From Here On Monsters Read online

  About From Here on, Monsters

  In a city locked in a kind of perpetual twilight, antiquarian bookseller Cameron Raybould accepts a very strange commission - the valuation of a rare codex.

  Within its fragile pages Cameron makes a curious discovery. Although seemingly ancient, the codex tells of a modern mystery: an academic missing for eleven years. Stranger still, as finding the truth becomes ever more of an obsession, Cameron begins to notice frightening lapses in memory. As if, all around, words, images, even people are beginning to fade from sight. As if unravelling the riddle of this book may be unravelling the nature of reality itself. And something frightening and unknown is taking its place...

  A noirish mystery, timely work of unbridled imagination from a startling new voice, Elizabeth Bryer.

  Contents

  About From Here on, Monsters

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Acknowledgements

  About Elizabeth Bryer

  Digital imprint page

  To know and not to speak.

  In that way one forgets.

  What is pronounced strengthens itself.

  What is unpronounced tends to non-existence.

  —Czesław Miłosz

  ‘Reading the Japanese Poet Issa (1762–1826)’

  The Separate Notebooks

  translated by Miłosz and Robert Hass

  1.

  ‘I’M MADDISON WORTHINGTON.’ Her smile was a beam of white framed by Mephistophelian red. Her gaze didn’t waver, and the flurry of colour she was wearing barely settled once she’d stilled and stretched out her hand.

  I tucked a bookmark between the pages of my novel and slipped my hand into hers, aware of the insistent press of her fingers first and its lack when she let go.

  ‘I’m Cameron,’ I said, ‘welcome to Alister’s Books.’

  ‘Do you recognise my face, Cameron?’

  I shifted on my stool as I studied her. Her eyes were calm seawater between foamy waves, the kind that drags you far from shore. Her bone structure was close to the surface of her skin, as if she’d pressed out the churn of her emotions with her fingertips, had sculpted away youth’s softness to reveal the control and beauty beneath. She raised her eyebrows, as if to say, Well? I shook my head, deflated. I was sorry to have to disappoint her.

  I was startled when she clapped, her palms clasping before her clavicle. Her fingers bore traces of cobalt blue.

  ‘Wonderful! You wouldn’t believe how tiresome it is to be constantly recognised, always aware of the public gaze. Now, my proposal for you. What are you like with words?’ She motioned towards the shelves of second-hand books. ‘You read a lot of these, I imagine?’

  ‘Sure do.’

  ‘And you’re quite the whizz at cryptic crosswords.’ Her gaze flicked to the Big Issue lying open at the puzzle page on the counter.

  ‘I cross-checked a lot of them with the quick clues.’

  ‘There’s no need for modesty.’

  I could feel confusion tickling up inside me. Puzzles were usually my thing, but key pieces were missing from this one.

  ‘I see you close early a couple of days each week and open late on others. So you could easily spend some time working for me.’

  ‘With words?’

  ‘Indeed.’ She laughed, and all I saw was that smile of hers, that mouth. ‘As I said in the ad, I have a few tasks that need doing; an extra assistant would do me a world of good. I’m a visual person, I know my strengths and weaknesses.’

  Finally the pieces fell into place. Two weeks earlier I’d expressed an interest in a part-time gig in the eastern suburbs. An advertisement sought a creative wordsmith; the hourly rate was more than I’d ever earned, and I could really do with the money.

  ‘I’d need you to be absolutely committed, one hundred per cent. That’s what I’m impressing on the applicants I’m visiting today. I need complete loyalty. Think on it. Tomorrow, come see where you would work, and we’ll talk some more; my assistant will fetch you in the afternoon.’

  Her phone chimed. She pressed it to her ear, giving me a brief smile as she made for the door. As suddenly as she’d arrived, she was gone.

  The shop was as quiet as if a crowd of people had left. The books peered at me from the shelves and walls. As Maddison Worthington’s heels tocked in the landing I thought of the assurance of that outstretched hand, that unwavering gaze.

  I picked up my novel, Kafka’s The Trial, and started reading again, the words bright with a perfume I only noticed now that she was gone: white woods, musk, heliotrope. Even her absence demanded attention.

  As the labyrinthine sentences started to draw me in, I raised a thumbnail to my mouth then stopped; thought of Maddison Worthington’s animation and poise. I looked down at my high-waisted shorts and oversized black-and-white-striped tee, which I’d cropped with kitchen scissors, feeling suddenly juvenile. An image of Maddison Worthington’s stained fingertips came to me, that little glitch in her presentation. I pushed my frames up my nose.

  I’d reached the part in The Trial where Josef K. tells Fraülein Bürstner about how he woke in the morning to find two functionaries in his room and how they said he was under arrest for an unidentified crime. He whispers to Fraülein Bürstner not to be afraid, that he will put everything right. I scrutinised the lines for a clue as to whether he was guilty, whether he’d wiped a crime he’d committed from memory.

  Reaching the bottom of the page a few moments later, I realised I hadn’t taken the last few lines in. Something was wearing at the edges of my concentration, another absence. I slid off the stool, crossed to the door and peered into the landing.

