Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

BRIAN STABLEFORD The Haunted Bookshop

I was putting the final touches to the introduction to a new edition of C. D. Pamely’s Tales of Mystery and Terror when the phone rang. I picked it up with my left hand while my right forefinger finished pecking out the last few words of the sentence.

‘Hello.’

‘Brian? Lionel, Cardiff.’

Lionel Fanthorpe rarely uses his surname when identifying himself to his friends in outward calls, preferring his place of residence.

‘Hi, Lionel,’ I said, attempting — unavailingly, of course — to match the cheerfulness and ebullience of his tone. ‘How’s fame treating you?’

Lionel had recently achieved a measure of celebrity by virtue of being appointed the presenter of Fortean TV, a magazine programme devoted to the not-entirely-earnest investigation of weird events and individuals. This had caused a certain amount of controversy in the broadsheet press, some of whose columnists had thought it unbecoming of a minister of the Church of Wales to lend his dog-collar to such irreverence.

‘It’s marvellous,’ he assured me. ‘Actually, that’s what I’m ringing about.’

‘You want me to appear onFortean TV?’ If I sounded sceptical, it’s because I am — and it’s because I’m universally renowned for my scepticism that I have every right to be sceptical about the possibility of ever being invited to appear on Fortean TV.

‘Oh no, we’re full up for the next series. It’s just that ever since the first series I’ve been deluged with calls from all kinds of people clamouring to get on. You wouldn’t believe some of the stories they tell.’

‘Actually, Lionel,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t believe any of the stories they tell — but I do believe that you’ve been deluged with calls. What do you expect if you set yourself up as the front man for rent-a-crank?’

‘That’s exactly why I thought you might be a valuable addition to our team,’ he told me, refusing to take the slightest offence. Lionel’s geniality knows no bounds.

‘You want me to be Fortean TV’s resident sceptic?’

‘No, no. Forget Fortean TV. It’s because Martin watched the show that he got in touch, but he doesn’t want to be on it. He wants me to exorcise a supernatural presence in his bookshop.’

If it had been anyone else on the other end of the line I’d have been perfectly certain that the word was ‘exercise’, no matter how nonsensical the containing sentence might have become, but this was Lionel.

‘Do you do exorcisms?’ I asked.

‘It’s not something I do lightly,’ he assured me, ‘but if I’m convinced that it will do some good, I’m prepared to employ any of the Church’s rituals. I believe that exorcism is a legitimate weapon in the war against evil.’ Lionel is what the Victorians would have described as a muscular Christian — not so much because he has a black belt in judo as because he believes that the power of active evil has to be countered by an equal and opposite reaction. He is the only man I know who could say ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!’ with perfect sincerity.

‘Why do you need me?’ I said. ‘The presence of a strident atheist is hardly likely to help the party go with a bang. Assuming, of course, that departing demons do go with a bang, as well as the obligatory whiff of brimstone.’

‘I don’t need you for the exorcism, even if there is one,’ said Lionel, cheerily. ‘I just thought you might be interested to sit in on a preliminary investigation — an all-night sitting — so that we can try to figure out exactly what we’re dealing with. I read your thing in Steve’s anthology.’

‘Ah,’ I said, as enlightenment dawned. Steve Jones had edited an anthology for Gollancz which consisted of famous horror writers’ true encounters with the supernatural. Not wishing to miss out on the opportunity I had supplied a piece entitled ‘Chacun sa goule’ which offered a scrupulously accurate account of a real event: the coincidental discovery of a rare book by Maurice Maeterlinck, of whose existence I had been unaware until a few days earlier, at an antiquarian book fair I had stumbled across by chance. Typically, I had supplemented my record of the bare facts with a philosophical rhapsody about the existential significance of the continued permeation of the world by the carbonaceous matter which once made up the bodies of the dead. I had observed that the carbon dioxide in every breath we take contains atoms which might once have been part of the people of the past, whose minds also echo in the pages of their writings, so that the dead do indeed retain a ‘ghostly’ presence in the present. Although graveyards were doubtless replete with such ghosts, I had said, the most significant of my own ghostly encounters invariably took place in bookshops. It was perhaps not unnatural, therefore, that on being told about a haunted bookshop — a bookshop whose resident supernatural presence was so discomfiting as perhaps to require exorcism — Lionel would think of me.

‘Well?’ said Lionel. ‘Are you interested?’

‘What bookshop?’ I parried. ‘Where?’

‘It’s a second-hand place — just down the coast, in Barry.’

‘There isn’t a second-hand bookshop in Barry,’ I said, confidently. I once lived in Swansea for several years and I still visit my children there on occasion. If there had been a second-hand bookshop in Barry, I would have found mention of it in drif’s guide and made the effort to visit it.

‘It’s not been there long,’ Lionel told me.

‘And it’s haunted already? Who by?’

‘Martin’s not sure that it’s the premises. He thinks it might be the books.’

I nearly came out with some crack about Martin presumably having picked up a copy of Abdul Alhazred’sNecronomicon at a jumble sale in Tiger Bay but I hesitated. The idea of haunted books was not without a certain appeal — in fact, the mere mention ofbooks was inevitably appealing to a man of my kind. Even the newest second-hand bookshop needs old books to dress its shelves. Most people anxious to move into the trade use their own collections as bases, but hardened collectors are usually so reluctant to put out their old favourites that they shop around for anything that can be bought in bulk at a reasonable price. I knew that there had been a time in the nineteenth century when the coal industry was booming and Cardiff was a busy port. The middle class had had aspirations in those days — C. D. Pamely’s father had been a mining engineer in Pontypridd but he’d harboured greater ambitions for his sons — and it was possible that there were some nice caches of good antiquarian stock lurking in a place like Barry, which had been a haven for the South Wales gentry before slipping way downmarket to become a third-rate holiday resort.

Haunted or not, there was just a slim possibility that the mysterious Martin’s shop might have some interesting contents — and if it had opened too late to obtain an entry in the latest issue of drif the professional vultures might not have had the chance to strip the shelves clean of tasty meat.

