The alley came to a corner, which I barely wedged around, and then opened upon a high, wide rotunda.
There were no furnishings there, and for the first time in days, I saw not a single book. Fat pillars of greenstone stood in a circle under a flawless, egg-white dome. It seemed the perfect place for giving speeches. The open floor before me was inset with a round, copper plate some thirty feet across. It resembled the Brick Layer’s front door, right down to the embossed figures walking in a circle, though they were subtly changed. Rather than passing their bricks and sharing the load with smiles stamped upon their face, these miserable figures struck at one another’s backs with daggers and with spears.
A man lay on the floor at the precise center of the big coin. He, I presumed it was a he, was dressed in heavy leathers and curled nearly into a ball. His helmet, an old-fashioned iron morion, obscured his face.
The sobbing seemed to be coming from him.
From the brink of the medallion, I called, “Sir, madam, are you all right?”
There was no reply.
Without further deliberation, I rushed to the man’s side. He lay curled, a little protectively it seemed, around a drain in the floor. A child’s pale hand reached up through the iron grating, like a prisoner in a foul oubliette. The sobbing emerged from that bleak recess.
“I’m here,” I said, leaning over the curled man. I grasped the child’s hand.
Then everything went very oddly.
I realized the child’s hand was made of wood an instant before I felt the click of a switch travel up through it. A heavy clang shuddered the floor.
I stepped away from the grate, and the room tilted. The ground ahead of me began to descend. Teetering onto my toes, I glimpsed the darkness hiding under the floor.
I fell backward over the leathered body, and the great medallion leveled again.
My fall jogged the helmet from the man’s head. The skull behind it was as brown as a raisin. I scooted away in revulsion, and the floor sank under me. I threw myself upon the skeleton again, and the ground righted. I tried another direction and was thwarted by the same result. Whichever way I stepped, the whole, heavy plate of the medallion tilted and chased me back into the arms of the corpse.
I was sitting on a plate balanced upon a point, and beneath me was a yawning gulf, a nothing, a bottomless pit.
I was trapped.
(The librarian is asleep, and I am exhausted. I’ll finish this account in the morning— unless some horror befalls me in my sleep. In which case, there will be no point to bragging about the time I cheated death.)
Day 5
(I survived the night! Books make terrible bedding. The librarian is eating breakfast. I think I will endure the stink of it this morning. Somehow, the thought of sitting off on my own has lost its appeal.)
It was quite something to realize I’d been caught in another man’s trap. I had laid so many of my own, I suppose I thought myself immune. Worse, it was an obvious trap: an empty room, a funny floor, an unresponsive body, and the sound of a bawling child. Really, what else could it have been?
But what sort of paranoid and conscienceless person puts a trap in a library? The Sphinx wishes to distinguish himself from Marat, who seems bent of destroying the records of our race for reasons I have yet to fathom but which I presume are ignoble and short-sighted, yet is it any better to preserve the canon of human thought by making it inaccessible and unfriendly to all? One man destroys; the other man hides. The difference is academic.
I do wonder how the Sphinx managed to capture and replay a human voice. His technology is so advanced it hardly makes sense; it just seems a sort of casual magic. It’s bizarre to think that right now Madame Bhata is likely sitting in her web of yarn, sewing a crude record of the day’s events in hieroglyphs and hatch marks. Meanwhile, the Sphinx has divined a method for bottling voices!
How different would the world be if such wonders were to get out?
But, back to the trap.
The grate with the protruding lever of a hand wouldn’t come off, no matter how I pried. The sobbing stopped once the trap was sprung, which was a small mercy. It was one thing to rot in stoic silence; it was quite another to be serenaded to death by a bawling child.
Since I had no choice but to sit so close, I could not help but scrutinize my companion. I came to the conclusion that he had been some sort of errant knight. The antiquated helmet, the leather armor, and the brocaded tabard, balled like a pillow under his head: it all suggested nobility. He had perished coming to the aid of what he thought was a child in distress. Whoever he was, we were kindred at least in this.
