Rebel in the Library of Ever

by Zeno Alexander

  The Not-Director crossed his arms and looked off to the side with a petulant pout. “No.”

  “Then get in back,” said Lenora, climbing into the chair. “And be quick about it.”

  The Not-Director squeezed in back, muttering all the time about how this was going to ruin his suit and Lenora was going to face disciplinary action, and a bunch of other nonsense that Lenora was no longer paying attention to. For the very first and very last time, Lenora felt some sympathy for those poor Forces, who had had to spend all their days listening to this (here Lenora used a very unkind term, which will not be repeated despite its complete accuracy) go on and on. And on.

  There was now, of course, a large label reading THE BOARD in bright letters. As the Not-Director continued his babbling, the capsule, to Lenora’s great surprise, did not shoot off down its glass tunnel when she inserted the key Zenodotus had given her. Instead, it rose gently into the air. Lenora looked up. Above them, a door was opening in the ceiling. The capsule rose up and through, and soon they were in open sky. Ahead of them was a tower. Lenora looked up and up and up. The top of the tower was surrounded by flames.

  She flinched at a hideous screeching next to her right ear. Somehow the Not-Director had managed to twist himself around so he could see out the windows. “What are you doing? Make it go down!”

  “Shhh,” said Lenora. “I’m flying this tube and it requires my complete concentration. If you are not perfectly silent, I’ll probably lose control and we’ll crash and die horridly.”

  The Not-Director clammed up immediately. The silence was delightful beyond words.

  Lenora looked back up at the tower. The tube continued to float toward its flaming top, leaving her with little doubt that this tower housed the Board. She also had little doubt that she had no idea what she was getting into, that she knew nothing about the Board, and that her bravado back in the Not-Director’s office was perhaps misplaced. She tried to console herself with the fact that an army of librarians was now in open revolt, and that someone would think of something, even if she couldn’t.

  The flames drew near. Lenora became concerned. Though they didn’t seem to be actually burning anything, she wondered what effect they might have on the capsule and its passengers. To her relief, an opening appeared just beneath the flames, a bit of the stone tower wall sliding aside. The capsule floated through, came to a stop on the stone floor, and opened. Lenora got out to find that they were in a large, round room, all stone, completely empty but for a rather dizzyingly tall ladder that went up to the ceiling, ending at a trapdoor.

  There was a tumbling sound as the Not-Director fell out of the tube behind her. He picked himself up and began patting his suit, muttering his list of complaints and threats once more. Lenora was reaching her limits with this man.

  She marched toward the ladder, for there was nowhere else to go.

  “We have to climb that?” shrieked the Not-Director. “I’m not climbing. I want an elevator.”

  “Maybe you can find one out there,” said Lenora, jerking a thumb at the open door leading out into empty sky. “Meanwhile, I’m going up.” Then she had a thought. “Though the Board probably expects the most important person to be in front.”

  This worked perfectly. The Not-Director pushed past her, as though terrified that Lenora might take the lead, and began to climb. Lenora allowed him a generous head start. Whatever was up there, she’d rather have the Not-Director climb into it first.

  The Not-Director was at it again. “Stupid Board! So disrespectful. I should have come here before so they could see who they were dealing with!”

  “Wait,” said Lenora from below. “You’ve never met the Board?”

  “No,” snarled the Not-Director. “I’ve never met the king of Canada either! Who cares! I can’t possibly let everyone who works for me have that privilege.”

  Now Lenora was even more glad the Not-Director was going first.

  He reached the top, Lenora ten feet or so below him, not looking down, though she’d grown quite used to heights by now. The Not-Director shoved the trapdoor wide open, clambered through, straightened himself—

  —and began to scream.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Lenora versus the Board

  Lenora paused, looking up at the screaming Not-Director. Then another voice screamed over his: “Daddy!” And suddenly Ada flew into view, clinging to her father and sobbing.

