Chapter 1
When the books began arriving at Vincent Bell’s loft, he did not regard them as inventory.
Inventory implied a business.
A business implied hours, records, an obligation to distinguish between objects that had been sold and objects that merely ought to have been sold.
Vincent saw walls.
The loft August had secured for him was large enough to make its emptiness troublesome. Sound traveled too freely. A cough returned from somewhere beyond the bare floor. Footsteps seemed to belong to more than one person. At night, the windows held the darkened interior against the glass, doubling a room that already contained more space than Vincent cared to occupy.
The books improved matters.
He began beside the sleeping area.
Hardcovers at the bottom.
Thicker volumes where a little weight was required.
Paperbacks fitted into gaps, their bent covers disappearing between biographies of dead statesmen, forgotten novels, and books whose titles he had not troubled to read.
He built slowly.
Not carefully in any conventional sense, but with the absorbed seriousness of a man doing something whose necessity was obvious only to him.
A wall grew between the bed and the rest of the loft.
Then another.
The books smelled of different houses.
Dust.
Old tobacco.
Paper kept too near a damp wall.
A trace of perfume caught between pages that had not been opened in years.
As Vincent handled them, small things occasionally fell out.
A receipt.
A photograph.
A bookmark bearing the name of a shop that might no longer exist.
He set these aside without examining them closely.
Other people had been using books to keep pieces of their lives.
Vincent needed them to keep one part of a room separate from another.
By the end of the first day, a narrow passage led from the entrance toward the windows.
By the third, there was a sitting area.
By the fifth, the loft had acquired corners that had not existed when he arrived.
August’s shipments continued.
Vincent accepted them with increasing satisfaction.
It was thoughtful of the old man to provide building materials.
The ordinary biographies were useful.
So were the works of fiction.
He made little distinction between them when choosing a volume for a particular place in a wall. Size mattered. Weight. Whether the spine would prevent another book from sitting level.
A thick account of a life could support a novel full of invented sorrow.
A romance could fill the space beside a murderer’s childhood.
From a distance, the partitions looked almost intentional: bands of faded cloth, glossy jackets, pale page edges, names turning in and out of view as the stacks rose.
Up close, they resembled an argument conducted by people who had never met.
Vincent moved among them contentedly.
The loft was becoming habitable.
It was also becoming less visible from its own entrance.
That pleased him.
A person ought to have somewhere to stand without being immediately found.
His first sale required almost no persuasion.
Robert Armstrong did not ask for a sample.
He did not demand a demonstration.
He had spent enough time listening to Vincent above and below the bar to believe that the world contained arrangements more consequential than the ones printed on licenses and tax forms.
When Vincent described the biography, Robert listened.
When he named the price, Robert asked how soon it could be made.
One hundred thousand dollars.
The bar was sold.
Money moved through accounts whose occupants had never heard of the King in Yellow and had no interest in learning what a book might do to the life written inside it.
Robert sent the transfer.
Vincent received confirmation while sitting on the floor beside an unfinished partition.
He looked at the message for some time.
Then he used the phone to call August.
It was not the first call of the day.
It would not be the last.
The cat remained an outstanding concern.
Robert had arranged transport through CatEx, a new service devoted to carrying cats from one place to another with a degree of ceremony Vincent found appropriate.
The journey would be recorded.
Someone would read the animal a story.
There were different levels of service.
Robert selected the deluxe package.
After the sale of the bar, it seemed a poor moment to economize upon the comfort of a creature that had done nothing to deserve the upheaval around it.
A CatEx representative asked for the cat’s name.
Robert gave the one he had heard Vincent use hundreds of times.
There was no reason to doubt it.
He had heard the word called up the stairs.
Repeated at feeding time.
Spoken with irritation when something fell, with tenderness when the animal climbed onto Vincent’s bed, and with solemn attention during conversations Robert had never felt invited to interrupt.
He made the booking.