I wondered how long he lasted before succumbing to dehydration. On closer inspection, I made the grim discovery that much of his leather jerkin had been systematically chewed.
The thought crossed my mind that the librarian might come to my rescue, and I spent perhaps a quarter of an hour shouting for him. But the more I cried for the cat to come (a bankrupt prospect from the start), the more I wondered what exactly I expected him to do. Fetch a rescue party? It hardly seemed likely. And what had Byron said: once the librarian went looking for a book, nothing turned his head?
I wish to spare myself the embarrassment of recording all the troubled thoughts that spooled through my head while I sat in the lap of the dead knight. But who would I be hiding the truth from? The oblivion of a shelf? The possibility of another trap, another pit I shan’t escape? Or perhaps I wish to hide the truth from myself?
The trouble is, I did not dwell upon the subjects I should have. Faced with a slow death, I should have reflected upon my life with Marya, both the one that we shared and the one we anticipated, a life cut short by my arrogance and prudishness.
But I did not meditate on such regrets.
Instead, I thought of how diligently I had deceived myself in the months since our separation. First, I hid my doubt, then my despair, and then my fear. It seems a conspicuous litany of flaws to blame upon the crumb. I can’t in good conscience do it.
I recalled my impression of the old woman I saw long ago at the foot of the Tower, scouring the Lost and Found with a determination, which, at the start of my own ordeal, seemed far from noble. I thought her weak and neurotic. And I believed I was superior to such a trap. Hope. What is its dimension? How long is it? Where does it lead? When does it become habitual, automatic, the answer not only to doubt, but also to action, and redemption, and living?
Again and again, I thought not of Marya, but of Edith: her patience, her resilience, her poise, and her sound advice amidst all of my bad. I thought of the coincidental embraces we shared, all the occasions when fate put us in each others arms, an innocent thing, but not unaware. Not without feeling. And I wanted to survive, because if I did, I knew I would see her again.
Is that wrong? Is it wrong to miss what is attainable?
I spent perhaps an hour in a state of absolute turmoil before concluding that I would rather die trying to escape than die chewing up my clothes.
The proud headmaster in me resurged, and I thought, ‘This is the sort of thing I can puzzle my way out of.’ Which may seem a completely asinine thing to think. But I have learned a little arrogance in the face of death is not the worst approach.
I studied the copper floor, the green pillars, which marked the shoreline I would eventually have to leap for, and the unblemished dome above. While craning about, I stumbled again and again over my companion. It began to seem a sort of clowning routine. I tried not to think about him because I knew he had stared at this room for hours, days, until he withered away. He had pondered himself to death. Which didn’t bode well for me.
What did I have that he didn’t?
I began to wonder how well the trap would work if a dozen men were standing on the plate when it was sprung. The more men, the more likely it seemed that the unbalance would be sudden and fatal. Even if by some miracle the men were evenly distributed, they would all have to leap clear at once, or most of them would end up i
n the hole.
Probably, the only hopeful scenario was one in which two levelheaded and similarly weighted individuals were standing together on the fulcrum at the moment when the trap was activated. If they had any presence of mind, it would not be too difficult for them to pace in exactly opposing directions, using one another’s weight as a counterbalance, until they both had traversed safely back to solid ground.
And in this lay the revelation: what did I have that my poor stranded companion did not? I had a counterbalance. I had him.
The trouble, of course, was getting a dead man to walk.
But he didn’t have to walk. He could slide.
I spread out his tabard and rolled him upon it, hoping that the length of felt would be as good as a sled. I did not allow myself to dwell on what I planned to do; I suspected on this occasion consideration was the enemy of courage.
I set my heel on the corpse’s side and pushed him away.
