The Book of Heroes

by Miyuki Miyabe

  Her mother and father had looked at one of the smooth cobblestones, then at each other.

  “Must’ve been hard for him to keep this place in shape,” her father had said.

  “If he needed money, why didn’t he sell his books?” her mother had wondered.

  How had he gone all the way to Paris in search of old books, but not been able to pay for the upkeep on his own cottage?

  “Hiroki! Hiroki!” Yuriko’s mother called as she waved her flashlight about and tried to push past her husband.

  “Hey, watch it. I don’t want to catch your hand with this thing,” her father warned, swinging the cutter, but it seemed like her mother couldn’t even hear him.

  No matter how many times her mother called, nothing stirred. She searched, looking for some light that wasn’t there. It seemed to Yuriko that her mother’s eyes burned with an intensity so bright, she half expected them to reflect in the windows. But the windows were dark.

  The front door was locked, and with more than just an ordinary lock. Someone had attached a light green-colored metallic plate to the door and the frame just above the knob, from which hung a large padlock. Both looked brand-new, like someone had slapped them on by magic just moments before.

  “Who did this? The lawyer? Your brother?” Mother asked in a panic.

  “How should I know?” her father snapped. “Get a handle on yourself, Yoshiko,” he said, grabbing her by the shoulder and shaking her. Her eyes seemed to lose their focus. The burning intensity in them went dull. The hand gripping the flashlight lowered to her side.

  In the end, they decided to break in through one of the windows on the first floor. Her father cut his wrist a little when he reached in through the broken pane to undo the crescent-shaped lock on the window frame. Yuriko, with her small size and light weight, had the easiest time getting through the window once it was open. Inside, the place smelled like dust. The darkness pressed in on her. Yuriko sneezed and had to press her face into her backpack to stop.

  “Hiroki! Hiroki?”

  Her father and her mother moved through the cottage, shining flashlights into every corner.

  Yuriko heard the red book whisper to her where it touched the tip of her nose through the thin fabric of her backpack.

  —Little miss, the reading room.

  The only light Yuriko had was a tiny pencil flashlight—the kind you got for free when you bought something else. She had to skid the tips of her shoes along the floor as she walked in order not to trip on anything. She was glad she hadn’t taken off her shoes. Lots of stuff was scattered around on the floor, so she repeatedly trampled over unseen objects as she walked. In the next room, she pulled the red book out of her backpack and held it to her chest with one hand, then dropped the backpack on the floor.

  —Go right here. Down the hall.

  Her memories from her last visit to the place came slowly drifting back to her. The large room ahead would be the reading room. Just through that door.

  The doorknob turned easily, and the door opened toward her. A light breeze blew past, wafting through her hair as she stepped through. Even though it should have been as dark as pitch in the room, she could clearly see the books lining the walls well outside the tiny circle of light cast by her pencil light.

  They’re shining!

  The books in the room were shining, glittering faintly like stars in the sky, winking and blinking, each of them in a slightly different shade. There was white, yellow, blue, gold, purple…a faint light was coming from the red book clutched to her chest now too. The glow reached up to her chin.

  “Aju?”

  “It is Aju!”

  “Aju’s come back!”

  Voices rained down on her from the walls and the ceiling. She almost jumped when she heard a voice coming up from near her feet.

  “Welcome back, Aju.”

  Yuriko turned to run, when the red book in her arms flared even brighter, giving off a warm light.

  “It’s okay, little miss,” the book said. “Don’t be frightened. They’re my friends.”

  You mean those voices…are coming from all those books?

  Lit by the glimmering light of the countless books surrounding her in the reading room, Yuriko felt like she was watching a show in a planetarium.

  “Who is the child, Aju?”

  “Why did you bring a child here?”

  I’m not even touching them, Yuriko thought. How can I hear them all talking so clearly?

  “Because you stand within the boundaries of a sanctuary we created, little miss,” the red book told her gently. “You don’t have to hold me quite so hard to talk to me anymore, by the way. You must be exhausted. Have a seat. We’ve finally made it.”

  Bewildered by all of this, Yuriko couldn’t move for several moments. The books fell silent, waiting to see what she did next. In their light, she spotted a small stepladder on the floor by her right foot. Her great-uncle must have used it to reach the books on the higher shelves.

  The ladder had three steps on it, though the second step was mostly occupied by a teetering pile of books. Yuriko sat on the lowest step, taking care not to lean too far back. The red book she put on her lap, unwilling to lose contact with it just yet.

  “I need a spell, if you would,” the red book was saying to his friends. “This child’s parents came here with her.”

  Just then, Yuriko heard a beautiful voice singing from the bookshelf just by the door. It was only a snippet of a refrain. No words, just humming.

  Suddenly, she could no longer hear her parents moving through the cottage. Their cries of “Hiroki!” didn’t just trail off, they stopped cold.

  Yuriko jumped to her feet. “What did you do? You did something to my parents, didn’t you?”

  She dropped the red book on the floor and made for the doorway. The door slammed shut before her eyes.