There is nothing that gladdens the heart of a book-collector like the thought of virgin stock. ‘It sounds interesting,’ I said to Lionel, effortlessly switching into earnest mode. ‘When do you propose to hold this investigative vigil?’

‘Monday,’ said Lionel.

It was short notice, but I assumed that it would have been even shorter if Lionel hadn’t been otherwise occupied on Sundays.

‘Suits me,’ I said, firmly hooked and avid to be reeled in. ‘Name your time and place.’

Lionel picked me up from Cardiff Station in an old Cortina whose funereal paint job seemed appropriate to the occasion. He already had two passengers in place so I had no choice but to take a back seat. There wasn’t a lot of space for me, let alone my overnight bag, but I squeezed myself in.

‘This is Martin,’ Lionel said, indicating the middle-aged man whose claim to the front seat had obviously been secured by reason of dimension as well as opportunity, ‘and this is Penny, from the Society for Psychical Research.’

‘Is that still going?’ I asked, nodding politely to a thin, thirtyish woman with spectacles whose lenses were almost as powerful as mine. My relentlessly antiquarian mind inevitably associated the SPR with its late Victorian heyday, and the investigations of Katie King and D. D. Home mounted by the likes of William Crookes and Oliver Lodge. The woman seemed slightly resentful of my ignorance.

‘Yes it is,’ she said, in a severe manner which suggested that she’d been warned about my sceptical tendencies — and also, perhaps, that she thought that taking a back seat to a man who presented Fortean TV was slumming it a bit.

‘Penny’s done postgrad research at Duke,’ said Lionel, proudly, as the car pulled way into the last remnants of the rush-hour traffic. ‘In the selfsame labs where J. B. Rhine once worked.’

‘I thought you could do that sort of thing in the UK now,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Arthur Koestler leave a bequest to set up an established chair in paranormal studies? Somebody took the money in the end, didn’t they?’

‘There isn’t a course here,’ the woman explained. ‘I wanted to do a proper course.’

I didn’t want to offend her further by challenging her use of the word ‘proper’. Instead I cast an appraising eye over the equipment with which she had surrounded herself. I recognised the fancy temperature tracking-gauge and the video camera easily enough, but most of the rest was in leather cases, and it wasn’t obvious what the ammeter on her knee was supposed to be connected to.

‘Are we the whole squad?’ I asked.

‘For now,’ Lionel said. ‘If Penny gets anything interesting, she’ll call in some of her associates for a more thorough investigation — with Martin’s permission, of course.’ The way he added the qualifying clause made me wonder whether Martin’s permissiveness might already have been severely tested by Lionel’s insistence that a preliminary investigation would be necessary before deciding whether an exorcism might be required. I could understand why; even though the traditional silly season wouldn’t be under way for another two months, the Fortean Times was hot enough nowadays to have all its best stories followed up by the Sun and the Daily Star, not to mention the Sunday Sport. That kind of coverage might boost the sales of a haunted bookshop for a week or two, but the embarrassment might last a lifetime.

‘I hope the Reverend explained to you, Mr Stableford,’ the bookshop proprietor intoned, in a broad way-up-the-Valleys accent, ‘that this whole business is confidential.’

‘No one will hear a word of it from me,’ I assured him. ‘My lips are sealed.’ I can be very pedantic when giving out promises; while I type this page not a sound is escaping from my lips. I have not, of course, changed any of the names in the interests of protecting the innocent — or even the guilty — but you will doubtless have noticed that I have withheld the surnames of the minor characters.

‘Perhaps you could fill Brian and Penny in while we’re on the road, Martin,’ Lionel suggested. ‘Give them some idea of what to expect.’

Martin did not seem overjoyed by this prospect. In fact, he looked as if he might be having second thoughts about the wisdom of having approached Lionel in the first place — but the incumbent at his local chapel was unlikely to do exorcisms, or to look kindly upon anyone who broached the possibility. The great majority of Welsh Methodists tend to the view that a man who imagines himself to be troubled by ghosts or demons is a man with an unusually guilty conscience, who should look deep into his own soul for the source of his disquiet.

‘Would you rather I did it?’ Lionel asked, his generosity as boundless as his geniality.

‘No,’ said Martin, his mind quickly made up. ‘Best if… well, see, I’m from the Rhondda originally. In the industry till the pits closed — not a faceworker, mind, always above ground. Middle management, I suppose, is the phrase they use nowadays. Anyhow, I was over twenty years in when the axe came down, an’ the redundancy was a nice package. I’m only forty-three, so I knew I had to use the money — start a business, like. Well, I’d always been a reader, an’ it just so happened that I was still in the office, tidying up, when one of the old boys we’d kept on to do the clearing up came in to ask what we wanted done with all the books from the old colliery library.

‘I didn’t even know there’d ever been a colliery library, but when the boys had found all these boxes of books in a storage-loft the old-timer had recognised them — said he’d often seen the like around his house in the old days, when his father and grandfather had been regular borrowers. It had fallen into disuse in the fifties, I suppose, what with paperbacks an’ all, an’ the room it was in had been turned into an office. So I said, it’s all right, boys, I’ll look after those — put what you can into my car, and pile the rest up in the bike-sheds. I’ll ferry the boxes home a few at a time. Well, nobody else wanted them, did they?

‘I thought at first I’d just look through them, like — sort out anything I wanted to read and give the rest to Oxfam — but when I got the old boy to help me stow the second batch he said that if I’d got a good home, he knew where the books from the old Workingmen’s Institute had been put away when they turned it into a club an’ the library was turfed out in favour of a snooker table. That’s when I got the idea. Ours couldn’t have been the only pit in Wales with its own library, nor our village the only one with a Workingmen’s Institute, an’ we’re not the kind of folk tothrow things away. Why not scout around, I thought, see what I could dig up, an’ open a bookshop?’

Why not indeed? I thought, sympathetically.

‘I knew there was no point doing something like that in the Valley, mind,’ Martin continued, ‘or even in Merthyr. I thought of Caerleon first, but the wife wasn’t happy about moving to what’s practically England, an’ I knew Cardiff already had two second-hand bookshops, so I thought of Barry, which the wife has always liked. It turned out that a lot of stuff from the old colliery libraries had been sold years ago to old Ralph in Swansea or that shop that used to be in the Hayes before it all got torn down, but I found four more sizeable lots that I picked up for next to nothing.’

