by Paula Guran
“Who was he?” Eleuthere asked.
“He . . . I loved him.”
The words ripped her open all over again, leaving the wound of him fresh and bleeding.
“He wouldn’t burn a Library.” Alba scrubbed tears from her eyes.
“War changes people.” Eleuthere’s etched teeth showed fierce in the globes’ moon-colored light, her ink black eyes hard.
“You go to war for an ideal, an idea, and it breaks you. You come back a ghost, haunted, dreaming of flame. You come back sick, hating ideas. What are books but ideas? You start to believe if you burn them, it will stop the pain.”
Alba stared at the novice. The ghost of flames lay deep in the blackest part of Eleuthere’s eyes, ink-drowned, but still there. The novice lifted her sleeve, bringing the words on her wrist inches from Alba’s face.
“There are scars under the ink,” she said. “I came to the Library to burn it, years ago.”
“You were a soldier.”
“The books, the words, saved me.”
“Show me how?” The words slipped, small and pleading into the space around them.
Eleuthere’s gaze didn’t waver. She lowered her sleeve, unpitying. “I already did.”
Alba caught her breath. Words, singing through her skin, words filling her, burning her to ash, and building her anew. She tried to hold onto the sensation, tried to remember love was small, and these words were vast enough to swallow her whole.
Her heart tripped on memory, regret. She could scale the shelf, pull her lover down, run. She could hide deep in the mountains.
And live on what? Words never spoken?
The words here lived—shouted onto paper and skin, pressed into her bones with Eleuthere’s hands, with her sweat, with her teeth and tongue. Alba’s books in the Main Hall were crowded with words. Her dead lover was wrapped in them. They were worth speaking; they were worth saving.
“Show me again,” Alba said.
The hardness in Eleuthere’s eyes faded, the fire dimming to smoke again. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. She held out a hand, and Alba took it, enfolding herself in Eleuthere’s arms. The novice’s words sang against her skin.
There is a story they tell, of the day the Library burned, and the day the Library was born. An acolyte and a novice became librarians in the deepest, most secret reaches of the old Library. They returned from those reaches, dust-soaked, sweat-streaked, and shouted into the Library’s silence. They shocked the old librarians’ hoods from their heads, revealing ink dense skin.
“Look,” they said. “Listen. We will tell you how to save the Library. No more secrets. No more silence. No more fear. These words are for everyone.”
And so they wrote on skin. They carved in teeth. They inked burial shrouds, and mummy wrappings. Where flesh had decayed, they etched in bone. They scrawled on living flesh, too, recorded prose and poetry in the beat of heart and blood.
Not just librarians, but novices, apprentices, and acolytes. They gathered the living and dead, working feverishly, scorning sleep to breathe poetry, shout verse. They pulled books from the shelves—ancient scrolls, fat leather tomes, skinny cloth-bound volumes, and wooden panels. They piled them high in the Main Hall. They smashed glass globes and clay tablets, breathing in dust. It wasn’t a funeral, but a wake; not a murder, but a celebration.
Hand in hand, inked skin to inked skin, the new head librarians stood by the pile they had made. Together, Alba and Eleuthere threw the first match. Not a holocaust, but a pyre—a joyous blaze sending the books spiraling up to the stars. Each librarian, novice, apprentice, and acolyte threw a match in turn. The books roared; they wept. They laughed. And they sang.
Words danced on sweat-slick skin and flashed from carved teeth. Shedding their robes, naked, the librarians, novices, apprentices, and acolytes, marched out into the snow, carrying the dead on their backs. Alba’s lover lay draped across her shoulders, his legs bound around her waist, his arms about her chest in a last embrace. Eleuthere walked beside her, holding Alba’s hand. The other denizens of the Library followed behind them.
Laughing, shouting, crying, singing, living and dead, they streamed down the Mountain to meet the soldiers climbing up with torches in their hands.
Wild and fierce, they were librarians all. Flame lit, they were beautiful. With the dead strapped to their backs, with love and madness in their eyes, they met the soldiers, who stopped, and stood aghast to find the Library already in flame.
The librarians, who were also books, who were a library of blood and skin and bones, embraced the stunned soldiers. They touched lip to lip, and breathed tales. They quieted ghosts with song, with fairy stories, with ancient histories, and new philosophies. They poured words from skin to skin; they crowded the empty spaces inside the war-haunted women and men until the ghosts had no choice but to flee.
They lay together in the snow, and their burning skin melted it around them. When the soldiers rose again, they were weeping, and laughing. They were Librarians, too. They joined the parade of mad women and men flowing down the mountain, carrying words, an unstoppable tide to drown in beauty the world.
That is the legend of the old Library, written in the stones of the new Library, built into the side of a cliff overlooking the sea. The halls there echo with the crash of waves. No one is forbidden to speak in the new Library. There is laughter. The words of the books lining the walls are shouted aloud—Alba and Eleuthere, the head librarians, encourage it.
The walls are white stone. The librarians’ eyes and robes are sea-glass green. The pages of the books taste of salt. They taste of sweat and ink, printed on a lover’s skin. Gathering words on the tongue, straight from the source, is encouraged here, too.
