Did I think the hall was dark? That’s funny.
The hallway had been dark, but at least in there had been those little glimmers from the sills and peepholes. Here in the windowless stairwell, the darkness is profound. It’s also hotter and even more humid, the air thick with mildew and dust that, mixed with the green apple candle, makes her stomach hitch. The candle throws out enough light for her to see about a foot before the darkness closes in like a blanket. She gives the door a half-hearted shake. Locked.
On her first step, she misjudges the length of the landing and the stairs fall away under her feet. For one sickening instant, she sways out into empty space, and then she throws herself sideways against the cinderblock wall, scrabbling one-handed for the rail, hissing as hot wax spills across her hand. She presses her shoulder against the gritty concrete, sweat tracing a slow track down the small of her back.
It’s a long moment before she’s ready to go again. The candle flame stutters, as if to say get moving. With her free hand clutching the rail, she inches forward, feeling with the edges of her feet. Only after she is planted solidly on a step does she moves again, like a woman wading into deep water. With every step, she pictures herself falling, landing on unforgiving concrete, cracking open her skull.
The flickering candlelight gives the illusion of someone always just behind her. Dust from the railing coats her hands so they felt thick and clumsy. Her shoulder rubs against the concrete wall, showering grit over her sweat-slicked neck.
She has to keep moving. Jasper isn’t just going to give up. A relentless fear has wound her up like a clockwork spring coiled dangerously tight. Part of the tension comes from the unshakeable feeling this headlong flight is exactly what Jasper wants, that she isn’t running so much as U run, like a rat through a maze. But the larger part of this jittery, wired-up feeling has nothing to do with Jasper or what’s happening here and now. It’s the darkness, so utter and profound.
It reminds her of another place.
The smell hits her just above the final flight of stairs. The same stench the grimoire gave off, of madness and trapped magic. She holds the candle up to the wall.
The textured concrete of Jasper’s building is gone, replaced by black marble run through with red veins.
Looks like he’s finally getting the hang of this, she thinks dully.
When she finally reaches what should be the door to the lobby, she holds up the candle again. She’s been hoping for a plain steel fire door leading to the lobby of an apartment complex in Southern California, with its cowhide chairs and inoffensive paintings of the blue Pacific. Only it is not that door. In fact, it was not the door she came in. This door is low and squat, fashioned of rough dark wood. Branded into its center is a crude pictogram. It is a door that belongs miles away, underneath a specific library. It belongs under Miskatonic University.
“No,” she says softly, “I can’t. I can’t do this.”
Her cellphone rings, the screen glowing bright green through the thin cotton of her pocket. She takes it out and put it to her ear, mindful of the shattered screen.
“Jane.” the Head Librarian says. “Where are you?”
“Outside the special collection.” Somehow...
“He must be stopped.” the Librarian did not sound surprised.
“I know that. But I don’t know how.”
“I think you do. I’m sorry to put this on you, but needs must.”
Jane’s skin goes icy. “No,” she whispers.
“We have no time for niceties. You must do…what you must do. For the good of the University. And for your own safety, of course.”
She pulls the phone away, staring at the screen. Under the shattered glass words formed and reform: now Latin, now hieroglyphs, now crude pictograms. These last make her eyes ache and her head swim.
“You didn’t just let me leave,” she says. “You sent me to him. You arranged this.”
“Your well-being was always my first priority.”
“You knew about Jasper. You knew he was a threat.”
“I…yes. You are of no use to me here anymore. And that man was becoming a genuine problem. I thought you could help me deal with him.”
“You…” Jane’s throat closes up, her fury rendering her speechless.
“You have every right to be upset, with me and with the situation,” the Head Librarian turns away to speak to someone, turns back. “We’ve run out of time. Do your best. We’ll help you all we can. Remember your Alma -.”
As the phone goes dark in Jane’s hand, Jasper’s voice floats out of the darkness.