‘How many books altogether?’ I asked, impatient for hard news.

‘About twelve thousand, give or take.’

It wasn’t as big a total as I’d hoped. Given the educational mission of nineteenth century Workingmen’s Institutes, I guessed that at least half the books would probably be non-fiction and half the rest would probably be religious texts. Even if there were only three thousand volumes of fiction, however — and even if the bulk of those were standard sets of Scott and Dickens, there ought to be something of interest. None of the books had seen the light of day for at least twenty years, and some might not have been inspected for the best part of a century — and the most exciting fact of all was that Martin didn’t seem to have a clue. In a business full of sharks, he was pure whitebait.

‘How long, exactly, has the shop been open for business?’ I asked.

‘Open for business?’ Martin echoed, incredulously. ‘It hasn’t been open at all. Didn’t the Reverend…?’

‘Sorry, Martin,’ Lionel interposed. ‘When I phoned Brian I didn’t realise that you hadn’t got that far.’

My heart was still busy leaping. Not just virgin stock but extra virgin stock, untouched by sharkish fin!

‘Do you think,’ Penny put in, resentfully, ‘that we could get to the paranormal activity?’

I had quite forgotten, in my excitement, that this was supposed to be a haunted bookshop. I remembered J.W. Dunne’s theory that ghosts are images displaced in the fourth dimension from parallel worlds where time might be running ahead of or behind our own. If so, Martin’s as-yet-unopened bookshop might easily be haunted by the shades of dozens of bookdealers, all impatient to get into it.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying to sound supportive of our collective mission. ‘Tell us about the ghosts.’

‘I never said ghosts’ said Martin, his voice suddenly infected by a note of pedantic caution. ‘I never saw a person, you understand. Whatever it is, it’s not people.’

‘Poltergeist phenomena, then?’ said Penny, eagerly. ‘Books moving by themselves — pages turning. Or is it a matter of sudden chills, changes in atmosphere?’

‘Bit of that, like,’ Martin conceded. ‘Wouldn’t mind, if it were only that — cold, creaking an’ so on.’

‘So what is it, exactly?’ Penny wanted to know.

‘Don’t know, exactly. You’re the expert, I suppose — you an’ the Reverend. I didn’t notice anything at first — even the wife thought the place was all right, when it was empty. It’s a lock-up, of course; we weren’t planning on living there although it’s got what the estate agent called living accommodation on the first floor. Modem family couldn’t live there, even if their kids had long gone — too small by half, an’ the bathroom facilities are woefully inadequate. I decided to use the so-called bedroom as a second stockroom, put shelves in an’ everything. Plan was that when I’d got the shop going steady we’d both move down to a nice house overlooking the sea, but there’s not much chance of that now until it’s properly sorted — by the Reverend, I mean. It’s not so bad in daylight, of course, but even then… well, the wife’s only been in there by day, an’ she swears she’ll never set foot in it again, even at high noon. I’ve been in there past midnight, putting up the shelves — but only the once, since I started putting out the stock. Seems as if the presence came with the stock, like, although it wasn’t there when the books were all in boxes piled up in my hall an’ front room. It’s a real mystery.’

‘If it were a single haunted book,’ Lionel mused, ‘you might be able to solve the problem just by getting rid of that one volume.’

‘If it is,’ said Martin, darkly, ‘an’ you can figure out which one, you can have it for nothing.’

Given his account of how he’d acquired his stock, Martin could probably afford to be generous. Given that his stock had been on the shelves of private lending libraries for many years, though — and stored in various lofts and cupboards for many years more, without anyone complaining about any kind of haunting — it was difficult to see how the problem could be one of the books, or even all of them.

My preliminary judgment, inevitably, was that the problem was probably in Martin’s mind. If he’d lived all his life in the Rhondda, heir to hundreds of years of mining tradition and having spent all his own working life in the industry, it must have been a terrible wrench to be forced to contemplate entry into an alien way of life. Reader or not, he was obviously no book-lover, he’d seen an opportunity and he’d felt obliged to seize it, but he must have thought himself caught between the devil of new endeavour and the deep blue sea of unemployment. Was it so very surprising that the devil in question had indeed turned, in his fearful mind, into a tangible force of darkness?

Lionel was still following his own train of thought. ‘What kind of book might that be, do you think?’ he asked, of no one in particular. For a moment, I thought he was really going to bring up the Necronomicon, but he took the second worst option. ‘A grimoire, maybe? A copy of the Key of Solomon?’

‘Sure,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘Every colliery in the Valley used to have its resident wizard, who kept his secret lore on the top shelf of the library, bound up to look like records of coal-production. You shift sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older an’ deeper in debt. Jesus don’t you call me, ‘cos I can’t go — I owe my soul to the pithead whore.’ I was content to recite the words with only the faintest lilt; I have the singing voice of a crow with laryngitis.

‘Actually,’ said Penny, ‘it wasn’t unknown for eighteenth-century mines, and even for early factories, to have luckmen — wizards of a sort. Miners, especially, were very superstitious. It was a high-risk industry, you see. The transition from forced labour to wage-labour wasn’t as long ago as you might think, even in these parts, and the transition from superficial workings — actual pits, that is — to deep-shaft mining was a step into unknown territory. The activities of the luckmen would have been vital to the morale of their fellow-workers.’

‘Did they teach you that at Duke?’ I asked, in a neutral tone.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The LSE. I did a degree in sociology before I did my master’s in parapsychology.’

I’d been a lecturer in sociology at Reading for twelve years before I quit to write fulltime, but I’d never heard of luckmen. On the other hand, I’d done my first degree in biology, so I’d never studied industrial sociology at all. ‘And were these luckmen in the habit of consulting books of protective rituals?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘If they did,’ Lionel put in, ‘moving the book might have been the crucial disturbance — like moving bones laid to eternal rest. Didn’t M. R. James once say that all his stories were variations on the theme of curst be he who moves my bones?’

