The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  “You betcha.” Steve jogged up to join Carolyn, grateful for Naga’s bulk at his side. Carolyn was untying the shoelace that tethered David to the mailbox. The bubble of blackness that started at his eyes had grown, Steve saw. Now it was over two feet across. It encased his head completely, and a good bit of his chest as well.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Carolyn said, gesturing at the people milling on the street. “They won’t hurt us.”

  “Well, good,” Steve said, dubious.

  The bonfire behind them was burning merrily now, and it put out a surprising amount of light. The dead ones stood watching it, bathing their faces in its yellow glow. Some of them had tears running down their cheeks. At first he thought they might be mourning—Margaret, maybe? Was she their Dear Leader, or something? Then he noticed that many of them were smiling as well. Maybe it’s the kind of crying you see at weddings? “Hey, Carolyn? Why are these guys so worked-up?”

  “It’s the fire. Around here fire means something.”

  “Oh.”

  There were dogs as well, Steve saw. He even recognized a few of them from before. They didn’t seem to remember him, or maybe they just didn’t care. They wandered freely among the people, un-petted. There were other animals as well—a fox, something that might have been a bobcat, or maybe a lynx, and—“Holy crap!”

  “What?”

  “Is that a tiger?”

  “It is. Don’t worry. He won’t hurt you. He’s one of the sentinels.”

  “Hear that? ‘Don’t worry.’ ” He and Naga exchanged glances. “What’s that thing next to it?”

  “It’s from the future. Don’t worry, Steve.”

  The animals and people and…other…milled around the street and the lawns. They moved out of the way when they saw Carolyn coming, but some of the dead ones reached out to brush her with their fingertips as she passed. They were speaking as well, muttering to themselves, one word over and over, a constant low murmur in a language he didn’t know.

  “What do they keep calling you?”

  “Sehlani.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “There’s no good translation in English. ‘Head librarian,’ is literally correct, but the connotations are wrong.” She made a sour face. “It’s what they used to call Father.”

  “Oh.”

  And then, finally, they were at 222 Garrison Drive. What was left of it, at any rate. The Library, Steve thought. At long and painful last. Then, giving it a critical eye, Whatever it was that came out to “project and defend” really did a number on the place. The brick front was still standing, but that was about all. The sides and back had caved in on themselves. Behind the false front there was now only rubble.

  “That’s it?” Steve asked. He was a little disappointed. Even before it had crumbled into itself, the Library must have been a rather unremarkable building—a brick saltbox, four columns and a couple of windows.

  Then he looked up. A few hundred yards overhead, the very large, very dark whatever-it-was swooshed by in the night. He felt the wind of its passage on his face. Suddenly he was uneasy again. “We’re going in that?”

  “Kind of. Not really. That up there is just a projection. The real Library is, um, distant. This doorway is the passage.” She walked up the brick steps to the porch and held her hand over the doorknob. “Come on.”

  “A secret passage?” He rolled his eyes. “I should have known.” He walked up the steps, but stopped just short of joining Carolyn and snapped his fingers as something occurred to him. He looked around. “Hey, wait a second…”

  “What?” Carolyn said.

  The porch was completely bare. Not even a welcome mat? “Where’s that token thing? The one you sent me in here for?”

  “That doesn’t matter. Not anymore.”

  “I still want to see what it is. After all that I’m curious.”

  Carolyn shrugged. She pointed to the shadow at the base of one of the columns. “There.”

  Steve walked over and squatted down. There, almost invisible in the shadows, he found it. “It’s a book?”

  She smiled. “Of course it’s a book.”

  He picked it up. It was old and tattered, the pages yellow with age and the grime of uncounted readings. The cover was missing, but there was something about it, something familiar…“Hey! I recognize this.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah! I had a copy when I was a kid. It’s about that horse, right? The one that gets taken away to this terrible life. Dark Beauty, I think?”

  Carolyn turned toward him, the muscles of her calves and thighs flashing in the light of the fires, her face half in shadow. “Something like that.”

