Manx

by Greg Curtis

  Still, he told himself as he rubbed the unguent on his skin, he was alive. Few five year olds dangled in front of a lion and then torn away as they were being mauled, survived. He had. It might have taken hundreds or even thousands of stitches, the care of a dozen physicians, and months of drinking horrible concoctions, but he had survived. Some days he wasn't sure that that was a good thing.

  Then again maybe there was a reason he hated cats he thought as he worked. Lions were after all just big cats.

  After finishing in the bathroom and dressing he headed downstairs to the kitchen for breakfast. And there, while he was eating his oats, he planned his day. Truthfully though, there wasn't much to plan. Really his day would mostly consist of sitting at his desk in the Winstone Library, receiving books, repairing them and then shelving them. He was a librarian after all. Maybe an archivist.

  Maybe that was a strange thing for him to be. He didn't know. His father was after all the Duke of Clairmont. Even though that was a bought title and not a real one, he could have held a much more prestigious position than librarian. Or he could simply have lived a life of ease in one of the family's estates and done nothing at all. But any chance of that happening had died when he was five. When his father, in one of his drunken fits had decided to dangle him from the end of rope over the lion pit. It had been a challenge of some sort, so Manx understood. Someone had bet his father that he wouldn't do it.

  After that he hadn't wanted anything to do with his father. And his father had wanted even less to do with him. Every time his father saw him, Manx imagined, he saw the scars. Maybe his father even understood a little shame for what he'd done. But it was unlikely. It was more likely that he was just an embarrassment to the family. So he had his little cottage in Winstone, where he lived by himself, and his boring job which kept him away from peoples' eyes. His father's estate paid him a small stipend which covered any extra expenses he might have. And he was comfortable. It was probably as good a life as he could hope for considering, he supposed.

  Once he was done with his breakfast, Manx finished dressing and headed out for the day. He walked into the heart of the town as he always did. Even though he could have taken a steam wagon, he had realised long ago that walking was better for him. The physicians said it helped him with his recovery, which he doubted. He doubted fairly much everything they said. The true reason he walked was that with his hat pulled down and his scarf wrapped tight around his neck, he could just be anyone. People didn't notice the scars, and if they did, they certainly didn't see the full extent of them. He was nobody. Just another citizen of Winstone walking the streets. He liked that.

  Of course he was also the nobody who was fighting an ongoing war with the stray cats of the city, the numbers of whom seemed to multiply by the week. The same stray cats that somehow knew he could understand them. And the cats who came up to him every few minutes begging for food. And when he told them that he didn't have any, the cats that started abusing him.

  The people in the street didn't understand that though. The cats were just cats. And when they saw him yelling at the cats, they just assumed he was mad. They even told him off sometimes. Even if he won the battle with the little vermin, he would still lose the war. And they would never stop fighting it.

  It was frustrating, but they weren't actually the most annoying city dwellers he had to deal with. The preachers were. The cats never followed him and they gave up on their insults fairly quickly. The women of the night, usually took no for an answer and looked for someone else. Maybe they also gave up quickly because they saw his scars and decided they wanted nothing to do with him. But the preachers were different. They were driven. God driven perhaps – by whichever of the hundreds of gods they followed. They would follow him. And when they spotted his scars they would follow him twice as far. Promising all sorts of miracle cures, that he knew they couldn't deliver on. He hated that. And sometimes he had to yell at them to go away.

  Manx carried on walking to work as always, and in time after he'd battled the solicitations of the women of the night and done his best to evade the beggars and the street preachers who demanded his coin, the library stood before him. The one spot of colour in an otherwise dreary city.

  Winstone was a city of cobbled streets, dirty red brick walls, the occasional patch of black wrought iron, and slate roofs. If there were any patches of greenery they were small and quickly covered over. It was mostly grey even when the sun was shining. But the city's public library defied the rest of the city. It was full of bright white bricks and huge glass windows. There were copper flashings over the windows and the edges of the great roof, and thanks to their age, they had turned a brilliant turquoise. And best of all, it was surrounded by gardens. It was a monument to colour. And for that reason alone he would have been happy to work in it.

  But he also liked books. Which was why as he crossed the street and headed towards the main entrance, his pace picked up a little. And why the beginnings of a smile found his face as he walked through the huge glass doors.

  “Librarian.” Grace at the check out counter greeted him as he walked in.

  She could have called him Manx, he wouldn't have minded. And no one here knew his true name. But there was a formal way of speaking here, and those who had completed their qualifications were always addressed as “librarian”.

  “Grace.” He nodded to her as he walked through the expansive reading area, which thus far was empty. “Nice looking day.”

  “It is,” she agreed as she continued setting up her station for the day. “But a busy night.”

