Xi'an, China. 2045. A Kazakhstani writer sits down at his desk and begins to type. Beneath his fingers, the story of a young girl unfolds: she holds a mysterious key, inherited from her grandfather. As the key turns, and the world changes, the lives of the writer and his character must intersect, or fade from memory forever. This is part one of a two-part story.
Xi'an, China. 2045. A Kazakhstani writer sits down at his desk and begins to type. Beneath his fingers, the story of a young girl unfolds: she holds a mysterious key, inherited from her grandfather. As the key turns, and the world changes, the lives of the writer and his character must intersect, or fade from memory forever. This is part one of a two-part story.
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
Episode #5 (The Keymaker: Part Two) out Sunday 21st March 2021 (21.03.21)
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"ambience marche 3" was originally recorded by schafferdavid and is courtesy of freesound.org, it is licensed under a CC BY 3.0 International License. Click here to read more about the license.
Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
Hi, I’m Cal, and if you’re new to Stories from the Hearth, there’s a few things you might like to know. This podcast is an experimental artistic space, kind of like a painter’s studio or a DJ’s headphones – it is a place where I can try new things, make art, and share it with others in the hope that it might bring some comfort, value, and escapism to their lives. It is also a means to an end; after all, it has been my dream ever since I was wee to tell stories for a living; just like the wandering bards of old, who I read about in my history books and fantasy novels. Each episode of Stories from the Hearth features a stand-alone work of fiction, performed to an immersive soundscape, which allows you to lose yourself in the tale. Usually, the stories are short enough to be contained within one episode, but a handful of them are split over two. If this particular episode isn’t your jam, don’t worry – there are heaps of stories to choose from, and no two are the same. This podcast is also a safe and inclusive space for all, which means that its stories actively embrace queerness and otherness, right alongside more mainstream walks of life. If you’re enjoying it, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below. And speaking of shout-outs, a huge thanks to these fine folks who help make Stories from the Hearth possible: my warmest thanks to Nick, Vivian, Jen, Charlie, Rob, Sandy, Jane, Ruathy and Mully.
Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode Four: The Keymaker (Part One).
He awoke to find their apartment full of morning sun. His head pounded, his eyes having strained against the luminescence of his computer screen all the previous day: at the perfect singularity of the blank word-processor page. He stank, too. Under the unacknowledged shimmer of last night’s full-moon, the writer had slept fitfully and sweated heavily; his mind marinating metaphor and tweaking turns of phrase, dreaming of towering walls, rotten fruit, and dark alleys.
Now, before even his husband could kiss him good morning, or ruffle the bed-skewed half-inch of greasy black hair which still clung to his crown, he rose swiftly. At the foot of the bed, their cat – a white and tortoise-shell stray called Cloud – flinched. She turned her old, skeletal head to face him, her eyes all judgement and disapproval. His dressing-gown spelled a sloppy C on the hardwood, and at least four of his joints crinkled as he bent to retrieve it.
In the pocket, he found an empty packet of cigarettes – the blue tipped ones his husband hated, stronger than most in both milligrams of nicotine and duration of lingering smell. But there was no time to go to the shop, not even to the English pub downstairs, which he felt sure would have had a cigarette machine. (If those things still existed, then surely they did so exclusively in colonial-themed bars.). No, this morning was one for urgency.
He grumbled a non-response to his husband’s pleas to return to bed. His husband could not see how his subconscious moved. Could not visualise the roaring crystal ball of his cortex, as it cycled through innumerable plot-possibilities and poetic flairs, as it rearranged old memories and imagined landscapes to form entire worlds, the doorways to which existed only in his mind, in that instant, in states of such incredible instability, such frightening fragility that he was left with no choice but to explore them, there and then. Disapproving husband or no disapproving husband.
The writer’s mug was the same mug which had left a Slinky of rings on his desk for the past week; never washed, only recycled. Takes after its owner, his husband teased. This morning, he filled it to brimming with coffee from the percolator. Percolator, what a word! Such a satisfying ring to it. He took his coffee black, and as he poured, watching sediment slide in after the watery top-layer, he wondered why writers drank their coffee black? Or did they? Was that in fact a fallacy, same as the whole ‘tortured’ thing, the whole Sylvia Plath x Ted Hughes thing?
On the balcony of the apartment opposite his study, a curtain twitched. The writer shook his head, his eyes blurring back into focus. No time for daydreaming. Not today. From his heart, the blood running to his fingertips trembled with magic. If he shut his eyes, or blinked in rapid succession, he could still see written across his eyelids those tumbling lines of prose for which he had woken so suddenly that morning. His eyelids the liminal space between the worlds of waking and sleep. And so, he wrote.
