The Fandom of the Operator

3

Captain Runstone was drunk. He was always drunk on Thursday afternoons. After he locked up the library at one o’clock he took himself off to the Flying Swan and got himself all drunk. He left the Flying Swan at three-fifteen, purchased a bottle of Balthazar’s Barnett Cream sherry from the off-licence, returned to his Lodge, hung his keys upon the hook beside the door, removed himself to his bedroom, consumed the cream sherry and by six o’clock was thoroughly stupefied.

I never knew exactly why it was that Captain Runstone drunk himself into oblivion every Thursday afternoon. I was very glad that he did, of course, because it allowed me access to the library. But I never knew why. It was probably something to do with the war. Most things were, back in the nineteen fifties. Most things that were bad were blamed upon the war. Which was a good thing in a way, because people never like to blame themselves for the trouble they’re in. And if they don’t have something really big to blame, like a war, or a depression, or a recession, or a bad government, they only start blaming each other.

Captain Runstone had bits missing – his left hand and also, I’d been told, his left foot, which accounted for his curious gait. Which is not to be confused with a curious gate. Like the one belonging to my Aunty May. Which had hinges on both sides and so had to open in the middle.

My Uncle Jon told me that Captain Runstone had been tortured by the Japs in Singapore. And, in fact, went into great detail regarding the specifics. And I knew that the captain cried out in a foreign tongue in his drunken sleep, because I’d heard him at it. But I didn’t know for sure what the truth was and I didn’t care too much. He wasn’t a relative, and as I didn’t even care too much about my own relatives I could think of no good reason to care at all about Captain Runstone.

I slipped in through the cat flap and nicked his keys, slipped out again and let myself in through the rear and secluded door of the Memorial Library.

I loved that library.

I did. I really did.

I loved the smell of it. And the utter silence. Libraries are always quiet, but they’re rarely silent. You have to be all alone in them to experience their silence. And when you’re all alone in a library, you experience so much more.

And I do mean when you’re really alone. Just you and the library. Just you and all those books and those millions and millions of words. Those words that were the thoughts of their authors. The lives of their authors. It’s special, really special. The restricted section held some most remarkable tomes. Books of Victorian pornography. Books on forbidden subjects. The inevitable Necronomicon, which every library has and every librarian is obliged, by law, to deny all knowledge of. Books upon freaks and evil medical experiments. And guidebooks to lead you on the left-hand path. Which is to say, Black Magic. Most people don’t really believe in Black Magic. It’s the stuff of horror films and the occasional psycho. It’s not real. It’s like fairies and Bigfoot. It makes for an entertaining read, it’s a bit naughty, but it’s not real.

This runs somewhat contrary to the beliefs of those who wrote about the subject and knew of what they wrote. Those whose books are only to be found in the restricted sections of libraries. The restricted sections that you can’t get into.

You can try if you like. You can apply for access. You can fill in forms and you might get into “a” restricted section. But you won’t get into the real one. The real one downstairs. In the basement. The one with the triple locks on the door. They won’t let you in there. Only government officials with high security clearance can get into those.

And do you know why?

No, you don’t.

I’ll tell you. But later, not now. Now I’m telling you all about this bit. And this particular bit is particularly pertinent to the telling of this tale, because it contains one of those special life-changing kind of moments.

I never told Dave about me getting into the restricted section. Dave didn’t even know that the library closed on Thursday afternoons. Libraries were of no interest to Dave. If Dave wanted a book, such as an Ian Allen train-spotters’ book for instance, he simply stole it from W. H. Smith’s. Dave had no need for libraries.

I undid the triple locks, swung open the iron door, switched on the lights, closed the door behind me and descended into the restricted section.

It smelled bad. It always did. These books weren’t like the ones upstairs. Some of these books were deathly cold to the touch. Some of them had to be forcibly dragged from the bookshelves and prised open. They actually resisted you reading them. It was hard to concentrate upon a single sentence. Your thoughts kept wandering. There was one tiny green book with a lumpy binding that I never managed to get down from the shelf. I always wondered just what might be in that one.

