Peter gave Eric and Valerie a tour around the surviving bits of artwork in the ruined hall. The obsidian desk had actually sagged. The fires had now completely cooled and only a frozen waterfall of rock remained. The rug lay intact and untouched.
Michelle did notice that Peter carefully avoided the area where the dais had focused all of those post-pubescent-teenage-girls-wearing-tennis-skirt dreams.
A demon showed up with fresh clothes and Valerie ducked behind a pile of boulders to change. She came out clad in leather skirt, a fringed denim shirt, and a mismatched pair of cowboy boots, one red and one black. At least they were the same height.
“You’re kidding me, right?” she had her fists on her hips and glared down at the clothing demon.
All she needed was a cowboy hat and a lasso to complete the outfit.
“Without the software, it is the best I can do.” It used Valerie’s exasperated glance at Michelle as an excuse to sprint for the door.
Michelle tested the terminal. Even the hard reboot into the machine logic layer didn’t bring up more than the Type Already! prompt.
She asked it an insulting question, in English and Latin, having to do with parentage, hamsters, and elderberries, but received only, Null response.
Now, it was time to face the resource of last resort.
# # #
“Where are we?” Valerie’s whisper echoed up and down the long hallway.
It had grown dimmer and dustier and they had walked its length. Vines grew from the walls and waved about lazily, though there was no breeze. The marble floor squelched like mud as they stepped on it. What had begun as simple fluorescent lighting at one end of the hall had faded to pale moonlight tinged dull red by a lunar eclipse. The double doors before them were aged oak with wrought-iron hinges bolted to the surface in ornate swirls and spirals.
Michelle threw the latch and leaned into the door. When it didn’t budge, she signaled the others. It took a scowl to get them to lean in, but after all four of them shoved against it, the door reluctantly groaned open with a shudder of disuse.
“You,” Michelle addressed Valerie’s question after she’d stood back upright and brushed off her clothes, “are in Hell’s Library.”
Chapter 27
The foyer to Hell’s Library had been redone since the last time Michelle was here. Now it was delicately lit with Tiffany lamps and offered comfortable chairs perfectly lit for casual reading. None were occupied. Each pair of chairs were separated by small tables that sported coasters made of lace doilies and accompanied by friendly bud vases. Each bore a pair of perky chrysanthemums in their matching vase that were all the colors of the rainbow.
In fact, Michelle scanned the room again, they were in exactly those hues as they progressed around the room, in order from deepest red to darkest violet.
A magazine rack had the latest copies of several dozen different knitting magazines. A small collection of quilting magazines filled the bottom row. Despite being new, they were clearly well thumbed. Rather than the dour Renaissance art that had weighed down the walls the last time she was here, several bright artisanal quilts decorated the walls. She particularly liked the one that was all curving swirls in the pale pinks and grays of a soft sunset.
“I based it on a Michael James pattern.” Janice, Hell’s Librarian came up beside Michelle and they admired the quilt together. “It’s just way cool, you know. So I did it. Curves are totally tricky.”
Her voice was bright and perky, sounding as empty-headed as could usually only be achieved with an intensive training course and long-term occupancy in southern California.
But Janice was a library savant, she’d apparently been born sounding that way. She was always such a pleasant surprise. Shapely, with blond hair down past her behind, and a sunny smile that lit her blue eyes. She wore a knit pullover, slim black leggings beneath a short blue skirt and bright-red high-top sneakers that had been decorated in silver-paint swirls in the style of traditional henna-dye designs. Despite looking like a teenage lifeguard, and sounding like one, Janice was able to find whatever Michelle needed in just minutes, which actually freaked her out a bit. She always made a point of being very polite to Hell’s Librarian.
“I like what you’ve done with the place, Janice.”
“Thanks. It’s certainly waaayyy more pleasant to look at all day than that oicky mess.” She waved a hand toward the back wall, or where the wall would be if there were one behind the librarian’s desk.
Immediately beyond the bright cheerful reading room, and the imposing desk that might be used to run an aircraft carrier for its sheer size and imposing mass, the stacks began. In the center, a card catalog formed both sides of a long aisle that stretched hundreds of feet into the fading distance. Hundreds of thousands of little drawers. The thing looked so aged and warped that half the drawers might no longer work. A long line of dead African violets in gray pots rested on top of the cabinet, only the few closest to the librarian’s light showing any attempt at survival. To either side, tall and dusty shelving rose a dozen feet high set on aisles barely wide enough to walk down.
The library stacks glowered out at her. The manuscripts loomed toward her, full of anger rife with lost knowledge, knowledge they retained within their pages but no one else remembered anymore. No one cared. Including her, they accused. It was creepy having a couple million volumes of the universe’s knowledge be angry at you.
Michelle looked away before it attacked, and refocused on Janice.
“And what brings you to my domain today? I’ve got a couple of new military romance novels you might like. Still hot off the press, if you know what I’m saying. Steamy stuff in helicopters. Or a great Runelords fantasy?”
The latter was tempting, but she really didn’t have the time.