“Jane? Where are you? Who are you talking to?”
Jasper comes towards her slowly, the grimoire still clasped in his arms. He’s sweating freely, and rather paler than the last time she’s seen him.
Reciting forbidden texts will do that, Chumley, she thinks.
“C’mon, Jane, help me out. I think I finally got that last bit, but I’m not…” He trails off, staring at the door in open-mouthed amazement.
You utter asshat. You’re like a child playing with a nuke.
“It’s…oh my God. I did it! The last Canto, I got it right, I really did it!” His face is suddenly alight with smug satisfaction. “I guess I don’t need you after all, do I?”
“Guess not. Go ahead, open it up.”
Jasper steps to the door and pushes. When it doesn’t budge he puts his shoulder to it, straining.
“No need for that. You just have to touch the sigil.”
He stretches a hand out to the mark on the door, and then pulls back, blinking.
“Something wrong?”
“I - what is that? It, it makes me feel…”
“What? How does it make you feel?”
“Weird, nervous. Unhappy.”
“Unhappy,” she laughs. “Oh, that’s good.”
“Don’t be so selfish! Just because you couldn’t hack it doesn’t mean I can’t! Take me in, you stupid bitch. I deserve this!” Delivering this tirade, Grimoire still clasped in his arms, Jasper looks a child with a toy he won’t share.
“I suppose you do at that,” Jane says. She is profoundly, unutterably tired. “I suppose I should give you what you came for. Like you said, it cost you everything.”
She touches the symbol, feels its greasy, loathsome warmth beneath her palm. The door swings open, hinges screaming in protest. She makes an 'after you' gesture, but Jasper steps back, frowning.
Jane sighs and steps across the threshold. The smell here is a mixture of many things: paper and leather, mildew and dust, under it all the thick, sweet-sour stink of ancient magic.
Home, she thinks. I’m home.
The books are as she remembers them: crammed into the shelves cheek by jowl, stacked in piles on the floor. A few are strewn open across the long wooden reading tables. Their pages stir as she walks past, rustling like… like…
Like the veldt at midnight something whispers, and suddenly it’s so: a gibbous moon shines down, bathing the room in pale and perfect light, a light breeze blows through the high grass. Off in the shadows, the eyes of a hungry predator shine back at her.
Jane sets her back against the wall, feeling the slow pulse of the veins within the marble, dimly aware of her own heartbeat roaring in her ears.
Jasper enters the room slowly, staring every way at once.
“What, what is this? Are we, is this outside? I thought we were in the Library?”
“We are. Welcome to the Special Collection.”
The moonlight vanishes. She looks up again: the moon is gone, replaced by an impossibly high, barrel-vaulted ceiling festooned with grinning gargoyles scuttling to and fro on pointed claws.
“How, how far down are we?” Jasper is staring up at the ceiling, shaking his head softly. One of the gargoyles drops down onto the table, gnashing its wicked teeth at him.
“Oh, we’re down a ways.” Somewhere far above them, she knows, are the stately red brick buildings and gently rolling lawns of the
Miskatonic campus. Is it morning up there? Mid-afternoon? Is there gentle sunshine filtering through the elms along the quad? No matter. Down here in Special Collections it is always midnight. Always and forever.
Back among the stacks, something large and slow is stumbling about. Jasper clutches the grimoire closer to him. The chittering gargoyle springs back up into the vaulting.
“How, how far down are we? How is it possible that the University could build all this -” Jasper trails off. A river of black ichor has begun flowing just past his feet. He jumps back before it can touch his expensive leather shoes.
“The University didn’t make this place. The books made it.”
“What do you mean? The books don’t make anything, they just, they hold things.” He’s staring at the river, his expression an uneasy blend of wonderment and fear.
“These books are full of ideas too terrible to live inside the human mind. All these books, all that power. It leaked out, like toxic waste from rusted barrels. When one type of magic meets another, anything can happen.”