‘If it’s a case of curst be him who moves my books,’ I opined, ‘we’re more likely to be dealing with a dyed-in-the-wool book-collector than a black magician. I’d come back to haunt anyone who creased the dust-wrapper on one of mine. Hell hath no fury like a collector who finds a shopping-list scribbled on a flyleaf.’

Lionel laughed, probably to be polite. Neither of the others cracked a smile. It looked as if it was going to be a long night, but I consoled myself with the knowledge that I could keep myself busy for hours with that much stock — fool that I was, I had no inkling of the horrible shock that was to come.

Martin’s shop wasn’t in a prime position, even by Barry’s standards, but it was close enough to the seafront to catch a certain amount of passing trade during the holiday season. He was enough of a businessman to realise that his bread-and-butter business would be selling paperback pulp to people who needed something to occupy their eyes while they lay around on the beach, so the wooden shelves he’d erected in the window were stocked with best-sellers that looked as if they’d been culled from all the charity shops in South Wales.

When Martin unlocked the front door Penny and Lionel had enough respect for the alleged supernatural presence to pause for a moment, so I was first in. Although the sun hadn’t quite set it was hidden by the houses on the far side of the street and the window display blocked out most of the light that was left, so I had to wait for Martin to switch on the electric light before I could actually set to work. It was not until the light came on that the full horror of the situation hit me.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course, but rampant acquisitiveness generates the kind of optimism which allows inconvenient realisations to slip through the cracks of consciousness. One sweep of my gaze across the shelves on the back wall was sufficient to tell me what I should have guessed the moment Martin started going on about old colliery libraries and the innate reluctance of honest folk to throw anything away. Maybe if his name had been Hywel or Dai the awful datum would have clicked into place, but Martin was an English name. Alas, the books he’d picked up for ‘next to nothing’ — the great majority of them, at least — were in Welsh.

What Martin had managed to acquire wasn’t the entire stock of the old libraries, I realised, but merely that fraction of it that had been left behind when the readily saleable stuff had gone — mostly texts whose utilitarian worth had been severely compromised by the fact that it was printed in a language falling swiftly into disuse.

If the bookshop really is haunted, I thought, bitterly, the culprit is more likely to be a dead language than a dead man.

‘Do you get many Welsh speakers in Barry?’ I asked, mournfully.

‘Welsh is taught in all the schools,’ Martin said, proudly. ‘Legal requirement, see. Not so many speak it at home nowadays, of course, except up north — but people from Gwynedd go on holiday like anyone else. Can’t keep a language alive without books, can you?’

By this time I had quick-scanned all eight of the shelves against the back wall and had turned my attention to the books behind the desk where the ancient cash-register stood. Most dealers keep their best stock — or what they think of as their best stock — behind their own station, to minimise the risk of theft. Not all the books behind the cash-register were in Welsh, but eighty per cent of them were, and the rest were evenly divided between books on mining and religious texts. This seemed to me to be a sad comment on Martin’s values as well as his stock.

‘Didn’t the library stock includeany English literature?’ I asked him, plaintively. ‘Or any illustrated books, perhaps?’

‘Some,’ Martin conceded. ‘I put the old fiction upstairs. That’s standard practice, isn’t it?’ He’d obviously done a little market research and observed that most second-hand bookdealers relegated the dross of ancient bestsellers and book club editions to the remotest corner they had. My spirits recovered a little; it was in such neglected corners that I always found my best bargains: rare works of nineteenth- or early twentieth-century fantasy whose specialist significance was unappreciated by dealers whose own expertise was in railway books or natural history.

‘The luckmen would have been Welsh speakers, of course,’ observed Penny, who was bringing in her second load of equipment and supplies while Lionel went back to the car for his third. ‘All their spells and incantations would have been handed down from time immemorial.’

‘They must have been true descendants of Merlin and Owen Glendower, mustn’t they?’ I put in, insouciantly. ‘The last custodians of the authentic Druidic tradition.’

She looked at me as if I were a caterpillar in a salad sandwich. ‘Yes,’ she said, simply. ‘That’s exactly what they were.’

Diplomacy compelled me to refrain from making any clever remarks about Taliesin, the Bardic motto, Eisteddfods or male voice choirs. I eyed the rickety staircase that led up to the first floor, carpeted in what had once been red felt but was now almost completely black. ‘Is there a switch for the upstairs lights?’ I asked Martin.

‘There’s one at the top on the left,’ he informed me, ‘and another just inside the door of the front room. You shouldn’t need them, though — the windows up there let in more light than this one.’

As I headed up the stairs I could feel renewed optimism putting a spring in my step. The uncluttered windows of the short corridor and the ‘so-called bedroom’ did indeed let in more light than the window downstairs, but they were also a lot smaller, so the advantage was not as marked as I could have wished. Even so, I let the electric switch alone as I stepped through the open door into the room directly over the shopfront.

As soon as I had moved into the room the feeling hit me. It took me completely by surprise, and the impact was sufficient to make me catch my breath.

I had been in that room before.

I had, of course, experienced the commonplace sensation of déjà vu, but never so intensely as to make me doubt the conventional explanation that it arose from an illusion generated when the same sensory information was accidentally duplicated in the brain, having been transmitted there by two distinct neuronal pathways. This was different, not just because of its intensity but because I knew — vaguely, at least — when and where I had had the experience that was being so carefully and so improbably reproduced by the present moment.

Most people, it is said, have recurring dreams. They may dream repeatedly of houses, of sexual encounters, of flying, or of appearing naked in public. When they have such dreams — or, at least, when they become conscious that they are having such dreams — they know that they are revisiting scenes already familiar: that the house is one they have previously visited in dreams, or that their power of flight is something which they are rediscovering. Some such dreams may be enigmatic, perhaps because they are symbolically disguised, but others are trivially literal; mine have always been perfectly understandable. My own recurrent dreams are of second-hand bookshops.