Michelle pulled out the several pages of the cookbook’s recipe for travel that the Universal Software had printed.
“I was hoping you might look these over and tell me what you think.”
Janice settled into one of the armchairs and Michelle sat in the companion chair. Valerie and Eric were sitting together in a pair of armchairs across the foyer and were holding hands. She judged their shock to be diminishing, but neither of them were yet standing on very solid ground. Peter wandered behind the librarian’s desk, clearly curious about Hell’s stacks.
“Don’t even think about it.” Janice didn’t raise her voice, nor did she turn to observe Peter, but there was such a force of command in her tone that his legs sent him sprawling backward against his own will. He landed hard in a chair that just happened to be in the proper place.
“But…”
“Shh!” Janice ordered in that same soft tone still without looking up. “I’m reading.”
Peter shut his mouth and shook his head as if trying to clear it after being punched. He looked at Michelle in wide-eyed shock. Michelle could tell him a thing or two about the library’s catalog, more mysteries than existed in Heaven and Hell… But she didn’t want to irritate Janice.
“I’ll tell you this,” Janice flipped through the last few pages clearly reading them as she went, “that software of yours is so out of it, it almost belongs in my library. This is some seriously convoluted logic. Like, gonzo sick.”
“You mean you don’t use it here?”
“Why would I?” And Janice aimed that calm, crystal-blue gaze at Michelle.
“Right. The card catalog…” She tapered off. It was sitting right there in front of her, of course Hell’s Librarian didn’t use the computer. One glitch and she’d lose all those records.
“How far behind is your filing?”
“We’re coming up on the Renaissance in the next few decades. Nothing much of interest has happened since then so it should go pretty quickly now. Another century to catch up with the labeling and shelving. Why, what are you looking for?”
“Oh,” Mi
chelle inspected her shoes. “We actually need current events. I was hoping that you could help us with finding where the software had gone.”
“Gone?”
“It was stolen by a Buddhist Hungry Ghost.”
“Awkward.” Janice perked up as if that were the first interesting fact in quite a while.
“Decidedly.” Michelle tried to be as cool and collected as Janice, knowing full well that she failed miserably.
“Then you need to go see Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha.”
It had taken them the better part of two days to reach that same conclusion on just as much information. It had taken Hell’s Librarian less than a single breath. She really had to remember that about Janice when she had a problem.
“That was the plan, we have an appointment, but the software is down and we aren’t sure how to get there. I was hoping that you might have a reference that would tell us how to adapt the recipe you’re holding there. It doesn’t list how to get to Bodhgaya.”
Janice flounced to her feet. “Why would I use something as silly as this? I mean, like, why you didn’t end up in the middle of a sun is kinda beyond me. Gimme a minute.” She went behind her desk, dropped the recipe on top, and began digging around in one of the drawers behind. Michelle moved to the chair facing the desk and watched as Janice changed from sneakers to roller blades.
“These are great. Beats the Heaven out of roller skates,” and she was gone, zooming down the aisle of the card catalog. A small brass telescope rested on her desk. After carefully noting its position so that she could replace it properly, Michelle took it and pulled it open until it was about two feet long. Then she looked down the aisle to see where Janice was going.
About a half kilometer down, Hell’s Librarian screeched expertly to a halt and pulled out one drawer, then another. In a fourth, she found whatever she was looking for. She carefully inspected the card she’d unearthed for several long moments, pulled a pencil from behind her ear, made some quick note. Then she closed the drawer and was off again.
Michelle lost track of her as she shot through a gap in the catalog table and roared into the stacks, her long, blond hair streaming out behind her. Michelle returned the telescope carefully.
In just minutes, Janice came shooting out of the side stacks with a volume at least half as big as she was tied across her back by a wide red ribbon.
“Did you ever think of becoming a bike messenger?”
Janice grinned slyly as she swung the massive tome onto a reading stand. It was bound in heavy, tooled leather and was as thick as Michelle’s palm was wide.
“No, but I might have tripped a few while I was trying these out. You should see me move when I put on my racing blades with the hundred-and-ten millimeter wheels. I tried entering the Chicago Inline Marathon, but they rejected my application when I applied for the ‘sixty and over’ age category. If they had a ‘two thousand and over,’ I’d really clean up.” She looked about twenty-five.
Janice began flipping through the pages of the massive tome. Without looking up from the manuscript, she reached to her desk for a magnifying glass. After she picked it up, she reached down again and flipped the telescope end for end.
Michelle felt as if she’d been spanked and tried not to blush.
Janice then began to study a small corner of the page very carefully.
The lettering was several inches high, so that made no sense, until Michelle inspected the page more closely herself. It was an illuminated manuscript and some crazy monk had written massive numbers of instructions in the form of the larger letters like some sort of a tesselation fractal.
“Hmm, this may take a bit. You don’t happen to have any root beer on you?”
“You need root beer for a trans-denominational transport?”
“No, I think I have all the things I need, I could just really use a root beer. There’s a vending machine out in the hall.”
