The Night Library

by T L Barrett

  Tyler would not accept such a possibility. He centered himself, swung, flipped through the air and landed squarely on the first branch of the tree.

  He believed that he was ready.

  ***

  Fifteen minutes, before the pool closed, Tyler put on his back pack, left the boy’s locker room and left through the back exit. Outside, a parking lot overlooked some of the recreational department ball fields and was bordered by a copse of trees on the right. Tyler knew that big kids went often into those trees to do bad things. He went to the edge of the trees and pulled his presence down inside himself as his Sensei had taught him to do.

  A few parents led their wet-haired children to cars and drove away. Some passed within a few feet of Tyler, but, he noticed with satisfaction, none took notice of him. When a teenage lap swimmer emerged, Tyler knew the time had come to act. He pulled out a pair of thin gloves with phosphorescent bones stitched onto the backs. His mother had made them as part of his skeleton costume from the Halloween the year before. Tyler felt excitement that the gloves would not only serve his purpose, but were very cool to boot.

  He moved in bursts, making sure that no one was around. He slipped back in through the exit door. Inside, he noticed the life guard had already lowered the pool house lights. He could hear her singing to herself from the woman’s locker room. He made it to the high rolled up pool covers, just as she emerged, jingling a big set of keys and heading his way.

  He stood very still, and put his hand over the tiny razor that rested in his jacket pocket. He felt assured by its presence.

  The lifeguard, alternating between humming and singing, locked the back door and then began making a circuit of the pool, putting things to order in the gloom of the pool house. Tyler moved in quiet bursts of speed, trying to instinctively match her movements with his own to avoid discovery. He headed for the brightness coming through the half open lifeguard office door.

  He slipped inside and made his preparations.

  The young woman came in humming. She stopped humming and walking when she looked up and saw the CPR manikin propped up in a chair facing her with an expression of eternal surprise on its puckered mouth.

  She gave a little yelp of fright. Then she collected herself.

  “Those jokers,” she said with good humor and shook her head at her own jumpiness.

  Tyler, who crouched beside the door, shut the light off and shut the door simultaneously. The life guard yelped again.

  Tyler tipped the huge bag of marbles and tossed them across the floor between the door and the lifeguard. His grandmother had given them to him after she had cleaned out her attic.

  The girl ran for the door, and slipped on the marbles. She fell sideways, pin wheeling her arms in the dark. Her head struck the edge of a counter with a powerful sound on the way to the floor.

  Tyler turned on the light and poised himself to leap, the razor between his gloved fingers. The girl lay motionless among the marbles on the floor. A deep mark, already growing livid, crossed the left side of her forehead.

  For a moment, Tyler stood over her with the razor, wondering if he could trust that she would remain unconscious. Finally, relived that he wouldn’t have to make too much of a mess, Tyler put the razor away.

  He nudged her with a foot, but she did not move.

  He took the keys from her and tried to drag her out of the office. She was far too, heavy. He looked around, and remembered a documentary he had watched with his father once about the building of great structures like Stonehenge and the pyramids. He found a mat and managed with a great effort to roll her on top of it.

  He dragged the mat out, using it as a sloppy travois. Wasting no time, he got her to the poolside and rolled her over the edge and into the water. She fell in and rolled. For a second he was worried that she would stay afloat, but saw that she went down, emitting a stream of bubbles as she went.

  Tyler went into the office, gathered up the marbles and put the CPR manikin back where he had found it. He spared a satisfied look at the girl in the pool before he went to the back door and unlocked it. Carefully, he went back to the pool’s edge and tossed the keys out so that they landed in the water right beside where the lifeguard’s body floated.

  Then, Tyler went out the back door, cut through the woods, slipped through a few back yards and was home well in time for dinner.

  ***

  That night, Tyler waited until his parents were snoring, and crept into the den. He turned on the computer, loaded up the Ninja Blade site and logged on. A banner exploded across the screen.

  Congratulations! You have proven your loyalty to the ancient clan! You will find your character has been given 1000 bonus building points to aid in your important missions!

  It took a lot of resolve for Tyler not to get up and do a jig in the den. Instead, he clicked on his character profile and wondered at the new outfit, the skill level advancements, but most importantly, the weapons.

  ShadowMax10 now wielded the Shuriken of the Old Ones.

  That night, Tyler lay in bed and fantasized about his future. Someday, he would open up his own dojo and train others in the ancient skills that would one day aid in the awakening of the ones who sleep.

  The Writing Program

  Some have a passion that just will not stop. For me it’s writing. I started out like any shy and introspective kid; I spent my days reading comic books and fantasy novels. Then, I read my first Stephen King novel and thought: this is what I want to do. I figured it would pass like the whole astronaut thing when I was eight. Now, however, I guess I’ve written this, and you’re reading this, so at least some part of my dream came true. I guess the program has been taking care of all that. It is all in their plan. I only ever wanted to impress two people.

  One of them is dead. The other I’m keeping alive by writing this.