‘Junlei tested the physicality of the key, rubbing its cool iron between thumb and forefinger as she approached the library. It seemed she still could not quite believe that it had fallen into her possession, nor that nobody at the will-hearing had questioned it. If it was what she thought it was – her grandfather being too private a man to disclose, even at the last, the meaning behind his riddles – but if it was, then, by some divine arrangement, in a few moments her life would irrevocably change.
Junlei tilted back her head, took in the building’s full form. Rising sheer from the pavement was a great municipal door, arched and crowned in dressed-stone; a granite fox and short-sighted owl eyeing each other from plinths, opened books at their feet. Between them, a stone plaque immortalised the year of the building’s construction. Junlei realised with a start that the library must have survived two World Wars and a revolution: the destruction of so much history and culture. And yet it had, if her grandfather was to be believed, remained open throughout, never submitting to any regime’s censorship decrees. Not those of the Manchu, the Japanese, not the Kuomintang nor Communists.
All that time, all that danger of punishment and closure, and in the end, it was apathy that had killed it. Apathy which closed a thousand libraries, converted them into high-end apartments and boutique coffee shops. Apathy, and the über-convenience, anti-intellectual bent of the early-21st century, she supposed.
The streets around her were deathly quiet. It was as if the funereal disease which had consumed the library had began to spread its tentacles.
As Junlei approached the shadow of the lock, her key held at her hip like a cowboy’s revolver, the morning held its breath…’
The writer sat back in his chair. It was a gift he had, funnily enough, inherited from his grandfather. In childhood books, whenever an old relative died and bequeathed their estate to those left behind, items of remarkable antiquity were somehow always unearthed. Wingback armchairs of exotic animal pelts, smoking jackets, and globes, which doubled as drinks cabinets, pulled from some seldom-used wing of the manor. Or antique flintlock pistols from a long-forgotten war, and curious diaries, hinting at hereditary family secrets, and suggesting the existence of a hidden treasure.
That had not been the case, however, in his family. The writer’s grandfather’s chair was a loose-screw swivelling office chair, the same one his grandfather had sat in for his fifty-three-and-a-half years in insurance sales. Black faux-leather with a cheap metal leg, split at the base into five rolling wheels which had long since seized to function. It creaked as he leaned back, absentmindedly smoking his pen like a cigarette.
Presently, with his coffee drained, and his night time stewed-over opening page transferred from brain to processor, the writer stood to stretch his legs, and moved to the living room to stare wistfully out the window.
His husband and he lived in a corner apartment, his study in a small box-room adjacent to the one in which he now stood, which curved with the contour of the building; a wide expanse of window looking out across an intersection, busy now, for it was rush hour. He watched old Mister Zhang leaning against the doorframe of his grocer’s, smoking his pipe. The writer salivated and sucked his teeth, turning his head in a vain attempt to ignore his cravings. Contemplating the start he’d made on his latest novella, he found to his satisfaction that he knew where the story was going. Somewhere trippy, historical, not altogether real. Those were the books he enjoyed reading the most; the ones which hinted at the existence of other worlds, hidden just out of reach, behind a thin veil.
Watching a pigeon initiation ceremony on the roof opposite – each bird taking it in turns to divebomb from the precarious plastic of the guttering – the writer only noticed his husband when the man cleared his throat.
‘Shèng shǐ! You scared me.’
‘What’s scary,’ replied his husband, stony-faced, ‘is how you still smell of Thursday’s takeout.’
‘What day is it?’ Asked the writer, realising his mistake too late to correct himself. His husband raised his eyebrows, a look which the writer correctly took to mean: You better be joking. ‘Ah shit. Sunday eh? Look, I know, I know. I’m honestly sorry, darling. I just, I have to write this story, I woke up and I–’ But his husband waved away his excuse.
‘Don’t bother. Just… get it finished, yeah? I’d quite like my husband back; and preferably a version who doesn’t reek of three-day-old Vietnamese food.’ The man placed in the writer’s hands a bowl of congee. ‘Egg and pork, eat up.’ For a second the writer was made to feel like a schoolchild, but then his husband smiled. ‘You’ll need your energy if you’re to finish, huh?’ He ruffled the writer’s hair, barely concealing his grimace at the matted sliminess of it. The writer smiled back, suddenly finding a deep and roaring hunger in his gut. ‘I’m away out,’ said his husband. ‘You’ll be done when I’m back?’ The writer nodded, a little sheepishly. With a kiss, he watched his husband leave.
Congee juices still slickening his moustache, the writer returned to Junlei’s story.