On this particular Thursday afternoon I didn’t bother with my usual assault upon it. I hastened to the voodoo section. Mr Seabrook had referred in his book to a tome called Voodoo in Theory and Practice, which had apparently contained the complete instructions for reanimating the dead, and I felt certain that a copy of this would be found somewhere here.

It was.

A greasy little black book with complicated symbols wrought in silver upon its spine. It gave itself up to me without a fight. It seemed almost eager to fall into my hands.

I leafed through it. The actual ceremony involved seemed straightforward enough. But, and there was a big but, it required a great many herbs and difficult-to-acquire items all being stewed up in a human skull and fed to the corpse. This, I considered, might be problematic. This was Brentford, after all, not Haiti. Where, for instance, was I going to find powdered Mandragora? Not at the chemist in the high street. But, and this reduced the big but to a smaller but, I was the bestest friend of Dave and if anything could be found and nicked, then Dave would be the boy to find and nick it.

It would have taken me ages to copy out the list of ingredients and all the details of the ceremony, so I slipped the copy of Voodoo in Theory and Practice into my pocket and prepared to take my leave.

I was almost at the top of the stairs when I heard the noise. It was the noise of the rear and secluded door being unlocked.

The noise caught me somewhat off-guard, because I was sure that the captain slept. So, who might this be? Well, whoever it was, I wouldn’t let them find me. I would wait, very quietly, until they had passed by the iron door and then I would slip out and be away smartly on my toes.

“The restricted section is just down there,” I heard a voice say.

I fled back down the stairs and ducked under them, bunched myself up in a corner and waited.

“The door’s unlocked,” I heard another voice say. “Security around here is a joke. And look, the light’s on too.”

“Hello,” the first voice called down the stairs. “Is someone down there? Captain Runstone, is that you?”

“Of course it isn’t him,” said the other voice. “He’s drunk in his bed. He’s always drunk in his bed at this time on a Thursday. I’ve done my research.”

“Hello,” called the first voice again. “Hello, down there.”

“Stop all that. Come on, follow me.”

“I’ll wait here. You go down.”

“Don’t be such a sissy.”

I heard a scuffle and the first voice saying, “All right, I’m going. There’s no need to push.”

Down the stairs the two of them came. I saw the heels of their shoes through a crack. Shiny and black, those shoes. Then the trousers. They were black as well. And then, when they were both at the foot of the stairs and standing under the light, I could see all of them. Two young men in black suits, with short-cropped hair and pasty pale faces. They looked rather ill and I wondered whether perchance they were suffering from the curly worms that worried from within. I certainly felt as if I was.

“It smells horrible down here,” said the owner of the first voice, the taller – and also the thinner – of the two young men.

The other man said, “Shut up, Ralph.”

The thinner man’s name was Ralph.

“Don’t tell me to shut up, Nigel.”

The other man’s name was Nigel.

“Smells like something’s died in here,” said Ralph.

“It’s the smell of magic,” said Nigel. “Magic always smells like this. It smells a lot worse when it’s being worked; this stuff’s only idling.”

“I should never have taken this job,” said Ralph. “I should have stayed in the drawing office.”

“You wanted action and adventure and now you’ve got it.”

Nigel was nosing about the bookshelves. “There’s some great stuff here. I think I might take one or two of these home to add to my private collection.”

“Mr Boothy would know if you did. He knows everything, you know that.”

“It’s tempting, though, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t tempt me at all.”

“Well, let’s just get what we’ve come here for and then we’ll leave.”

“Yes, please, let’s do that. What have we come here for anyway?”

Nigel rooted about in his jacket pockets and brought out a slip of paper. “Alondriel’s Trajectories,” he said, “Arkham, 1705.”

“Bound, no doubt, in human skin.”

