The End of Mr. Y

Chapter One

You now have one choice.

You ... I'm hanging out of the window of my office, sneaking a cigarette and trying to read Margins in the dull winter light, when there's a noise I haven't heard before. All right, the noise—crash, bang, etc.—I probably have heard before, but it's coming from underneath me, which isn't right. There shouldn't be anything underneath me: I'm on the bottom floor. But the ground shakes, as if something's trying to push up from below, and I think about other people's mothers shaking out their duvets or even God shaking out the fabric of space-time; then I think, Fucking hell, it's an earthquake, and I drop my cigarette and run out of my office at roughly the same time that the alarm starts sounding.

When alarms sound I don't always run immediately. Who does? Usually an alarm is just an empty sign: a drill; a practice. As I'm on my way to the side door out of the building the shaking stops. Shall I go back to my office? But it's impossible to stay in this building when this alarm goes off. It's too loud; it wails inside your head. As I leave the building I walk past the Health and Safety notice board, which has pictures of injured people on it. The pictures blur as I go past: A man who has back pain is also having a heart attack, and various hologram people are trying to revive him. I was supposed to go to some Health and Safety training last year, but didn't.

As I open the side door I can see people leaving the Russell Building and walking, or running, past our block and up the gray concrete steps in the direction of the Newton Building and the library. I cut around the right-hand side of the building and bound up the concrete steps, two at a time. The sky is gray, with a thin TV-static drizzle that hangs in the air like it's been freeze-framed. Sometimes, on these January afternoons, the sun squats low in the sky like an orange-robed Buddha in a documentary about the meaning of life. Today there is no sun. I come to the edge of the large crowd that has formed, and I stop running. Everyone is looking at the same thing, gasping and making firework-display noises.

It's the Newton Building.

It's falling down.

I think of this toy—have I seen it on someone's desk recently?—which is a little horse mounted on a wooden button. When you press the button from underneath, the horse collapses to its knees. That's what the Newton Building looks like now. It's sinking into the ground, but in a lopsided way; one corner is now gone, now two, now ... Now it stops. It creaks, and it stops. A window on the third floor flaps open, and a computer monitor falls out and smashes onto what's left of the concrete courtyard below. Four men with hard hats and fluorescent jackets slowly approach the broken-up courtyard; then another man comes, says something to them, and they all move away again.

Two men in gray suits are standing next to me.

"Déjà vu," one of them says to the other.

I look around for someone I know. There's Mary Robinson, the head of department, talking to Lisa Hobbes. I can't see many other people from the English Department. But I can see Max Truman standing on his own, smoking a roll-up. He'll know what's going on.

"Hello, Ariel," he mumbles when I walk over and stand next to him.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race. Does he like me? I don't think he trusts me. But why would he? I'm comparatively young, relatively new to the department, and I probably seem ambitious, even though I'm not. I also have long red hair and people say I look intimidating (because of the hair? Something else?). People who don't say I look intimidating sometimes say I look "dodgy," or "odd." One of my ex-housemates said he wouldn't like to be stuck on a desert island with me but didn't say why.

"Hi, Max," I say. Then: "Wow."

"You probably don't know about the tunnel, do you?" he says. I shake my head. "There's a railway tunnel that runs under here," he says, pointing downwards with his eyes. He sucks on his roll-up, but nothing seems to happen, so he takes it out of his mouth and uses it to point around the campus. "It runs under Russell over there, and Newton, over there. Goes—or used to go—from the town to the coast. It hasn't been used in a hundred years or so. This is the second time it's collapsed and taken Newton with it. They were supposed to fill it with concrete after last time," he adds.

I look at where Max just pointed, and start mentally drawing straight lines connecting Newton with Russell, imagining the tunnel underneath the line. Whichever way you do it, the English and American Studies Building is on the line, too.

"Everyone's all right, at least," he says. "Maintenance saw a crack in the wall this morning and evacuated them all."

Lisa shivers. "I can't believe this is happening," she says, looking over at the Newton Building. The gray sky has darkened and the rain is now falling more heavily. The Newton Building looks strange with no lights on: It's as if it has been stubbed out.

"I can't either," I say.

For the next three or four minutes we all stand and stare in silence at the building; then a man with a megaphone comes around and tells us all to go home immediately without going back to our offices. I feel like crying. There's something so sad about broken concrete.

I don't know about everyone else, but it's not that easy for me just to go home. I only have one set of keys to my flat, and that set is in my office, along with my coat, my scarf, my gloves, my hat, and my rucksack.

There's a security guard trying to stop people going in through the main entrance, so I go down the steps and in the side way. My name isn't on my office door. Instead, it bears only the name of the official occupier of the room: my supervisor, Professor Saul Burlem. I met Burlem twice before I came here: once at a conference in Greenwich, and once at my interview. He disappeared just over a week after I arrived. I remember coming into the office on a Thursday morning and noticing that it was different. The first thing was that the blinds and the curtains were closed: Burlem always closed his blinds at the end of every day, but neither of us ever touched the horrible thin gray curtains. And the room smelled of cigarette smoke. I was expecting him in at about ten o'clock that morning, but he didn't show up. By the following Monday I asked people where he was and they said they didn't know. At some point someone arranged for his classes to be covered. I don't know if there's departmental gossip about this—no one gossips to me—but everyone seems to assume I'll just carry on my research and it's no big deal for me that he isn't around. Of course, he's the reason I came to the department at all: He's the only person in the world who has done serious research on one of my main subjects: the nineteenth-century writer Thomas E. Lumas. Without Burlem, I'm not really sure why I am here. And I do feel something about him being missing; not loss, exactly, but something.

My car is in the Newton car park. When I get there I am not at all surprised to find several men in hard hats telling people to forget about their cars and walk or take the bus home. I do try to argue—I say I'm happy to take the risk that the Newton Building will not suddenly go into a slow-motion cinematic rewind in order that it can fall down again in a completely different direction—but the men pretty much tell me to piss off and walk home or take the bus like everybody else, so I eventually drift off in the direction of the bus stop. It's only the beginning of January, but some daffodils and snowdrops have made it through the earth and stand wetly in little rows by the path. The bus stop is depressing: There's a line of people looking as cold and fragile as the line of flowers, so I decide I'll just walk.

I think there's a shortcut into town through the woods, but I don't know where it is so I just follow the route I would have driven until I leave the campus, playing the scene of the building collapsing in my mind over and over again until, realizing I'm remembering things that never even happened, I give up thinking about it at all. Then I consider the railway tunnel. I can see why it would be there: After all, the campus is set on top of a steep hill and it would make sense to go under rather than over it. Max said it hadn't been used for a hundred years or so. I wonder what was on this hill a hundred years ago. Not the university, of course, which was built in the 1960s. It's so cold. Perhaps I should have waited for the bus. But no buses pass me as I walk. By the time I get to the main road into town my fingers have frozen inside my gloves and I start examining roads off to the right, looking for a shortcut. The first one is marked with a NO THROUGH ROAD sign, partially obscured by seagull shit; but the second looks more promising, with red-brick-terraced houses curling around to the left, so I take it.

I thought this was just a residential road, but soon the red-brick houses stop and there's a small park with two swings and a slide rusting under a dark canopy of tangled but bare oak tree branches. Beyond that there is a pub and then a small row of shops. There's a sad-looking charity shop, already shut, and the kind of hairdresser that does blue rinses and sets for half price on a Monday. There's a newsagent and a betting shop and then—aha—a secondhand bookshop. It's still open. I'm freezing. I go in.

It's warm inside the shop and smells slightly of furniture polish. The door has a little bell that keeps jangling for a good three seconds after I close it, and soon a young woman comes out from behind a large set of bookshelves, holding a can of polish and a yellow duster. She smiles briefly and tells me that the shop will be closing in about ten minutes but that I am welcome to look around. Then she sits down and starts tapping something into a keyboard connected to a computer on the front desk.

"Have you got a computerized catalog of all your books?" I ask her.

She stops typing and looks up. "Yeah. But I don't know how to use it. I'm only filling in for my friend. Sorry."

"Oh. OK."

"What did you want to look up?"

"It doesn't matter."

"No, tell me. I might remember dusting it."

"Um ... OK, then. Well, there's this author called Thomas E. Lumas ... Have you got any books by him?" I always ask this in secondhand bookshops. They rarely do have anything by him, and I've got most of his books already. But I still ask. I still hope for a better copy of something, or an older one. Something with a different preface or a cleaner dust jacket.

"Er...." She screws up her forehead. "The name sounds sort of familiar."

"You might have come across something called The Apple in the Garden. That's his famous one. But none of the others are in print. He wrote in the mid to late nineteenth century but never became as famous as he should have been..."

"The Apple in the Garden. No, the one I saw wasn't that one," she says. "Hang on." She walks around to the large bookcase at the back of the shop. "L, Lu, Lumas ... No. Nothing here," she says. "Mind you, I don't know what section they'd have put him in. Is it fiction?"

"Some is fiction," I say. "But he also wrote a book about thought experiments, some poetry, a treatise on government, several science books, and something called The End of Mr. Y, which is one of the rarest novels..."

"The End of Mr. Y. That's it!" she says, excited. "Hang on."

She goes up the stairs at the back of the shop before I can tell her that she must be mistaken. It is impossible to imagine that she actually has a copy up there. I would probably give away everything I own to obtain a copy of The End of Mr. Y, Lumas's last and most mysterious work. I don't know what she's got it confused with, but it's just absurd to think that she has it. No one has that book. There is one known copy in a German bank vault, but no library has it listed. I have a feeling that Saul Burlem may have seen a copy once, but I'm not sure. The End of Mr. Y is supposed to be cursed, and although I obviously don't believe in any of that stuff, some people do think that if you read it you die.

"Yeah, here it is," says the girl, carrying a small cardboard box down the stairs. "Is this the one you mean?"

She places the box on the counter.

I look inside. And—suddenly I can't breathe—there it is: a small cream clothbound hardback with brown lettering on the cover and spine, missing a dust jacket but otherwise near perfect. But it can't be. I open the cover and read the title page and the publication details. Oh shit. This is a copy of The End of Mr. Y. What the hell do I do now?

"How much is it?" I ask carefully, my voice as small as a pin.

"Yeah, that's the problem," she says, turning the box around. "The owner gets boxes like this from an auction in town, I think, and if they're upstairs it means they haven't been priced yet." She smiles. "I probably shouldn't have shown it to you at all. Can you come back tomorrow when she's in?"

"Not really...," I start to say.

Ideas beam through my mind like cosmic rays. Shall I tell her I'm not from around here and ask her to ring the owner now? No. The owner clearly doesn't know that the book is here. I don't want to take the risk that she will have heard of it and then refuse to sell it to me—or try to charge thousands of pounds. What can I say to make her give me the book? Seconds pass. The girl seems to be picking up the phone on the desk.

"I'll just give my friend a ring," she says. "I'll find out what to do."

While she waits for the call to connect I glance into the box. It's unbelievable, but there are other Lumas books there, and a couple of Derrida translations that I don't have, as well as what looks like a first edition of Eureka! by Edgar Allan Poe. How did these texts end up in a box together? I can't imagine anyone connecting them, unless it was for a project similar to my Ph.D. Could someone else be working on the same thing? Unlikely, especially if they have given the books away. But who would give these books away? I feel as though I'm looking at Paley's watch. It's as if someone put this box together just to appeal to me.

"Yeah," the girl is saying to her friend. "It's like a small box. Upstairs. Yeah, in that pile in the toilet. Um ... looks like a mix of old and new. Some of the old ones are a bit musty and stuff. Paperbacks, I think..." She looks into the box and pulls out a couple of the Derrida books. I nod at her. "Yeah, just a real mix. Oh, do you? Cool. Yeah. Fifty quid? Seriously? That's a lot. OK, I'll ask her. Yeah. Sorry. OK. See you later."

She puts the phone down and smiles at me. "Well," she says. "There's good news and bad news. The good news is that you can have the whole box if you want, but the bad news is that I can't sell individual books from the box, so it's all or nothing really. Sam says she bought the box herself from an auction, and the owner hasn't even seen it yet. But apparently she's already said she hasn't got the space to shelve loads more stuff ... But the other bad news is that the whole box is going to cost fifty pounds. So..."

"I'll take it," I say.

"Seriously? You'd spend that on a box of books?" She smiles and shrugs. "Well, OK. I guess that's fifty pounds, then, please."

My hands shake as I get my purse out of my bag, pull out three crumpled ten-pound notes and a twenty and hand them over. I don't stop to consider that this is almost the only money I have in the world, and that I am not going to be able to afford to eat for the next three weeks. I don't actually care about anything apart from being able to walk out of this shop with The End of Mr. Y, without someone realizing or remembering and trying to stop me. My heart is doing something impossible. Will I collapse and die of shock before I've even had a chance to read the first line of the book? Shit, shit, shit.

"Fantastic, thanks. Sorry it was so much," the girl says to me.

"No problem," I manage to say back. "I need a lot of these for my Ph.D., anyway."

I place The End of Mr. Y in my rucksack, safe, and then I pick up the box and walk out of the shop, clutching it to me as I make my way home in the dark, the cold stinging my eyes, completely unable to make sense of what has just happened.

Chapter Two

By the time I get to my flat it's almost half past five. Most of the shops on the street are starting to close, but the newsagent opposite glows with people stopping for a paper or a packet of cigarettes on their way home from work. The pizza restaurant underneath my flat is still dark, but I know that the owner, Luigi, will be somewhere in there, doing whatever needs to be done so that the place can open at seven. Next door the lights are out in the fancy-dress shop, but there's a soft light upstairs in the Café Paradis, which doesn't close until six. Behind the shops, a commuter train clatters slowly along the brittle old lines and lights flash on the level crossing at the end of the road.

The concrete passageway that leads to the stairs up to my front door is cold, as usual, and dark. There is no bicycle, which means that Wolfgang, my neighbor, isn't in. I don't know how he gets warm in his place (although I think the huge amount of slivovitz that he drinks probably helps) but in mine it's a struggle. I've no idea when the two flats were constructed, but they are both too large, with high ceilings and long, echoey corridors. Central heating would be wonderful, but the landlord won't put it in. Before I take my coat off, I put the box of books and my rucksack down on the large oak kitchen table, switch on my lamps, and then drag the space heater down the hall from the bedroom and plug it in, watching its two metal bars blush dimly (and, it always seems to me, apologetically). Then I light the gas oven and all the rings on the cooktop. I close the kitchen door and only then take off my outdoor things.

I'm shivering, but not just from the cold. I take The End of Mr. Y carefully out of my bag and put it down on the table. It seems wrong, somehow, sitting there next to the box of other books and my coffee cup from this morning, so I move the box of books and put the coffee cup in the sink. Now the book is alone on the table. I pick it up and run my hand over it, feeling the coolness of the cream cloth cover. I turn it over and touch the back, as if it might feel different from the front; then I put it down again, my pulse going like ticker tape. I fill my little espresso maker and put it on one of the blazing gas rings, and then I pour out half a glass of the slivovitz Wolfgang gave me and down it in two gulps.

While the coffee heats up I check the mousetraps. Both Wolfgang and I have mice in our flats. He talks about getting a cat; I have these traps. They don't kill the mice; they just hold them for a while in a small plastic oblong until I find them and release them. I don't think the system works: I put the mice outside and then they come straight back in, but I couldn't kill them. Today there are three mice looking bored and pissed off in their little see-through prisons, and I take them downstairs and release them into the courtyard. I didn't think I'd mind having mice in the flat but they do eat everything, and one time one ran over my face while I was lying in bed.

When I get back upstairs, I take four large potatoes from the box in the vegetable rack and wash them quickly before salting them and putting them in the oven on a low heat. That's about as much cooking as I can cope with now; and I'm not even hungry. My sofa is in the kitchen, since there's no point having it in the empty sitting room, where there is no heat. So, as the room starts to steam up and fill with the smell of baking potatoes, I finally take off my trainers and curl up on it with my coffee, a packet of ginseng cigarettes, and The End of Mr. Y. And then I read the opening line of the preface, first in my head, and then aloud, as another train rattles along outside: The discourse which follows may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed.

I don't die. But then I didn't really expect to. How could a book be cursed, anyway? The words themselves—which I don't take in properly at first—simply seem like miracles. Just the fact that they are there, that they still exist, printed in black type on rough-cut pages that are brown with age; this is the thing that amazes me. I can't imagine how many other hands have touched this page, or how many pairs of eyes have seen it. It was published in 1893, and then what happened? Did anyone actually read it? By the time he wrote The End of Mr. Y, Lumas was already an obscure writer. He'd been notorious for a while in the 1860s, and people had known his name, but then everyone lost interest in him and decided he was mad, or a crank. On one occasion he turned up at the place in Yorkshire where Charles Darwin was receiving what he called his "water cure": He said something rude about barnacles, and then punched Darwin in the face. This was in 1859. After that, he seemed to retreat into ever more esoteric activities, visiting mediums, exploring paranormal events, and becoming a patron of the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital. After about 1880, he seemed to stop publishing. Then he wrote The End of Mr. Y and died the day after it was published, after everyone else who'd had something major to do with the book (the publisher, the editor, the typesetter) had also died. Thus the rumored "curse."

But there may have been other reasons for the idea of the curse. Lumas was an outlaw. He favored the evolutionary biologist Lamarck (who said that organisms pass on learned characteristics to their offspring) over Darwin (who said they don't), when even people like Samuel Butler—once described by someone as "the greatest shit-stirrer of the nineteenth century"—were coming around to the idea that we are all, actually, Darwinian mutants. He wrote letters to the Times criticizing not only his contemporaries, but every major figure in the history of thought, including Aristotle and Bacon. Lumas became very interested in the existence of a fourth spatial dimension and wrote various supernatural stories about it, somehow managing to upset people who did not believe in the existence of another dimension. His response was: "But they are merely stories!" although everyone knew that he used his fiction mainly as a way of working out his philosophical ideas. Most of his ideas were about the development and nature of thought, particularly scientific thought, and he often described his fictional works as "experiments of the mind."

One of his most interesting stories, "The Blue Room," tells of two philosophers who attend a party in a mansion. Somehow they get lost on their way to play billiards with the host, and end up in a blue room in the (supposedly) haunted wing of the house. This room has two doors, on its north and south walls, and a spiral staircase in the middle. One of the philosophers says they should go up the stairs, but the other thinks they should leave via one of the doors. They can't reach an agreement, and instead end up speculating about the existence of ghosts. The first one argues that, as there are no such things as ghosts, they have nothing to fear. The second agrees that there is nothing to fear: He has never seen a ghost, and therefore has concluded that they don't exist. Satisfied that there are no ghosts, and enthused by their agreement, the philosophers leave the room via the door they came in and try to make their way back to the party. However, the blue wing of the house seems to be arranged in a peculiar way. Once they leave the room they find a corridor leading to a spiral staircase. When they go down it, they end up back in the blue room. When they try the other door, the same thing happens. But when they go up the staircase, they simply find one of the doors. Whichever way they go, they end up back in the blue room.