‘The key was heavy in her hand, heavier, it felt, than before. The big loop of its bow fitted neatly in her palm, its length a further five or six inches, ending in a complex, double-sided arrangement of teeth. She considered them for a moment, admiring their craftsmanship. The teeth varied splendidly in width and height, some finished to a point almost sharp enough to cut with, others ending bluntly, or even concave. She had never seen a key quite like it. Certainly, none of those she used on a daily basis – for her apartment, car, or work – required such complexity. Gradually, her thoughts wandered along the dull iron, imagined the key once bright, burnished by the frequent touch of her grandfather’s hand, as he opened the library to the public every morning. A glimmer of grief threatened to take hold, and she quashed it.
Shaking her head free from thought, Junlei tried the lock.
But the key didn’t seem to fit. The bottom half of the bit looked snug, but there was nowhere for the upper-teeth to go. She frowned. She was certain that the key opened this building; there was no other to which her grandfather had ever alluded. What’s more, surely no other building in her city would have required a key ancient as this. Not that she could think of, anyway. Junlei bent down to inspect the lock more closely. The door was heavy with the soot of exhaust fumes and decades of unwashed grime, but after a minute she found the issue. Just above the hole, set flush against its upper-curve, was nailed a thin, inch-by-half-inch piece of wood.
Pushing her finger into the exposed part of the lock, Junlei levered the weight of herself with a shoulder pressed to the door. With a grunting and the sharp pain of pinched skin, Junlei was finally able to prize the covering off. And now her eyes widened. Beneath the wood was a continuation of the keyhole: a thin slit just a half-centimetre wide.
Now, she saw, the key would fit perfectly.
Sliding it into place, Junlei relished the stiff sound of the ancient wards, as they slid away from those meticulous metal teeth. She took a deep breath, preparing herself for disappointment as well as triumph, and with both hands gently twisted.
As the key turned, the world turned with her.
Though the motion itself should only have taken an instant, it felt to Junlei as if a lifetime passed, in the time it took the key to turn. And in that lifetime the only two constants were she and it, her fingers clasped around the iron bow a centrifugal force, about which the whole world spun. The sensation was akin to being whipped by a ferocious wind, and stranger still, she felt that she experienced a sort of whirlpool of colour, light, sound, and smell, curdling and cavorting in league with that wind. And though all about her felt chaotic and untenable, infinite and yet fractious, Junlei herself stood strong, remained whole and same throughout.
When finally, a half-second later, the key clicked to a satisfying stop, the great towering door of the library swung softly inward, a sigh of fresh air exiting the building, as if relieved to have a visitor once again.
As Junlei entered the foyer, letting the door close behind her, she failed to notice two quite extraordinary things. Whilst moments ago, the door had sagged under the weight of accumulated dirt, now it positively shone, the wood of its construction young and varnished, quite beautiful, in fact. Furthermore, the tarmacked street onto which the library opened, was suddenly transformed. Had she turned around, even for a second, Junlei might have observed a road of mud and dust, prismatic in the last sliver of sunlight spilling through the crack in the door. She might just have seen that road, once dead, now bustling with the energies of a hundred folk, dressed in strange, clumsy looking outfits, going about their business as if not a thing in the world had changed.’
The writer’s word-processor was another inherited piece of history, an Amstrad PPC-640, quite the thing back in its day. A portable personal computer which the writer’s grandfather had been given as a retirement present by his company. Never having used it – in fact, outspokenly denouncing all modern technology, and preferring manual work to any alternatives – his grandfather hadn’t waited until he’d died to donate this to the writer. Unlike the chair, his grandfather had bestowed it off-handedly, and the writer had known that he was probably doing the old man a favour in taking the Amstrad out of his hands.
Staring at it now, he wondered with a faint smile as to his ancestor’s reaction, when presented it at his leaving-do. It wouldn’t surprise the writer if the old man had asked the entire gathering of well-wishers what in the hell they’d got him it for. Stubborn old bastard.
With its LCD screen, and combination of flimsy plastic keys in metal frame, it seemed suddenly out of place. In fact, emerging from a stupor of inspiration, the writer realised he felt a little ill. He pushed back from his desk, nearly tipping over when the broken wheels of the chair stuck fast. He needed some air. God damn it, he needed a cigarette.
Moving to the living room, though, something lodged itself at the back of his brain, halfway to realisation. When had they painted the walls? Had he really been that out of it lately? His husband would surely despair when he found out he’d only just noticed. And yet, no, something else was wrong, too.