# # #
Michelle fought open the library door with Valerie and Eric’s assistance, Peter had refused to leave his chair. She wasn’t sure how she’d missed it before, but the vending machine shone like a beacon in the red gloaming of the hallway.
She shooed aside a vine that was checking the coin return slot for spare change and punched in for Janice’s root beer. When it asked for money, she swore at it, hard. The machine decided its continued existence might be best served by not arguing and it reluctantly rolled the bottle of soda into the output tray.
Valerie and Eric had followed her down the hall to help carry.
“Is Janice, uh, like you?” Eric selected something orange and sugary.
Michelle did her best to look offended, “Are you asking me to give away the secret of a woman’s age?”
“Um, no. I wasn’t. Well, not exactly. It’s just…”
“Aren’t men so cute when they’re flustered?”
Valerie nodded her agreement and they shared a smile.
“No,” Michelle let him off the hook as she decided a root beer sounded good and selected a second one for herself. “Janice is older than she looks, but neither is she staring her fourteen billionth birthday in the face. Damn that’s a depressing thought.”
Valerie selected ice tea.
“And I have no idea where she cultivated the empty-headed blond persona, that was before I met her, way before anyone but the Native Americans knew about California. She was the librarian of Alexandria. When Julius Caesar almost burned down the library by accident, Janice began transferring all of the important volumes here. A couple hundred years later, there was a little intramural war between the Christians and the Jews. Some idiot decided that dragging the Head Librarian through the streets and then murdering her was a good idea.” She selected a lemonade for Peter and they headed back down the corridor.
“She was some kinda pissed when she arrived here. So, she and I went back to earth and cleared out the library before some idiot torched the place. She changed her looks and her name and has been here ever since. She spends her spare time scavenging from libraries that are letting their collections molder or burn. Nalanda, Constantinople, Kabul when the Taliban were in power, any number of others.”
“Janice…” Eric mumbled half to himself. “Wasn’t there a Greek God Janice? No, maybe…”
“Janus, with a ‘u-s.’ The God of gateways.”
“The two-faced god.” Valerie knit her brows. “Can we trust her?”
Michelle almost laughed aloud. “Trust her? Sure. Feel totally cowed and humbled every time we enter her presence? Absolutely. By the way, Janus was two-faced because he looked both to the past and future. I think DC Comics started the whole ‘two-faced equals evil’ thing, which he thinks is kind of cool, by the way. His primary role was God of Transitions, gateways were just a sideline. But that’s why I came to her. Janice is very clear sighted.”
They forced their way back into the library.
“And she just happens to have the entire collected knowledge of the universe at her fingertips.”
Chapter 28
“Been thinking about your problem while you were out.” Janice had a line of flasks and aged-scarred tureens lined up on her desk.
“Oh,” Michelle did her best to sound nonchalant as she handed over the Librarian’s root beer.
“So I put in a call to Plato.”
“Plato?” Michelle decided the best way to trust her knees was not to use them, so she sat down before they had any bright ideas about no longer supporting her. Why did she feel a pinch because Janice had called Plato? She wanted to protect him. But one of the precepts of Hell’s whole setup was, “Good luck, you’re on your own.” It wasn’t like her to react this way about any one soul. Was this man different from all other men? Would they eventually spend a night together that was different from all other nights? Now there was image.
“Did he have anything interes
ting to say?”
Janice opened an old, cork-stoppered leather flask, and dribbled a viscous, dark-purple liquid into a tall glass with exacting care to not spill it. Then she knocked it back and made an awful face.
“Are you okay?”
Janice took a big slug of root beer. “I hate Manischewitz wine. But this formula insists that I can’t be sober while I’m mixing it. I’ll have to do this three more times. If I end up with a hangover or having stupid sex, I’ll be blaming you.”
Michelle could only nod her agreement.
Janice shook a gray powder from a gray packet the size of a teabag into the largest silver tureen, about the size of a small washtub or an overlarge mop bucket. “Book dust. Don’t ask why. It specifies book dust, specifically off manuscripts from late 1700s alchemical texts. I have plenty of those. That the formula was written in the 1100s is the intriguing incongruity.”
She began sorting through other flasks and sometimes measuring carefully, sometimes just dumping the contents in. The second glass of wine and another swallow of root beer went by the wayside while they watched.
“You were talking to Plato,” Michelle reminded her.
“Right. So, we did a little data analysis. Mortal, when did the software attack your computer, how many days ago?”
Valerie looked at Eric. “Uh, I think we’ve slept twice since then.”
Janice knocked back the third shot of wine and didn’t appear to remember the root beer chaser.
“I don’t care about your sex habits… Oh, you mean you actually slept. Okay.” She fiddled with a bottle’s wax seal, it was a tiny bottle with a huge seal that she had to struggle with.
Michelle took it from her, broke the seal and handed it back.
Janice squinted at the massive tome’s page through her magnifying glass, shrugged, dumped in the wax seal, and threw the bottle away over her shoulder. It shattered on the stone floor part way down the card catalog. A chartreuse mist arose, gathered, dissipated, gathered again, then crept away beneath the catalog.
Cookbook from Hell Reheated Page 16