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Georgie left on a Friday, two months or so after she probably should have.“I wish you all the best Jon. Really, I do. Don’t be a stranger.”An impossible ask. Stranger was all he had ever been. Stranger than the world he inhabited, stranger than those who seemed to understand it, stranger than the unmarked body he had dared for a while to share a bed with.He knew, as she drove her meagre possessions away from their shared flat with its rapidly dwindling lease, that he would not call her. The bumper of the little purple Ford Ka with the hissing fan bounced over the hill in a familiar vista of finality.Loss, at least, was something he knew. He would resign Georgie to the same windowless archive as those half-memories cut out by narcotic scalpels, and he would lock the door. Spiders would spin cobwebs over it. He would stay away.He wished he had some photographs to burn, but he didn’t like having his picture taken. He was all edges, sharp lines jutting out of two-dimensional confines and leaving him looking superimposed and uncanny. Georgie had managed to catch him unawares with her camera once, and had presented him with a polaroid, grinning triumphantly. He’d stuck out so far that he’d run his fingers over the paper to feel for the telltale ridges of tampering.That feather-light dusting movement could so easily have been reverence, were paranoia not the god he broke bread for.As it was, the only images he had to burn were stored within himself.As he chain-smoked out of the bathroom window, he reasoned that while it wasn’t ideal, his lungs were at least close enough to his heart to singe the edges.… Jon found himself performing many listless dances those first few weeks without Georgie, because if he made himself dizzy enough with movement the world might blur enough to be manageable. His dances were listless imitations of activities that people in their right minds might do to keep themselves calm. He took long walks through ancient parks and didn’t step on the cracks between paving slabs in case long fingers grabbed his ankles. He visited art galleries and imagined himself melting into oil renderings of medieval tragedies. He wandered around pet shops and imagined the rats sinking their teeth into his fingers, pinprick scars to add to the collection.And on an overcast Saturday afternoon, he found himself touring the charity shops. (An itching in the back of his skull told him that there was a reason he did not do this.)(An itching a memory maketh not.)He dropped his cane as he made his way into the shop, the impact on the hard floor clanging into a discordant note with the cheerful jingle of the bell at the top of the door. Before he could laboriously coax his screw-and-metal knee to bend, a black-haired stranger had picked it up and handed it to him.“Thank you,” he muttered.“Don’t mention it,” the man replied distractedly, attention stuck fast to the back of the shop.Jon spent a few minutes absent-mindedly pawing at the coats and jumpers in a ditch attempt to convince himself that he was there for any reason other than the bookshelves. They took up a generous amount of space - for a non-Oxfam charity shop anyway – and the sections were even marked by little cardboard signs. He didn’t hold out much hope for the “Classics” actually being classics rather than just mildewed, but he reasoned it was worth a try. Reading lists were mightily expensive things.To his surprise, he found a decent enough copies of Jude the Obscure and Troilus and Cressida on his first sweep of the section. Student area, he supposed. He set them to one side, balanced precariously on a box-set of the Back to the Future films and stood on tiptoe to investigate the top shelf. At the far left, he saw a spine that looked similar to an edition of Goblin Market he’d seen on his online trawl, and teased it out with his pointer finger.It wasn’t Goblin Market. It didn’t even seem to be in English. It was yellow and battered, the cover dense with a script that Jon didn’t recognise. It had no pictures.He flipped open the cover and –
there he was eight years old not even out of a child’s car seat yet not a birthday cake with double figure candles yet can’t see over the kitchen counter orphan weird unwanted too much too loud too smart too fast read those jonathan maybe theyll keep you quiet jonathan maybe if mr spider eats you you wont bother me anymore jonathan mr spider wants more mr spider wants blood mr spider wants you to throw up in the flowerbed outside the police station and for that to be the last thing you remember before they start cutting bits out of you but they can’t get it all they can’t get it all they can’t get
FROM THE LIBRARY OF JURGEN LEITNER
Jon dropped the book and sucked in a strangled breath. He staggered away from the bookshelf and into the spindly spider-like arm of a clothes rail, knocking three cardigans to the floor. He blindly groped for empty space and bent double in front of a wall of board games, sending huffing bovine breaths through his nose. His scars burned. His heart was going to fall out of his sternum.Oh God.
