by Amy Bloom
Tomorrow was going to be utter. We go to class. We hear a lecture by some heyjoe about some subject. Like we walk all together into one of these lecture halls with seats that have these paddle arms where you put your notebook and take notes with a pencil. I got a pencil in my goodie bag. No paper. Maybe the note stuff was like for kidding.
By now I was somewhere that was pretty empty of spring-breakers. The buildings felt like they were sort of looking down on me, like looming. Up in the corners of buildings and on the edges and gutters were these faces—little heads of monsters or like demons. Staring, grinning, showing teeth. Not for kidding: they were there.
Freaking out a bit. What happened to everybody? Was this still Yale? I went past a building that was like a giant white cube, with squares on each face, sort of like a ginormous Rubik’s Cube without the colors. Not old. Not old but cold. And then when I hooked a left and a right there was the most, the tallest, the most looking-at-me building ever. It had to be a church. I’ve seen churches. This was the churchiest church I’d ever seen. The steps that led up to the churchy-pointy door were worn away, by a million feet going up and down a million times. I stood in sort of shock. Ancientness.
Then I saw that the door was open. A little. I could tell that if you went up and pushed on it, it would open more.
So I did.
* * *
See, what I learned: that you can be born too late, and really old things can seem, like, familiar to you. There’s a sadness. What it is, it’s more of an entrancement. Which is on the whole not a good thing, because you can just wander on and never come back. Not that knowing this was any help, as it turned out.
The church was just like in this VR tour of somewhere I did once. It was huge and empty and gray. The pillars of it ran together into arches high up. There were little windows made of colored glass, pictures in glass made long ago, or looking like it. What wasn’t there were all the rows of seats to sit in and like worship. It was empty, it was the emptiest place I’ve ever been in. It made you gulp. The VR tour not so much.
I went over to one of the pillars and put my hand on it, the stone, worn by the ages. Cold and rough. Not even VR can give you feels. I was liking this when a weird feeling came over me, like somebody was nearby.
Somebody was. I don’t know how he came up to me that close without making a sound, but when I turned I saw him and I did the guh-guh-guh thing.
“Looking for something?” he said. I didn’t know then how long I was going to be listening to that voice, or how much I would want to not hear it. He was a little guy with a round head, almost bald, with this farcey mustache. Smiling.
“Is this,” I said, “a church?”
“No indeed,” he said. “Or in a way, yes, a church. A Cathedral of Thought. It is in fact a Library.”
“Wow.”
“Yes.”
“And who are you?”
“I am,” he said, “the Librarian.”
“Wow, so a Library.” I took a few steps farther in, and he kept close to me. “And you’re a Librarian.”
“I am the Librarian. There are no others. Not anymore.”
What’s that ancient movie, Seymour sent me snips once, a Cathedral, and this ugly messed-up heyjoe who loves the bells and climbs up the tower to ring them? For some reason I thought of it now.
“Why,” he asked, “does your hat have the number two thousand seventeen on it?”
“Oh, ’cause I’m a student, and that’s my class.” I could tell he didn’t quite get it. “I don’t really know why I’m here, I just . . .”
“Oh, I know why you’ve come here,” he said, getting a little too close.
“You do?”
“Because you’re a Student. You’re drawn to books.”
“Actually not so much.”
“You love books.”
“Um.” I made that look—eyes sort of closed, shoulders up, hands out to show they’re empty. Like hmmever.
“You don’t. You don’t. Like books. You hate them.”
I laughed. “Well they’re sort of heavy, you know? A whole lot of them together especially.”
He laughed at that, kind of wildly, which made me think I was making a like good impression. Poor guy. His eyes were sort of bulge-y, that condition, you know? And they sort of vibrated. Not his fault, but.
“So books?” I said. “Where are they?”
“In the stacks.”
“Stacks? You mean all piled up?”
“Well, ‘stacks,’” he said with the double-finger-waggle. “Called stacks. All neatly placed on shelves. You went up, up . . .”—he pointed up, like to heaven, to the ceiling—“and got the one you wanted. If you were allowed.”
“Uh,” I said. “Who’s not allowed?”
“Students,” he said. “Haha, too bad for you. Haha, not true, you could, but long ago, no.”
“So . . .”
“We-ell,” he said, as though I was little kid, “what you did was, you looked up the book in the card catalog. You see those cabinets over there? They’re all that’s left of the system, and they’re now actually empty. But once there were hundreds of cabinets, and each drawer in each cabinet held hundreds of cards, all in alphabetical order”—here he stared at me with his goggle eyes vibrating, like to make sure I understood what that is, which I do, sort of—“and the card told you what the book’s call number was, and then you looked at that sign over there, which told you where in the Library that range of numbers was.”
“You called the number?” I dialed with a finger, another finger to my ear, like in oldtime cartoons means call me.
“No no. You’d write it on a paper. And ask a clerk to go find it.”
“Every book had a different number?”
“Every book. Every. Single. Book.”
“Of like how many?”