I have never considered it at all unusual that my long-standing addiction to combing the shelves of second-hand bookshops should be reflected in my dreams. Nor have I ever considered it unusual that such dreams should often be attended by the sense of returning to familiar haunts — because that, after all, is the form that the vast majority of my actual book-hunting trips take. It is only to be expected that when I dream of bookshops — or, at least, when I become conscious that I am dreaming of bookshops — I usually feel that they are familiar bookshops. Interestingly, however, they are never bookshops that really do exist in the everyday world; they are always imaginary bookshops. This means, of course, that when I have the sense of having visited them before, I know that I can only have done so in other dreams. It is as if the virtual geography of my private dream-world numbers amongst its fixtures a series of shops, some fascinating and some not-so-fascinating, which I visit at irregular intervals: a population parallel to that with which the geography of the real world is dotted.

Sometimes, when dreaming of bookshops, I become conscious that I am dreaming — but I resist waking up, because I know that when I do I shall have to leave behind any interesting books I might have found. When my bookshop dreams become lucid in this fashion I often become conscious of the fact — or at least the illusion — that the shop I am in is one of which I have dreamed before.

Just as I had never dreamed of entering an actual bookshop, so I had never actually entered a bookshop of which I had dreamed. That I seemed to be doing so now was more than a cause for astonishment; it seemed, in fact, to be a violation of natural law, as threatening in its fashion as any conventional apparition or ominous shadow. I stood transfixed, appalled by the thought that I — a great and hitherto worthy champion of scepticism — could be assailed in this rude and nasty fashion.

Mercifully, the moment did not last. The shock of awful discovery was replaced soon enough by a struggle to remember what, if anything, I had found in this room when it had only been the figment of a dream. The mental reflex of the book-collector was powerful enough to drive away the alarm of revelation; I ceased to worry about the how of the mystery and focused my mind instead on the truly crucial question of what there might he to be found, and whether the illusion of having dreamed about the room — I was already content to dismiss the sensation as an illusion — might somehow assist my search.

No sooner had I begun to scan the nearest shelves, however, than the force of reality began to reassert itself upon my senses. The proportion of Welsh texts here was considerably smaller than on the shelves below — no more than half, and perhaps a little less — but that did not make the remainder seem significantly more promising. There were several sets of standard authors, more poetry than prose, in horribly shabby pocket editions. My expert eye immediately picked out a number of yellowbacks, but their condition was so awful that it would hardly have mattered had they been more interesting titles than they were. A few bound volumes of old periodicals turned out on closer inspection to be Sunday at Home andPick-Me-Up, not even Longman’s or Temple Bar, let alone anything more interesting.

In brief, it looked like the kind of stock over which a collector might toil for hours in order to turn up a couple of items whose significance to his collection was marginal at best. Not, of course, that I could contentedly let it alone; I knew that I would indeed have to inspect every single shelf, lifting every volume whose title was not clearly inscribed on its spine, in order to make perfectly certain that nothing evaded me. No matter how laborious the task became, I would have to stick to it come Hell or high water — but first I had to return downstairs, in answer to Lionel’s urgent call.

All Lionel wanted, it turned out, was to hand me a cup of tea and ask my opinion as to what kind of pizza he ought to have delivered.

There is nothing like a four-way debate about pizza toppings to bring a ghost-hunting expedition right down to earth; by the time we had settled on two mediums, one with bacon, mushroom and tomato and the other with olives, anchovies and pepperoni, mundanity had such a secure hold on Martin’s bookshop that even Madame Arcati at her most lunatic would have been hard-pressed to find the least hint of spirit activity.

By this time, of course, Penny and Lionel had set up all the SPR’s apparatus. The video camera was on its tripod, ready to be spun around in quest of the kinds of things that one glimpses in the corners of one’s eyes. A quaint little pointer was inscribing a record of the room’s temperature on a slowly rotating drum. (I was glad to note that since we had entered the shop our combined bodyheat had contrived to raise the temperature by a whole degree Celsius to a reasonably comfortable sixteen.) I still wasn’t sure what it was that the ammeter was hooked up to but whatever it was had not yet succeeded in generating a flicker of current.

Lionel asked Penny to tell him a little more about luckmen and their role in the mines of yore, but Penny had already run to the limit of her information on the subject so she tried to pump Martin about residual superstitions in the modern industry — a subject on which he was not at all forthcoming.

‘I was always above ground, see,’ he said. ‘The boys at the face had their own little community — they’d tell you tales for a laugh, like, but they’d never let on that they took any of it seriously.’

‘What tales?’ Lionel wanted to know.

‘You know. Not a pit in the Valley has a clean sheet mortality-wise — not any that’s been open longer than twenty years, anyhow. The eldest are full of worked-out shafts and old rockfalls, an’ there’s always talk of voices — voices of men killed by gas or crushed, you see. Offering warnings as often as not; I’ve heard far more tales of men being saved than men being lost. Nobody goes down a pit needs scaring, see; work’s dangerous enough without that.’

‘Judging by the dust on some of the books upstairs,’ I said, ‘one or two of them must have made a good number of trips down into the shafts.’

‘I doubt that,’ Martin said. ‘No time to read down there, nor light good enough to read by. The dust on the bindings is the kind that gets in everywhere — the fine stuff that hangs about in the air and never quite washes out. Almost like a liquid, it is, or amiasma — smears and clings and blackens even if you never set foot in the cage or a hand on a hopper.’

I had to admire the way he pronounced ‘miasma’, lingering over the vowels as only a Welshman could.

‘The dark spirit of the pit,’ said Penny, softly. It would almost have been enough to make us look over our shoulders if we hadn’t heard the delivery boy’s moped rattling over the potholes in the street. We fell upon the pizza-slices with the kind of eager rapacity that only competition can generate, even though we all knew perfectly well that we were only entitled to four apiece.

While we ate, darkness fell — and shadows crept upon us in spite of the electric light. Martin, born and bred to the economy of the Valleys, had only fitted sixty-watt bulbs.

Martin was watching us now, alert for any sign of tension or unease. As with many Celts, his eyes were pale even though his hair was dark, but they weren’t blue; they were as grey as slate. Although Penny was a very different physical type — ectomorphic rather than endomorphic — she had very similar colouring. Her eyes did retain a slight hint of blue, but her complexion lacked the hint of rosy pink that Martin’s had. Lionel must have been at least twenty years older than Martin and thirty years older than Penny but he looked more robust than either of them. He was originally from Norfolk, which probably meant that he — like me — was a descendant of Viking settlers. Our ancestors had never been bards or Druids; our family trees were as devoid of luckmen as of mistletoe.