In the main room, with the light breeze from the open window to fill his lungs, the writer looked out at the street. Or rather, he looked out at a street, but not his. The intersection was still there, roughly, he supposed, but all the pavements were gone. The traffic lights were gone, too, and the road was brown, not black. On the spot where Mister Zhang smoked his pipe, there was now a young mother, a baby tied to her back. No store, no neon sign, just a cart and a price painted in black. The woman peddled durian fruit, the kind that foreign tourists turned up their nose at, or dared each other to try, as if Chinese produce was really that alien to them. There were no white faces at the intersection today, though. No Starbucks across the street for them to congregate around like lost mosquitoes. Almost everything about the place had changed.
The writer’s heartbeat quickened. He was overtaken for a moment by a dizziness, and a tremendous urge to puke.
Inspecting his living room again, his back to the window, he could no longer recognise it. The walls were dark and bare to the wood. Wood? Wood. No brickwork here, not any more. The furniture, too, was wooden. Sparse and hand-crafted. Where was his and his husband’s IKEA sofa? The one with the plush red and white ‘oriental’ pattern they’d accidentally fallen in love with? Where was the art on the walls, the TV in the corner? His dizziness returned. There was in fact nothing in the room of electrical build or charge. No plug sockets in the walls, no standing lamps. The only source of light other than that of the window came from the grill of a smoky stove by the door, crackling away despite the summer heat…
No, no, no, no. This is not real, he thought.For the window at his back was not open, the breeze he had breathed was in fact a bitter whisp of chill, seeping in through a crack in the glass. And outside it was not summer, not anymore. Fallen leaves and a sombre sky told instead of deepest Autumn, and sub-zero temperatures. The writer wrapped his arms about himself. What the fuck is happening?
Too late did he notice the soft pad of small feet approaching the living room.
‘Mother? Mum? There’s… there’s a man in our house… Mum!’
Inside, the library was far bigger than Junlei could have ever imagined. Whereas from the outside she’d counted three stories, standing now in the threshold of the foyer, she counted five. They lined the main room, an unfolding space perhaps once the courtyard of an even older construction, which was here generously lit by a skylight. On each floor, bamboo bookcases ran the entire lengths of the walls, wheeled ladders attached to their frames allowing ready access to even the highest shelves. At regular intervals in the bookcases were the entranceways to myriad other, presumably smaller rooms, wherein Junlei imagined the library kept its rarest and most especially important manuscripts.
Like all large, empty spaces, the library housed an atmosphere at once intriguing, bewitching, and slightly sinister. It begged exploration, yet warned (in the tentative hackles on Junlei’s neck) of its otherworldliness.
What surprised the girl the most, from amidst countless miniature surprises, was that every single shelf was still stocked to the gunnels with books. Now, of course, typically this should not have elicited surprise from a library-goer, but this was no typical library. As far as Junlei was aware, it had stood empty now for well over a decade. Perhaps longer. And yet, in all that time, she thought, had her grandfather never sold the books on? Never thought to donate them, even box them up?
The presence of the books puzzled her, but her concentration failed to stick with one puzzle long enough to solve it, for others leapt at her out of the woodwork every way she turned. The polish of the floors, the distinct lack of dust. Candelabras stocked with new candles, the easy freshness to the air, or the scrolls and tapestries still hanging from the rafters, decorated with giant characters painted in fat calligraphic strokes. Two of these scrolls, their tails almost brushing the floor, hung as if floating from wires attached to the high ceiling. On each was a single character, and together they read: Shíjiān Gǎibiàn; or, Altered Time.
‘Huh,’ exclaimed Junlei aloud. ‘Is that the name of this place? Is that the name of you?’ she called out, addressing the stacked floors. Then, in a whisper, she said: ‘Still full of surprises, eh, Grandpa? Now, where to start?’
Dressed only in slippers, his pyjama bottoms, a stupid satirical t-shirt which his husband secretly despised, and his soup-encrusted, stale-smoke-smelling dressing gown, the writer burst into harsh light of midday. From the window above him – whoever’s window it now was – a chorus of voices descended. They called after him, angry and accusatory, their accents unplaceable, their language somehow old, outdated, theatrical. They called to their neighbours, warning of a burglar on the loose. Him! A burglar?! His mind reeled.
He had of course tried to reason with the family, when first they’d found him in his… in their home, but it had proved useless. He wasn’t even sure they had understood him. The boy who’d found him had at first seemed amenable. He’d tried to touch the writer’s dressing gown, to feel for its softness; tried to make sense of the man’s ironical Xi Jinping commemorative slippers. But the boy had quickly succumbed to fear, when rallied by the frightened calls of his parents. So, now the writer braced the frosty air of late-October in an outfit entirely unfit for the task.