  At the sight of Ada, Lenora raced up the ladder herself, emerging into a large, round room lit dimly by thousands of candles. There were no windows anywhere to let in sunlight. The room was circled by a dozen or so pillared balconies stacked one on top of another, going all around except for three huge alcoves embedded in a semicircle in the wall.

  Lenora blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimness. For a moment, only a moment, she saw in the alcoves enormous thrones fifty feet high, on each of which sat one of three equally enormous shadowy creatures, all staring down at Lenora and the others. She blinked again, and the creatures vanished. Standing before Lenora now were three people (though of course, as Lenora knew, they were not really people at all). She had seen them all before:

  A woman in a red raincoat, smiling a wicked smile.

  A man in a green raincoat, grinning an evil grin.

  A young girl in a long purple raincoat, baring hideous, sharp teeth.

  Lenora shuddered. The Board had been right in front of her all along.

  Lenora had only moments to take this all in before she was struck from the side. The projectile was Ada, who had hurled herself at Lenora, throwing her arms around her and screaming, “Lenora!” straight into her ear.

  “Yes, yes, I’m here,” said Lenora, struggling to escape while her head swirled with no ideas at all on how to deal with these three creatures.

  For his part, the Not-Director was somehow, again, recovering himself. He had stifled his screams and was patting down his hair and suit and struggling to change the expression on his face from fright to confidence. He jutted his chin out, frowned, and stabbed a finger at each member of the Board, one after the other.

  “Now you listen to me,” he said with command. “The only one who does any firing around here is me. I’m the smartest and make the best decisions. I’m the one in charge!”

  The girl in the purple raincoat laughed sharply, a noise so piercing that Lenora almost clapped her hands over her ears. The girl ignored the Not-Director and addressed Lenora. “Yes,” she said, her pointed red tongue flicking over those sharp teeth. “He’s the one in charge, isn’t he?”

  “No,” said Lenora with as much firmness as she could muster. “Not anymore.”

  “I am so!” cried the Not-Director. But there was uncertainty in his voice.

  “His lies,” said the girl, again to Lenora, “have lost their power. He is beginning to realize that, very slowly of course.”

  “Now just one minute—” started the Not-Director, but he was interrupted by the man in the green raincoat, who spoke only to Lenora.

  “Do you not hate him?” said the man in a voice full of slime. “He destroyed your precious Library, after all.”

  “Well, I don’t think, I, you know,” the Not-Director sputtered. “That’s not—”

  “No,” said Lenora to the man. “I don’t hate him. He was only ever your tool.”

  “What a shame,” sighed the man. “A girl such as you would have made a valuable ally.”

  “I’m not a tool!” yelled the Not-Director. But no one was listening. Even Ada had taken her place beside Lenora now, her hands curled into trembling fists.

  “You get out of here!” Ada cried. “Leave us alone, or I’ll—”

  The woman in the red raincoat laughed. “You’ll what? I can see the fear in all three of you. You know you cannot stand against us. We’re going to devour all of you.” Her nose wrinkled. “Well, maybe not him. He doesn’t look very tasty. We’ll just hurl him into a void outside of time and let him float there forever.”

/>   “No,” whispered the Not-Director. “Please … not Prin—I mean, Ada … not my daughter … I’m—”

  “No,” shouted Ada, leaping in front of her father, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Please! Not my daddy. He can’t hurt you!”

  “No,” said the woman. “He cannot.” She gestured, and Ada was flung several feet through the air, hitting the floor with a hard thud.

  “Ada!” Lenora ran to her, kneeling to place herself between Ada and the Board.

  “Daddy,” whispered Ada weakly. Both girls looked toward her father.

  All three Board members had clenched their hands into fists, pointed straight at the Not-Director. Beneath his suit, things began slithering, things that he struck out at desperately, landing blows all over his body. His face turned red, then purple, and though his mouth was open wide, he made no sound.

  A dark portal appeared, and with a thrust of the Board’s fists, the Not-Director stumbled into it and vanished.

