Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  He walks past a room full of artfully draped spider webs and candelabras drooping with drippy candles. Someone is playing the organ behind a wooden screen. He goes down the hall and up a long staircase. The banisters are carved with little faces. Owls and foxes and ugly children. The voice goes on talking. “Yoohoo, Jeremy, up the stairthz, that’thz right. Now, come along, come right in! Not in there, in here, in here! Don’t mind the dark, we like the dark, just watch your step.” Jeremy puts his hand out. He touches something and there’s a click and the bookcase in front of him slowly slides back. Now the room is three times as large and there are more bookshelves and there’s a young woman wearing dark sunglasses, sitting on a couch. She has a megaphone in one hand and a phone in the other. “For you, Jeremy Marth,” she says. She’s the palest person Jeremy has ever seen and her two canine teeth are so pointed that she lisps a little when she talks. On the megaphone the lisp was sinister, but now it just makes her sound irritable.

  She hands him the phone. “Hello?” he says. He keeps an eye on the vampire.

  “Jeremy!” Elizabeth says. “It’s on, it’s on, it’s on! It’s just started! We’re all just sitting here. Everybody’s here. What happened to your cell phone? We kept calling.”

  “Mom left it in the visitor’s center at Zion,” Jeremy says.

  “Well, you’re there. We figured out from your blog that you must be near Vegas. Amy says she had a feeling that you were going to get there in time. She made us keep calling. Stay on the phone, Jeremy. We can all watch it together, okay? Hold on.”

  Karl grabs the phone. “Hey, Germ, I didn’t get any postcards,” he says. “You forget how to write or something? Wait a minute. Somebody wants to say something to you.” Then he laughs and laughs and passes the phone on to someone else who doesn’t say anything at all.

  “Talis?” Jeremy says.

  Maybe it isn’t Talis. Maybe it’s Elizabeth again. He thinks about how his mouth is right next to Elizabeth’s ear. Or maybe it’s Talis’s ear.

  The vampire on the couch is already flipping through the channels. Jeremy would like to grab the remote away from her, but it’s not a good idea to try to take things away from a vampire. His mother and Miss Thing come up the stairs and into the room and suddenly the room seems absolutely full of people, as if Karl and Amy and Elizabeth and Talis have come into the room, too. His hand is getting sweaty around the phone. Miss Thing is holding Jeremy’s mother’s painting firmly, as if it might try to escape. Jeremy’s mother looks tired. For the past three days her hair has been braided into two long fat pigtails. She looks younger to Jeremy, as if they’ve been traveling backward in time instead of just across the country. She smiles at Jeremy, a giddy, exhausted smile. Jeremy smiles back.

  “Is it The Library?” Miss Thing says. “Is a new episode on?”

  Jeremy sits down on the couch beside the vampire, still holding the phone to his ear. His arm is getting tired.

  “I’m here,” he says to Talis or Elizabeth or whoever it is on the other end of the phone. “I’m here.” And then he sits and doesn’t say anything and waits with everyone else for the vampire to find the right channel so they can all find out if he’s saved Fox, if Fox is alive, if Fox is still alive.

  The Inheritance of Barnabas Wilcox

  Sarah Monette

  Some four months after I attended the fifteen-year reunion at Brockstone School, I received a letter from Barnabas Wilcox. I was puzzled, for there was no love lost between Wilcox and me, but instead of doing the sensible thing and throwing the letter unopened on the fire, I read it.

  Dear Booth (Wilcox wrote):

  I’m writing to you because you know all about old books. The case is that I have recently inherited a house in the country from my Uncle Lucius, and there’s a stipulation in his will that his library catalogue should be made up-to-date. Would you care to come down with me this weekend and take a look at it? I don’t know anyone else who would even know where to begin.

  Yrs,

  And then an involved squiggle in which a “B” and a “W” were dimly perceptible.

  It took no great leap of intuition to guess that Wilcox’s “Uncle Lucius” had to be the noted antiquary Lucius Preston Wilcox, and that lure overcame my dislike of Wilcox. Friday I took a half-day, packed my bag, and met Wilcox on the platform at quarter of three. He was a big, square, red-faced man, with thick, blunt-fingered hands and smallish, squinty hazel eyes. Despite my white hair, he looked easily ten years older than I; when we shook hands, I smelled liquor on his breath.

