by Roland Smith
Lod had gone Beneath with a plan …
“He had a map,” Kate said. “He knew where he was going. He broke into a government building and discovered the plans and location of a top secret facility built during the Cold War in case of nuclear attack. It was built to last a hundred years and house up to five hundred people. It was provisioned, never used, and forgotten.”
Early on there were problems.
Betrayals.
Fights.
Revolts.
After a few months people started wanting to leave.
Lawrence Oliver Dane became Lord of the Deep.
And no one who tried to escape ever made it to the top alive.
They died when she was a couple of months old.
She was told that her parents had starved to death trying to reach the top.
Lod and her grandmother raised her.
“My grandmother died last year,” Kate said. “Just before she passed she told me the truth about my parents’ deaths. They did not die Beneath. They made it to the top, but my grandfather tracked them down. He murdered them, then took me back into the Deep.
“I didn’t believe her … at first. She hated my grandfather. I thought she lied to spite him from beyond the grave. But I was wrong.”
Kate took two sheets of crumpled paper out of her pocket. She handed them to me and positioned her headlamp so I could read them.
They were copies of two articles from the New York Post dated Christmas Day years earlier …
I said.
“What?”
“The Community’s postman discovered your parents,” I answered. “We walked by the alley where they were found. He wouldn’t go down it.”
“The old man who works at the bank?”
“They call him Posty, but he goes by Terry Trueman, which apparently isn’t his real name either.”
“We keep a close eye on everyone in the Community, but I didn’t know the old man was Terry Trueman.” Kate thought a moment. “But I bet Lod knew. He knows everything about everybody.”
“How?”
“The room,” Kate answered.
“What room?”
“A place where only Lod and the Originals are allowed into.”
“What’s an Original?”
“The remaining eight men and women who have been in the Deep from the beginning. They would happily die for my grandfather. Not even I have been into the room. The rumor is that it’s filled with computers and surveillance equipment. I think Lod has hacked into every camera in the city and has put up cameras of his own, and not just in New York. Two Originals are in the room twenty-four-seven. And they all gather inside once a day to discuss Pod business and make plans.”
“What kind of plans?’
Kate shook her head. “I don’t know, but whatever they are, they’re getting close to acting on them. He and the Originals have been busy the past couple of months … Coming and going up top, sometimes meeting several times a day for hours at a time, shutting down areas of the compound. I asked Lod about it. He said, ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be safe.’ I took this to mean that other members of the Pod will not be safe. I’m afraid. I think he’s going to hurt people.” She paused. “A lot of people.”
“Did you tell Coop this?”
“I didn’t get a chance to before we were caught. I didn’t even get a chance to show him these newspaper articles.”
I turned on my headlamp and took a closer look at the two sheets of paper.
“Where did you get these?”
“The Deep has a librarian?”
“Are you kidding? We barely have books. And the ones we have are screened by the Originals. I was jealous of all the books the Community had, but over the years I’ve managed to read dozens of banished books with the help of the Librarian.”
“Who is he? Or is the Librarian a she?”
“He,” Kate answered. “And I don’t know who he is. We’ve never spoken. I guess I better explain.”
“I guess so.”
Kate was thirteen years old when she discovered the Librarian. Or at least the first stack of books he had left for her.
Along with a note:
Read these. Tell no one. They will take the books away.
You will be punished.
When you finish them I will lend you more books.
The Librarian
At first Kate thought it was a test.
Lod and the Originals were always testing the Shadows.
She didn’t touch the books.
But she didn’t tell anyone about them either.
It took her four visits to the forgotten Murray Hill Reservoir beneath the New York Public Library before she picked up the first book and smuggled it back into the compound.
“I’d never been more frightened in my life,” she said. “I read the book at night under my covers with a flashlight thinking that any second one of the Originals, or Lod, would burst into my room. I was the youngest person to ever become a Shadow, and there were … there still are … a lot of people who want me to fail. I bypassed a dozen people wanting the coveted position, including some of the Originals’ family members. I could have been sent to the mush room for reading a forbidden book.”
“What’s the mush room?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Actually, I did want to know, but I let the question go and asked another.
“What was the first book?”
“Lord of the Flies by William Golding.”
“The Librarian jumped right into it,” I said. “What did you think of the book?”
“Subversive propaganda,” Kate said. “You see, I told myself that I was going to play along with him by reading the books … but my real goal was to find out how he got into the Deep. With the exception of my detour, there are only two other ways into the Deep that I know about. And both of them have surveillance cameras, which are monitored around the clock. If I could catch an intruder and discover an unknown entrance, all doubts about my becoming a Shadow would vanish.”