  “Indeed.” He nodded. Though he wasn't quite sure what she was talking about. He doubted it was the damned cats fighting. He had though smelled smoke as he'd walked here, coming from the other side of the city. Maybe there'd been a fire.

  Manx headed for the stairs at the back of the first floor, greeting a few of the others who were there as he always did. And for a moment he forgot he was a freak. These people knew his scars. They had seen them every day for many years. They had learned not to gasp or stare or look away. That was a precious thing.

  The stairs though brought him down to the basement, a place which he alone worked in. It was here that he would work on the repairs of the books that needed mending. Fixing torn covers, sewing pages back in and glueing broken spines back together. Sometimes he even had to rewrite little pieces of the titles on the cover when they were too faded. And every so often when a book was too badly damaged he had to order a fresh copy from one of the publishers.

  His work was important, he knew. Without him, the library would slowly grind to a halt as it ran out of books. But still he thought as he took his station at his desks, he shouldn't need to be here. People should treat books with greater care. They were valuable things. Things that should be respected.

  Then after hanging up his coat and scarf he began work. He started as always with the books he'd glued overnight, making sure the glue was properly set and the spines bent as they should. And once he was confident that they would hold together he loaded them on to the trolley and wheeled them over to the dumb waiter. From there they would be hoisted up to the main floor to be put back on the shelves, and a new batch of books would be sent down for him to mend.

  After that he set to work on the rest of the books waiting for him on his desks. He had four desks, set out in a triangle with different types of restoration carried out on each of them. And of course each desk had a batch of books piled on it. There were a lot of books waiting for his attention he noticed. But that was normal. This was a large library. It catered to an entire city of a million and a half people. And he was the only restoration librarian.

  At least there was plenty of light for him to work with. It made his mending a lot easier. And he would have a cup of coffee brought down to him for morning tea and lunch and so forth. This was a civilised workplace. It wasn't as though he had to slave in a factory or a warehouse as so many other did. He was luckier than many.

  But
sometimes it was too quiet. He would have liked having someone to talk to. Always assuming of course, that they didn't run screaming at the sight of him.

  Still the quiet let him work, and so he let the hours pass as he put book after book back together as best he could. Some couldn't be repaired of course. Some had been completely ruined. But he did his best. And as the hours passed it was only when he realised that the lunch hour had come and gone that he noticed something wasn't normal. No one had come down to him with his coffee.

  Had they forgotten about him? That didn't seem right. It had never happened before. Sometimes they were a little late in bringing him his drinks, but they'd never forgotten him completely. And yet it was the only explanation he could think of.

  Meanwhile he was thirsty, and he wanted something to drink to go with his sandwiches. So he wrapped his scarf around him and pulled on his hat and headed for the stairs.

  “I wouldn't do that, old man,” a woman's voice came out of the gloom.

  “I'm not old,” he protested, before he realised that the speaker was a cat. There was something about their voices that he could always identify. “And what are you doing in here?”

  “It was noisy up there. All those people running around, screaming. I was trying to nap. And then there was the fire.”

  “Fire?” Manx's eyes widened. “In the library?”

  “No!” She snapped at him. “Of course not dolt! Are you in your dotage! Why would I have come here if it was on fire?! Do you think I'm as stupid as you monkeys?!”

  Manx stared at her, the little white and tabby cat that had walked out of the shadows, and realised there was some reason in her words. But that didn't change the fact that she was telling him that something was very wrong above. So he put his foot on the first of the stairs and started up.

  “Well don't say I didn't warn you fool!”

  Manx ignored her and continued on up the stairs. But he was careful not to go rushing too quickly into a dangerous situation. And as he walked higher above the stairs, he could hear something of what the cat had been talking about.

  There were people yelling. Running too, though the sounds of their foot falls were muffled by the double doors at the top of the stairs. And in the distance he could hear what sounded like gunfire. It was faint, which surely meant it wasn't in the library itself, but the sound was distinctive.

  When he reached the top of the stairs and the landing, he stopped and tried to peer through the glass windows in the doors. But they were rough, reinforced glass panes that didn't let him see anything clearly. So he carefully pushed one of doors open a crack, so he could see what was happening.

  Unfortunately he couldn't see anything because on the other side of the doors was only an office area. But he could hear things much more clearly. And what he heard was frightening.

  The screaming was louder, and there were definitely guns being fired. But there were explosions too. Cannons? Or bombs? He didn't know. But worse than that, he could smell smoke. Something was definitely burning.

  Eventually, when he realised that none of it was inside the library, he risked opening the door a little wider and creeping out into the open office area. And then he crouched low when he realised there were no walls for him to hide behind, just desks and chairs and a few columns. Then he crept closer to the front desks so he could look out over the ground floor of the library.