Then he telephoned Vincent.
“Fingal,” Vincent said.
Robert stood in the emptied bar with the transport confirmation open before him.
“What?”
“His name is Fingal.”
“That isn’t what you call him.”
“It is his name.”
Robert looked toward the place where the till had stood.
There was a pale rectangle upon the counter.
“I’ve heard you call that cat—”
“Robert.”
Vincent’s voice acquired a patience more difficult to oppose than anger.
“Would you wish to travel under a false name?”
The cat sat upon a chair nearby, washing one forepaw.
Robert looked at it.
The animal gave no indication that the question troubled it.
“I’ll call them back.”
“Thank you.”
CatEx amended the booking.
The correction caused a delay.
One day.
Vincent received this news as a minor bureaucratic tragedy and telephoned Robert twice more before evening to discuss whether Fingal had been informed.
He called August ten or twelve times a day.
Some calls concerned sales.
Some concerned deliveries.
Others began as questions about one subject and ended somewhere neither man could have predicted from the first sentence.
August answered with diminishing enthusiasm.
He had provided Vincent with shelter, stock, and an occupation.
Vincent had interpreted these provisions as the beginning of an ongoing conversation.
The telephone rang while August was reading.
It rang again.
He took a moment to finish the sentence.
Then he answered.
“Yes?”
“Mister Derleth.”
August closed his eyes.
“Mister Wild.”
“I have a question.”
“I assumed.”
Vincent stood inside the little passage he had built from books.
One wall rose above his shoulder. A biography near its center had begun to lean outward. He pressed it back into place with the heel of his hand.
“May I have the book you made about me?”
August did not answer immediately.
Vincent listened to the silence with interest.
There were silences that meant someone was thinking.
Others meant someone hoped you would continue talking and spare them the effort.
This one seemed to belong to a third category.
At last, August said, “There isn’t a single book about you.”
“Not yet?”
“There are two volumes.”
Vincent looked toward the loft windows.
Light lay upon the floor in a broad, dusty rectangle.
“Two.”
“Yes.”
“That seems generous.”
“It wasn’t a matter of generosity.”
August’s voice had grown precise.
“Your life and your wife’s are too closely entangled to be treated separately.”
Vincent said nothing.
The word wife had altered the dimensions of the little passage.
For a moment, the stacks on either side seemed too close.
August continued.
“The first is titled Book of Constance and Vincent.”
Vincent repeated the title softly.
“The second is Book of Vincent and Constance.”
“The names change places.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the books do.”
Vincent lowered himself onto a chair.
It stood in what he had decided was the sitting room, though one side remained open and a carton of novels occupied the place where a table might eventually go.
“The first volume,” August said, “contains what preceded your meeting, and the life that followed it up to her death.”
“Both of us?”
“Yes.”
“Before we knew one another.”
“Yes.”
Vincent looked at his hands.
It was a strange thing to imagine: Constance elsewhere, living through hours that had not yet acquired him.
A room he had never entered.
A morning in which she had no reason to know his name.
“What about the second?”
“Everything after she died.”
The answer was simple.
Its implications were not.
Vincent watched the patch of sunlight.
A little dust moved through it, visible only while crossing the brightness.
“And she remains in the title.”
August exhaled.
“As I said, the lives cannot be cleanly separated.”
“May I have them?”
“No.”
The refusal came quickly this time.
Vincent frowned.
“You sell these books.”
“Under certain conditions.”
“I have money.”
“This is not about the price.”
“Most things become about the price if the conversation goes on long enough.”
“Not this.”
Vincent glanced toward the walls.
Names faced him from the spines.
People whose lives had been made portable.
People who had never met the person stacking them beside his bed.
“If she were alive,” August said, “you could have the first volume.”
Vincent’s attention returned to the telephone.
“But she isn’t.”
“No.”
“And that prevents it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s the rule.”
August sounded as though he had already expended more explanation than the subject deserved.
