The Manual of Detection (20 page)

Josiah closed his eyes. From below came the whirring of machinery, and the deck of the barge began suddenly to lift. Unwin grabbed Josiah’s hand and tried to pull him toward the rowboat but could not budge him. The deck angled higher, and Unwin’s shoes slipped. It was too late. He let go of Josiah and grabbed his umbrella, then scrambled under the rail and into the rowboat. He swiftly undid the knot securing them to the barge and started to paddle.

Josiah Rook tipped, then tumbled across the tilting barge. The hills of alarm clocks collapsed and slid with him. Many were still ringing as they spilled into the bay, going mute as the water took them.

Edwin Moore sat up and blinked. “I don’t know any songs for this,” he said.

Unwin did not know any either. He was thinking of the backgammon board he had seen in the Rooks’ cottage, of the game left unfinished there.

 

 

 

UNWIN ROWED WHILE Edwin Moore held the umbrella over their heads. It swayed and bobbed above them while the boat bobbed beneath. They sat close to keep dry, facing one another with knees nearly touching. Someone had left a tin can under the seat, and Moore used it to bail water. Sometimes the wind dragged the umbrella sideways and they both were drenched.

Moore shivered and said, “I tried to forget as much as I could, but I couldn’t forget enough. They knew me the instant I fell asleep.”

The world was two kinds of gray—the heavy gray of the rain and the heavier, heaving gray of the water. Unwin could barely tell them apart. Reaching through both was the yellow arm of a lighthouse beacon. He rowed toward it as best he could.

“Who knew you?” he asked.

“The watchers, of course.” Moore squinted, and drops of water fell from his thick eyebrows. “They watch more than the detectives, Mr. Unwin. They are detectives themselves, in a manner of speaking. Of course, I didn’t know who would catch me first: Hoffmann’s people or the Agency’s. Some of your colleagues must still be using the old channels, the ones the magician knows to monitor.”

Unwin understood that no better than he understood how to keep the boat pointed in the right direction. It veered as soon as he rowed on one side, then spun the other way when he tried to compensate.

Moore set the tin can on the seat between them and wiped his face with his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I lied when I told you there is no Chapter Eighteen in
The Manual of Detection.”

“But I saw for myself,” Unwin said. “It ends with Chapter Seventeen.”

Moore shook his head. “Only in the later printings. In the original, unexpurgated edition, there are eighteen chapters. The last chapter is the most important. Especially to the watchers. And to the Agency’s overseer.” He set his elbows on his knees, looked down, and sighed. “I thought you knew all this. That you were a watcher yourself, maybe, and had been sent to toy with me. I’m the architect of an ancient tomb, Mr. Unwin. I was to be buried inside my own creation, the better to keep its secrets. I will not tell you more, for your sake. But if you ask, I will answer.”

The rain drummed on the umbrella as water splashed against the sides of the boat. Unwin’s arms were sore, but he kept rowing. Their little craft was taking on water. He watched it swirl around his shoes, around Moore’s shoes. The water was red. There was a stain on his shirt, and his hands had stained the oars.

“I killed a man,” Unwin said.

Moore leaned close and set his hand on Unwin’s shoulder. “You killed half of a man,” he said. “It’s the other half you have to worry about.”

Unwin rowed faster. He was getting the hang of it now. The trick was to play each side off the other, but gently. Still, it would take a long time to reach the shore.

“Tell me about Chapter Eighteen,” Unwin said.

WHEN THEY REACHED THE harbor, it was far from the pier of the Travels-No-More. Unwin rowed in the shadows of cargo ships, and each splash of the oar echoed in the vastness between the towering hulls. It was dark, and the air smelled of rust and brine. They landed in a small cove at the base of the lighthouse, where bits of junk had collected among the rocks and seaweed. Together they dragged the boat out of the water.

Unwin noticed something gleaming at the fore of the craft as the light swept past. It was an alarm clock, and it looked a lot like the one that had vanished from his own bedside. Unwin put the clock to his ear, heard its machinery still at work, and wound it. The clock just fit inside his coat pocket.

