by Molly Flatt
MacRob walked over to the lamp and began to remove her cape and shirt, casting billowing, distorted shadows across the rock. There was a rustle from inside the chute and Alex turned to see MacBrian climb out, carrying a second lamp. Moments later Taran emerged too.
‘What’s going on?’ Alex asked, her voice a child’s squeak.
In reply, MacBrian simply nodded at MacRob. MacRob clipped the lamp onto her belt, then scooped a handful of white powder from a pouch on her belt and clapped it between her palms. She slotted her left boot into one of the spherical hollows in the wall that should have held a sphere. She reached her hand into another hollow above her head, then boosted herself up, grabbing and thrusting her way up the inside of the tower with silent, startling speed. Perhaps thirty feet up, just before the wall domed into the roof, she stopped. She found her balance in a set of indentations, then unhooked the lamp and raised it above her head.
The flames illuminated a single Story bulging out of the wall. Even allowing for the distance and the colour of the lamp, Alex could see that it looked odd: dim and cloudy, as if it had been frosted, with a sickly yellowish tinge.
She didn’t need to ask. It was like the sight of her own face in a mirror, or the smell of her own skin. She just knew.
Shitshitshit. It was hers.
No. Not exactly. It wasn’t hers. It was her.
She tried to breathe. She swallowed. She whispered: ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘We were rather hoping,’ MacBrian said grimly, ‘that you would be able to tell us.’
‘Is MacRob going to Read it? Going to Read . . . me?’
‘That’s the problem. She can’t. None of us can.’
Alex dragged her gaze away from the Story and back to MacBrian, who was studying her, unblinking, her face all angles in the flicker of the lamp. Behind her, Taran was a looming shadow. Alex swallowed again. ‘Why not?’
‘We’re not entirely sure. As you can see, the skin has thickened, so we can’t see what is going on inside. We’ve never seen anything like it. All of our best Readers have tried to open it, and every one of them has failed. Professor MacGill’s scholars have searched centuries’ worth of records, but they have found no precedent so far.’
Alex dug her nails into her upper arms. She could hear her own breathing, fast and ragged. She looked back at the Story.
Get out, she told it.
Not a flicker. Not a twinge.
Get out, she thought. Whatever you’re doing, stop it. GET OUT.
She looked back. MacBrian was still staring at her. ‘I can’t—’ she stuttered.
‘Breathe, Miss Moore.’
‘But how am I supposed to control it?’ Her chest was tight. ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t . . . I can’t . . .’
A weight on the back of her scalp, pressing her head down. Alex closed her eyes and grabbed her thighs, hauling in shallow gasps. She heard MacBrian shout something, and lifted her head just in time to see MacRob scuttle back down the wall in a riot of rocking light. She stared at the patch of darkness where she knew her Story to be.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Tell me what the hell is happening. Tell me why I’m here.’
MacRob thumped down softly beside them, exhaling little puffs of steam in the chill atmosphere. At a word from MacBrian, she gathered up her cape, jogged over to the chute and slipped silently away. MacBrian waited until the light from her lamp had dissolved in the dark, then turned back to Alex.
‘Egan MacCalum wouldn’t stop Reading,’ she began. ‘All our Directors scale down their shifts or stop Reading altogether, once they take office. All except Egan. He was one of the most accomplished Readers that Iskeull has ever known. A prodigy really. He made it a condition of his appointment that he be allowed to continue to work his usual shifts.’
‘He couldn’t live without it,’ Taran said.
MacBrian’s jaw twitched. ‘Taran and Egan,’ she said, ‘were very close.’
The whites of Taran’s eyes shone in the gloom. ‘He was my best friend,’ he said. ‘My only friend.’ He gave a humourless hiccup of a laugh. ‘Oh, Egan was the first to admit that he wasn’t a natural politician. He’d been pressured into standing for the Directorship because he was handsome, charismatic, a true athlete. He certainly knew the Library better than anyone. But he hated the administration, the paperwork, the endless squabbles between the island Council and the international Board. He told me it was only when he was Reading that he felt free.’
Alex thought of the statue’s blank eyes, gazing out across the town to the peninsula.
