I looked around before uttering “Rumblegumption.” The sheer delight of multiple syllables, held dammed up inside me all day, burst onto my tongue. I added another for good measure. “Falstaffian.”
It paused and cocked its head. Shiny black eyes stared at me. “Anopisthograph.”
I thought for a second. “Sardoodledom.”
The rat twitched its nose and long whiskers and dashed away, throwing back over its scaly fine tail a disgruntled, “Ninnyhammer.” It dislodged a book, which fell with a ponderous thud.
“Well now, my handsome library boy. This is a surprise.” Genet was leaning casually against Shotgun/A-G, watching me. He stepped close to me. In the moonlight, it was almost possible to describe his gaunt face as handsome. “I was injurious in my dismissal of your mind. Hiding such an”—he reached out and grabbed at the crotch of my trousers—“impressive vocabulary would be grounds for”—he squeezed and I gasped (truth be told, I was hard, rigid, tumescent then, both by the wickedness of the man and my discovery)—“termination.”
I stepped back and he released me. His scuffed shoe nudged the fallen book. Double Exposure. “Of course,” I said. “We should go back.”
He tsked. “Say it right.”
I sighed. “It would be auspicious for us to return to the Speakeasy before our mischief is discovered by a certain overseer.” Somewhere within me a door opened.
* * *
The Librarian found me on the morning of my second day’s employment hungover and only a few breaths short of whimpering at every book deposited by the Collectors for me to index.
“How’s our young man doing?” he said, unfolding his papery frame from between the stacks.
Behind him, Gadzooks mumbled something. He had barely glanced at me beyond the necessary since the night before, when Genet and I had burst into the Speakeasy out of breath and disheveled and sweaty.
“Fine,” I said, enunciating the single syllable with care.
“Tremendous, tremendous,” he said, rubbing his endpapers together. “The Index is looking pleasingly sparse. Fine job, fine job.” He paused, mid-flow, and looked around, wrinkling his nose. “Hmmm.”
And:
“Hmmmmm.”
I rubbed my bleary eyes. “What’s wrong?”
Gadzooks looked away.
The Librarian took a deep breath which expanded his torso like an accordion. “Something smells amiss,” he said. “No. Something smells … missing.”
I risked a glance over his shoulder, to where the slim pink spine of Double Exposure sat on the shelf.
The Librarian sniffed again. “Most incomprehensible.” He departed, dragging his long coat on the ground, which rather than wiping them bare instead lined the flagstones with dust in his wake.
* * *
I fretted all the day. Shelving volume after volume of lost books, I slipped more than a few times on the cold brass ladders. Behind texts, the rats devoured the deracinated and the archaic. Gadzooks labored next to me, but he still avoided conversation.
That night he did not invite me back to the Speakeasy. I didn’t mind: I had other things to occupy my time. Before he had been smuggled back to 1943, Genet had pressed the worn copy of Our Lady of the Flowers into my arms, suggesting that it might make good bedtime reading, and departing with a lascivious wink. (Thinking on it later, his precise words had been, “Take this and think of me in bed,” which I supposed wasn’t quite the same thing.)
And so it was for a week or so. The Librarian would appear unbidden and unnoticed, sniffing the air before vanishing, leaving me to dreary tasks—filing the assembled works of a seven-volume fantasy epic into Doubt, box after box stuffed into Teenage Diaries, navigating the complex organization of Pantos/Variations/Peter Pan.
Gadzooks had been correct about the rats’ fondness for me; they would appear amongst whatever shelf I was tending. “Anopisthograph!” said one in particular. I was convinced it was the very same rodent with which I had exchanged words on the night run. “You’ve already had that one,” I said, and shooed it away.
The next day I saw the Librarian sniffing around the display that featured famous luggage—the Library must have had other workers, still unseen, who tended to the glass-enclosed exhibitions of the detritus of authors—and with that long finger tapped by Hemingway’s suitcase. I was thankful that—for tonight at least—Genet’s manuscript was not hidden within as it usually was, with such fragrant prose that the Librarian could not have failed to scent its presence.
