Thrice Told Tales

by Robert W. Walker

  He stood like the monster Grendel outside the warmth of the mead hall of mankind’s acceptance, a poor lonely bedeviled, reviled creature of common humanity’s nightmares now just as much as his so-called sacrilegious manuscript – however true and sincere in its rending of the fabric of four thousand years of Christianity – was during his lifetime of obsession with its research, writing, rewriting, packaging, posting, and recycling. Just bad, bad timing is what Min told him, what with the Religious Right controlling the media.

  And so Min wept for Milmar tonight: he who would stomp out ignorance had he not failed, the tragic hero of his own story, the ghostly apparition left of a man who would be King of the literary anarchists, revered by all who snubbed convention and conservatism and dogma if only THEY had published him. She’d wept for what he had not become then, and what he was become now -- a wandering spirit filled with loss, grief, remorse, and a litany of what ifs culminating in a low boiling stewing anger that the ghost kept under restrained sway. “I knew I should’ve just written that conventional text on the history of the Anti-Christ instead,” he conveyed to her now as she lay smoking a final cigarette in her dark room.

  “Perhaps,” she whispered through the smoke, attempting to console his anguished spirit. “Still, what you accomplished in just finishing the book at six thousand, forty-eight double-spaced pages, sweetheart, baby…you are one of the reigning phantoms of our --”

  “People kept asking me why I don’t just sit down and write a bestseller, and I kept telling people that I couldn’t write that badly. But you know, Min, people are sheep. Like with this DaVinci Code shit; they want it love it at a fourth-grade vocabulary, they want no challenges, nothing so annoying as asking them to pay attention!” His anger rose and swelled again. “The rejections kept pushing me to write a cozy mystery novel and to not kill any cats in the story. One agent suggested I tweak my book to bash Satan instead. Said Americans love Anti-Christ bashing. Guess I coulda been a contender,” came Arthur’s final lament before his form faded overtop of Minerva where she’d lain, her eyes understanding, lashes waving him off even as she blew hot breath over him in a vain attempt to keep him interested and corporeal. Parting was such sweet sorrow.

  But now her clock chimed 6AM, time for Min to shake off sleepy-headedness, rise, shower off the perspiration and fluids of the night, put on her uniform, and make her way back to the library -- the daily grind she so loved for the treasures she found there as with Jacob Kosler’s book on astral projection, as with that odd little unpublished work written from the point of view of a Bonsai tree. Who’d have imagined? “Weird crumpled up old slant-eye he was, that gnarly Bonsi buckaroo,” she said aloud as she showered off Arthur’s green ecto-spray.

  Outside the shelter of this place, World War III had so escalated as to rain down over the Earth, but Min Wakely gave it little thought. She was safe here, as were her precious manuscripts, books, and ghosts. They were, after all, five hundred feet below the Earth’s surface in a facility reinforced with impenetrable space-age materials in this dual federal and state repository where she lived, ate, worked, slept, and made love to ghosts.

  The network of connecting departments and agencies resided secretively below ground -- below Arlington Cemetery in fact, a perfect ruse and fitting -- rivaling the storehouses of the US government! But theirs was a custodial facility, and she and Mrs. Cox the last of the custodians in a guardianship, the two of them saviors of savory words, in this place that also took care of human history, people‘s aspirations, ideas, important documents, dissertations, scripts, and books—none of which had ever seen publication. The First Library of Congress and the Original Repository for the Smithsonian could be reached from here by underground tram. So too the libraries for each state in the union, and the Presidential Libraries from the beginning of US Constitutional history, not to mention the most important documents of government -- all accessible via the underground maze, and all consolidated in one safe, concentrated area, all bedded down below Arlington as if asleep.

  How many nights now had she lain awake with Arthur, assuring him of the horrors that he’d have endured had his book ever been published. Aside from the ridicule and downright hatred and invective his subject matter would have engendered there was the consideration of insult after publication that all published authors constantly bitched about, all of which he’d been spared: No ad budget, no review copies, no reviews as a result, no PR, no TV time, no radio spots, no sales, no royalties. Min told him she had it on good authority—dead published authors who had come to her—that their out of print, eternally orphaned books felt as painful to them as if having had buried a child. Then they’d go on -- bitching about remainder tables in the now bombed out Costco and Sam’s Clubs, complaining about the life of a paperback original being a four-week window on an extinct Borders or Barnes and Noble shelf, and that the hardcover fared even worse, before their precious gems were brutally stripped naked of covers and returned to their respective publishers. “Publishing can be a bitch, too,” she’d counseled Arthur.

  # # #

  As she worked this morning, Min Wakely felt for Arthur Canterbury Smithe Milmar II and his assuredly ‘controversial’ book that had not become controversial since it’d never seen light of day.