  There he discovered that he wasn't alone. He could see others taking shelter behind shelves of books or whatever else they could find. Hiding. More were on the first floor. He could see their faces poking out between the rails of the balustrade that ran from the top of the stairs right around the centre of the floor. And if he could have seen that high, he would have guessed that there were more people doing the same on the second floor, and all the way to the roof.

  Obviously the library had become some sort of shelter from whatever was happening outside. That was probably a good thing. But it still didn't tell him what was happening. And one look at the frightened faces of those inside the library told him that they weren't going to tell him anything either.

  So eventually, once he felt a little more in control of things and his heart wasn't beating quite so fast in his chest, he risked standing up and then creeping over to the front of the library so he could peek outside.

  But when he did, he immediately wished he hadn't. Because the first thing he saw was a three headed hound running down the street, snorting fire everywhere.

  “Balls!”

  Hell-hounds! It was definitely a hell-hound! His mouth fell open at the sight and his stomach caught fire. He knew what the beast was, if only from reading a great many books about demon beasts. It could be nothing else! But he also knew it couldn't be. Because there were no such creatures. They were all just the imaginings of various writers – most of them likely out of their minds on spirits.

  This was the modern world. They had steam and electricity. Ships that floated through the skies. They didn't have demons! And they certainly didn't have huge three headed dogs that breathed fire!

  Unfortunately as he watched the beast stop and turn around in its tracks and then rush at the soldiers busy firing on it, he didn't think it looked very imaginary. It looked very real – and very deadly. And he suddenly understood why the cat had taken shelter in the library. Cats didn't like dogs at the best of times. This one she surely had to hate!

  Manx stayed at the window, leaning against the solid wall and peering out through the corner of the glass at the street beyond, wondering if he had gone mad. Because what he was seeing wasn't sane. And there were more than just hell-hounds out there.

  He saw black horses with hooves of fire and the wings of ravens, racing past. Sometimes flying, sometimes galloping. Nightmares? He saw soldiers in black armour with black horns on their helms, riding them. And he saw the city guards falling in the streets. Their rifles seemed to have little effect on the black knights. Or the beasts.

  There were fires raging all over the city, judging from the giant columns of smoke rising into the air. And people cowering and taking shelter everywhere. There were bodies too – and not just those of the guards. Regular people had been killed. Obviously whatever had begun on the other side of the city had made its way to the city centre.

  In time he realised that there was one thing he didn't see. Organisation. There was no sign anywhere in front of him of these beasts and the black knights being formed into military units. Instead it was as though they were all just monsters and killers let loose on the city. Running and killing at will. But not trying to take over the city or do anything as an army.

  What did that mean, he wondered when his wits finally returned to him? Soldiers that weren't soldiers? Wild demonic animals simply running free? No sign of an army? He didn't know much about military matters, but that seemed wrong.

  And why hadn't they come into the library? They could have. They probably should have if they had any sort of plan. It was a big, open building right in front of them. But for some reason they weren't approaching. Maybe it was because the building had been blessed? In the name of Atan himself – the Father of the Gods?

  Then a thought struck him as he sat there watching his home burn. A strange one. These creatures weren't going to like fog. They had fire within them. Whether they breathed it or it burned from their hooves, they had fire. And fog was moisture.

  So he started calling it. It didn't matter that he was in a building or that it was a sunny, dry day. Just then his fear and desperation lent him all the strength he needed, and soon he could see the fog rising from the streets. Lifting up in the library too. All of the water that was around was rising into great white clouds that filled everything.

  The other people gasped when they saw the cloud rising inside the library – but they didn't realise it was his doing. They probably thought it was the beasts – and it frightened them.

  In time the fog became thick. So thick that he couldn't see anything. But it didn't matter. He heard th
e sounds of the hell-hounds and knew they were howling not in savagery but in pain. The fog was working. Damping their fires. Weakening them hopefully.

  For a few precious moments he had hope. He even dared to believe that this might be over.

  But he should have known better. Because a few minutes later a wind came from out of nowhere and his fog was blown away – at least outside the library. That wasn't a normal wind, he knew. It was magical. But somehow that didn't surprise him. Hell-hounds and horses with hooves of fire weren't normal either. It worried him though. At the least it meant that somebody had spotted his magic. Somebody with magic of their own.

  He decided not to risk bringing whoever it was to him and so quickly began thinning the fog around the library. That way if someone did arrive, they wouldn't know that the magic had come from there. And then he stood there and waited nervously. Would someone arrive? He didn't know.

  What he did know was that his fog had had an effect on the hell-hounds. They looked sick. Or maybe just sluggish. Their fire wasn't burning as hot. The black horses were simply missing. Maybe they'd run away. Or flown away. The knights in the blackened armour weren't around either. But he didn't know what that meant.