“Just red cloth. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m not disappointed at all. So what is to be found in Alondriel’s Trajectories and what does the old man want it for?”

“Old man Boothy doesn’t confide in me. Perhaps it’s something to do with the communications project.”

“Oh, that,” said Ralph, scuffing his heels and hunching his shoulders. “I don’t think I believe in all that.”

“No?” Nigel asked, as he ran his fingers over book spines and peeped and peered and poked. “You know better, do you? You know better than the experts? All the boffins? All the ministers? All the brains behind these projects? You know better than all of them?”

“I’m not saying that I know better. I just said that I don’t think I believe in it.”

“It’s only a theory so far, but I think it makes a lot of sense,” said Nigel, still peering and prodding and poking. “And if it’s true, then it answers a whole lot of big questions and opens up a lot of opportunities.”

“Receivers,” said Ralph, with contempt in his voice. “That we’re all just, what? Radio receivers?”

Nigel turned upon him. “Receivers and communicators,” he said. “But what we really are is not up here.” He tapped at his temple. “It’s out there somewhere.” He pointed towards out there generally. “It works through us, but it’s bigger than us.”

“All right,” said Ralph. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but this is the theory in essence. The theory is that human beings – that’s you and me and everybody else – are not really thinking, sentient life forms. We are alive – we eat, we breathe, we reproduce – but we don’t actually think.”

“In essence,” said Nigel. “It’s a bit like television sets. You sit and watch them, you see the pictures, you hear the sounds, but they’re being broadcast from somewhere else. The TVs are only receivers that pass on information.

“And the theory is that human beings are like that. Our brains don’t actually do our thinking. Our thinking is done somewhere else, by something other than us, then broadcast to our brains.

“And the brains send messages to our muscles and make our bodies function. Move our eyes about, make our voices work, make our willies get a stiffy when we want a shag.”

“So I’m not actually me,” said Ralph. “I’m a sort of puppet being moved by invisible strings by something that I have no knowledge of?”

“That’s the theory.”

“Well, it’s a duff theory. If it were true, then I’d know, wouldn’t I? The ‘I’ that is pulling the invisible strings, I’d be aware that I was doing it. I’d know where I really was.”

“The theory is just a theory, so far. That something that is nonhuman is experiencing life on Earth through us. How can you actually prove that the thinking you do really goes on in your head and not somewhere else?”

“Oh, don’t talk daft. Hit yourself on the head with a hammer, you’ll feel the pain.”

“The sensory apparatus housed in my body will feel the pain. Look, Ralph, you can’t actually feel with your brain, can you? You see through your eyes, but where is the actual image you’re seeing? The image is being projected through the lenses of your eyes into your head and processed in your brain somehow. And it’s somewhere in your head. Is it? Can you be sure? How would you know if it wasn’t? And the sounds you hear through your ears, where are those sounds? Inside your head somewhere? They could be in your armpit – you wouldn’t know any different, you’d just register that you’re ‘hearing’ sounds. If in fact what you’re hearing is actually what’s really there to be heard. Human ears have a somewhat limited range. There’s a lot more noise going around us than we can actually hear.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Ralph. “Actually! And I don’t think you know either. My thoughts are my thoughts. They’re inside my head. They’re not somewhere else in the universe being beamed to me. I can feel myself.”

“Please don’t do it in front of me!”

“You know what I mean. I’m me. I don’t believe all this stuff. It’s mad. And if my thoughts are coming from elsewhere, and your thoughts are coming from elsewhere, then the thoughts of the expert who came up with this theory are coming from elsewhere too. So, if whatever it is that’s pulling these invisible strings is really pulling these invisible strings, it wouldn’t let him have those thoughts. If it didn’t want to be found out, it wouldn’t, would it?”

“Perhaps it does want to be found out. Or perhaps it thinks that it can’t be found out. We don’t know, do we? What is the point of the communications project? To find out. And if it’s there, to find out what it is, why it’s doing what it’s doing, what it intends for the future. Everything.”