  But with a job to do and concentration all important, as Mrs. Cox was quick to point out, Min put Arthur out of her mind and lifted another loose bound manuscript held together by three brass brads slotted through punched holes. The unpublished manuscript flopped out of her hand, a life of its own asserting itself, hitting her pushcart. When Min made a stab at it, she sent her pushcart rolling off. Min stared down at the ugly unbound, come-loose thing when suddenly a ghostly image came to into focus. It lay over the manuscript, and Min watched the ugly duckling become a beautiful leather bound volume with gold lettering -- the kind of book that collectors fought over, the kind of book that warms the heart, the kind of book the lost dissertation wanted to be. As it was, it had no glue, no spine, much less leather and lettering. “A rare book indeed, I know...I know,” she said in soothing tones as she bent to lift it. “One of a kind -- not so much as a single other copy in print…an original…nothing quite like it on the planet, of course, of course.”

  People in the library wandering about in search of something to light on, all of them in institutional issue pajamas and booties, shuffled about. Mrs. Cox called the ones too lazy to dress for the day “shufflers” and indeed the descriptive fit as another shuffled by.

  Min, a tear welling up, read the title scrawled across the faded cover of the script she’d lifted from the dirty floor. It read: Semi-conducting in an Artless World -- the true story of a UPS long-haul driver who, after taking courses, became a concert conductor, but whose dream came up short when cancer struck.

  The very notion brought on tears now, and Min’s empathy soon found the spirit behind the book, the phantom author rising up out of the creases of the dog-eared dissertation, catching up her breath even here in this public place, making overt love to her. She felt her nipples rise beneath her cardigan.

  # # #

  From across the room, Mrs. Fiona Cox stared again at Minerva Wakley’s strange behavior. All the others, seated, standing, milling about, wandering, staring out windows that looked out on igneous granite rock facings as black as Hades, none of them gave Mrs. Cox so much spleen-gnashing turmoil as Min. Min-min-min-min-min, what are we to do with Min, petite, pretty, sexy little pudgy-faced, smiling Min whose baby face could still be found in the folds of her sagging features?

  The soft elevator music of this place, meant to work like the lime green walls, appeared only to bring out the worst sort of romantic notions in Min. Mrs. Cox watched as aging Minerva, Assistant to the Head Librarian, now pirouetted and waved hands in the air while balancing one of the manuscripts she’d been told to re-shelve over her head. Mrs. Cox gritted her teeth, pounded the inkblot with her date stamp, pretending business, checking in returns. Haughty in her print dress, Mr
s. Cox also worked to make a grin of pretense that all was well.

  Min’s voice rang out in a concerto of lilting high notes. She held a pointer in her right hand now, the book in her left, and her arms flailed like a truck driver directing Beethoven’s Fifth.

  Again Mrs. Cox pounded and stamped, pounded and stamped, until she realized she was acting as crescendo counterpoint to Min‘s tearful wailing. “Fuck,” she muttered, “fuck, fuck, fuck. I shoulda kept my old job at the fuckin’ post office.” One of her stacks fell over the side. She grumbled, “Who’s idea was it to take inventory in this ridiculous hell hole?”

  No one answered but some twitters erupted around and behind Mrs. Cox, and a man with a big stick raised and lowered it into his palm as a kind of friendly reminder to Cox that she really must remain calm.

  Pound, stamp, pound, stamp, pound, stamp.

  All the scattered people in the library hit the ground, stricken to the core when Mrs. Cox screamed louder still. The book she had just stamped responded, spewing forth a venomous bile, like a bad liver exploding. A kind of acrid smoke rose over the pages as if the thing might spontaneously combust.

  Min recognized the manuscript that Mrs. Cox had stamped returned, and all in an instant, she dropped everything and raced to aid Mrs. Cox. Min grabbed hold of the flaming tome, holding it in both hands, the stench of her flambéed flesh filling the library and setting everyone in slippers and pajamas so on edge that a caterwauling cacophony of moans, cries, shouts, groans and cheers erupted with Min’s hair. Pirouetting now with the burning book sending off spirals of flame, Min appeared fused to it even as she shouted at it, holding an entire conversation with Arthur’s book, quelling for a moment both Arthur’s angst and the spectral stench and fire.

  # # #

  Mrs. Cox stood in Min’s face, whispering through the fence rail of her chipped dentures, “Min, you keep talking to these imaginary friends of yours, and I can’t say that even this place, the library, will be safe haven. They’ll come for you and take you off.”

  “You’ve seen the spirits, Mrs. Cox. I know you have.”

  Someone in nightclothes and slippers shuffled past. “Keep it down. This is a repose library,” Mrs. Cox shouted after the shuffling feet. Then she pulled Min Wakely aside and shoved a finger in her face. “Listen to me. Those damned spooks you’re seeing’re going to be your death, Min, mark my word.”

  “Death? Why Mrs. Cox, no one’s ev --”

  “There’re as many of them filled with rage as as --”

  “As you?”

  As the fucking rest of us.” She jammed a pencil into her wig. “I like you, Min. For the life of me, I don’t know why, but I do, so please heed my words.”

  “I know...I know --”

  “--can’t get too close to the spirit world. Look what happened to Joan of Arc and John Edward in the end.” Mrs. Cox added, “That’s why God put the spirit plane so far out of reach in the first place.”

  Mrs. Cox turned back for her desk and stamp pad, when behind her, Min erupted, shouting at the unpublished manuscript she’d worked so hard to re-organize and bind back with the spiked brass tabs that’d mysteriously come off.

