "how numb I feel at this moment of greatest suffering, and soon," a frothy wheeze silenced the discourse; and Pierre, that little man whose eyes had seen the unraveling, the rupture begun by idiot men, took up the severed hand of Borslover, and muttering in near abandon, squeaked, "It begins, it begins, it ..." Then Pierre, after tenderly restoring the hand to its resting place, left the lair and ascended through the hidden passages to take up his post.

Turner Page thought himself in a paradise, for all around him were books he had only dreamed of ever seeing; the Count had led the party of startled visitors to his 'guest library', and there was seeing to their comfort.
Less distracted than Turner by the bibliophilic bounty, Nora and Clio surreptitiously examined the library for clues to the Count's motive in welcoming them so fulsomely.
"What concerns me," murmured Clio, "is that although the Count is rather reclusive, he did at least once attend a sale at the Antiquaries' Auction-house in Zurich, and I'm sure this wasn't the man I saw at the time..."; but she fell hastily silent and smiled guardedly at the Count (if it was he) as he passed swiftly and quietly out of the room, having indicated to Rhys where a small drinks cabinet lay hidden below the burnished walnut surface of a side-table, and nodded indulgently at the distracted Turner, who was admiring the plates in a rare edition of Blenkinsopp's "Beliefs and Customs of the Siberian Tribesmen", bound in a rich leather of burnt umber hue with gold edging and the imprint of the Zugzwang crest (a crab holding the king from a chess set in its claws) embossed on the front cover. A slow, florid and ornate whistle floated from the area of the far wall of the library where Nora was looking over three large portraits; the metal plates identified them as Aalovera Zugzwang (1846-1911), Adolphus Zugzwang (1907-1966), and Alois Zugzwang (1923- ?); the portrait of Adolphus was the man who had led them to this room.