[Addendum note: Chapter 15 is also missing. I am beginning to realize that either a) Castellemare had planned for me to steal this book but wanted to remove most of the key passages that would allow me progress, or b) The pages were intact when I first took possession of the book and some unknown person has since removed them. According to where the pagination resumes, 16pp are missing. Text resumes at opening of 16th chapter.]
16
I had learned later that Sigurd and Castellemare had been in frequent contact with one another. This served to unsettle me slightly, if not because it was done so discreetly, but it was the way men like Castellemare could attract the incoherent and misunderstood with the seductive philosophy of abandoning Reason for the bacchant revel of chaos. This was evidence of some level of collusion between the two. I felt it the sign of a terrible predator for someone to lure others in a state of weakness. Sigurd had recently been released from care and was now said to be visiting that posh home of Castellemare without inviting me.
Here is where events travelled into a strange province of circularity, of [Text missing. The text was missing here as well, blacked out to the end of the printed page with the remainder physically torn out. None of these removals look like an accident born of neglectful handling, but a deliberate action. I resolve not to take the bait of yet another bobbing mystery and read on. The book is coming to its natural, if not awkwardly set up, conclusion, but I am now missing a vital piece of the narrative if only because there would be no explanation as to why Gimaldi and the narrator decided to go see Castellemare, and their willingness to enter into some variety of labyrinth. There is no bridging material to explain these loose ends. It may not be important. The arc of the story had very little lift to begin with, and the clues of importance to me were sparse and scattered. At this point of the story, I gathered that they were going to be trapped in Castellemare's labyrinth, and the narrator would relent to write the book after all].
17
Even Gimaldi couldn't see any other option but to take up on Castellemare's challenge.
“We may never get out,” Gimaldi said. “That is always the risk, but hopefully our convictions are in league with the truth.”
“If we get out, then I will finally understand,” I said. “Then I can write the Finis Logos.”
We went to Castellemare's villa, and he greeted us with an excessive cordiality that merely masked his smugness. He led us to an unmarked door and said, “I guarantee that there is an exit, but you must first weave your way through the labyrinth. The entrance will be barred, so don't think of backtracking.”
A guarantee of an exit. If only the mystery would also have one, or perhaps the exit of the labyrinth and the resolution of the mystery would be one and the same. It seemed suspiciously orderly for someone like Castellemare – self-professed anarchic figure – to have a labyrinth as well as an exit. His may not have been chaos after all, but that troubling thought that gets us to question the guarantee of a clockwork universe: who fabricates and winds it?
And so we entered, and felt terribly anxious. It would probably be Castellemare's plan to let us die there if an exit was not found. Perhaps he was counting on us becoming desperate, making hasty decisions and causing us to further lose ourselves in this maze. This would vindicate his philosophy of chaos and non-resolvability, of paradox and defeat.
Gimaldi and I travelled down a corridor that led to a triangular room with two doors. The carpet patterns remained the same: red with gold trim, tracing that same interlocking pattern of red lions. One door was inscribed with the word love and the other with hate. We went through the south door (”love”) and came across another corridor leading to a quadrangular room and another triangular room, each with a variety of doors.
“We must mark our trail so that we don't repeat the same path,” Gimaldi said. “But I have no such marker.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “Each room has the same items: a four by four plexiglass cube encasing some rare tome. Perhaps we could turn off the lights when exiting a room.”
“I do not see any light switches.”
Which was true. Pot lights kept the rooms illuminated.
“Then perhaps we should record the names of the books we come across. But I have no writing instrument, so we'll have to rely on our memories.”
The quadrangular room's book was the Liber Artemidorus, and the triangular room's book was the De Specificae Animaculum. We went through the right door of the quadrangular room and proceeded down the corridor before it turned sharply to the left and into a wall.
“Dead end,” I said. “Let's go back.”
One corridor led to a room and nothing more. To complicate matters, we encountered staircases, ladders leading both up and down, and the floor was sometimes recessed gradually - all this would cause us never to know with certainty what floor we were on. Some doors were locked on one side, and so we could only go through them by taking a roundabout route, only to return to rooms we had already traveled through.
Some doors only led to empty closets, yet all the doors looked the same. After two hours of trial and error, and encountering room after room (perhaps some we had already been to, but we couldn't know for sure), we came across a circular room with doors that branched from it - some on one side, and some on the other.
“Let this be our point of return,” Gimaldi said. “An anchor in this space to orient ourselves by. As long as there is no other circular room in this labyrinth.”
We entered another triangular room where there was another book, the Summa Necroticatis, and ended up in another corridor, but this one slightly different. It had a suspended corridor and three staircases above. We could not get to the corridor from there. So we returned to the circular room.
One of the doors from there led to a smaller circular room, with more doors. Once again, Castellemare's villa's architectural cunning exposed itself. While proceeding down one corridor, it appeared to fork, and at the fork, proceeding beyond the dimensions of the smaller circular corridor we had entered from. Upon closer inspection, we discovered a mirror.