Yet, for all his strange behavior, the Librarian didn’t seem to suspect I possessed an intellect or a libido.
Eventually Gadzooks thawed, and reappeared at my bedroom door. “Would you like to—y’know…?”
At the Speakeasy, Genet regaled the crowd from atop the suitcase. (I wondered what had Hemingway done to Genet to deserve such roughshod disregard for his possessions, and eventually asked him; he said only “The man is famous for writing about a fish. Not a whale but a fish.”) Genet greeted me loudly. “Witling! I don’t suppose you have my book on you? I’ve drunk enough to chase away the memory of what I wrote ages ago. That I can remember my own name is a wonder.”
He pirouetted drunkenly, and toppled over. He chuckled. “Perhaps I shall just be Jean tonight and let Genet stay on the shelf.”
I helped him to the bar. I arranged two glasses, placed spoons over them, and a sugar cube atop each. Genet watched my hands as I poured the absinthe over it.
“Why do you leave it here?” I said.
“It? Pronouns are the weakest of words. Even an adverb has more panache.”
I leaned into him. He thought I meant to kiss him and I moved at the last moment so my lips touched his ear. “Your book,” I whispered into it, and felt Genet press vigorously against me; after all, what words could be more seductive to a writer? “They smuggle you in, they smuggle you out—couldn’t you take it with you?”
Genet held my face in his hands and blinked a while. “A first draft—a mere masturbatory fantasy. It belongs right here, one more lost book. It’s a dirty rag for my spent fantasies, written in the throes. What was published is superior.” He frowned. “At least, that’s what the Collectors say. I’ve only sold…” He let go of me and began to count on his fingers but quickly lost his way. “Well, not many, but they tell me that one day—”
I kissed him. Our teeth clicked and thankfully parted. We had yet to even drink the sugared absinthe but I found his mouth so pleasing that I did not notice someone tugging at the cuff of my trousers.
No, not someone. A rising wave of noise broke the familiar chatter. The minstrel faltered in his song; the assembled revelers bloomed into panic. The single rat at my feet let go of the fabric and leapt for my knee, claws digging through my trousers into the skin. “Anopisthograph. Anopisthograph!” and then at the doors the noise crescendoed with a tumult of panicked rats spilling through and across the floor.
Genet cursed. I shouted, “The Librarian!”
And:
“Run!”
And:
We dashed, and it was hard not to laugh with how Genet smiled as we escaped. I pulled him towards the Index; he pulled me towards the staircase; in the tension between the two we spun in each other’s arms as if we were dancing. In the end, I did not deny him another night spent in my bed. I shut the door fast, almost crushing the rat that scampered in and took refuge in my writing desk.
“Ow,” Genet said as we collapsed onto the mattress. “How can you sleep? What is in this? Horsehair?” He wet my lips. “Have you ever eaten cheval?” He groped me. “It’s an acquired taste.”
Authors were indeed.
* * *
I nibbled on the sweet rolls they fed us. I had pocketed an extra one for Gadzooks.
“The last Indexer would give me his meals,” Gadzooks said as he chewed. “He never came to the Speakeasy. He wasted away in his room.”
“Lost in a book?” I said.
“Oh, no. He didn’t dare read.
I think that’s why he faded to nothing. Every time he spoke he lost the words in his head.” Gadzooks rapped on his misshapen skull. “If you don’t replace that with something … even feelings, then you stop.”
I had so many words in my head but I wasn’t sure if there would be enough feelings if I lost my vocabulary.
A rat scurried into the middle of the Index.
“Anopisthograph.”
And then:
“Thomas Hardy,” said the Librarian. His fingers traced down my cheek and neck, and far from the brittle dryness I had imagined, they felt sharp, as if they might leave a trail of papercuts on my skin. “Quite fascinating. Such a faultless resume should have been enough to make me doubt. Clever boy … I was lulled by the passive voice. I should have checked your references.”