There have been a few academic papers written about Lumas as a historical figure, and maybe ten about his novel, The Apple in the Garden. There have been no biographies. Back in the 1990s, a couple of Californian queer theorists claimed him, or at least his Journals, in which one can find, among other things, half-finished homoerotic sonnets about some of Shakespeare's male characters. But I don't know what happened to the queer theorists. Perhaps they lost interest in Lumas. Most people do. As far as I know, hardly anything has ever been written about The End of Mr. Y. What has been written has all been by Saul Burlem.

"The Curse of Mr. Y" was the subject of Burlem's paper at the conference in Greenwich eighteen months ago, delivered to an audience of four people, including me. Burlem hadn't then read The End of Mr. Y, but instead talked about the probable invention of the "curse" story. He had a rough, sandpaper voice, and a slight stoop that somehow wasn't unattractive. He talked about the idea of the curse as if it were a virus, and discussed Lumas's body of work as if it were an organism attacked by this virus, destined, perhaps, to become extinct. He talked about information becoming contaminated by unpopularity, and eventually concluded that Lumas's book had indeed been cursed, not in a supernatural sense, but by the opinions of people who wanted him discredited.

There was a reception afterwards, in the Painted Hall. It was packed in there: A popular scientist had been giving a talk at the same time as Burlem, and he was holding court in the large Lower Hall, underneath an image of Copernicus. I had considered going to his talk instead, but I was glad I'd chosen Burlem's. The other people from Burlem's talk—two guys who looked a bit like a pair of tax inspectors except for their almost white-blond hair, and a fiftyish woman with pink-streaked gray hair—hadn't hung around, so Burlem and I started on the red wine, drinking too fast, hiding away in the far corner of the Upper Hall. Burlem was wearing a long gray wool trench coat over his black shirt and trousers. I can't remember what I was wearing.

"So would you read it, then?" I asked him, referring, of course, to The End of Mr. Y.

"Of course," he said, with his odd smile. "Would you?"

"Absolutely. Especially after this."

"Good," he said.

Burlem didn't seem to know anyone in the Lower Hall, and neither did I. Neither of us attempted to leave our corner and mingle: I'm not very good at it and often offend people by accident; I don't know what Burlem's reason was—maybe he just hadn't been offended by me yet. The whole time I was in the Painted Hall I felt a bit like part of a huge box of chocolates, with the browns, creams, golds, and reds of the vast paintings seeming to melt around me. Perhaps Burlem and I were the hard centres that no one was interested in. No one else came to the Upper Hall the whole time we were there.

"I can't believe more people didn't come to your talk," I said.

"No one knows Lumas exists," he said. "I'm used to it."

"I suppose you were up against Mr. Famous, as well," I said.

Burlem smiled. "Jim Lahiri. He's probably never heard of Lumas, either."

"No," I agreed. I'd read Lahiri's best-selling popular science book about the end of time, and knew he wouldn't approve of Lumas even if he had heard of him. Popular science can say some pretty wild things these days, but the supernatural is still out, as is Lamarck. You can have as many dimensions as you want, as long as none of them contains ghosts, telepathy, anything that fucks with Charles Darwin, or anything that Hitler liked (apart from Charles Darwin).

Burlem picked up the bottle of wine, refilled both our glasses, and then frowned at me. "So why are you here? Are you a student? If you're working on Lumas I should probably know who you are."

"I'm not working on Lumas," I said. "I write these little articles for a magazine called Smoke. You may not have heard of it. I'll probably write one on Lumas after this, but I don't think that counts as 'working on' in your sense." I paused, but Burlem didn't say anything. "He's a great person to write about, though, even on a small scale. His stuff's pretty compulsive. I mean, even without the controversies and the curse it's still amazing."

"It is," said Burlem. "That's why I'm working on a biography." After he said the word "biography," he looked first at the ground, and then up at the painted ceiling high above our heads. I must have been frowning or something, because when he looked back at me he smiled in a crooked, apologetic way. "I hate biography," he said.

I laughed. "So why are you writing one?"

He shrugged. "Lumas got me hooked. The only way to write about his texts seems to be to write a biography of his life. It might sell. There's a vogue for digging up these nineteenth-century eccentrics at the moment and I might as well cash in on it. The department could do with some funding. I could do with some bloody funding."

"The department?"

"Of English and American Studies." He told me the name of the university.

"Have you started on it?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Yeah. Unfortunately there's only one biographical detail about Lumas that really does it for me."

"The punch?" I suggested, thinking of Darwin, imagining, for some reason, a huge splashing sound as he fell over after Lumas hit him.

"No." He looked up at the ceiling again. "Have you read Samuel Butler at all?"

"Oh yes," I nodded. "Yes—that's actually how I came to read Lumas. There was a reference in Butler's Note-books."

"You were reading Butler's Note-books?"

"Yeah. I like all the stuff about the sugared Hamlets."

Actually, what I like about Butler is the same thing I like about Lumas: the outlaw status and the brilliant ideas. Butler's big thing was consciousness; he thought it was very likely that machines would become conscious and, probably, take over the world. He said that since we evolved from organic, unconscious vegetable matter, our consciousness must at some point have emerged from nothing. If we had become conscious out of nowhere, then why couldn't machines? I'd written about that in the magazine only a couple of weeks before.

"Sugared Hamlets?" said Burlem.

"Yeah. These sweets they were selling in London. Little sweets in the shape of Hamlet holding a skull, dipped in sugar. How great is that?"

Burlem laughed. "I bet Butler thought that was hilarious."

"Yeah. That's why I like him. I like his sense of the absurd."

"So presumably you know the rumors about him and Lumas?"

"No. What rumors?"

"That they were lovers; or at least that Lumas was infatuated with Butler."

"I had no idea," I said. Then I smiled. "Does it matter?"

"Probably not. But it leads to the biographical detail I'm most interested in."

"Which is?"

"Have you read The Authoress of the Odyssey?"

"No." I shook my head. " The Authoress ...?"

"You must read it. It's Butler arguing that the Odyssey was written by a woman. It's fucking brilliant." Burlem ran his hand through his hair and went on: "Butler published his own translation of the Odyssey alongside it, with some black-and-white plates showing photographs he took of old coins, and landscapes relevant to the Odyssey. One of the landscapes, supposedly the basis for the tidal inlet up which Ulysses swam, has a man and a dog in the distance. In the introduction to the book, Butler goes out of his way to apologize for this, and to say that they only appeared when he developed the negative; that they weren't supposed to be there."

"Wow," I said, not sure where this was leading. "So..."

"The man in the picture is Lumas. I'm sure of it."

"How do you know?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if they travelled together. But the way the man appears in the developed photograph, previously unseen ... You can't see the figure well enough to tell who it is but ... What if it was Lumas? What if it was even his ghost, but before he was dead? I may be a little drunk. Sorry. He had a dog, though, called Erasmus."

At this point Burlem did a jerky thing with his head, as if he was trying to get water out of one of his ears. He frowned, as if considering a difficult question, and then made another face, suggesting that maybe the question didn't matter, anyway. Then he raised an eyebrow, smiled, walked over to the table, and got another bottle of wine. While he did that, I looked at the vast image beyond him, painted on the back wall. The scene showed what seemed to be a king descending from heaven, alighting on some reddish, carpeted stairs. The stairs almost appeared to be part of the room rather than the painting, and the figures in the image looked like they might be using them to step into reality; into the present.

"Lumas can drive you a bit crazy," he said, when he returned.

"I like the idea of the photograph, though," I said. "It reminds me of that story of his, The Daguerreotype."

"You've read that?"

I nodded. "Yeah. I think it's my favorite."

"How on earth did you get hold of it?"

"I got that one on eBay. It was in a collection. I've got almost all of Lumas's books apart from The End of Mr. Y. I found a lot of them on secondhand book sites."

"And this is all for a magazine article?"

"Yeah. I do it pretty intensively. For a month I'll live and breathe, say, Samuel Butler. Then I'll find some link from him to take me to the next piece. The column is called Free Association. I started with the big bang about three years ago."

Burlem laughs. "And what did that lead to?"

"The properties of hydrogen, the speed of light, relativity, quantum mechanics, probability theory, Schrödinger's cat, the wavefunction, light, the luminiferous ether—which is my personal favorite—experiment, paradox..."

"So you're a scientist? You understand all that stuff?"

I laughed. "God no. Not at all. I wish I did. I probably shouldn't have started with the big bang, but when you do, that's what you get. At some point I went from artificial intelligence to Butler, and now here I am with Lumas. While I'm working on him I'll probably decide on what link I'm going to follow through next so I can order all the books. I might do something about the history of photography, actually, following through from The Daguerreotype. Or I might follow it through to the fourth dimension, and that Zollner book, although that takes me back to science again."

In The Daguerreotype, a man wakes up to find a copy of his house in a park across the road, with a large group of people gathered around it. Where has the house come from? People immediately accuse the man of losing his mind and arranging to have a copy of his house built in the park overnight. He points out that this is impossible. Who could have a whole house built overnight? Also, the house in the park does not seem new. It is in fact an exact copy of the "real" house, down to some scuffing on the door panels, and some tarnish on the brass knocker. The only thing that's different is that his key doesn't work, and the keyhole seems to be blocked by something. The man initially tries to ignore the house, but soon it takes over his life and he has to try to work out where it has come from. Because of the house in the park he loses his job as a teacher, and his fiancée runs off with someone else. The police also become involved and accuse the man of all sorts of crimes. The house has some strange properties as well, the main one being that no one can get into it. It is possible to look through the windows at the things inside: a table, a vase of flowers, a bureau, a piano; but no one can smash the windows or break down the door. The house behaves like a solid shape, as if it had no space inside.

One day, when the man in the story has almost lost his wits, a mysterious old man comes to his (real) house with a box full of equipment. He tells the man that he has heard of his predicament and thinks he knows what has happened. He takes out a velvet-lined folding case and explains to the man about the daguerreotype, and how it works. The man is initially impatient. Everyone knows how daguerreotypes work! But then his visitor makes an impossible claim. If humans, three-dimensional beings, can create two-dimensional versions of the things around us, would it be too impossible to assume that four-dimensional beings could make something like a daguerreotype machine of their own, but one that produces not flat, two-dimensional copies of things, but three-dimensional ones?

The man is angry and throws the photographer out of the house, thinking that there must be another explanation. However, he is unable to find one and later comes to the conclusion that his visitor must have been right. He finds the man's card and resolves to call on him immediately. But when the maid lets him into the man's house, he finds something very strange. The photographer seems to be standing in the drawing room, holding the daguerreotype machine. But it's not the real man; it's a lifeless copy.

"You know what I love about The Daguerreotype?" Burlem said.

"What?"

"The unresolved ending. I like it that the man never does find his answer."

Up until that moment there had been no music in the Painted Hall, just the crackle of voices and laughter echoing around the large rooms. But someone must have remembered that they were supposed to have music on, and the first heavy notes of Handel's Dixit Dominus seeped into the hall, followed by the first line, with all the choral voices tumbling over themselves: Dixit Dominus Domino meo, sede a dextris meis.

"So," Burlem said, raising his voice over the music, "you work full time at this magazine, then?"

"No. I just write my column every month."

"Is that all you do?"

"For the moment, yes."

"Can you live on that?"

"Just about. The magazine's doing pretty well. I can afford my rent, and a few bags of lentils every month. And some books, too, of course."

The magazine started as a small thing, edited by this woman I met at university. Now there's a distribution deal and it's given away in every big record shop in the country. It has proper advertising now, and a designer who doesn't use glue to put the layouts together.

"What did you do at university? Not science, I take it."

"No. English lit and philosophy. But I am seriously thinking of going back to do science. I think I'm probably going to apply to do theoretical physics." I explained that I wanted to be able to actually understand things like relativity, and Schrödinger's cat, and that I wanted to try to revive the dear old ether. I think I was feeling a bit drunk, so I wittered on about the luminiferous ether for some time. Burlem was familiar with it—it turned out that he ran the nineteenth-century Literature and Science MA at the university—but I still went on at length about how fascinating it was that for ages people couldn't work out how light could travel in a vacuum, considering that sound couldn't (you can see a bell in a vacuum, but you can't hear it go ding). In the nineteenth century people believed that light travelled through something invisible—the luminiferous ether. In 1887 Albert Michelson and Edward Morley set out to prove that the ether existed, but in the end they had to conclude that it didn't. While talking to Burlem I couldn't, of course, remember the date of this experiment, or the names of the scientists, but I did remember the way Michelson referred to the lost object of his experiment as the "beloved old ether, which is now abandoned, though I personally still cling a little to it." I got a bit excited about how much poetry there was in theoretical physics, and then I went on for a bit about how much I like institutions: especially ones with big libraries.

And then Burlem interrupted and said: "Don't do that. Fuck theoretical physics. Come and do a Ph.D. with me. I'm assuming you don't already have one?"

It was the way he said it. Fuck theoretical physics.

"What would I do it on?" I said.

"What are you interested in?"

I laughed. "Everything?" I shrugged. "I think that's my problem. I want to know everything." I must have been drunk to admit that. At least I didn't go further and say that I want to know everything because of the high probability that if you know everything, there'll be something to actually believe in.

"Come on," Burlem said. "What's your thing?"

"My thing?"

He took a gulp of wine. "Yeah."

"I don't think I know what my thing is, yet. That's the whole point of the magazine column. It's about free association. I'm good at that."

"So you start at the big bang and work your way through science until you end up at Lumas. There must be a connection between all the things you've written about."

I sipped some more wine. "Lumas's ideas about the fourth dimension are particularly interesting. I mean, he didn't exactly preempt string theory, but..."

"What's string theory?"

I shrugged. "Don't ask me. That's why I want to do theoretical physics. At least, I think I do."

Burlem laughed. "For fuck's sake. Come on. Find the connection."

I thought for a moment. "I suppose almost everything I've written about has had some connection with thought experiments, or 'experiments of the mind,' as Lumas called them."

"Good. And?"

"Um. I don't know. But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics but using metaphors instead. That's how I've been approaching all my columns. For each of these ideas and theories, you find there's a little story that goes with it."

"Interesting. Give me an example."

"Well, there's Schrödinger's cat, of course. Everyone can understand that a cat in a box can't be alive and dead at the same time—but hardly anyone can understand the same principle expressed mathematically. Then there are Einstein's trains. All of his thoughts about special relativity seem to have been expressed in terms of trains. I love that. And whenever people want to understand the fourth dimension nowadays, they still go back to Flatland, which was written in 1880-whatever. I suppose you can look at Butler that way, too. Erewhon is basically a thought experiment intended to work out ideas about society and machines."

"So write a proposal. Do a Ph.D. on these experiments of the mind: I'd be very interested in supervising that. Work in some more novels and poetry. I'd recommend looking at Thomas Hardy and Tennyson, as well. Make sure you don't get too carried away. Set a time frame, or some other sort of limit. Don't do a history of thought experiments from the beginning of time. Do, say, 1859 to 1939 or something. Start with Darwin and end with, I don't know, the atom bomb."

"Or Schrödinger's cat. I think that was in the thirties. The bomb is too real; I mean, it's where the thought experiment becomes reality, really."

"Maybe." Burlem ran his hand over the stubble on his face. "So, anyway, what do you think? I reckon we could sign you up pretty easily. You have an MA?"

"Yeah."

"Superb. So let's do it. I can get you some teaching as well, if you want."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously." Burlem gave me his card. At the top it had his name in bold, and then: PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

So I wrote the proposal and fell in love with my idea. But then ... I don't know. When I went to start working with Burlem, he seemed to have gone cold on the idea of Lumas. My proposal had been accepted, of course—I was planning to look at the language and form of thought experiments, from Zoonomia to Schrödinger's cat—and everything was fine with Burlem until I mentioned Lumas. When I did, he stopped making eye contact with me. He looked out of the window, now my window, and said nothing. I made some joke relating to our conversation at the conference; something like "So, has the curse claimed any more victims, then?" and he looked at me and said, "Forget that paper, OK? Leave Lumas until later." He recommended that I start by focusing on the actual thought experiments: Schrödinger's cat, Einstein's Relativity, and Edwin A. Abbot's book Flatland. He also persuaded me to leave out Zoonomia, Charles Darwin's grandfather's book about evolution, and begin later, in 1859, when The Origin of Species was published. He also reminded me to look at some more poetry. I had no idea what was wrong with him, but I went along with it all. And then, a week later, he was gone.

So now here I am, unsupervised, like an experiment with no observer—Fleming's plate of mold, perhaps, or an uncollapsed wavefunction—and what am I doing? I'm reading Lumas. I'm reading The End of Mr. Y, for God's sake. Fuck you, Burlem.

Chapter Three

THE DISCOURSE WHICH FOLLOWS may appear to the reader as mere fancy or as a dream, penned on waking, in those fevered moments when one is still mesmerised by those conjuring tricks that are produced in the mind once the eyes are closed. Those readers should not abandon their scepticism, for it is their will to seek to peer behind the conjurer's curtain, as it is the will of man to ask those peculiar whats and wheres and hows of life. Of life, as of dreams. Of image, as of word. As thought, as of speech.

When one looks at the illusions of the world, one sees only the world. For where does illusion end? Indeed, what is there in life that is not a conjuring trick? From the petrifactions that men find on the seashore to the Geissler tube recently seen at the Royal society, all about us seems filled with fancies and wonders. As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond ; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity. We may ask what illusion is, and what form may it take, when it is so easy to dive into its depths, like a fish into a pool, and when the ripples that emerge are not ripples of illusion nor ripples of reality but indeed the ripples made by the collision of both worlds ; the world of the conjuror and the world of His audience.

Perhaps I mislead the reader by talking of the Conjuror in this manner. Let the creator become curator! And we creatures who live on in the dreams of a world made of our own thought ; as we name the beasts and barnacles who creep on and cling to this most precious and mysterious earth ; as we collect them in our museums, we believe ourselves curators. What folly takes light through ether to each eye from every horizon. And beyond this is not truth but what we have made truth ; yet this is a truth we cannot see.

