The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  The books above were much as the same below, and similarly arranged, with older books on the bottom row and newer ones atop, but again the order was not rigidly chronological—as though there were some timely aspect to the order, though not publication date. As below, authors and many publishers were unknown to me, and again the exquisite workmanship of the covers was not confined to familiar houses. I noticed occasional details that were not quite right—two-coloured inks on the front board to a volume from Cassell & Co. ostensibly from 1868, for example. Naturally, I could not as easily dispute irregularities having to do with the publishers unfamiliar to me.

  I did notice one characteristic that seemed universal, even if I inferred it from the small sample I examined. I began to pull and set down books from a section primarily dating from around the turn of the century: gold inlay (possibly ‘Dutch Gold’, though none of it had oxidised) was once again in use, and ‘poster design’ illustration dominated the cover art in two or three inks. It was common at the time to incorporate title and author’s name into the artwork, which I saw. On many volumes at the time, the attribution to the author is simply inferred by the presence of the name, but, as part of the incorporated text, it was at least as common to include the word ‘by’ (especially on novels). On not a single novel in that library did I find the conjunction used for attribution, either on the cover, the spine, or the frontispiece—never was a book ‘by’ someone. I would have thought it no more than an interesting coincidence particular to that group if not for the persistent absence of a single repeated or familiar name throughout the library.

  Though it was hardly the best lighting to read by, I decided I should at least briefly turn my attention to the content, even if only to scan a page or two here and there. There was the expected variability in quality, but in general there was nothing differentiating the work from the known material of the time; grammar usage and the art of the prose were sufficient to be ‘believable’—which quieted my concern that the library housed a massive dump of vanity press material. Again, from a small sample, it is hard to make a broad generalisation, but I thought I detected a sort of forthrightness in the material across most titles that read refreshingly. That observation may be of little help, but I can only say it was a strong impression. I noted ‘most’ of the materials were naturalistically engaging; one foul tome stuck out against the rule: an autobiography, apparently, of one Lewis Llewellyn Woldscot, Esq. The tone of the prose was dry and haughty, and the author attempted to invest terrible self-importance in the most menial activity, addressing the reader as though conferring an undeserved award. It was truly, uniquely awful.

  I felt my eyes fatiguing in the gloom. I turned from my stack of books and the emptied shelf and looked across the expanse to the far side. I had been so engrossed by the ceiling above and the books in front of me that I had failed to notice an exception to the wraparound shelving: directly opposite me there was a break, creating a shallow alcove between bookcases, wherein a lone book lay open on a pedestal. The metal catwalk trembled as I hurried clockwise around the room.

  The book was bound in black leather. It appeared to be a well-travelled grimoire of some sort, though closer inspection revealed its imposture. It purported to be the collected knowledge of the Gallowsmen, that fledgling secret society to which Owen Charles Coombs pledged fealty and then apparently ruined. The book was assembled with amateurish stitching from pages that matched neither in size nor material. A compact section in the front appeared to have been invented by the society; ornately handwritten bawdy poetry dominated, interspersed with nonsense rituals and ‘spells’ that even the neophyte chemist would recognise as pranks. Later sections were likely included for no other reason than to add ‘weight’, both physically and figuratively. There was a section of purloined illustrations depicting several Greek myths in lascivious detail; another section was compiled indiscriminately from a few popular and unremarkable occult sources; one long section torn at its beginning and end looked to be stolen directly from Skull and Bones! The book was pretence, a toy for young men stabbing at blackness for a thrill, dabbling in the forbidden to feel empowered. But then I found a section of a few pages that stopped me short. The pages were old and yellowed and pasted onto newer paper (dear God—pasted! I hoped the reverse was blank). I did not know the source from which they were stolen, but I recognised their power. The language was Old High German, the symbols unknown but like to the one on the ceiling of the library. I read just enough of the text to get some sense of where the books in the library might have come from before the light reeled across the wall as the lamp fell to the floor with a crash. Despite the grill, the impact snuffed the bulb.

  The other lamp revealed nothing near the base of the toppled tripod but I heard that dreadful skittering sound again. Light up through the metal floor splayed like slats between prison bars on the shelves of the upper level. The far corner where my egress waited was near solid black. The ‘slats’ wobbled—the other lamp was trembling. I yelled. The walkway rang from the quick clappers of my soles. I thought I saw something near the ladder but I didn’t hesitate. I refused to be left in the dark on that second level. I overshot the hole and banged my shin. My hand flew out to steady myself on the shelf and I touched something that felt like a shrivelled gourd. It squirmed and I wrenched my hand away. There was movement near my face and I batted something away with a flailing arm. My hands would not grip; I tumbled down the ladder, smacking my head and nearly twisting my knee backwards—but I made it to the floor. The tripod jerked backwards but stayed upright. I saw the orange cord wiggling but not what moved it. I looked to the opening. There, silhouetted by the light of that normal, too-distant room was a hellish brown thing as much man as insect, a diminutive, spindly acrobat, suspended from feet that clutched the wall by unknown means, whose things like hands tugged at the cord. And though its face was in silhouette, the head that rose to regard me was oblong and oval and painfully narrow, as though squeezed in a vice or extruded from a crevasse. I wanted to see no more of it, but I grabbed the light and swung it in front of me. Thank God the thing understood my intent and scampered into the shadow of the long leg of the reverse L. My way out was clear and I made for it with lamp in hand. But just as I got to the entrance, right before I stepped over the low rubble and through the breach, I stopped. The sound of skittering was louder down at the end of the dark wing. Other sounds were mixed with that slight and hellish noise, something like the squeak of gas slowly passing through a torn membrane, and a ticking in time with a slurping sound, and a sort of wet scratching like fingernails on sweaty leather. I shined light into the recess.