With wild eyes, he stumbled to the fruit-seller on the corner, paused mid-sales pitch, even the pungent fragrance of durian unable to slice through her curiosity. She shrank from him, her hand instinctively moving to secure the wrap which held her baby to her back. Even at a crossroads as busy as this, it was painfully obvious who it was the screaming family on the corner referred to.
‘Please,’ spoke the writer, ‘where am I? What is this? Where’s Mister Zhang?’ But the woman only retreated further, her eyes darting from the man to her cart of fruit, trying to decide whether he posed great enough a threat that she should just abandon it. ‘Please,’ he tried again, ‘where am I?’
‘Mister, I have nothing, okay? No money. Just leave. Please. I won’t say a word.’
‘You don’t understand, I’m just… That’s my… Where, where am I?’ But even as he spoke, reality began slowly setting in; the weight of his predicament settling like tea leaves. He was beginning already to realise that it was not the ‘where’ he need enquire about. But how? How did that make any sense? For the time being, the writer pushed the idea from his head. The fruit-seller was now some twenty feet from him, and another peddler had come to her rescue, their fists clenched. The man looked even less open to honest discussion than the woman, and so the writer gave up. He raised his hands in apology and began to walk. His eyes darted about like a timid cat’s, sensing danger in every stare, each strange detail of his whereabouts stirring confusion and anxiety in his mind. Across the crossroads and up a random street. No all-night karaoke club, no McDonalds, no Aunty selling pancakes from a food truck, no Uncle selling dumplings from his café, just low, dark entranceways to dilapidated houses, running in unceasing rows either side of him, dark-eyed children with grubby fingers and unwashed faces stealing glimpses of him from street-level windows.
Where were the taxis? Where the car horns? The tinny crash of cymbals in some young rocker’s earbuds? Where was everything he recognised? His neighbourhood so dear to him, so familiar? He was jogging now, though he didn’t notice it, his body working on sheer impulse. Fight or flight. And as he ran, people stopped and stared. Hundreds of them, dressed uniformly in heavy coats of wool, workers caps, and fingerless gloves. Why so similar? What the hell was this place?
The ties of his dressing gown flapped stupidly as he went, his slippers slap-slap-slapping against the bare soles of his feet, and on his cheeks were tears.
Turning a corner, he drew suddenly to a stop. His breath was short and raw, the air harsh against the back of his throat, and something irony and slick gurgled up with his saliva. And then something hit him. An idea, a thought. It occurred to him quite instantly, and in the same moment that he almost discounted it as ridiculous, he accepted it totally and completely, as just about the only possible, rational, reason for all of this. He thought of Junlei, and of her key. He scoffed. Have you gone completely mad? He asked himself, perhaps out loud, perhaps not. Then, Yes, he decided. Yes, you are. You’ve fucking lost it.
Turning on his heels regardless, the writer plunged headlong down an alley, dark and crowded, making in the direction of the library.
The call of the handbell rippled through the towering halls of the public library. Junlei listened, her eyes following its sound, a bemused smile on her face. She’d found the thing on the desk at Reception, not a mote of dust on it. Holding the cast-iron weight in her hands, she felt transported to some more aristocratic time: she the lady of the house, her butler awaiting the ding of that bell, from some small room in a far-off wing, always ready at her beck and call. It was not so different, really, from the flush silver buttons of modern reception desks, and yet human will had, over time, pushed the boundaries of convenience all the same. We are such lazy animals, thought Junlei.
Of course, no answer rose to meet the call of the bell, but it settled her nerves all the same, to have some other source of sound, of life, in that great and empty hall. As she walked across its wooden floor, her footsteps resounded deep and richly, giving a certain authority to her movements. Here, she felt at home, as if the spirit of her grandfather, the library’s last caretaker, still resided here. She was not a particularly spiritual person, but a small part of Junlei actually believed that she could still sense him, in the sheen of the floors, expertly waxed, in the gentle air, which told of a cleanliness unmarred by mould, or any of the other maladies which might beset old and ancient books. It was a calming presence.
Drifting listlessly along the halls, glancing at, but barely aware of the innumerable spines, stacked in colourful rows along the bookshelves, Junlei began exploring the various antechambers off the main hall. She did so half-heartedly, unaware of and thus unsurprised to find that the sense of anticipation with which she had entered the library was now all but gone. She observed the ancient building’s fascinating intricacies with all the emotion of an insurance surveyor, checking for damp and bad wiring.
In the antechambers, she found many oak tables, complete with neat rows of benches and candelabras to see by, unlit of course, though all armed with fresh candles, their wicks as yet untrimmed. Perhaps, she thought, when closing down the library for the last time, her grandfather had prepared it as he always did, in preparation for another morning to come. The notion, quaint and faintly puzzling, suited her memory of the man well.