I was prepared to feel a slight pang of regret about that; I knew that if I were going to find any real treasure in that dust-caked morass upstairs I was going to need some luck. Even while we ate, my restless eyes were checking and rechecking the downstairs shelves, unable to find anything worth lingering over.

The pizza was as mediocre as could be expected, but the tea was better. It seemed much better until I got to the dregs, when I began to notice an odd aftertaste. I noticed, too, that the air in the shop had a peculiar texture to it. All bookshops are dusty, of course, and when books that have been a long time in storage are first set on shelves they often release a little dampness into the air, faintly polluted with fungal spores and bits of dead silverfish. Book-lovers learn to savour that kind of atmosphere, or at least to ignore it — but this texture was slightly different from any I’d encountered before. This gave the impression of being vintage dust — a real grand cru. Martin’s pronunciation of the word ‘miasma’ echoed in my mind as I tried to measure the dust’s quality more precisely, but it didn’t seem dismissable simply as coal dust any more than it warranted elevation to the status of ‘the dark spirit of the pit’. It was something more teasing than either.

I couldn’t help thinking of the sceptical kind of occult detective stories, where the intrepid investigators eventually find that alleged hauntings are merely noxious vapours released from bad drains or unusual chemical reactions. Was it possible, I wondered, that the redistribution of books kept so long in close confinement really had set free some disturbing vapour that had been patiently building up in the inner recesses of the boxes for decades? I didn’t like to suggest to the others that perhaps we should have brought a canary.

‘Well,’ I said, as soon as I had bolted my last allotted slice of bacon, mushroom and tomato. ‘I’m going to get started on the upstairs stock. If you need me, just scream.’

‘Will you be all right up there on your own?’ Martin asked, as if he sincerely believed that I might not be.

‘If I’m not,’ I assured him, ‘I’ll scream.’

‘If you find any of mine,’ said Lionel, ‘let me know.’ Long before he got religion Lionel was the most prolific writer of science fiction and supernatural fiction in Britain, producing over a hundred and eighty volumes for the late unlamented Badger Books at the princely sum of £22 10s a time. His one longrunning series had consisted of occult detective stories starring the redoubtable Val Stearman and his lovely female associate La Noire. Stearman had, of course, been modelled on the young Lionel, and his spirit was doubtless still active even though the containing flesh had suffered a little. It required an extremely optimistic eye, alas, to find the slightest hint of La Noire in Penny-from-the-SPR.

‘I will,’ I promised.

This time, I had to use the electric lights. I made a mental note to bring my own hundred-watt bulbs if I ever got involved in a similar vigil in future. I started my search in the top left-hand corner of the shelf-unit to the left of the door and began to work methodically across and down, across and down.

If you’ve ever browsed the less popular shelves in the London Library you’ll know how dust from the red leather bindings that are gradually rotting down will stain your hands and your shirt, so that a long session in French Fiction can leave you looking suspiciously like Jack the Ripper. Exploring these shelves was not dissimilar, but it was an order of magnitude worse. Within ten minutes my hands were absolutely filthy and my green corduroy jacket was beginning to turn black. My shirt and my jeans had started out black, but that didn’t spare them any manifest effect, because the dust was so fine as to be slick and it soon made itself felt in their texture. If the dust had been pure carbon it would, I suppose, have been graphite, but even the best Welsh anthracite isn’t anywhere near pure carbon. This was impure carbon, and its impurities were enhancing its ability to form a miasma.

I couldn’t help wiping my hands periodically on my jeans even though I knew that it wasn’t helping the situation. Nor could I help occasionally touching my hand to my face, my forehead and my hair, even though I knew that such touches would leave smudges. By the time I’d done twenty feet of shelves — without finding a single book that I’d have been happy to pay more than 50P for — I knew that I must be a real sight, and what Martin had said about the woeful inadequacy of the bathroom facilities suddenly began to seem more relevant.

Despite the aforementioned inadequacy, my companions stumped up the staircase one by one to use the facilities. Lionel was the only one who looked in to see how I was doing. When I stopped for a break myself I took the opportunity to inspect my features in the mirror, and I managed to scrub off the worst of the stains with toilet paper, but even a thorough soaping failed to shift the worst of the grime from my fingers.

As I resumed my labours I remembered what I’d written in ‘Chacun sa goule’ about our breathing in the carbon dioxide relics of the dead every time we fill our lungs. To the extent that the dust-particles on the books were coal they were presumably the relics of creatures that had roamed the earth in the Carboniferous Era: the flesh of early dinosaurs compounded with the mass of gymnosperm tree-trunks and the chitin of giant insects. That ancient carbon must, however, be mingled with echoes of more recent lives and deaths: the lives and to deaths of the men who hewed the coal, or that minority amongst them who had tried, valiantly, to improve their minds with the aid of the written word.

Once, at the university of Reading, I had attended an open lecture in which A. N. Wilson had argued that the rich inner life of thought and feeling, which we now take completely for granted, is largely a product of books, and most especially of novels. Men who lived and died confined by oral culture, Wilson argued, had not the mental resources to build a robust inner monologue, a pressurised stream of consciousness. If that were true, I thought, such men could hardly be in any position to leave ghosts behind when they died and decayed. If dust really could retain some kind of spirit, it would, of necessity, be the spirit of readers — in which case, book-dust ought to be the most enspirited of all.

As I formed that strange thought the sensation of having been in that room before returned in full force, swiftly and irresistibly.

I did not pause in my routine of plucking the books off the shelves, inspecting their title-pages and returning them, but the automatism of that routine suddenly became oppressive and seemingly unnatural. Before, when the sensation had come over me, I had thought it an anomaly: a sensation that I should only have been capable of feeling in a dream — but now it did not feel anomalous at all, because it seemed now that I really was in a dream, where I was perfectly entitled to remember bookshops visited in other dreams, and to dwell in the curious nostalgia of discoveries barely made before being lost in the moment of awakening. As in all such episodes of lucidity, I had not the slightest desire to wake; indeed, I had the strongest possible desire to remain as I was, potentially able to grasp and hold any treasure that wishful thinking might deliver into my horrid night-black hand.