He bent over so close to me, with this creepy suspishy smile, that now I was thinking that he, or well they, was maybe gay or bi. “Millions,” he said.
That sort of staggered, yah? Millions?
“You want to see them,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Do I?” I looked away and up and around, the darkness was like solid, there was no sound. Place was entirely soundproof, with all these books—like a million pounds of insulation.
“Jeez. They must be unbelievably valuable. I mean worth a lot.”
“Not really so much,” the Librarian said coldly. “Not one by one. All the really valuable ones—they’ve been taken out, they’ve been put with all the most valuable ones in that big marble cube—you saw it, right?—the Beinecke. And locked up so no one can steal them or handle them or even see them except the big shots, who don’t care much anymore anyway.”
He looked up to the spaces overhead, as though he could see the books up there, in stacks. “What’s here are the ones they don’t care about. Oh, they aren’t valuable, no. They’re just here. Abandoned. This building’s kept safe and locked and a few lights on until they can decide what to do with them. Ha. Pretty clear what they’ll decide.”
I thought: place had not been locked when I arrived.
“Listen to me,” he said. “I’ll tell you something no one knows but me. There is one book in this library that is unique. If they knew it was here they’d take it and put it in with the Audubon Elephant Folio and the Gutenberg Bible and all the rest over there. Because you know why?”
“Why.”
“Because there is only one copy of this book in all the world.” His nose was almost touching mine, far back as I pulled, and he whispered, like somebody might hear, “It’s one thousand years old. It’s covered in gems. The pages are made of the skin of goats, pounded so thin you can almost see through it.” He smiled this mad smile. “Only one copy. It’s never been kindled. It’s not on the Internet Archive. It can’t be accessed online. It is fabulously valuable.” He goggled at me. “This book is mine.”
“Okay,” I said. Mostly I was trying to picture j
ewels stuck on a goat’s skin, and getting nowhere.
“You want to see it?”
“Yes. Maybe. Sure.”
He let out this strange sigh, as though deflating, like after you’ve held tension a long time. “Yes,” he said. “You do.” He jumped up, dusted off his core-droys, and set off, wagging his hand for me to follow.
I followed.
He took me down the hall to this place that would have been an altar, if it was a church, and then around and through a little door.
“Up,” he said.
This was a different space, narrow not big, closed not open, low-ceilinged, tight.
“The stacks,” he said. Slowly by slowly we went up the zigzag stairs. They made this ringing noise in all that silence. His steps, my steps. Now and then we go through a padded door and then up again. There was an elevator, but a lock bar bolted over it. He’d look back at me grinning, like a dad taking a kid for a treat.
There were so many books. Endless. Lonely. Fearsome. Looking at me, like those demon faces. Thinking their words, reading themselves to themselves.
I knew we were high up now, but it didn’t feel like it; it felt like being down in a mine. There was only a light now and then, and it was just an emergency or like a nite-lite. “What’s that smell?”
“Books.”
It was a strange smell, musty or mildewy but dry and not ick, sort of appealing actually, like I don’t know what, a nice cave or a grandma’s bedroom or. It smelled . . . old.
He turned down a narrow passage and ran his hand gently across some books, looking no different to me than the others. “Poe,” he said. “You’ve read Poe, of course.”
This suspishy look in his eye made it clear I was supposed to say Of course, but of course I couldn’t. “A little, maybe,” I said. “I think I played the game a few times.”
He took one out, opened it, and spoke words, not like he was reading them, like he was remembering them or making them up. “There was a discordant hum of human voices!” he whisper-yelled. “There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.”
The Pit and the Pendulum. Didn’t know that then. Sure do now.
He closed the book gently, like it might be hurt if he smacked it shut, and put it in its place like putting a baby to bed. Patted it.
“Up,” he said. He pushed me along to the next stair up.
Then another smell, almost not there at first, then more. Not nice, bad. Something dead, dead rat like we once had in the basement.
“Books,” he said.
“Not books,” I said.
“Up,” he said. “It’s up this way.” He pushed me ahead of him through another padded door and up another metal stair. It was starting to feel a little close-to-phobic. “Where’s this book?” I said. “I gotta go. There’s a party. There’s a class.”
“Here!”
There was an empty space in the ranks of shelves, where they’d been sort of dismantled somehow. He grabbed my shoulders and turned me toward it. I was done here, hey, I wanted out, and wondered if I knew how to get out. “Okay,” I said, “just a peek, then we go, yah?”
“Shut up,” he said. He gave me a shove in the back, he growl-shrieked, and then that’s all I knew. I guess a minute or two, or seconds, and things appeared again, like coming into focus. I’d got hit on the head. Hit on my fucking head with something by this fucking heyjoe.
I reached out to smack him, and I couldn’t. Fucker laughed.
I was stuck to the metal shelving. With zipties.
“What the fuck,” I said, calmly. I even tried a little laugh.
“What indeed,” he said.
“Heyjoe,” I said. “Come undo. I can’t.”
“I see that you can’t.”
