‘Like the dead man.’
Victor was lost.
‘The dead man on the beach?’
‘No. The dead man on the pages. See? Everywhere, there’s the dead man.’
Victor gave him an odd look, and then turned the book around and peered at it.
‘Where? I don’t see any dead men.’
Gaspode snorted.
‘Look, all over the page,’ he said. ‘He looks just like those tombs you get in old temples and stuff. You know? Where they do this statchoo of the stiff lyin’ on top of the tomb, with his arms crossed an’ holdin’ his sword. Dead noble.’
‘Good grief! You’re right! It does look sort of … dead …’
‘Prob’ly all the writing’s goin’ on about what a great guy he was when he was alive,’ said Gaspode knowledgeably. ‘You know, “Slayer of thousands” stuff. Prob’ly he left a lot of money for priests to say prayers and light candles and sacrifice goats and stuff. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. You know, you’d get dese guys whorin’ and drinkin’ and carryin’ on regardless their whole life, and then when the old Grim Reaper starts sharpenin’ his scythe they suddenly becomes all pious and pays a lot of priests to give their soul a quick wash-and-brush-up and gen’rally keep on tellin’ the gods what a decent chap they was.’
‘Gaspode?’ said Victor levelly.
‘What?’
‘You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?’
‘I ain’t just a pretty face.’
‘You aren’t
The little dog shrugged. ‘I’ve always had eyes and ears,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you’re a dog. I dint know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do.’
Victor stared at the pages again. There certainly was a figure which, if you half-closed your eyes, looked very much like a statue of a knight with his hands resting on his sword.
‘It might not
He looked closely at the page. The dead man — or the sleeping man, or the standing man resting his hands on his sword, the figure was so stylized it was hard to be sure — seemed to appear beside another common picture. He ran his finger along the line of pictograms.
‘See,’ he said, ‘it could be the man figure is only part of a word. See? It’s always to the right of this other picture, which looks a bit like — a bit like a doorway, or something. So it might really mean—’ he hesitated. ‘“Doorway/man”,’ he hazarded.
He turned the book slightly.
‘Could be some old king,’ said Gaspode. ‘Could mean something like The Man with the Sword is Imprisoned, or something. Or maybe it means Watch Out, There’s a Man with a Sword behind the Door. Could mean anything, really.’
Victor squinted at the book again. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t look dead. Just …not alive. Waiting to be alive? A waiting man with a sword?’
Victor peered at the little man-figure. It had hardly any features, but still managed to look vaguely familiar.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘it looks just like my Uncle Osric …’{36}
Clickaclickaclicka. Click.
The film spun to a standstill. There was a thunder of applause, a stamping of feet and a barrage of empty banged grain bags.
In the very front row of the
The Librarian loved the clicks. They spoke to something in his soul. He’d even started writing a story which he thought would make a very good moving picture.[18] Everyone he showed it to said it was jolly good, often even before they’d read it.
But something about this click was worrying him. He’d sat through it four times, and he was still worried.
He eased himself out of the three seats he was occupying and knuckled his way up the aisle and into the little room where Bezam was rewinding the film.
Bezam looked up as the door opened.
‘Get out—’ he began, and then grinned desperately and said, ‘Hallo, sir. Pretty good click, eh? We’ll be showing it again any minute now —
The Librarian ripped the huge roll of film off the projector and pulled it through his leathery fingers, holding it up to the light. Bezam tried to snatch it back and got a palm in his chest that sat him firmly on the floor, where great coils of film piled up on top of him.