“If you were watching Coop on surveillance cameras, why didn’t you stop him before he found the opening? You must have been watching him for days.”
“We wanted to see if he could find it. We thought he’d give up.”
“Coop never gives up.”
“I’ve noticed,” Kate said. “After a couple of days we thought for sure he would head back where he came from. By the time he was through we were hardly paying attention to him. He’d missed the rock a hundred times. No one was close when he slipped through and reached the river.”
“You didn’t know he was from the Community?”
Kate shook her head. “Our only option in the dark is to use infrared cameras, so all we can see are thermal images. No details. If I’d known it was Coop, I would have gone up and warned him off immediately.”
“Not that he would have listened to you,” I said.
“That’s another one of his annoying traits.”
I looked at my watch. “I’m feeling better. Shouldn’t we get moving?”
“We still have some time.”
“I thought we were trying to get as far in front of Lod as we could.”
“We are, but there are other ways of increasing our distance than rushing to the compound. I have a way that might slow Lod down, but it has to be timed just right. I also have to get into the compound without anyone being suspicious of me. If they are, I won’t be able to sneak you in and we’ll have no hope of getting Coop out.”
Kate read a book a night.
Sometimes two.
Her plan to find out who the Librarian was and how he was entering the Deep did not change.
But the books she read changed her.
Word by word.
Idea by idea.
Novels. Philosophy. Religion. Politics. Geography. History. Science. Art …
“I continued looking for the Librarian,” she explained. “Sometimes spending the entire night hidden away waiting for him to pi
ck up the books I dropped off. But I never saw him. I never heard him. All I would find was a new stack of books.
“I put our best Seekers on him. These dogs can track a single mouse for miles. But they never picked up his scent. It was almost as if the books were taken and replaced with new books by magic, but of course I knew they weren’t.
“After a couple of years I stopped looking for him. I realized that if I caught him, there would be no more books. The books had become more important than proving myself as a Shadow. I thought I was using the books to catch him, but it turned out that he had used the books to catch me …”
Kate walked up to drop off the books she’d read and there he was.
Sitting on a boulder.
Reading a book.
He didn’t look up.
At first she thought he didn’t know she was there.
He turned a page and kept reading.
Then another page.
And another …
Kate waited.
Finally he slipped in a bookmark and closed the book.
He looked up at Kate. “I dislike stopping in the middle of a chapter, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Kate said, barely able to find her voice.
“Have you enjoyed the books I’ve left?”
“Most of them.”
“I didn’t expect you to like all of them.”
“Who are you?”
“A friend.”
“It’s not safe for you down here.”
“I’m perfectly safe down here. I’ve been down here as long as your grandfather.”
“How do you know about my grandfather?”
“I know everything about the Pod.”
“Have you met my grandfather?”
“A long time ago.”
“What’s your name?”
“That’s no longer important. I’m just a simple librarian now.”
There was nothing simple about the Librarian.
Kate wasn’t even sure he was a real person.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Kate answered quietly, looking away.
I understood why she was looking away.
Our escape. Coop’s life. Depended on someone, something, that might not exist.
“A ghost?”
“I’m not sure. I don’t know what he is. All I know is that I’ve tried to follow him a dozen times and every time I do, he turns a corner and vanishes.”
“Poof,” I said.
“More or less,” Kate agreed.
“And this is who we are depending on to get us out of here?”
“It’s a long shot, I know.”
Impossible is more like it, I thought. “What’s he look like?”
“Old. He wears a tattered suit and tie. Thick, black-framed glasses. Gray beard. He smokes a pipe.”
“How old is he?”
“Late seventies … eighties. I don’t know. But for his age, he moves incredibly well.”
“And he can disappear into thin air,” I added.
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“Does he know you’re trying to get Coop out?”
“I’m not sure.”
“All right. I’ll put it another way. How do we find him so he can show us how to get out of here?”
“I don’t find him,” Kate said. “He finds me. At first I only saw him at the reservoir, but then he started popping up in the Deep, Beneath, and above.”
“You saw him up top?”
Kate nodded. “A few times, but above we never spoke. I’d pass him walking down the street. Or see him watching me. He knows how the Pod operates. We work in teams up top. There is always a second Shadow within sight for security in case there’s trouble.”
I wanted to ask her what kind of trouble, but I was more troubled about Coop and how we were going to get him out of the Deep.
“Let me get this straight. We’re relying on an old man … or ghost … who sometimes appears and sometimes doesn’t, who can apparently vanish into thin air, who has no idea that we are trying to get out of here, and who may not know how to get out of here himself?”
“He knows how to get out of here,” Kate said. “The books he’s left for me are from the New York Public Library. And I wouldn’t be so sure he doesn’t know we’re trying to get out of here. He could be watching us right now, listening to this conversation. Just before he gave me these articles he told me that I was leaving the Pod.”