  The fluorescent light buzzed, projecting a sallow sheen across the space before me, which stretched from my door to the lift a few steps forward to the left, to Buttonorama opposite and to the stairwell on my right. Next to the button shop was a short corridor that led to three studios, only one of which was occupied.

  The niggling absence became clear—the clunk and rumble, the ting and the shunting off: the lift hadn’t made any of those sounds. Where, then, had Maddison Worthington gone?

  Buttonorama was closed for the day, and the two graphic designers who shared the studio down the corridor were flinging terse exclamations back and forth. I moved to the stairwell and peered over the banister.

  Five floors down a heavy door opens onto the lane, but there’s a trick to manoeuvring it. I hoped Maddison Worthington wasn’t trapped down there, possibly panicking. Hearing nothing, I went back into the shop and crossed to the middle window. It looks out to the building opposite, and those tall narrow slabs and panes railroaded my gaze down to street level.

  I leaned against the sill and waited for her to appear below. Cars were inching along the lane, pedestrians moving just as rapidly beside them, all of them so sure of where they were going or supposed to be. The heat from the window burned into me and I lifted a hand to shield my face.

  When the bell above the door tinkled, I turned to see a rotund form I knew well entering the shop.

  ‘Hello, Bailey! Your special order’s arrived.’ I crossed to the counter.

&nb
sp; ‘No rush, I’ll take a look around first.’

  I found The Opium Wars and placed it next to the till. A few moments later, a pale adolescent came in and asked shyly if I had any modernists. I zigzagged down the aisles and pulled out Zora Neale Hurston, Futabatei Shimei, Osip Mandelstam, Clarice Lispector. He said a quick thanks and took the books to the table in the corner, lowering himself into one of the armchairs. When Bailey popped his head around the closest shelf, holding up a hardback, I followed him to the counter and rang up his bill. On his way out he held the door open for a researcher; she was looking for pre-1950s Australian popular fiction titles. I left her checking the boxes of new arrivals and searched the shelves as the bell tinkled once more.

  This is what happens: there’s hardly anyone and then there are so many that the rest of the day goes by in a blur. It was only when I was closing that the issue of whether Maddison Worthington had managed to let herself out of the building came back to me the way a pulled muscle twinges at midnight. I took the stairs instead of the lift, disturbed by the remote chance I might find her injured or unwell. My footsteps rang out and my head spun from all the turns. I came across no one, a relief. Of course she was long gone; what had I been thinking? I heaved the door open and stepped into the night.

  The next day, the skittishness tickling beneath my skin meant I couldn’t even concentrate on my novel, let alone complete a crossword. I was half-waiting for Maddison Worthington’s representative, the worst kind of waiting.

  There was a lull in customers, so I stuck a BACK IN FIFTEEN sign to the door and headed out for a late lunch, sticking to the shaded shopfronts. The heat felt like it was braising my eyes and made my skin sticky.

  A place tucked into the far corner of the station serves five-dollar snacks, one of the cheapest eateries within a few blocks. Inside makes me think of a Christmas tree: the yellow down-lights reflect off the shiny floor and varnished square-top pine tables. The conditioned air hit me hard and sweet.

  An elderly man and woman were seated in the middle of the room, fried fare and pots of beer before them. Two men stood towards the back, studying the horses racing across the three identical TV screens fixed high on the wall.

  The bartender had a five-o’clock shadow, a shock of black hair, thick eyebrows and a world-weary air that evaporated whenever he smiled. Although I ate there often, I didn’t know his name. He looked up as soon as I came in, keeping his eyes on me as I headed towards the bar and perched on one of the stools.

  ‘A couple of steamed dim sims?’

  ‘You’ve read my mind.’

  ‘Always do.’

  I reached for a newspaper on the bar. Its corners were curling and a ring was branded into it where a sweating glass or bottle had been. The picture on the front was of people packed into a decrepit-looking boat, discoloured smears marking its sides. Lengths of rope were looped around the bow and drums hung from the pilot’s cabin. The headline read: RECORD NUMBER of boat arrivals.

  A young woman, brow furrowed, mouth open, hair all whipped about, was the only one looking at the camera, and it felt as if she was looking directly at me as I sat at the bar waiting for my food.

  The bartender set down a plate and a tall aluminium beaker before me, then glanced at the paper.

  ‘What some people go through, huh?’

  ‘Mmm.’ I sank my teeth into the first salty dim sim, the rubbery skin giving way to the mushy interior. There’s something one-part unpleasant to two-parts comforting about eating drunk food when sober.

  Only a few customers came in the rest of the afternoon, but I stayed two hours after closing, in case Maddison Worthington’s representative came by late; the next day I’d be too busy to visit my prospective workplace because I had two appointments to appraise books. As the light started to fade, I wondered if I’d misunderstood the arrangement.

  When I finally turned out the light and moved towards the door, a room in the building opposite was visible. Usually, the daytime glare reflects my building and so conceals what lies within. I was taken aback to see a room filled with haphazardly arranged shelves, all of them lined with books.

  I stepped closer to the window. A floorboard creaked beneath my tennis shoes. Could there be a competitor so close by that I’d never known about?