  “Stop it!” Min pleaded. “Stop this destructive behavior right now, Arthur! Arthur!”

  Everyone watching heard ‘author, author!’

  Min screamed in fiery pain. “It’s not that bad! No! The book does not deserve such a fate! And you, Arthur, you don’t deserve the fate doled you, either!”

  Min’s clothes had caught fire from leaping flames. Two men in uniform tried desperately to get at her spiraling, burning bush form, and a third sprayed Min with a petered-out fire extinguisher that had a date of 2001 stamped on its bottom.

  Finally, Mrs Cox threw a vase of water and plastic flowers over Min, and the ethereal flames vanished as they had appeared -- in a whoof of sound -- all gone, but the result had Min in the fetal position, looking like Christ after they carried him from the cross to his waiting grave.

  The shuffling-feet-crowd gathered round Min alongside the shaken Mrs. Cox, all leaning in, staring, some few grinning, others regarding her fate as they might a broken pencil.

  Covered in first and second-degree burns, Min’s last gasp of breath began escaping as in slow motion as the library room filled with a wickedly evil acrid odor that seemed perched dark and somber over poor Minerva.

  “I am become Joan of Arc -- the ghost of Joan...God’s Only Begotten Daughter...” With that Min’s tears for the ghosts ended with her last breath. Then Mrs. Cox saw and heard Arthur take shape over Min to plead for her forgiveness. “I didn‘t mean to lose it, Min. Saw red with that last stamp. Last thing I wanted was to hurt you, Min. It’s me, Min. I love you. You are the only one in this godforsaken trash bin who understands me! Fuuuuuuuuck! What‘ve I done!”

  The shape of this haunted, tragic, pained figure dissolved with its final cry, spiraling skyward, leaving only the blinking drained overhead

  lights of the library in its place, along with the lifeless form of Minerva Wakely lying sad and crumpled and red-blackened like a grilled mackerel across aisle 7 marked: Non-Fiction Q thru T....

  “Did you hear something?” asked a shuffler.

  A second replied, “No, but I saw something.”

  “What? What’d you see?” asked a third.

  They looked to Mrs. Cox. She set her jaw, returned to her desk and her inkpad, and began anew to pound and stamp, pound and stamp. Under her breath, she muttered, “Told that little woman not to take on so...so much...told her to take care... that spooks aren’t spawned from some magical place.”

  She saw she’d drawn an audience of shufflers. “Well damn it! Haints, haunts, phantoms, apparitions, seraphs, succubuses, incubusmen, specters, ghouls, goblins, grimlins, hoofed hounds of hell, whatever you want to call the varied mix of the dead and unread, they’re all borne of man and woman, all of human origin.”

  “Human beings?” asked one of the guards, still shaken at finding no reasonable, logical explanation as to what had killed Minerva Wakely.

  “Exactly -- human as us, these beings. And that means they’re damned dangerous! But would she listen? No, not Min. You all know Min wouldn’t have any of it. She knew it all. Voracious reader. Livin’ through all those dead volumes. Coulda been a Harvard Grad. Told her, I did, that some spirits hold more evil in their angry hearts and little fingers than all of us together.”

  “Where do I gotta go to get a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, Mrs. Cox?” asked one of the silly shufflers in night shirt and slippers.

  She looked through the shabby, unshaven man. “Not here!”

  “But isn’t this a library?”

  “Not that kind of library, no, and besides, we are beginning our annual Repository inventory, and trust me, not even a whisper of Alexander Dumas better be found here in my accounting of my repository. Now do go pester someone who deals in commercial crap like Dumas and Twain and Faulkner and Shirley Jackson and King, and Koontz and the McDonalds shit and such as that…or else!”

  “But –”

  “Ah-ah-ah! This is a repository of ideas, dissertations from geniuses, not a library packed with lies and fictions!”

  Pound, stamp, pound stamp.

  # # #

  The Sub-city Washington DC paramedic corps efficiently arrived and cleaned up the mess that was Min. Cox, watching from out of one eye as she pound-stamped, smiled at the notion that Min would have, in life, enjoyed the big, brawny hands of the well-fed med-crew. Under her breath, she said, “She died for our sins, she did.”

  The medics listlessly moved past Mrs. Cox and her desk and the sign posted over her head that read National Repository for Unpublished Dissertations, Book Manuscripts, and Out-of-Print Titles -- Non-fiction Only.

  “Told Min to get more sleep,” muttered Mrs. Cox. “Perhaps if she’d gotten more sleep, she’d not’ve been so...”

  “Clumsy?” asked the guard on her right.

  “Susceptible...I was goin
g to say susceptible.”

  “Pardon?” asked the guard on her left.

  “You don’t pay me no mind, now, you hear?” Mrs. Cox hoped to remain under the radar.

  “Who is she?” asked the new guard of the old.

  “Oh, Cox? That batty old dame? Just one of the loonies.”

  “Damn…I thought she was with the staff.”

  “Nahhh…she just happens to still put on clean underwear, open-toe shoes, and a dress and makeup. Happy so long as you let her ahhh...pretend to run the place.”