Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  Menchú nodded. “The same method? Transformed into paintings?”

  “It looks that way. I didn’t stick my head in long enough to take an exhaustive survey. The walls started bubbling after a glance. But we closed the door and turned out the lights, and nothing tried to break out. It seems like complete darkness can contain it, at least for a while.”

  “Any clue what’s causing this?”

  “Who knows? The new cave has been open for weeks without issue.”

  “I saw Perry,” Sal said.

  Menchú stopped. “Your brother’s here?”

  “He was back at the museum when the beast broke out of the wall. But he pulled a disappearing act again. I couldn’t catch him. He wanted me to see him. I don’t know why, or what that might mean.” She shoved her hands in her pockets, and stared out over the sunset town. “Anyway, we think we’ve found patient zero.” She opened the door.

  Agnieszka paced the room, glaring at the walls. When Menchú entered, she stopped and stared. Sal wasn’t certain whether she was about to cry or laugh. Then the young woman started speaking Polish, fast and earnest and angry. Menchú raised his hands, and replied in the same language, haltingly. Agnieszka’s face melted with relief to hear her language spoken, however poorly. “Thank you, Father,” she said, in English this time. “I am so glad to see you. Sally says you can help my sister?”

  “Sally?” Menchú said. “Oh. Sal. Yes. Yes, I hope I can.”

  Sal walked to Agnieszka, and touched her arm. “Just tell Father Menchú what you told me.”

  Agnieszka glanced down, and tucked a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear. She looked—penitent, that was the word. Ashamed. “My sister Sylwia vanished last night. She and I had, ah, argument. I am, you know,” she said a few words in Polish, then shook her head, tried again. “Computers, you know? Databases? In Paris, for five years. My younger sister, she is to college soon. Does not know what to study. She comes out to stay with me, we travel together. I was so excited. I thought, I will show her my life, I will take her to dance, to hear good music, I will bring her to restaurants, pour her wine. But she does not want to dance, or to travel, or to drink good wine. None of the things I show her interest her. Only to sit in museums and draw: She draws da Vinci, she draws Michelangelo. And this after years, we do not see each other. We were so close, as children.” She started pacing again. “I was stupid. I do not understand. I did not understand. You see?”

  “Yes,” Menchú said, and once again Sal felt awed by the ease he projected. “What happened then?”

  “I say we should go down here, to see paintings. She’s happy. I am happy, too. We have good talks on the train, she laughs, we play cards. Sing songs. Then we get here, and Sylwia learns we cannot see the paintings—not the real ones. Is all fake. She draws them, and draws them, always angrier, angry at the copies. She hears about new paintings they have found, in woods. We try to see them, but the professor, Gerondain, he says no. Is not allowed. She gets upset, mad, screams at him. I take her away. That night, we argue. She leaves hotel. I think she is outside, pacing, to calm down, like when we were children. But when I go to find her, she is gone. I have bad feeling, so I go to new cave. Find her—but she moves like she is asleep. She walks to fence, and through, as if fence is not there. Walks to cave, and cave swallows her. Like mouth.” She turned away and waited, hugging her own arms, breathing. Soon, the shivers passed. “I try to tell the professor, and he says, is not possible, go away. I follow him, and he casts me off. And then shadows eat him.” That last sentence sounded—not quite happy, but satisfied. “Sally says she can help.”

  Menchú’s gaze shifted to Sal, and Sal tried to look innocent. They weren’t supposed to say that—not in so many words. There was seldom an honest chance of help on offer. But she hadn’t been able to resist. “We’ll do our best,” Father Menchú said. “That’s what we do.”

  “Thank you, Father. Thank you. This is all my fault.”

  “It’s not,” Sal said. “Really.”

  Menchú held out his hands to Agnieszka, and she took them. “I need to talk to my friends outside for a moment. Can you wait here?”

  The woman nodded, and sat and drank tea as the door closed.

  “Well,” Menchú said, when the door closed. “It sounds like our next step is to investigate the cave.”

  “Shadow monsters,” Sal said. “I wish Grace was here.”