Can this place—this place where dreams and automata are one, where the very fibres of being are conjured from memories no more real or unreal than the dream in which we may observe them, and fish with noses and jaws and skin made only of thought play on the surface of the pooled fancies of our maker—can this place be real, created as it is in Aristotle's metaphora? Indeed, for it is only in the logos of metaphora that we are to find the protasis of the past, that glorious illusion which we call memory, that curtain of destiny, drawn tightly over the conscious mind but present in every fibre of being, from sea-creature to man, from pebble to ocean, as Lamarck and E. Darwin have maintained. Can this place be real? Perhaps not. For this reason, it is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered.

T. E. Lumas, July 1892

I see ahead a time-wrought shore;

A fishing boat lifts on a wave;

No footprints on the sandy floor,

Beyond—an unfamiliar cave.

Or—forest tree'd with oak and yew

A dark mare waits to carry me,

Where nothing stirs yet all is true,

A cabin door and here—the key!

Perhaps I'll wander in a field,

With poppy-flush on carpet green:

However thought has been concealed

No sleeper's eye can now undream.

In any place that I take flight

The dark will mutate into light.

I finish reading the preface at about nine o'clock. It is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered. That's how the preface ends. What does that mean? Surely anyone would read a novel as fiction, anyway?

The main narrative begins with a businessman, Mr. Y, visiting a fair-ground in the rain. But I don't read properly now. Instead I skim the first couple of chapters, reading the odd sentence here and there. I like the first line: By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr Y. I keep flicking through the book until I reach the end (which, of course, I don't read), mainly just because I like the feel of the pages, and then I turn back to the first chapter. It's while I'm flicking backwards that I see it. There's a page missing from the book. Between the verso page 130 and the recto page 133 there is simply a jagged, paper edge. Pages 131 and 132, two sides of one folio page, are missing.

I don't quite believe it at first. Who would want to rip a page out of The End of Mr. Y like this? Is it simply vandalism? I carefully check the rest of the book. There are no other missing pages, nor any other obvious sign that somebody wanted to damage it. So why rip out a page? Did someone not like that page? Or did they steal it? But if you were going to steal a page from a book, why not steal the whole book? It's too confusing. I shiver, wishing it would heat up in here.

Downstairs, I hear the squeal of the main door that suggests that Wolfgang is back. Then, a few seconds later there's a soft tap at my door.

"It's open," I call, putting The End of Mr. Y away.

Wolfgang is small and blond and was born in East Berlin. I don't think he ever washes his hair. Today, he's wearing what he always wears when he plays at the hotel: a pair of pale blue jeans, a white shirt, and a dark blue suit jacket. When I first met Wolfgang, on the day I moved into this flat, he told me he was so depressed he couldn't even get the enthusiasm together to kill himself. I became worried and started doing small, life-enhancing things for him, such as making him soup and offering to bring him books from the university library. For ages he said yes to the soup and no to the books, but recently he's been asking me for poetry: Ginsberg and Bukowski mainly.

As Wolfgang walks into the flat, I keep thinking of Lumas's words: Of life, as of dreams. Shall I tell Wolfgang about the book? Perhaps later.

He grins at me sadly. "Oh, well. I'm rich in one universe. Are you cooking baked potatoes for me?"

The "rich in one universe" thing is something I told him. It's what the Russian physicist George Gamow said after he lost all his money in an American casino. It means that, as usual, Wolfgang has gambled his tips away in the hotel casino. In a parallel universe, perhaps, some other version of him has won thousands of pounds.

"Mmm," I say back. "Potatoes with..." I look around the kitchen. "Olive oil, salt. Um ... I think I've got an onion somewhere."

"Great," he says, sitting at the kitchen table and pouring some slivovitz. "Gourmet." This is a joke between us. Very gourmet is worse, and implies a meal costing almost nothing. (I can do something very gourmet with lentils; Wolfgang's very gourmet meals usually include fried cabbage.)

I open the oven and take out the potatoes. "I suppose you could say I'm rich in one universe, too," I say, through the steam and heat. I put the baking tray on the counter and smile at Wolfgang.

He raises a blond eyebrow at me. "You've gambled also?"

"No." I laugh. "I bought a book. I've got about five quid left until the magazine pays me at the end of the month. It was ... it was quite an expensive book."

"Is it a good book?"

"Yes. Oh yes..." But I still don't want to tell him about it just yet. I start slicing the onion. "Oh—the university fell down today as well."

"It fell down?" He laughs. "You blew it up? No. How?"

"OK, well, it didn't exactly all fall down, but one building did."

"A bomb?"

"No. A railway tunnel. Under the campus. It all kind of collapsed inside, and then..."

Wolfgang downs his drink and pours another. "Yes, I see. You build something on nothing and then it falls down. Ha." He laughs. "How many dead?"

"None. They evacuated the building in the morning."

"Oh. So is the university shut down?"

"I don't know. I suppose it must be, at least for the weekend."

I mash olive oil into the potatoes and put them on the table with some olives, capers, and mustard. We sit down to eat.

"So how's life, anyway?" I ask him.

"Life's shit. No money. Too many mice. But I've got my afternoon shifts back."

"Fantastic," I say. "What happened to Whatshername?"

A few months ago some talented kid came along and took some of Wolfgang's shifts. From her point of view the narrative must have been exciting: Teenage girl gets life-changing opportunity playing piano in public. But it meant that Wolfgang couldn't pay his rent and his bills, so he stopped paying his bills.

"Pony accident."

I smile while he fills in the details. I'm not really listening; I'm thinking about the book.

"Oh ... Wolf?" I say, once we've finished eating.

"What?"

"Do you believe in curses?"

He looks at me with his head slightly tilted to one side. "Curses? Of what sort?"

"Like a cursed object. Can something be cursed?"

"Now that's interesting," he says. "You could argue that everything is cursed."

I had a feeling he'd approach the question from this angle. "Yes, but..."

He pours more slivovitz. I get up to sort out some coffee.

"Or you might ask why curses even exist. What is their purpose? I've been wondering this myself for a long time, ever since I first saw Wagner with Catherine."

Wolf has a girlfriend who is aiming to "improve" him by taking him to the opera.

"I suppose maybe we have to start by defining 'curse,'" I say. "Is it a word or a thing?"

Wolfgang groans. He's had enough conversations with me before that have started in this way. We usually get into an argument about Derrida and différance.

"Stop. Please. Don't start hurting me with your French deconstruction. Just pretend for a minute that there is something called a curse and it exists and it is a thing. Where does it come from? That's what we need to ask."

"Do we?"

"Yes. Is it something magical, or is it a prophecy that comes true because you make it come true? Or is it even just nothing at all, just a way of explaining bad things that happen to us that are actually random. I may ask: Why do I have an infestation of mice? Did someone curse me? Or did I just leave too much food out one day to tempt them? Or is life just as simple as there are mice?"

I light a cigarette. "I found three today."

"Three what? Curses?"

I laugh. "No. That would be very unlucky. No. Three mice."

"And you put them where? Not in the corridor again?"

"No. Outside. In Luigi's backyard."

Wolf starts talking again about getting a cat. After a few minutes the coffeepot hisses and I pour the coffee.

"Anyway," he says, exhaling slowly as I put the cup in front of him. "This is what I am wondering about curses: Can they exist if we don't believe in them?"

I laugh. "How is that different from what I was saying?"

"It's simpler."

"Not if you think it through."

As Wolf starts talking about voodoo curses, and how they only work on people who believe in voodoo, I imagine something like a Möbius strip, the shape you get if you glue together a long strip of paper with one twist in it. You could be walking along one side of this strip quite happily forever, without ever realizing that, in a strange kind of way, you kept changing "sides." Just as this world once seemed flat, so your world would seem flat. You could walk forever and not realize that you kept going back to the beginning and starting again. Even with the twist, you wouldn't know. Your reality would change, but as far as you were concerned, you'd just be walking on a flat path. If this Möbius strip was a spatial dimension, your whole body would flip when you travelled past the twist and your heart would be on the right side of your body for a while until you looped back. I learned this from one of the physics lectures I downloaded onto my iPod. At Christmas I made myself some paper chains that were all Möbius strips. I prepared to stay in on my own all day reading and drinking wine; then Wolf came round with a huge, misshaped plum pudding and we spent the rest of the day together.

"What if it isn't people who make curses?" I say.

"Ha," says Wolf. "You think curses are made by gods."

"No, of course not. It's just a hypothetical question. Can something be created in language independently of the people who use the language? Can language become a self-replicating system or..." I'm drunk, I suddenly realize, so I shut up. But I do wonder for a moment about this idea, that something could emerge within language—an accident, or mistake, perhaps—and the users of that language would then have to deal with the consequences of this new word being part of their system of signification. I vaguely remember some radio documentary about the Holy Grail suggesting that the whole thing was just a mistake: a wrongly used word in an old French text.

We sit in silence for a while, and a train goes past outside. Then I start to clear the plates away while Wolfgang finishes his coffee.

"So anyway," I say to him, "you haven't said whether or not you do."

"Whether I do what?"

"Whether you actually believe in curses, or cursed objects."

"It's not whether something is cursed that's important," he says. "You have to find out why it is cursed, and what the curse is. Let me wash up."

"OK."

Wolf gets up, walks over to the sink, and squirts about half the carton of washing-up liquid over the plates. Then he runs the hot tap, swears a bit because the water never gets as hot as he likes, and eventually boils the kettle and tips its contents all over the dishes. I'm thinking about whether or not to show him The End of Mr. Y. In the end I decide that I won't. Before he leaves he gives me a look, as if his eyes are made of electricity, and he says: "You do have something, don't you? Something you think is cursed."

"I don't know," I say back. "Probably not. I'm probably just feeling a bit weird after today, with the university collapsing, and after all this cold and too much of your bloody slivovitz, and..."

"Show me anytime you like," he says. "My life can't get any worse. Don't worry about protecting me."

"Thanks," I say. But... Shit. What's happened to me? The last thing I'd thought of was protecting Wolf. I just wanted to keep the book to myself and, if I'm honest, stop him stealing it. As I go to sleep, with a dry mouth, and The End of Mr. Y under my other, empty pillow, I wonder if curses exist after all.

Chapter Four

Sometimes I wake up with such an immense sense of disappointment that I can hardly breathe. Usually nothing has obviously triggered it and I put it down to some combination of an unhappy childhood and bad dreams (those two things go very well together). And most times I can shake it off pretty quickly. After all, there's not much for me to be disappointed about. So I never got any of the publishing jobs I went for after university? Who cares. That was ten years ago and I'm happy with my magazine column, anyway. And I don't really care that my mother ran away with a bunch of freaks and my father lives in a hostel up north and my sister doesn't even send me Christmas cards anymore. I don't care that my ex-housemates all got married and left me on my own. I like being on my own; that wasn't the problem—I just couldn't afford to do it in the big house in Hackney that seemed to sprout empty rooms like baby universes. Coming here has meant that I have been able to just get on with being on my own and reading my books, so it's hardly as if I have anything to be sad or disappointed about.

Sometimes I like to think that I live with ghosts. Not from my own past—I don't believe in those sorts of ghosts—but wispy bits of ideas and books that hang in the air like silk puppets. Sometimes I think I see my own ideas floating around, too, but they usually don't last long. They're more like mayflies: They're born, big and gleaming, and then they fly around, buzzing like crazy before they simply fall to the floor, dead, about twenty-four hours later. I'm not sure I've ever thought anything original anyway, so I don't mind. Usually I find that Derrida has already thought of whatever it is, which seems like a very grand thing to say—but actually Derrida's not that hard; it's just his writing that's dense. And now he's a ghost, too. Or perhaps he always was—I never met him, so how can I be sure he was real? Some of the most friendly ghosts I live with are those of my favorite nineteenth-century science writers. Most of them were wrong, of course, but who cares? It's not like this is the end of history. We're all wrong.

Sometimes I try my own thought experiment, which goes as follows: What if everyone is actually right? Aristotle and Plato; David and Goliath; Hobbes and Locke; Hitler and Gandhi; Tom and Jerry. Could that ever make sense? And then I think about my mother and I think that no, not everyone is right. To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, she wasn't even wrong. Maybe that's where human society is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century: not even wrong. The nineteenth-century crowd were wrong, on the whole, but we're somehow doing worse than that. We're now living with the uncertainty principle and the incompleteness theorem and philosophers who say that the world has become a simulacrum—a copy without an original. We live in a world where nothing may be real; a world of infinite closed systems, and particles that could be doing anything you like (but probably aren't).

Maybe we're all like my mother. I don't like to think about her, or my childhood, too much, but it can be summed up fairly quickly. We lived on a council estate where reading books was seen as the most disgusting combination of laziness and hubris and only my mother and I—as far as I know—had library cards. While the other kids had sex with each other (from about eight years old) and the other adults drank, gambled, bred violent dogs and mangy cats, and thought up ways to get rich and famous, my mother occasionally took me to the library and left me in the kids' area while she researched the meaning of life via books on astrology, faith healing, and telepathy. If it hadn't been for her I probably wouldn't have even known that libraries existed. That's the only good thing she ever did for me. At night she used to sit downstairs in her pink dressing gown waiting for aliens, while my dad would take me to the park and photograph me picking up aluminium benches and writing graffiti on the walls of the subway—so he could send the pictures to the local paper as proof that the council was losing the war against hooligans. My father, who was at his best when approximately 50 percent sober, and used to buy me toy cars and football stickers, believed everything was a government conspiracy. My mother believed that the conspiracy went higher than that. They taught me that everything you are told by anyone is a lie. But then it turned out that they lied, too.

It's not that I didn't enjoy hanging around with the other kids, playing chicken in the main road, stealing rich children's bikes, setting fire to things, and letting the older boys grope me for ten pence a go. In fact, I got pretty rich on the money and was eventually able to buy a bike that didn't have to be given back or dumped in the river. After that I gave up sex and rode to the library every day. That was when I got into the habit of binge-reading. It's easy to do when you spend hours of every day surrounded by more books than you can ever read. You start one, but you're distracted by the idea that you could, equally, have started a different one. By the end of the day you've skimmed two and started four and read the ends of about seven. You can read your way through a library like that without ever properly finishing any of the books. I did finish novels, though. But I wasn't one of those kids who read Tolstoy. I read the kinds of adult books that they didn't let you actually borrow.

The grammar school started off feeling sorry for me, with my secondhand uniform and my weird hair. But (thanks, Mum; thanks, Dad) I wasn't allowed to attend assembly and never believed anything I was taught, which made me stand out as one of the "difficult" children. I also had to do my own laundry after I was about thirteen, and usually I didn't bother. The other kids didn't care that my shirt collars were grubby, or that my too-short skirt hadn't been ironed in weeks. But the teachers would occasionally take me to one side and say things like "Maybe you could mention to your mother that school uniform should be..." My mother? You could communicate with her, in theory, but only if you had a CB radio and could do a convincing impression of something from outer space.

So I did what you'd expect and ran away to university as soon as I could. But I couldn't even do that properly. I expect that someone in my position should have sat on a coach quietly reading Jane Eyre and occasionally sobbing into a handkerchief as she considered the nasty stains on her life. I drove down the M4 to Oxford in a car with no tax disc, stopping on the way to have a torrid weekend affair with a biker, get a tattoo, and have my broken tooth replaced with a silver one.

I sit up in bed slowly, feeling the disappointment trickle away like puddles after a rain shower. I have an old coffee-making alarm clock that I got from a jumble sale, so I'm able to lie in bed sipping thick black coffee while this happens and the fog of sleep and slivovitz hangover slowly thins out. I think it's fair to say I hate mornings. I hate the honesty of the morning; the time before your consciousness switches on the light and gets rid of all the nasty shadows. Yuck. But my coffee's OK.

The End of Mr. Y. I take it out from under my pillow and slowly start reading from the beginning of the main narrative. I read the first line several times: By the end I would be nobody, but in the beginning I was known as Mr. Y. Then I read on. The story begins with the protagonist, a respectable draper, on his way to Nottingham on the train. He has some business there the following morning. Once there, he can't help but notice that the annual Goose Fair has taken over the town, and, the following day, after his business is concluded, he happens to wander past it.

There was a persistent drizzle hanging over the town, as if it were being gently smothered by a damp veil. Having no previous experience of anything like the Goose Fair, I nevertheless willed myself to avoid what I felt certain would be the most diabolical sort of entertainment, and instead resolved to find a respectable establishment in which to take tea. However, I soon found myself drawn into the fair, as if by mesmerism. It comprised side-shows and stalls with several mechanical attractions, and, fringed by the ramshackle vehicles of its considerable staff of animal trainers, performers and penny-showmen, extended to the edges of the Market Square. Once within its perimeter, it felt somewhat as though I had entered another world, one perceptibly warmer, and, once under cover of the various tents and stalls, certainly drier than the one I had just left. Curiosity's crooked finger beckoned me further. A hand-bill, tacked to a post and flapping in the breeze, informed me of the appearance at the fair of Wombwell's Menagerie, and assured me that this was the Queen's favourite exhibition. Other gaudy posters alerted me to such spectacles as the Strange Girl, the Indian Snake Charmer, The Wonderful Talking Horse, a Beautiful Serpentine Dancer on a Rolling Globe with Lime-light Effects and Professor England's Performing Fleas, including an 'entirely new and original novelty' : The Funeral of the Flea.

The breeze reduced as I proceeded further into the fair, although the air seemed to darken and thicken despite the freshly illuminated naphtha lamps which hung from the openings to the tents, and which decorated the frontispieces of the various stalls. A glance upward confirmed the appearance of the darkest rain-cloud I had ever seen. Eager to escape a thorough drenching, I looked for a covered diversion. I soon came upon a waxwork exhibition, outside which stood figures of the most unhealthy complexion I have ever seen. This seemed singularly unappealing, as did the promise of the 'living skeleton' just beyond, so I continued onwards towards a tent in which there were taking place, a young woman promised me as I walked past, marionette shows of the very highest quality. She was playing an organ ; an old, battered thing from which emanated the most harrowing bombilations. I was informed that the next show was about to start and, mostly out of pity for the girl, I paid my penny and went in.

The show turned out to be a trivial moral spectacle involving a pair of village idiots who are stuck on a country road with a donkey that will not move. At some point the devil appears and offers to help the idiots. Needless to say, the story did not end well. The tent in which this took place was made from canvas, and included a small proscenium of a somewhat mouldy appearance, made of what seemed to be packing boxes draped with two pieces of worn black velvet. The closed space soon overwhelmed me with its peculiar olfactory mixture of old snuff, tobacco, treacle, sour milk and pomade and I was pleased when the show was complete.