I won’t pretend the production went smoothly. I overestimated the skeleton’s weight and almost slid off at once. The slope brought him coasting after me, and I had to leap over him as he flew past. One of us got off center, and the plate tilted in a new direction. I tried to correct it, but sent the gallant knight sliding back to center instead.
After all that hopping and sliding, we were back where we began.
My second attempt was more considered. By degrees, I managed to shift the knight toward the opposite shore of the plate. I shuffled forward, and he retreated; I shuffled backward, and he stopped. Our telescopic dance went on for what seemed hours, but which could scarcely have been more than a few minutes.
When at last I had backed my way to the edge of the trap, it occurred to me that the moment I stepped off the plate, the knight would be unceremoniously dumped into the void. It seemed an unkind way to handle the man who had saved my life, but there was no helping it.
Stepping from the coin, I glimpsed the abyss beneath and the spire upon which the plate balanced. Then the floor fell again, and the knight was gone.
I returned to the crossroads where I had left the librarian and found him curled upon my backpack, sleeping on his tins of food like a dragon on its hoard.
Chapter Twenty
“The lion’s share of blunders occur in the final hour of a job. Pails are kicked, hinges painted over, and brushes lost in the lime. When the end is in sight, mind how you go.”
-The Art of Painting a Barn by Mr. B. Ritter
Day 6
I’ve been monstrously ill all day. I’m rattled by chills and hobbled by vertigo. What I wouldn’t give for a bed, a bed warmer, and a bowl of broth. I’d rather eat a sand dollar than another cracker.
I had hoped my recovery would follow some reliable upward trajectory. Instead, it has felt as if I am surveying the peaks and valleys of a strange hinterland. Down I go into troughs of absolute dread and discomfort, only to ascend some moments later into clarity and calm, which endures just long enough to sharpen the next decline.
When will it end?
I have been repeatedly forced to halt our progress to catch my breath, an event that the librarian, that orange opportunist, uses to beg for food. He has allowed me to doze once or twice, though each time I have awoken from the most appalling nightmares. If my condition worsens, I wonder if I’ll be able to go on. But what choice do I have? What choice did the Sphinx give me? I can almost understand how a man like Marat would come to loath such a cold-blooded master.
For the first time since beginning this terrible errand, I am glad to be alone. I would not want to be seen like this. Dignity is entirely ephemeral; it is like the dust of a butterfly’s wing. Once shed, it is impossible to recover. Besides, I do not wish to extort any more kindness from my friends. They have already lavished enough patience upon me.
Despite my delirium, I think I detect a change in my environment. I don’t trust my senses well enough at the moment to be sure of it, but I suspect I have entered a new hemisphere of the athenaeum.
I still hear plaintive calls and sobs come from the dark rows of the stacks, but I have no difficulty ignoring them now. I have learned my lesson. Though the voices make me feel quite alone.
The librarian must suspect I am ill. Quite uncharacteristically, the furry academic has just spent the past half hour curled upon my lap. I did not dare pet him, but I appreciated the warmth and the company.
Tomorrow will be the seventh day of our journey. I choose to believe it will be the day that I lay my hands on the Sphinx’s book on zoetropes, the day we turn around and start the walk home.
‘Home.’ What a funny word to use for all that lies behind me.
Day 7
I am halfway through my food, and still there is no end in sight. (What a stupid phrase to use while wandering through a maze. Of course the end isn’t in sight! That’s the entire enterprise of a labyrinth!) Tomorrow I will begin to ration the biscuits. Somehow, I doubt the librarian will submit to such an injustice.
What on earth am I going to say to Edith?
Obviously, a proper apology is required. These are not sentiments one can rap through a door. I have been making too much of myself. I am not a man of destiny. The Tower is not punishing me. I am one of millions, and my troubles are really quite usual.
The question I keep returning to is this: when does chasing after lost love turn into self-loathing? Can a soul be loved quite sincerely and just as sincerely lost? The disciplinarian in me wants to believe that punishment is redemptive, but if whipping were any good at reforming a man, would I not be a saint by now?
