Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  I stomped off to the Classics section. What else was there to do? My plan was to save the books. There were a good number of real books floating around of recent releases, if not in our town then in general, around the world. But classics . . . ever since they started loading hundreds of famous old books on to every e-reader they sold, I don’t know anyone who bothered to buy the Brontës or Shakespeare in hard copy.

  My mum used to have a whole lot of them, battered paperbacks and a few nice hardcovers. I hadn’t read most of them, but I loved the bright covers all lined up unevenly on the shelves. My favorites were the Penguins, spine after spine in brilliant orange. So many books I was planning to read, when I got a chance.

  One holiday, when I was staying at Nan’s, Mum cleared off half her shelves, boxed up the books and took them off to the tip shop. “I’ve got them all on the Kindle,” she said impatiently, when I yelled at her. “We needed the space.”

  2

  I spent my whole allowance at the tip shop that week, buying back The Three Musketeers and Playing Beatie Bow and a whole row of Agatha Christies. She thought I was mad, but I liked looking at them, rearranging them on my shelves.

  In the library, now, I stashed a handful of Jane Austens in my backpack. I wasn’t a particular fan of Lizzy Bennet and that crowd, but they were my Mum’s favorites, and she was going to need them.

  I picked books out carefully. I wasn’t sure if I was coming back here again, not after what the creep had said. Maybe he was lying and maybe he wasn’t but . . .

  Should I pick books because of posterity and shit like that, or should I just be selfish and save the ones I wanted to read? It wasn’t like anyone else was coming to salvage anything from this library.

  No one but me and him.

  I stomped back to the main area of the library. He was still there, swinging his foot and listening to his stupid old record player. Where had he even got that from? He must have stolen it from the antique store or something. They wouldn’t have one here in the school.

  “How do you know about the Observers?” I snapped. “Or were you just trying to sound impressive?”

  “Impressed you, did I?”

  “Don’t try so hard. No one’s ever seen them. Not and survived.”

  “Maybe no one in your hick town. I know people. I hear things. I know what to look for.”

  I glared at him. “Fine. If you’re so smart. Where’s Wuthering Heights?”

  He laughed at me. “Is that what you came all this way for? Emily Brontë? That’s so earnest of you. If I was going to risk my life for an author, I’d stick to one who’d bothered to write more than one book.”

  “She died of consumption!” I yelled at him.

  He shrugged and looked away. “Try to leave the Asterix comics when you make off with your backpack of contraband, yeah? I don’t want to be left here completely without culture.”

  The school library had six copies of Wuthering Heights. I remember that. I remember looking at them on the shelf a month earlier and thinking it was kind of dumb, really, because there were so many e-readers and they all pretty much had it on there as a freebie. Why would they not be on the shelf now?

  I didn’t have time for this. I was going to get into so much trouble if I was caught. I whirled back and grabbed books quickly, filling my backpack. I grabbed history books, and poetry, and a bunch of Dorothy Sayers novels. I left some space at the top, just in case Emily Bronte turned up, and finally found what I wanted, several battered paperback copies of Wuthering Heights, hidden on the lower shelf of the Recent Returns (ha!) trolley. I picked the one in best shape and hugged it to my chest like it was a treasure map.

  “I can tell you how it ends,” said the creep as I walked past him, on my way out.

  “Don’t.”

  “If you really want to know . . . ”

  “I’m going to report you, when I get back.”

  “No, you’re not,” he said lightly.

  “You could be a spy. I sneaked out, but that doesn’t mean I’m not . . . ”

  “A patriot? A good girl? A law-abiding citizen?”

  I stared at him for a moment. “Stupid. I’m not stupid.”

  “When you report me,” he called after me as I left. “Call me Heathcliff. With two fs.”

  I gave him the middle finger, and went home. Slowly. By the safe route.

  I hid the books under the bed for a month. I didn’t realize it at first, but Wuthering Heights hadn’t made it home with me. I searched my backpack three times, and asked if anyone had been in my room, but they all ignored me.