  Steve frowned. “It’s funny. I know I read this, but I can’t remember the ending.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “Yeah,” Steve said. “I guess I am. Should I bring the book?”

  “No. Leave it.”

  “What if it rains, or—”

  “Leave it. That book has been through a lot. It’s tougher than it looks.” She reached out to the doorknob again but stopped just short of touching it. “Are you ready?”

  “Um…I guess. What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s easier if I just show you.” She touched the knob gently with the tips of her fingers, then took a step back.

  There was a soft clicking, metallic and well oiled. The sound, perhaps, of brass tumblers aligning in the world’s largest lock. The door swung open into darkness. Warm air spilled out, dry as desert wind and heavy with the scent of ancient dust.

  Behind him Naga yowled, a feral, alien sound that Steve had never heard from her before.

  He turned to steady her, and her fur was high, prickly under his hand. “What’s wrong, girl?” But he knew. He felt it too.

  “Animals don’t like this place. She probably won’t come in. Here, give me David.”

  He handed her the shoelace with David bobbing at the end. “What is…” He trailed off, squinting into darkness.

  “Come on.” Carolyn stepped inside.

  Steve blinked. As she crossed the threshold she receded as if she had been shot out of a cannon. “Yeah,” Steve said. “Fuck a whole bunch of that.”

  He turned to go, then froze. Behind him, the dead ones and the animals stood on the lawn, watching. He took a step down. One of the dogs growled, just a little. A quarter mile or so to the east and west on the highway, the Apaches blazed like bonfires. The wind was filled with the scent of burning kerosene, and every few seconds there was a pop or bang as the ammunition kicked off.

  Beyond that, approaching sirens wailed. How long would I last out there? Alone, broke, the most wanted guy in the country? Even if I don’t wind up back in jail immediately, where could I go? Africa? Bolivia? The moon?

  From the hill he heard a woman’s voice. He couldn’t tell whether she was screaming or if it was the beginning of a song.

  Steve sighed, then turned back onto the porch. “You up for this?”

  Naga looked up at him for a long moment, dubious, then gave her tail a small swish.

  They stepped over the threshold together.

  Chapter 12

  The Library

  I

  Thinking of how Carolyn had seemed to recede, Steve was expecting…something. A yank, a sense of forward motion. Something. But it wasn’t like that. He stepped into darkness. A moment later he stood on dry, ancient oak. Carolyn was waiting, hands poised to catch.

  “Well, that wasn’t so…” Then, seeing where he was, he staggered back against the wall behind him. “Jeee-zus fuck.”

  “Yeah,” Carolyn said, relaxing a little. “That was pretty much my reaction. At least you didn’t faint. A lot of people faint.” She steadied herself against a nearby bookcase and set about peeling off her leg warmers.

  “What…I mean…Jesus…what is this place?”

  “It’s Father’s Library.” Something occurred to her. “Well…I suppose…it’s mine now.” She blinked. “Hmm. Mine.�
��

  “Library,” Steve said, his voice flat and toneless. At his side, Naga yowled. He patted her shoulder. “Yeah, sweetie. Me too.” He looked around, gaping. “Jeee-zus fuck,” he said again, this time with real reverence.

  The Library was vast.

  It was easily the largest structure he had ever been inside, ever heard of, ever imagined. Bookshelves stretched across the floor as far as the eye could see. He saw a globe of light high overhead—like, skyscraper high—and a ceiling somewhere beyond that. It was impossible to estimate how far away the ceiling was—thousands of feet? Miles? The space he stood in was higher than the Superdome, wider than the airport terminal in Atlanta. “You could fly a plane in here,” he said. “Maybe not a 737, but a Cessna—easy. Probably even a Lear.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Her voice was muffled by cloth.

  Steve glanced over and saw that Carolyn was taking off her sweater. He clapped a hand over his eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting out of these ridiculous clothes. Want a robe? One size fits all, and they’re clean.” Cloth hit the floor with a soft rustle.