  That awful music is playing. It resonates through the walls in the dingy room in which I sit and type. I know it has something to do with my words, that there’s some secret message in the story. I go to write a story, and from the very start I guess I’m saying things, but I don’t even know what they are.

  Only this time, I’m going to tell it all. I’m not making up shit for these ‘people’ anymore. I’m not writing a story. It isn’t going to be easy. My mind keeps drifting into the most awful dreams. When I come to, I’m typing away, and don’t know what I’ve written. I’m going to try to tell the truth; and we’ll see how they like that.

  It all started after I brought my aunt, who I had lived with for seven years, since I was twelve, to the hospital because of complications during her chemo therapy.

  I got desperate in our silent apartment and went into my aunt’s room. Maybe I thought I’d find the address or phone number of one of her old friends, who might help out or visit.

  In her closet, I found the new age books my mother had written in a little gift box covered in dust. Hefting them, I realized that these were maybe the only things other than me that proved she had existed. They had committed her when I was six; she took her own life later that year. I sat under the fluorescent light in the kitchen, skimming and reading alternatively into the night.

  As I read, it was as if I could hear my mother’s voice, strained and passionate, sad but hopeful. She wrote about how the ancients guarded against man’s general unhappiness, but we’ve forgotten how. It all had to do with thoughts and habits of thoughts, which were alive somehow. At first it was all shining crystals and homeopathic rainbows, with us as creators who bring forth shining truths and thoughts of goodness into the world. Then the narrative got darker. She claimed some thoughts were older than man and had somehow given birth to themselves in the detritus outside our reality. She told about how these thoughts could twist a man. She said that in old times there were groups of people that worshipped these thoughts and sacrificed men to them. She talked about witches that, in service to these thoughts, could sing a man’s soul from his body.

  Yes, I could see that my mother h
ad slowly and surely gone completely insane. I almost gave up reading in disgust, but I read on. At the end, my mother gave a desperate prayer for humanity, but mostly for her young son and that he should live in a world untouched by these terrible ‘thoughts’.

  I sat and asked myself. Was I like that? I had just been drawn into her insane ramblings about demonic alien thought-gods. I cursed myself for a fool. I wasn’t like her, and I wasn’t like my drunken and abusive father. I took after my aunt.

  Suddenly, I felt a great and awful guilt for hardly doing anything to improve my aunt’s life, who had given me everything. In that impulsive way I have, I grabbed up a newspaper classifieds in hope that something lucrative would present itself.

  That’s when I saw a little announcement for THE WRITING PROGRAM. It said: If you have talent in writing and would like a chance to earn a sizeable stipend, come to the Bearfield Municipal building 3C, 8:00AM, March 15th. That was it, no number, no other contact information. I had been wary of these things since I had first turned eighteen and been trapped in a seminar for a pyramid scheme. However, this felt like serendipity. My shift at the grocery store didn’t start until 11:00 AM. I had intended on visiting my aunt first thing, but she’d be wicked excited if it panned out; and if it didn’t, at least she would be impressed that I went. I wanted so desperately to give her something positive to think about.

  When I got to the municipal building at 7:45, two people waited on the benches in the hallway. One was an old woman doing some knitting, and one was a big Slavic man with a moustache and a broken nose. I went to 3c and tried the doorknob.

  “It’s locked, I tried it,” the big man said gruffly. I turned around and then, not knowing what to do, sat down beside the old woman. A few minutes later, a harried forty-year old woman joined us. She flipped open a binder of her writing. I looked to the old woman’s bag and saw an enormous binder of her own sticking out among the needles and yarn. The man had a leather bound journal in his great ham-hock of a hand. Were we supposed to bring examples of our work? I hadn’t brought anything. For that matter, I didn’t really have anything to bring.

  I stood up and turned to go.

  A man in a business suit appeared at the end of the hall. He had slick black hair and a thin, handsome face. The man’s impeccability seemed at odds with the hall and town in which he strode. And stride he did. He seemed to float down the hall with an heir of imperial import.

  “Not too fashionably late I hope?” the man asked.

  “It hasn’t started yet,” I blurted.

  “No, it hasn’t yet,” he said. “But, it is about to. Thank you for coming. I am Mr. Smiley.” He gave a little false bow. “I’ll be taking your applications today.” The others got up as he went to 3C, flourished a key and opened the door. The others went in. He turned to me, gave me a wink, and motioned with his hand. I, feeling like a charlatan, took a seat at a big table with the others.

  “Those of us that manage The Writing Program are very excited at this new arrangement, but we are looking for just the right person to…well, write,” he said with a little chuckle. “I’m going to give you each a pad of paper and a pen. I’m going to go, and leave you to write whatever you desire. After forty-seven minutes, I will return and look over what you’ve managed to scribe for me, all right?” he looked to each face and waited for a nod. When he had them, he handed out the pads and pens and disappeared out the door.

  “Forty-seven minutes?” the man with the moustache grumbled.