I must forgive myself. I must beg the pardons that I owe. And I must decide to make my life more than a tribute to past failures.
I have committed to go as far as Pelphia, and I am resolved to do so, though in all honesty, I do not expect to find Marya there. I am sure the Sphinx is clever enough to discover a few details of my rather public life to bait me with. All he had to do was say “red helmet,” and I happily signed my ship away. What a fool. I can’t afford to continue to be so desperate, so naïve. I imperil my friends!
If Marya is not there, I will not carry the search any further. It has been a year since I wandered away from her and she from me, a year since I began turning in this maze, expecting to see the end appear around every new corner.
This must end in Pelphia. One way or another, it must end.
Day 8
I woke up this morning thinking about what I had written last night, which is never a good sign.
Ah, this is the devil of writing in ink! A pencil allows one to speculate and retract, to play a card and then renege. But ink immortalizes gestures and moods and muttered truths. If pencils were all we had, I suspect there would be far fewer books.
I did briefly consider scratching out a line or two of what I wrote, but the specter of Luc Marat’s black library does not linger far from my thoughts.
And the truth is, I don’t want to take it back. I stand by what I have written, and I want to add a further taboo to the record.
I think Edith Winters is an attractive woman.
There.
I haven’t the formal training to elaborate upon this point. That is the domain of poets. They know how to organize an ode, how to polish a woman’s features separately, then arrange them like pieces of fruit in a bowl. They are adept at making astute observations about the troubled quality of beauty; they do not struggle to produce sensitive metaphors. They have the courage to speak.
If there were some form of verse composed only of ellipses, interjections, and parentheses, I would be a bard!
There can be no doubt about it now: the rooms are shrinking, and they have been for days.
At first, I thought I was suffering from claustrophobia, a condition that sometimes afflicted me in my youth. Claustrophobia is such a useless and intense feeling. I know very well the tricks it plays upon the senses: space constricts, the body tightens, and the world seems to inhale forever and ever.
I knew I could not aff
ord to give into claustrophobia, and indeed, my renunciation of the panic was so firm that it persisted even after I began to bang my head on doorways and stir ceiling lamps with my shoulders. When I realized at last that I was walking with my nose down, like a hen chasing a tick, I had no choice but to admit it was not my imagination. The rooms were really growing smaller.
Not only smaller, but less distinct, too. The corners of the rooms, softening at first, have now completely vanished. The white plaster has flaked away, revealing the chiseled stone underneath. All evidence of chambers has ended. If the passage constricts any more, I will be forced to crawl along on my hands and knees. I will have to live as a mole.
All the pretty vestiges of the library, the frescos and gargoyles and flowering capitals, have surrendered to the pinching of space. Except the books— they linger still, though without any shelves. They line the floor at my elbows, lying in the dust, their corners balding in the grit, their pages sagging like fat between the bones of their binding.
One might reasonably expect these books to be the most worthy, the most valuable, and occult of the collection. Why else stow them in such an inconvenient shaft? But they appear to be common novels, fairytales, and quaint family manuscripts. These works are the very soul of mediocrity. It seems appropriate that I squirm among them.
I feel as if I have wandered into a mineshaft, but rather than coal or minerals, books are the ore, the ceiling, and the floor. If I rolled onto my back and plucked a volume from one of the tightly packed ribs above, I believe I would be crushed by the ensuing collapse. What seemed a pleasant perfume in the library, here tastes like depleted air; it is as if these books have breathed all the sweetness in, and exhaled a thin and sour gas.
The librarian slinks before me, his tail raised nearly to the limit of our tunnel. He leads me like a color guard. When he looks back to see if I am still with him, his eyes shine like chartreuse stars. I make no qualms about petting him now when we take our rest. I feel quite fortunate to have him with me.
Arm of the Sphinx (Books of Babel Book 2) Page 36