Coming to one final room, lighter than the others thanks to a high window, Junlei’s wandering eyes came to rest on a shelf of fairly modern-looking tomes set into the wall. At eye-height, the shelf housed about twenty volumes, their spines smooth and flat and multipatterned, just like modern fiction. In fact, though she did not realise it at the time, they were a deal more contemporary than should have been, for a library closed over a decade earlier. The names of the books were largely unremarkable: The Girl and the Glacier, The Nine Lives of Wang Lijuan, Death the River, Three Crows. What struck Junlei the most was the name of the author, and author-singular, at that, for all forty or so of the novels appeared to have been written by the same man. His name was strange, though, maybe foreign, and she had trouble smoothing it into a clear pronunciation in her head.
At length, one of the titles caught her eye. A rather slim volume, the book was a light beech in colour, its title a cool blue, and it was called The Keymaker. Inside, following the frontispiece, was a dedication: ‘For all those Sundays missed, H.’ Turning to the first page, Junlei’s face twitched. She stared glaikit at the first sentence, reading and re-reading it, an automaton stuck in a loop. She tried steadying the book, but for some reason her hands had begun trembling, and so the words were soon blurred: a matrix of symbols, constantly shimmering, changing, tugging at the corners of Junlei’s mind like a frightened child. Toward the rear of her throat, she tasted the stringy, acidic bile that preceded vomit. Balancing herself against the bookcase, she let the novel drop to the floor. She watched in dismay as the book, landing page-down, revealed to her the illustration on its spine: an all-too-recognisable image of a key, double-toothed, intricate and antique…
Junlei swayed, her forehead suddenly clammy with sweat. Trying merely to remove the object from her gaze, she turned her gaze back to the shelves, densely packed, and her knuckles, white and tense, holding on for dear life. Something about the scene didn’t sit right. At length, it clicked. On the first shelf, the upper one from which she had taken The Keymaker, the books looked as all books should. Yet, on each subsequent shelf of the case, though populated by more works by the same author, there was not one single book with a title. Each spine was blank, except for that half-nonsensical nom de plume. Where the name of the book should have been, there was only blank space. Testing a couple of these, Junlei found that their covers, too, were bare. Throwing them open, she found their pages empty.
‘Fuck sake,’ wailed Junlei, recognising the return of feeling, of anger specifically, reappearing with all the grace of a gut-punch. She was angry at herself, angry for having stopped in thisparticular room, of all the rooms she could have stopped in. Angry for not having heeded her misgivings about this place, earlier. And yet, no, not just angry. Anger, she understood, was misplaced. She wasn’t sure what it was she felt.
Stomaching a rising nausea, she took up The Keymaker once more, and turned back to page one. As the paper folded before her, she felt a slim lick of hope rise to the surface… and then burst, like a forlorn balloon. Alas, it had been no trick of the eyes, no confusion of sight. There, printed in sober characters of black-on-cream, was the book’s opening line:
‘Junlei tested the physicality of the key, rubbing its cool iron between thumb and forefinger as she approached the library…’
The Muslim quarter of Xi’an, on the edge of which the writer lived, was dense with clamorous life, a few thousand souls squeezed into the sunken streets behind Bell and Drum Tower Square. The morning was bright, soft blue skies rippled here and there with sun-shaped clouds, and through his threadbare dressing gown, a crisp autumnal breeze cut. Though he had put good distance between himself and his corner-apartment, he had yet to shake the stares and murmured gossip which followed him like a scent-hound. And it was easy to see why.
In the Xi’an of his reality, few would have batted an eye to see some poor or lazy sod, their hair askew, eyes bloodshot, sliding their slippers along the frosty morning cobbles. For one, few urbanites would have bothered to peel themselves from the light-emitting diodes of those pocket-sized soulmates they called smartphones. For another, informal attire in the street signalled to most the presence of the homeless, which by their own admission most of the writer’s contemporaries shamelessly avoided, wherever they could: hoodies, sweatpants, and sleeping bags – along with dressing gowns – were a kind of camouflage, the likes of which even the military were yet to try and weaponize.
But here, in this Xi’an, not in the hands, pockets, nor snuggled in the ear canals of those around him, did the writer see one sign of mobile electronics. Moreover, far from blending in, his attire seemed to carry a bewildering sort of fascination for the bustling marketeers, for the businessmen and housewives of the Muslim quarter. They made no qualms about it; pointing rudely, exaggeratedly, hollering their friends over, and pulling passers-by by the elbows, singling the rogue writer out from amongst the crowd.