I left the marionette show to find that the rain-cloud was, as I had feared, spilling its contents with an alarming intensity. In my attempt to keep dry, I found myself part of a crowd that had gathered under a dirty white canopy to the left of the marionette tent. There a man was offering an entertainment which he called 'Pik-a-Straw'. He had, he claimed, various envelopes containing a secret so grave that the authorities would not let him sell them. Instead, he was selling—quite legitimately, he assured us—lengths of straw. The person to choose a long length of straw would win one of the envelopes. He who had the ill-fortune to pick a short straw would win nothing. The straws were a penny each. I observed several gentlemen and one lady approach him. Of these, the lady and two of the gentlemen drew the longer straws and were handed an envelope each. All eyes were on them as they drew out the paper from within and, after considering the contents for a few moments, made startled exclamations. I wasn't about to be fooled by such an old trick, and I felt pleased when my suspicions were confirmed by a more thorough examination of the lady in question. The mud on her shoes, combined with the redness and strength of her hands, suggested that she was either engaged in service, or she was a fair-ground girl. A wink from her accomplice soon confirmed the latter.

Having turned away from this spectacle, my eyes were soon drawn to a far more intriguing advertisement outside a large marquee. It told of something called a Spectral Opera, featuring Pepper's Ghost and Gompertz's Spectrescope, and boasted royal patronage. It was a ghost show, the sort of entertainment I had heard men talk of in my club, but which I myself had never attended. Bowing my head under the pounding rain, I ventured out from under the canopy and towards the tent, which, after climbing several steps, I entered.

The make-shift theatre was half full and the lights dimmed as soon as I had alighted on the hard wooden bench. Shortly thereafter, the beginning of the performance was heralded by the most singularly spectral and dissonant music I have ever heard. I was reminded of a music box from my childhood, a small, silver contraption, used primarily by one of my sisters as a church organ for the extravagant funerals of broken dolls and dead mice. Soon, still bathed in this eerie music, I was able to behold a truly intriguing spectacle, as, by some ingenious science, transparent phantoms did indeed appear on the stage. There were three of them, each the height and breadth of a living man, but with flesh as pale and insubstantial as a dandelion clock. At first I half believed these to be actors in particularly perlaceous costumes ; they were of human form and did not jerk about like marionettes. Indeed, they appeared to float across the stage, with their feet never touching the board beneath them. Then, quite suddenly, a solid actor strode onto the stage and put a sword through the nearest phantom with neither resistance, nor blood. I confess that I, along with the other members of the audience, let out a gasp of horror as the sword penetrated the frail and pitiable body of the ghost. It was at this moment that my reason must have deserted me. After the show was complete, I confess I dawdled, hoping for some indication of the construction of this elaborate hoax. I did not then believe in ghosts, and I had no doubt that science and reason were behind this display of phantasmagoria, but I became frustrated that I could not deduce the method for myself.

Very soon I was left alone in the tent with a thin-framed man. He walked over to me slowly and pointed in the direction of the stage.

'It is certainly an intriguing spectacle,' he said.

'Indeed it is,' I concurred.

'And it is my guess that you are trying to find an explanation for it.'

'Yes,' I said.

The man was silent for a moment, as if he was making a calculation.

'For two shillings I will show you.'

Before I had even had time to protest at the price, I was following the man towards the stage. At first I believed that he was going to show me the mechanics of the illusion, and explain it in that manner : by a simple demonstration. Instead, he led me through a flap in the tent into a smaller canvas structure in which there was a medicine chest balanced on a small table along with a large lamp, a more vulgar example of which I had never seen. Its ceramic base seemed to combine the deep variegated reds of an old wound, and on this base were painted sickly yellow flowers of a sort, I felt certain, not known to nature. From the rim of its ceramic shade dangled several glass beads, clearly intended to refract the light in the manner of a chandelier, but in fact only managing to create an eerie spattering of shadow on the back of the tent. Beyond the table was a slab that looked like a closed coffin, but which I assumed was intended as some sort of bed.

'I don't believe I caught your name,' I said.

'You can think of me as the fair-ground doctor,' said he. 'And you?'

His manner made me reluctant to introduce myself in the proper way and so I simply suggested that he address me as Mr. Y.

I was suddenly overcome with the peculiar sensation that everyone else had gone home and that I was the only man left at the fair-ground. I could hear the many fists of rain beating on the top of the tent but fancied that I could not hear anything else from outside : no laughter or voices. Even the infernal drone of the organ would have been welcome. I suddenly felt vexed, and I did not trust this doctor. Yet, when he motioned for me to sit on the slab I did as he suggested.

'You wish to know the nature of the illusion you just witnessed,' said he. 'I can show you this, and more. But—' Here he faltered. 'Perhaps you do not have the constitution for the illumination I am about to offer. Perhaps—'

'I have two shillings,' I said to him curtly, and withdrew the money. 'Now, do as you promised.'

The doctor opened his medicine chest and drew from it a vial of clear fluid. From this vial he poured a small measure into a glass which he then passed to me. With his other hand, he motioned to me to wait. He then withdrew another object from his chest : a white card with a small black circle at its centre. He then instructed me to drink the mixture and lie down on the slab, holding the card above my face, concentrating as hard as I could on the black spot. As I did as he asked, I wondered to what kind of trickery I was being subjected. I suspected mesmerism of the crudest sort. Not for one second did I believe that the mixture would have any effect, nor was I aware that the rest of my life would be altered as a result of drinking it.

By eleven o'clock I have finished the first chapter of The End of Mr. Y. The winter sun is peeping meekly through the thin curtains and I decide to get up. It's freezing. I pick up my jeans from the floor and quickly exchange them for my pajama bottoms; then I put on a random jumper. As I trot down the concrete steps to get the mail, I am suddenly possessed with a feeling that I've forgotten something. Have I locked myself out again? No, it's not that. My keys are in my hand. I note the take-away flyers and taxi cards without picking any of them up, and go back upstairs. What could I have forgotten?

Porridge. Coffee. A whole day of reading ahead of me. Things could be worse. I already have the sleepy feeling I get when I'm reading a good book: like I want to curl up in bed with it and forget about the nonfictional world. At some point I still have to try to work out how to survive for the next three weeks on five pounds, but that could even be fun. Once I've had breakfast I dig out my packet of ginseng cigarettes and light one. In fact, I'm feeling pretty relaxed when the buzzing sound starts in my bag. It's my mobile phone, which is broken and can no longer ring. At first I think the buzzing represents a call and so I ignore it. But the vibrating only goes on for a few seconds and I realize it's a text message, so I go and get the phone out of my bag. There's a little picture of an envelope on the front and I press the button that metaphorically opens it.

r you still on for 2day where shall we meet

Shit. That's the thing I've forgotten. It's Patrick. I think quickly and then text back: Cathedral crypt 5pm. I can't not see him. I cancelled last time, and anyway he'll probably buy me dinner. His text messages aren't very articulate when you consider that he's a professor of linguistics, but then again he's the kind of person who writes his e-mails in lowercase type because he thinks it's the done thing. I've been seeing Patrick for about the last three months, and in that time we have had sex less than a dozen times. But it's good sex; intense sex; the sort of sex you can only really get with an older man who isn't worried about whether or not you will eventually get married; the kind of sex that is had for its own sake, and not as a deposit against something one party wants to gain in the future. Patrick is already married, of course, although his wife has affairs, too, which stops me from feeling guilty about our arrangement. Sometimes I think through the logic of all this and realize that there must be young men out there—the equivalents of me—who want infrequent sex and companionship without the complications of love and commitment. Would I sleep with one of these guys if I could find one? Probably not. There's something too smooth about younger men. And anyway, older men really do know how to fuck. Crude, but there you are.

I don't think Saul Burlem was married, and maybe it's a good thing he disappeared: I did have a bit of a thing for him, after all. But it is obviously a very bad idea to sleep with your supervisor, and I could have grown to really like him, if his books and online lectures are anything to go by. I would have gone home with him on the night I met him, though, before I'd had a chance to think any of it through. Did he know that? Maybe he knew it would be a bad idea, too. After we'd talked about my Ph.D., I excused myself and went to find the loo. I was drunk and I did get a bit lost, but I wasn't gone that long. I do remember an amazing corridor, though. It was this low-ceilinged, whitewashed space that felt like the inside of an antique telescope: smooth and cold. I must have walked up and down it three or four times, wishing I had a camera, or a better memory. When I got back to the Upper Hall, Burlem had gone.

By half past four I have had a bath, got dressed again—this time with more sense of purpose—and completed a short inventory of the food items I have in the house. The list isn't very inspiring. It tells me that if I am happy to live on porridge, tinned soup, and noodles, I can do so for roughly one week. Can five pounds therefore stretch to cover the remaining two weeks? I could buy a big bottle of soy sauce for about fifty pence at the market and, say, fourteen bags of slightly out-of-date noodles at twenty pence each. That would leave a bit of change that I could use to buy a large bar of bitter chocolate. But what about cigarettes and petrol? What about coffee? I can't buy bad coffee, but I certainly can't afford the good sort. I could drink tap water and slivovitz for the duration, I suppose. And what about vegetables? How long before I got scurvy? The idea of suffering scurvy and both nicotine and caffeine withdrawal at the same time doesn't give me happy thoughts. Is it all going to be worth it for the book? Probably. I'd make the same decision again in any case.

Mr. Y, I think, smiling. Mr. Y.

A mouse runs across the kitchen floor and I instinctively draw my legs up and hug my knees. I've read so little about The End of Mr. Y. All I really know about it is the curse. It's a strange experience, coming to such an old book without the benefit of a thousand TV adaptations and study guides and reading groups. What is it about? What thought experiment of Lumas's does it represent? And what about this question of fiction? It is only as fiction that I wish this work to be considered. I guess I'll have to finish the book to find out what that means.

Already, though, the fiction has become blurred. Am I Mr. Y? Do I have to be for the book to work? When I was a kid I always made an agreement with myself never to identify with main protagonists, because bad things or, more troublingly, big things tended to happen to them and I couldn't cope with the feeling that these things were also happening to me, to the self that you project into fiction when you read. So I would decide on a secondary character that I would "be" for the duration of the book. Sometimes I died; sometimes I turned out to be evil. But I never had to take center stage. Now I'm older I read more conventionally. Right now I'm scared for Mr. Y/me and I feel as though it must be raining outside, even though it isn't. How does his/my/our life change as a result of drinking this potion? I remember the missing page and suddenly it means more, now that I am involved in the story. I hope I can work out the bit that's missing. And I hope that Mr Y's end isn't too painful, although I suspect it will be. Lumas's books and stories never have anything like a happy ending.

I leave the house at about twenty to five and start walking up Castle Street towards the cathedral. In this town you can see the cathedral from almost anywhere. When I was new here, I used it to navigate by. The sun has almost completely set, and the sky behind the pale gold spires is smeared with a cold, waxy pink. As on any other Saturday afternoon in winter, I walk past shops advertising the football scores, and young academics out buying a paper or something for dinner. My breath freezes in the air in front of me and I wonder when the university will be open again. I think of the free heat in my office, and the free coffee in the staff kitchen. OK—the coffee's not really free: You are supposed to pay about five pence a time, I think, but most of us just put in a pound or two when we remember. Will Patrick buy me dinner? I can't see why not. I usually insist on paying half, but I just won't today.

Only a couple of weeks ago the courtyard outside the cathedral was full of carollers and Christmas shoppers; now the space is virtually empty. The cobbles have taken on a dark, pinkish hue in the sunset and I hurry across them and through the Christ Church entrance. Then I cross the precinct gardens and enter the cathedral. I walk up the left-hand side of the nave towards the crypt and then down the stairs into its pale stone interior. I love the cathedral crypt, despite (or even because of) what happened here, which feels more like a story than a real thing. I love the soft, hollow sounds of the few people walking around, and the single candle burning in the Chapel of Our Lady Undercroft. A while ago it felt like everything in London was being blown up and the prayer desk seemed only to contain Post-it Notes asking for world peace. I would come here just to sit quietly, but I'd always read the prayers first. I remember once imagining a bomb going off in the cathedral itself. But the place is so vast, and the walls so solid, that it would surely have as little effect as a firework.

Patrick is standing by the Eastern Crypt, so I walk over to him.

"Hello," he says quietly, kissing me on both cheeks.

"Hi," I whisper back.

"This is a rather somber meeting place," he says, raising an eyebrow.

I smile. "I know. Sorry. I just wanted to light a candle; then we'll go."

I walk over to the small altar and pick a small tea light candle from the box underneath it. I put forty pence in the collection slot. I'm not sure why I am even lighting a candle: It's not something I've made a habit of in the past. There's no breeze in here, but I watch the small flame of my candle flicker uncertainly for about half a minute before it seems to decide not to go out and starts to glow, uniformly, along with the others. I look at it for a moment and then turn away, wondering what happens to all the energy generated in places like this. It's as if we make God ourselves out of all that energy. Is God made from the thoughts of people, or are people made from the thoughts of God? I'm sure I came across that idea in my research, but I can't remember where.

Chapter Five

Patrick has booked a hotel somewhere over by the ring road. We walk through town to the underpass and then, once we come out from that, down the main road towards the hotel. This is a nighttime space, with neon signs hanging off take-aways, video shops, late-night supermarkets, and nightclubs. We check in and walk up a broad wooden staircase to our room, which is airy and clean, if a bit shabby with age. While Patrick changes, I stand in the bathroom contemplating myself in the mirror. Am I cursed? I don't look cursed. I look as if I have caught myself unawares, washed out and dazzled in the fluorescent light.

Would you read a cursed book if you had one? If you heard that there was a cursed book out there and you found it in a bookshop, would you spend the last of your money on it? If you heard there was a cursed book out there, would you go searching for it, even if no one thought any copies existed anymore? I think about my conversation with Wolf last night and wonder if life is as simple as "there is a book." But again I think about stories and their logic and wonder if there can be any such thing as simply "there is a book." Once upon a time there was a book. That makes more sense. There is a book. And then what happens? There is a book and it contains a curse and then you read it and then you die. That's a proper story.

I come out of the bathroom and find Patrick wearing expensive-looking blue jeans and a pale pink shirt. He doesn't look bad in jeans, but I preferred Burlem's look: the black shirt, the dark trousers, and the trench coat. But Burlem's not here, and Patrick is. After flirting for a while we go for dinner and have a strange conversation about nineteenth-century poetry, during which I go on and on about Thomas Hardy, and how the best bit of his poem "Hap" is his invented word "unblooms," as in: "And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?" The whole poem is about wishing for evidence of a vengeful god—since there certainly isn't any evidence of a benevolent one—because a higher power, even a cruel one, gives us meaning in a way we can't give meaning to ourselves. This ends up with us talking about structuralism and linguistics (Patrick's specialism) and then Derrida (one of mine).

"How can you read Derrida?" Patrick asks me at some point.

"How can you not?" I say.

We've finished dinner, and I realize that I am now having the conversation as if I were a robot taking part in the Turing Test. I can probably convince Patrick that I am human and listening to him, but really I'm thinking about Mr. Y.

"Are you OK?" he asks.

"Yeah," I say. Perhaps I should try harder. "Have you ever listened to any of Derrida's lectures?"

"No."

"You should. I've got one on my iPod. In it, he says that praying is 'not like ordering a pizza.' I love that. I love the little image of Derrida spending an evening praying and ordering pizzas to prove they're not the same thing. Not that he would have done. I mean, I can't see him praying, or trying to prove something by experiment. I bet he ordered pizzas, though."

Patrick is grinning again. "It's unbelievable," he says.

"What, Derrida praying?"

"No. The fact that I'm about to sleep with someone who owns an iPod."

Our roles in bed are quite simple. I am the eager young student, and he is the slightly sadistic professor. We don't go so far as to actually act out our parts, and his slight sadism doesn't extend further than occasionally tying me up with silk scarves, but I like it when he tells me what to do.

By the time I wake up the following morning, Patrick has had breakfast and left. There's a card on the bedside table thanking me for a wonderful night and explaining that there's been some sort of "crisis" at home that he needs to attend to. I wish I'd brought my book with me. I have a large room-service breakfast and read a complimentary newspaper before getting up and making the most of the hot water. The water in my flat never seems to get anywhere beyond "fairly" hot, but I like water with which you can actually burn yourself.

As soon as I am washed and dressed I walk back into town and along the dilapidated city walls towards my flat. The ring road runs next to me on my left, and the landscape I can see is a confused mess of cars, shops, road signs, bollards, a petrol station, some cranes in the distance, a pub, a roundabout, and a pedestrian bridge. At some point a train goes past, emerging from behind a billboard advertising shiny cars and disappearing again behind a nightclub. Every kind of urbanity seems to exist in this space, from the city walls themselves to the remains of the Norman castle and the ugly red blocks of flats that have gone up next to it. Beyond the castle there's a subway under the ring road and if you go through it you can walk along the river towards the motorway, passing the gas tower and the encampment of homeless people who live in tents. I walked that way once, curious about the local countryside. There was a smell of gas all the way.

When I get back there's no sign of Wolfgang's bike, so it looks as if I'm going to be on my own with the mice. When I look, I've got two full traps, so I take them downstairs and release the mice out the back by Luigi's bins. Back in the kitchen I reload the traps with stale biscuits and put them back under the sink; then I put coffee on the stove and arrange all my things around the sofa: The End of Mr. Y, cigarettes, notebook, pen. As soon as my coffee is ready, I curl up on the sofa and begin reading where I left off yesterday morning.

The moment the liquid struck my tongue I became aware of several new sensations, including a sudden aversion to darkness and a heavy, constricted feeling. At first I felt sure that these were simply delusions occurring because of the rather melodramatic manner in which the fluid had been prescribed, and that I was simply falling prey to fancies. However, after a time I began feeling increasingly anxious and experiencing something like vertigo. Nevertheless, I fixed my attention upon the black circle, as instructed, beckoned once again by curiosity's claw. I remained convinced that, if this fair-ground doctor was, as I suspected, a fraud, then nothing he could do would cause me any harm.

After lying on the hard slab staring into the black circle for several moments I was startled to see it begin to disintegrate before my eyes. Two larger circles took its place, one pink and one blue, and these shapes then appeared to expand and contract with the soft translucency of jellyfish. I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that one has when moving downhill on a switchback ride, or in the dreams of falling that one has from time to time. It was not my physical being, however, which was descending, but rather my mind. It was as if the thinking, reasoning part of my being was closing with the finality of a heavy, locked door. In its place a small aperture appeared, growing larger and larger until it eclipsed the black circle on the small piece of card, and continued to enlarge until it was the size of a railway tunnel. I was alarmed to realise that I was now moving down this tunnel at a giddying speed.