  So much for my rescue mission. So much for Emily Brontë.

  When they finally got around to setting up school lessons in the town hall, I volunteered to make a database of all the hard copy books owned by people in the town, as an independent project.

  My teacher was delighted with the idea. We had three teachers. Which is odd, because the school had at least fifteen, and I’m pretty sure none of them died in the invasion. I would have heard. Maybe some of them didn’t come inside the barricade. Maybe they were off somewhere selling black market copies of Gothic novels for food and medicine.

  Maybe they didn’t want to be teachers any more. A lot of people refused to do their old jobs, now that the world was different, and our town was stuck behind a wall.

  My brother Otis used to have an apprenticeship as a mechanic, but he stopped bothering when the invaders came. He didn’t help Frances with the baby much either. He hung out with the other men who called themselves the town militia, and marched up and down the inside of the barricade, acting like tools.

  He didn’t care about books. Lots of people didn’t care about books. They acted like I was crazy, most of them. My mum even got angry at me once, like collecting the books and keeping track of who owned what was somehow—admitting that the electricity was never coming back.

  Then they moved the barricade.

  I didn’t realize at first, but Otis and Dad were gone for lunch, and I overheard them talking when they came back. “What do you mean, Martin Avenue is gone?”

  “Town business,” my dad muttered.

  “That means it’s everyone’s business,” I said sharply. “What happened?”

  My dad shuffled off into the house, leaving Otis to tell me. “No one’s heard from the Jacksons in three days. One of our patrols evacuated the rest of the families this morning. New barricade is more defensible.”

  I wanted to argue, to scream. Defensible against what? Either we’re safe inside the barricade, or we’re not.

  “Are the Steeles okay?” I asked finally. “And the Hopkinsons?” I didn’t want to think about the Jacksons, about what might have happened to them. Now they were on the other side of the barricade, so if they were okay, they wouldn’t be for long.

  “They had to leave a lot of their stuff behind, but they’re alive. We’re sorting out accommodation now.”

  Their stuff. I looked at him, stricken. “Their stuff? But forty percent of the town’s Mills and Boons were archived with Mrs. Hopkinson. We’re already running short!”

  “Katie, when are you going to stop with all this book crap?” he roared at me. “We’re trying to stay alive here. Survival doesn’t have time to stop for a cup of tea and a nice bedtime story.”

  “Then what are we surviving FOR?” I retorted, and walked away from him.

  So yeah, I went back. You saw that coming, right? Maybe I was crazy, maybe it was post-invasion syndrome or whatever they’d be calling it on TV if we still had working TVs.

  But Wuthering Heights had vanished, and I knew there were more copies in that library. And. And the book supplies were getting smaller, and.

  And. And.

  We weren’t safe behind the barricade. We all knew that, now. I didn’t know how to deal with that knowledge. I didn’t even know how to deal with all the adults around me, pretending they weren’t freaking out just as much as I was.

  So after I sneaked through the barrica
de, on a night with barely a sliver of moon in the sky, I didn’t go to the school by the same route I had used last time. I went the Mitchell Lane way.

  People all said something different, about what observers looked like. They were CCTV cameras, they were spiky silver balls that hovered in the air, they were actual people, they were robots, they were . . .

  I didn’t see any of those things, that night. I walked slowly, keeping to the shadows, step after step, looking up at every window, the line of every roof.

  Maybe he had just been screwing with me. That was a distinct possibility, right? It was the dickheadiest thing he could possibly have done, and I had no doubt he was capable of a lie like that, just to see what my reaction would be.

  Then I saw it. A small, bright white smudge in the darkness. A pool of light that moved slowly across the road ahead of me, only there was nowhere for it to come from. It wasn’t moonlight, or streetlight. It was something else.

  It was growing. The whiteness spread like psychedelic milk spilled from a plastic bottle, out and out and out.

