“We don’t have days.”
“Once again, the question is not answered by you, a genius. Thank God you’re not out to take over the world.”
“Pinky and the Brain, we’re Pinky and the Brain,” she sang absently. She found a pair of wooden desks and chairs, one with a desk lamp with an old-style green glass shade. Switched on, it contributed little to the watery dimness. “We only need to find one book,” she said, “and I’m going to need your help. It’s the one that contains the key to finding the other things we need.”
I tried not to puff up at her asking me for help. God, get a grip. Show some pride. “Which book?”
“It’s in Latin, it was written by a Carthaginian monk in about 1357. You’d translate the title as Celestial Observations.”
“That doesn’t sound like—”
“I know. But he was offered a covenant.”
“Like you.” I ignored the fresh drumbeat of words in my head at the mention of it, as if it had been a lightswitch that someone was fiddling with, a dog drooling for a treat. Something there. If only she could see it. If only I could see it. I held down my worry and tried to listen.
“Yes. And he did the equivalent of wishing for more wishes: He bargained for the ability to do what Drozanoth does. And They allowed it.”
“Why? That seems like a stupid move. Like a... a country with nukes giving one to a country without any. You could cause a war, disaster. Kill millions of people.”
“Of course. But you can’t tell people what to want. You can tell them it’s stupid and horrible and destructive and self-serving, but you can’t tell them not to want it.”
“I would.”
“I know, but you can’t expect them to stop wanting it just because you did.” She sighed. “They love to make covenants and then wait to see them go sour, knowing that human nature guarantees it. Like mine. They like to see what evil comes of trying to do good. It’s the way They play, amuse Themselves, over the millennia.”
“Did it? Did he fuck himself up?”
“Sure did. Died young. He wasn’t dealing with Drozanoth back then anyway, but Nyarlathotep—someone with whom you do not want to fuck, and humans rarely do, fortunately.”
“Why?”
“He’s bad shit. He’s still asleep after his last banishing, thank God, but he’s really nasty stuff—he likes appearing in human form, which is a problem on its own, of course, but he also likes to have human servants, companions, apprentices, cults. For all intents and purposes he’s the Lucifer of their pantheon. Drozanoth idolizes him, rather than its own master Azag-Thoth, who’s technically more powerful. Nasty politicking there, if the old stories are true.”
“Is there anyone more powerful than Nyar... ghh?”
“Just Azag-Thoth. And one more, with no name, the most powerful of all, there’s hardly anything written about that one. The oldest, most powerful of all, old, old, old. It’s just a thing with a yellow, silk mask over its face that doesn’t touch its features, because not even They can look at it. Don’t let’s talk about it.”
“Let’s not. Tell me about the monk who wrote this book we’re looking for.”
“He asked, he received. He saw so many things, some of which he didn’t even understand. At the end of his life he frantically wrote everything down, encrypted it, and sneaked it into the appendices of a completely unrelated book. There’s only one copy. And it’s here somewhere.”
“What does it look like?”
“No one knows. I only know about it because it was written about in other books. The way books always call out to each other, even if the book doesn’t exist yet, or any more.”
“Well, that can’t be true,” I said, irritated. “One person knows—Akhmetov, because he got the book and put it down here.”
“He probably doesn’t know he has it. In times of normality, the book can’t be known as what it is. But if you find it when the barriers are too thin, when there’s enough magic in the world, it’ll fight you—and it’ll call for help. It’ll call to Them. That thins the walls between our worlds even more, as more of them wake up in response to the call and press against them. If you find it, yell for me. Don’t touch it. Actually, don’t touch any of them. Like the old man said.”
“If you find it, will you be able to touch it?”
“Should do. There’s enough for me to get a spell of subduing on it. I just need to get it back here into the light.”
She took out her Sharpie and drew two complicated magic circles on the backs of her hands, slightly different, unmatched. I felt woozy looking at the designs, which shifted as I watched them, like gears. A solid circle in the centre of each winked suddenly at me, and I flinched.