The light of the sixty-watt bulb grew dimmer, and the walls of the room drew closer. The spines of the books grew darker, and the air became thicker and heavier. Because I knew that I was in a dream-state, I wasn’t unduly worried — to the contrary, I was intent on preserving a state in which the power of desire might be adequate to lead me to a precious find. It occurred to me that the room had become uncannily like a pit, both literally and metaphorically. The dross on the shelves was the stone of the imagination, inert and useless, while the texts for which I was searching were pregnant with mental energy that only needed to be read in order to warm and illuminate my inner being.

Because I already possess twenty thousand volumes, my want list has been shrinking for years, and the works which I yearn most desperately to find nowadays are so rare that it would require a veritable miracle of luck to locate affordable copies. Without any magical ritual to aid me in my search through Martin’s stock I had only honest toil to bring to my task: a simple, straightforward determination to make certain that nothing would escape my notice. I searched with relentless efficiency. I worked methodically along the shelves, ignoring the miasmic dust, in the frail hope that somewhere beneath its obscuring cloak a treasure trove might be waiting: a copy of Gyphantia, or Omegarus and Syderia, or The Mummy! or The Old Maid’s Talisman, in any edition and any condition provided only that the text were complete.

It soon became so difficult to draw breath that I felt slightly dizzy, and so dark that I had no alternative but to pause in my work. I was already kneeling down, inspecting the lowest shelf in a unit, but I had to put out a hand nevertheless to support myself against the shelves. My eyes began to play tricks on me; phosphenes lit up the black air like a cluster of stars, and the darkness itself began to flow and shift, as if it were alive with a host of bustling shadows: a host so vast and so crowded that its individual parts were jostling for presence in a narrow corridor that was growing narrower by the instant.

The dust that lay upon the air now seemed so dense that the air was indeed liquid. My trachea closed reflexively and I found myself gulping, swallowing the air and the intoxicating spirit which possessed and saturated it.

I was not afraid. I was secure in my conviction that an instant of panic would be enough to bring me out of the dream-state and back to wakefulness, and I had dreamed far too many dreams of this frail kind to allow panic its moment of opportunity. I drank the spirits of the dead, and drank them gladly. I drank them thirstily, because I knew that they were closer to me than any mere kin. What was my own spirit, after all, but a compound of all that I had read and inwardly digested? Even if A. N. Wilson were mistaken in his estimate of the majority of men, he was surely right about himself and he was right about me. My inner life, my pressurised stream of consciousness, was the product of texts and the love of texts. I had been a ghoul all my life; what had I to be afraid of in that dark room full of clamorous spirits? The greater part of my life, and the greater part of my emotion, had been spent and generated by intercourse with the dead; what need had I to feel threatened, or to suspect the presence of maleficent evil?

I drank deeply, avid for further intoxication. The dust was, after all, a previously untasted vintage.

I felt slightly stirred, as if moist wind and cloying warmth were washing over me but leaving no impression. I felt the fading gleam of the Celtic twilight in my lungs and in my heart. I felt the heritage of Merlin and Taliesin and the force of Druid magic in my brain and in my groin. I heard the musical voices of luckmen intoning their spells, mingled with the strangled cries of hewers choked by gas or crushed by falling stone, all echoing together in the empty spaces of my mind.

It was a delicious fantasy, a haunting dream: a fantasy so delicious and a dream so haunting that I would dearly have liked to maintain it against the cruel penetration of lucidity — but I could not do it.

My supporting hand moved along the wooden shelf and my senses reeled. It was only the slightest of adjustments, but the little finger picked a thin splinter out of the distressed wood, and the tiny stab of pain made me gasp. The gasp turned to a cough, and then to a fit of coughing — and a cataract of black dust cascaded out of my mouth into the palm of my hand.

The sixty-watt bulb buzzed and flickered, and its light became noticeably brighter. I hauled myself to my feet, blinked away the moment of drowsiness and went to the bathroom to rinse my hands again. Having done that, as best I could, I went back to the place at which I had paused and started scanning the top shelf of the next unit

I didn’t curse myself for losing the dream. Dreams are by nature fragile and fugitive, and only death can free us, in the end, from the everpresent duty of waking from their toils.

It took me a further three-quarters of an hour to finish searching the upstairs room. The best items I found were a couple of bound volumes of Reynolds’ Miscellany, including the serial version of Reynolds’ Faust, and battered copies of Eugene Sue’s Martin the Foundling, George Griffith’s A Criminal Croesus and Mrs Riddell’sFairy Water. They were all in poor condition, but they were all tides that I’d be glad to add to my collection. Considering that the hunt had started so unpromisingly it didn’t seem to be a bad haul, and there was still a slight possibility that I could add to it from the ground floor stock.

Lionel, Martin and Penny were sitting downstairs, all as quiet as church mice. I thought at first that they might be asleep, and I took care to tiptoe down the last few steps, but Lionel looked around and said: ‘There’s more tea in the pot. We’ve all had a second cup.’ His voice was slower than usual and a little thicker.

‘I’m okay,’ I assured him. ‘Seen any sign of the presence?’

‘Not seen, exactly,’ he told me, ‘but we definitely felt something, didn’t we?’

‘It’s not as bad as it has been,’ Martin said, evidently disgruntled by the failure of his shop to come up with the goods, ‘but I can feel it.’

‘How about you?’ I said to Penny.

‘Nothing objective,’ she said, looking sadly at her various instruments. ‘But I can feel something. It’s faint, but it’s there.’ I could tell from the tone of her voice that she was disappointed. It’s hard to impress people with subjective feelings; she knew that unless she could carry away some kind of tangible record — a clip of film, a trace on her rotating chart or a leaping needle on the ammeter — she’d have nothing to interest the punctilious inquisitors of the Society for Psychical Research.

‘Anything upstairs?’ Lionel asked, obviously expecting a negative answer.