“Unless you bring her back, the books stay where they are.”
The loft grew quiet.
Not actually quiet.
Traffic continued beyond the windows.
A pipe clicked somewhere in the building.
Farther down, someone dragged something heavy across a floor.
But Vincent’s attention withdrew from those things.
He looked toward the partition beside his bed.
An unfinished section left a narrow opening through which he could see the folded blanket.
“Bring her back.”
August said nothing.
“From the grave?”
“That would satisfy the condition.”
Vincent leaned forward.
“And then?”
“Then you may have them.”
“Both?”
“Yes.”
“No additional charge?”
“No additional charge.”
August paused.
“All yours.”
Vincent considered.
His expression did not change greatly.
Only the eyes moved, shifting away from the windows toward a point nearer the floor.
Constance had become a death he knew about without possessing a clear memory of receiving the news.
Now she had become a condition in an agreement.
An absence that could, apparently, be corrected.
He did not ask where she was buried.
Not yet.
He did not ask what kind of return would count.
The room around him had begun to suggest other uses for its empty spaces.
He sat back.
“Good to know.”
On the other end of the line, August waited.
For a question about the means.
For a qualification.
For any indication that the man had understood the difference between an assurance and an invitation.
Instead, Vincent said, “I have another question.”
“Go on.”
“Robert says I came to Providence to find my daughter.”
August remained silent.
Vincent touched the edge of one wax ear, adjusting it carefully where it met the skin.
“I don’t recall that.”
He tried to summon the morning above the bar.
The coat.
The ticket.
Robert standing near the entrance.
There had been urgency.
A purpose.
He could recover the shape of wanting without finding the thing wanted.
“But Robert usually remembers practical matters.”
“Yes,” August said.
Vincent waited for more.
Nothing came.
“So I thought you might know where Missy is.”
August looked at the book before him.
His place remained marked beneath one finger.
The question had arrived without preparation.
That did not mean he was unprepared to answer it.
“She’s dead.”
Vincent did not speak.
The old man continued in the same voice.
“Her great-grandfather, on her mother’s side, stabbed her.”
Outside Vincent’s windows, a vehicle sounded its horn.
The noise rose through the glass, thin and impatient.
“Recently?” Vincent asked.
“The other day.”
A pause.
Then Vincent looked toward the unfinished wall.
One of the books had slipped.
Only a little.
Enough to disturb the line.
He leaned sideways and pushed it back.
The volume resisted, then settled.
“I see.”
August waited.
There were responses the living ordinarily made when told that a child had died.
Questions.
Denials.
The sudden need to establish how, where, whether someone was certain.
Vincent supplied none of them.
That might have been indifference.
It might have been the mind refusing a fact too large to enter all at once.
August had little interest in discovering which.
“Was there anything else?” he asked.
Vincent’s gaze remained on the wall.
A woman’s name faced outward from a spine.
Not Constance’s.
Not Missy’s.
Someone else whose whole life had been reduced to a narrow, readable surface.
“No.”
His voice sounded almost cheerful when he spoke again.
“Good to know.”
He shifted the telephone.
“Thanks a million.”
August said nothing.
“Toodles.”
Vincent ended the call.
For a while, he sat without moving.
The loft had become a series of small rooms made from other people’s stories.
One passage led to the bed.
Another toward the windows.
A wall of lives stood between him and the entrance.
Somewhere in the city, August possessed two volumes that could not separate a husband from his dead wife.
Somewhere else, Missy’s life had ended.
Vincent looked at the phone.
Robert had remembered why he came.
August had told him why the journey no longer mattered.
Or ought no longer to matter.
But a rule had also been spoken.
Unless you bring her back.
The words remained available.
Unlike memory, they did not shift when he reached for them.
Vincent rose.
He moved one stack of books.
Then another.
Near the center of the loft, he began clearing a space.
Fingal would arrive tomorrow.
There was still time to put the room in order.