Getting so weird. He was looking at me like I was a big goodie bar.
Then. This happened. No shit. He turned and from the shelves across the walkway he started pulling out handfuls of books and plopping them down around me. Then more. “You’ll be happy here,” he said. “Right here with the other book lovers, haha. Yes. One on each side of you. Kyra I think was the name. And Ira. Or something. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. You’ll be right in the middle, like Alice.”
“Shut up,” I said. “Get me out.”
“You won’t have much,” he said. “And soon you won’t need much. Oh, but you’ll have what no one else does. You’ll have books!”
He was piling up the books any which way, pressing them against me. Working like a madman. I almost couldn’t see over them now. I could hear the Librarian breathing, almost panting, like—well, like panting.
“For shit’s sake!” I cried. “For the love of Mike!”
“Yes,” said the Librarian, calm-cold, still piling books. “For the love of Mike.”
There was no more light now. I was behind the wall of books. It was black dark. I couldn’t even read the titles. I started yelling. I knew it was no good, but I did it anyway. Actually it wasn’t a plan. I just did it.
“Calling for help?” the Librarian said, and I could hear the sneer. “Who do you think will come to your rescue here? Pip? Holmes? Allan Quatermain?”
I didn’t know those guys. Or any guys. My wrists were bleeding from fighting with the zipties, you can’t break a ziptie, this I knew but still.
“If you need me,” he whispered into the cracks in the bookpile, “I will be downstairs. In Reference.” And he laughed like a maniac, which he actually was. I could hear his feet go down the metal stairs. “No!” I yelled. “I love books! Books! BOOKS!”
Nothing. No sound. Probs I gave another scream. I don’t actually remember. In a Library no one can hear you scream.
How long was I in there, behind the books? A day? Days? I blacked out, then came back, and there were books. I believe I peed my pants. When I was alert I could only see books; also when I was passed out. Once I thought I’d got free and was reading one, but that wasn’t factual. It seemed all the time that the books were actually coming closer to me, like pressing in, the stacks squirmishing forward to crush me. He came back once. I heard his feet. I thought he’d had a change of heart. I sort of moaned-pleaded, I could hardly speak; he nosed around like some rat sniffing for what he could get.
“Help,” I whispered. “Oh help.” Then I wandered away again into nowheres and when I came to he was gone again.
I was done for. Like Kyra and Ira. I could see them in my mind, skeletons hung up with zipties like corpse pirates, behind their books. I was just in the act of passing out again, for good this time, the books smothering me in revenge—and at that exact second I heard footsteps, foot-dings, on the stairs, not one person’s but two or three’s, coming up from below. Then came this wild kungfu yell and the books were pushed away, this side, that side, and a little light came in. An outstretched hand caught my arm.
It was the hand of Seymour Chin. The Singaporean had reached New Haven. The Library was in the hands of its enemies.
* * *
What I remember after that is not much. Seymour Chin looking at me like his face was going to pop—I’d never seen the man in the body. Behind him this very large diversity person in body armor, Yale blue, their hand on their gun, looking like they’d seen a well you know.
Then I fainted.
So what it was that happened, which I learned later in the Yale hospital where they checked me out: Seymour’d followed a thumbnail microtag we worked on freshman year—our first proj! I installed it on myself way then and forgot! Amazing he could trace his way up through the stacks, but that was what the tag was supposed to do, and damn it did.
Seymour explained about the rumors. Hadn’t I heard them? The Old Campus Vampire. No I hadn’t. Heyjoe, everybody tells them for giggles, just. But some people really had disappeared over t
he years, maybe just wandering in the empty buildings or like looter-ish. Never found. Seymour was very into stories like that in gaming and such. But not kidding? Not one kid, he said. The Library Ghoul. The Book Fiend. We had to laugh, but it wasn’t actually funny. Because it wasn’t just Kyra and Ira. It was others. They’re still looking.
“Heyjoe,” he said to me when we’d left the hospital and got out from around the media collected there. “Still time. Let’s go to the College, get a beer. Wet T contest! So I heard. Rock out!”
Seymour too loves old things.
“Not for me, Seymour, sorry to say.” I checked my watch, saw messages and-cetera. Relief. “Love you, heyjoe, but you know what?” I said. “Spring Break’s over. I need to get back to the real world.”
Then I see it’s the Library Fiend. Like looking at me out of my watch. Startled, very. Then I see it’s like Foxnews, it’s his what, arraignment? In this dim New Haven courtroom. He seemed so small. When the public defender person said something about a psych-eval he piped right up, and his weird eyes started revolving. “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” He tried to get to his feet but a cop shoved him back. “The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?”
Well fuck yes you are, heyjoe.
“Poe,” I said. “I bet.”
“Hmmever,” Seymour said. He was guiding me along the street through the crowd. They were going in and out of the tech stores and the clothes and shoes and such. But not into one store, on a corner, that seemed closed. We got closer and it looked closeder. But it wasn’t. There were lights on inside, and on the window was written BOOKS.