V. Comfortably Numb

V. Comfortably Numb

The ruled hand had answered him before he opened the book.

That was how it felt, at least. Flinch came down to the study at half past six, because Master would not be up until nine and the lamp wanted seeing to, and the Journal was lying shut on the desk with a faint warmth along its spine, as though it had been held. He did not mean to open it. He picked up the lamp. He put the lamp down. He opened it.

On the left-hand page, in the ruled hand:

Yes.

There is somebody you should meet. You will find you have a great deal in common.

He read it standing, with one hand flat on the desk, the way a dredger reads a notice that has been pinned to his own door.

It was not unkind. It was that he had asked about the house, and the answer was about a person, and somewhere between the two something had been decided on his behalf. He had asked who was at home. It had told him who was coming.

—

In Brill, in the corner by the fire, Percy had not touched the pot of something warm.

He had not opened the book either. It was back in his sleeve beside the poster, and he had been sitting for an hour with his hands in his lap, watching the fire do nothing in particular, when his left hand went away.

That was the only way he could put it. It did not hurt. It was simply no longer where he had left it. It had gone a long way down a corridor and was still there, small and clear at the far end, like a thing seen down the wrong end of a telescope. It lay in his lap and was very far off, and he was entirely calm about it, which he put down to a general numbness of long standing.

The candle on the table leaned. There was no draught to account for it. It leaned toward the east and held there, and then straightened.

Mezzlos went stiff at his shoulder, all at once.

“A door is open,” he said.

“Where?“

“I do not know where. It is not in this room.” He waited a moment. “It is closing.“

Percy turned his hand over. It came back down the corridor in no hurry, with a small flourish of pins and needles at the end, and settled where it had been. He had not felt anything like that since the waking. He found he did not like it, and that he would have kept it if he could, and he noticed both and put them away.

He took out the book to write it down: Candle leaned. Left hand absent. Cause unknown. The page held his list on the right and the Arcanum‘s two answers on the left, as before, and nothing more. Nothing had come for him. Whatever had opened had not opened on his side.

He wrote the three lines and closed the book.

—

The page had begun to fill while Flinch watched.

It did not appear, the way the answers appeared. It arrived, from the bottom of the left-hand page upward, in a hand so upright that each letter looked as though it had been told to stand straight and had done so. The air in the study changed with it. There was woodsmoke in it, and under the woodsmoke the cold clean smell of fish on ice, and for the length of a breath the room was larger than it was and had a fire in a corner it did not have. The lamp on the desk guttered, and held.

Then the smell went, and what was left was a list.

Flinch read it as he read everything, twice, once for what it said and once for what it left out.

Held.

A hand that writes straight, and does not know why.

A ring, cut For Deliah.

Four deaths in a village of the cursed, and some company who came back for me. I have not said thank you. I do not know how it is done.

Owing: a name. A trade. A past that I cannot locate and would, I think, rather not.

It was a ledger. A man had set down a ledger of himself, with a heading and an underline and a column for what he owed. Flinch felt something shift in his chest. It was the sort of thing he would have done, and he had never done it as well.

Further down, there was a line he read a third time. Gnomes: a recent dislike, found rather agreeable.

Master was a gnome. So, for that matter, was Mister Nobby.

At the bottom, on a line by itself, was a question. Is there anybody out there?

He had asked whether anyone was at home. The book had answered, and it had answered this one too, and he understood now what it had meant by somebody. Here he was. A hand that wrote straight. A man who kept columns. Flinch looked at his own writing on the margin of the list book beside the Journal, which leaned a little to the left and had a blot on the F, and thought that the book had gone and found itself somebody with a proper hand.

Two worlds that have lain against each other long enough will begin to wear through at the same place, and the wearing needs no help. This one had not had any. The world in the north had been put up quickly, and its edges had been left until later, and the house at Founder’s Point stood where nothing was sealed as well as it would be. Nobody had meant a page to cross. UG and Flinch had done nothing but be curious, which happens to a thin place the way damp happens to a wall.¹

Whoever tends such places had not meant it either. It is the nature of a well-run system to notice a leak and to intend to mend it. It had not noticed yet. It would, and when it did it would write, politely, and with dates.

—

“Master,” said Flinch, “there’s a page.”

UG was at the kitchen table in his dressing gown with a notebook open at the wrong place and a pencil behind each ear. He looked up with the expression of a man who has to travel a long way back to find the subject. Flinch put the Journal down in front of him, open, and stood back.

UG read the list. He read it quickly, and then he stopped, and then he read it slowly, which Flinch had seen him do perhaps twice.

“A voidwalker,” he said. “A voidwalker, who objects. Flinch, he’s got a voidwalker. He’s a warlock.” He turned the Journal toward the lamp as if the light might make it truer. “Shadow, fel, a pet with opinions. He’s one of us.“

“Yes, Master.”

“And it introduced you. I said it was a conduit. I rather expected something of the sort.“

“Did you, Master?”

“I may have,” said UG, and Flinch, who had lived in the house for a long time, could not have said whether it was true, and neither, he thought, could UG.

“Master. It says he don’t like gnomes. Here. A recent dislike, found rather agreeable.”

“Agreeable!” said UG, delighted. “A dislike with a date on it. Marvellous understatement.” He looked up. “Flinch, you’re not worried about that?“

“I’ll say it the once, Master. I don’t rightly know what he’d do, was he to meet one.”

“Then we shall find out. Write to him. Say hello. Say it’s a marvellous list. Ask what thread he’s on.“

“I don’t rightly know what a thread is, Master.”

“Neither do I, quite, but it’ll be very interesting to hear.“

So Flinch took the Journal back to the study and wrote it himself, with a good deal of crossing out, and a few lines from Master.

Dear Mister Percy,

I am Flinch. I keep the house at Plot 38, Founder’s Point, which belongs to Master. I read your page, which I did not mean to and am sorry for. I do not rightly know how it came to me. The book said somebody should meet you, and I would not like to say it is right.

You asked was there anybody out there. There is. I am here, and so is Master, and so is Mister Nobby, though he is more a letter than a person. I do not know who else.

Master says to say it is a marvellous list, and to ask what thread you are on. I do not rightly know what he means by it. He says you are a warlock, by the voidwalker, and I think he is pleased. Master is a warlock also.

I have a kettle, and a lantern, and a niche. I do not say it to boast. It is only that you did not say whether you had a house, and I thought you might like to know it was possible.

Yours respectfully, Flinch.

He read it over. He had not said that Master was a gnome. Nobody had asked, and he was not sure it was the sort of thing one put first. He had said so to himself once, plainly, and he did not put it in.

He shut the book. He opened it.

Delivered, said the ruled hand, and under it, after a respectful gap, Is there anything else I can help you with, Flinch?

—

In a tavern in Brill, in a sleeve, in a book that had not been opened since it was put away, a reply was written on the left-hand page. Every person who had had a hand in it knew what it said, and the one whose book it was did not. He would open it in the morning, as he opened it every morning, and he was in a manner of speaking the last to know.

—

¹ This is also how most great discoveries happen. Someone is curious in a draughty corner, and later someone else puts up a plaque.