The Library of the Dead

by Brian Keene

  Sarah nodded. “I was texting with Jessica and asked where she was. That’s when Siri started and said, ‘I’m following you home.’”

  “So that response is something Jessica would have texted back to you?”

  Sarah nodded again.

  “And Siri said it a second time, right?”

  “Yeah.” Remembering sent a shudder through her body. “She said something like, ‘I’m almost at your house, Sarah…’ It called me by my name! It was creepy!”

  “And the Siri app activated when the voice came through?”

  Sarah nodded again.

  “Do you know how Siri works?”

  “You ask her a question and she answers.”

  “Right. I suppose while it’s possible for Siri to interact with the iMessage app, I don’t think Apple has even considered using the two features together.” Dad was facing her, the iPhone still in his hands. “When you ask a question, a recording of your voice is sent to an Apple server. The recording is broken down in a process called feature extraction, which numerically transforms the sound wave and pulls out relevant features from your question. This is run through a speech recognition engine to interpret what you’re saying and turns it into text. The Siri app then uses resources from your iPhone that includes the Internet, your contact list, and your GPS location to respond to your question. All this works within seconds.”

  Sarah didn’t know how to respond.

  What the hell did Dad just say?

  As if he’d read her thought, Dad smiled at her. “There has to be a glitch in your iPhone somewhere, honey, probably in a bunch of them for this to happen. Your phone doesn’t appear to be tampered with, and what we’ve heard on the news regarding this so-called stalker has only happened in this area. My guess is a batch of iPhones that got sent to our area are defective and everybody is attributing it to a stalker who probably doesn’t exist.”

  “Bart Shafley’s death a few weeks ago have sparked a lot of urban legends around here,” her mom said from the sofa. “I did some research online. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it. It’s been all over your school.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I’m sure Jessica heard about it and that’s why I didn’t pay attention. All that stuff is just …” She didn’t really pay attention to rumors, especially those not grounded in reality.

  “From what I’m reading,” Mom said, “there’ve been a few cases where girls are reporting strange activity on their smartphones, as if somebody is trying to communicate with them. There’s only one other mention of Siri acting weird. In all these cases, there has been no police involvement.”

  “So there’s no stalker?”

  “There’s no stalker,” Dad said. “And if there was, it’s very difficult to remotely access somebody else’s iPhone. It still wouldn’t hurt to enact some security policies just to be safe.”

  “Like what?”

  “Password protection for one.” He held up her iPhone. “Give me a few minutes and I’ll set up a password for you and make sure some other things are in place, then you’ll be good to go. Okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks, Dad.”

  A few minutes later, Dad handed back the phone. Sarah got to pick her own password. After getting a short lesson on the security features he’d enabled, she thanked him, gave him a goodnight hug, and dashed upstairs.

  She watched a movie on her laptop for a while in her room, then she Skyped with Jessica. Around 11:30 she heard her Mom come upstairs, followed by the dog, who slept at the foot of their bed in her own dog bed. Dad came up a moment later. The house was now locked up, the security alarm enabled. They were safe.

  Sarah dimmed the lights in her bedroom with the remote and crawled under the covers of her bed. She chatted with Jessica on iMessage. Jessica was still freaked out by what happened earlier that evening.

  Don’t be so paranoid, Sarah texted to her. My Dad says it was probably just a glitch.

  It’s still freaky !

  I know! We’re going to contact Apple tomorrow. Maybe those other girls reported the same thing.

  Those other girls are dead, Sarah.

  Sarah sighed.

  She thought carefully about how she’d respond. She tapped out the message and read it over before hitting Send.

  My Mom said there are no dead girls. There hasn’t been anything on the news about them, and she’s a news junkie. If two girls had been abducted in this area, she would have known about it.

  There was no response from Jessica.

  Sarah waited a while, then texted back.

  R U There?

  No answer.