The walls of the tunnel were charcoal-black at first but presently I became aware of various inscriptions on the walls which appeared alongside me as if drawn by light. At first these were simply pinpricks, like little stars in the firmament, and I fancied that if one could connect them, then perhaps a picture would form. There were also oscillating lines of the sort one might observe in the crude representation of a wave in the sea. For one instant I fancied I saw before me pictures of the human genitalia. There then appeared various shapes, and, despite the tremendous speed with which I passed them, I observed several circles, spheres, triangles, pyramids, squares, cubes and rectangular parallelepiped objects until these faded and the walls of the tunnel then became adorned with what appeared to be ancient hieroglyphics, which I confess I could not read. These little pictures blinked like apparitions as I passed them : I saw things that looked like birds and feet and eyes. All of these impressions appeared before me as though drawn with light.

I became aware of my anxiety paling as I continued my journey through the tunnel, and I was intrigued by the little symbols that flowed past me as if projected on a phenakistiscope. I saw many circles bisected with a cross or a line, and an abundance of other shapes including those which resembled little flags, stalks, boxes, and the reversed Roman letters g, E, r and E I also saw what appeared to be Roman letters as if drawn in the hand of a child. However, it was clear that not all the Roman letters were present, and their expression seemed to vary between upper and lower case. I am sure I only observed the letters y, I, z, which was crossed in the French style, and l, o, w and x. Later there also appeared the upper case characters A, B, H, K, M, N, P D, T, V, Y and X. Presently the Greek letters appeared in sequence, from alpha, beta, gamma and delta through to phi, chi, psi and omega. Then I observed the Roman alphabet in the correct sequence, from A through to Z. Still there appeared hieroglyphics here and there. The further I journeyed into this long tunnel, the more characters I perceived on the black walls, until there was more light than shade, and thousands of characters jostled before me. I saw Roman numerals and Arabic numerals and other shapes I could not discern, for they flew past me with such tremendous velocity. There were also mathematical equations. I recognised Newton's F=MA but none of the others.

Presently I began to sense that my journey was almost at an end. The light on the walls of the tunnel eventually expanded so that I felt bathed in it. Indeed, for one curious second I fancied myself to be part of the light itself. I could no longer perceive anything around me but for this bright white glow. I remember quite distinctly thinking, 'That's it! The penny showman has killed me. Now I shall see what Heaven is like.' I did not think of the other place. And, after a short time, it did appear that I had awoken in a heavenly landscape. I did not find myself confronting Saint Peter, however. Indeed, there were no other beings, mortal or otherwise, to be discerned on the softly rolling meadow I saw before me. Under a bright blue but curiously sunless sky, I observed grass, flowers and trees of species to be found anywhere in the nineteenth-century English countryside. I admit that at that moment I experienced the most profound sensation of peace, which was most welcome after the creeping dread with which I had become familiar at the start of my journey.

How long had I been travelling? I had no idea. In the depths of my mind something gnawed at me with persistent little teeth. Did I have an assignment in this place? I recollected the fair-ground doctor and his strange potion, and then the reason for my journey arrived once again in my mind. I was here to see the workings of Pepper's Ghost, although I had no idea of how this could be achieved, and also felt that my appetite for solving this mystery was a very slight pang of hunger indeed in comparison with the greedy desire I now felt to solve the far bigger mystery with which I had been presented : where was I and how had I come to be there?

At the same moment that my assignment had reappeared in my mind, so a small piebald horse had appeared in the meadow to the right of my current position. The horse presently came and nuzzled at my hand, and, noticing that it was fully tackled, I understood that I was supposed to ride it. I have some experience as an equestrian and I saw no option than to insert my foot into the stirrup, swing myself onto the animal and take the harness. With only the merest of nudges, the horse moved gracefully forward. Again I had the sensation that I knew something I could not know, and fancied that the horse would take me to the place I needed to go. This sensation was a powerful one and so I let the horse trot onwards, towards the brow of a small hill. All around me was calm and tranquillity and I felt as if I could remain in this place forever and not want for anything. Yet I felt compelled to complete my assignment.

I soon became aware of several dwellings ahead of me. As my horse drew closer I saw that there was indeed a small hamlet of cottages clustered before a vast and tangled forest. I understood that I was supposed to examine these dwellings and so I dismounted from my horse and tethered him outside the first cottage. This was a dark little place, with a garden overgrown with brambles and thick, twisted trees. Even before I saw the name on the gate, I knew that this was the fair-ground doctor's house. The next place was plainer, with a whitewashed exterior and a name on the gate that I did not recognise. Something told me to enter this gate and I did so. Again, this something that seemed to speak from within my mind told me that the door would be unlocked, and so I entered without knocking, knowing that according to the customs of this place this action would not be considered aberrant.

Then I experienced the most peculiar sensation of all. Language almost fails me when I try to formulate this sensation in words. The closest approximation is this : imagine stepping not into another man's shoes but, rather, into his soul. Even as I write this, that paltry description appears feeble in comparison to the odd, but not at all uncomfortable sensation of expansion that I felt as whatever is 'I' grew, as if from a seed, into whatever was 'him' and the two of us became one. All at once I intuited what had occurred. Inconceivable and impossible though it may appear, I had entered the mind of another. I had entered the mind of the illusionist Mr. William Hardy, proprietor of Hardy's Ghost Illusion and Theatre.

I can assure the reader that the telepathic intercourse one has with another is in no way partial, vague or insubstantial. For, although I still seemed to carry with me the portmanteau of my own being, once inside this man's mind I had the palpable sense that I existed not in his place, but alongside him. Much though it vexes me to write these words, for I am a man who does not believe in ghosts, phantoms and the so-called fourth dimension of Zollner and others, I have no doubt that I shared the mind of this man. I could think what he thought, I knew what he knew, and, for the time that I remained a guest in his being, I experienced what he experienced.

He (although it seemed to me that 'I' did all that follows, I will not confuse the reader here with the first person singular or, worse, the plural) was hungry ; this was the first sensation of which I became aware. Of course, I experienced the same hunger, now that I was inhabiting the same being, and, without thinking what I was doing, I cast my own mind back to the last time I dined. I quickly perceived something reminiscent of two transparent images placed on top of one another. Of course, this does not adequately explain the sensation but words will not allow me a fuller description. I saw, or felt, myself taking luncheon at the Regency Hotel, but at the same time experienced William Hardy, who, I understood, likes to refer to himself in his own mind as Will, or even 'Little Will,' a pet name given to him by his mother, sitting down to consume a steamed meat pudding wrapped in paper. It is with some difficulty that even I myself believe my own recollection as I write these words, but I certainly experienced the illusion of being able to taste the heavy, thick suet pudding and the dense brown gravy, as sweet as the meat inside. Nevertheless, I, or he, or we, still felt hungry. The meat pie was merely a memory and Little Will wanted his supper.

Before supper, Little Will had to pack up his ghost illusion. The fair would be departing the following morning and so everything would have to be carefully disassembled and stored in a large wagon. Will found the idea of this task rather overwhelming, as did I, and I quite understood his anguish and frustration as he barked orders at his underlings, wanting them to hurry this moment and take more care the next. I understood why he felt betrayed by his assistant Dan Roper, and I instantly knew that Peter, the boy helper, was too clumsy for this task. I do not believe that I shared William Hardy's exact thoughts while the packing up process was in progress ; I was not 'mindreading' in the crudest sense. Rather, I had access to his memories in the same way one accesses one's own memories. Images came to me as fast as quicksilver. I saw, for example, the hapless boy Peter breaking a large sheet of glass, and was aware that this event had occurred at some time in the recent past. I saw Dan Roper creeping behind a grubby fair-ground tent with a woman. Then I saw Little Will with the same woman. Of course, I did not see him from above, like an omnipotent observer. I was his eyes, ears, nose and flesh as he coupled with this woman, barely a girl, whom I now knew to be called Rose.

I confess that I almost became lost in this new world, for, given access to another man's thoughts, who would not roam endlessly within them? What anthropology or biology was this, that I was able to read another's mind as if it were a play? I sincerely believed that the entire works of Shakespeare shrank in comparison with the tragedies, comedies, betrayals and desires of this one fair-ground entertainer. Still, however, I recalled my assignment. I was here, in the mind of William Hardy, to understand the ghost illusion that he peddled from country fair to country fair.

In an instant all was clear to me. I saw the intricate placing of the large, expensive sheet of glass, polished five times a day by Little Will himself. I saw it balanced on the stage, resting against a wall or structure behind. I saw, and understood, the forty-five degree tilt. I had the most profound knowledge of the way the illusion worked, from the tilted glass to the actors underneath who danced in a projectionist's light, thus creating images, like inverted shadows, to be reflected through the glass and onto the stage. I understood Little Will's amazement when he himself first discovered the construction of these beings of light, and I recalled, as clearly as if thinking of a scene from my own past, the evening that Little Will opened the book that revealed the secrets of this illusion. I must say, however, that the sensation of reading a book in a man's memory was a queer one, and although many passages were forgotten, and therefore appeared to be missing, I was able to read the most significant sections as if the book was in front of my own face.

There is a part of my adventure that I have not yet described for fear of entirely compounding the impression that I lost my wits that day in the fair-ground tent. However, I must now relate this curiosity, and I beg further indulgence from the reader. What I wish to describe is the way in which my field of vision altered when inside this 'spirit world' of other minds. At the beginning, I confess I had no idea of how far this world-of-minds expanded, nor how far within it I would be permitted to travel. However, on that first visit I became aware of some important factors, which I will now attempt to describe. When one sees the world in ordinary social intercourse, or in the comings and goings of a typical day, one sees the world as if that world were contained within a frame. The outside world therefore is a picture on a wall ; or, perhaps, many pictures. If I were to look to my left I would see one picture. If I glanced to my right, another. A philosopher may ask if indeed there is another picture behind me, one which I cannot see, but I shall not take this avenue of enquiry for the time being.

If one accepts this way of looking at the world as a frame with perceptible edges, albeit blurred ones, then one will more easily comprehend the altered frame through which I gazed on the world of Little Will. For Little Will's frame also contained my own, superimposed on top of it. The result of this superimposition was the existence of a milky hue over all that I saw, as if I were looking through thick glass or a thin veil. Yet the peculiarities of this new frame did not end there. Around the edge of my perception of Little Will's vision was a blur similar to that which creeps around the edge of ordinary vision. But the blur around the edges of Little Will's frame was made more pronounced by the existence of layers of little pictures, like playing cards laid out in a game of Patience ; one to the right and one to the left. There was another feature of this new kind of vision which perplexed me even further. When Little Will came close to another person and regarded him, a dwelling would appear faintly behind the already milky image that I had. I understood without fully comprehending that at these moments I could, if I so wished, simply walk into that house instead of the one in which I was currently standing ; in other words, I could enter another mind. At least, this was the theory I constructed from the evidence before my eyes, but when I tried this on the boy Peter I seemed to bounce from an invisible wall and instead landed back on the small path connecting the cottages.

Again, I was overcome with a sense of peace and fullness. The hunger I had felt when joined with Little Will immediately subsided and I realised that spending time in another man's soul was terribly draining. Out on the open landscape I felt no discomfort, but I remembered the sensation of privation and desperation I had shared with Little Will. I concluded that the further adventures I so craved were best left for another visit, and so I retrieved my horse and let him take me back to the place from which I had entered this world.

The journey back through the tunnel appeared of a far shorter duration this time, and presently I arrived, if that is the right term, for an observer would not have seen me leave, on the slab in the fair-ground tent. Once more I could hear the rain on the thick canvas, and I struggled to open my eyes on the familiar world I had left behind for a time. With my eyes still half-closed, and my head thick with fancies, I asked myself whether I had concocted an elaborate dream or whether I had in fact telepathed into another man's mind, and resolved to interrogate the fair-ground doctor the instant I had fully regained my senses. However, when I opened my eyes I found myself alone in the dark. The vulgar lamp, which had been burning brightly before, was now extinguished. The doctor was nowhere to be seen. I withdrew my watch from my pocket, along with a box of matches, and, after striking a match close to the face of the timepiece, found it to be past eleven o'clock. Startled, I immediately got to my feet and felt my way out of the tent, using another match to guide me. How could I possibly have been unconscious for such a long period of time? I confess I felt frightened as I stumbled out of the large theatre tent and into the open air of the darkened, deserted fair-ground. I was determined to find this doctor and admonish him for leaving me alone and defenceless for such a long time. However, the doctor was nowhere to be seen and, now tired and desperately hungry, I made my way back to the Regency Hotel, resolving to find the doctor the next day.

Chapter Six

By lunchtime I am hungry and cold and I need to pee. From my bathroom window it looks as if the whole world is lidded with rooftops and hinged with back doors and fire escapes, as if it were one big higgledy-piggledy doll's house. I can see the top of Luigi's back room and the dark metal staircase down which you could escape if there was a fire. Below a gray concrete roof is the back door of the Indian restaurant. I can see a guy standing there, puffing urgently on a cigarette, constantly looking around as if he's about to get caught. I can see alleyways and small, uneven courtyards; but mostly there are rooftops and chimneys, red brick and concrete, and it suddenly seems more like a three-dimensional puzzle out there. How is it possible to fit so many buildings into one small space? I think, not for the first time, about how many people there must be around me all the time, even though it often seems as if I am entirely alone. I wonder what it would be like to "telepath." Would it make you feel less alone, or would the loneliness somehow become worse?

I cook some Puy lentils for lunch; then I go back to the sofa and balance my bowl on my lap as I continue reading about Mr. Y, and his search for the fairground doctor. By the time Mr. Y gets to the fair-ground the following day, the whole thing has disappeared, including the doctor and his curious potion. Poor Mr. Y. He was so certain that he would be able to return to this world-of-minds that he didn't bother to investigate everything while he was still inside it. He asks around and finds that most of the fairground people have moved on to a site just beyond Sherwood Forest. But when he gets to the site and finds the fairground, he can't find the doctor. Indeed, when he asks people if they have seen this "fair-ground doctor," most of them are perplexed and assure him that there is no such man.

Once he is back in London, Mr. Y becomes increasingly obsessed with the questions posed by his adventure. Had he, in fact, been given the ability to read minds (or, as he puts it, "to telepath"), albeit only briefly? Or did the doctor simply give him a strong sleeping draught? He doesn't know, and does not have any way of finding out. But he becomes inclined to believe that he did in fact read the mind of William Hardy. Indeed, he is able to locate and read the exact book from which Hardy learned of the Pepper's Ghost illusion, and finds that his "memory" of it (from reading it via Little Will) is exactly correct. Knowing that a man cannot have a memory of a book he has not read, he concludes that something supernatural happened to him that evening at the Goose Fair. But he simply does not know what this was. In the absence of any proper explanation, he does a good Victorian thing and starts labelling and classifying the parts of the new world he has encountered. The name he gives to this other world is the Troposphere, which he derives by taking the word "atmosphere"—a combination of the Greek words for "vapor" and "ball"—and replacing the unknown vapors with something more solid: the Greek word for character, tropos. It takes Mr. Y more time to conceive of a term for the journey itself, but eventually he names it Telemancy: tele from telos, meaning distant; and mancy from manteia, meaning divination. In his mind this was divination at a distance, and he badly wanted to do it again.

At this point in the narrative we begin to learn something of Mr. Y's business affairs. His drapery shop, located in the East End of London, used to be a very successful enterprise but now it seems to be failing, and soon he has to let several of his assistants go. A rival has set up shop just around the corner from Mr. Y, and his business is booming. The proprietor of this rival business, Mr. Clemency, is roughly characterized in the novel as a shifty, spiteful individual who seems to enjoy the misery he heaps on Mr. Y, and believes that his method of making clothes—locking his workers in a small, hot back room and paying them hardly anything—is superior to Mr. Y's old-fashioned ways. Mr. Y soon has two obsessions: Telemancy and revenge, and he thinks that if only he knew what had been in the potion given to him by the doctor, he could concoct it himself and revisit the landscape of the Troposphere. Once there, of course, he would visit the mind of Mr. Clemency. He admits, with some shame, that he intends to blackmail his rival if he can find a way to do so.

Meanwhile, his business continues to deteriorate. On top of this, his father is taken ill and his usually meek wife becomes vexed and anxious. Mr. Y can't cope with everything, and so neglects his father and shouts at his wife. He is clearly rushing headfirst down the slope of his own ruin, but he can't see this. Instead, he burns a lamp each night and reads Materia Medica and herbals that might give him some clue as to what the mysterious mixture was. He finds none. But the world of the Troposphere, particularly the calm landscape on which he rode the horse, beckons him like a drug to which he has become profoundly addicted.

The light is fading outside my kitchen window and I look at my watch. It's just gone four o'clock. I've got a reading lamp in my bedroom, so I go and get that and plug it in behind the sofa and then place it on the windowsill. That's better. I can aim it directly at the pages of the book. One lamp can't use up too much electricity, surely?

At about half past five I hear the sound of the door downstairs, and then the dissonant tinkle of Wolfgang's bicycle bell as it scrapes against the wall. Although I really want to finish reading my book, my eyes are hurting and I haven't spoken to another human being for hours. So when there's a faint tap on my door a few minutes later, I call out that it's open, and get up to make coffee.

Wolfgang comes in and sits down awkwardly at the kitchen table.

"Good day?" I say, although his posture should answer the question for me.

"Ha," is all he says, putting his head in his hands.

"Wolf?"

"What is Sunday for?" he asks. "Tell me that."

"Um ... church?" I suggest. "Family? Sport?"

The coffee hisses and I take it off the gas ring. I pour a cup for each of us and sit down at the table facing Wolf. I offer him a cigarette and then light one myself. He does not respond to my suggestions, so I try to think of some more. Without meaning to, I effortlessly transport myself back to Mr. Y's 1890s world, and summon up half-finished coloring-book images of women walking through parks in hobble skirts, children playing with hoops, and vague dot-to-dot trips to the seaside involving parasols and slot machines, although I don't think they had slot machines until the turn of the century. It's an after-church, afternoon world that I can't even begin to understand. I try to think myself back out of the 1890s.

"Sex?" I suggest instead. "Reading the papers? Shopping?"

"Ha," says Wolf again, sipping his coffee.

"What happened?" I ask.

"A weekend with Catherine's family," he says, with some disgust.

"It can't have been that bad," I say. "Where did you go?"

"Sussex. Country house. And it was very bad..."

"Why?"

He sighs. "Where to begin?"

I think of the Odyssey. "Try the middle," I suggest.