One day, men and women may come with torches in their hands to burn this Library down. But the books, the words, will go on and on.
What Books Survive
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature is dumb, science is crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.—Barbara W. Tuchman.
My Chronicle Diary Historical Account of What Happened After The Invaders Came, by Katie Scarlett Marsden, Age 16? (and yes, that is a deliberate Adrian Mole reference, so there)
My brother Otis caught me, the first time I tried to sneak out through the barricade. I remember when he wasn’t such a boy scout, but we’re all different now.
“Don’t be thick, tadpole,” he said to me. I hated that nickname. It reminded me of the river we had lost; of the muddy, happy weekends before everything ended. “There’s nothing out there any more.”
“Nothing that you care about,” I snapped, and went straight home so he would think he had won.
Everyone in town acted like the barricade was it; the thing that would save us from the invaders who had come crashing in from the skies. I guess it made them feel better. But how could the barricade be good when it cut us off from everyone and everything else?
Our family was lucky. At least our house was on the right side of the eight-foot wall they built of broken things and piled earth and dead cars. We didn’t even have to take in guests from the abandoned houses, because there were already five of us: Mum, me, Otis, his girlfriend Frances, and the baby.
Everyone’s so busy being frightened, pretending that the barricade will fix everything, that no one ever talks about what was left behind. The stuff that’s smaller than houses and roads and the river, anyway. The really important stuff.
They talk about how sensible it was to keep the town hall, so we have a central point for meetings, and we can use that for the school too, when there aren’t town meetings (our town likes meetings, twice a week—as good as the barricade for making people feel safe).
No one talks about the fact that when we built the barricade, drawing the line along Wharton Street and Mansfield Avenue, we didn’t just leav
e the school on the other side, and half the shops, and the river.
We left the library.
My house is full of books that don’t work. That’s the worst thing about the invasion. Well, okay. Not the worst thing. But it’s not like people were shot out of the sky, bodies lying in the street or anything like that. The invaders don’t care about us, as long as we stay behind our walls.
Meanwhile, nothing electronic functions. Computers, TV, phones. Our shelves are full of DVD cases full of shiny silver discs we can’t watch. Everyone’s acting like the world we knew is going to come back any minute.
What if it doesn’t come back? We have a dozen actual paper books in our house, and I’ve read all of them. Most people have less. When they drew those big red lines in the map, they thought about space to hold school lessons once things are back to normal, but no one thought about what they were going to hold lessons with. Slate and chalk? What happens when all the ink runs out of the biros?
Anyway. That’s not my problem. Not like I’m trying for a uni place now.
I just want to read the second half of Wuthering Heights.
There was a scream. Three weeks ago. Not a person screaming. It was like the sky filled with scream, from edge to edge. I was lying on my bed with some stupid soap blaring at me, and music drilling into half my brain through a single earbud, with my Kindle resting against my knees. One more book to go. I’d figured, reading all the Brontës, that was an easy project for my class reading assignment. There were only three of them, right?
Should have guessed from the smirk on Ms. Hopkinson’s face, what I was getting myself into. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall went okay, and then Jane Eyre basically kicked my arse six ways from Sunday, and then it turned out that Charlotte (officially my LEAST favorite Brontë) had written tons of books. Screw that. One book per sister, I decided.
And I only had three days left, before the assignment was due. But Wuthering Heights was brilliant. It was spooky and weird and kept changing voices. I hated everyone in it, and I wasn’t sure what a moor actually was, but I couldn’t stop reading.
Catherine died. Like, she actually died, and it was only halfway through the story. What the hell was that about? Was she going to come back as a zombie or something for the second act? I wouldn’t put it past Em and her nasty sense of humor (me and Emily Brontë were on first name terms by now).
Then the sky screamed, and my TV flickered, and my iPod went silent. I saw something, on the screen of my Kindle, and then reflected in the TV screen too. A face. At least, I think it was a face. Whatever it was, it sure as hell was not human.
Wuthering Heights turned into a mess of pixels as the Kindle shut down, and then there was nothing there but one of those weird line drawings of dead authors. Only, it wasn’t a dead author at all, was it? It was the same face that had stared out from the TV screen. The same face that stared out from every electronic screen, it turned out, when the sky screamed. Before the world stopped working.
The second time I sneaked through the barricade, Otis didn’t stop me.
I felt like a criminal at first. I tried to walk really softly on the pavement, even though I was already wearing sneakers, and not exactly clomping around. I walked close to the side, near the fences of abandoned houses, so my shadow wouldn’t give me away.
It was night, but there was a decent sized moon, enough for me to see the world. I was wearing dark jeans, the pair that already has a rip in them (and where am I going to get new ones?).
I used to walk this way every day. From home to school. It takes maybe seven minutes, unless I stop to chat or hover around the corner shop for too long.
There it was, the old corner shop. The windows were broken and the door half bashed in, from the embarrassing half-riot that had gone on during the building of the barricades, before everyone came over. The whole town went crazy for about ten minutes, then regretted it. I could see cans of food on the floor of the shop where they had been dropped in the panic. There was still a display of chocolate bars by the counter. They wouldn’t be too gross, right? Not after only four weeks. But I couldn’t bring myself to step inside.
