by K. M. Fawkes
“I don’t think we are.” Brad had made up his mind and there was no changing it. “I’m guessing the lights turn on at sundown and shut off again at sunrise. We have all night to find the source.”
“We have to sleep at some point,” said Anna, but without much conviction. She already seemed resigned to a night of fruitless exploring.
Leaving the Italian diner, they made their way back down Main Street, knocking at the doors of a coffee shop, an American Legion, a maintenance supply store, a distillery, and an animal shelter.
No one answered. And yet every light in every building in town seemed to be on. He didn’t know how to explain that.
At the far end of the street, between the library and the train depot, the Bethany Christian Fellowship was lit up from porch to altar as if summoning parishioners to Wednesday night prayer and worship. But when they knocked, no one came to the doors of the church.
That left Brad and Anna one building on the strip they hadn’t tried yet, and by the time they reached the front of the library a dull conviction had settled over them that they were never going to find the mysterious source of the town’s power.
“Maybe we ought to try climbing up into the bell tower of the church,” said Anna. “If we ring the bell, maybe someone will hear us.”
“If there’s anyone here,” said Brad, “they’ve probably heard us already. If they haven’t shown themselves by now, it’s because they prefer to keep hidden.”
“We could live here, though,” Anna said dreamily. It was nearly 8:00pm now, past the time they normally went to bed, and already she looked half asleep. “We might be the only two people in the world living in a town with power. It would certainly make things easier.”
“We wouldn’t be the only people here for long,” Brad pointed out. “Someone would be bound to find us. And who knows how long the lights would stay on? I’m starting to think this is just a fluke, some quirk of the system. In a day or two it will go out and we’ll never get it to come back on again.”
“I just want to know how it happened—” said Anna, but broke off suddenly as footsteps resounded in the silent library.
Presently the door creaked open. Gripped by a protective impulse, Brad pulled Anna closer. He had only a split-second to decide whether to reach for the pistol in his ankle holster, but decided against it—perhaps some primitive instinct had assured him he wouldn’t need it.
The porch light came on and a trim figure in a long, patterned skirt emerged from the lobby. She wore tortoiseshell glasses with a frame that was badly cracked near the bottom and was wearing her white and silver hair in an old-fashioned up-do, a silky black and green scarf at her neck.
Brad was reminded of every formidable old librarian he had known in his youth. He guessed that she no longer had many patrons, but in spite of this she retained a powerful air of authority.
“Can’t you read the sign?” she asked sharply. “Loitering is forbidden.”
“We weren’t loitering,” said Anna, looking bewilderedly at the strange lady. “We… we didn’t realize the library was open.”
“Well, if you’re going to come in, then come inside and stop blocking the entrance.”
The woman motioned for them to follow her inside and they obeyed without question, compelled by some irresistible feeling of curiosity and enchantment.
Inside, Brad found a perfect recreation of the library as he remembered it from his childhood, as if a designer had patterned the interior based on his memories. It didn’t smell like most things in this town did, now—it smelled of binding and old books and a woman’s perfume and a certain indefinable scent that might have been baby powder. Brad realized it had been ages since he had been in a library, that he had stopped going years before the collapse and couldn’t remember exactly why now; he had simply fallen out of the habit.
“Do you have a card?” the librarian asked, resuming her station behind the front desk.
“For this library?” replied Brad. It seemed an odd thing to worry about, given the circumstances. “No, we’re just passing through.”
“You’re welcome to get one; there’s no charge.” She typed something into her computer, which Brad was surprised to see working. “Whatever books you check out here can be returned to any branch library in the Penobscot County system.”
“We’re not interested in reading!” Brad said, a little too sharply. Anna kicked him deftly in the foot, giving him a warning look.
The librarian shrugged as if to say she was used to this sort of treatment. “Suit yourself. Did you come in here just to use the computers?”
“Is the internet working?” Brad asked.
She shook her head with an odd smile of satisfaction, as if pleased that she could deny internet access to a book-despising patron.
“No, I just use this for typing and spreadsheets. Helps to keep me organized and, honestly, that goes a long way toward keeping a person sane in these lonely days.”
“Who else lives here?” asked Anna.
“In the library?”
“No, in town.”
“Nobody, as far as I know.” The librarian looked as though she was beginning to regret having allowed them to invade her peace. “You’re the first people I’ve seen in the past week. Man came by a few days ago on his way to Syracuse, but he didn’t stay long. They never do.”
“We were wondering about the lights,” said Anna. “How is it that you have electricity here when we can’t get it anywhere else?”
She looked as though she had been expecting this question. “Now that is an odd story. I couldn’t believe it myself, when it first happened.”
“So you haven’t always had power,” said Brad. With that peculiar logic known only to dreamers, he could sense that his time in the library was winding down, that he would be waking up shortly, and that he needed to ask his questions fast if he wanted answers. “When did it come on again?” he asked. “How?”