His head was dizzied by the noise. His nose choked with the rich mutton-and-chilli smell of freshly-cooked biang biang noodles, an aroma which had coagulated unpleasantly with the sickly scent of Osmanthus rice cakes, baking in the troughs of a hundred ovens. Presently, the writer stopped to catch his breath, and decided, however reticently, to ask someone for directions.
He had lived in Xi’an half of his adult life, and yet found he could not make head nor tail of the low, traditional buildings beside which he now walked. None of these streets made sense, they were too numerous, too fractious. Xi’an didn’t look like this. Not to him.
At a cart selling pomegranate seeds, sandwiched between two competing-durian sellers, he spoke with a dark-skinned man. The stench of the durian – somewhere between stale vomit, rotting onions, custard, and death – hung over the entire interaction. It made him think of his mother, and her insistence that the family learn to love the fruit, so as to better assimilate into Chinese society. He thought of her death, of the smell of it, of how durian fruit poked at him, prodded at that most-painful part of his past. Didn’t they say that smell was the greatest recaller of memory? He tried not to think.
‘Ex-excuse me – do you know – could you point me, in the direction of the library?’
The dark-skinned man began shaking his head before the writer even had a chance to finish.
‘Please. I just need – look, I’ll buy something, okay?’
He patted himself down, stupidly surprised not to find the bulge of his wallet in the pocket of his dressing gown. Between fingerfuls of lint, he eventually located a rogue coin. He pulled it out, willing it to be of some value.
The writer stood, holding out to the pomegranate-peddler a five-yuan coin, repeating his question: ‘Do you know the way to the library?’ But the man did not move. His eyes were wide and scrutinising; If he were a cat, thought the writer, you would see each individual hair of his hackles snap to attention along his spine. It was a funny image, one which the writer instinctively made mental-note of. As the simile formed and folded itself away, from out of the banks of his memory came his husband’s voice:
You never really switch off, do you? It was half-scolding, half-proud. He swallowed a rising emotion.
The fruit-seller was waving his hands now. Short, quick movements, his hands palm-outward. In uncertain tones, he spoke to his neighbour, a Han-Chinese woman. His speech was unintelligible – thickly accented and archaic – but when the woman replied, the writer had no trouble interpreting her, nor the suspicion shrouding her words.
‘He’s trying to buy you,’ she said, ‘he must think you are a Capitalist.’
Another brief exchange, another reply.
‘No,’ her nostrils flared, the corners of her mouth raised in a grimace, ‘Look at him. He’s all… wrong. He says he wants the library.’ There came a chorus of uneasy laughter. Then, with a deal more courage than anyone else in that city had yet shown, the lady turned to the writer and spoke directly. ‘What do you want with the library?’
The writer was propped against the fruit-cart, his breath laboured with wheezing (it occurred to him that he had not moved as quickly or as purposefully as he had today in far too long). Where his hand had rested, between two bamboo cups of pomegranate juice, the table was now bare. Without his noticing, the male-merchant had been silently pushing his produce away from the writer’s hand with a pole.
Turning to the woman, the writer replied. ‘I, eh – What? I just – I need to – return some books.’ What? Why the hell did he… What a dumb-fuck thing to say, he thought. ‘Well, no,’ he tried again, ‘actually I need some books, and I, uh – I’m meeting a friend there.’
The woman’s ire was risen now to full-blown scorn, as she translated his inconsistent ramblings for the benefit of the gathering crowd. She was answered by a refrain of gasps. From her overcoat, she produced something and held it aloft, as much for the writer to see as for the eyes of the onlookers. It was a small, slim red book, plainly decorated with only a little debossed gold star on its cover, and characters too tiny to make out. Whether he could read the title or not, though, the writer recognised it immediately. No child of the last hundred years, whether foreign-born or not, would have mistaken that book: its innocuous aesthetic the damnation of a nation, its weight small in theory, yet immeasurably heavy with the blood its words had precipitated. It was the historical chisel which had been used in one of history’s most hysterical bouts of cultural-trepanning. It was Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book.
The woman held the writer’s eyes with a look of such unchallenged vindication that he could not help but lower his gaze.
‘The library, he says! And what for? To dredge up the poison words of ancient snakes? What more could one need than this?’ Violently, she shook her copy in the air. ‘Do you not carry it on you? Do you even have one?’ She did not need to search the writer’s dressing gown pockets to know he did not. She roared an animal call of horror at his silence. Though the majority of those street-goers who had stopped to listen (which was everyone) could not see who the woman derided, they mimicked her cry all the same. A chorus of boos and angry indignation filled the air. The writer’s mind transformed them into a thick cloud of mosquitoes, sizing up his exposed skin.