‘A pity,’ MacBrian said stiffly, ‘for his own sake, and ours. I didn’t hide the fact that I disapproved of him continuing to Read, when he had neither the time nor the energy. Others on the Council felt the same. We were all relieved when, in March last year, he finally bowed to the pressure and announced that he was stopping for good.’ She paused. ‘Unfortunately, as it turned out, he was lying. A fact we discovered on the seventeenth of February. Taran? I think you should take it from here.’
Taran withdrew a flask from his pocket and took several noisy gulps. ‘Just after third bell on the seventeenth,’ he said, ‘that’s ten o’clock, a young Reader called Dughlas came to my study, where I was finishing some paperwork. Now Dughlas was a sensitive boy, an orphan, impressionable, eager to please. He absolutely idolized Egan. Anyway, Dughlas admitted that Egan had been working his shifts for months. Apparently’ – he glanced at MacBrian – ‘Egan had told Dughlas to keep the rota unchanged, and to fabricate Reading records for each shift.’
‘Reading records?’ Alex said faintly.
‘Ah, yes. We have details of every Reading that has occurred, give or take the odd slip-up, since the system was introduced – in the International Library Administration Treaty of the 1580s. It’s all there, noted in the records, stored in the archives, cross-referenced in the index. The data the Chapters have collected over the past few centuries has transformed our knowledge of the Library and helped improve our work.’ The whites of his eyes were shining again, but this time with fervour, not grief. ‘Some of us believe that the world’s strongest Storylines will combine, over time, to create some great text of wisdom. Others, like Sorcha here, believe that such theories are sentimental nonsense. Nonetheless, we do undoubtedly observe high-level collective Story behaviours that can—’
‘Taran,’ MacBrian said, ‘this is not the time for science fiction. Could we stick to the matter in hand?’
Taran sighed. ‘Well, as Dughlas told me the whole sorry tale, it was obvious that he had been thrilled to be taken into Egan’s confidence. To be made his accomplice, if you will. At first. But as the months wore on, he began to feel increasingly guilty, and anxious about what would happen to him if anyone found out. What’s more, he complained that Egan had become increasingly distracted and short-tempered as the year went on.’
‘An observation,’ MacBrian, added darkly, ‘not restricted to Dughlas MacFionn.’
‘I must admit that Egan did not seem . . .’ Taran paused, twisting the cap on his flask back and forth. He blinked several times. ‘I knew him better than anyone. We had trained together. Even when we were boys he far outstripped my abilities. But then I was always more interested in ideas than in the act of Reading itself. And when I was appointed Head of Scholarship, and Egan became Director, well . . . He might not always have understood the importance of the work we do in the archives, but I was still the one he confided in. The one he came to, when he needed to let off steam. But even with me, over those last few months, Egan was . . .’ – twist, twist, twist – ‘not entirely himself. I’ve wondered whether I should have paid more attention, probed harder, but then we always had so much work to discuss. And I had distractions of my own.’ He looked down at the flask as if he had only just noticed it, and shoved it back in his pocket. ‘My sister is not well.’
There was a short pause. ‘The night of the seventeenth,’ MacBrian said.
‘Yes.’ Tara
n inhaled sharply. ‘Well, that night, apparently, Egan had been particularly strange. Called Dughlas in here, accused him of conspiring with Sorcha to depose him—’
‘Which is of course nonsense,’ MacBrian added. ‘I had no idea what they were up to.’
‘Threatened to get Dughlas banned from the Library if he ever betrayed his confidence, shouted at him to leave. It seems that Dughlas’s conscience and, yes, perhaps his wounded pride, finally intervened. So he came to me.’ He paused. ‘I will always regret that I didn’t immediately tell someone else, or go to the Stack myself straight away. But Egan . . . I knew better than anyone how badly he craved Reading. How much he needed it. I didn’t want to be the one to take that away. So I thanked Dughlas and told him I would talk to Egan, then went back to my paperwork.’ He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t concentrate. I knew something wasn’t right. So I held out for two hours and then I left the archives and made my way out here.’ He looked up into the dark. ‘When I poked my head up out of the chute into the Stack – this Stack – everything looked normal. Your Story was open, and Egan was standing in the centre of the floor, right there, Reading its heaviest Storyline. Certainly I could see that he was struggling. His body was shaking, and it was clear that the Storyline was very old and powerful. The Memories were resisting – they did not want to give up the pattern they had formed for so many years. Nevertheless, the Storyline was moving, albeit slowly, circuiting his wrists. He was getting through it, Memory by Memory, steadily coaxing it apart. But then he reached the root Memory at the heart of the Storyline, right in the middle of the figure-of-eight. He stood there, touching that Memory, for a long time. His knees looked ready to buckle. Then he took a deep breath, and I thought it was about to yield. But then, before I could understand what was happening, the whole world turned silver-white.
