The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  “Are you my uncle?” she said. She couldn’t see any resemblance herself.

  “Not precisely,” he said. “It’s a bit more complicated than that. But all you need to understand is that we’re family, and that you’re welcome here. My name is Geryon.”

  “Alice,” said Alice, trying to remember her manners. “It’s very kind of you to take me in.”

  “Think nothing of it.” Geryon gestured, one stained sleeve flapping. “After I heard what happened to your father, it was the least I could do.”

  “Did you know my father?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid. But I’ve always kept track of him, and you, with a certain—affection. Please think of The Library as your home for as long as you like.”

  Alice looked around. “The Library?”

  Geryon chuckled. “The estate is called The Library. A reference to my own peculiar habits, of course. I’m a great collector of books. Do you like books, Alice?”

  “Very much,” Alice admitted.

  “I’m sure we shall get along, then. Though I must warn you, I’m a bit . . . particular about my books. You should never go into the library building on your own. For your own safety, you understand?” Before Alice could reply—she’d never found anything more dangerous in a library than a paper cut—Geryon slapped the banister with a sound like a gunshot. “But here I am keeping you talking in the hall when you must be exhausted. Let’s get you squared away. Emma!”

  Alice turned to see the girl from outside manhandling her luggage through the doorway, awkwardly trying to hold open the heavy doors with one foot while wrapping both arms around a trunk. At Geryon’s call, she dropped it with a thump and straightened up.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Show Alice to her room, would you? Mr. Black can bring her bags.”

  Mr. Black’s lip twitched, and he shot a glare at Alice, but he said nothing.

  Emma hurried over to Alice, lowering her head respectfully. “Of course, sir,” she said. “Follow me, miss.”

  Emma started up the stairs, setting a rapid pace, and Alice had to scurry to keep up through a bewildering maze of corridors, T-junctions, and wood-paneled passages. Most of the house was dark, with only one gaslight out of three or four burning, but Emma seemed to have no trouble. Eventually they found another staircase, steeper and uncarpeted. At the top was a short corridor with a line of closely spaced doors, the first of which was open.

  “This is your room,” Emma said, stepping aside. She kept her eyes on the floor.

  It was a servant’s room, Alice thought, with space for a bed and a dresser but very little else. A massive leaded-glass window occupied much of the far wall, and a cheerless gray rug covered the floor.

  “Toilets are down the stairs. Left, then right, then left again,” Emma went on, in a singsong tone, as though reciting something she’d memorized. “Breakfast is at seven in the dining hall, lunch at noon, dinner at six.” She went silent, as though she’d run out of things to say, like a record player reaching the end of its groove.

  “Emma,” Alice said. “That’s your name, right?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “Alice is fine.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “I mean,” Alice said carefully, “you can call me Alice. Not ‘miss.’”

  “I . . .” The girl paused, then gave a little bob of the head, automatic as a well-oiled mechanism. “As you say, miss.”

  Another awkward silence.

  Alice cleared her throat. “Did you want something else?” she said, trying to be polite.

  Emma blinked, placidly. “No, miss.”

  Alice looked at her more carefully. She was skinny, taller than Alice, but she hunched her shoulders and kept her head low. Her plain face was scattered with freckles, and her mouse-brown hair was tied in a tail at the back of her neck. Her cast-down eyes gave Alice the overpowering urge to check and see if her shoelaces were untied or her dress unbuttoned.

  “I mean,” Alice said, abandoning politeness in favor of making herself understood, “why are you still standing there?”

  This question seemed to perplex Emma. Her forehead wrinkled, and after a moment she said, “Nobody told me where to go next, miss.”

  “Could you fetch some things for me?”

  “Yes, miss.”

  Again, the silence, as though the conversation had fallen into a pothole.

  “I’ll need some light,” Alice said carefully. There was a gas lamp in the hall, but it only provided a sliver of illumination through the doorway. “Please bring me a lamp, and some matches.”