  “What? No, I’m fine.” He peeked, just a little. Carolyn’s bicycle shorts were puddled around her ankles. He turned his back to her and opened his eyes. A moment later she stepped into view wearing a gray-green robe of some rough cloth, vaguely monk-like. It suited her better than the Christmas sweater.

  “Are you hungry?” Carolyn said. “I’m starving.”

  “What?”

  “Food,” Carolyn said. She rubbed her belly with one hand. “All of a sudden I’m starving again. Walk with me, OK? I’ll show you around.”

  “Uh…” He blinked, remembering the modest house with the crumbling porch. When she had said “hidden,” he had thought of an underground bunker, something like a fallout shelter. But this…“Big. How can it be so big?”

  “It’s not that big. I paced it once. It’s only about two miles on an edge, give or take.”

  “Edge?”

  “Yeah. We’re in a pyramid. See?” She poked a finger up.

  Following her finger he saw the pyramid’s apex, three equilateral triangles meeting at a point impossibly high overhead. “Oh,” Steve said. “I see. But what I meant was”—he did some quick algebra in his head—“a mile and three quarters is a lot of square footage for this neighborhood. Aren’t you violating the building codes? Or the laws of physics?”

  “Building codes, probably. None of the wiring is grounded. But the laws of physics don’t apply in here.”

  “Whatever the fuck might you be talking about, Carolyn dear?”

  “Can you freak out while we walk? Pretty please?” She jiggled the shoelace impatiently. David, now almost completely swallowed by blackness, bobbed at the end of it.

  The floor was mostly unfinished wood planks, wide and smooth—acres of them. But he and Carolyn stood on jade, the endpoint of a main access path—road?—running the length of the floor. It was as wide as a three-lane highway, all of it neatly inlaid with jade tile. It glowed faintly underfoot. Carolyn set out down the road, walking quickly, not waiting to see if he would follow.

  Steve trotted after her. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing. About halfway between him and the far wall something that looked like DNA stretched up to the sky, thin and spindly. It was capped by a jade disk. Maybe it’s a lookout deck? Like on the roof of a skyscraper? Just over the platform a cloud of lights rotated slowly, bathing the hall with a warm, candle-like glow.

  “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “Man,” he said. “This place is huge. Are we, like, still inside the house somehow?”

  “No. The house wasn’t important. The only thing about it that mattered was the front door. It’s one of the places where the Library and normal space overlap. Defensible choke points, you see. Father was very particular about who got to see his work.”

  “What do you mean, ‘his work’?”

  Carolyn spread her arms out to the uncounted thousands of bookcases. “His work.”

  “One guy wrote all of this? There are, like, millions of books in here.”

  “Yeah. Like I said, Father was old. He did a few pages every day, sometimes on one thing, sometimes another. Over time it adds up.”

  “Wow.” Here and there along the jade corridor there were teetering stacks of unshelved books, little trays for scrolls, mini shelves for folios. Naga was sniffing one such now. Actually…Her look reminded him of the one Petey got when he was about to defile the carpet. He trotted over and patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t pee on the magic library, OK, sweetie?”

  Carolyn, still walking, called back over her shoulder. “No such thing as magic, Steve.”

  “If you say so.” Steve looked around, then up. He blinked. The sides of the pyramid that were overhead had bookshelves as well. What, are they like nailed to the ceiling or something? All this was half a mile or more above him, far enough that he could see that their layout made a fractal pattern, complete with little clearings here and there. Squinting, he could make out tiny couches and desks, all of them apparently immune to gravity. Three broad, ruby walkways radiated out from the geometric center of the ceiling. It was like looking down when your flight was coming in for a landing.

  A couple of seconds of this gave him vertigo. He reached out to steady himself on the pile of books. He grabbed the top book, an oversize volume bound in purple leather, and set out after Carolyn, who was moving away at a surprising rate. It was too heavy to fully open while he walked, but peeking in he could see that the pages were all handwritten. “So if these aren’t magic, what are they about?”