“Protection against whatever might come when I touch the book the first time,” she said. “More warding. Different kind. Don’t look.”
“Can I have one?” I said, pointing.
“I can’t power it for both of us, sorry,” she said. “It’ll be okay, Nicky. Just call for me and I’ll come.”
I hadn’t really wanted one of the ugly, alien things, and barely knew why I had asked. Helpless to contradict anything she’d said, I moved off into the stacks.
Dust motes swirled in a golden darkness; I smelled mould and felt a bolt of terror. Leaving home had heightened my senses for... not danger, precisely, but reminders of my eventual fate. Not the vague one that awaits all of us in some way, but the specific one that awaited us right now. I knew the likely day of our deaths, the time, even who would be responsible. Only the manner was unknown, and I didn’t want to think about it.
After the heat of the day, the cold, silent breeze should have been refreshing, but it wasn’t. If it had been just cold and still, that would have been one thing—we were underground, after all—but it felt like water continuously trickling on my face. I began to shiver as I moved carefully around the teetering stacks, eyes beginning to tear up from the dust.
Everything in me wanted to start turning them around so I could read the titles on the spines, but both Johnny and Akhmetov had said not to touch the books. I was less inclined to believe the grouchy Akhmetov, who would have said it just to be a pain in the ass, but if Johnny said not to touch them, I’d be damned if I would. It was slow going though, especially as the paths narrowed deeper into the stacks, so that I had to suck in my gut and contort my shoulders not to touch the crumbling paper.
“We’ll know,” I muttered. The increasingly slender main path branched off into dozens of even smaller ones, some delineating stacks just a couple of books wide, others big enough that the path slipped out of sight. It occurred to me that this place was like Johnny’s house—carved out underground and far bigger than the house on top, like an iceberg.
I shivered and walked, walked and shivered. If I could just touch the books, I could see if they were in Latin at least. Maybe similar languages would be grouped together. Arabic with Arabic, Latin with Latin. Whatever pointy stick language Johnny had been learning in the other libraries before we left. Akkadian? Sumerian? What had she called it—coneform? Comic-book stuff, time of legends, Conan the Barbarian, King of Cimmeria. A time of beasts and monsters and wizards and magic, but also the time, it seemed, that people learned the words to speak of Them, write of Them. Maybe the time humanity had invented writing specifically to banish Them and record what They’d done.
I thought: If the plan works, no one will ever know. They’ll just know that Joanna Chambers, child prodigy and scientific entrepreneur, had run off with a boy for a week, or been kidnapped by a boy for a week, and beat up some people in an airport, and then meekly came home. My name won’t even be remembered. We’ll never be in the history books for this. If it works. If the plan works. It will be our secret, another one to keep. Like the bullet that still invisibly joined us. Like falling through the ice. Like the wasps, at the Creek, and looking at each other through the clear water. Like the kite I’d broken at her house, a gift from the Emperor of Japan that I never should have touched
.
Like thirteen years of friendship with the glass wall of her secret between us, like the barrier separating animals and humans at the zoo.
And yet here we were, nine thousand kilometers from home, together. A girl and her dog.
I took random turns, left here, right there, waiting for a book to... what, jump out at me? Be so amazingly gorgeous I couldn’t miss it? Speak to me? Light up? The mouldy smell was intensifying too. I pre-emptively told my stomach not to be a dick, held my hand cautiously over my nose, and kept going. With everything looking the same, it was hard to tell whether I’d been through a particular path before. If I could just... turn some books, make kind of a code, like a half-turn so it stuck out an inch would mean I’d passed it and a full-turn, like two inches, would mean I’d passed it and come back around as well...