  “I’m confused,” the old woman said.

  “What? Really?” the harried woman said.

  I looked at my paper and tried to clear my mind. My mind wandered back to the pictures of a childhood friend I had seen on Facebook that morning before I had left the apartment. He and some college fraternity brothers were frolicking in obvious drunken buffoonery. The young man still had that dark twinkle in his eyes that I had seen the day he had shown me where he had killed and eviscerated all kinds of small animals in his back yard.

  I wrote about that strange suffocating afternoon in my tenth year. I forgot about the grunts and sighs of the other three applicants. I was back in my childhood, my pen flying across the paper. I jumped when the man appeared back in the room and asked for our applications.

  We gave them to him and filed out onto the benches where we waited for his verdict. He came out fifteen long minutes later with checks in his hand. He marched over to the old woman and flourished a check.

  “Why thank you!” she said ecstatically, her hands shaking. I couldn’t help but see that the check was for one hundred dollars.

  “You’re welcome,” Mr. Smiley said. “You’re work is very… competent.” Then he gave a check to the literary-looking woman, who took hers more tentatively, her eyes wide. He swiveled and offered one to the man with the moustache. Just as the man went for the check, Mr. Smiley snatched it back. The man squinted and scowled, and Mr. Smiley chuckled and then put the check in his hands.

  “Thank you for your time, ladies and gentleman,” he said and made little shooing gestures with his hands. They rose and started out, looking dejected. I, feeling like a total shit, slumped and went to follow. A surprisingly strong grip took me by the arm.

  “Young sir, please don’t leave,” Mr. Smiley said. “Your destiny waits. You’re just the writer for whom the program is looking!”

  ***

  My aunt, who was being treated for a very nasty internal staph infection, was overjoyed to hear the good news. I floated through my shift at the grocery store and afterward walked all about the town. I followed the directions Mr. Smiley had given me for the next morning a bit out of town, down by the river. Down a cracked and disused drive there lay an abandoned foundry. I had a strange feeling looking at the shambling place where hobos and cats went to sleep, hunt and piss. It looked dismal… and haunted. As I turned away in confusion, I swore I felt eyes on me. This couldn’t be the place that we were meeting? Could it?

  The strange feeling stayed with me all through the night. Many times, as I lay there unsleeping I thought it must all be some kind of scam and that I would be a fool to return in the morning. However, I had got someone to fill my shift the following day, and I couldn’t exactly tell my aunt I hadn’t at least checked it out…

  The next morning, the foundry still looked dilapidated, but there was a bit of life to it. A fair spring breeze wafted the branches about the place. Four cars were parked in the cracked parking lot. I went to the door, knocked, tried the handle and walked inside. Mr. Smiley was waiting inside the hallway.

  “Welcome, Curtis! How excited we all are!” he said. I looked around, but could only see him standing there. “Come right this way! We’ll get you to work, and do not let me forget to write you a check before you leave here today, all right?” I nodded and let him lead me to a dingy workroom with odd bits of metal and refuse along the walls, which were peeling in different layers of what I took to be lead paint. Upon a table in the center of the room sat a laptop. Cords ran from the laptop and disappeared through a door and around a corner. Mr. Smiley pulled back the desk chair at the table and motioned for me to sit.

  “What do you want me to write?” I asked.

  “Give us… give us a story, Curtis. Give us the story that you have always wanted to write! Don’t hold back now!” he said and ran a graceful finger across the mouse pad to wake the computer. An empty Word processing screen stared at me. I licked my lips, rummaged into my hoodie’s front pocket, pulled out my MP3 player and proceeded to put the ear buds into place.

  “Oh, no, no, no, I’m sorry, but we can’t have that, sir!” he said and snatched the MP3 player from my hands. I looked at him in shock.

  “We are providing the music to inspire you, Curtis. It is all part of the Program.”

  He clapped his hands and the strangest music jumped through the walls. I jumped, too. Mr. Smiley chuckled and gave me a pat on the shoulder. He made furious typing motions with his fingers at the keyboards and followed th
e cords out of the room.

  The music, how can I describe it to you? Loud and assaultive, it was like nothing I had ever heard. I had no idea what kind of instruments could make such intricate wheezing undertones. It got straight into your blood. Imagine Bach overtures on acid, I guess. I mean that’s a pretty lame explanation, but I can’t really do any better. You wouldn’t want to hear it anyway, believe me.

  A half an hour later, I came back to myself, and saw that my fingers were feverishly moving over the keyboards. I was writing, really writing! I gave a weird laugh, and at that moment, the music swelled up in a cacophony of strange hilarity, as if to meet my very mood.

  By five that night, I had written not one, but three stories that must have been pin-balling around in my head for years. Rereading the last few haunting lines of my last story, I realized the music had stopped.

  “Well, Curtis, this is… fantastic!” Mr. Smiley said in triumph as he marched into the room. He looked over papers in his hands. He reached into his pocket and handed me a check.