The Clerkenwell Tales by Peter Ackroyd (good short books .txt) 📕

His hand was moving quickly, as if he were shaking invisible dice. “You know of dreamers and geomancers?”

“I am a clerk, Gabriel, not an enchanter. Do sit.”

“Yet you told me that in the stars is written the death of every man, clearer than any glass.”

“It is so.” He hesitated. “Are you in sickness?”

“Not one that any leech could cure.” Gabriel sat down upon a little wooden stool, but then immediately rose and walked over to the horn window. “I am in wanhope.”

“Never say so, Gabriel. Even to speak those words is a great sin.”

“But mine is a great trouble.” He was looking down into the street below. “I am marked down.”

Then he began his story. He had been resting in his lodging in Camomile Street, when he heard noises in the room above his own. He noted the footsteps of several people, as well as voices engaged in conversation; the words were so muttered and confused, however, that he could not make them out. They made a low and indistinct sound, which reminded him of the noise of the city when heard from the fields. He had been lying quietly upon his mattress, but suddenly he sneezed very loudly. The conversation above him stopped, and for a moment there was absolute silence. Then there was the noise of footsteps, and the door of the upstairs chamber was flung open. Gabriel could hear two of them coming down the stairs very quickly and, to his horror, there was a ferocious banging upon his door. It continued until Gabriel could bear it no longer; he crept over to the door, and put his ear against it. It was then he heard the sound of heavy breathing, loud and intense. Slowly he unlocked the door, raised the latch, and looked outside. There was no one there.

Emnot could not help breaking in. “So these were bloodless and boneless ones behind the door?”

Gabriel enquired among his neighbours, but no one had heard or seen anything that evening; the room was itself untenanted, given over to worms and spiders. Gabriel would have dismissed the matter from his mind since, as he said to Emnot, “men may die of imagination.” But then two days later he had been walking down Camomile Street towards his shop in Forster Lane, when he was possessed by the strangest sensation of being followed. He looked around, but could see nobody except the traders and the casual populace of the area. He thought that he had heard someone calling out, “Head him! Head him!,” but amid the general clamour it might have been the baker’s cry of “Bread!” He also recalled that, at this moment, a horse reared up and threw its rider into the kennel of water and rubbish in the middle of the road.

On his way to work the following morning, in the same part of the street, he believed that he was once more being pursued; someone then put a hand upon his shoulder but, when he turned in alarm, there was no one. The same fear had come upon him, in that street, many times since. “It is more horrible than all monsters,” he told Emnot.

“When does it press about you?”

“At dawn. And then again about curfew. Sometimes, too, I hear the steps above me in the room.”

“Can you cast in your thought what they may be?”

“No. I cannot.”

“They say that the souls of those who betray friends or guests go to hell, while their bodies continue to live.”

“But there are no bodies. They are without shape or form.”

“It is marvellous and strange to me. They seem to be of this earth but they cannot be seen upon it.”

“Yet they are more menacing than cruel mouths.”

Emnot rose from his chair and joined Gabriel by the window in the waning light. “Let me consider. If their anger arouses in you these floods of tremblings, then they possess an influence like that of intolerable heat or cold. Now it is said that where a great fire has for a long time endured, there still dwells some vapour of warmness. Could this be your case?”

“How so?”

“They may be creatures of a time beyond human memory.” Emnot was troubled by his cousin’s story in another sense, since these invisible meetings were like a ghostly image of the predestined men who met in secret places. All his fears of pursuit and capture were aroused by Gabriel’s haunted life. “Like the mist which is made of disintegrating clouds, they may be a memory of passed things.”

“If that is so, Emnot, then they have come to my infinite harm.”

“Or these people may be upon a different path. What if they were ahead of us?”

“And are yet unborn? Why would they come into Camomile Street?”

“Yes. True. So they must be a sad token of what is gone.” Emnot was distracted by a memory of William Exmewe’s vision of the circles interlinked, circles that partook of each other’s nature so that it was not clear where one began and another ended. He thought of the round drops of light rain, or mist, or dew, running into one another. If you looked into the circles deep enough, all would be cured.

“Whatever path they tread, I am foully vexed with them.”

“They are but dead, Gabriel.”

“One touched me, Emnot.”

Emnot went over to a small cupboard, took out an enamelled jug, and poured two cups of wine. There were some crumbs of bread floating on the surface, and he picked them out with his finger. “How great be these darknesses. And therefore David says, Abissus abissum invocat. Deepness calls unto deepness.”

Gabriel looked at him with pity. “You are still a man of learning, I see. A very perfect gentle clerk.”

“And as a clerk I will give you my avisement.”

“Go to the nun?”

“By no means see that witch. Remove from your lodgings, and shun Camomile Street.”

Gabriel Hilton did indeed take his cousin’s advice. He rented three rooms in Duck Lane, and never ventured again down Camomile Street; it became what he called