‘Just books,’ I said. ‘Hundreds and hundreds that no one will ever want to read — and a few dozen that someone might. I’ve only found a few, but they won’t just sit on my shelves unread. I feel sorry for the rest, in a way. All that thought that went into their creation! All that effort! If they only had voices, they’d be clamouring for attention, don’t you think? They’d be excited, wouldn’t they, at having been taken out of their coffins at last and put on display? They probably thought that the Day of Judgment had come at last when Martin first unpacked them — but disillusionment must be setting in by now. How long do you think it takes a book to give in to despair? Not long, I expect, if it’s a book from a colliery library — a book which has already had a taste of the darkness of the abyss.’

‘You’re not taking this seriously, are you?’ Martin said, without undue rancour. ‘It’s all a joke to you.’

‘The trouble with sceptics,’ Penny added, taking care to couch her remarks in general terms, ‘is that they’re too enthusiastic to accept their own insensitivity as proof that there’s nothing to be sensitive to. They’re like blind men denying that sight is possible. Not everyone’s the same, you know. Everybody’s different, and some of us can feel the presence of things that others can’t.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I said, mildly. ‘You don’t mind if I move about, do you? I’ll try not to disturb you.’

‘Feel free,’ said Lionel, with typical bonhomie. ‘There’s no need for us to sit still or be quiet. There’s a long night still ahead of us — plenty of time for the presence to make itself felt more keenly, if it cares to.’

He was absolutely right, of course — the night that stretched before us was very long indeed. I did my bit, and never closed my eyes for a moment. Once I’d finished checking the downstairs stock I perched on a wooden chair and chatted to Lionel about anything and everything except religion. We remembered a few old times and a few old friends; he told me all about Fortean TV and I told him about all the stories and articles I’d written lately. I expect the others found it more than a little boring, although Lionel kept bringing them into the conversation at every possible opportunity. He likes to be the life and soul of every party, and he sometimes succeeds in that, even when it seems to be an uphill struggle. He was the commanding presence in the bookshop now; his was the personality which filled it.

All the while, I watched the three of them. I watched them watching, waiting for something that always seemed to be on the brink of arriving but never quite did. They did feel another, darker presence — of that I was sure, although they made no elaborate attempt to describe or discuss it — but they had no idea what it was. They wanted it to become more clamorous, not so much because that would reveal it more fully and more clearly, but because they thought that the clamour might somehow contain its own explanation — but it never did. Its brief hold on the atmosphere of the shop was loosening; it needed no exorcism to persuade it to slip away into oblivion. Hour by hour and inch by inch, Martin’s haunted bookshop became dispirited.

So far as I could tell, we did nothing to encourage the slow decay of the presence, but we did nothing to prevent it. None of us had the least idea how to encourage it, and none of us would have wanted to had we known how.

As the time passed I watched my three companions become sleepier and sleepier as habit tested their resolve. I heard their voices slow and slur as dreams reached out for them even while they struggled to stay awake — but wakefulness won the war, and the dreams that might have claimed them had they been alone evaporated into the increasingly empty air. The dust stirred up by Martin’s exertions was already beginning to settle out and to settle down, adsorbed on to the surfaces of wall and window, carpet and ceiling. Even when I first sat down the air was no longer vintage air; as the morning progressed it became flatter and more insipid, increasingly soured by the faint odours of living flesh.

By the time dawn broke, Martin and Penny were agreed that the presence had gone — that its hold was broken. Martin was slightly anxious that it might return as soon as it could find him on his own again, but Lionel assured him that he would be more than willing to come back if Martin thought it necessary, and would be happy to spend the night alone on the premises if that were the only way to bring the presence out. The way he said it told me that he didn’t expect any such thing to occur; without quite knowing how he knew it, he was convinced that the presence had loosened its grip and lost its hold.

We had breakfast in a cafe before starting back to Cardiff. Lionel drank lots of black coffee to make sure that he was in no danger of falling asleep at the wheel, although he was no stranger to all-night vigils. In the event, we got back to the railway station without the least hint of alarm.

‘You didn’t have a wasted journey, anyhow,’ Lionel said, as I got out of the car. He was looking at my overnight bag, which was bulging with the books I’d bought at a pound apiece — a perfectly reasonable price, considering that they were only reading copies — from the parsimonious Martin.

‘Not in the least,’ I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t think any of us did. Sometimes, all it takes to exorcise a presence is to fill a place with people and talk of ordinary matters. Perhaps Martin will feel more at home in the shop from now on.’

‘Let’s hope so,’ said Lionel. ‘Thanks for coming down.’

I waved goodbye as the car pulled away. I slept on the train, dreamlessly, all the way back to Reading.

When I got up to leave the train I noticed that the orange upholstery was stained with black. I knew that my jacket would have to go to the dry-cleaners and my jeans into the washing-machine, but I had every faith in the ability of modern technology to clear away the last residues of the dust. Ours is an inhospitable world for matter out of place and mind out of time.

Lionel called me a week later to say that Martin had had no further trouble with paranormal phenomena and discomfiting presences, but that he’d decided to get rid of the shop anyway.

‘He reckons that he’s not cut out to be a bookdealer,’ Lionel informed me, sadly. ‘He says there’s a world of difference between being a reader and being a real bookman, and that he’s obviously just a reader. He thinks he might look for a little newsagent’s shop, or a pizza franchise.’

‘Good luck to him,’ I said.

‘Penny’s gone up to Scotland to investigate an old mansion. It’s only the Lowlands, she says, but it’s still more promising ground than Barry. The Scots are more firmly rooted in their native soil, she says. They’re more closely in touch with their ancestors, and they’re far too wise to doubt the nearness of the Other World.’

‘Good luck to her, too,’ I said. ‘How about you?”

‘Still skating on that thin crust called reality,’ he assured me, quoting the catch-phrase he uses in every episode of Fortean TV. ‘You won’t believe some of the stuff we’ve got lined up for the next series. Be sure to watch it, won’t you?’

‘Actually, Lionel,’ I told him, ‘I won’t believe any of it. But I’ll tune in religiously just the same.’