The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels Page B

shall be sure to give it my full attention. But first let me show you around our little empire. We take such pride in our activities that we subject all our authors to the grand tour.”
    “ Of course,” Glickman replied.
    The two men left the interview room and, with Yaanek leading the way, passed along the corridor and through a series of locked doors and gloomy and interminable back-and-forth stairways, worthy of Escher, until they came to a vast chamber which, in turn, could have sprung from a nightmare of a Piranesi. It was a gigantic operations centre located deep inside the building.
    There were hundreds of people working in the chamber. They all seemed to share that pallid, withdrawn aspect he had noted amongst the other employees, and shuffled reports and examined the huge piles of books that lay on their desks. Some would consume the pages of the books, and then vomit the regurgitated pulp into huge bins. Every few minutes a servitor would wheel these bins away, presumably to another part of the building.
    The chamber was filled with banks of decayed computer terminals. They were machines the likes of which Glickman had not previously seen or even imagined might exist: half-mechanical, half-organic structures that seemed to operate on a basis of mutual degeneracy. The clerks were wholly absorbed in their tasks. In fact, as he drew closer, Glickman very clearly saw that their limbs seemed to have moulded with the flesh-like apparatus of the keyboards. One could not determine where one began and the other ended. It was only when total exhaustion overcame one of the operatives that he was taken away to recuperate, his limbs disengaging from the apparatus like melting plastic.
    And in their beady, black, unblinking eyes were reflected the hundreds of screens displaying binary code, scrolling across and downwards at a fantastic rate. The typists seemed to be trying to transmit information that would lurk behind the endless sequence of zeroes and ones, like thoughts behind words.
    “ My hackers…” said Yaanek, as he motioned his aides to restrain the horrified and staggered Glickman, “have also been extremely successful in eradicating knowledge. We cannot have text existing in cyberspace, eluding oblivion. Millions of our agents around the world, mimic their acts of annihilation. Of course physical books and manuscripts such as your own we may destroy more easily.”
    •
    Afterwards Glickman was taken down to the basement where he was imprisoned in a small room that served as a cell. It was only seven square feet across with a folding bed and a bucket in one corner and seemed to have formerly been a storage room. It had no windows and a lightbulb provided the only illumination, being screwed into a socket on the wooden-slatted walls. He paced the cell for a time and then sat down on the bed. There was nothing to do except await whatever fate the Nemesis Press had planned for him.
    Some hours later, though Glickman had no way of measuring time, two nameless clerks entered the cell. They said nothing to him, but simply leant back on the wall facing Glickman and stared at him intensely without blinking. A horrible smile played about both their faces.
    Glickman turned away from them. After a few minutes he began to discover that his thoughts were being invaded. The fear he felt was evaporating and instead he experienced a sensation not unlike madness. Voices were speaking inside his head. Although initially this consisted of a dialogue with the invaders it was not long before the alien voices drowned out his attempts to resist them. The source of this intrusion was undoubtedly the clerks who were using some morbid form of telepathy.
    Glickman’s brain reeled with the waves of thought that were directed at him. He learnt of the falsity of literature and, at first to avoid the pain of resistance but later with dawning enlightenment, shared in this vision. Glickman, who had made the dissemination of books his passion,