‘And what,’ the woman shrieked, her voice suddenly cracked asunder, its pitch akin to nails across slate, ‘is that!?’
It took the writer a while to fully comprehend her question, but eventually he saw what the woman referred to. Having leant on the fruit-stand, the ties of his plain-blue dressing gown had come undone, and now the gown had fallen open to reveal a set of eye-wateringly colourful pyjamas underneath. On his bottom half, the writer wore an awkwardly-undersized pair of Simpsons leggings, a kaleidoscopic nightmare of Bart and his skateboard loudly proclaiming “Eat my shorts!” in American-English. He surmised that aside from their garishness, the bulge the tightness of his pants exposed was not being as well-received as it had been by his husband. His top-half was arguably even more confusing to the gathering crowd. He wore a black t-shirt with a fading print, which at a glance was the artwork for Coolio’s album Gangsta’s Paradise. Superimposed over the rapper’s face, however, was that of Chairman Mao, pudgy cheeks and tonsured hair crowning Coolio’s slim frame. Above and below the image ran the reworked words: “China: A Worker’s Paradise”. The satire had been somewhat controversial even in his day, let alone whichever day he currently resided in.
The trousers were a leftover from his teenage years, the shirt one stolen from an ex. Both were made from synthetics: statically-charged factory-farmed cotton-substitutes, a million miles, even at a glance, from the thick, scratchy greys and greens of the woollen clothing worn by those around him.
‘What is this!?’ repeated the woman, and this time the writer detected an element of fear in her voice, a rising anger twisting into something that made him want to turn and run. ‘Why have you done this?’ Her words were half-choked, and he frowned to see the tears in her eyes. ‘WHY HAVE YOU DONE THIS!?’ She screamed at him, and yet screamed too at the crowd, her confusion and hurt apparent to even the most casual of observers.
Punctured by the woman’s cries, the bubble of caution which had surrounded the writer was instantly shattered. First one man, then another, and another, and soon a horde of men descended on him, each vying to be the first to solve the mystery of his identity. Who was this stranger? Why were his words so brutish, so full of slang and yet so bourgeois? Why did he wear these things? What were they? A thousand questions screeched across the morning light, and as the writer struggled to free himself, Time reached the hour, and from Drum and Bell Tower Square came a clangourous roar.
His head swam. Suspicions, which had been fomenting ever since he first noticed the changes in his apartment, now came to the boil. As understanding dawned on him, he realised with a start that he had known the truth all along. He had been supressing it, forcibly confining it to a stuttering simmer on the back burners of his mind. Now, though, try as he might, it was no use denying it any more.
The writer was not in his Time any longer, and this was no dream, no psychotic episode.
As the woman continued to rally support, and the swarm of men began grabbing and inspecting him like a prize sheep, he did not struggle. The magnitude of his situation became at once crystal clear, and utterly overwhelming. With a pull in his gut which he recognised as primeval fear, the writer gave in to the only plausible truth: he now was in the very last time period you could have wished on anyone; and what’s more, of course he was, for this was exactly the time in which he had set his novel, and for just this reason. It was a terrifying place to find oneself. As the mob turned from cautious, to agitated, to full-blown angry, the writer stomached a laugh: the sort of laugh that follows the umpteenth time you’ve dropped, spilled, or broken something in a day; a laugh of resigned helplessness. It was a laugh which acknowledged that of all the obscure and outlandish t-shirts he could have found himself wearing in a time such as this, his was the absolute last you could have wanted.
‘It’s – it’s just a joke!’ He cried, straining to be heard above the converging masses.
‘A joke!’ Screamed the death-smelling durian-woman. ‘The Chairman: a joke!’
A call came from some anonymous face, wheeling and dancing in the tumult, and at once the entire street came alive in echo:
“Cow demon! Snake spirit! Class enemy! Counterrevolutionary!”
And all the while – as the mob became a raging beast of accusation and exhilaration, of grinning faces, strong arms, and hungry eyes peeled back in zeal; as they hoisted high the frightened writer, and marched him in the direction of the square – the woman continued howling from behind her stack of stinking fruit, calling out her list of charges against him.
‘Bourgeois traitor! Look at his clothes, his riches! He parades as if an emperor! Capitalist! He tries to buy our silence! He plots against the Chairman! He mocks our Chairman Mao! Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!’
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Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. The story of the writer and the girl Junlei, reaches its dramatic conclusion next episode, in part two. What will happen to the writer, left at the mercy of Communist China’s ferocious Red Guard, and will Junlei discover the true meaning of the book which seems to tell her story, or of the library in which she is trapped. Find out next time on Stories from the Hearth. If you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, website and email address via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.