  Menchú checked his timer. “So do I,” he said. “But not under the present circumstances.” He stowed the phone again. “Liam. You mentioned that you met one of the researchers at the dig site—Monique? Maybe she can get us in.”

  • • •

  “No.” Monique crossed her arms over her sweater-vest. “Absolutely not. I refuse.”

  The new excavation lay in the forest south of Montignac, up a winding gravel service road flanked on both sides by new-fallen leaves. Bordeaux farmland rolled a few miles away, but the forest hills stood fast. Humans were only guests on this land, and they left gentle traces: a road centuries would erase, huts to feed the rot and rain, paintings that survivors twenty thousand years down the line might find and, finding, feel how fragile was their hold on the world. In these hills, the scholars dug.

  Monique stood before the gate of a chain-link fence. Behind it, battery floodlights peeled back the dark, revealing white tents, a few pickup trucks that looked smaller than the pickups Sal knew back home, and the cave: a heavy lip of rock projecting from a gradual slope. Monique would not let them get closer.

  “Look,” Liam said. “You have guards posted on the cave, looking in. What are those, grad students?”

  “Postdocs.”

  “And I’m sure they’ll do a great job if anything does happen. You shouldn’t even be on site this late. Obviously something’s wrong. All we want is for you to let us inside, so we can take a look around.”

  She glared at him over her glasses. “The professor is missing. We may be in danger. The site may be in danger. The paintings inside are priceless. You have no idea what kind of damage amateurs could do.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he said. “There’s already an amateur in the cave. Her sister.”

  Monique’s eyes flicked over his shoulder to Agnieszka, who returned her gaze with fury, but sought Sal’s hand. Sal took hers, and did not wince much when Agnieszka crushed her fingers. “This woman has been bothering us all day. Her sister didn’t enter the cave. We have cameras, alarms.”

  “But I imagine your cameras experienced a little trouble last night, didn’t they? Went a bit fuzzy around—when was it, Agnieszka?”

  “Nine,” she said.

  “Nine o’clock at night? Just for a few minutes?” Whatever changed about Monique, Sal could not put it into words. Her arms remained crossed, her feet spread broader than shoulder width, her body squared against Liam, her head held at an angle so she seemed to be looking down at him rather than up. But the foundation on which she stood was a touch less certain than before. “Look. You know there’s something wrong already. Or you suspect it. You saw what you saw, back at the museum. Maybe you’ve heard things in the cave already, voices that almost make sense, movement glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. Paintings you know have changed places, but when you look at old photographs of them, they’ve always been where they are now.”

  Her mouth compressed. “I will call the police.”

  “You have given postdocs shovels and rakes and told them to guard a cave mouth in case something comes out. You know what’s going on, even if you can’t admit it to yourself.”

  “What is going on here, then, Mister Liam Doyle? You have brought us a priest? We are scientists here, scholars.”

  “So are we,” Menchú said, which even Sal had to admit was stretching the truth a bit more than usual. She wished Asanti were here—the archivist had a powerful gift for speaking to academics, and seemed to know most of them. Monique’s eyes narrowed. “I know it’s difficult to accept that there mi
ght be forces at work beyond your experience. But you’ve seen them with your own eyes.”

  “Superstition,” Monique snapped back. Sal felt bad for the woman, cut loose in a world that refused to keep to the rules she had learned. Pressed, people retreat to ground they know they can hold. “Father, I have great respect for the Church as an institution, but you will not intimidate me with bedtime tales of ghosts and witchcraft. Whatever is happening here, we will deal with it rationally.”

  Menchú nodded, calm as ever in the face of others’ frustration. He seemed to have an answer ready—he always had an answer ready, and it was always the right thing to say—but before he could speak, the earth roared.

  A shadow in the cave bubbled, boiled, and burst. One of the postdocs on guard duty screamed; two others brandished their makeshift weapons like pikemen. More ran from the tents, carrying books, spades, whatever they had to hand.