  “It’s all right, little miss,” the red book said, chuckling from where it lay on the floor. “They’re just taking a little rest, that’s all. You wouldn’t want them to worry while you’re talking with us, would you?”

  Yuriko grabbed the doorknob. It rattled in her hand but wouldn’t turn. The door was frozen shut.

  “Really? They’re just asleep or something? That’s all?”

  “Of course.”

  “How can you do that? How did you make them sleep?”

  “Books have the power to lead people into dreams,” the red book explained. “You’ve fallen asleep while reading a book before, haven’t you?”

  In fact, she had fallen asleep several times at her desk while facing a particularly boring textbook. “I don’t fall asleep if it’s interesting,” she said, pouting, though she realized that didn’t exactly counter his argument.

  “Who is the child, Aju?” a voice asked from behind and above Yuriko, up near the ceiling.

  “She is the sister of the one who took the Book of Elem,” the red book answered. Yuriko realized she could tell the red book’s voice apart from the others. Each of the books’ voices was slightly different—just like people.

  Yuriko warily returned to the stepladder. She couldn’t see where the red book had landed among all the scattered shimmering volumes on the floor.

  “Little miss, turn off the device in your hand. Its light is harsh to us.”

  Yuriko didn’t see any point in protesting now, so she did as she was told. When the light flickered off she inhaled deeply, getting dust in her nose, which made her sneeze. Moving her feet to keep her balance, she stepped on something on the floor. When she looked by the light of the books, she saw it was a piece of cloth. She reached down to move it so she wouldn’t step on it again, and found it velvety to the touch and surprisingly heavy.

  “You know what has happened, don’t you, Aju?”

  Around her, the books began to talk to each other.

  “I know. This child’s brother touched the Book of Elem. His name is Hiroki. Hiroki was a vessel. Thus was he possessed.” The red book’s voice sounded
earnest and full of regret. “I did everything in my power to stop it, but it was not enough. I am sorry.”

  When the book said, “I am sorry,” Yuriko finally spotted its red glimmer. It had fallen on the floor on the other side of the stepladder.

  “You’re called Aju? That’s your name?” Yuriko asked.

  “More or less,” the book replied. “It’s a short form of my real name.”

  Aju explained he was a dictionary, compiled around 3000 BC. “Of course, I didn’t look like I do now when I was first written. There were no leather-bound books in this Circle back then.”

  Yuriko didn’t follow most of these details, but she understood one thing: whatever was written in the red book was very, very old.

  “Where were you made?”

  “In a land called Babylonia.”

  The red book explained it was a beginner’s dictionary of spells. Yuriko laughed out loud at the thought of there being a beginner’s dictionary for something like that. “This is all starting to sound like some kind of fairy tale,” she said, but the red book—Aju—didn’t join in her laughter. The sound was swallowed up in the silent glimmer of the books.

  “Aju,” one of the other books said. “This child Hiroki was not merely a vessel. He was the last vessel.”

  “What!” Aju practically shouted. Yuriko had never heard him raise his voice like that before.

  The books all began to talk at once.

  “The child Hiroki was not merely possessed.”

  “He has become the Summoner.”

  “It is free.”

  “It has escaped.”

  “The First Bell rings in the nameless land.”

  “The Hero is free.”

  “The prison has been broken.”

  Everywhere, all around her, the books were speaking. It was like she had been thrown into the middle of a flock of birds, all squawking in whispers. All the books were talking, winking and blinking like stars. Yuriko grew dizzy. She felt sick. Her stomach rose in her throat. She screwed her eyes shut and was about to clap her hands over her ears when one of the books said, “The end is coming.”

  All the books fell silent.

  Her fingers were already loosely over her ears, but Yuriko could still hear the words creep in.

  The end is coming. The end of the world!

  She looked up to see the books in the reading room glittering like gemstones at the bottom of a pool of water. She stood in the middle, bathed in their eerie light.

  “What does this mean?” a familiar voice asked. Yuriko stretched out a hand, snatching up Aju from the other side of the stepladder.

  “What are they talking about? Tell me! Explain it so I can understand!” Yuriko whirled around, the book in her hands, and opened it to the very middle, pressing her face into its pages. She could see the tight lines of its code-like letters.

  “Miss. Oh, little miss,” Aju said, its voice trembling, dizzy from the quick motion. “Please calm down. Hurting me won’t help anything. I want you to talk to them. Tell the books here what you saw your brother do.”

  “No, I want you to explain this to me first!”

  What was this Book of Elem? And the nameless land? Whoever heard of a place with no name? What country was that in?

  “The Book of Elem is one of the copies in which the story of the Hero is written. It’s the name of the book your brother took from here the same day he took me. He thought he needed me to read it.”

  The letters written in the Book of Elem and the letters written in Aju were very similar at first glance, the book explained. They looked the same, but their formation and their history and the people who made them and used them were entirely different.

  “Still, your brother was very smart to realize that I am a dictionary.” However, the book explained, he didn’t think her brother had planned to decipher the books all by himself. “He was probably planning on showing me to one of his teachers.”