  Even if I had seen the grad students before then I couldn’t have recognised them. They were nude and wilted. Their loose skins stretched over the rooting proboscises of stick-things whose abdomens were swollen sickly blonde and mottled red. There was not a drop of blood on the floor. The feeding beasts waivered momentarily in the unwelcome glow, but bent once more to their foul task like oblivious drunks. A chorus of hisses emerged around them. Hands or claws curled over the tops of spines. I could feel them, a hungry multitude with stick legs and stick arms and pill heads, scrabbling over each other in the gaps between the books and shelves. I knew I was not safe, that all too quickly their building frenzy would overcome their loathing of the light.

  I know I saw one of their faces. My conscious mind has rejected the image so that I do not remember it with clarity, but it flashes from a dark corner when I close my eyes, each time a little more horribly defined.

  I don’t think I can take credit for actions I don’t remember performing; nevertheless I feel a certain degree of pride in how I comported myself during my hysterical breakdown (even if some decisions were ultimately hurtful). They tell me I set fire to the house, using varnish stripper as an accelerant applied around the hole in the wall. Golfers saw the smoke. When emergency services arrived, they found antiques strewn on the lawn. I emerged with the final box that would be rescued from the f
ire, and then promptly collapsed. Fire-fighters could do little but contain the blaze; the mansion was gutted.

  The authorities have only my word and that of Professor Randall that there were ever any books in that hidden library. They found only ash and the charred skeletons of the grad students. Unfortunately, my actions destroyed the ‘evidence’; I understand I will be charged with two counts of homicide if I am ever found fit to stand trial. The professor has argued in my defence that I am not capable of such crimes, but I can tell when he visits me that that assessment waivers. I have told him what happened just as I have written it here.

  Of course, the professor cannot embrace my account of events. I imagine his disinclination to do so is exacerbated by my interpretation of the library. I am sure he judges it to be the folly of my illness, even accepting for the sake of argument that my breakdown was caused by something I saw there and not previously incipient (though I think the professor believes it was my immersion in occult semiology that precipitated my belief that I saw something terrible; unfortunately, it is this reduction that makes him question if I was not perhaps capable of killing his students after all). For the sake of untold innocents, I hope someone else will read this and see the evidence and believe. The professor is a good man, but age can compromise courage (even without being called to measure, instead rushing to dismiss a questionable threat), and I don’t think he will chase this fight. For the Initiate, I believe the requisite ceremony can be found among the banishments or closures in Sigillum Proditoris ‘as related to’ Der Heyden. Unfortunately, I cannot convince my doctors to retrieve it from my belongings, as they, too, fear an occult ‘fancy’ drives my mania. I will not be believed before I disappear, and probably not before many others have died. But I must do what I can.

  I believe the history of the room is fairly easily traced. It was, of course, not present in any form when John Cuthbert Coombs built his two-room-and-detached-kitchen home in 1799. He built a secret space during the unrecorded first renovation, and expanded it during the second renovation (which left off the detail of the interior). I doubt the room served as a library—normal or otherwise—during John Cuthbert’s lifetime. I think it more likely that he used it in relation to some ‘lightly criminal’ means of income, though I cannot exclude a more nefarious function. Either way, even if it was not the accursed ‘place’ it would become, John Cuthbert created the space for secrecy’s sake, a psychic seed which took root and imbued the room with a welcoming energy conducive to what followed.

  I think the professor’s ‘suspect’, Owen Charles Coombs, was indeed the culprit responsible for the library. I believe Owen Charles ‘created’ the library during his dissolute years and shuttered it when he apparently repented (either before meeting Edith Hauser or as a result of her influence). The physical space was fashioned in its final form during the third renovation, which either occurred before his marriage to Edith, or possibly the extant room was reopened during the third renovation with Edith in residence. If that was the case, then I will take liberty to romanticise the timeline: I imagine Owen Charles indulging his young bride (despite his reservations) and then the library was accidentally breached, which in some way (possibly the worst imaginable way) contributed to Edith’s death. This naturally occasioned the darkening of Owen Charles’s relationship with his son, who fled as soon as he was able, never to return. If Roderick Coombs produced an heir, perhaps some oral tradition was passed that could corroborate my theories.