“The theory’s full of holes,” said Ralph.

“Ralph, you and I only know a bit of the theory. A hint. What we’ve overheard when we shouldn’t have been listening. What we’ve been told, which is bound to be not all of the truth. What we’d like to believe; what we don’t want to believe. If it’s true and the communications project works, then we’ll be on the inside of something really incredible. Something that will change everything on Earth. Certainly the way we ‘think’ about everything. You joined the team because you wanted action and adventure. You wanted to get out of the office.”

“I thought it would be like spying. Or undercover work.”

“It is undercover work. It doesn’t come much more undercover than this.”

“I thought it would be like, you know, like him.”

“Like Lazlo Woodbine? You fancied yourself as a private eye?”

“Who doesn’t?” said Ralph.

“Help me find the book,” said Nigel. “Let’s find the book and get out of here and then we’ll go down the pub.”

“I didn’t think it would be stealing, either.”

“The book will be returned. The books are always returned.”

“Yes,” said Ralph. “But what I don’t understand is this, the department is a branch of the Government, right? A secret branch that even the Prime Minister doesn’t know about, but it’s really big and powerful. So how come, if the department has so much clout, it doesn’t have its own copies of these books? Why do we have to keep creeping into public libraries to borrow them?”

Nigel sighed. “How many books do you think there are down here?” he asked.

“Thousands,” said Ralph, looking all around and about.

“Thousands. And there’s further thousands in every other library. And that adds up to millions. They’re safer here in these little suburban libraries, where no one would ever think of looking for them, than all together in some top-secret library at the Ministry, where some Russian spy would be bound to find them.”

“How could he find them if the library was top-secret?”

“Because it would be such a huge top-secret library that it would take up half of London. You are such a twonk, Ralph. Perhaps you should just go back to the drawing office.”

“It’s dull in the drawing office.”

“Then just help me find the book.”

“What’s this book about, then?”

“How should I know? Help me find it and we’ll have a look inside.”

Ralph shrugged and scuffed his heels a bit more. And then he helped Nigel to search for the book. And after a while, which seemed a long time to me, as I cowered in the shadows under the stairs, they found it.

“There,” said Nigel. “We have it.”

“So go on, open it up.”

I ducked my head. I had learned from the occasional bitter experience that certain of these books were better opened with care.

Nigel apparently hadn’t, so Nigel swung open the book with a flourish.

I couldn’t quite see what happened from where I was cowering, but I registered a sort of bang and a flash and there was a very bad smell, far worse than the one there already was. And Nigel took to coughing and Ralph took to gagging into his hands. And Nigel dropped the book and there was another sort of bang. And then Nigel gathered up the book and tucked it under his arm and the two of them scuttled up the stairs and hurried away on their toes.

I crept out from my hiding place and stretched and clicked my shoulders. I knew that I had just heard and seen something that I wasn’t supposed to have heard and seen. Something secret.

Something big.

Bigger than the something big I was up to.

Something really big.

I didn’t quite understand what I’d heard. But then it was clear that Ralph and Nigel didn’t quite understand it either. But looking back on it now, from where I am now and after all that happened to me, I suppose that I am quite impressed by myself. By the myself that was me back then. Because I seemed to know instinctively that what I had heard was in some way going to shape my future. I had a sort of a future already planned for myself – I hoped to enter the undertaking trade – but I knew that the conversation between Nigel and Ralph meant something to me personally. It was almost as if it was meant for my ears. As if it had been no coincidence that I was there to hear it.

And now, all these years later, knowing what I know and having done all the things I have done, I know that it wasn’t.

So, with my purloined book in my pocket, I climbed the stairs, switched off the light and left the restricted section, locking it behind me. Then I left the library, locking that behind me, returned the keys to Captain Runstone’s lodge and headed home for my tea.