‘I can only have been unconscious for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes, I was back in the chute, wedged in like a cork in a bottle, face-down. I was in great pain, but it must have saved me, being flung back beneath the earth like that. I slowly managed to pull myself back up the chute and into the Stack. And the first thing I saw was your Story. It was right up there in the wall, like it is now. Your Memories had flown back inside it, just as they normally do at the end of a Reading. And your Story’s skin had closed. But it wasn’t undocking. It seemed to be stuck. And all the other Stories docked into the wall around it were sliding away. They weren’t simply returning to the blackness behind the wall. They were riding its currents all the way down to the sea of Library energy that lies deep beneath the earth. They didn’t want to be anywhere near this Stack. It was like they knew they might be in danger. Like they knew that something they didn’t recognize had happened here.’ He paused again, his expression inscrutable in the lamplight. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said quietly. ‘Never imagined it was possible. And then I looked down. And I saw him. I saw Egan.’ He gestured at the ground beneath them. ‘He was lying right there, on his back.’
Alex looked down, as if she might suddenly see the statue’s beautiful face shattered under her soles.
‘I hauled myself across to him as quickly as I could,’ Taran said. ‘He was still breathing. I said his name, and after a moment he opened his eyes. He managed to say three words – Dorothy, Moore, London. But a minute or two later, he died.’
Alex couldn’t look at him. She couldn’t look at either of them, or at the floor where the man everyone loved had died. She certainly couldn’t look at the wall where the thing – her thing, her wrong, hideous thing – lurked. She pulled her cape around her tightly, as if she might be able to hold together with a piece of cloth the world that she knew. She stared at her feet until the silence stretched so thin she could hardly breathe.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry that my . . . my Story thing is somehow mixed up in this. And I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend. But this all sounds like a horrible accident.’
‘No.’ MacBrian sighed. ‘Certainly, it seems that Egan was going through some kind of personal crisis. The pressures of the Directorship are intense, and he had been dealing with them for fifteen years. He was no longer a young man. Perhaps, just perhaps, his skills were beginning to fade. He may well have been getting frustrated that Reading was becoming harder for him than it once was. But’ – she paused—‘but, Miss Moore, Egan could not have caused this damage, either to you or to himself. He could no more do anything to your Story than you could control him using psychic powers. That’s simply not the way the Library works. The very skill of Reading requires us to suspend our own Stories. To become a neutral physical conduit, so that someone else’s Story can take a few minutes of time and space outside the Library to reorganize. We cannot change so much as a single Memory in someone else’s Story. If we tried to Read in any other way, the Story we were working with would simply close.’
‘So what are you trying to tell me?’
‘Egan died from a surge of energy to the chest. All our doctors agree. A great blast, which essentially disintegrated his heart.’ MacBrian paused. ‘Now, everything we know about the Library tells us that this is impossible. Stories draw on the energy of the Library to make Memories and form Storylines. Nothing more. Nothing less. They cannot direct that energy in any way. They certainly cannot use it to kill. Except that is exactly what seems to have happened, with yours. It seems that your Story somehow took advantage of Egan’s weakened state and . . . well.’
There was another silence. Alex felt utterly disembodied, as if she was gliding through some weightless new atmosphere.
‘Anyway.’ MacBrian cleared her throat. ‘As soon as Taran alerted us to the tragedy and reported Egan’s parting words, Iain sent a team over to our base on North Ronaldsay to research who the owner of this renegade Story might be. It was not hard to find out – thanks to all the information available online nowadays – that there are twenty-three Dorothy Moores currently alive and living in London. Identifying which of them was the Dorothy Moore we were after, however, was far more difficult.