  Bitch probably turned off her phone and went to bed, Sarah thought. She set her phone on the nightstand and settled against her pillows, closed her eyes, and turned over.

  She was on the edge of drifting off to sleep when Siri’s voice filled the room.

  “I BEAT YOU HOME.”

  Sarah shot up in bed, grabbing for her iPhone. Heart pounding madly, she saw that the Siri app was open. She swiped the screen and typed in her new password to unlock the phone.

  “What?” Sarah said.

  “I SAID, I BEAT YOU HOME.”

  Her bedroom door was closed.

  All she had to do was leap across the room, open the door, and dash down the hallway to her parent’s room and she’d be safe. She debated what to do—she had to tell Dad! He had to see this!

  “DID YOU HEAR ME, SARAH? I SAID, I BEAT YOU HOME.”

  Sarah looked down at her phone with growing terror.

  “Who are you?” she whispered. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Siri answered.

  “I’M YOUR NIGHTMARE. AND I’M RIGHT BEHIND YOU.”

  A cold, clammy hand pressed on the back of Sarah’s neck and another one cut off her scream.

  THE LIBRARIAN

  3

  The next room glows even brighter, everything—even the air around you—gold and radiant. The room is quiet, respectful, and reverential. Much of the light comes from a ceiling composed of yellow and white and orange stained glass, with a few shades of purple in seldom locations, which offer impossible—yet can only be—sunlight, for there are no artificial lights and the two eye-level candelabras in the room are unlit. You attempt to estimate the number of books in this smallish room, and guess five hundred.

  It is another room of golden books, but so is the next, and the next, and the next, for the hooded figure leads you through half a dozen rooms and down windy paths that expose the building’s three stories. And then you stop in a large vestibule overlooking both bookcases—yes, even more books—and granite walls, and from here your path offers multiple directions from which to explore.

  Life joins you amongst the dead in this gateway between rooms. Plants of various height fill decorated pottery and planters from tile and granite; round pits and statuettes sprout from gravel- and rock-filled enclosures as if to force you away from the center of the room toward the walls, which you cannot help but touch. Where there are not glass-enclosed shelves filled with book-shaped cinerary urns, the walls are bare and polished-granite white and as smooth as glass. Names and dates of the dead are etched onto the surfaces of each square section that tile the walls—at least fifty feet from floor to ceiling, it seems, and stretching all three floors in places. These are tombs as well, you realize, perhaps entire families, perhaps generations of families.

  The librarian allows you to explore the many outlets here as he or she seeks out the next three books. As you peruse, the librarian pulls a book from a waist-high bookshelf covered with a planter; some sort of ferns hang over the sides and the hooded figure leans down to reach a brownish-copper volume.

  “RELIVING THROUGH BETTER CHEMISTRY,” the figure reads, and in a softer voice says, “This one you may find most interesting, as it contains a story pertaining to the very ashes this book contains.”

  Quotes etched onto walls at the ends of a few hallways are haunting, with letters bigger than hands. On one wall, towering
over you in Dalek font:

  IMMORTAL LOVE.

  FOREVER FULL.

  FOREVER FLOW-

  ING FREE . . . . .

  FOREVER SHARED.

  FOREVER WHOLE.

  A NEVER EBB-

  ING SEA . . . . . .

  Two angels embrace in a kiss: a statue standing six feet high, either carved from white marble or plaster-cast from a mold. Soft droplets from twin fountains surrounding a palm tree break the silence. And around the corner, broken by your line of sight from the corner of another floor to ceiling book-/urn-shelf, are more words:

  SHALL THINK

  OF DEATH AS

  DOOM .

  “CTHYLLA,” says your guide, and you instantly picture the word etched onto the wall with the others, although you realize it’s another title of a book soon to be opened. The librarian spots it from a distance, floating diagonally from one side of the room to the other, to a vast amount of books with similar metal bindings at least twenty feet up from the floor. From this distance, the books look solid black with silver text.