Oh God.
It was going to happen again.
He was twenty years old.He was eight years old.He had the singed edges of impossible memories.He breathed.He couldn’t breathe.He was trying so hard to breathe.He could feel eyes beginning to look at him, concern and distaste sharing space as they so often did when directed towards him. One more haggard breath and he began to straighten up, uncoiling like a grub who has resigned itself to being prey. He needed to destroy that thing. That thing that was –Not on the floor where he’d left it.His head snapped up and the world tilted on its axis.The stranger who had picked up his cane had the book in his hands.(It was happening again.He had doomed another.
It was happening again.)
Legs jelly, he staggered over to the shelf and all but collapsed into it. The stranger turned to him, a blinking, startled look on his face, and began to reach out a hand to steady him.“That’s,” Jon swallowed thickly, and jabbed a finger towards the book. “I need that book.”The stranger’s face morphed quickly from concern to something vaguely amused. He huffed a chuckle.“I’m sorry my friend, I saw it first.”
Don’t laugh.
You don’t know what I’ve done to you.
Don’t laugh.
“You… you didn’t. I put it down for a moment.” Jon choked around the lump in his throat. “I saw it first.”“That’s not quite how things work in the cut-throat world of charity shopping I’m afraid. Can never let your guard down.” The stranger bounced the book teasingly toward Jon’s nose. “Anyway mate, you left it on the floor. I think I’d best take care of it, don’t you?”Jon shook his head vigorously.“I need to have it.”The stranger laughed again. “There’s a whole shelf for you to make your eBay fortune from. This one’s mine. Sorry.”“Please.” Jon’s eyes were beginning to sting. His ears were full with the sound of a slamming door. He could feel hysteria rising in his chest. “I mean, look at the state of it, it’s falling to bits, it will hardly be worth anything however old it is. And anyway, the… the pages, they’re yellow, sickly yellow, who knows where it might have been to get like that, it could have absorbed something, some sort of chemical, it needs destroying, it could be…”Jon trailed off, because something in the air had changed. Looking up, he discovered that the stranger’s gaze had turned ice-cold. Jon shivered, and curled in on himself.“Dangerous,” the stranger finished quietly.“Yes,” Jon whispered.“I know exactly what this book is,” he said lowly, “Do you?”“Not exactly. But I know enough.”The stranger nodded slowly, then detached his gaze from Jon’s eyes. He trailed down him appraisingly, ghosting over his pockmarked skin, the slash on his neck, the tight grip of his coarse palm on the handle of his cane.“Wait there.”He turned from Jon and drifted easily over to the counter, an amicable smile assembling itself on his face. He paid for the book with a five-pound note and told the cashier to keep the change, and to have a lovely day. He slipped it into his pocket. The smile melted like wax as he returned to Jon.“Do you drink coffee?”“Not if I can help it.”“Hmm. Do you smoke?”Jon looked at the ground.“Not if I can… help it.”“Can you?”A pause.“Not at the moment, no.”“Brilliant.” The stranger retrieved a packet of Marlboros from another of the many, many pockets of his leather coat. He rattled it tantalisingly. “I think we ought to find somewhere for a chat.”The desire to flee was almost insurmountable. Every one of his scars ached as ink pooled beneath them and stretched their rubbery surfaces. The cold promise of an empty flat with sturdy locks and places to hide whispered close in his ears.Instead, he held out his hand.“May I carry the book, please.”The stranger once again set that icy blue gaze on him and placed a protective palm over the pocket where it sat, dormant.“I think I’d best look after -”“Please.”Rather me than my tormentor, he had spent a decade thinking.
So most certainly rather me than a man who has done me no wrong.