"Ah. The middle. OK. In the middle, I run over the dog."

I can't help but laugh, even though this is obviously not funny.

"Is the dog OK?" I say.

Wolfgang looks sad. "He is now lame."

I sip my coffee. "How exactly did you run over the dog?"

Wolfgang doesn't drive: thus the bicycle.

"In a ... How would you say it...? What is the word...?"

This is something of an affectation of Wolf's. He speaks English better than most of the literature students in the department, but sometimes he'll fish for a word like this, playing on his foreignness to add drama and, sometimes, melancholy, to whatever story he's telling. I don't dislike the affectation, in fact, I find it funny. But that doesn't mean I'm not familiar with its mechanics.

He's still at it. "A ... like a little tractor"

"You ran over your girlfriend's family dog in a 'little tractor'?"

"No. Well, yes. But I mean what is the word for little tractor?"

"I don't think there is a word for little tractor. What do you do with it?"

"You cut the grass with it."

"Oh! A lawnmower."

Wolf looks at me as if I'm simple. "I know lawnmower," he says. "You push a lawnmower. This other thing you sit on."

"Oh," I say. "Yeah, like a lawnmower you sit on. A ... Oh God. What do you call those things?" I think for a while. "I think they're just lawnmowers that you sit on. What did Catherine's family call it?"

"I think they called it the 'mower.' But I was sure there would be another term."

"I'm not sure there is. So, anyway, why were you on the mower?"

"The father, Mr. Dickerson, he had got it stuck and he wanted a 'big strong lad' to drive it out."

I laugh at the thought that anyone would call Wolfgang a "big strong lad." He isn't any one of those three things.

"Yes," he says. "Ha ha."

"Sorry. So, anyway, what were they like, the family?"

"Rich," says Wolf. "From carpets."

"And is there a future with Catherine?" I ask.

"For me?" He shrugs. "Who knows?" He gets up and takes the bottle of slivovitz from the shelf. He pours himself a large glass, but when he offers some to me I shake my head. "Anyway," he says, when he has sat down again, "how is your curse?"

"Hmm," I say. "Can you keep a secret?"

"You know I can. And I've already said that I don't care if I become more cursed."

"I don't think you'll become cursed just from hearing about it," I say.

"So what is it? An object?"

"A book."

"Ah, the curse of knowledge," he says immediately.

"I'm not sure if it is that," I say. "It's a novel. I think the curse might just be some superstition. But the book is very rare and potentially very valuable—although my copy is damaged, so it's probably actually worth nothing."

"And you bought this on Friday?"

"Yeah. With, basically, all my money."

"How rare is it?"

"Very rare." I explain to him about there being no known copies anywhere in the world, apart from the one in the German bank vault. "Even with the damage, it's still a pretty amazing thing to have. It's by that author I'm studying: Thomas Lumas. I could be the only person in the world to write a paper on the actual book rather than the mysteries surrounding it. I must be one of the only people to have read it in the last hundred years." Just as I'm getting excited about it, Wolf interrupts.

"And the curse is what?"

I look down at the table. "The curse is that if you read it, you die."

The book is still on the sofa where I left it, and I notice as Wolf's gaze travels around the room and then rests on it. He gets up and goes over to the sofa. But instead of picking up the book, he simply looks down at it as if it were an exhibit in a museum. For a moment I imagine that he's much more frightened of curses than he has let on, and this is why he doesn't touch it. But then I decide that it must be simply a respect for the age and rarity of the object. Wolf isn't scared of curses: He's said so.

He comes back to the table. "What's the story about?"

"It's about this man called Mr. Y, who goes to this Victorian fair-ground," I begin. I tell Wolf the story as far as I know it, ending with the last scene I read, where Mr. Y's wife has implored him to stop spending all night poring over medical textbooks. Mr. Y tells her to mind her own business and go to bed. This she does, and he resumes his reading.

"What does he think the mixture might be?" Wolf asks me.

"So far he has no idea," I say. "He thinks it might be based on laudanum, which is opium in alcohol, but isn't sure. He knows it's active as a liquid, so he has ruled out nitrous oxide—laughing gas—and chloroform, both of which you have to inhale. Other candidates include ether, a substance made from sulphuric acid and alcohol, and chloral. He's also trying to obtain more exotic herbals from further afield, and concocts a weird theory about some foreign witch doctor giving the information to the fairground doctor. But if this is true then the mixture won't be something he can concoct from ingredients to be found in any Victorian pharmacy. This basically throws him into total depression. But after a while he comes to the conclusion that it can't have been an exotic mixture. For two shillings it was unlikely to have included Peruvian tree bark, African snake venom, unicorn blood, or whatever. He works out that for two shillings, the mixture must have contained relatively cheap ingredients. But what?" I shrug. "Even if the ingredients aren't exotic, they could be anything."

"And you have no idea yet?" Wolfgang asks.

I shake my head. "No. But I'm looking forward to finding out, if you ever do get to find out, that is."

Wolf lights a cigarette and falls into a deep contemplation of his glass of slivovitz. I consider telling him about the preface to the book, and the hint that there could be something "real" about it, but I don't. Instead, I get up and rinse the coffee cups while Wolf drains his glass and gets up to go.

"I can do something gourmet tonight if you like," he offers.

I am tempted. What I've got here is at best "very gourmet," but I do want to finish the book.

"Thanks, Wolf," I say. "But I think I'm just going to keep reading."

"And complete the curse?" he says, with a raised eyebrow.

"I really don't think there is a curse," I say.

By eight o'clock it's freezing and I have to switch on all the gas rings. I am nearing the end of the book and it seems clear that Mr. Y is well on his way towards bankruptcy and destitution as the result of his obsession with the Troposphere and the method by which he might return there. He has taken to experimenting with various drugs and potions and lying there on his couch gazing at a black dot, but none of the drugs he has tried have worked. At every corner he is assaulted by advertisements suggesting cure-all panaceas like Dr. Locock's Pulmonic Wafers, and Pulvermacher's Improved Patent Galvanic Chain-Bands, Belts, Batteries, and Accessories. What was in the wafers, and could the fairground doctor's vial of liquid have contained it? And what about Pulvermacher's electrical objects? Perhaps the fairground doctor had in some way electrified whatever fluid he had concocted. Mr. Y realizes that there is no way he'll be able to find the concoction by chance. The only way he will ever be able to revisit the Troposphere is by finding that doctor and persuading him to tell him how.

By the beginning of chapter 12, Mr. Y has discovered that many of the people who travel the country with fairs in the summer end up in London in the winter, exhibiting their sideshow horrors in run-down shops and backstreet houses. As a last resort, Mr. Y has taken to spending his evenings, and much of his money, touring these establishments, trying to find some clue to lead him to the fairground doctor.

My search continued into November. The weather had turned bitterly cold but I kept at it every night, even as I began to doubt that I would ever find my man. It seemed to me that London had become a sort of Vanity Fair, with many of the establishments in the back streets of the West End—and beyond—dressed up with gaudy crimson hangings and advertising, by way of vast painted representations and pictorial facsimiles, such unsavoury offerings as the Bearded Lady, the Spotted Boy, the Giantess of Peru and various other mutants, savages and freaks of nature.

Although most of these establishments remained open all day, I had discovered that it was in the evening and nighttime hours that one should expect to encounter the fullest range of their offerings. And so it was that I would venture out after supper every evening and pay my penny at the doors of establishments both gaudy and drab, populated by crowds of people or empty. In every place I asked the same question, and in every place I received the same response. No one had ever heard of the fair-ground doctor.

November grew older and greyer, and each night it snowed a little more. I decided to confine my investigations to my own locality until such time as the weather improved, although I confess that by that time there was barely a waxwork or living skeleton in London that I had not already seen. However, I had been told of a new premises on the Whitechapel Road, opposite the London Hospital, formerly the site of an undertaker's, and, previously to that, a drapery business with which I had been familiar. So, after a small supper of bread and dripping, I set off on foot towards Whitechapel Road. My journey took me past the Jews' Burial Ground and the back of the Coal Depot and then along the southern side of the workhouse behind Baker's Row. Not for the first time I experienced the direst of premonitions that, if I did not succeed in my undertaking, my own family would be forced inside such an establishment. I did not imagine worse, because I knew of no worse.

I followed the railway line down towards the London Hospital, looking behind me all the time for the thieves who dwell in areas such as this. I was not carrying very much money with me but I had of course read the horrible stories of the new breed of East End thieves who, if they find you with only a few pence, will easily kick out one of your eyes—or worse—as thanks for it. The snow fell softly on me as I walked through the smoky air, with coal dust from the depot mingling with the smog already thick around me. I coughed a little, and rubbed my hands to keep warm. I thought then that if I were fully in possession of all my senses I would surely not have been out on a night such as this one. Yet on I walked.

As I turned into Whitechapel Road, my eyes almost immediately fell upon the establishment of which I had heard. The upper part of the house was adorned with a large sheet of canvas, on which various entertainments and spectacles were depicted, including yet another Fat Lady, along with the World's Strongest Woman and various other oddities. It is alarming how one so quickly tires of these sorts of spectacles, especially when one visits these establishments with such regularity as did I over those months, and if one chances, as I did, to observe the dreary reality behind the lurid and gruesome teratology presented by the showmen. Once, early on a Saturday morning, I happened to walk past an establishment I had visited two or three nights previously. There, in an overgrown garden, I observed the 'amazing' bearded woman, who by evenings was a sombre, backlit, half-human spectacle, pegging out her washing and engaging in an argument with an African 'savage' who was to be found after sunset adorned with a straw skirt, golden tunic and hoop earrings, and who apparently made only the utterances 'Ug, ug', but was at that moment wearing the rather less exotic outfit of shabby stockings, corduroy britches and a grey cloth cap, and was demonstrating an advanced grasp not only of English, but of its myriad vernacular words and expressions. I also once chanced upon the Boy With the Gigantic Head, a child of perhaps twelve or thirteen years, outside of his darkened room, and removed from all costume, lime-light and painted advertisement. He was no longer a gaudy freak but clearly a sick child who required medical attention.

Feeling rather half-hearted, I paid a penny to enter the Whitechapel establishment. On the ground floor, and requiring no further payment, were the usual trivial spectacles of ships-in-bottles, shrunken heads and the like. There were also various waxworks of prominent political figures, and a scene depicting the glories of Empire. There were also, seated at small card-tables, various scoundrels engaged in the dark art of hiding the 'Lady' from those gentlemen who would find her for a shilling, and other similar forms of petty embezzlement. As I left this room and made towards the stairs, a young girl attempted to entice me into a back-room in order that I might have my fortune told by a Madame de Pompadour. I assured the woman that all the possibilities of my fortune were already well-known to me and proceeded up the stairs. Here I found a troublesome display indeed : eleven waxworks, each depicting one of the victims of the Whitechapel Murders. I confess I had to avert my gaze after briefly regarding a mutilated copy of Mary Kelly lying on a bed in a chemise with thick wax blood coming out of her neck. However, something about this gruesome little scene—something beyond the basic horror of the spectacle—troubled me as I walked into the next room and beheld a red-headed young woman lifting weights with her long plait of hair. Presently I returned to the waxwork exhibition and regarded the scene of Mary Kelly's demise once again. And, sure enough, there it was. The gaudy red lamp that I had last seen in the fair-ground doctor's tent was now serving as a prop for this morbid tableau.

I immediately strode over to a woman sitting in an old armchair in the far corner of the room. I presumed that it was she who was keeping watch over the waxwork display. I stood facing her for some seconds before she looked up from a costume in her lap, onto which she was sewing sequins over frayed and greying sections of material.

'Can I help you?' she said to me.

'I wish to enquire after the owner of that lamp,' I said to her.

'You mean that poor girl Mary Kelly?'

'No,' I said, quickly becoming exasperated. 'No, a gentleman. A fair-ground doctor. Perhaps he is engaged here?'

The woman looked down at her embroidery. 'Sorry, sir,' she said. 'I don't think there is anyone of that description here.'

She then briefly flashed her small eyes at me and I understood what she wanted. I found a shilling and showed it to her.

'Are you certain you do not know him?' I asked.

She eyed the shilling and then reached out and took it from me.

'Try the fortune-teller downstairs,' she told me quickly, in a half-whisper. 'The man who owns that lamp is her husband.'

Without hesitating further I made may way down the stairs and, full of impatience, burst into the fortune-teller's salon. There sat a bony, pale woman, with her hair arranged in a colourful scarf. Before she even began to speak, I addressed her directly.

'I am looking for your husband.'

As she began assuring me that she had no husband and that I could pay her directly for her services, which were of a most superior nature, there suddenly came a blast of cold air into the room, and the fair-ground doctor entered.

'Mr. Y,' he said. 'How pleasant.'

'Good evening, Doctor,' I said.

'I understand that you have been looking for me,' he said.

'How—' I began, and then stopped. We both knew the effects of his medicine. I quickly worked out how this present fortune-telling act worked. The doctor presumably read the minds of all the people to enter the establishment and primed his wife with their biographies, ready for her to exploit them. Therefore, I reasoned, he had already read my mind and knew what I was looking for. I guessed that there was a chance he would give it to me—for a price.

'You want the recipe,' he said to me.

'Yes,' I said, but hesitated to tell the doctor just how much I longed for it.

'Very well. You can have it,' said he, 'for thirty pounds and no less.'

I cursed my own mind. This man, this back-room showman, already knew that I would give everything I had for another taste of his curious mixture, and, of course, he planned to take everything I had and no less.

'Please,' I said. 'Don't take all my money. I need to buy cloth for the shop, and to pay the wages of my assistant. There is also medicine for my dying father—'

'Thirty pounds,' he said again. 'Come here to-morrow evening with the money and I shall give you the recipe. If you do not come I shall regard our business as concluded. Good evening.'

He showed me the door.

The following evening I withdrew the money from its hiding place and carefully stowed it inside my shoe, lest the East End ruffians take it from me. With a heavy heart, and a profound uneasiness, I made my way back to the establishment opposite the London Hospital. The previous evening I had witnessed only a young man playing the Pandean pipes outside ; today, the girl with the organ was in attendance as well, her instrument wailing and buzzing with the same bombilations I recalled from the Goose Fair. I strode past all this, past the boys selling plum duff, the pick-pockets and the vagrants, and into the House of Horrors, paying another penny for the privilege.

I feared that the so-called doctor may have disappeared again, but the promise of thirty pounds must have been sufficiently enticing for him, as he greeted me as soon as I stepped into

And this is the place where the ripped-out page would have been. My eye keeps falling on the single sentence on page 133, the next existing page:

And so, in the freezing cold of that late November night, I walked away, each footprint in the snow a record of a further step towards my own downfall, the oblivion that faced me.

What am I supposed to do now? There is one chapter left, starting on page 135. Do I read it, and disregard the fact that what must be the crucial scene between Mr. Y and the fairground doctor is missing? Or ... What? What are the other options? It's not as if I can just go to a bookshop tomorrow and buy a replacement copy, or simply read the page. This book is not on any library record anywhere in the world: It doesn't even exist in rare manuscript collections. Is this page lost forever? And why on earth would someone have removed it?

Chapter Seven

Monday morning, and the sky is the color of sad weddings. I'm going in to the university, although I'm fairly sure it's still shut. But perhaps they'll have the heating on, anyway. And, as long as our building is still standing, there'll be free tea and coffee. Will our building be OK? It had better be, because I need to try to break into Burlem's computer. He's the only person I know who has ever seen a copy of The End of Mr. Y and maybe there'll be something on his machine that will tell me where his copy came from, or whom I could contact to arrange to look at the missing page. I didn't read the last chapter in the end last night. It wouldn't be right without the missing page. Instead, I listened to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on my iPod and wrote out everything I thought about the bulk of the novel I had read. I didn't get into bed until about three A.M., so I am not at all awake today.

I have never walked up to the university; I don't even know the right way. All I do know is that it is a steep climb, and I don't want to go up the way I came down on Friday because I am convinced that the right way must be shorter than that. So I do the only thing I can think of and go to the Tourist Information place by the cathedral. There's no one there apart from a woman with a gray perm and thin wire glasses. She is busy arranging a display of cathedral mugs, and I have to stand there for a few seconds before she notices me. It turns out that there's a free map of walking routes around the city, so she gives me one of those and I start following it immediately, walking around past the cathedral walls until I see a sign for the North Gate. I follow the sign and walk past some terraced houses and a noisy mill race opposite a pub where my map tells me to turn left, then right. Then I walk over a bridge and past some stinging nettles up a hill until I come to a footpath, which takes me through a tunnel under the railway: a strange cylindrical space with smooth, graffiti-spattered walls and round orange lights set to come on as you walk underneath them (at least, this is what I assume; perhaps the effect is actually the work of a poltergeist, or simply due to the fact that the lights are broken). I walk along the edge of a shabby suburban park, the kind of place where kids play football and dogs fight on a Saturday afternoon, then down an alleyway, across a main road, past a hairdresser, and into a housing estate. I think students live here, although it looks like the kind of place you'd come to only when you'd retired or given up life in some other way. All I can see as I walk up the hill are cream-colored bungalows and front gardens: no graffiti, no playgrounds, no shops, no pubs. The whole place has the kind of stillness you'd expect just before the world ended.

On days like this I do not feel afraid of death, or pain. I don't know if it's the tiredness, the book, or even the curse, but today, as I walk through this housing estate, there's a feeling inside me like the potential nuclear fission of every atom in my body: a chain reaction of energy that could take me to the limits of everything. As I walk along, I almost desire some kind of violence: to live, to die, just for the experience of it. I'm so hyped up suddenly that I want to fuck the world, or be fucked by it. Yes, I want to be penetrated by the shrapnel of a million explosions. I want to see my own blood. I want to die with everyone: the ultimate bonding experience; the flash at the end of the world. Me becoming you; you becoming we; we becoming forever. A collapsing wavefunction of violence. On days like this I think about being cursed and all I can think is Now, now, now. I want that missing page.

Soon I find the beginning of the pathway up to the campus. Weather-beaten gates stop cyclists from zooming straight upwards, not that anyone would be zooming up here: It's virtually a forty-five-degree angle. Tired though I am, I do feel a bit like running, just to get this hyped feeling out of my system. But I don't run. I walk through two sets of these gates and then past a patch of woodland on my left, where I'm hidden from the pale sky under the thin fingers of the winter trees. As I near the top of the hill, it starts to rain a little, and in the distance I can see yellow construction vehicles trundling around the collapsed Newton Building like toys in a nursery. I get to my building and the crazy feeling starts to seep away. I realize that the walk has taken more then half an hour. I wish I could liberate my car for the way back, but I was going to put petrol in it on the way home on Friday and I can't afford to do that now.

