I found Markie to be pleasant enough. A great wit, truth be told. He remembered me a good deal more than I remembered him, though when he talked of my earlier bullying I felt a few flashes of the old memories returning. I’d been an awful bastard, but Markie thought it was funny, now. Days gone by and all that. I caught him up to speed on the village (he seemed to know everything already, as if it were only another of the tests he always studied for) and I caught him up on the story of my life, which wasn’t much. A few women. My wife, now. The futility of fishing the lake. The best places to sit in each of Leighton’s three pubs.
Marken’s life had gone in more interesting directions. He’d taken in with an antiquarian up in Bradford. Playing the part of an apprentice. Learning to tell if a scarab was four thousand years old, or only four weeks. He’d also gone crazy for languages, learning them by the basket. I asked about the writing in the rooms below the abbey and the rubbing I had taken, but he said he couldn’t read a word of it. Looking back, he was lying, of course. Looking back, I know I missed his reluctance to return the paper to my grasp.
I asked why he wanted to restore the old tower. Nobody had lived within its premises for some hundred years, and there were further centuries of accumulated dust even so, and a man of his means (trading in antiquities seemed to be remarkably profitable, though I might add that Marken comes from money, and a rich man slides along the path to money, while a poor man stumbles) might well have had any house in Leighton, or perhaps even renovated the lake house, a far more modern and hospitable structure. He’d shuddered when I mentioned the lake house. I need no hindsight, here. I noticed it even then.
We talked of women, of course… of our own wives and other women, and also of women we wished had been our wives. Much laughter, of course. Women may weep over spoiled romance, but men such as Marken and I see the comic side. We also spoke of the local football clubs and how strikers seem to be born and goalkeepers seem to be idiots. Women see the comic side in such things as that, but men such as Marken and I are nearly driven to tears.
What I mean to say is that the mood had been good until I spoke of the renovations, the strange quality of the basements. Marken did not speak for some moments and I had the feeling that I should remain quiet as well. He looked off in the distance, mostly, but his eyes kept returning to mine. I could see that he was calculating. Gauging. Weighing facts and emotions. That sort of thing. All nonsense. We know in an instant whether we trust a man. All the rest is mere twaddle.
Marken did a very extraordinary thing.
Before finally speaking, he nabbed up the teapot, still half filled with water. Cooled by then, of course, as we’d been talking for nearly an hour.
He poured it on the lawn. Not in any casual manner, but in that precise and sadly focused way a man will line up a good shot on a dog that’s gone bad.
I took a long look at Marken, then. The cut of his suit was beyond adequate. Much better than mine, and I do take some care with my general grooming. He had the sideburns of a learned Bradford man. His hair was perhaps longer than we prefer in Leighton, but there’s no law against a man’s hair catching the wind. His hands were strong, and his general form was that of a fellow who could ride a horse or swing a golf club without huffing or heaving. His eyes were dark and there was a certain moistness to his skin that I assumed was sweat, as the day was balmy and we’d taken chairs in the sun to hasten the drying process of our shoes and trouser legs, soaked as they were by the excursion into the renovations.
His skin was somewhat leathery, and dark and spotted by the sun, but that’s as a man should be.
Marken placed the teapot upended on the table and emptied both our cups into the grass. I did not protest. Too curious to form words, I admit.
Then, he said, “Have you heard of the Book of Eibon? Or the Cthäat Aquadingen?”
It is that moment that I consider my first step into madness.
* * *
Joslie Miller was a peach of a girl. A peach. She had been visiting her friend, thirteen-year-old Constance Grane, a visit during which the two of them had crafted several paper dolls, clever cutouts from newspapers Joslie’s father had brought back from a recent excursion to Stoke-on-Trent for medical reasons. Joslie’s mother had taken ill. Some sort of wasting sickness. A cancer, I hear, but I hear other things and give them more credit, now.
The paper dolls had been connected to each other, cut away from the papers so that each of the duplicate figures was holding hands. I heard people talking, later, of how the search parties were similar, with all of us holding hands, moving across the meadows and through the woods as best we could, staying within reach of each other because Joslie was such a small girl and could be missed so easily.
She’d never come home from the Granes’ house. Joslie’s mother had waited a fretful time and then come to me, and I take things seriously at all times and the disappearance of Cecil Cabershaw was still biting at my mind. I rounded up as many of the villagers as I could, and we took such lanterns and torches as were available, and we set out.
As it happens, I was the one to find her. Joslie’s little body was crumpled no more than a hundred feet from her mother’s house. Caught in the weeds, she was, at the edge of the fallow field, half hidden by the tall grass and the wheat. She was cracked and she was broken as if some monster had crumpled her there, or she’d fallen from a cloud. She was soaking wet and… just before I found her, I could have sworn I heard a running stream, but the nearest river was a half mile distant. These phantom sounds were drowned away by the swish of running men as they came plunging through the wheat when I cried out, and of course soon there was nothing but her mother’s wails.
* * *
By the time the dogs began to disappear, over the course of the next several days, Marken and I had become friends. We were something, anyway. I take to friends slow, I admit, but Marken was on his way. It would have gone quicker without the disappearances, and without his madness, and certainly without the way his madness began to make sense. I think that was what disturbed me most of all.
He had theories about Leighton. About the town and the lake. He explained these theories to me when we were drinking, and once I had his words in my head I didn’t want to stop drinking. Not ever. I didn’t want to be sober in my bed, my wife going about her duties in the kitchen, me listening to my thoughts and to the raindrops coming off my roof, or the hissing complaints of a teapot set to boil.
“The tower is old,” Marken told me. He had several papers spread out on his table. Drawings of the tower within which we were sitting. I say they were papers but they were not. They were on parchment. Papyrus. Or leather. And there was one drawing of the tower in a book that Marken called the Cthäat Aquadingen, as old a book as I’ve ever seen. I’ve never been a book man, and now I never will be, because that book is in my head. It got in my head. Dripped inside. It has me.
Marken said, “Versions of this book first appeared in the 5th century. Nobody knows who wrote it. God give him a good grave, though. God grant him that. This one is in English, and there was a Latin version mentioned in damnation by the first of the Knights Templar, and they called it a new book, then, which I suppose would date it to the 11th or 12th century.”
“I suppose,” I said. I was looking at the book. It was stained. Stained with what I hoped were coffees or wines or waters. And the book seemed to be creaking. A thick and ugly thing, it was. Several hundred pages long. A folio. Bound in a leather of which I wanted no knowledge. Bulging. That book was bulging. Solid and resting motionless on Marken’s table, but it felt like it was creaking open nonetheless. I was sweating. The circulation in the abbey tower is not good. Marken had opened the book to an image of the very tower we were in. The image was hundreds of year old, but the base structure of the tower was unmistakable, as was its proximity to the lake. Unsettling, then, to see how the tower was only the beginning of the image, with the earth cut away beneath, basements and cellars and caverns reaching down an unimaginable depth. Strange creatures roamed below, and channels were connected to the lake. And then, far beneath, a being of inconceivable size. A protoplasmic blob that could have stretched itself from Leighton to London.