  “Right away, miss.”

  Emma sprang into motion, animated by the words as if by a magic spell. She curtsied politely and went out, only to be replaced in the doorway by a scowling Mr. Black. He dropped Alice’s trunks to the floor a bit harder than she thought was necessary, inclining his head the tiniest fraction in acknowledgment.

  “The girl tell you about meals and such?” he said, in his deep, rumbling voice.

  “She did.” Alice hesitated. “Has my uncle said anything about what I’m supposed to do here?”

  “Not to me.” The big man smiled, his teeth a patchwork of gray and brown. “I’m sure he’ll send for you when he wants you. Meantime, you can ask the girl if you need anything. And you remember what the master said about the library?”

  “That it could be dangerous?”

  “Right. That goes for the basement as well, ’cause if I catch you down there, then I’ll stripe your hide. Got it?”

  Alice nodded. Mr. Black grunted, looked around the room for a moment, then turned away and shut the door behind him. His heavy footsteps made the floorboards in the corridor pop and groan.

  Alice felt, suddenly, very tired indeed. She decided that unpacking could wait until morning, and sat down on the bed. The mattress was stiff, and the sheet was splotchy and fraying at the edges. She undid her laces with a sigh and kicked her shoes across the room, then swung her legs onto the bed and put her head on the lumpy pillow without bothering to undress. Only the faintest light came from the gaslight in the hall through the crack under the door, and the ceiling was invisible in the gloom. Alice closed her eyes and pretended she was in a cave, some hermitage at the top of a mountain a thousand miles from anything.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE EMPTY HOUSE

  WHEN SHE OPENED HER eyes again, daylight was filtering in through the grimy window. The fading remnants of a dream chased themselves around her skull for a moment, the fairy laughing at her and gibbering incomprehensibly. Then it was gone, and she was staring at the spiderweb of cracks across the ancient plaster ceiling.

  After a drawn-out expedition to find the toilet that involved at least three wrong turns, Alice, feeling sticky and disheveled, went back to her room and stripped off her mourning dress. She rummaged through her trunks and changed into a gray blouse and a long skirt, both creased and rumpled from their bumpy journey. Emma had left an oil lamp and a box of matches, and Alice set it up on the dresser in front of the cloudy mirror. She dug a brush out of her things and did the best she could with her hair, though it really needed a proper wash. At the bottom of her trunk, she found the pair of ancient rabbits, and after a brief internal debate she pulled them out and sat them on the windowsill, where they could keep watch on the door.

  They must have a bath here somewhere, she thought. At least the toilets proved they had running water. This far from New York, she wouldn’t have been surprised to find outhouses and hand-drawn wells.

  There was no clock in her room, but she was fairly sure it was well after seven by the time she made her way downstairs. The long train ride with only a packet of crackers from the station store had left her with a healthy appetite, and she hoped there was something left of breakfast. Finding the dining room turned out to be easier than locating the facilities, and as sh
e pushed open a pair of big swinging doors, the rich smells of bacon and eggs wafted out to greet her.

  The dining room was built on the same gargantuan scale as the rest of the house. The long wooden table could have seated at least sixty, flanked by threadbare, rickety-looking upholstered chairs. It was entirely bare except at one end, where a single chair had been pulled back, and three large, covered platters leaked delicious-smelling steam. Apart from Alice, the huge hall was empty.

  Has everyone else eaten and gone, then? Alice hadn’t thought she was that late. She sidled around the table—it was perfectly clean, and so gleaming with polish that she could see a cloudy reflection of her face in the surface—and made her way to the chair in front of the platters. In addition to the food, there was a pitcher of water and another of orange juice, so cold that drops of water beaded on the sides.

  “Hello?” Alice said. “Is this for me? Anybody?”

  The smell of the food was overwhelming. Alice put a hand on the back of the chair and made a last effort to be sure she wasn’t somehow breaking the rules.

  “If I’m not supposed to eat this,” she said loudly, “someone please tell me.”