The English and American Studies Building is still standing, and isn't locked. That means someone must be in. Mind you, someone usually is. Even on Sundays I rarely have to unlock the door myself, although I did have to when I came here on Boxing Day. Even though there must be someone here, I can't sense anyone as I walk down the long corridor. It's not just that I can't hear the hum of electricity, or the monotonous sound of stressed-out fingers hitting cheap keyboards. I just can't feel the presence of anyone down here. I go into my office and find that the heating is on, although I am actually too hot from walking up the hill. I go to open the window and I see that the rain has hit the pane in these spattered patterns: broken diagonal lines that look somehow deliberate, and remind me of the pictures in my books of photographs from particle accelerators. I start up my computer and go up the stairs to the office to check my post.

Mary is in there, talking to the secretary, Yvonne.

"I suppose most people don't check their e-mail at home," Yvonne is saying. "I mean, on Friday they were talking about shutting down campus for a week. I'd be surprised if you saw people in here before next Monday. I suppose some might come in on Friday, out of curiosity. But of course the academics don't all come in during the vacation period, anyway."

The department used to be run by senior academics, who rotated the role among them. Now it, like most other departments in the university, is controlled by a manager brought in specifically to run the budget. Mary has somehow adopted the air of an academic, perhaps hoping this will make us trust her. But she doesn't really know much about academic life, and I often overhear Yvonne filling her in on what sort of things the academics traditionally do.

Mary looks pissed off. "So who is here?"

"Max is in. Oh hello, Ariel. Ariel's in."

Mary and I both know that my being here is of importance to nobody. I'm teaching one evening class this term and that's it. I don't have any admin responsibilities and I am not a member of any committees. I'm simply a Ph.D. student, and I don't even have a supervisor anymore. So I'm surprised when Mary looks at me as if I'm someone she needs to see.

"Ah, Ariel," she says. "My office, if you've got a moment."

I wait for her to walk past me into the corridor and then I follow her around the corner to her office. She unlocks the door and holds it open for me while I walk in. I don't think I've ever actually been in Mary's office before. She's got two of what they call the "comfortable" chairs set up facing a low, pale coffee table, so I sit at one of these and she sits at the other. I'm glad the days of having to face your boss across a desk are over. You can't do that kind of thing with computers in the way. Everyone faces walls or screens in offices now.

Mary doesn't say anything.

"Did you have a nice weekend?" I ask her.

"What? Oh, yes, thanks. Now." She goes silent again, but I assume that she's about to say whatever it is, so I don't attempt any more small talk. "Now," she says again. "You're in quite a big office on your own, aren't you?"

Damn. I knew this would come up one day.

"It's Saul Burlem's office," I say. "I've just got a corner of it, really."

This is a lie. Once Burlem had been gone for a couple of months, I cleared the surface of his desk, moved his computer to the coffee table, and made myself a large L-shaped arrangement out of his desk and mine. I've filled all the shelf space with my books, in case I ever have to do a runner from the flat in town, and generally populated the office with moldy coffee cups and all my research notes. I have a whole drawer full of things I believe might come in useful one day. There are three small bars of bitter chocolate, a Phillips screwdriver, a flathead screwdriver, a socket set, a spanner, a pair of binoculars, some random pieces of metal, several plastic bags, and, most worryingly, a vibrator that Patrick sent me through the internal post as a risqué present.

"Well, it's quite clear that Saul isn't coming back to us for the foreseeable future, so that means that a large portion of your space is unused?"

I can't do anything else but agree with this, at least as a theory.

"Right," says Mary. "Look. All heads of department have agreed to provide temporary office accommodation for the members of staff who have had to leave the Newton Building. It's going to be a squash for most of us but still, it has to be done. We've agreed to take four. Two are going to share the Interview Room, and two are going to come in with you. OK?"

"OK," I say. But I must look horrified. I love my office. It's the only really warm and comfortable space I've got in the whole world.

"Come on, Ariel, I'm not asking you to leave your office or anything like that. Just to share it for a while. You'd be sharing it anyway if Saul was around."

"I know. Don't worry. I'm not complaining or—"

"And we all have a responsibility for refugees."

"Yes, I know. As I said, it's fine." I bite my lip. "So ... Who are they? Do we know yet? I mean, do I know who I'm going to be sharing with?"

"Well." Mary gets up and picks up a sheet of paper from her desk. "You can choose, if you want. There's ... Let's see. There's a theology lecturer, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology, a professor of bacteriology, and an administrative assistant."

Well, I'm not having a bacteriologist in my office, although he or she would probably find a lot in there to study. And I fear an admin assistant might take the same view of my office as a bacteriologist.

"Um," I say. "Can I have the theology person and the evolutionary biologist?"

Mary writes something on her sheet of paper and smiles at me. "There. That's not so bad, is it?"

I leave Mary's office, wondering if she speaks to everyone as if they are children. I do try to like her, but she makes it difficult. I think she's been to some management training that tells you how to "empower" staff and let them feel that they've made the terrible decision that, after all, they're going to have to live with. Oh well. I still haven't even checked my post, so I go into the office to do that.

Yvonne already knows about the new office arrangements.

"I'll come down later and help arrange the desks," she says to me. "And Roger will be in with another desk as well, and some more shelving. We're going to put Professor Burlem's computer into storage, and any bits and pieces from his desk, so if you could maybe start sorting those out...?"

There is no post for me, in the end.

When's "later"? Whenever it is, it leaves me less time to get into Burlem's computer than I'd thought, especially now they're going to put it in storage. I lift it back up onto the desk and plug it in and switch it on. This won't be the first time I've tried to get into it, although the first time was really just a halfhearted attempt to see if there was any clue to where he'd gone. Then, as now, I was confronted with the login screen that asks for your user name and password. I know his user name: It's sabu2. But I have no way of knowing his password. The last time I did this I pretended I was in a film and confidently typed in several guesses before realizing that it was a stupid idea. This time I am going to use a more sophisticated hacking technique. And I learned in a book last year that the most sophisticated hacking technique doesn't involve guesses, algorithms, logarithms, dictionary files, or letter-scrambling software. The most sophisticated hacking technique is where you simply convince someone to give you the password.

Who knows our passwords? Computing Services definitely do, but does Yvonne? I think for a minute. Yvonne can't have our passwords, but what if she needed to get one for some reason? Presumably she'd just get in touch with Computing Services. It can't be that big a deal: Everything here officially belongs to the university anyway, including all the files on our computers. And Burlem has disappeared, so ... Could I just ring up Computing Services and pretend to be Yvonne? Probably not. She probably rings them all the time. They'll know her voice. Um. I think for a minute; then I run my fingers through my tangled hair a couple of times, set my expression to "very worried," and go back upstairs.

"Ah," I say, as soon as I walk in. "Yvonne?"

She's drinking tea. "Yes, Ariel? What can I do for you?"

"Um, I'm having a bit of a problem. A huge problem, actually, and I don't quite know what to do about it."

"Oh. Anything I can help with?"

"I don't know." I frown, and look down at the brown carpet. "I think it might be hopeless, actually. But..." I sigh, and run my fingers through my hair again. "Well, you know how Saul's computer is going into storage later on today?"

"Yes?"

"Well it's got a document on it that I need, and I don't know how to get it. I don't think I can. Saul's not here, and I don't have the password anymore. I used to have it, of course, but I've forgotten it and ... Oh. How can I explain this? Basically there's this anthology that someone at Warwick's putting together, and I was supposed to finish the, er, bibliography for Saul and e-mail the document over to them. It doesn't have to be there for another month, which is why I wasn't too worried about it. But I was just starting to pack the things away for storage, like you asked, and then it just came to me." I shrug. "I suppose I really need some sort of miracle or something. I don't suppose you'd know how to get a document from a computer with no password, would you? I mean, you're not by any chance an experienced hacker in your spare time?" I laugh. As if any of us would ever hack into a computer.

Yvonne sips her tea. "Well, you have got a problem, haven't you?"

"I know. I think I was just putting the whole thing off until I could just get in touch with Saul. I thought maybe he'd get in contact nearer the deadline, but of course he won't know that his computer's going to go into storage and ... God. Sorry to bother you with this, but I thought if anyone would know what to do it would be you."

I'm being careful not to mention the word "password" too much. I have a feeling that if I make this the problem it will sound a lot more dodgy than simply "I need a document and I don't know how to get it." And I think joking about hacking helps, but it is a risk.

"Have you tried Computing Services?" she asks.

"Not yet. I just thought they'd basically tell me to go away. I mean to them I could be anybody. And it is a bit of a weird thing to ask for. I mean, obviously you understand, but I'm not sure they would."

"Do you want me to give them a call?"

"Oh, would you? Thanks so much, Yvonne."

"I'll authorize the new password request and get one of them over to sort it all out for you. When Professor Burlem comes back he'll need to set a new password, but his old one will have expired, anyway. I don't know when they'll be able to get over to you, but do you want to let me know when they've been and we'll come and do the desks then?"

By twelve o'clock the technician still hasn't come and I'm beginning to feel hungry. If I could get hold of a bread roll I could make a chocolate sandwich (which wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had) but who knows if the canteen is even open. I try to open the university Web site so I can log on to the Intranet and see which of the various restaurants and cafeterias are open, but all I get is an Error 404 message instead of the front page. No wonder no one's here. Anyone who'd logged on to the university site to see whether it was open again would surely have feared the worst from this. I sigh. Even chocolate on its own wouldn't be the worst lunch I've ever had—in fact, it's practically gourmet—but some bread to go with it would be great, and the rolls in the canteen are only ten pence. I write a note for my door and pin it up. BACK IN FIVE MINUTES. I just hope he doesn't come and go away again.

The Russell Building is, like the Stevenson Building on the west of the campus, built in the shape of a four-petalled cyber-flower with a small set of cloisters in the middle. I haven't spent much time in the Stevenson Building, because the students all say that it is exactly the same as the Russell Building but "the other way around," which sounds impossibly confusing, especially considering that the Russell Building is confusing enough on its own. I only seem to get lost in the Russell Building at the beginning of the academic year, when all the new students are around and everybody seems confused, and it's as if the confusion leaks out of everyone's minds and infects everyone else.

Now I go out of the English Building through the side door, and under the walkway that leads to one of the Russell side doors. I go up some concrete steps, and then down some more, until I come to the mouth of a long, white corridor with a worn tiled floor and whitewashed walls. When the students are around this space seems almost normal but now it feels like the medical wing of an abandoned 1960s space station, or someone's idea of one. They keep broken university furniture in one of the rooms along here. I can hear my footsteps as I walk, and for the first time ever I get the sensation that there could be no one in the whole building apart from me.

The tables in the dining hall are laid out in a geometric pattern that seems accidental until you go up to the Senior Common Room and look down. From up there you realize that the long tables all point towards the cathedral, which is itself framed in the large windows at the back of the hall. It all makes sense, from up there, the whole thing, and you feel as if you are part of one picture, and nothing on the perfect line joining you with the cathedral really exists. You're in the dark, and the cathedral is framed in a rectangle of light. One time I had to go into this dingy room off Reception to search the slide projectors for a transparency I'd left behind after a seminar, because this librarian was basically going to kneecap me if I didn't get it back. As well as my slide (The Runner by Vittorio Corona) I found another one in the box: It showed the cover of Baudrillard's The Illusion of the End. On the way down to the canteen I held it up in the only light available: the window at the back of the hall, and that's when I saw what it was. The slide was all melted on the back but not the image: The image was perfect. But when I tried to pick out some of the detail I realized I was looking at the cathedral through the slide, and the two images became one. After that I fell in love with the slide and took it back to my office and tried to find a way of projecting it onto my wall. But I couldn't work it out and I don't know where the slide is now. I read more Baudrillard after that.

Today the tables are there in their usual formation but there are no jugs of water and no people and the whole thing is, as I had feared, closed. I could go to one of the other buildings but it seems pointless for a bread roll, so I walk back to my room and eat two bars of chocolate on their own. Then I have a coffee and a cigarette and settle down to wait for the technician. I try not to feel sad that this is possibly my last day alone in my office, but it is difficult. I suppose I won't be able to talk to myself in here anymore, or smoke out of the window, or fall asleep under the second desk. Will the new people want the blind set at a different angle? Will they want to bring potted plants? It's all too much to think about.

To pass the time, I open up the Internet browser on my machine and do a search for the word Troposphere. I don't expect anything to come up but then I find out that it does exist. It's a part of Earth's atmosphere: the place where most weather takes place. Could Lumas have missed that? I assumed the word was made up. I do the search on the OED instead, and find that the earliest use of the word was in 1914. So Lumas invented it first, but no one took any notice. But then why would they? It's only a novel, after all. After I've read the whole entry I do a search for The End of Mr. Y, just to see if there's any information online that I haven't seen before.

When you search for The End of Mr Y on the Internet, you usually get three links. One is an old abstract of the paper Burlem gave at the Greenwich conference. Another is a thread from a discussion board on a rare books site, where someone has left a request for the book and no one has replied. The third is a little more mysterious. It's basically a fan site, with a black background and some Gothic flourishes, and as far as I know it used to have quite a lot of information on the book. There was a page on the curse, and another page speculating about why there are almost no copies left in the world. The author of the Web site seemed to have concocted a conspiracy theory that the U.S. government had tracked down and destroyed all the known copies, including the one in the German bank vault (which, according to this guy, had once belonged to Hitler). He didn't say why this would be so, but hinted at some powerful secret that no one knew. I think the real story is simply that there were not very many copies of the book printed in the first place, and when a book has over a hundred years to fall into obscurity, it's pretty easy for it to simply disappear. Anyway, about six months ago, or maybe a bit more, the Web site closed down. I check it today and it's the same as it was last time I looked at it. There's no error message or anything, but the front page simply says, "They shut me up and I went away."

Today I am intrigued to see that there's a fourth link to a page containing a reference to The End of Mr. Y. It's a blog called "Some Days of My Life," and when I click on the link I am taken to a pink and white screen with various journal entries. I scan up and down but can't see the reference. I use Find instead and then I see it. It's the entry for last Friday.

Had to work in the bookshop again today (thanks a lot, Sam) despite humungous hangover. Spent the day dusting books which was oddly therapeutic. Had no customers apart from this student who came in and paid fifty quid for a book called "The End of Mr. Y," which I've never heard of but must be pretty rare. Maybe I'll go into the secondhand book business. How about it, Sam? We could be partners and give up crappy college and make fortunes out of people who are prepared to pay £££ for old books. How hard can it be?

There's a knock at the door and I immediately close down the browser.

It's the technician. "Ariel Manto?" he says, looking at a piece of paper.

"Yes," I say.

"Come to set a new password," he says.

"Oh, yes. Great," I say. "It's this machine over here."

I try to absorb myself in something else while he tinkers around with the system, thinking that the less fuss I make about it the less suspicious the whole thing will seem. So I don't try to explain or justify why I need the new password on the machine; I just let him get on with his job while I make a start typing up my notes on Mr. Y. Ideally, I'd like to write a whole chapter on The End of Mr. Y for my thesis. It would be easy enough to write, considering my obsession with the book, but it would also make a great article or conference paper on its own. The only problem is that I'm not sure in what way I could argue that it is a thought experiment.

Thought experiments or, in German, gedankenexperiments, are experiments that, for whatever reason, cannot be physically carried out, but must instead be conducted internally, via logic and reasoning, in the mind. There have been ethical and philosophical thought experiments for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, but it was when people began using these experiments in a scientific context that they were first given the title "thought experiment," a literal translation of gedankenexperiment, although Lumas had always referred to them as "experiments of the mind." The luminiferous ether is the result of a thought experiment of sorts, which postulated that, if light is a wave, then it has to be a wave in something. You can't have a wave in water with no water—so where was light's "fluid"? So people invented the luminiferous ether as an answer, only to discard it again when the Michelson Morley experiment proved that, sadly, there was no ether.

Edgar Allan Poe used the principles of the thought experiment to solve the Olbers's Paradox, and, some people believe, to more or less invent big bang theory a good hundred years before anyone else. His "prose poem" "Eureka" sets out his various scientific and cosmological thoughts, but Poe was no experimental scientist and so these theories came in the form of thought experiments, or, perhaps, something close to the way he described infinity, as the "thought of a thought." His Olbers's Paradox solution is one of the most elegant thought experiments in history. In 1823, Wilhelm Olbers wondered why we see stars the way we do in the night sky. At the time, most people believed the universe to be infinite and eternal. So if the sky was infinite, surely it would contain an infinite number of stars? And if there were an infinite number of stars, then our night sky should be white, not black. Olbers thought it was all down to dust clouds, and wrote, "How fortunate that the Earth does not receive starlight from every point of the celestial vault!" Edgar Allan Poe thought this through and decided that a simpler and more plausible solution for the "voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions" was that some of the stars were simply so far away that the light hadn't had time to reach us yet.

Perhaps the most famous thought experiment in history is when Einstein wondered what would happen if he could catch up with a beam of light. Einstein worked out that if he could travel at the speed of light then, logically, he would see the beam of light as if it were motionless, just as if you are in a train going at the same speed as another train moving alongside you, you see the people inside it as if they are not moving. So, what would light look like if it seemed to be at rest? Would it look like a frozen yellow wave? A paint spatter of particles? And what if you could look at yourself in the mirror while travelling at the speed of light? You'd seem invisible. Maybe you'd even be invisible. Einstein realized that there could be no such thing as an electromagnetic field that stood still. Maxwell's equations, which seemed to imply that you could, in theory, catch up with a beam of light, also showed that light was not something that could be stationary. So one of those points had to be wrong. It would be interesting if it was the other one, and you could catch up to light and see it frozen, but, for various reasons that I need more physics lectures to understand, it isn't. Einstein's theory of special relativity states that no matter how fast you go, light is always travelling relative to you at c, the speed of light. It doesn't matter if you're travelling at one mile an hour or a thousand miles an hour. The light you see around you is always going faster than you, and it's always going at c. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, it wouldn't seem to you that light going in your direction was therefore travelling half as fast. It would still appear to be going at the speed of light, c, relative to you.

"Let us suppose our old friend the railway carriage to be travelling along the rails with a constant velocity, v," says Einstein in his book Relativity. He then goes on to explain that if you walked along the carriage in the direction of travel, you'd be going not at the speed of the train, nor at the speed you were walking, but at the sum of the two. If the train was going at one hundred miles an hour, and you were going at one mile an hour, you'd actually be moving forwards at a velocity of one hundred and one miles per hour, relative to the embankment you were passing. Similarly, if I were to drive on the motorway alongside the railway line at, say, eighty-five miles per hour and this train passed me, it would appear to me to be going at fifteen miles per hour relative to me; and you, walking inside it, would seem to be going at sixteen miles per hour. If you looked out of the train and saw me driving along, I would appear to be going backwards. All this is Newtonian relative velocity and it does not apply to light.