Jane takes a step towards him. As she draws nearer the grimoire in his arms starts to shimmer, an eldritch glow that lights up the air around it. Jasper holds the book up, marveling.
“They made this place. A space between spaces. They dream here. To be a Librarian you have to keep all of that power in check. It’s a tremendous job. It requires a very special type of person.”
“And you couldn’t do it. You had the job of a lifetime and couldn’t hack it. But I can. I want to be a Librarian,” Jasper says.
“You think because the books contain the magic, they also control it. But it’s the other way around. It’s the darkness that’s in control. That’s why the real Librarians never come down here. Much too dangerous. They keep that job for people like me. The grunts. I lasted four months.”
She touches the cover of the grimoire in Jasper’s arms.
It twists around, latching itself onto his chest.
Jasper screams, dropping to his knees, clawing at the book wildly. It clings to him, tighter than a lover, blood pouring from the place its fastened to his skin.
The veins in the walls are beating faster. The vaulted ceiling is transformed into the outspread limbs of a giant spider, holding the room in a many-legged embrace. As Jasper twists in his grimoire’s embrace, one sharpened, hook-ended leg spears a gargoyle through, pulling it to pieces.
“You think I left Miskatonic because I’m afraid. And I am, just not in the way you think. I’m not afraid of the books, or what lives inside them, not any more. I’m not afraid of the darkness, either.”
She looks down at him, watching him recoil at the shadows she feels twisting behind her eyes. She feels fear fall away, leaving only the joy of the change.
“What frightens me is how much I like it.”
The cell phone springs to life, and Jane drops it to the floor, where it paints the walls in an eldritch glow. Through the speaker, a chorus of murmuring voices chants: Yoggothor gotha llll h'gof'nn orr'e shogg ebunma mg ngthrod, Azathoth fm'latgh lloig n'gha stell'bsna uh'eog 'ai sgn'wahlog, uh'e Azathoth ooboshuyar athg uln hai Tsathoggua h'Dagon –
The scars on Jane’s arms spill out cold light of their own, merging with the light from the phone. She bathes in it, lets it envelope her. Exhilaration runs through her now, pulsing in rhythm with the walls.
Jasper screams again. The grimoire shoots an eager, glistening tentacle into his mouth. He bites down, whipping his head back and forth, as black ichor pours out in a stream.
Jane-not-Jane smiles, showing her ten thousand teeth. They were golden, and pointed like fine needles.
“As I’ve said, Jasper, you don’t understand. But you will.”
The Rat in the Library Walls
K. T. Katzmann
It had been waiting for someone to die for a long time.
Even for something with no ability to describe or measure time there was a primitive awareness of waiting. From the safety inside the darkness, it had seen the changing of the light so many times. The rooms would be bright and filled with the two-legged ones, and then dim and quiet. It waited. It vaguely sensed the light had changed an unbearable number of times now, but it stayed deliberately ignorant.
Over the years it had grown whatever it needed to survive, but some ancient part of it knew being able to think on the time it had spent scrambling inside the narrowness would be unbearable. So it waited and thought not upon the waiting.
It (even when it had walked on two legs long ago, it had a hard time thinking of itself as a “he”) had watched the two-legged ever since the night with the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider. While it waited for one of them to die, they walked, perched, and moved their books around endlessly. Despite all the ideas, concepts, hopes, and dreams that had left it, the word “book” remained a word it could understand. One of them was important, it knew viscerally, but it no longer knew how to differentiate them. It needed to be more than it currently was.
It needed someone to die.
The fellow darkness crawlers from whom it had long ago appropriated a body weren’t useful in this regard. It had long ago learned how easy they were to kill. Violent conflict was risky and had nearly proven the end of its existence, but it was still cleverer than they were. The easiest way it had found to grow was to lie motionless for long periods of time. Eventually one of the crawlers would come sniffing. It would let the crawler consume just enough of itself before reasserting control. As the piece of it came back to life inside the wet inner warmth of the crawler, the furry beast would shriek, spasm, and twitch its long naked tail to no avail. Soon afterwards the crawler would be still. Following that, the crawler would be a part of it.