  The room is mapped on the plans for the fourth renovation, but the room was obviously shuttered at its conclusion. Even so, Oliver de Pauw sensibly got away from it as soon as he could manage. He likely excused any compunction he had about selling the house by convincing himself that the room would not be rediscovered—as indeed, it was not, despite another extensive renovation, as we see Judge Whitehead and daughters happily kept residence there for nearly a century apparently without incident.

  So that is the room, but what is the library?

  Professor Randall was in my cell. I have not been cleared to use the dayroom.

  ‘Can you describe to me something you can’t imagine?’

  Suspicious of my mental state, the question was an uncomfortable one for the professor; nevertheless, he answered honestly, ‘By definition, the task is impossible.’

  I nodded. ‘But tell me what this is: The body of a lion, the wings of an eagle, the face of a woman.’

  ‘The Sphinx,’ he identified.

  ‘The Hippogriff: Half horse, half Eagle. The Nue: Body of a tiger, with a monkey’s head and a snake for a tail. And what of the elevated Seraphim?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Seven wings and four animal faces. Mythological hybrids, all,’ Randall said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I replied, ‘but might they be descriptions of things we can perceive but which we can’t apprehend? They are near things. If we were to see a being from another dimension—or a demon from Hell, if you like—we must see it on terms we can define, whether they be animal hybrids, or gross distortions, or even analogy—something we see so completely differently from its original form that we can only describe it as something of exceptional normality, such as a library.’

  He scoffed. ‘You cannot mean a room is a beast?’ I think the concept I was advancing was sufficiently incredible that the ridiculousness of it actually relaxed the professor.

  ‘No, not exactly. But it might represent a part of one.’

  ‘What part?’ he asked. ‘You’d have me believe that library was the mouth of a demon, gobbling souls!’

  I shook my head. ‘Not its mouth. How could it feed while so firmly locked away? And even if it was not—if that was the only opening—then the number of people I believe it has devoured could never be enticed into one house without the thing being discovered years before. Naïve Owen Charles Coombs summoned the thing, or breached a barrier there in that secret room, but the demon that came was not strictly confined to it.’

  ‘Come now.’

  ‘No, professor—the thing’s mouth—mouths—likely opened in fallow fields and dead-end alleys, mouldy attics and reed-choked coves across the country, sucking in unsuspecting, wayward innocents from the lonely places to the loneliest place—the hidden library—probably no more than a few in each spot over a span of three generations until it went dormant.’

  ‘Dormant? Ah, but why? I’m sorry, my friend, I cannot indulge this . . . this . . .’

  I didn’t wait for him to find the apt word. ‘Because it was full. As I said, the library was not the mouth of the beast.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It was his stomach. And it does not consume souls at all—in fact, the souls are the undigested bits.’

  ‘No, no. No, I won’t hear it.’ The professor waved shaking hands in front of his face as he looked askance.

  ‘I am disturbed, professor, you’re right to think that. I am much . . . affected by my experience. But I think because of it, I was able to work out the answers, quite quickly, really, once I was lucid—I am lucid, in the day, professor. Think of it, what we all have in our stomachs: microbes that have evolved over untold millennia that grow with us from birth, that break down our foods to aid digestion. And so it is with the thing in the library—the thing that is the library. Those stick creatures, those men or insects—I dare not think on them too long, even now, those things which appear as the monsters they are because the matter they repurpose is so terribly, unfortunately terrestrial—they break down the food. Like the one I hit with the book which burst and leaked over the spines of the shelved books—leaked human fat on those books.’

  Professor Randall made a sound signifying disgust.

  ‘I was sure of what it was: I saw the heap of bones and skin in the corner. But the immortal souls are not so easily broken down. The books, professor! The books were the souls of the victims of the demon’s appetite. Remember: None were attributed—they weren’t by the authors, they were the authors. Somehow the process of each soul’s excision—or its im
prisonment in a place no longer entirely in or of our reality—forced it to physical form. Some were more attuned to the world or defined by it—those ‘published’ by familiar houses—while others were products of their invention, though just as well crafted. Some had trifling irregularities, imperfect like memory, or perhaps they were marred by the trauma of their creation.’

  He scoffed, ‘It’s all very well to put forth a theory that can’t be refuted.’

  ‘Nor proven,’ I nodded. ‘I know. I remember a few names, but don’t have the resources here to check them. And even if, as I suspect, they disappeared, one could counter that I found the names first, and constructed the anecdote around them. It is frustrating. If we still had the books, then I could test another aspect of my theory: that the not-quite-chronological order reflects the ‘books’ being shelved according to the author’s date of birth.’

  ‘Eh? But if we accept the, ah, humanness of the books—at all, but especially to the point where it supersedes their artifice—it makes even less sense that they were primarily works of fiction.’