  I realised with a start that inside the room in the building opposite a man stood looking at me. I blinked, the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. It was hard to see his face from this distance. I slowly raised a hand but let it drop when he made no sign in return. I remembered then that I was standing in the dark. To him I would be no more than a silhouette against the faint light from the landing. I shook myself and tore my eyes away, then picked my way to the door and locked it tight.

  2.

  THE FIRST COMMISSION took me to a house in a northeastern fringe suburb on the river, a two-storey terrace fronted by a cast-iron fence and a row of Iceberg roses. I grasped the hoop hanging from the brass lion head on the door and knocked twice.

  A man in suit pants and a collared shirt must have been waiting just inside. He opened the door, his fishlike eyes contemplating me as if from behind a curve of glass.

  ‘Good morning. Ms Raybould?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Right on time. I’ve wasted entire mornings waiting for tradespeople.’

  ‘And you’re Felix?’

  ‘I am.’

  He led me down a wallpapered hall, speaking to me over his shoulder.

  ‘Have you been in the trade long?’

  ‘I took over from my mentor a year ago and helped him out for three years before that. But it’s something you practise all your life, really, if you’re a certain way.’

  ‘Bookish, you mean?’

  ‘Interested in the book as a physical object, not just its contents. Editions, first printings, circulation, that kind of thing.’

  He stopped before a door, pulled a key from his pocket and turned it in the lock.

  ‘This is the library, Ms Raybould,’ he pushed the door open. ‘Take as much time as you need. May I bring you some tea?’

  ‘I’d love some, thanks!’

  As he disappeared down the hallway, the door of the library creaked back towards me. I pressed against it and stepped through.

  The room was dim. Uneven light filtered through the patterned glass of two tall windows, eddying into brightness then shadow, and the carpet was a rich burgundy with a gold pattern, worn in parts and giving off a musty aroma.

  Something felt wrong about this smell. Maybe it was the faint traces of turpentine, pitching me off-kilter. But it was an emptiness or lack in the atmosphere that troubled me more.

  At the centre of the room were two armchairs and a small table dwarfed by the height of the ceiling. And all around, stretching to the ceiling on walls interrupted by only the doorway and windows, was the library, as Felix had called it.

  I’d never seen anything like it and had to step closer to confirm what I was looking at. How on earth should I value the collection? Even Alister would have been stumped. For as I moved closer, the library’s true nature became plain. Exquisite as the artistry was, it was a library of painted books, and those painted books lined painted shelves. I experienced the faint discomfort of laughing at a punchline that you don’t quite get.

  I concentrated on the painting that covered the closest wall. Among what I guessed were imaginary titles were faithful depictions of real books. I ran my fingertips across the tiny sweeps the paintbrush hairs had made, across the bubbled plaster surface, thinking of a Classical Greek story I’d found in the bookshop. Retold in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, it was the tale of a contest between two painters, Zeuxis and his rival Parrhasius. Zeuxis painted a still life so convincing that birds flew down to peck at the painted grapes. Parrhasius then asked him to judge one of his paintings, concealed behind a pair of curtains. Zeuxis, full of heady elation at the success of his own painting, asked for the curtains to be drawn aside. This was impossible:
the curtains were the painting. Zeuxis’ trompe l’oeil had deceived a couple of birds, but Parrhasius’ had deceived a master artist.

  I daydreamed about a visitor wandering into this library and imagined the viewing angle and the light aligning to create a perfect illusion of depth. Standing ninety degrees before a book spine, glancing at it when no light was reflecting off its surface. Maybe this person would reach out to grasp it. Then, the quick intake of breath on encountering the cool, flat disappointment of wall.

  My daydream broke against the thought that a hyper-real painting of books was the perfect meshing of content and form: both books and trompe l’oeil have the power to deceive. How well they deceive their audience is the measure of their success. Both offer comfort, but if the illusion breaks you might feel shock, betrayal, even anger. All of us prefer to remain deceived.

  The tea hadn’t materialised, so as much to kill time as to fulfil this bizarre commission I tapped the approximate prices of the painted volumes into my tablet and made a note of the titles I didn’t recognise or had doubts about: Elizabeth Durack’s Seeing—through the Philippines, An Artist’s Impressions of the Islands in a retro pink and white design; Jennifer Dickerson’s Chiaroscuro; and what might have been the first edition of Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding. I made hypothetical assessments of the hypothetical books’ condition and based my estimates on those. This was hard, not only because I couldn’t check the spine against the imprint page (in the case of a painted Magic Pudding, for example, there was no way of knowing whether the volume was the 1918 edition or a facsimile reprint), but also because I was used to handling the books I was appraising, used to noting their weight, the texture of their covers. The feeling of a book in my hands was crucial to reaching an accurate estimate. The painting was impeding my work, robbing me of the real even while upholding the pretence that it could represent that reality. I felt frustrated, but whenever I encountered an especially lifelike tome I thrilled with marvel as well.

  I was calculating the total when Felix appeared carrying a silver tray with a teapot, jug of milk, sugar bowl and cups and saucers, which he set down on the table.