“An illusion of space,” Gimaldi muttered, now becoming quite irritated.
When we returned to the larger circular room after another hour of searching, something peculiar had happened: the doors were in a different alignment since we had last been there. I heard a faint humming, and so my frightening hypothesis was confirmed: the room was revolving very slowly on an axis, like we were on the face of a large clock. Now it stood that nothing was stable. I reasoned that if this was the case, then we should proceed downwards to the source of the revolutions, to locate the pivot itself. After winding our way through rooms and taking any available ladder or staircase down, we finally located the bottom. Regrettably, it was a small circular room with only one door. When I opened it, there was a staircase that brought us up a few flights and into another room.
“Let us take stock of our progress so far,” Gimaldi said. “Where did the left door of the Liber Glamis lead us?”
“Back to the Summa Necroticatis room.”
“I see. And the right?”
“Mirrored corridor - dead end.”
“Then the path is clear. We head left to the Aegyptiae Anotatio room, up the ladder, go right through the Sed Contra Areopagitica room, down the left corridor, and out the Renuncio quo est room.”
But though we did this, we only encountered more of the same. I was feeling hungry and tired, but we could not risk sleep for fear that we would not recall the names of the rooms we had passed through.
Castellemare was more devilish than I had thought. The plexiglass cubes were bolted to the floor, the carpet was too tough to rip out, and so we had no way of marking our progress.
“Can we kick any walls in?” Gimaldi asked in exasperation, his reason petering out as tiredness came on. I tried to kick the walls, but to no avail. “How about the doors?” Solid oak, invincible hinges.
We thought of every possible solution. There were no de
bris, either, for the labyrinth was immaculately clean. There were more rooms than the ripping of our clothing into strips would make useful.
We spent two whole days there, now parched and weary. The hallucinations brought on by sleeplessness were also troublesome. But it was in this surreal state that I came up with the solution: to use Castellemare's philosophical object against him.
“I can't believe we missed it all this time,” I said with wild disbelief, half reproaching myself for not thinking of it earlier. “Come with me.”
And so we found one of the many corridors with a mirror. With two kicks, the mirror shattered. I gave a shard to Gimaldi and kept one for myself.
“What are we to do with these?” Gimaldi asked. “Slit our wrists?”
“No, we will mark our trail,” I said. That was when I placed the shard firmly against the wall and began walking, making a long scratch on the wall. When we got to the circular corridor, I explained the plan: “we mark all the doors, on both sides, with a large circle. Doors that we have tried that lead nowhere, we will scratch with an 'X' in the circle. Easy enough?
This had brought us to greater and greater degrees of success, but the most perilous was yet to come - especially owing to our tired state of mind and the effects of being so confined in a repetition of confusion. We finally came across the door that led us out of the labyrinth... into the Tain. To spend so long in a place where the walls were the same, defining the borders of one's visual perception, could have a serious effect - especially when one leaves such a place into its contradiction: infinite space without walls. When we entered, we both let out unearthly wails, and almost retreated back into the labyrinth. The sight of infinite space, though an illusion, was enough to destabilize even the most secured mind after any length of time in such maddening confinement. Gimaldi had evidently never been inside the Tain before, only heard of it.
Though Castellemare would not admit it, his labyrinth had been constructed from Reason, albeit a very complicated form of Reason. And Reason had led us out. Just as we made our way through the Tain, cries of joy and terror leaping from us, like the utterances of wild animals, our reflection was... replaced... with that of Castellemare's. He had entered the room to greet us.
“There can be a place for Reason,” I gasped in triumph.
“And another age ends, my little avatars,” Castellemare said. I did not understand what he meant until we left the villa...
17
A Horrifying Miracle
I had resisted the urge to toss the book across the room, having only a few more chapters to upset my digestion. No, to throw the book across the room on account of its sloppy writing and ridiculous plot would be to ennoble it somehow. I had to patiently remind myself that I was after clues, couched in no matter how awful the writing was. And, still, no clearer mention of the synthesis. I could not bring myself to skip to the next book just as yet for fear of missing out on some kind of clue, something that would provide the proper context for consuming the next text in the series. Although I had yet to speak further with my neighbour, Leo, as another potential lead, I decided to do that when I was ready; namely, when I got into the next book.
There was a knock on my door. In my now usual fashion, I spied through the peephole. It was Angelo again, second time in as many weeks.
“Come in,” I said, holding the door and waving him inside. It was getting hard to walk around, what with so many new boxes of books that were still quite steadily being mailed to my place.
“You really are trying to break my neck, aren't you?” he said in a joking manner. “Did we go a little nuts with the credit card on TextOnline?”
“I'm being lavished with gifts from your employer.”