  Bulls made of darkness and rust emerged from the cave into the clearing. Their hooves tore grooves in the gold-leaved ground. They snorted coils of black steam.

  Before the bulls, the forest had made its own nighttime sounds, like and unlike those Sal knew—crickets in a different key, wind and nearby water—but when the bulls emerged those sounds knelt before their hoofbeats and their mythic breath. The bulls were deeper than the world. They existed by stripes where floodlights fell. They seemed hardly there in the darkness between.

  Then they charged.

  One student tried to brace her shovel against the earth. The bull tore into them both, and she vanished, pike and all. One student tried to run, but the second bull caught him on its horns as if to gore, or toss, and they both vanished, too. Two bulls met no resistance and ran through the tents and fence out into the woods—and one ran straight toward the team.

  Sal moved first. Agnieszka’s grip had tightened to the point of bone crushing, so she just tugged the other woman along, shoving herself between Monique and the bull. Agnieszka tried to pull away, but Sal raised her crucifix, and hoped she wasn’t making a mistake.

  The bull thundered toward them, horns lowered. Hoofbeats drummed the earth. It passed through the fence like a breeze, but Sal felt the weight of it, the undeniable presence of those hooked horns. In the last second before impact Sal smelled it through interposing eons, the meaty auroch’s scent of muscle and hot leather and dirt.

  The part of her brain that was still convinced, deep down and in spite of all evidence, that she was a primeval monkey walking the grasslands that used to be the Sahara, made good and ready to die.

  The bull struck her. The crucifix burned in her hand. She fell to one knee, and gritted her teeth, and did not scream as the shadow flowed around her, over her, through her.

  When the flood passed, she returned to herself, kneeling before the fence, with a tarnished crucifix in one hand. Agnieszka helped her up. Sal took a breath, and realized she wasn’t dead. “Thanks.”

  “You saved us.”

  Menchú and Liam were both still there, at least, checking their own silver: all tarnished. Monique remained, too, shocked.

  One perk of the job that Team Three didn’t tend to discuss, Sal thought, was how often you got to be right about things. If she had been the kind of person to say I told you so, she would have really enjoyed it. Instead, she tried: “Monique, we’re all on the same side here. We want your professor safe. We want to help those kids who just disappeared. Go to the police if you want—but that will slow things down, and we don’t know how much time we have.” Twenty-eight hours until Team One comes in with the napalm, she didn’t say. “I know it looks scary, but we’ve seen things like this before. This is what we do.”

  Cricket sounds returned to the forest, and wind. Somewhere not so far away, great ancient beasts stampeded through the dark. “Okay,” Monique said. “But I’m coming with you.”

  • • •

  Flashlights died as they approached the cave, which Sal had expected. To her surprise, so had Monique. “This happened yesterday, too.”

  “And you didn’t think it was weird?”

  “Of course. Magnetic interference, we believed. Anyway, this is why we have chemical lanterns.” She produced something that looked to Sal like a glorified glow stick, and cracked the seal. It guttered and died, too. “That’s strange.”

  “Here.” Liam passed out torches from Menchú’s kit, and drew his own lighter.

  “You can’t bring fire into the cave! The paintings—”

  “You’re suggesting we go down there in the dark?”

  “I’m not suggesting we go down at all! We should wait for the authorities.”

  “Much as it pains me to admit, Monique, we are the authorities.”

  Monique glared at him with intent to murder—but at last she grabbed a torch and they all went down together.

  The cave sloped down sharply after the lip. Ten feet in, even Liam could stand upright, and after twenty the ceiling was high enough that he no longer needed to duck away from the odd stalactite. Then the tunnel widened, and the paintings began.

  Sal caught her breath when she saw them. The replicas, she had assured Liam, were identical to the originals: same pigment, same brushes, same brushstrokes, even. The imitators knew what they were doing. But the real paintings breathed. The living past pressed against them like a lover’s body beneath a sheet.

  She felt a bit silly when she realized that the paintings really were breathing.