  The portal started to close.

  And too late, Lenora realized that Ada had gotten to her feet and was stumbling toward the shrinking portal, saying, “Daddy … Daddy … no…”

  Lenora leapt to her feet and ran, reaching for Ada, pulling her back from the portal just before it vanished with a pop.

  The Board began laughing, hideously and hysterically.

  Lenora spun to face them. “Don’t you dare hurt him!” she shouted.

  “Oh, don’t worry about him, little one,” said the girl in purple.

  “Yes,” said the man in green, “we don’t care about him. You are the one who ruined all our careful planning, all our decades of work.”

  “We have a special punishment for you,” spat the woman in red.

  The girl in purple grinned her sharp grin and held out her hands. The others took them.

  Lenora took several steps back, as she had seen something like this once before. The Board members were melting into one another like candles, growing larger and larger. Soon they were one hideous person, six times the height of Malachi.

  The monster grinned down at Lenora with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. Lenora looked everywhere for a weapon, but there was none to be found. When she turned back to the creature, it had changed.

  It was a grotesque thing, composed of pure darkness, black eyes glittering. Shreds of its raincoats flapped in tatters on each side, and within the tatters, within the darkness, Lenora could see images rushing past like broken bits of a movie—the entire Library in ruins, ceilings caved in, walls fallen over, weeds winding through the rubble. Here and there she could see fires, hideous blazes with a horrid scent that stung Lenora’s nose, and the Forces of Darkness rushing forward with books in their arms, hurling them into the blaze.

  And all three members of the Board towered sixty feet over Lenora and Ada, standing all alone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Lenora, Fear, and Lies

  The monstrous creature towered over Lenora and Ada.

  And towered. And towered. After a few moments of this, Lenora realized the monster had stopped moving. The flames in the images of burning books were no longer flickering. And beside her, Ada was frozen in place, her mouth opened to scream and her arms raised halfway over her head.

  Everything had stopped. Everything except Lenora. She looked at her hands and flexed her fingers, then looked back up at the Board, wondering how this had happened and what she should do. And then she felt a presence behind her and turned.

  “Malachi!” she cried.

  For there stood the Chief Assistant Answerer.

  The giant woman bent to one knee and reached down to take Lenora by the shoulder. And, for the first time Lenora had ever seen, she smiled.

  “Yes, Lenora,” said Malachi. “Now listen, for we have very little time. The Library is in full revolt. But here and now, the Forces of Darkness are many, and we are very few. I am needed elsewhere. It is up to you to defeat the Board.”

  “Defeat them how?” said Lenora with despair, for she had been sure that Malachi was here to accomplish that very thing. “I’m not powerful like you!”

  “Really,” said Malachi. “Was it I who found a place of safety for librarians to gather their strength? Was it I who saved Zenodotus from the depths of his sorrow, and exposed the Director, and created a rebel army that waited only for your command to strike? You are more powerful than you know, Lenora. And remember, as always—your friends are all around you. I asked one of them to lend you this, in fact.” And into Lenora’s hand she placed an object.

  Lenora recognized it immediately. Rosa’s device, the one they’d used to find the koala, and Zenodotus. But whatever would she do with this?

  There was no time to ask. There was a blinding flash of light, so bright that Lenora closed her eyes. And when she opened them, Malachi was gone, and it appeared that she’d taken Ada with her, for Lenora was all alone. Except for the Board, who had returned to their human forms and were looking around frantically.

  “What happened?” shouted the woman in the red raincoat.

  The man in the green raincoat focused his gaze as though looking at something far away. “Librarians,” he said, shocked. “Everywhere, all over the Library.”

  “That’s impossible,” spat the young girl in the long purple raincoat. Her tongue flicked out between her sharp teeth. “Where have they come from?”

  “We must stop them—now!” cried the woman, and with three popping sounds, the Board vanished.

  I have to follow them! thought Lenora. She gripped Rosa’s location device and pictured the woman in the red raincoat.