“Heh. Maybe he thinks you need to read more,” he said off-handedly. Something else was on his mind. “I could really use a hand. There are far too many books slipping off, and some of them are proving impossible to retrieve. Not to mention that the boss has been acting very strangely lately.”
“He is strange to begin with, so I would be the last to tell the difference. Any news on Setzer's murder?”
He ignored my comment and question and launched right into what he wanted: “I need your help, Gimaldi. I cannot do this alone. There are too many books, and they're popping up all over.”
He was sweating and his eyes, ringed with sleeplessness, were bulging and darting. He was in a bad, nervous way.
“I am no longer under his employ, Angelo. I cannot be of any service.”
“The boss has withdrawn – most likely somewhere inside the Library. None have seen him or heard from him in the last day.”
“So he took a holiday. He wrote me an email recently, and has been trying to bury me under books since.”
“There is something not right. I know it,” he kept repeating, the small crack in his usual brusque demeanor now a large fissure out of which was pouring worry. “You must help me reacquire the books. There are far too many of them. No one is tending the Library and things are falling into disorder. And I'm being followed.”
“Angelo, you are agitated. You need bed rest.”
“I see them, Gimaldi! They are tailing me, watching me. They sometimes get on location before I do and replace the book I am to reacquire with a dummy copy.”
“Who?”
“Nearest I can figure, those Devorants you told me about. I think what they did to Setzer they mean to do to Castellemare... and me. It makes sense that the boss has hidden himself away like that.”
I braved a friendly arm around his shoulder and led him to the reading chair, meekly offering to make him some tea. He declined this and asked for something stiffer; I poured two tall whiskeys. The phone rang, causing Angelo to jump.
“Don't answer it!” he blurted. My hand was paused over the phone and I retracted. He took a long gulp of his whiskey and helped himself to more from the bottle between us.
In an effort to unwind him slightly, I tried to interest him in some book or other on some vaguely humourous topic. However, as I pulled the book from the shelf, two came tumbling after.
“What's that?” said Angelo in the beginnings of a panic.
“Nothing, just a few books fell off the shelf. It's a bit cluttered,” I said, but when I looked down at the fallen books, I did not recognize them as part of my collection. Angelo must have read my consternation as a sign of trouble.
“What?” he said, and repeated again as I was frozen on the spot. I tried stammering that all was ok, but could not help myself from dipping my hand into the shelf again, pulling out another book... followed by another, and... another?
“Oh, god, god, shit, man... What the hell?” he said, wild-eyed and standing.
I maintained a kind of curious calm, quizzically pulling book after book from a never-ending shelf like the way magicians pull rabbits out of hats. None of them were part of my collection. It was the scene of a horrifying miracle as I kept pulling ever more volumes from the shelf, robotically. Angelo just looked on in turgid fear, unmoving with a mask of panic upon his generally imperturbable sneer of a face.
“I... don't know what this means, Angelo,” I said slowly, rapt with what was happening before me.
“It's happening all over – I know it,” Angelo replied, his tone a vicious mix of fear and surrender.
Was I determined to do this interminably, like those who have the compulsion to pull at a loose thread on knitted garment until it was just a loose pile without form? I stepped away from my shelf, the floor in front of it littered with alien books. The phone rang again. I did not make a move to answer it, nor did I allow myself to be baited by the notification sound on my email. And nor did either of us move when we heard a loud and insistent banging on the door. None of this was making sense, and I cursed myself for not abandoning my apartment forever and staying on the continent, far removed from this terrible, murderous enigmas. I could also hear Angelo's PDA sounding off, but he made no motion to investigate. People were desperately trying to c
ommunicate with us.
I whispered to Angelo, “I think we're trapped. We may have to face whoever this is.”
Angelo was rooted to the spot, staring fixedly at the miraculous bookshelf. For him, it meant the end of order, the effacement of all his knightly duties. I wondered to myself if it were not Castellemare himself who was now pushing books out of the Library and into the world. Or, perhaps, according to the laws of the Library I could not understand, the Library was now experiencing textual stigmata, profuse bleeding from the wound of the now-dead artificer Anton Setzer. Was not Setzer's whole task to multiply books ad absurdum? Did the Library prefigure his necessity, and was now off-balance because of his death?
“We need safe passage to Detroit,” I said to Angelo, but he was deaf from fear.
The knocking, ringing, and every other kind of noise linked to a communication device, continued. My shelf was now actually bleeding books without me having to pull them out, a gushing forth of volumes spilling upon my already book-choked floor.
Save our souls. It was a bizarre thought to have at that exact moment. We were going to drown under all these books, but there was no safe way out. The knocking was still insistent, but had fallen into a rhythm as if to underscore our sense of panic, to provide a kind of drumbeat that would drive us mad. If I could not save our souls, I could at least save the two books. These I deftly stuffed into my shoulder bag, beckoning Angelo to assist me in storming our way out.
The Infinite Library Page 27