“One question at a time, please,” said the librarian, adjusting her scarf with an air of impatience. “I had fallen badly ill with an unrelated illness when the nanovirus was at its peak, and was housebound for months. When I finally began to pull out of it, I found my family gone, my neighbors dead, the entire neighborhood in which I and my partner lived deserted—”
“Where did your partner go?” asked Anna.
Brad thought it was kind of an invasive question, but the woman didn’t reproach her.
“She left a note—fled into the mountains, I think, because she knew she had been infected and didn’t want me to catch it from her. I pieced together what had happened by watching the last of the news broadcasts on TV, just before the remaining anchors and reporters went home to be with their families. Three days later, the power went out.”
“But not forever, it seems like,” said Brad.
“Yes, I was getting to that,” said the woman. She smelled faintly of sherry and he wondered if she was nursing a bottle under the counter. “I didn’t have anywhere to go. I had spent most of my life here, never got my driver’s license, and even if I could have stolen a car, it wouldn’t have gotten me very far.
“What, apart from the library where I worked, was motivating me to keep living, now that everything and everyone I had known was gone? I supposed I could hole up here like the man in that old Twilight Zone episode, reading the few classics I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading—but what would be the joy in that, even? Even being an introvert loses its distinct pleasures when there’s no one else.”
Brad could sense that the woman must be terribly lonely, and that she had been repeating this story to herself for weeks waiting for a stranger to come by the library. His heart softened as he realized the inevitable conclusion her story was leading to.
“You were going to take your own life,” he said.
For the first time, oddly, the woman smiled.
“A man with empathy is a rare thing,” she said. “I spent a few days praying about it and finally decided t
hat, under the circumstances, God would forgive me. I was going to take a bottle of sleeping pills and go upstairs to my room and lie down, wearing the scarf that Delia had knitted for me.”
“But you never made it up there!” Brad was surprised to find himself so caught up in the story. “The lights!”
“They came on again,” she said with a serene smile, like a woman remembering an encounter with an angel. “I couldn’t explain how. I searched the entire town and found neither man nor woman. I took it as a sign that someone up there must have wanted me to keep living, that I still had a purpose on earth. I thought about the books I had spent my life shelving and decided that this must be it.”
“To keep shelving the books?” asked Brad. It seemed absurd to him that anyone would seek to continue this job after the world had ended.
“To look after them,” said the librarian, “to be their guardian and steward until the world returns to its senses. There has to be someone to preserve all that was good and beautiful about humanity before the collapse—which I guess is what we’re calling it now. When civilization begins to knit itself back together, there have to be people to remind us that our greatness was never in weapons and warfare, but in art and literature and song and theatre, and the great philosophers and poets, and in how we cared for the poor and needy.”
Brad was torn between his admiration for the librarian’s dogged idealism and his own realism.
“You’re dreaming,” he said with a contemptuous sneer. “Anyone who was meek or gentle or loving or whatever, all your poets and songsters and sonnet-writers, they’re long dead. If they didn’t die of the virus, they were murdered or made into slaves. The world was never truly a safe place for those people, and it’s even less of one now. Whoever told you the meek would inherit the earth had it all wrong.”
“I guess that remains to be seen,” said the librarian, appearing unfazed by his mockery. “They don’t teach a book called Fahrenheit 451 much in school these days, do they?”
Both Anna and Brad shook their heads, embarrassed.
“You really ought to read it,” said the librarian, “if you want to understand how we got the world we’re living in now.”
But Brad doubted that he would ever have time or leisure to read another book.
“How long have the lights been back on?” he asked, mindful once again of his time here running out.
“Since around the beginning of November,” she replied. “You’ll forgive me for not knowing exactly what day it is now. I assume we’re probably adopting a new calendar system now that the rider on the pale horse has mown down a good chunk of humanity.”
“And they come on every day?” Brad was getting slightly exasperated with the librarian’s poetic digressions; she had the dreamy but hard-nosed air of every librarian he had ever met.
“At around sundown. The first morning after they went off again I wasn’t sure they were ever going to come back. But then they returned that night—slowly at first, neighborhood by neighborhood and block by block. How long had you been traveling before you arrived in town?”
“Three or four days,” said Anna. She didn’t elaborate; Brad guessed that she didn’t want to explain the circumstances that had set them on the road to this place.
“And you haven’t seen any other towns with electricity?”
“Not a single one. That’s why we were drawn here.”
“The last man to pass through had the same story.” The librarian looked dissatisfied, as if pondering a mystery she felt powerless to solve on her own. “I wonder what makes me so blessed.”
“Surely it’s just a coincidence,” replied Brad in a tone of impatience. “You can’t really believe someone up there wants you to look after all these books.”
“I don’t see why not,” she said calmly. “If there’s someone up there, why would we assume they hate books? Why would they be indifferent to beauty?” She shrugged and drew the scarf tighter around her neck. “Anyway, I’m hedging my bets that they want me here, and that all of this has happened for a reason.”