  I turned and ran, and had no doubt that it was following me.

  A few minutes later, I slammed the front door of the school behind me and leaned against it, gasping for breath. I had come here. Why had I come here?

  Oh. Because an observer was following me, and I didn’t want to lead it—them—it through the barricade. It made some sort of sense at the time, or maybe that was the adrenalin talking.

  My chest hurt.

  He was playing Elvis this time. Of course he was.

  I knew these songs. I walked slowly, from the front door and up the stairs and along the corridors towards the library, and in that time I heard “Loving You,” and “Got a Lot of Living To Do,” and the stupid one about the teddy bear.

  My dad used to sing that to my mum, when he thought we weren’t listening. Which is weird, right? They’re both far too young for Elvis. It was some kind of parent joke, that made them giggly and flirty in a way that made me and Otis want to stick our fingers in our ears and go, Lalalalala.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my mum smile.

  Also, wasn’t the front door of the school supposed to be locked? I didn’t remember walking through it, but I must have done. I definitely didn’t climb in through the window.

  I stopped outside the library doors and thought about it.

  The needle scratched its way along the record, and “Lonesome Cowboy” started up. It seemed appropriate enough music as I pushed open the doors and made my entrance.

  He was sitting in the same place, with his feet up, as the last time I’d been here. Which was weeks ago. Also, there was no way I was going to call him Heathcliff. Even if he was as much of a douche as the original.

  “Someone stole my Wuthering Heights,” I said, though I didn’t really think that was what had happened.

  “Damn those post-apocalyptic book clubs,” ‘Heathcliff’ drawled without looking up. “Cut-throat to the last.”

  “I saw one of them,” I blurted, and wondered why. I hadn’t been planning to tell him. “An Observer.”

  He looked sharply at me, and then grinned. “Scary fuckers, yeah? Even though they don’t look like anything at all.”

  “It might have followed me.”

  I expected him to be angry at my confession, but instead he laughed. “Yeah, no. Not in here. This is the one place that’s completely safe from them.”

  That unsettled me. “You mean the one place outside the barricade,” I corrected him.

  He didn’t flinch. “Do I?”

  “You could come back to the town with me,” I said, not sure why I was even offering this much. “They let in travelers, you know. At least, they did once.” Hitchhikers who had been stranded in the middle of the electromagnetic pulse, and walked for weeks before they found us. They had been carrying two well-thumbed Harlequin romances, a ripped Archie comic, and a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road that didn’t even have a crease in its spine.

  His face closed over. “Didn’t I make it clear? This is the only place that’s safe. You’re cute and all, with your mission to rescue the world’s reading material, but I don’t fancy the rest of your town moving in here with me.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went back to the Recent Returns trolley, and fished out another copy of Wuthering Heights. If I was really superstitious, I’d sit here and read the whole thing, from beginning to end, just in case the next one I took got lost too.

  There were three left. I took one, thought about it, then took the other two, then put one back. In case my backpack had some kind of Wuthering Heights eating vortex in it.

  I didn’t only pick fiction this time. I loaded up on some practical books about farming and making your own butter and shit like that. I thought about Frances, my brother’s girlfriend, and how hard it was to get an appointment with the few health professionals left in our town, but sadly high school libraries aren’t great on maternity and early childhood books. Not many picture books, either. When do babies start to read?

  “We value your custom,” drawled the creep as I walked past him. My backpack felt lighter. Without a word, I sat down on the library floor and started unpacking it, book after book. The practical books had gone. So had Wuthering Heights. All I had left was the fiction, more Agatha Christies, a few familiar romances and the Sherlock Holmes novels I had added in at the last minute because if the baby didn’t have picture books we were just going to have to start him on the classics early.

  “What the hell?” I said, and then glared up at him. “Did you do this?”

  He—whatever his name was—not Heathcliff, leaned over the desk. He looked kind of sad. “Nothing to do with me.”

  “I put the books in here.”

