The Forbidden Library

by Django Wexler

  Besides, Geryon had a library that was so big, you could get lost in it! This, Alice thought, I have to see.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE LIBRARY’S LIBRARY

  TO ALICE’S SURPRISE, EMMA led her, not to Geryon’s suite, but out the kitchen door and down a gravel path into the backyard. It was a gray, overcast day, not quite raining but thick with the threat of it, and the air smelled clingy and damp. The wind cut through Alice’s shirt and raised goose bumps on her skin.

  Alice hadn’t paid much attention to the grounds thus far. For all that it was nearing summer, there hadn’t been a proper sunny day since she’d arrived, and the air was still cold enough that she had to wrap up to go outside. From the upstairs windows, she’d gotten the impression of a vaguely rectangular lawn surrounded on all sides by dense, leafy forest, and she hadn’t bothered to investigate further. She wasn’t much for the outdoors at the best of times, and whenever her father had taken her on some rural outing, she’d always been secretly eager to return to the well-organized life of the city.

  Now she found that her impression had been mostly correct, but for one important detail. There was another building on the other side of the lawn, its facade barely protruding from the thick surrounding greenery, its sides disappearing back into the forest so that it was difficult to get a proper sense of its size.

  The gravel path led right up to its unornamented stone face, in which was set a single door of ancient, greening bronze. There were no windows that Alice could see, and no embellishments or decorations at all.

  “This is the library?” Alice said.

  “Yes,” Emma said, as always without elaborating further.

  It looks more like a fortress, Alice thought. Or else some kind of bank vault. Emma grabbed the heavy bronze ring attached to the door and pulled, grunting with effort, and the door swung slowly open with an anguished scream of corroded metal.

  Inside was a little anteroom, dark except for the dim trickle of sunlight through the doorway. A set of heavy hurricane lamps hung from pegs in one wall, beside another bronze door.

  “You must use a lamp when you’re inside, never a candle,” Emma said. Alice was startled to hear her speak unbidden, until she remembered that Mr. Black had told her to explain the rules. “And you must always close the outer door before you open the inner.”

  “Got it,” Alice said.

  Emma lit one of the lanterns, dropping the match into a bucket of water apparently provided for the purpose. The flame flickered weakly inside the double layer of glass, like a caged spirit. She handed the lamp to Alice and lit another for herself, then pushed the outer door closed. It swung slowly, giving another grinding shriek of protest, and closed with a forbidding boom. Darkness closed in at once, broken only by the faint flicker of light from the lanterns.

  Emma opened the inner door and raised the lamp over her head, revealing a wooden-floored space flanked by enormous bookshelves. Stretching back from the entrance—

  Alice stifled a gasp. There were eyes, a forest of eyes, from the floor to up above her head. Every one of them glowed a brilliant yellow in the lantern light, and every one was focused on the two of them.

  Emma went through, paying no mind whatsoever. After a moment, the closest pair of eyes came forward to greet her, sauntering into the circle of lamplight in the form of a small gray-and-white cat. Alice let out her breath.

  “Cats,” she said to herself. They’d had a cat, back in New York, a brown-and-white mouser that kept mostly to the storerooms. Alice had always left her alone, and she had returned the favor.

  Emma bent down on one knee and held out her free hand. The little cat sniffed it for a moment, then permitted itself to be scratched behind the ears.

  “I like cats,” Emma said. There was a note in her voice that Alice hadn’t heard before, something that, if she hadn’t known better, she might have called human feeling.

  The gray-and-white cat, having concluded that Emma had not brought it anything to eat, padded over to Alice. It met her gaze with unblinking eyes, yawned for a long moment, then wandered off. As though this were a signal, eyes disappeared from the bookcases all around them, and there was the faint susurrus of two dozen cats returning to their interrupted business.

  Now that she’d recovered from her surprise and her eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness, Alice got a better sense of the space around her. The library seemed to be a single vast room, cluttered with bookcases that rose almost to the low stone ceiling. They were arranged in rough rows, but irregularly, with gaps at random intervals. Each shelf was stacked high with books, some so heavily that they were bowing in the center.

  The books themselves were of every possible description, from ancient leather-bound tomes to cheap cardboard-covered novels. The majority looked like they dated from the previous century or even earlier. Most of the titles were in foreign languages Alice didn’t understand, and some were even in letters she didn’t recognize.

  There was no organization whatsoever that she could see, and a dense layer of dust covered everything. The air was absolutely still, and on the nearer shelves she could see where the cats had left trails of neat, feline footprints through the grime.

  It’s so . . . big. Alice had been to the Carnegie Library in the city, which was much larger, but that had been bustling with busy people. This place had the same dead, silent feeling as the house. It felt less like a library than a tomb, or a dragon’s hoard. What would drive someone to collect so many books and stash them here, miles from anywhere, where they could do no good for anyone?

  As they started to walk, the sliding shadows gave the unsettling impression that the bookcases were shifting behind them. It was comforting to spy a distant glow, vanishing and reappearing, like the pilot light of a distant ship on a stormy night. Alice kept looking over her shoulder at their dusty footprints disappearing into the darkness behind them.