  “Actresses and actors, athletes and Olympians, politicians, scientists, historians, authors, critics, mathematicians, physicians, war heroes, homemakers, good souls and bad; they are all gathered here, their stories waiting.”

  The vestibule seems to go on forever, in all directions, and you stand in the middle of it. Ashes from thousands and thousands of dead must be entombed in these halls, you consider. Contained in these books, these urns, trapped in the walls with past loved ones, lives spanning centuries, all gathered together—

  “Some of the tales stored within The Library of the Dead are older than the building that houses them,” says the hooded figure at your side. “Some offer histories of this land, and some offer reason to this land’s unstableness.”

  The figure glides to a wall of glass-covered shelves half-filled with brass volumes, and you follow. One book stands out from the rest because of its size, nearly twice as wide at the spine—a longer story, you can only imagine, perhaps containing the ashes of more than one storyteller: FAULT LINES.

  Together, the three books look heavier than one should be able to carry, yet the hooded figure, your guide, carries them under an arm to a the end of a hallway where a lone, black, wire-mesh patio chair awaits; the free hand gestures for you you to sit, and as you do, you can’t help but look past the towering shelves of books at either side to the ceiling where most of the light emanates.

  The first of the next three books opens before you. As ash billows from the absence of pages, you cannot avoid inhaling the dead.

  RELIVING

  THROUGH BETTER

  CHEMISTRY

  WESTON OCHSE

  Why is it when you’re fifteen that eighteen seems so far off? I swear to you it seemed a lot closer when I was twelve. My mom says it’s because I’m impatient. I’m not impatient. I just want to grow the fuck up. This waiting around to become an adult bullshit is just that … bullshit. If this was a hundred years ago, I’d already be an adult, on my own, and have a job so I wouldn’t have to borrow money all the time.

  Mom was working the night shift again at the Oakland Regional Hospital so she left me ten for pizza. I grabbed three value burgers from Mickey D’s instead, pocketed the rest and stood waiting for Randy and the guys to pick me up. Of our little group of four, Randy was the only one with access to a car. Ricky was like me and couldn’t even come close to affording one. Lamont had one but he’d thrashed it against a tree five days after he used his life savings to buy it. As much a piece of shit as Randy’s Saturn was, it was a car and any car was golden to us.

  I watched a red-headed MILF in a minivan, an old man in a Buick, and some girl I recognized from school in a Camaro with her boyfriend make their way through the drive-thru before Randy showed up in his Saturn. I hopped inside and we were soon heading towards the cemetery.

  “Do you have it?” Lamont stared at me eagerly, tapping his fingers on the glass and jiggling his leg up and down. He was rail thin, black as night, and twitchy to the point of locomotion.

  “Yeah. Two tabs.”

  He began to hyperventilate. “Only two? That’s not going to be enough.”

  Randy glanced in the rearview mirror. “Dude. Easy. Maybe you should take some. Calm your hyperactive ass down.” Randy was the sort who would have been the high school quarterback and dating the head cheerleader had it not been that he was home-schooled.

  Lamont grinned sheepishly and wiped away a little spittle. “Can’t do it. You know the mix. We need four then two then ash. Four then two then ash. It’s fucking chemistry.”

  I cringed a little inside, wondering if all this extracurricular activity might be having a permanent effect on Lamont. Not taking the Ritalin was one thing, but this seemed like something else entirely. I glanced at Ricky, but noticed he was staring miserably down at his hands.

  “Yo, Ricky? Whassup?”

  “Dad’s moving us.” That got everyone’s attention.

  Randy asked “Where?”

  “Fucking Rhode Island.”

  “What’s in fucking Rhode Island?” I asked.

  He balled his hands into fists and laid them against his thighs. “His new job. Can we not talk about it?”

  I noticed the bruising on the back of his neck—purple dark lines. Ricky was always moving. He’d only been with us for six months and was already on his way out. Whatever the job was, we all knew the real reason.