  “You can’t take them with you.”

  “Why not?”

  He sank back on to his chair, spinning it slowly around. “Figure it out, Kay-amy. What do they have in common, the books that you’re allowed to take?”

  I looked down at what looked like a pretty ordinary selection. Then it clicked. “I’ve read them before. All of these. I’ve read them before.”

  It felt like the library was pressing in on me, and the books were sucking all the air from the room. I was very small, in this giant space of bookshelves and Elvis music on a scratchy record player. “What did they do to the library, the invaders?” I asked, in a tiny voice.

  “Absolutely nothing,” he said. “I was asleep in the basement of the school, the night they came. My dad had kicked me out, and I was going to hitch across to the big city, but I didn’t get farther than two towns over. This was the easiest building to break into. So I was asleep when it hit, you know.”

  “The electromagnetic pulse.” The thing that stopped everything working, every electronic device, every television, every . . . every . . . every . . .

  Something I was forgetting, on the tip of my tongue. Brain. Finger. “It’s funny,” he said, in a tone that made it very clear that it wasn’t, actually. “I figured it out later. The bit of basement I was dossing in was right here, beneath the library. It was like . . . the books protected me, when everyone else . . . ”

  “What happened to everyone else?” I whispered.

  He looked so sad, so hollowed out, and I didn’t even know what his name was. Maybe I should call him Heathcliff after all. It was the only name he’d ever given me.

  “The wave—the pulse—whatever you want to call it. It killed them all. I walked out of the school into a ghost town. The buildings were dust, most of them. And the ones that weren’t—some houses, a few shops. The antique shop, the newsagency. I figured it out, eventually. It was the buildings that had books in them. Real, paper books. All the rest of them were gone to dust. And all the people were dead. Dust and shadows.”

  “But that’s not true,” I argued. “Not this town. All the buildings are still standing. And everything behind the barricade is just fine.”

  “No,” he sa
id with a small smile. “It’s really not, Kay-amy.”

  “Katie. My name is Katie.”

  “Huh,” he said. “Did you know that’s Scarlett O’Hara’s real name, in Gone with the Wind? It’s Katie Scarlett O’Hara.”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Books are important.”

  “Not if we’re all dead, they’re not.” I leaned in and tweaked his nose.

  “Ow.”

  “See? I’m not dead. None of us are. You’re just being stupid.”

  “I know what I saw,” he said. “I saw a town full of people, gone to dust. And then—they all stood up again. They kept themselves busy, building a wall of air and imaginary things. I could walk right through them, and they never saw me. Whatever it is that pulse did to our electronics, it did something to people, too. We’re not real any more. We’re just memories that won’t lie down.”

  I thought about Otis, and my Mum, and Frances and the baby. I didn’t know what to think about them. All I knew was that they were going about their lives as they always had, only everything was smaller and fading and . . . maybe it was true.

  “You were so worried about preserving the books, weren’t you?” he said now. “But you didn’t have to be. The invaders like books. Paper ones, especially. They have a reverence for them. They want to keep the books, store them and tend to them. It’s human beings they don’t plan on cataloguing.”

  His skin looked paler than before, almost a bright white. His skin shimmered like moonlight in the darkness. Like a spreading pool of milk.

  “You’re an Observer,” I said, stepping backwards, tripping over my empty backpack and landing hard against the scattered pile of books I had already read.

  He moved through the desk like he was a ghost, the milky whiteness of him parting and then reforming. “They made us,” he said. “I don’t think they meant to kill all the humans, with that first wave. But the bodies were so fragile. The thing that’s left, the memory of humans, they’re trying to figure out how to make a record of them, but they can only change a handful into something . . . permanent. They chose me because I was here. They thought I was a librarian, can you believe that? I promised them I would bring them someone who cared about the books, who could explain to them how they work. And here you are. You’re the only one who came, while the rest of them were building that fucking wall. You’re the only one who thought about the books.”