  There was no answer. Several more doors led off from the dining hall, including a big one that she guessed went to the kitchens, but there was no sound of movement or conversation from any of them. Still feeling a bit like Goldilocks trespassing in the bears’ house, but unable to ignore the rumbles from her stomach any longer, Alice took a seat and lifted the covers.

  She revealed a breakfast that wouldn’t have been out of place at the Ritz. In addition to the bacon, there were thick slices of ham, swimming in juice, and big plates of hashed potatoes, toast, and scrambled eggs with bits of green stuff she couldn’t identify. Alice loaded her plate with a bit of everything, then looked up instinctively for her father, expecting one of his gentle admonishments. He always said that no one likes a pig at mealtimes.

  The room was still empty, of course. Alice’s throat went tight, and she felt like something was rattling around loose in her chest. She wanted to cry, to let the feeling out, but the tears wouldn’t come. After a moment she attacked the ham with knife and fork, making a bit of a mess of it and daring anyone to complain.

  When she’d eaten her fill, and truth be told a little extra, she pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The big house was still as quiet as a graveyard, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that something was watching her, and so she spoke aloud again.

  “Should I take the dishes in myself?”

  It was something she’d learned to do in the past few years. After her father had had to let the maids go, he’d told her it was too hard on poor Mrs. Voule to expect her to cook and clean, so they’d done the washing together, her father with his shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows.

  There was plenty of food left, though, and she didn’t think she ought to just throw it all away. Alice went to the kitchen door and put her hand against it, pushing it inward just a crack.

  “Hello?” she said, more quietly. “What should I do with the rest of this?”

  When there was no answer, she opened the door all the way. The kitchen made the one in her father’s house look tiny. There was a long central counter, spotlessly clean, and a row of shelves with plates, bowls, dishes, and tureens all stacked in regimented ranks. Against the other wall was a bank of stoves and ovens that looked big enough to handle a cow all at once. They were clean too, every burner scraped free of grime and even the metal frames polished to a dull sheen. Another door, with a heavy dead bolt, let onto the backyard, and there was corridor Alice guessed led to a pantry.

  And it was all empty. The huge kitchen could have housed a dozen cooks comfortably, but there was not so much as a pot-boy in sight, and no sign that anyone had been there. Alice let the door swing back into place and turned around, shaking her head.

  The platters were gone. Her plate was gone, and the pitchers. Someone had wiped up the table where she’d let a bit of the ham juice drip. The whole thing gleamed, polished and perfect, as if it had never been used at all.

  All right, Alice thought. She felt a fluttery, nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach, and that in turn made her feel irritated. Something very strange is going on here. She squared her shoulders and went to find out what.

  Over the next several days, Alice explored the mansion from top to bottom, except for the parts that were behind locked doors. The dining room and kitchens, she discovered, were typical. The house was enormous, scrupulously clean, and empty.

  There were rows of guest rooms on the third floor, all dusted and turned out as though visitors were expected at any moment. The corridor near her own room had quarters for an army of servants, none of which gave any sign of being lived in. Drawing rooms, sewing rooms, laundry rooms, rooms full of armchairs and small rickety tables of no obvious purpose, all as neat and uninhabited as an after-hours movie set.

  Geryon lived in a suite of his own on the ground floor, and came out only rarely. Periodic awful stinks emerged from under his door, sometimes sick-sweet like something rotten, sometimes a vicious, bitter vapor that stung Alice’s eyes and made her nose run. When the old man did show himself, it was usually to speak to Mr. Black, and he spared only a few, curt words for Alice.

  Mr. Black’s domain was the basement, which was reached via a passage from the kitchen. He spent nearly all his time down there, where he had something to do with maintaining the house’s gas and heating. More than that, Alice didn’t know, because he refused to answer any of her questions. If Geryon was curt, the huge man was downright rude, glowering at Alice whenever he spotted her as though she’d done something to offend him. Of course, his face seemed made for glowering, with its shaggy rough of hair and huge bushy eyebrows.