  “How are you, Booth?” he said when we were settled in our compartment. “It’s good of you to come.”

  “I, er,” I said. “ . . . I like libraries.”

  “Well, old Uncle Loosh should keep you happy then. I remember, my brother and I used to think the books had to be fake, he had so many.”

  I recollected in time that Wilcox’s brother had died in the war, and asked instead, “When did your uncle die? I don’t remember reading an obituary.”

  “Daft old coot. He wouldn’t have one written. It was the first stipulation in his will, and he’d told his lawyer and his housekeeper and everybody about it. And, after all, there’s no law that says you have to publish one. It’s just that people usually do. But Uncle Loosh was crazy.”

  “ . . . Crazy?”

  “He got into some weird things. He used to write me these long letters saying he’d figured out how to cheat death and was going to live forever. I couldn’t understand half of what he said.”

  “That’s not a very pleasant occupation.”

  “Uncle Loosh wasn’t a very pleasant person. I can’t think why he left everything to me. We didn’t get along.”

  The train began to move. With a muttered apology, Wilcox dug some papers out of his attaché case and settled in to work. I stared out the window and watched as the train left the city behind.

  The estate of Wilcox’s uncle was called Hollyhill and was accurately named in both respects. The house stood on a prominence among the farms and woods of the gently rolling countryside, and was surrounded by as thriving a stand of holly trees as I had ever seen.

  “I shall have those cut down first thing,” Wilcox said as we turned through the gates. “I don’t know what Uncle Loosh was thinking of, letting them grow like that.”

  In the rear-view mirror, I caught the eyes of the driver; his name was Esau Flood, and he had been Mr. Preston Wilcox’s groundskeeper. He was small, very tan, with a head of thick white hair. His eyes were gray and reminded me strongly of the sort of smooth, round pebbles one finds in a swiftly-moving stream. He said, “Mr. Preston Wilcox was very fond of the holly, sir.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Wilcox said disagreeably. “I’m not.”

  “I’m sure not, sir,” said Flood, too politely.

  The house itself was remarkably unattractive, with an aggressively square façade and windows that seemed too small for the proportions. Inside, I was oppressed to discover that the entire house was paneled with dark-varnished oak, and that the windows gave as little light as one would expect. They had uncommonly thick curtains. Wilcox seemed uncomfortable as well; he said several times over dinner that he did not know why his uncle had left him the place, and he was not sure but that the best thing to do would be to sell it—”not that I could find a buyer,” he added.

  “It might be more pleasant without the, er, the paneling.”

  “Oh, but that paneling’s valuable. They don’t make stuff like that any more.”

  “Yes, but it’s quite dark.”

  “Better lights would solve that,” he said, staring up at the chandelier with disapprobation. “Well, that I can take care of tomorrow. I fancy I’ll have to leave you on your own most of the day, Booth. There’s quite a list of things that need buying, and for some reason Flood hasn’t done any of it.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, because I did not want to be a witness to what already seemed like an alarming escalation of hostilities b
etween Wilcox and Flood, “perhaps he didn’t like to do anything without . . . that is, without asking you first.”

  “Good God, it takes no more than common sense to see that I shan’t kick over buying enough plaster to repair a great gaping hole in the cellar wall!” Wilcox stared at me; for a moment he was the bully I remembered from Brockstone. Then he said, more mildly, “I daresay you’re right. Flood and I have rubbed each other the wrong way a bit, but we’ll get along all right soon enough. I know Uncle Loosh couldn’t speak highly enough of him.”

  I managed to mutter something about “time,” and Wilcox turned the conversation to bridge, of which he appeared to be an addict. I do not play myself, disliking any form of activity which requires a partner, but Wilcox needed no encouragement to discourse at length.

  After dinner, he said, “D’you want to look at the library now?”

  “I, er . . . yes, while you’re here to . . . ”

  He rolled his eyes. “Come on, then.”