They walked together through abandoned dockyards. What Unwin understood of Moore’s description of Chapter Eighteen he would have disbelieved entirely if not for the events of the last two days.
Oneiric detection,
Moore had whispered to him.
In layman’s terms: dream surveillance.

This is was what Miss Greenwood must have meant when she spoke of another’s eyes in the back of her skull. Dream spies. Had the Agency’s overseer done this to her? Hounded her through her sleep so she never rested? She said she did not want him to know about her daughter. Would a dream of the girl be enough to betray Miss Greenwood’s secret? Unwin wondered whether he himself could ever sleep easily again.

Edwin Moore, his feet back on solid ground, seemed to have discovered new stores of vitality. He walked with a jaunty step, his cheeks reddening from the exertion. He was still trying to explain how dream detection worked. “You’ve heard the story of the old man who dreamed he was a butterfly,” he said. “And how, when he woke, he wasn’t sure if he really was an old man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or if he was a butterfly dreaming it was an old man.”

“You’d say there’s truth to it?”

“I’d say it’s a lot of nonsense,” Moore snapped. “But the mind struggles with the question nonetheless. How often have you tried to recall a specific memory—a conversation with an acquaintance, maybe—only to determine that the memory was a delusion, spawned in dream? And how often have you dreamed a thing, then found that it spoke some truth about your waking life? You solved a problem that had been impenetrable the day before, perhaps, or perceived the hidden sentiments of someone whose motivations had baffled you.

“Real and unreal, actual and imagined. Our failure to distinguish one from the other, or rather our willingness to believe they may be one and the same, is the chink through which the Agency operatives conduct their work.”

“But what do they do, exactly?” Unwin asked. “Lie down next to someone who’s sleeping? Rest with their heads touching?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t have to be near your subject; you only need to isolate that person’s frequency. It’s work a watcher can do from the comfort of an office chair.” Moore winced and touched the lump on his forehead, which had assumed a purple hue. He sighed and went on. “You know of course that signals from the brain may be measured, even charted. There are electrical waves, devices to read them, people who study these things. Different states have been identified, cataloged, analyzed. What our people figured out is that one brain may be entrained to another, ‘tuned in,’ so to speak. The result is a kind of sensory transduction. Not so different, really, from listening to the radio.

“That’s my metaphor, at least. Those who practice dream detection describe it as a kind of shadowing, only they tail their suspect through his own unconscious mind rather than through the city. If they are after some specific piece of information, they may even influence the dreamer in subtle ways, nudging him toward the evidence they need.”

They left the dockyards a few blocks from the cemetery. They would have to keep to the shoreline now—Unwin did not wish to draw too close to the Forty Winks and be spotted by someone who might inform Jasper Rook of his whereabouts. He led his companion north, and Moore seemed content to carry on with his lecture, following wherever Unwin directed his umbrella.

“Some in the Agency believe that this technique has been practiced for a long time but called different things through the centuries. It was easier to do, they say, when people lived in small tribes spread over the earth. Fewer signals to sift through then, and a greater willingness to allow them to mingle. The omens, visions, and prophecies of shamans and witch doctors: these might have been rooted in what we call dream detection.

“But I don’t care much for the history, and in any case things are different now. In our city, each night is an enormous puzzle of sensation, desire, fear. Only those who have trained extensively can distinguish one mind from another. At the Agency their training is put to use on behalf of the organization’s clients. The watchers, whose work is coordinated by the overseer himself, investigate the unconscious minds of suspects while the detectives seek out clues of a more tangible nature. It is this technique that gives Agency operatives their unprecedented insight.”

“What if someone tried to use the technique with only a little training?” Unwin asked.

Moore glared at him. “Assuming he succeeded at all, he would put himself and others in danger. There are reservoirs of malevolence in the sleeping city, and you would not want to tap them accidentally.” He paused, then added quietly, “There are, however, some who can assist in the process. Who can induce the focused states necessary to employ oneiric detection—or be more easily subjected to it. Their talents, when used, might appear as hypnosis to the uninformed.”