It was deathly silent, nothing but my shuffling footsteps. I couldn’t even hear Johnny, who had gone in the opposite direction. Worse, the deeper I went, the darker it got. I wished I had asked for a flashlight or one of those glass lanterns. But realistically you’d never want to take a flame into a place like this, even enclosed. You’d burn to death in moments, long before you ever found the way out. I ignored the fear creeping up my throat and forced myself to keep walking. The light of the single bulb was long gone and everything was lit by its reflected radiance, so that I moved through pools of completely black shadow interspersed with the various greys and browns of exposed paper.
I hoped Johnny would find the book first, but I also—slightly less—hoped that I would. Be first, for once in my goddamn life. The stench was a solid wall now, and my hand did nothing; I pulled the hem of my shirt up to make a half-mask. Gawd! It was like something had died in here. Bigger than a mouse.
I stopped the moment I thought that, heart pounding. It did smell as if something had died. Died, and was rotting slowly in the cold. Not a mouse. Not a dozen mice. Nothing so small.
The ground was changing under my battered runners, going from the hard, smooth clay of the walls upstairs to something more raw, crumbly and uneven—gravel and stones, then sand. I stopped and stared at it. Definitely sand. Fine, black sand. They hadn’t said I couldn’t touch that, so I did, scooping up a handful and letting it run through my fingers. It was even, dry, and so cold that my hand went numb.
I teetered on the edge of the gravel, wondering if I should turn back. There were a dozen or more of the tiny book paths that I hadn’t followed, in other directions, some heading back towards the light. The book could be there. Or maybe Johnny had already found it and had dragged it back to the desk, silencing its screams for help with the black-marker gears on her hands until she could subdue and open it, not wanting to waste our precious time looking for me. Maybe she was just waiting for me to come back.
No. Come on. Fucking coward. At least go look.
I headed into the darkness. All around me I could still feel the barely-visible pressure of the books, like a crowd of people that had shuffled just close enough that I could sense their presence but not feel their breath. The sand hissed softly under my shoes.
I ran out of light so gradually that at first I didn’t realize what had happened, only that the looming mass of the books was gone because I could no longer see them. Just the barest grey light still somehow reached me, bounced off the edges of a billion pages. I turned, and stopped dead.
Because the rest of the library was gone. There was nothing but sand dunes, lit faintly by the impossible light of a few dull stars.
I STOOD THERE with my mouth hanging open for what felt like far too long. The smell of mould was powerful here, fresher, harsher, mixed with a dozen other unfamiliar stenches. Nothing I could identify. The closest I’d come had been a dead deer in the woods by the Creek. Decaying flesh was not something a city boy would have much experience with; the occasional chicken breast gone green and blue in the fridge, that’s all.
I took a few tentative steps back the way I’d come, my footprints clearly marked, but when they ran out into clean sand, I felt panic rise over my head and threaten to pull me under. The books were gone. Everything was gone. In the silence, my gasping breath whistled through my nose. Too fast. Might faint. Okay. Calm down.
“Johnny?” I called. “John!”
Nothing. The dark stars ate my voice.
I called for several minutes, not even hearing echoes off the dunes. How was this possible? I had to still be in the library, there must just be some... some spell that made me think... that I wasn’t, that I was outside in a desert, on a night with no moon (but there had been a moon last night) and only the faintest of stars (when they had shone so brightly that I saw constellations I should never have seen).
The sand began to hiss, then boom and roar, as if something heavy were driving over it. I stood poised on my tiptoes as my eyes began to adjust to the starlight. A whirlpool formed in the sand, grew, hungrily ate its own crumbling edges. Sinkhole!
I turned to run, slid backwards. Yelling, pumping my arms and kicking my knees almost up to my chin, I scrambled up the shifting slope and got back onto firmer ground, then watched in terror as the sand drained away my remaining footprints. There was something in its centre, something dark yet emitting its own dark light, like ultraviolet, something that my eyes couldn’t perceive but something else could, my skin or my inner ear or my pineal gland, something that made me turn away uneasily.