  “No, Aju. That was not the way of it,” said a weighty voice from behind Yuriko. “From the moment the child touched the Book of Elem, he was defiled.”

  “Then why did he need me?” Aju retorted. “No, he was simply curious, that’s all. He flipped through the pages of several other books, comparing the writing within, before choosing me. You all remember that.”

  “The vessel is only a vessel, nothing more,” another voice said, coldly.

  “Don’t talk about him that way. Hiroki is this little girl’s brother,” Aju replied, his voice sad. Though she couldn’t follow their entire exchange, Yuriko realized Aju was trying to protect her.

  She lifted her eyes, facing the books in the room. “My brother—” she thought she could feel the books turning toward her, listening. “At school, he…” Then Yuriko told them. She told them about her brother Hiroki. She told them what kind of a person he was, what he liked to do, and about what had happened at school. She then told them about coming home early from school and her mother crying, and what her parents talked about in the car on the way to the cottage, and everything else she could think of. She jumped backward and forward in her story, until everything was so tangled she was sure she wasn’t making any sense.

  But the books listened to every word.

  “My brother doesn’t fight with his friends like that. He would never stab someone,” Yuriko told them. Now it was her turn to protect her brother. “Aju told me my brother had been possessed by an evil book. The book he took from this room…the Book of Elem, was it? That’s the evil book’s name, right? It can possess people, right? The book is this Hero you all talk about, isn’t it? The book made him hurt his friends, and made him kill a boy even though he didn’t want to.”

  I saw the Hero. I saw his shape, even if I couldn’t see his face. His funny pointy crown and his tattered cape. And my brother, bowing his head to the floor in front of him.

  “The Hero was standing in front of him, like he was proud. He tricked my brother, I know it. There’s no way he would do what he did otherwise. No way. No way!”

  Yuriko was out of breath, and her story was finished, even though there was so much more she could say, so much more she could tell them.

  “This girl,” Aju said when she had fallen silent, “wants to help her brother. She wants to go find him.”

  The books began to blink faster, their light waxing and waning.

  “I told her it was impossible, reckless. Of course, I didn’t yet know what I know now.”

  About it being free.

  About Hiroki becoming the Summoner.

  “Now that this has come to pass, someone must go recapture the Hero. Is this girl not qualified?” Aju asked the books.

  The room was silent. There was only a faint glow and more blinking. For the longest time, no one (that is, no book) said a word. Yuriko was tense at first, but she had almost grown bored by the time the weighty voice from the top shelf broke the silence.

  “If we are to speak only of qualifications, then you are most likely correct. But, Aju, do you truly believe it proper to further burden this young child who has already suffered so much?”

  Yuriko found the book that was talking, a large tome that winked with a deep green light. She was able to spot it easily because when it talked, the light from the other books dimmed, as though they were holding their breath.

  “It’s not about whether it’s proper or not,” Aju insisted. “She’s saying she wants to go look for her brother. She’s begging to go.”

  “Only because she does not know how hard a path it is to walk.”

  “You can handle it, can’t you, little miss?” Aju asked her. “You don’t care how hard it is as long as you don’t have to go back to your life the way it was, right?”

  Aju told the other books how the students picked on Yuriko at school. “Which is why you decided to go look for your brother, right?”

  It was true that was what she had told Aju before, but now, in this bewildering place, hearing all the books talking and faced with the prospect
of even more hardship, Yuriko’s resolve was shaken. She was ready for some difficulties, sure. But how much could she take?

  “Will it be that hard to find him?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve lost your nerve already!” Aju wailed. “Or…have you not made up your mind yet?”

  “No, I made up my mind. But…”

  More than anything else, it was the words she had just heard that bothered her. The end is coming. That sounded hundreds of times more important than a missing middle school student, even if that student was her brother. She couldn’t just pretend she hadn’t heard it.

  “Be quiet a moment, Aju,” the dark green book commanded. “Child. Tell us your name.”

  “Yuriko. It’s Yuriko,” she answered, looking up at the dark green glimmer high on the shelf.

  “Yuriko, you may call me the Sage.” The book’s voice was raspy, like an old man’s. “I was friends with the master of this house.”

  “With my great-uncle? With Mr. Minochi?”

  “That’s right. There are many here who have sat upon this shelf far longer than I, but none were as close to him as I was.” Then the Sage asked what had become of Minochi.

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “It has been a long time since he left us. Too long for one of his regular trips. You must tell me. Has Minochi died? He has died, hasn’t he?”

  Yuriko nodded. She told the books about the used bookstore in Paris and the heart attack.

  “It is as I feared, then.”

  “But,” Yuriko said, “I’ve been here to this cottage since then. And so have my aunts and uncles. Did no one talk about Mr. Minochi dying?”

  “I did notice the people visiting. They were surprised to find us all here, I recall. But they spoke little of Minochi, and as he was not one with many connections in this world I thought perhaps he was merely feigning death for the sake of solitude somewhere. And yet now I hear he has truly died.” Yuriko detected genuine sadness in the Sage’s voice. “Minochi and I had a falling out. I believe that is why he departed to Paris.”