“Alright. Just until we talk.”He handed the book over.There were eyes tattooed on his knuckles.***The stranger’s name was Gerard.He had black hair with a starburst of blonde exploding from the roots and a tattoo of an eye on each visible moving part of his body. His cheekbones were sharp and his clothes didn’t fit him quite right. He held his cigarette like a movie star and had the bluest eyes that Jon had ever seen.“So,” he began, then held his cigarette up to his nose and turned it from side to side, peering at it, “These do that to you?”Jon didn’t have to ask what he meant. Many a well-meaning teacher had quietly asked him if his grandmother ever hurt him with cigarette butts when they saw those round, circular scars. If they ever got as far as getting her in the room, they saw the way her face retreated into itself like she’d sucked a lemon at the mere mention of the things, and the matter quickly put itself to bed.Jon shook his head.“Hmm. Run-in with a hole punch?”Jon shook his head again.Gerard twirled the cigarette across his fingers like a circus baton, then slowly tilted his gaze up to meet Jon’s eyes.“… a Leitner?”Very slowly and very small, Jon nodded. And then he began to speak.“I… I didn’t know there were more. It’s about the last thing I remember before… things went wrong. That bookplate, like a brand, bright through the haze that my mind became after. Everything else is foggy and dripping and homogenous, but that, it’s sharp and glowing and horrible, I –”He took a shaky drag of his cigarette. Blew it out in a haggard expulsion. “I’m sorry,” he spoke into the dancing smoke. “I know I’m not making any sense. I’ve never made any sense.”Gerard shrugged gently. “Sense is overrated in my experience. It’s arrogant. It tricks people into thinking that our neurotic human ways of categorising the world have cracked some sort of cosmic code. How is that possible when we’re so small and breakable? People who claim to have ‘sense’ just haven’t left their own heads for long enough to realise that reality rejects order.”“Still,” Jon said, partly to fill the would-be silence if he’d reacted instinctively and just gaped. “I haven’t explained myself very well.”“Would you like to try again?”Jon considered this for a moment, then shook his head slowly. “No. No, I’d rather get answers.”Gerard put his hands in his pockets and sank back into the bench, kicking his feet out and burying his heels in the soft gravel.“What would you like to know?”
Everything.
I have always wanted to know everything.
Where the path through the wood leads, why the sky is blue, what the birds are saying when they sing. Who was standing here 800 years ago, how hot the kiln was that forged their sword, whether they had cares comparable to ours. How children know when someone is different, who taught them to be cruel, why some people seem to know everything.
Who I am, who you are, who’s out to get me.
Who’s finally going to succeed.
Jon shook his head, and cleared his throat.“What are… Leitners? You called them Letiners – is it some sort of… evil publishing company?”Gerard flicked his eyes upwards, in what was almost a roll.“Let me ask you this. What does a library do?”“It houses books.”“Does it produce them?”“No.” Jon paused. “Unless you count a catalogue as a book.”“There are worse things to be a slave to than pedantry, I suppose. Not many, but some.”Jon scowled, but said nothing.“No, the Library of Jurgen Leitner is not an evil publishing company. It is exactly what it sounds like. A repository of pre-existing bad books.”“Okay. Written by whom?”Gerry wiggled his cigarette in the air like a stick of chalk. “Now what did we say about sense. In the world of sense, they would need an author. You and I are beyond that world, aren’t we?”“I –”“Or have the doctors found a rational explanation for why your upper epidermis is doing its best impression of the Great Barrier Reef?” Gerard raised his eyebrows.Jon sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.“They have not.”Gerard splayed out his hands in a gesture that, if captioned, would read, Well, there you go.“Do they all do…” Jon looked at the ground. “What it did to me?”“What did it do to you?”