Brad felt compelled to argue, but the conversation didn’t progress any further because just then Anna moaned in the darkness and he blinked back into full consciousness. They were lying in the back of the car; she was still asleep, and the fire had only just begun to burn out.
Chapter 6
“I would love to believe it was just a dream,” he told Anna, “but my brain has never been that creative. It was like a movie from beginning to end, the way it unfolded—realer than real life.”
They were seated on the edge of the foldout seat in the blue light of dawn; for the past couple hours a family of robins had been trilling enthusiastically in a tree some yards distant, as if celebrating the overthrow of their human superiors.
Brad found it grimly ironic that the collapse of civilization might have presaged good news for the rest of the animal kingdom. Prior to the disaster, bees and mammals and whales and even the bulk of the world’s insect population had been quietly disappearing, threatened with extinction by human industry and the destruction of natural habitats. Maybe the plague had been nature’s way of snapping back.
He had been disappointed to awaken at 5:00am and find that the last few days of their journey—since they had fallen asleep in the back of the Civic—had never happened.
Even in the dream he had been half-aware that he was dreaming, but he still felt a strange sense of loss as he rose and watched Anna sleeping. Conversations they had never really shared; the sight of the sun rising in hues of pink and teal over a densely wooded, snow-clouded hill; the sense of mystery that consumed the last day of their hike and its resolution in the story told by the old librarian—all of this he would have to explain to her.
“I’ve never had a dream that felt so long,” he said now. “I couldn’t have been asleep for more than a few hours, but it felt like days had passed. I don’t know that I can say I really rested, since I seem to have spent most of the dream walking and now I’m exhausted.”
“You know it was only a dream, right?” Anna asked. “The lights only came back in the dream because some part of you wanted them to come back.”
“I know, I know,” Brad said. But inwardly he wasn’t so sure. Once or twice in his life he had had dreams that were so vivid it was like someone had projected a film reel across the white canvas of his mind. Later parts of these dreams had come true with what felt like uncanny accuracy.
When he was fourteen, the last summer he had stayed with Lee at the cabin, Brad had dreamt that he was wandering across country from farmhouse to farmhouse; but at each house he stopped in he found the lights had gone out and corpses lying on sofas, in the bedrooms, in the bath. The dream had shaken him. Lee had warned him not to think too much about it, that only a fool paid too much attention to the content of his dreams, but he had never forgotten it. In light of recent events it had come to seem eerily prophetic.
“I wish you could have been in the dream,” he said to Anna. “I mean, you were—but as a character, not a spectator.”
He didn’t know how to put into words what he was feeling. There was something unbearably sad about living through an experience with someone only to find that they had no memory of it. Rationally he knew those things hadn’t really happened to Anna, but still it felt like someone had reached into her head and erased her memories.
Sensing how much the dream must have meant to him, Anna softened a little. “What did the librarian say to you when you asked about the lights?”
“Nothing really helpful,” he said wearily. “Mostly a lot of guff about literature and art being the only things man had ever done that were worth saving.”
Anna bristled slightly. “That doesn’t sound like you at all.”
“I was pretty annoyed, honestly.” Brad laughed. “It felt like I was being slapped in the face by the old lady who used to check out my books when I’d go into the library on weekends. She didn’t even seem to care that most of the world’s po
pulation was dead; she just wanted to save the books from being forgotten.”
“Well, it gave her something to live for, at least. I’d imagine it’s probably easier to get up in the morning if you think you’re part of some sacred mission to preserve human culture.”
“I read about these Irish guys one time,” said Brad. “These monks who were living after the fall of the Roman Empire, which must have been like the end of the world for them. They gathered in these monasteries in Ireland and started copying all the great books of the Western world by hand. That’s the only reason we have them. Imagine being that committed to something. Imagine having that much dedication.”
“The only thing I’m committed to doing is getting the kids back,” said Anna. “After that, who knows?”
“There’ve got to be things you enjoyed doing before.” Brad rose and used his coat to stamp out what remained of the fire. Overhead the day was slowly brightening with scattered streaks of cloud in the east. “I’m not even just talking about hobbies. There was a time in my life when hunting was hugely important to me.”
“Maybe I’ll think about having a hobby when I’m no longer worried if I’ll live till morning,” Anna replied quietly.
Brad couldn’t argue with her there, even as inwardly he wished he possessed half the joy in anything that the old woman in the dream had shown toward her beloved books. He had spent so much of the past year just trying not to be murdered that he had almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy things, or that enjoyment was even possible in this battered world.
As they had done so often lately, his thoughts turned toward Emma, the wife of the college professor with whom he’d had a fling some ten years before.
“A woman I admired once told me that everyone needs one consuming passion, even if it’s something as basic as collecting albums on vinyl,” he said.
“You think maybe she was speaking to you through the woman in the dream?”
Normally such a question would have been too mystical for Brad’s liking, but Anna had caught him at an odd moment.