  “Mr. Wurms is working there.” Emma pointed to the glow.

  “I haven’t seen him in the house,” Alice said. “Does he live in here?”

  “Yes,” Emma said. Whatever spirit had briefly animated her was gone, and she was back to answering in monosyllables. They walked on in silence for a few moments.

  “What do I do,” Alice said after a while, “if I get lost?” It was easy to imagine in this huge, dark place.

  “Look at the ceiling,” Emma said.

  She raised the lantern as she spoke, so Alice could see the stones that made up the roof. Something glittered among the irregularly shaped blocks—a chunk of obsidian, roughly triangular and about the size of her fist.

  “The narrow end always points toward the front door,” Emma explained tonelessly. “You should always be able to find your way back”

  Unless your lantern goes out, Alice thought. But she kept that to herself.

  They seemed to have walked for miles by the time Mr. Wurms’ table came into view. It was set amid the bookcases, and volumes were piled up around his lamp. Beside them, in a rickety-looking chair, was a bespectacled man in a black suit.

  He was middle-aged, Alice guessed, but he seemed old. His hair was still deep brown, but it had receded enough to leave him with a broad crown of shiny forehead. His face was thin and sallow, with sunken cheeks, and his hands had long, thin fingers with thick knots at the joints. He dressed in shabby black, like a clerk or an undertaker, but he sat so still that dust had settled all over him, like snow, and turned him a dirty gray. When he stirred at the sound of Alice’s footsteps, it puffed up and rolled off him in waves.

  “Ah,” he said. His voice was as dry as a corpse. “Emma. And you must be Ms. Creighton, though I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  Alice nodded politely. “Yes, sir.”

  “My name is Wurms.” He had a slight German accent that turned it into Vurms. “Otto Wurms. It’s a pleasure.”

  His tongue, shockingly
soft and pink, rasped across his dry, cracked lips. The thick glass of his spectacles turned his eyes into huge, distorted pools, but she could nonetheless feel something unpleasant in his gaze. It felt . . . hungry, somehow. When he smiled, she could see his black, rotten teeth.

  Alice decided she did not like Mr. Wurms.

  She cleared her throat. “Mr. Black said you needed some help?”

  “Yes.” He turned his gaze away from her with some reluctance and pointed off into the shelves. “There’s been another collapse. The rot gets into the shelves, you know. Mr. Black has promised me he’ll see about getting another set, but in the meantime I need you to bring all the books back here. We can’t have them lying on the floor, can we?”

  “No,” Emma said, apparently unable to tell if a question was rhetorical.

  “It’s quite a load,” Mr. Wurms said. “You’d do best to fetch the trolley.”

  With that he turned away, back to his reading, as though the two girls were an electric light he’d switched off. Alice wanted to say something, just to make him turn around again, but she thought better of it.

  She turned to Emma. “Come on. We’d better get to work.”

  The trolley was an ancient, squeaky-wheeled monstrosity that required both of them tugging to steer. It seemed almost sacrilegious to push the rattling, screeching thing through the deadly quiet of the library, and Alice fancied their progress was preceded by a vanguard of fleeing cats. Following Mr. Wurms’ directions, they found a place where an ancient set of shelves had given way under the weight of books, spilling fragments of rotten wood and hundreds of volumes across the stone floor.

  When she saw it, Alice sighed. “This is going to take all afternoon.”

  Emma didn’t express an opinion one way or another, just set to work picking up the fallen books and stacking them in piles on the floor. Alice hesitated for a moment, distracted. She felt a peculiar itch between her shoulder blades, an odd sensation of being watched. Something moved, at the corner of her eye, but when she turned to look it was only a thin gray cat, slinking through a gap between the shelves.

  “There’s no percentage in hanging about,” she said aloud. It had been something her father had told her, whenever he’d needed to get her moving; she’d said it automatically, but the memories it called up made her chest clench tight. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then forced herself to take a deep breath. Maybe if we finish early, I can ask Mr. Wurms if it’s all right to take something back to read. “All right. Try and pick out the biggest ones first, we’ll need to put them on the bottom.”

  Emma followed Alice’s instructions dutifully, and once she’d gotten started, she worked tirelessly. The biggest books were a set of huge, linen-bound folios, yellowed and musty with age, which the two girls extracted and laid on the trolley like foundation stones to support the rest of the pile. It was heavier work than Alice had expected, and after an hour her back was aching. Her blouse was damp from the exertion, and the dust mixed with sweat to form a gray paste that covered her skin like the marks of some horrible plague.

  And someone was still watching her. She was certain of it, in the pit of her stomach, but no matter how fast she turned around, she could never catch a glimpse of the observer. She wondered if it could be Mr. Wurms, secretly checking on their progress.

  Probably, she thought, it’s just the cats.

  It was difficult to keep track of time in the windowless library, but she thought it was getting on toward evening by the time they’d loaded the trolley with the last few springy pamphlets. Alice’s stomach was reminding her it was nearly dinnertime, in any case, and she was more than ready to get out of the old library and find a basin to wash off the clinging, all-pervading dust. For a library one mustn’t go into, this has been a real disappointment. There must be some interesting books in here, surely, but with nothing organized, they would be impossible to find. And there’s certainly nothing dangerous, unless Geryon was worried about the shelves collapsing on me.