“How could he know that?”
“When he said it, I had no intention of leaving. In fact, I was still thinking about turning him in.”
“But then you discovered your grandmother was telling the truth,” I said. “The articles were the proof.”
Kate nodded. “But here’s what’s strange. Look at the bottom of the pages.”
I held them under my headlamp.
There was a time stamp on the bottom of both articles.
They were printed twelve years earlier, long before the Librarian began lending Kate books.
“Don’t ask,” Kate said. “Because I don’t know the answer. All I know is that he always shows up when I need him. Somehow he knew all of this was going to happen. He’ll help us if he can.”
“And if he can’t, or if he doesn’t want to?”
Kate stood. “It’s time to go.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to save Coop, but first I need to lie to my grandfather. At the right place.”
was the path above the River Styx.
Kate jogged along the dark narrow ledge as if it were as wide and bright as a well-lit street.
I walked along behind, clutching the rusty railing, wondering if my claustrophobia had been replaced by vertigo.
When I finally caught up to her she was wearing the flashing Bluetooth Coop had mentioned.
“Another Pod rule,” she said. “Shadows are not allowed to turn their radios off. Ever. I suspect that Lod and the Originals have special transmitters in the radios and use them to track us. I’ve had my radio off for more than twenty-four hours. I’m about ready to turn it on.”
“Why?”
“Because I want him to know exactly where I am. I want to continue the argument I started with him three days ago.”
“You confronted him about murdering your parents?”
“Are you kidding? If he knew I knew about that, he’d probably murder me. I’m talking about the argument I started when he caught us. He accused me of trying to get Coop out of the Deep. He accused me of trying to run away with him.”
“Weren’t you?”
“Of course, but if I admitted that, I’d be locked up like Coop. I insisted that I was bringing Coop in, not taking him above. I acted outraged that Lod could even think for a minute that I would leave the Deep, especially with someone from above. I didn’t talk to him for two days … then I turned my radio off and disappeared.”
“Poof,” I said.
Kate smiled and took a very small radio out of her pocket. “I’m going to turn this on and put it on speaker. You might want to record the conversation for Coop. It will make an interesting addition for Coop’s project if we get out of here alive.”
She turned the radio on.
“Where are you?”
“You know exactly where I am. Where are you?”
“Up top looking for you. You turned your radio off. You helped that kid escape. You broke our law, Kate.”
“I stopped another topsider from getting into the Deep. And I proved that our security is weak.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You walked right past me.”
”!Impossible!”
“At the Community. I was there watching you. I sent the kid up top with Bouncer, then I waited. There were eight of you. You were after me, not Coop’s brother. You didn’t even know he was Beneath, but I knew. How long do you think he would have hung around the Community waiting for Coop to show up? He wouldn’t have. He’s claustropho
bic. He wanted out of there. He was going to get in touch with the authorities. I told him that Coop headed to Mexico with a girl he met from the Deep. That he wasn’t coming back, that —”
“You listen to me …”
“No, Lod. You listen to me! A couple of days ago, according to you, that fictitious girl was me. I’m the one who found Coop and pushed him into the river, yet you accused me of trying to run off with him. I could have gone up top with his brother and you would have never found me. But where am I? I’m headed to the compound, which you’ve left virtually unguarded, chasing someone who’s not running. There is no one in the Pod more loyal to you than me. No one! This has got to stop right now, or I am going to leave.”
This was followed by a very long silence. When Lod spoke he sounded like a completely different person.
“This is not how I wanted to spend Christmas. I don’t want you to leave, Kate.”
“Like you ever cared about Christmas, Lod. If you want me to stay, make me an Original along with two other Shadows of your choosing. You need to bring some young blood into the decision-making process. That’s the best present you could give to the Pod for Christmas.”
“We’ve talked about that.”
“The time for talk is over.”
“I hear you. I think it’s time. But what about this boy … Coop’s brother?”
“That’s up to you. If you want to track and grab him, that’s fine with me, but I don’t think he’s ever coming back down here. He doesn’t know anything, and he’s afraid of the dark. Like I said, I told him that his brother was on his way to Mexico. He’s either on his way home or headed south to find his brother.”
“I’ll send a couple of Shadows and Seekers after him just in case.”
“What?”
“I said I’ll send a couple of —”
“You’re breaking up. That’s another thing we need to fix. Our communication system is terrible. I don’t know if you can hear me or not.”
“I can hear you …”
“If you can hear this, I’m heading down to the compound. I’ll see you when you get there.”
“I’ll be down in a few hours …
“I hate this thing. We’ve got to get this —”