Einstein's equations, the end result of his original thought experiments, show that matter and energy are different manifestations of the same thing, and that if you tried to approach the speed of light you'd just become heavier the closer you got as your energy converted to mass. He also showed that space and time are essentially the same. For Lumas, the fourth dimension was a space containing beings, or, at least, thought. For H. G. Wells it was a greenish otherworld containing spirits. For Zollner it was a place full of phantoms who seemed to like nothing better than helping out magicians. But for Einstein, it wasn't a place at all. But it wasn't simply time, either. It was the fourth dimension of space-time: not just the clock, but the clock ticking on your wall, relative to you.

The technician clears his throat. "Almost there," he says.

"Great. Thanks," I say back.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to be Einstein, sitting in a stuffy patent office looking out at the trains and the railway track. There's something romantic about it, of course, in the way only other people's lives can be. I briefly look up from my notes and out of my big, steel-framed window. Something comes to me, suddenly, some weird Lumas connection, and I look back down at my notes. I write:

Metaphor (as in Lumas preface)...Trope...(Troposphere!—weird) Ways of thinking about the world. You can't use trains as metaphors if there are no trains. Cf. différance. Can a thought exist without the language with which to have the thought? How does language (or metaphor) influence the thought? Cf. Poetics. If there was no evening no one would think it was like old age.

"All right," says the technician. "All set. If you just want to come over here and type in the new password..."

He gets up and moves to the other side of the room while I sit there and try to think of something. I should just use my own password; that would be simple. A few possible words go through my mind. But something makes me calmly type hacker into the box. It comes up as six little stars and I hit OK and then tell the technician I'm done. He comes over and does a couple more things and then restarts the machine.

"All done," he says, and leaves.

I have moved the mouse about a millimeter across the desktop when the phone rings. It's Yvonne.

"Has that technician been yet?" she asks.

"Yeah," I say. "He's just gone."

"You got your document all right then?"

"Er ... No. Not yet. I've literally only just logged in."

"All right, well, you sort it out and I'll be down in ten minutes to do the desks. Roger's here now, but I'll just give him a cup of tea and we'll hang on for a bit. You're all right to wait ten minutes or so, aren't you, Roger?" I can hear a muffled "Yeah, if there's a biscuit as well" in the background. "OK, Ariel, see you soon."

Ten minutes. Shit. I'm not going to be able to investigate Burlem's machine in ten minutes. OK: plan B. I take my iPod out of my bag and connect it to the back of Burlem's machine. I pray (to what? to whom?) that it won't reject the connection, and in a couple of seconds it's appeared as the F Drive. Fantastic. Now all I need to do is transfer the contents of Burlem's "My Documents" folder over and ... There. That took about twenty seconds. Would he have hidden any information anywhere else on the machine? I metaphorically poke around for a bit but a few clicks on folders tells me that he doesn't use anything apart from "My Documents" for his files. I'm not completely satisfied, but that will have to do. I double-check that the files have copied OK; then I unplug my iPod and shut the machine down just before a knock on my door tells me that Yvonne has arrived.

Chapter Eight

Yvonne is upset about the number of books in the room.

"What do you think, Roger?" she asks.

"Well," he says. "You're not going to fit any more shelves in here."

"No. That's what I thought."

While they're having this conversation, I'm clearing out Burlem's desk drawers, something I should have done much earlier. I've already filed a few loose documents relating to his Literature and Science course, and now I'm on to the general debris. There's a teaspoon, presumably stolen from the kitchen, which I hide before Yvonne can see it. There's a bag of filter coffee, unopened, which I also hide, thinking something along the lines of "finders keepers" but also that Burlem probably wouldn't mind me having his coffee in an emergency. But there's nothing else of interest in Burlem's drawers: just lots of pencils and board pens. Oh! And an electric pencil sharpener. I'm having that as well.

"What do you think, Ariel?" says Yvonne.

"Sorry?" I say. I've been so carried away with looting Burlem's drawers that I've somehow managed to tune them both out.

"We're just saying that Professor Burlem's books might as well go in storage, too. If I bring down some boxes, do you mind packing them up? We'll finish the rest tomorrow morning."

By four o'clock I've packed most of the books. Or, at least, I've packed most of the books that I think I won't ever want to use (mainly literature classics that I also have copies of, also in this room), and I am alarmed to see that they have only filled two of the five boxes I've been given. The shelf space they've left behind is minimal at best. I look again. There's no way I'm sending all Burlem's theory books into storage. I need all those. And the Literature and Science textbooks have to stay because I'm teaching the course in a couple of weeks' time. What about the nineteenth-century science books? I suppose I do have a lot of them at home. Shit. What am I going to do?

While I'm contemplating the situation further, the phone rings.

"So..." It's Patrick.

"So." I say back, playing along.

"Guess what I've got?"

"What have you got?"

"Keys."

"To?"

"The Russell study bedrooms. So I was thinking..."

I laugh nervously. He wants to fuck on campus. That's new. There's something in his voice I haven't come across before. He sounds bitter, as if he was angry a while ago but now he's resigned to whatever it is.

"Patrick," I say, as though I'm about to explain to a kid that you shouldn't play with matches. "What if...?"

"There's no one around," he says. "Why don't you bring that thing I sent you?"

Can I tell him I've got to pack boxes instead? Probably not. What about investigating Burlem's computer files? I open my desk drawer and look down at the object he wants me to bring. And then that's it. Desire bites me hard and I feel its warm poison creep through my body. I ignore the fact that Patrick's voice is weird, and that this is a stupid idea, and, after agreeing to meet him in a remote corner of the Russell Building, I pick up my bag and go over there, looking behind me a couple of times in case anyone is watching. I'll do the boxes later. And how long can this take? A quick fuck might be just the thing to break up the afternoon. And other people have tea breaks, don't they?

Afterwards, at six o'clock, still sitting in the small, slightly sordid room after Patrick has left, I wonder if the reason I tend to say yes to everything is because I deeply believe that I can survive anything, but I'm still looking for the definitive proof. It turned out that Patrick's voice was odd because his wife is in the process of leaving him—not because she found out about me, but because she has fallen in love with one of her toy boys. Patrick had been angry; that was clear. And it wasn't as if he'd called me up so he could take it out on me—he's usually a nice guy. But once we were in the room his fantasy world somehow collided with the violence and anger he'd built up in the real world and made everything more intense, more desperate, and a lot darker than usual. Had he known that this was the turn it would take? He'd asked me to bring the vibrator he'd sent, after all. But he'd also brought rope (not the usual silk scarves). But surely he hadn't meant to go as far as he did? Did he want me to tell him to stop? I don't know why I didn't. Except ... I didn't tell him to stop because I didn't want him to stop, because, well, maybe I like the darkness and violence, too. Maybe I need darkness and violence like food, like cigarettes. Maybe ... Maybe I should stop thinking about this.

After a couple more minutes I leave the room and, after walking down a dingy hallway with posters telling the students not to leave their windows open because pigeons fly in and lay eggs, I descend the steep staircase to the main part of the building. I walk through the white corridor under the white lights only to find the side door won't open. They don't usually lock it this early. Shit. I kick it a couple of times but it definitely is locked, so I have to walk all the way around again, my eyes moving nervously like a thief's, knowing that if I bump into anyone now it will look odd, and I can't even claim to have been to the vending machines because I'm not carrying any sweets or crisps. Am I walking strangely? After what I've just done it wouldn't be surprising. But the porter just nods at me as I escape through the main entrance and I glance blankly back at him. Back in the English Building I go and make coffee in the small, deserted kitchen, and then I take it down to my office, first ignoring the fact that I am now very hungry, and then deciding to eat the last chocolate bar.

I sit cross-legged on the floor for a while, just looking at the boxes while I drink my coffee and eat the chocolate. Then I examine the small rope burns on my wrists and ankles. There's something interesting about the grazed areas of flesh; something pleasingly symmetrical about them. But I probably won't see Patrick anymore. I'll do anything once for the experience, but that doesn't mean I'll necessarily do it again—even if at the time I enjoyed it. For a moment I think about Yvonne, who is probably at home now making tea for the kids in a bright kitchen with yellow lights everywhere and a dishwasher and a big TV ready to pump out brightness for the rest of the evening; I wonder at what point my life swerved to avoid that, and if that life would have been nicer than the one I've got.

It's dark outside the window as I start putting more books into boxes. They are dusty from being on the shelves for so long, and my hands are soon almost black with the grime from them. Ignoring this, I fill the first box with as many of Saul Burlem's nineteenth-century science books as I can bear to part with, although it takes a long time because I keep stopping to touch the pages, and to read the odd line here and there. I linger for longer than usual on Transcendental Physics by Professor Zollner. Burlem's copy of it is a small brown hardback from 1901. I randomly open it and read a short section about Kant, God, and the fourth dimension, which is opposite a picture of some knots. Another plate, farther on, shows a small, freestanding table, with a wide, solid top and bottom, with two solid wooden loops encircling its thin single stem. It's clear that if the table and loops are both solid wood, the loops would have had to have always been there; but they haven't been. They've been conjured onto it somehow. I turn the page and read about the strange lights and the smell of sulphuric acid that preceded these loops being placed onto the leg by unseen, possibly higher-dimensional forces.

Somehow I manage to clear one whole bookcase via this method of selecting a book, reading a bit, then, slightly sadly, placing it in the box. After that, I try to arrange all my books, plus the ones I'm "borrowing," onto one bookcase, but they won't fit. I look again at Burlem's books. If I boxed up his four volumes of the 1801 edition of Zoonomia, Erasmus Darwin's book, that would leave a bit more space, especially if I boxed up some of his Aristotle as well. But Zoonomia is one of my favorite of his books, and one I was definitely planning to use for the Ph.D. Except ... Actually, I won't be using it anymore, since Burlem persuaded me not to include it. I remember his words. Forget about Mr. Y. And forget about Zoonomia, as well. He said 1801 was too early and that I should stick within my time frame. Well, I suppose if I change my mind there is a copy in the library. So they're going in the box. I have to stand on a chair to reach them and I try not to get too absorbed with touching their wide green spines, then opening them and running my fingers over the thick, pulpy rag paper that still seems to contains tiny bits of tree. Perhaps it's because it's the end of a strange day, or because my arms are tired, but I'm not as careful with the books as I usually would be, and the thick pages flap about as I lift each volume off the shelf. In fact, the volumes don't seem to be in the best condition, because as I take Volume IV down, one of its pages actually falls out and flutters down onto the carpet like a leaf.

When I get down off the chair and pick up the page, I see that it isn't the right size, or thickness, for Zoonomia. It doesn't have that blotting paper feel, or the thick black type with the long letter s that looks like an f In fact, I realize, it's not a page of Zoonomia at all. The small, thin typescript is familiar to me, however, as is, in some unconscious way, the jaggedness of the tear in its edge. It also has a very faint crease: the result of having once been folded into four. This isn't a page that's simply fallen out of Zoonomia. This is the missing page from The End of Mr. Y.

For about five whole minutes I just stand there looking at it; not reading the words, just touching the paper and allowing the circuit in my mind to be completed. The book was Burlem's. The whole box of books from the shop was Burlem's. And it was Burlem who, for some reason, tore out this page and hid it. It must have been him. He must have left the page here. No one else has a key to this room except me, and if someone else had taken the page out of the book, surely they'd have hidden it in their own things, not in Burlem's. And I don't actually know anyone else who has ever even heard of The End of Mr. Y, except Burlem. But why would he hide a page of a book? And how on earth did the rest of the book end up in an auction? I can't work out how all these things could possibly fit together. Apart from anything else, the book would have been so valuable whole that it must have taken something mind-boggling to make him remove a page. And why not simply put the whole book on the shelf?

Forget about Mr. Y. Sorry, Burlem. That's not going to be possible now.

And, I now wonder, did he really want me to forget? He connected these two things: Mr. Y and Zoonomia, because he knew he'd left the page there. He connected them in language long before I connected them in the real world.

I can't read the page here, although it is difficult to stop myself. Instead, I tuck it carefully inside the Zollner book, which I've decided to take home with me, and, as quickly as I can, I finish packing the boxes and leave.

An hour later, after a cold, dark walk down the hill, I sit down on my sofa in the kitchen with a large cup of coffee. This feels like a ritual, but perhaps it should be a ritual. I never thought I'd read The End of Mr. Y, and then I found a copy of it in what appeared to be the most improbable circumstances. I never thought I'd find the missing page, but now here it is. And every one of these events is connected. But not by luck: It's pure cause and effect. The only piece of luck involved in all of this was the university starting to collapse and creating the cracks of chaos out of which these things could emerge. Of course, I still have no idea of what happened to Burlem, but I know that whatever happened to him is the real cause for what's happening to me now. Why did he disappear? It must have been something very bad if whatever it was meant that his most precious book ended up in a box in an auction. And the books in the box are definitely his: I flicked through them as soon as I got in and found some marginal notes in his pointy, up-and-down handwriting that proved it. I take a big gulp of coffee and, as a train clatters underneath my window, I read the first line on page 131, the remainder of the broken-off line on page 130.

the darkened room with its single lamp. I bade him good evening.

'Good evening to you, Mr. Y,' said he, a cold smile spreading itself thinly across his face. 'Shall we immediately begin this business? I trust you have the money?'

I reached down and withdrew the money from my shoe, almost losing my balance as I did so. This had the effect of thinning the doctor's smile yet further.

'I must say your purse is a little queer, Mr. Y.'

'This is all the money I have,' I told him. 'I was not about to allow it to be stolen.'

'Indeed not,' he replied.

Presently he motioned for me to sit down at the table, and he took the opposite side, as if a consultation were about to take place. I handed the money to him and felt a profound sense of emptiness puncture my soul. Would this fellow even give me what I wanted? I have to confess that at that moment I half believed that the next thing I would see would be a puff of smoke, and then the trick would be complete. However, there was no puff of smoke and the doctor continued to regard me across the table.

'I have transcribed the recipe for you,' he said. 'It is quite simple and requires no special preparation. The ingredients are common, as you will see.'

I realised then that he was holding in his left hand a sheet of tattered blue note-paper. There was the information I had been searching for all this time! I did not understand why this man was sitting there in this pose, simply holding on to this knowledge, this most precious thing. Why did he not simply give me what I had paid for? All at once I felt some demon seize possession of me, and I was overcome by an urge to reach across the table and rip the paper from his hand. I confess that I further imagined wrestling him to the ground and taking back my money. Yet all this only happened in my mind, and in reality I did nothing but sit there meekly awaiting my prescription.

'This mixture,' I said. 'It will have the same effect as...?'

'You wish to know if the mixture will enable you to telepath?'

'Yes,' said I. 'If that is indeed what took place in Nottingham.'

The doctor's thin smile returned.

'This mixture will most certainly enable you to telepath, if that is all you require of it.'

'If that is all I require? What in heaven do you mean?'

'The mixture will take you on many curious journeys, Mr. Y, I can assure you of that.' For a second or two the doctor looked as if he might continue in this portentous vein, but then something queer seemed to happen to him. His whole body appeared to grow limp, like a marionette placed in a cupboard after a performance, and for a full minute he did not move ; nor did he say anything else. When he did come back to life it was with a little jerk, as if someone had once again taken hold of his strings. He looked at the piece of note-paper in his hand as if puzzled by it and then, without saying anything else, he handed it to me.

I had only the merest opportunity to glance at my treasure before he rapped the table twice with the knuckles of his left hand and made to stand up.

'Well, then, good evening, Mr. Y. You have what you came for.'

I hesitated, understanding that this would be my only chance to ask the question that so burned on my lips.

'Before I leave,' I said, 'I have one question to ask of you.'

The doctor lifted one eyebrow in response but said nothing.

'I wish to know how many other people have this recipe,' I said.

'You wish to know how valuable is this knowledge you hold in your hand,' said the doctor. 'You wish to know how much power you now possess, and how it has been potentially diluted among the rest of the population. Well, I can answer your question quite easily. You are the only person to whom I have sold this recipe. Not everyone is as willing as you were to lie in a tent and imbibe a stranger's medicinal concoction simply for the purpose of knowledge. For pain relief, this is common. For pleasure, also. But you can rest assured, sir, that you are my only customer to date.'

I had more questions, but the doctor made it quite clear to me that our business was concluded and I walked out into the cold, murky hallway. In a parlour on my right I saw a child trying to light a fire. The result of this was a low, persistent, hissing noise and enough smoke to make my eyes sting. When I was certain that no one was looking, I rubbed the grime from my eyes and briefly examined the document in my hand. It only contained four lines, written in an untutored, unorthodox hand, in pale violet ink.

Make the tincture in the following way—:

Combine one part Carbo Vegetabilis, that is, vegetable charcoal, in

the 1000th centesimal homoeopathic potency, with 99 parts holy

water in a glass retort or flask and succuss the mixture ten times.

FD 1893

Then I slipped the blue paper into my shoe and made my way for the door.

I finish reading the missing page of The End of Mr. Y with a dry mouth and my heart beating as if it's trying to get out. I just can't believe it. I immediately reread the page, trying to re-create the sensation I felt when I got to the recipe, rather in the same way you queue up to take a fairground ride that has just terrified and excited you. But it doesn't quite work in that way. This isn't a ride you can take again but one, I am guessing, that is simply impossible to get off. And then I find that I can't sit down anymore. I get up and pace the room, feeling as though I should do something bigger, much bigger, to express the emotion I feel, but not knowing what that would be. Laughter? Tears? My brain is hysterical but I don't do anything to show it in the end; I just pace and smoke and think. I think about the strange preface, and all the hints that The End of Mr. Y contains something real. I think about the trouble someone, probably Burlem, has taken to conceal this page, which contains nothing of any interest apart from the instructions for making up the tincture. I think of Lumas's strange allusions to telepathy, and I remember this section about the "automaton of mind."

As Robert-Houdin has built automata with which to produce his illusions, I shall here propose to create an automaton of mind, through which one may see illusions and realities beyond ; from which one, if he knows how, may spring into the automata of all minds and their electricity.

And when I'm certain that I understand why the page is important, and the potential reason it was hidden, I sit down and finish the rest of the book, distracted by my own desire to find the ingredients and make up some of this tincture for myself.