The rat turned slowly, almost apologetically, and backed away beneath the stacks. I sighed.
“Indeed,” I said. “That would have been prudent of you. Judicious. Shrewd. Discerning, even.”
The Librarian winced.
Gadzooks attempted to fade away into the shelves. “Ah-ah-ah,” said the Librarian. He beckoned Gadzooks closer with a crooked finger. “Surreptitious sneaking—I’m afraid I cannot allow that.”
With one hand the Librarian covered my face. I feared he meant to smother me; his skin against my nose smelt of spilt ink, the emaciated palm against my mouth made me choke with its taste of glue.
Then I heard Gadzooks scream.
The Librarian released me. All that remained of my Collector friend was a large hessian sack and some old wooden toys. A yo-yo stopped spinning, its thread a last umbilical cord.
“Don’t think of it as murder,” said the Librarian. “Think of it as a metaphor for murder.”
I swallowed.
“The old beak warned me. Something missing. Boys before you sneaked into Unwarranted Adventures or Illegal Pornography. But you went there.” He gestured at the door. Neither of us needed to say aloud the section.
“What am I to do with you?” He plucked from his coat pocket a book that made my heart sink. “And more importantly, what am I to do with this, found in your mattress.” He inspected the spine. “The Sum of All Our Tales, by Barnabus Hardy. Father? Grandsire? Brother?” He leered. “Lover?”
“Father.”
“Pity,” the Librarian said. “You must have been so young. The age when you were warned about razorblades in Halloween candy—not the bathtub.”
I stiffened.
“No note. Just his final manuscript. Did the literary world mourn his loss?”
“Stop.”
The Librarian shut the book hard enough that his clothes rippled. “By all means. But tell me, young Hardy, have you ever heard the word ‘deaccession.’ Not so common any more, which is a shame.” He opened the grate of the nearest gas lamp. I screamed at him to cease, to desist, but still he poked one corner of my father’s only book into the flame.
He dropped the papers curling into ash as the fire spread.
“A lesson, a dear lesson in realizing what a lost book is,” he said.
The Librarian’s immense arm pressed me back, anticipating me wrestling free, though I didn’t know what I would do even if I could escape his grasp—perhaps throw myself on the fire in hopes of extinguishing it, rescuing the scorched remnants of the manuscript from the ashes? But it would be futile: it does not take long for poetry to burn. Verses are highly flammable—it’s because they were dear fuel in someone’s imagination.
“Consider that a written warning—obviously it cannot be filed away, but … well, I am a practical man. With the elder Hardy’s esprit in ashes perhaps you will no longer want to open a book again.” The Librarian straightened his bow-tie. “You may take the rest of the day off. If I find you at the Index in the morning, I will know your decision to stay with us. At a reduction in salary.”
Perhaps my gaze was too wet with tears to set his retreating backside ablaze.
I trudged to my room. The Librarian’s search had torn apart bed and desk. I sat down on the floor and wrapped my arms around my knees.
Something climbed up my back and to my ear. “Empressement.”
I stroked the rat with two fingers. It chirped and then nipped gently at my earlobe. “Frantling.” It leapt to the ground and ran towards the door, stopped and looked over its shoulder at me and squeaked. “Usative.”
I followed it through the maze of the Library. The lighting where we tread was dimmer. I had not been everywhere. Some subjects were unknown to me. Down one path I saw a familiar figure reclining on the penultimate shelf devoid of books. The rat scampered away as Genet peered up at me.
“Sometimes I do not go back,” he said, looking chagrinned. He handed me the book his head had been resting on. A Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling by Benjamin Franklin. “How he loved whores. Once they brought him to the Speakeasy and all he wanted to do was steal a boy’s glasses and find the door leading to ancient Lesbos.”