something about a spider and something about a door and something about vomiting into the flowerbed outside the police station and something about memories and screaming and eyes and pain and fire and desolation and ink and blood and doors doors doors and clowns and mannequins and cold cold hands and where is he where is he he’ll be lonely where have you taken him -
“I don’t know.”“Then I can’t really answer that, can I?”“It did…” Jon swallowed and winced. “Something that doesn’t make sense.”“Then yes. They do things that go against the confines of what we, as a species, have decided constitutes reality. They distort, or they harm, or they maim, or they take, or they change, or they burn, or they end. They create dissent and disorder and they poison whoever wields them with an unyielding sense of, and hunger for, power.” For the first time, Jon noted a very slight tremble in Gerard’s fingers as he raised his cigarette to his mouth. “That’s the worst of them. What they do to those who worship them. What they turn them into.”In that moment, every eye on Gerard’s body looked as though it had deep lines of pain etched around the corners. Jon blinked, and they were gone, and Gerard had settled back into his gently smug posture.“So you what, you… you hunt these books? Destroy them?”Gerard shrugged. “Best I can. They seem to evade capture, if we’re going with your ‘hunt’ metaphor. Although I seem to have something of a knack for finding them. As, apparently, do you.”“Probably shouldn’t think too hard about that.” Jon shifted uncomfortably. “About how maybe once you’ve found one…”Gerard smirked. “Doesn’t make sense.”There was a twinkle in his eye, and against every instinct in his body, Jon found a small, ironic smile settle itself on his lips. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Which likely means it’s true.”“You learn fast. Probably warrants a sticker or something.” He took a long drag. “Would you like to burn a book with me? I’d suggest smoking the ashes afterwards, but I don’t think even the noble cause of goth aesthetic is quite worth the risk.”To his utmost surprise, Jon’s reaction was -
Yes.
Oh God, yes.
***
Was this what having a friend was like?
There had been Georgie of course, but even before they were romantically involved there was the possibility of something more complicated simmering below the surface, which didn’t seem quite the same as the unencumbered things he’d observed on the school playground. Then there had been Georgie’s friends, but he wasn’t even going to try and kid himself that those relationships were anything other than proximity. Or morbid curiosity perhaps. But that had lasted only as long as he could give unsatisfying answers to questions about his scars. After that, their questions dried up and shrivelled into giggles behind hands and corner-of-the-eye glances. He wondered sometimes if Georgie could see that her friends were a little bit mean. He suspected she probably could. If that was friendship, he’d decided at the time, he didn’t want it.Somewhere between the third and fourth burning, Gerard became Gerry, and that was something Jon did want. Friday evenings, Gerry arrived at Jon’s flat with something warm and homemade in a canvas bag, and didn’t exasperatedly point out that it took Jon an hour to eat it. Then, Gerry sat on the floor with his laptop, with Jon cross-legged on the sofa above him, and they hunted. Online auction sites were the richest vein, and for reasons Jon was unwilling to ask, Gerry always had money to bid on them, although rarely money for anything else. On days when the air felt light enough, they made pantomimes of these cumbersome transactions – Jon was surprisingly good at (and willing to perform) the fast-talking auctioneer voice, and Gerry greatly enjoyed striking Jon on the top of the head with whichever item he’d decided was a gavel. Other days, they bid stilly and silently, sitting very close together.Most Saturdays, they (along with Gerry’s twenty-year-old Nissan Micra, a wing, a prayer, and the AA on speed-dial) rattled down the motorway towards whatever car-boot sale was happening in whatever drizzly field. The guise was that they were continuing their search, and they did indeed pore over tables of wrinkled volumes for long enough that men in flat-caps began to get twitchy. But the truth, which peeked out from behind this excuse and flashed a self-conscious smile, was that it wasn’t entirely unpleasant to eat a Mr Whippy in the car while torrential rain batters on the windscreen, getting the lyrics wrong to Bowie songs on cassette and sharing tartan blankets.In between, there was being laughed with rather than at, elbows silently offered when his gait started to pitch rightward, socked feet nudging him gently in the ribs when he began to doze off upright in the early hours of the morning.Once, there was the merry-go-round at London Zoo, and wind in his hair, and feeling like maybe, just maybe there were worse things he could be than himself. He was dizzy when he stepped off and he fell into Gerry’s side, and had the delirious thought that if he just kept sinking, he may never have to resurface again.They burned the books on Sundays. There was something final about doing it on the lord’s day of –
rest in…
just rest.
By the sombre light of curling pages, Jon considered the future.“I’m thinking of becoming a researcher,” he said quietly. “You’d be good at it too.”Gerry huffed.“Must be nice. The possibility to become anything.”Jon frowned“What’s that supposed to mean?”A sad smile.“Nothing, Jon. Nothing at all.”***
Jon,
Remember that you and I, we are beyond sense.
I have not left for any reason that can be rationalised. I did not want to. It was not in my control. You are not to blame. There is nothing wrong with you. There are very, many things wrong with the world.
I hope you become.
Maybe I will too.
I’m glad I met you.
Gerry.
***