  We reached the cemetery by nine. I’m not sure where the idea of snorting the ashes came from, but it had become an addiction that I knew was going to kill us. Randy had invented the game, using a concoction of X, Ritalin and ash, we’d find a soft piece of grass, snort the combination up our noses, then lay back and relive.

  Here’s the deal. You can snort someone’s ashes and live part of their life. Usually it’s the last moments before they die. Sometimes it’s an important moment in their life like their honeymoon or the birth of a child. Other times it’s even better because it’s sex. Sex is a powerful memory. When you find one of those it’s hard not to try and snort it one more time.

  What happens if you snort it twice?

  Nothing usually. But we’d all agreed that three times was the ultimate limit. I mean, I’m not the expert, but it’s like pieces of the persons soul were in the ashes and every time you snort it, they get in you, infect you, become you. That’s how we’d lost Trey. He’d been Randy’s best friend. He’d found this one old man whose ash memories were always him having sex with some women. His name was John Henry Chaney and we looked him up online. He spent thirty years in the Navy, always going to different ports—especially Asia. Trey couldn’t get enough of it. I mean, we all tried Chaney’s ash. Don’t get me wrong, it was good. Real good. We might have tried more of it, but Trey bogarted it, keeping it all for himself.

  That is until he went bat shit crazy.

  Lamont checked for the security guard. It was football season, so he was entranced by the glow of the game. We had at least forty five minutes before the game ended so we were cool. Then Randy took the two tabs of X I’d scored from my cousin Donny, got two tabs of Ritalin each from Ricky and Lamont, then proceeded to select an urn from the several thousand on display. He finally settled on one none of us had tried before. His name was James Robert Franklin and he died at the age of twenty four.

  Four, then two, then ash, then up our nose and we lay back on the grass and …

  Blam! Ten seconds of drifting followed by a slick shot through a memory coaster, down time rails, swooping into the fuzziness at the edge of vision, then I’m locked in. I’m on a boat on a lake. I’m fishing with my dad—his dad. The sky is only a shade lighter than the water. I’m staring at my dad—his dad—as he’s lost in thought fishing. I love my dad—his dad—so much I feel my chest expanding with the volume of it, cracking with the purity of it. I sit and stare at him for a while, happy, fulfilled, knowing that my love for him is at least equal to his love for me. A fish
strikes my dad’s line. He stands and I grab the net. The fish is a fighter. It leaps twice from the water, its long glistening frame flinging wet drops and fear as it pirouettes through the air. Then …

  The ride was over.

  I’m back in my own brain with my own problems living my own suck ass life—one with no father, no chance of a father, and completely without the possibility of feeling what James Robert Franklin felt for his. A niggling voice scolded me, telling me that if this is how I feel afterward, then I shouldn’t continue. I ignored that voice. It didn’t know me. It didn’t understand that I wanted to live someone else’s life because mine was so mind-numbingly dreary. It didn’t understand. This way I get to experience emotions I’d never otherwise feel, probably for my entire life.

  Lamont sat up, eyes wide, his hand on his forehead. “Holy shit did you guys relive what I just relived?”

  Randy grinned. “I was having sex.”

  We all groaned. He always gets the sex moments.

  “I was fishing with his dad. It was cool,” I said.

  Ricky smiled grimly. “I got that one too. It was uber cool.”

  By the way he said it and the way his eyes stared through his hands, I knew he wished his father was more like that.

  “You all are boring me to death. I went skydiving. Jumped out of a freaking plane with some military unit. I don’t know what was happening, but it was about the coolest shit I’ve ever done.”

  “You mean relived,” I corrected. “It’s not like you actually did it.”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  “Wonder if that’s how he died?” Randy asked.

  My eyes got wide. I’d never relived a death and didn’t want to. “Dude, what if the parachute didn’t open? It might have—

  Lamont waved me away. “That shit ain’t true. I’ve relived many deaths. They don’t kill you. Hell, some of them were the best reliving I’ve done.”