  Nor were they all exactly ancient. Amid the aurochs and ponies, the deer and Megaloceroses and antelope, she spotted two kids in soccer jerseys, and a tourist with a camera phone raised against the stampede. She hoped, for Monique’s sake, that they could reverse this magic, and bring all these people back out of the wall. There probably weren’t all that many Real Madrid jerseys in prehistory.

  Agnieszka hefted her torch higher. “You have a sister?” she asked.

  “Just my brother,” Sal said. Liam and Monique were arguing about directions; Father Menchú looked lonely. “Two years younger.”

  “Good.” She nodded. “It is hard to be so far away in age. We are together, you know, but we are not really together. She sees me like aunt, sometime.”

  “Two years is a little close if you ask me,” Sal said. “Perry and I were so close that we couldn’t have much in common.” Agnieszka looked confused. “If I liked sports, he couldn’t just not play them, he had to be this total nerd about it. He had to be everything I wasn’t. It hurt when we were kids.” A giant painted snake slithered on the ceiling. “I wanted us to be a team. I always came through for him when he needed me, and he came through for me, but if we weren’t in trouble, we didn’t see each other much.”

  “You said he vanished,” Agnieszka said, as they turned down a cave passage that, to judge from overheard bits of Monique’s and Liam’s argument, hadn’t been there before. Menchú had produced a compass, or something like a compass, that seemed to confirm their direction. New magic kit from Team One’s coffers. “Is that what you mean?”

  “What? Oh. Um.” No sense hiding it now that they were down here in a magic-animated cave hunting art monsters. “No, I meant that literally. He got possessed, that is, he sort of joined with—you know the word angel?”

  “In Polish, word is anioł,” she said. “Not so different. With wings, yes?”

  “Something like that.”

  They descended a winding passage. Cave silence pressed about them, so close Sal could hear her own heartbeat. No, that was not her heartbeat: That was a real drum, from somewhere deep down. Waves of oily shadow passed over the wall now, seeping over cave paintings, clustering close to the rock.

  “Yeah,” she said. “So, there was this angel, and he and Perry got jammed together in his head, and then Perry disappeared. You saw him back there in the—”

  She stopped before she could say museum.

  The passage opened into another gallery, larger than the first, and more densely painted, where the walls weren’t covered with slick shadow. He
rds of animals gathered on the far wall, forms pressing against the darkness, fighting to break free: more bulls and horses, more Megaloceroses, and other animals she hadn’t seen yet, huge shaggy cats and wolves four feet tall at the shoulder, and other creatures for which she had no name.

  Perry sat in the center of the cave, in a candlelight circle, chanting in a high reedy voice and beating a drum in heartbeat time.

  Liam ran toward him. Easy deduction: Whatever Perry was doing, it wouldn’t be helpful. But the easy deduction was just as often wrong as not. And the animals pressing against the confines of the shadow glared at Perry hungrily; they lunged against the limits of the shadow and fell back.

  He wasn’t letting the beasts out. He was keeping them bound.

  She had time to shout “No!” before Liam crossed the candlelight circle and let loose the stampede.

  4.

  Sal scrambled to her feet, and tried to sort out the last few seconds’ panic. Liam broke the circle, shadow animals charged out of the walls, she ran toward Perry, Agnieszka followed her, a large shaggy elephant-like thing galloped to the head of the stampede, and then, well.

  She stood beneath a stony sky. No, scratch that. The sky was stone—not an arch or dome of some sort, but solid stone, complete with massive mineral veins, riven with tiny cracks left by ice and shifting earth. Stone, too, was the ground beneath her feet, a shade redder than the sky, cracked and layered. Far away, or at least she thought it was far away, on all sides, lay a jagged charcoal horizon. Between the horizon and Sal stood other charcoal suggestions of terrain, and shadowless beasts grazing on invisible grass, or charging across the plain.

  Two suns burned in the sky, and an enormous cyclone moved behind the charcoal mountains.

  Dammit. She had a fresh crucifix and everything. She pulled it from beneath her shirt, and saw only a tarnished smear. That much magic at once must have burned through the silver. She hadn’t seen that happen before.