  There remained the task of piloting the trolley back to where Mr. Wurms was waiting, which turned out to be no simple endeavor. The pile of books was taller than Alice’s head, so if she pushed from the back she couldn’t see where she was going, much less attempt to steer, and the thing weighed so much, it took ages to shove into motion and an equally long time to stop. Emma, at the front, walked in a sort of rolling crouch to drag the thing along and keep it pointed in the right direction, with Alice alternately shoving against the unyielding weight and hauling backward when they were about to run into something.

  Between them, Alice imagined they made quite an amusing spectacle, and she was privately glad there was no one to see them but the cats. It was therefore with some surprise that she heard, through the squeaking rattle of the metal beast, the definite sound of a snicker.

  At first she thought she’d imagined it. It had been a long day, and she was hungry and getting cross. But it came again as they were rounding a corner, which entailed both girls hauling sideways on the trolley like cowboys wrestling an unruly stallion, and this time the sound was absolutely unmistakable. Alice thought briefly of the cats, and her feeling of being watched. But—though she was not an expert on cats—she was fairly certain that they did not, as a rule, snicker. She waited a few heartbeats, until they’d gotten the trolley straightened out, and then, fast as she could, looked over her shoulder.

  There was a cat, a gray one, standing on a low shelf. It sat quite still, staring directly at Alice and looking extremely pleased with itself.

  Something went thump up ahead. Alice spun around and pulled back on the trolley as hard as she could. Once she’d gotten it stopped, she hurried around it, and found Emma on the floor and doing her best to keep from being run over.

  “Sorry!” Alice said, automatically, putting out a hand to help her up. “Are you all right?”

  “I am,” Emma said. She got to her feet and took hold of the front of the trolley again, without even dusting herself off.

  Alice looked over her shoulder. The cat, to her surprise, was still there. Its tail flicked back and forth, raising little puffs of dust.

  The cat did not snicker at me, Alice thought. I’m losing my mind.

  But, underneath that, the ever-present refrain: If my father can talk to a fairy over our kitchen table, who knows what a cat can do?

  “Emma,” Alice said, without taking her eyes off the feline. “Can you take the trolley the rest of the way to Mr. Wurms?”

  “I can,” Emma said. A moment passed, and she remained still, waiting for Alice to resume her place at the back. Alice sighed.

  “Emma, take the cart to Mr. Wurms. Tell him I will be along shortly.”

  Emma nodded and started pulling. Alice felt guilty for a moment for making her haul the heavy load by herself, but it wasn’t that much farther to Mr. Wurms’ table and there was only one more corner. Once the squeaking, rattling trolley had made a little progress, Alice walked back toward the cat, moving slowly so as not to startle it.

  The cat raised its head, and its eyes rolled in an excellent imitation of an impatient look. It raised one paw and started to wash itself daintily.

  “Hello,” Alice said quietly. She did not wish to be seen trying to talk to cats. “Was that you I heard laughing at me?”

  The cat did not reply—honestly, Alice would have been startled if it had—but after a moment it stood up, stretched, yawned, and jumped to the floor. It sauntered a few steps, through a gap between shelves that led away from Mr. Wurms’ table, then stopped and pointedly looked over its shoulder.

  “You want me to . . .” Alice paused. This is crazy. But what was the worst that could happen? She glanced upward, to make sure the markers in the ceiling were still there. No matter how much of a maze the place was, it couldn’t be that hard to find her way out.

  The cat cocked its head inquisitively. Alice raised her lanter
n a little higher and went after it, and it turned away from her immediately and led the way through the gap in the shelves and down a little lane, small footprints trailing behind it in the dust.

  They walked for some time. The distant noise of the trolley’s progress vanished almost at once, and there was no sound in the library except for the soft padding of her own footsteps. The darkness seemed to close in around her, no matter how high she lifted the lantern. The cat looked over its shoulder from time to time, to make sure she was still there, and its eyes glowed yellow in the dim light.

  Very gradually, Alice became aware that something strange was happening. They were walking in a straight line, not turning any corners or going around any bends, but she had the odd feeling they’d changed directions several times. She looked up at the markers, and tried to remember which way they’d been pointing before. And the aisle they were following went on and on, without ever reaching a wall or an intersection. She already felt as though she’d walked so far, they should have been at the edge of the building.

  And, out of the corner of her eye, she thought she could see the shelves changing. Shifting their positions, rearranging themselves in her wake. When she looked at them, they remained reassuringly still, as bookshelves ought to, but as she turned away she could have sworn she saw gaps appear and vanish again, books and shelves sliding apart and together again.

  It reminded her of the invisible servants in the house, and all at once she went from being a little afraid to flushed and irritated. She was sick of everything happening behind her back, sick of whatever joke was going on. It’s about time they let me in on it.

  Alice walked a few more steps, picking her moment, then whirled abruptly on one foot.

  “What is going . . .”