Finally I studied the thing through slitted fingers, feeling again that sense of disorientation or illness, like looking into a malfunctioning strobe light, barely lessened by the narrowness of field. And there it was. Had to be. The book.
It was the size of an ordinary paperback, emitting that pulsing throb of ugly light, its cover illegible but marked, clearly, with something. Swirls and circles, probably meant to be models of stars or planets moving, with a darker purpose that anyone casually looking at it wouldn’t know. But I recognized magic circles now.
It took several more long peeks to realize, with a little involuntary yelp, that it wasn’t sitting in the sand on its own. I wasn’t alone here in the desert. And I had spent so long feeling unwatched that it seemed to come as an extra shock to see someone there watching me just as I was watching hi... it. No gender seemed right.
It was curled in the sand, its limbs not human, more like paddles, webbed and cracked where the starlight touched them. Its face was a smooth slate of black stone, like an obsidian arrowhead. That was the only smooth surface—its hunched back was irregularly lumpy, as if it had both wings and legs under there, or—I shuddered—a whole other monster. Like Master Blaster in Mad Max, but dead and rotting, maybe forever.
It spoke to my entire body, every cell, every muscle, in a way I couldn’t even articulate properly as fear, more like a reflex—like shading your eyes against the sun. My entire body wanted to turn and run so badly that my thighs trembled with the effort of staying still. But we needed that book. We couldn’t do anything else without it. If I couldn’t get it, I may as well give up and allow the end of the world to happen.
I edged towards the pit, kicking at the sand to make a ramp. The light burned and throbbed as if it were physically trying to push me away. But I didn’t dare close my eyes as I walk-slid down the slope, shoes filling with the black sand, in case I overshot and collided with the dead thing holding it. Between the smell and the light I found myself retching emptily again and again. Everything about the thing and the book seemed to want me gone. But knowing that was half its power. I wondered what would happen to someone if they simply wandered in here and didn’t know what the book was, not that Akhmetov would ever let that happen.
It was flatter at the bottom of the pit, where the thing holding the book sat and rotted half-buried in the dry sand. I held my breath, reached for it—then paused. She’d said not to touch it. They’d both said not to touch it. But what choice did I have, if she couldn’t find me here?
I unwound the scarf from my head and wrapped my hands in it, making a sling, and reached ou
t again.
“Who are you?” whispered the dead thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I SCREAMED AND leapt backwards, my head crashing onto the sand. Above me, the stars in the flat, charcoal-gray sky grew marginally darker. I scrambled up, groping for the dropped scarf and clutching it to me for what scanty comfort and protection it could give, like holding up a blanket against a nuclear bomb.
“I’m...” I hesitated. Tricksy things, she’d said, the Ancient Ones. They’d studied humans for a long time and knew that words were our biggest weakness. “Who are you?”
“My name, once, was Namru,” it said. The voice wasn’t like Drozanoth’s—this was dry, without weight, the sound you’d imagine from the mouth of a mummy rather than a swamp monster. No muscles to push air out of the chest. Or like an insect. Something making noise by rubbing something together, not with the wet red springiness of vocal chords.
“Why are you here?” I said, not sure why I was asking.
The blank, mouthless face tilted down protectively at the book. “I was... something else... in another time.”
“What were you?”
“A guardian. Protector. I think.” The voice clicked and grated randomly, then resumed. “They... tricked me. Trapped me here. I once was the God of Knowledge, many prayed to me, their voices... I heard many prayers. Scribes and priests and beermakers and engineers and sailors. They prayed to me for numbers, letters, seals. They prayed to know. But now, nothing... no one. I am here, dying. Forever. Alone. At Their behest.”
I stared at it. There was no good reply, least of all sympathy. I knew what had happened. A covenant had gone wrong, a loophole had been found. Namru, who once had been a smaller spirit like the one Johnny had called on for her warding spells, had been betrayed and imprisoned here. I wondered when it had last seen a human being, heard a voice like the prayers it had once received. Poor thing.
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