It felt like they’d know. The invaders. Bad enough I was out on the wrong side of the barricade. They’d know as soon as I touched the chocolate. If I was going to get in trouble for stealing (rescuing!) something, it wasn’t going to be junk food. It was going to be for a book.
My backpack hung loosely from my shoulders. I hadn’t brought anything in it, not even water. I didn’t want to waste an inch of space. My mouth was dry and yuck already, though, and I couldn’t help thinking about the closed fridges in the shop, full of bottles of Coke. Sure, it would be room temperature, but it would still be Coke.
Later. Maybe. Books first.
The school looked undamaged at first. Empty, like on the first day of the holidays. But the thought of crossing that wide asphalt yard to get to it was too much. I already felt exposed, and there was moonlight sweeping across the black space. So I kept to the wall, following it around until I got to the front gate, with all the scrubby bushes and the gum trees. The windows were broken on this side, and the school looked a whole lot less okay.
Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Maybe there wasn’t anything left worth saving inside.
But I had to try.
I scurried up the little path to the doors. They were locked, and barred. Of course they were. The adults might have been making some pretty dumb decisions lately, but they weren’t completely stupid.
One of the windows had most of the glass missing, and I found a loose brick in the corner I could use to knock the rest of the pieces through, one by one. With every small crunch of glass, my stomach twisted hard, and I checked behind me a million and twelve times.
Finally, I clambered in over the windowsill and landed on the glass-strewn lino.
Inside was safer. It had to be. The invaders didn’t come within our walls. It was one of their rules, right? So I was okay. I was alone in my old school, only one staircase and a couple of corridors away from where I needed to go.
That was when I heard the music.
It was so quiet I wasn’t sure at first, but as I got closer to the library . . . oh. It was coming from there.
The music didn’t sound right. It was uneven and sort of scratchy, and one of those old fashioned tunes that they wouldn’t even cover on Glee, something that lived in a black and white movie.
The music hit me full in the face as I opened the doors. It felt heavier than I was used to, from mp3s and e-videos. It vibrated through the carpet into my feet.
I want to be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you . . .
It was a record. I could see it now. An actual record playing on an actual record player. I’d seen them in the tip shop from time to time, but never actually seen one working. Even Nan has a CD player, and iTunes.
(I haven’t heard from her since the invaders came. She lives in Newcastle, and it’s just too far to hear from. I hope she’s okay.)
The needle reached the end of the track and sort of jerked for a moment. Then a hand snaked out, and lifted it off the record.
I froze, but didn’t yell or anything. I just backed up, towards the doors.
“You don’t have to run anywhere,” said a lazy male voice. “Safer in here.”
“Oh, you think?” I said back, like I wasn’t freaking out.
“Safest place in the world, libraries.” There was a squeak as a chair spun around. I sidled around the desk, to get a look at him. Oh.
He was younger than I’d thought from his voice, but still older than me. Definitely out of high school. Not old enough to be a teacher. And I’d never seen him before, not ever. He wasn’t one of us. “What’s your name?” he asked, leaning back in the chair, spinning it slowly around. He had a ponytail, and battered jeans. A jacket that had taken some damage, with charred marks around one sleeve. But maybe he just wore it to look cool, like he was all dangerous.
He didn’t look c
ool, incidentally, scorched leather aside. He looked thirty or more years out of date.
“Ka— Amy,” I said, too late realizing that I didn’t want to give him my name.
He raised his eyebrows, like I’d said something funny. “Nice to meet you, Kay-amy. Welcome to my castle.”
“It’s not yours,” I said, angrier than I had expected to be, now I wasn’t afraid of him. He looked like too much of a slacker to be dangerous.
“I bet you went to school here. Good girl, were you? Popped in to pick up your homework?”
“I came for a book,” I said crossly.
He leaned forward, suddenly intent. “You came through the hole in the barricade on the far end of Mansfield, yeah? Walked down Susann Street to come in the front entrance of the school?”
That was creepy. Really creepy. “How did you know that?”
“Because,” he said, shrugging back into his chair like my confirming his guess made me uninteresting all over again. “The other obvious way is around Mitchell Lane, and if you’d come that way, the Observers would have wiped you out.”
What was a girl supposed to say to a line like that? “I don’t believe you,” I said, though I sort of did. I didn’t want to think about it. How stupid was I? I’d heard the rumors, even without radio and TV. There was a reason all the adults were so hot on barricades, and a reason that the invaders hadn’t just blown our new walls apart.
Observers, everyone called them. I wasn’t even sure what they were—cameras, I guess, or mines, or something in between.
No one who ever saw one survived it.
The rule was, if we didn’t move around, if we stayed inside the barricades, we stayed alive. I knew that. And I’d risked everything for a stupid book.
Well, not a stupid book. A really good book.
“Help yourself,” he said, waving one hand. “Plenty of books here. Grab an e-reader while you’re at it. Maybe you can trade it on the black market for some bubble gum.”
“Funny,” I said, glaring at him.
He put another record on, another stupid old song that I remembered from some Saturday afternoon old movie, and lost interest in me altogether.