This was the only pleasure in the world left to it.
Once, it had tried to incorporate enough crawlers into itself to complete its task, whatever that might be. It knew instinctively being bigger would make it capable of remembering the task, recalling which book was special. It had been a waste of crawlers. Oh, the two-legs had been frightened by the smell and noises, but it had found itself no smarter than before. Only a seething network of conflicting crawler instincts. Afterwards, it had stayed dormant long enough much of its mass had rotted away. When it moved again, it knew with certainty that crawler bodies were insufficient for anything more than survival or pleasure.
It had tried to kill one of the two-legged once.
The masters of the books would always be “two-legged” in its mind, although it did dimly understand the concept of “people.” Still, the only other being it had ever shared enough similarity with to recognize as “people” had died shortly after . . . the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider. It was alone; if any more “people” were to exist in the world, they would have to be made from the body of it.
It had tried to kill a two-legged, but was less than successful. Sharp teeth and surprise had not won out over brute strength and fear. The prospective victim had nearly killed it. It had just managed to slide its crushed self away into the library walls, leaving behind a screaming survivor who didn’t stop shrieking for thirty years of padded walls. No loss. It had nearly been killed before, by the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider. It had survived then; it would survive now.
Now, it waited for a two-legged to die. This had happened once, early in its existence, but the vessel was not clean. It was the Old Man, and whatever hate was left in it burned like a hot nail at the thought of incorporating the Old Man. He had done something to it, and had forever placed himself beyond the pale of its attentions. The Old Man must not become a part of it. He must not share in what was to come in any way, so it let his broken body spasm and die out in the small room of books, desirable but untouched.
It would wait a long life rather than give any semblance of life back to the Old Man. It would rather venture out away from the walls, into the green grass and the Awful Thing It Must Not Consider, and it had never done that. It stayed inside the dark narrow spaces of the book building, waitin
g patiently for someone to die.
Its patience was rewarded.
*
Mary had a hard time imagining a more horrible sight than that of Chet’s sweaty hand inside his pants brim, furiously working fingers distending the stretchy fabric. She was sure such sights existed, but couldn’t bring any of them (or in fact anything else) to mind at the sight.
“Damn it, stop that!” She flinched, almost retreating into the waiting sanctuary of the darkened folklore stacks.
He smiled, and it was neither comforting nor intended to be. “Calm down. I’m just scratching.” He chuckled. “Unless you want to--"
“Finish that sentence and I tell Professor Walters.” She narrowed her gaze at his skeptical snort. “In writing.”
Chet cautiously lifted himself up from one of the row tables that bisected the Miskatonic Library’s third floor. “Calm down. Geez.” He closed his laptop and heaved up his backpack, breathing out a bit at the effort.
As he grunted and winced, Mary asked, “Do you need help?”
“Screw it, I’m fine,” he spat out.
Mary normally treasured the afterhours at the library, but she’d always been alone. Dim peaceful lighting, a quiet not found in her bustling dorm hall, and open access to the catalog spelled a perfect night for her. Still, university work was one fourth research, one fourth publishing, and one half politics. When her adviser had suggested to bring Chet along to work on his thesis, Mary had grinned the plastic grin all graduate students learn.
Regardless of the reasons Chet had given their mutual adviser, his real motives had become obvious pretty quickly.
As Chet rose in leering indignation, Mary pointed her thumb towards the stacks. “Look, I can work over there. If you want to me to stay out of your way, I’d be happy to give you the tables.”
Chet’s slightly oversized hand waved greasily through the air. “Let me be the gentleman. I’ll take one of the quiet study rooms in the hall, and you can busy yourself in here.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Unless you’d like to join me.”
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