  Nothing happened.

  She thought furiously. What had Rosa said? I can locate anyone once I have their image. But the image in Lenora’s mind, of a woman in red, was of course not her true image. The woman had appeared as a huge, shadowy creature, too, and then again as a colossal dark nothingness. Lenora had no idea what her, or rather its, true form was.

  If it even had one …

  Lenora snapped her fingers.

  The creature did have a true form. And it had been revealed when Lenora first met it. In fact, she had encountered this creature a number of times in her life, long before she had ever become a librarian.

  And when Lenora had stood bolted to the floor, terrified, her words coming out in a squeak, she had remembered what Malachi taught her, and the creature had hissed and flinched, giving Lenora time to escape.

  She gripped Rosa’s device. She closed her eyes and remembered all the times in her life when she had been afraid, alone in the dark when she was very young, on her first day at a new school when she knew no one, and that terrible day when her parents told her that her grandmother had …

  Wind nearly knocked her from her feet.

  Lenora opened her eyes. She was no longer in the Board’s chamber, but standing atop some domed structure high up in the sky, with wind gusting so terribly she had to drop to her hands and knees immediately to keep it from hurling her right off the edge. Terror surged through her as she thought, I’m going to fall, and imagined the horrible plunge awaiting her, even as she looked up and saw the woman in the red raincoat standing in the center of the dome, her arms raised, laughing. Lenora struggled to support herself on her trembling limbs, knowing she oughtn’t be afraid. But the wind was still forcing her ever closer to the edge, scraping the skin off her hands and knees.

  And she would fall. She was sure of it. She’d fall, and with that the Forces would take over the Library forever. She had failed. She tried to summon the strength to crawl forward, but could not. She felt one of her knees go off the edge into open air, and then—

  “Lenora!”

  Haruto shot past her. The boy was standing on some kind of disc that hovered in the air and seemed to be powered by something in his backpack, but Lenora didn’t have time to think about that, for he was heading right for the woman in red, who shrieked and dodged, and for an instant her spell was broken and Lenora clawed her way back from the
edge.

  The woman recovered quickly and raced toward Lenora as Haruto flew in a circle around the dome. Lenora felt terror crash down over her once more. A moment later, the woman had Lenora by the arms, laughing, shoving her back toward the edge. But this time, she thought, I will not fall. Haruto will catch me.

  The woman’s eyes flashed red in fury.

  “I am not afraid!” shouted Lenora. “This is my Library, and my friends will always be here for me.” And now she began to push, hard as she could, and this time it was the woman who took a step back.

  With a final shriek, the woman transformed once more, briefly, into a creature of pure nothingness—and then, as though she were sucked away through a straw, she vanished.

  There was no time to celebrate. Lenora waved to Haruto, cried, “Thank you!” over the roar of his hover board, and gripped Rosa’s device. She remembered the lies the girl in the purple raincoat had told her. That Lenora had been fired, and Malachi had been devoured.

  The windswept dome vanished.

  Lenora found herself in a long, columned hallway, surrounded by a whirlwind of action. Everywhere, librarians were running up and down, some of them pushing empty bookshelves back into place along the walls or adding books to the shelves. Strangely, the walls were also covered with hundreds of signs that said things like:

  WAR IS PEACE

  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

  The phrases sounded like famous lines from a book whose title Lenora couldn’t recall. But there was, again, no time to figure this out, for these were lies and Lenora knew the girl in purple must be responsible. She ripped some of the signs from one part of the wall, then another, but when she turned back, more signs had appeared.

  Lenora caught a passing librarian by the arm. “What’s going on?” she asked, gesturing at the signs.

  “I don’t know,” said the harried librarian, who was lugging a box of books and looked quite weary. “We’ve tried tearing them down, but it’s no good. Please, Lenora, do something!” She hurried away with her box. Lenora watched her go, allowing herself one moment of pride at how hard her fellow librarians were fighting. Then she turned her attention back to the matter at hand.