  “Different things. There are twelve main catalogs.” She glanced over. “The violet ones are mathematics—that one’s a primer on alternate geometries, I think.”

  He cracked it open and peeked inside. “It looks medieval. Like one of those, whaddya call them, a book of hours?”

  “That one’s at least twenty thousand years old. And if the Inquisition caught you with it they would have started heating up the thumbscrews.”

  “Really?” Very curious now, he stopped at the next tall pile of books and used it as a pedestal for the book. He cracked it open at a random spot. The pages were thick vellum, crammed with neatly inked pictograms arranged in vertical rows like cuneiform, or maybe hieroglyphics. He couldn’t read the writing or even guess what language it might be in. A couple of pages later he found a two-page illustration—pale ink, inlaid with gold leaf, hand-drawn and faded with age. It had a weird aesthetic, part technical diagram—neatly ruled planes, measured angles, squiggles that were probably equations—and part battle scene. Interspersed with the lines and parallelograms, an army of long-necked toothy things were clawing their way out of a hole in the sky. The forest below was littered with their corpses. A few survivors—they looked a little like giraffes—cowered before a man in black robes.

  The hair on the back of Steve’s neck got all prickly. Her Father’s work.

  Beside him, Naga rumbled. She was hunched over, peering into the shadows between the shelves.

  Following her gaze, Steve thought he saw a hint of motion, out there in the dark. He patted Naga’s neck, as much to reassure himself as to calm her. Her muscles were tense, quivery.

  He glanced down the jade corridor. Carolyn hadn’t stopped. Now she was half a football field away, the black ball bobbing behind her on its shoelace. “Carolyn?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Carolyn?” He left the book on the pile and jogged to catch up with her, wiping the fingers that had touched it on his shirt. He caught up with her faster than he would have thought possible. It occurred to him that the jade floor might be helping him along somehow, like one of those slidewalks at an airport. “I think I saw something move back there,” he said, panting a little.

  “Hmm? Oh. Yeah, you probably did. We have housekeepers. Remember the guy with the lawn mower? Like him. They take care of the menial stuff—dusting and shelving and the like. T
hey try to stay out of sight when real people are around.”

  “Well, that’s creepy as fuck. And what was up with that pict—” He broke off. “Daaaayum.” They had come farther than he would have thought possible. Now the DNA spiral was just ahead of them. From here he could see that it was actually a staircase, however enormous. It hung in midair, thousands of feet tall but unsupported, leading to a vast cloud of light overhead. “What is that?”

  Carolyn pointed at the cloud. “It’s the universe. The normal one, I mean. The one you grew up in.”

  “Like a planetarium, or—”

  “No. It’s the real deal. The original.”

  “That’s imposs…” He trailed off, then sighed. “How? How could a thing like that be?”

  “Do you know the word ‘superset’?”

  “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe. Not really.” He rubbed his temples. “It sounds vaguely familiar.”

  She patted his shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up too much. It’s a lot to take in, especially at first. It was the same way for me.”

  “Good of you to say.”

  “The Library is a separate universe, a superset of the one you grew up in. There’s a little bit of overlap, but not much.”

  “A separate universe?”

  “Yeah. There are some very dangerous, uh, people, who would do anything at all to get their hands on Father’s work. He tried earthly fortresses—towers, keeps, some very advanced defense mechanisms. But anything that can be locked can be unlocked. The stakes are enormous, and there were some close calls. Eventually, he created this place.”

  “But…” He looked up at the cloud of lights overhead. “I mean…the universe is, like, big? Right?”

  “Yes and no. Size is notional. It has to do with the structure of space. The door we came through was a gateway, but it’s also sort of a transition function. You wouldn’t be wrong to say that going through the transition makes you bigger.”

  “I feel the same size.”

  “Well…you also wouldn’t really be right to say it either. It’s sort of mathy.”

  Steve rolled his eyes or, perhaps, looked to the heavens for strength. “I don’t think she’s being deliberately obtuse. And the words sound like English…”