  Emma, by contrast, seemed to have no secrets, but Alice found her the hardest to understand. All her attempts to engage the girl in conversation had gone the way of their talk the day she’d arrived, tailing off quickly into uncomfortable silence. At first Alice had thought Emma was putting her on. After a few days, she dismissed the idea, and decided the girl was just simple, but that didn’t quite fit either.

  She would do what she was asked, quickly and without hesitating, and was capable of executing quite complicated tasks flawlessly. She could read and write—Alice watched her go through a stack of newspapers for Mr. Black, page by page, noting down some detail from each into a little notebook. And she was unfailingly polite, even when Mr. Black fumed and glowered.

  But she seemed, for lack of a better word, empty, like the house itself. A friend of Alice’s father had described someone by saying: “The lights are on, but no one’s home.” In that case, he’d merely meant the poor man had gone mad, but it seemed to Alice that this was more literally true as a description of Emma. When no one gave her anything to do, she would simply do nothing, standing in the front hall or sitting alone in her room for hours without any sign of discomfort. She was more like a mechanism than a person, Alice thought, and wondered if there was a secret catch at the back of her head that would open up her skull and reveal whirring gears and pistons.

  Emma was a servant, in that she did what Geryon or Mr. Black—or Alice, for that matter—told her to do, but she didn’t do what Alice thought of as servants’ duties. As far as Alice could tell, no one did, and yet things did get done, in a clandestine way that started out creepy and ended up as plain infuriating. There were no cooks in the kitchens, but meals were laid out on the table when she arrived and whisked away when her back was turned. When she returned to her room in the evening, the linen had been laundered and the bed made. The floors were always mopped, the windows scrubbed, the gaslights cleaned and lit and the lintels dusted. But it all happened out of sight, when she wasn’t looking, and no matter how fast she raced from one room to the next or how suddenly she turned around, she could never catch any of the mysterious cleaners a
t work.

  It felt like an enormous practical joke, or possibly a determined effort on the part of whoever-it-was to drive Alice insane. The suspiciously mindful silence around every corner made her want to run through the house screaming, fling her dishes against the wall, or break some windows, just to see what would happen. She didn’t, of course, because her father hadn’t brought her up as the sort of girl who broke windows, and also because she was gloomily sure they would only be made whole while she wasn’t watching.

  By the fourth day, she felt like she would soon go mad even without the mysterious servants. There was nothing she was supposed to be doing, and no one to talk to, except for Emma, and that was worse than talking to herself. She’d have given anything to have Miss Juniper assign her some algebra, or a French passage to translate, if only so she could look forward to being done with it.

  When Emma turned up at her door just after lunch, therefore, Alice was glad to follow. Her sense of relief even survived the sight of Mr. Black, who was waiting for them in the front hall and regarded Alice as though she were something he’d had to scrape off the bottom of his shoe.

  “Mr. Wurms asked for help in the library,” he rumbled. “He’s got a bit of a disaster that needs sorting out. The two of you go and do whatever he needs.”

  Alice’s ears pricked up. The one thing she hadn’t found in her explorations of The Library was, in fact, a library. She’d been assuming it was locked away somewhere, probably in Geryon’s private suite, and she’d been hoping to catch him long enough to ask if she might visit. At least then I could find something to read.

  Still, against her own best interests, she couldn’t help raising an objection. “Geryon said I wasn’t supposed to visit the library.”

  Mr. Black scowled. “He said you’re not supposed to go in there unaccompanied. But you’ll have Emma with you, so that’s all right. Emma, make sure to tell Alice the rules and show her how not to get lost.”

  “Yes, Mr. Black.”

  Alice bit back a further argument. She wasn’t honestly sure Emma counted as a proper escort, given that the girl would do whatever Alice asked her to. But those had, technically, been Geryon’s words, and if it was good enough for Mr. Black, Alice thought she could accept.