‘Of course we had no idea whether this person knew what she had done, or whether she intended to do it. The Chapters are scrupulous in maintaining the secrecy of the Library – you can only imagine what would happen if it became a pawn of the world’s religious leaders and governments. Yet many on the Board feared that there had been a breach, somehow, and that the killing of the European Director was the opening salvo in a larger attack. And so we decided to invite as many Dorothy Moores as possible to Iskeull, interviewing them under the guise of GCAS. We even tried sending some of Iain’s men out into the field to investigate. However, as you have seen for yourself with Finn MacEgan, that is an ineffective approach. The same genetic quirk that gives Library nations the ability to Read keeps them tied to their islands, you see. All Iskeullians are born with a unique Storyline that connects them to Iskeull. The same goes for the Menikuki Readers and the island of Menikuk, the Gavians and Gave, the Yíngzhōuese and Yíngzhōu, and so forth. If anyone here spends more than a few days away from Iskeull, a terrible form of homesickness rapidly cripples both their body and mind. So, frankly, I was starting to believe we faced an impossible task. Until a new lead surfaced this Monday.’
Alex thought of the questions Not John Hanley – Finn MacEgan – had asked in her office four days before. She said, numbly, ‘The interview in Flair.’
‘Precisely. The team found an article that revealed your true name. A name you had kept concealed throughout your adult life.’
‘But I didn’t conceal it!’ Alex looked from MacBrian to Taran, pulling the cape around her even more tightly. ‘Look, are you seriously suggesting that ever since I told my family to call me Alex – when I was eleven years old – I’ve been hatching a grand plan to become some kind of . . . evil psychological murderer?’
‘It wasn’t just your name,’ MacBrian continued steadily. ‘It was your account, in the same interview, of how dramatically your life had changed that nigh
t. It had all the hallmarks of a successful Reading, an extraordinarily successful Reading. The coincidence was too great. I convened a meeting of our Council and consulted the Board, and we formulated a plan to bring you here.’
Alex could feel her Story lurking there above her in the dark. GET OUT, she told it. GET OUT. GET OUT. She took a step back into the shadows, shaking her head. ‘Look, I’m sorry.’ Her face was hot, her heart banging in her throat. ‘I wish I could help. But I have a business to run, I have responsibilities. I have deadlines.’ She glanced up at the wall one last time, then back at MacBrian and Taran. ‘I’m not going to deny this has been . . . I mean, fucking hell. I don’t know how I’m going to – how I’ll be able to . . . But that’s the point, isn’t it? You’re the ones born to all this. The ones with the centuries of scholarship, the ninja skills. So if something has gone wrong here, I think it’s clear that it’s your responsibility to sort it out.’
Before they could reply, she turned and strode back towards the chute, breathing hard. She heard the clank of lamps as MacBrian and Taran made to follow, but she was on her belly and sliding under and up before they could reach the opening. She clambered out and started walking back along the path towards the rotunda’s distant dome. Not running, but walking, with fake-calm determination. It must have confused the heavies, because no-one grabbed her.
For exactly twelve seconds. She counted.
But when Alex turned to yell at whatever testosterone-pumped lackey had taken hold of her wrist, she saw that it was MacBrian. The Director had an expression of such open desperation on her face that it stopped the shout in Alex’s mouth. Iain was already running over, but MacBrian turned and barked a command. He jogged, frowning, to a stop. In the distance, Taran’s dishevelled head popped out from under the tower.
MacBrian turned back to Alex. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please listen to me. I believe you. I do. I believe that you did not do this consciously, or with malice. And I will make sure everyone here understands that, too. But do you feel this?’ She dropped Alex’s wrist and lifted her own palms to the rain. ‘These storms are flooding our fields. They’re rotting our crops, endangering the lives of our fishermen. Whether or not you intended it, this is happening because of you. The Library is part of the fabric of this island, part of our stone and our water and our earth. The health of the Library determines the health of the island. And every day your Story is stuck in that Stack, it gets worse.’