Unwin recalled what Miss Greenwood had done to Brock that morning, at the carnival ticket booth. Something whispered in his ear and the man had fallen immediately into a kind of trance. “Cleopatra Greenwood is one of those people,” he said.

Moore grunted. “The power of Greenwood’s voice has been observed on several occasions. Sivart knew of it, though he didn’t know what it was. You remember she had a brief career as a singer? When I left the Agency, the overseer was experimenting with recordings of her music, to see if they could help expand the uses of dream detection. To what end I’m not entirely certain. But Hoffmann, of course, is also aware of her talent. In fact, I no longer consider it a coincidence that one of Cleo Greenwood’s songs was first played on the radio almost eight years ago, on the night of November eleventh.”

Of course: Unwin had heard it, too. That was why he recognized the tune when he heard it performed at the Cat & Tonic the night before. The questions that Sivart had left unanswered in his report on The Man Who Stole November Twelfth returned to Unwin’s mind: the day skipped on calendars across the city, the mysterious operatives—never identified or apprehended—who changed the date at all the government offices and news agencies. But maybe there had been no operatives, at least not conscious ones.

“Could Hoffmann have influenced us somehow?” Unwin asked. “Infiltrated our dreams and made agents out of us while we slept? We might have altered the calendars ourselves.”

Moore frowned, his lips disappearing behind his whiskers. “He knows the technique of dream detection. Years ago the secret was leaked to him—the work of a double agent, probably. And he is more powerful by far than any of the watchers, because his mastery of disguise and ventriloquism makes him untraceable as he moves from one dream to another. But how he could have planted suggestions, fooled us into stealing a day from ourselves—that I cannot imagine. And if he had done it once, wouldn’t he have done it again? Why stop with one day if he could take so much more? Every night, his sleeper agents would be doing his work.”

“Last night the alarm clocks were stolen by a gang of sleepwalkers,” Unwin said. “I saw one or two people emerge from every building we passed—they must have broken in to each apartment and taken the clocks. They thought they were going to a party to drink and gamble, but really they were delivering their plunder to the Rooks. Miss Greenwood was there, singing to them, and Detective Pith was shot because he discovered the operation.”

Moore shook his head. “There’s something we’re missing, then. Some tool the enemy has acquired. A battle is under way, Mr. Unwin. The last, maybe, in a long and quiet war. I don’t understand the meaning of the maneuvers, only the stakes. Hoffmann’s desire for vengeance has grown in the years since his defeat on November twelfth. The gambling parlors, the protection rackets, the black markets—these have always been means to an end, a web from which to feed through the long years of his preparations. His true goal is the destruction of the boundary between the city’s rational mind and the violent delirium of its lunatic dreams. His ideal world is a carnival, everything illusory, everything in flux. We’d all be butterflies dreaming we were people if he had his way. Only the Agency’s rigorous adherence to the principles of order and reason have held him in check. Your work, Mr. Unwin, and mine.”

From the north came the sounds of traffic, of the city awakening. Unwin’s clothes were torn and bloodstained. How many people would have seen his name in the papers by now? It would not be good for his defense, he thought, to be found covered in another man’s blood. He wondered whether there was a subway station nearby, one with access to the eight train.

“You realize by now that your search for Sivart is hopeless,” Moore said. “He is probably dead.”

“He contacted me,” Unwin said.

“What? How?”

“He appeared in my sleep two nights ago. And again, I think, last night. He told me about Chapter Eighteen.”

“Impossible. Sivart knows nothing about dream infiltration. None of the detectives do; they’re given expurgated editions of the
Manual,
like yours.”

“But the watchers—”

“The watchers never reveal the true source of their knowledge. It is disguised as intelligence gleaned from mundane informants. This is standard protocol; it’s all in the Agency bylaws. The unabridged edition, of course.”

“Someone told him, then. Zlatari saw him reading at the Forty Winks, just before he disappeared. It must have been a complete version of the
Manual.
”