Genet stretched, a gesture that was part exercise and part pretense to embrace me suddenly. “I doubt more than a handful of authors end up in Wasted Graphemes so it is safe here.” He touched my face, my cheeks. “Ahh, but you recently had a terrible encounter with the wicked regent, I see.”
I told him of my father, of his poetry. It had been years since I spoke of being away at school when they found his body, of life at the homes of distant relatives who could not look at me without seeing a debt to family they wanted little part of. My last name was all I had of my father’s until I learned of the Library.
“You must feel his loss keenly.”
I shrugged. “My father is a long-closed chapter.”
“Ah, I see. The book, then—you mourn the loss of the book.”
“Something like that.”
“We shall toast to both the man and his book at the Speakeasy tonight,” Genet said, laying a hand on my shoulder.
I rested my cheek against Genet’s fingers. “Actually—I had another thought. If you don’t mind.”
And finally:
1943 smelt of fire and paper. Feet stamped in unison, close by; voices intoned, “Heil Hitler!”; the books of Germany burnt in the courtyard, a gout of gluttonous smoke bearing their words into a sky already thick with many volumes. I backed away from the bonfire as fast as I could, pushing through the crowds that railed against the soldiers, shouldering my way through and away. Away from the crowd, away from the noise. Ducking into an alleyway, I paused to breathe, heaving against the damp wall.
One hand was in Genet’s as I pulled him along behind me; the other clutched tight to the worn leather handle of Hemingway’s suitcase. Several street corners away, I pulled Genet into an alleyway. “You said you had a room near here—the room above the tavern, where the bed-springs sing?”
He pressed against me, mouth close to my ear. “How forward of you—I like it.”
He led me a few streets further, arriving at a narrow doorway in the shadow of rotting tenements, the tavern windows the only warm thing in sight. He fumbled with a key, whilst I wrapped my arms tight around myself and shivered. Away from the book-burning, the city was freezing. Eventually, Genet persuaded the door to open, and he led me up rickety stairs to a room reminiscent of my chambers at the Library: sparse, furnished with a bed and a writing table. The greying sheets were balled on a threadbare mattress, and the table was strewn with papers. The floorboards creaked and wobbled beneath our feet.
There was a murine flicker by the doorway, and a scaly tail darted between my feet. A whispered word floated back in its wake. “Anopisthograph!”
I sat on the bed, still shivering. Genet watched the rat depart and closed the door. The sound of the key in the lock released me; the tension of weeks in the Library, fumbling around under the Librarian’s watchful eye, drained away. I sank back.
Genet lay down beside me, his skin warm against mine. He smelt of absinthe and book dust; I had the urge to bury my face in his chest, but my bone
-weary limbs wouldn’t co-operate.
“Will you read to me?” I said.
He arched an eyebrow, and nuzzled against my shoulder. “My handsome witling—foreplay, is it?”
“This isn’t foreplay.”
“I have nothing to—”
“The suitcase.”
The bed-springs sang as he arose; I heard the grate of the lock opening, and the rustle of papers, then Genet returned to me with the contents of the suitcase in his hands: the first manuscript of Our Lady of the Flowers, where I had returned it when I had finished.
Genet smiled faintly. “My slack-handed first draft—but if you insist…” He cleared his throat, and raised the first page to his eyes. “‘Wiedmann appeared before you in the five o’clock edition,’” he began.
“No,” I said. “Turn it over.”
He did as I asked, squinting at the fresh scrawl that coated the reverse of his pages.
“Sorry about my handwriting,” I said. There had not been light in my Library chambers, or much space with which to work. My letters had been shrunk to the smallest I could manage to cram in everything I needed to write on the pale underside of Genet’s own pages.
Genet sat up on the bed, crossed his legs, looked from the page, to me, and to the page again. He cleared his throat theatrically. “‘The Sum of All Our Tales, by Barnabus Hardy’,” he began.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Matthew Bright
Art copyright © 2017 by Red Nose Studio
The Library of Lost Things Page 2