  The doors to the library—vast, carved things like cathedral doors—were locked. While Wilcox, grumbling, sorted through his key-ring, I examined the carvings. They were crude, almost primitive, in design and execution, and their crudeness bothered me because I could not quite tell what the reliefs were meant to represent. There were trees—I was sure of that—and there was one figure, always holding a box and thus easy to identify, that seemed quite reliably to be human, but the rest of it was disturbingly muddled, so that I could not determine whether the other shapes were persecuting the human shape or obeying its commands.

  “Ha!” said Wilcox and unlocked the doors.

  In the library, at last, we found a well-lit and comfortably appointed room. It was quite large, large enough that it disrupted the severely square proportions of the house by jutting out into the back garden. Although the windows were still small and mean, in the library it seemed almost reasonable that they should be so, since every inch of wall space, including both above and below the windows, was taken up with bookshelves, themselves crammed with books. Where the shelves were deep enough and the books small enough, the books had been double-stacked; everywhere, books had been shoved sideways on top of the rows, and there were stacks on the floor in front of the bookcases, stacks on the desk, stacks on the two small tables—so that the impression was less of a collection and more of an explosion of books.

  “Good God,” Wilcox said faintly.

  After a moment, I said, “You mentioned a catalogue. Do you know . . . er, can you find it?”

  “I don’t know,” Wilcox said, staring around helplessly. “I just know it’s mentioned in the will.”

  “Flood might . . . ”

  “Or the lawyer, Dropcloth or whatever his name is. But I’ll ask Flood.” There was a bell-pull, conveniently situated by the desk; Wilcox pulled it briskly.

  Flood appeared in the doorway, and I thought again how round and flat his eyes seemed. Wilcox put his question, and Flood said, “Oh, yes, sir. I believe you’ll find the catalogue in Mr. Preston Wilcox’s desk. He was making notes just before his last illness.” Flood did not come into the library; it struck me, perhaps unjustly, that he regarded the massed books with some distaste. Wilcox started opening desk drawers and said, “Thank you, Flood, that was all I wanted,” without looking up.

  “Yes, sir. Good night, sir,” said Flood, and I did not like the expression in those round, flat eyes. He vanished as silently as he had appeared.

  “How long was he, er, with your uncle?”

  “Flood? Ages and ages. I remember him from when I was a boy, looking just as he does now. Why?”

  “ . . . No reason. He just . . . that is, I don’t . . . ”

  “He gives you the creeps,” Wilcox said, resorting to the lowest and deepest desk drawer, which seemed to be crammed to the brim with paper. “He does me, too. I don’t expect I’ll keep him on. Get my own people in. New blood and all that.”

  “ . . . Yes,” I said, although I found myself wishing he had not used the word “blood,” and then did not know why it bothered me.

  “This must be it,” Wilcox said; he dragged a leather-bound ledger from the bottom of the drawer, sending sheets of paper flying in a kind of fountain. “Blast. Here, you take a look at this, and I’ll get this stuff back in the drawer.” He shoved the catalogue into my hands.

  Lucius Preston Wilcox’s rigidly legible handwriting marched across the pages of his catalogue like a conquering army. I noted the careful descriptions of the books, including provenances and conditions, and then, obedient to the signs of Wilcox’s growing impatience, allowed myself to be herded out of the library and up to bed.

  I slept badly that night. In itself, that was not surprising. I am an insomniac—I rarely sleep more than six hours a night, frequently no more than four, sometimes not at all—and I am always nervous in strange bedrooms.

  I had not expected to sleep at all, had come prepared with a book on forgers’ techniques. But my eyes grew heavy, and finally the book slipped out of my fingers entirely, and I found myself in a dream.

  Even at the time, I knew it was a dream, which was some comfort. I was dreaming of being a boy again, thirteen or fourteen, the age at which I had most hated Barnabas Wilcox. I was standing on a staircase; in the dream, it was the main staircase at Brockstone School, but I recognized it as the staircase here at Hollyhill, the one I had just climbed in Wilcox’s company on the way to our respective rooms. I was on the landing, by the newel-post, and two boys came running past me down the stairs. I recognized one as Wilcox and tensed, clutching the banister. But they did not notice me; I wondered hopefully if I was invisible.

  I followed them downstairs, where they had been caught by a master and were being scolded for something. He was an old man, with bright, piercing eyes. The dream insisted that he was Dr. Smayle, the Greek master, but I kept thinking that he was really someone else, although I did not know whom.

  “Useless the both of you!” he was saying. “Senseless as stones. Can’t lift your heads above the animal reek of the world, can you, lads?”

  “But, sir,” said Wilcox, “Tony’s dead.”

  At that I recognized the other boy as Wilcox’s older brother, the one who had died in the war.

  “Makes no difference,” said the old man. “Alive or dead, you just can’t see. Your friend would be more use than you are. What’s your name, boy?”

  Then I’m not invisible, I thought sadly, and said, “Booth.”

  “Booth?” said Wilcox, twisting around to look at me, his face sneering. “What are you doing here?”

  “You brought him, you lunk,” the old man said. He wasn’t Dr. Smayle now, and he never had been. “Brought him right into the middle of something you don’t have the motherwit to understand.” I fell back a pace under the hammerfall of his eyes. They were not Dr. Smayle’s kind blue eyes; they were black and hard. “Booth, you said your name is. Stay in the library, Booth. Don’t let Barney drag you out.”

  “That’s right,” said Wilcox. “Don’t come out of the library, or I’ll make you sorry.”

  The dream changed then, became a different dream, a dream of Wilcox chasing me through Brockstone School, Wilcox and his thuggish friends. I ran until I woke up.

  At breakfast, Wilcox looked as haggard as I felt. He did not look like the Wilcox of my dream, but I still felt edgy, as if the fourteen-year-old boys we had been were watching us, each horrified at the perceived betrayal in our eating breakfast together. I was grateful that he did not speak.

  He disappeared promptly after breakfast, with a mutter about “business.” I went into the library and settled down to work.

  There was no great difficulty. The catalogue was carefully kept and accurate in all its details. My worst trouble was in finding each volume; the shelves looked to have undergone at least two partial reorganizations, so that the volumes wedged in sideways might as easily be among Mr. Preston Wilcox’s first purchases as among his last. I ended up making stacks of my own on h
is desk, and it was inevitable that around two o’clock that afternoon I knocked one stack over, sending books sliding across the desk and onto the floor.

  I gave a yelp of dismay and dove after them. Happily, none had been damaged; it was as I was crawling out from beneath the desk, having retrieved the last of them (Life Among the Anthropophagi of the South Pacific), that the corner of a piece of paper caught my eye.

  I realized that it had to be one of the papers Wilcox had dropped the night before. It had slid all the way under the bottom drawer, so that no one who did not crawl entirely beneath the desk, as I had done, would ever see it. I put Life Among the Anthropophagi on the desk and went back after the paper.

  It was a page of notes, clearly belonging to Mr. Preston Wilcox. I recognized the handwriting from the catalogue, and the contents matched up with Wilcox’s description of his uncle’s obsessions. Elliptical and oblique, they were notes to jog the old man’s memory, not to enlighten anyone else. There were references to the holly trees, and to something he called “the Guide” and something else he called “the Vessel.” It did not make sense to me, but I was troubled by a feeling that it ought to, that I had seen something like this somewhere before. But every time I tried to track that feeling down, I found myself remembering my dream of the previous night—Wilcox chasing me through endless hallways, calling me “freak” and “coward” and worse things. In the end, I put the paper on the desk and returned to the catalogue.

  When Wilcox returned, he came to the library and apologized for being so late. Startled, I looked at my watch and saw that it was past eight o’clock.

  Wilcox laughed, not pleasantly to my ear. “Same old Booth. Come on and eat.”

  I went to turn the lamp off before I followed him, and the paper on the desk caught my eye. “Oh! I found this under the desk.”

  I handed it to him. He glanced at it, said, “More of Uncle Loosh’s nonsense, looks like to me. Thanks.” He stuffed it in his pocket, and we left the room.