“Audrey!” Jessa slumped up the steps, lopsided under the weight of her backpack, slung low over just one shoulder.

“Hey!” Audrey thumbed her book so she could greet her sister with a hug before organising a better bookmark. Jessa noticed the hug was closer and longer than the sisters had shared for a long time.

“How are you doing?” Audrey asked earnestly.

“I’m all right.”

“You look a bit peaky.”

“Yeah, well…” Jessa shrugged.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Well, you know you can, right? You can call me any time, or you—”

“I know. It’s fine,” Jessa smiled weakly. “Really, I’m fine. It was just a long day at school, that’s all.”

“What did you want to do here?” Audrey changed the subject. She packed away her reading book and took the final swig from her coffee flask before putting it away.

“There’s something I want to look at, and I remember you said you could use your student membership to look at the special books here.”

“Depending on what it is, of course.”

“Ancient books by someone called Felix Aurelius. He has one called Hundred Quatrains and another set called Manuals.”

“Hmm, I’ve never heard him. You’re sure those are here?”

The younger sister nodded.

“All right,” Audrey conceded, leading her younger sister through the revolving door of the Humboldt Library.

Jessa was surprised and impressed at the security measures required to enter the library. The grumpy frown on the security attendant’s brow also did nothing to ease Jessa’s tension about the walk-through metal detecting scanner, and she was left wondering just how much of her he was able to see on the screen. When Audrey explained they were hoping to look at something in the special collections, the cantankerous man issued them with a little pager and the instruction to push the button if they needed help accessing a book.

“So what now?” Jessa asked, looking up at the massive structure before her. Multiple storeys of books on shelves, tomes upon tomes of knowledge. The air smelled like leather and must.

Audrey beckoned for Jessa to follow her, and together they approached the cube. They entered into a narrow spiral staircase, and their hands made a tinkling brassy sound on the bannister as they went higher and higher.

“I’m assuming this is about the obvious,” Audrey said, “so we’ll start at the levels specifically dedicated to parapsych works.”

“How much further is that?” Jessa huffed, stepping harder on each step to force herself up.

“Here we are, level six.”

“Phew,” Jessa breathed heavily and let her eyes adjust to the distinctly dimmer light.

Where the outside of the glass cube had seemed effortlessly beautiful, the inside was cloying and sickly. Each level was overpacked with bookshelves. At the end of the row was a doorway that Jessa presumed led to the outer walkways that had been visible from the ground floor. She considered the number of steps they’d just climbed and felt a pre-emptive vertigo thinking how high up they were. She hoped the books they were looking for would be on one of the inner shelves and not on the outer gallery.

“Aurelius, here it is,” Audrey finally said, pushing her finger against a little glass door with the shelf behind it. The copy of Hundred Quatrains itself was larger than Jessa had expected, and it was too large to stand upright in the case, so was lain flat, where they could easily see the front cover. It looked as though it was once beautiful, but time had let it fade and decay to something homely and quite forgotten. Nothing about it jumped out to Jessa’s interest.

“Where are the Manuals?”

“They’re not here. I guess they’re in a different section,” Audrey replied, pressing the call button on the pager.

A strangely robotic voice suddenly sounded through speakers they didn’t even realise were there.

“Please stand by. Someone will assist you shortly,” it said militarily.

Jessa and Audrey waited somewhat impatiently at the behest of the robot voice. A balding man shuffled into the room through the doorway from the outer landing, holding a stack of books so high that he had to rest his chin on the top of the pile to help balance it. He wound his way over to them, the sides of his white lab coat billowing with his gait.

“Hullo hullo, what can I help you with?” he asked in an unusual accent.

“We’re looking for something else by this author. Something called ‘Manuals’,” Audrey said politely.

“Vury good, vury nice. Over here,” he disappeared out of sight with his stack. A moment later he returned and began unlocking the glass window of the next shelf over.

From his pocket, he pulled out a pair of stretchy gloves and made a point of putting them on with finesse, showoffingly stretching out all his fingers as the latex encased them. His gloved hands caressed the cover of one book and then another.

Jessa’s heartbeat stumbled and a breath caught in her throat. A familiar knot formed in her stomach.

“Come wuth me, please,” he trotted ahead, clack-clack-clacking in his brogues.

He pulled down a piece of fabric over an angled reading table and propped the books delicately upon it. Then he offered the Baxter sisters a box from which they were each to pull a set of gloves.

“These are some of our oldest editions!” he beamed. “I am honoured for you to see them, but please, no food, no drink, and absolutely no bare hands. Turn pages one at a time, lifting gently frum the corner of the page. I wull be working over here, so please call for me if you need assistance.”

“Where’s the other one?” Jessa looked at him.

“Whut?”

“The other one. There’s supposed to be three.”

“You’re mistaken, missy. We have Manuals I and II.”

“I can see you have them, but there’s supposed to be three of them.”

“Uncorrect!” And with that, he snapped around and went to the other desk, where his hefty pile of books was waiting for him.

Jessa frowned at Audrey. “He’s wrong. There’s one missing.” She turned her attention to the first of the two books before her. “Oh,” Jessa’s heart sank as she turned to the first page, “it’s in Latin.”

Audrey rolled her eyes. “What were you expecting? It’s an ancient text, it’s not likely to be written in modern English, is it?”

“Well I don’t know, I didn’t think about that!”

Audrey sighed loudly.

“Hmm, there are pictures, though,” Jessa said, mostly to herself, as she inspected some of the images on the decrepit beige pages.

“They look more like diagrams.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A diagram is instructional or technical. See here, for example, there’s this main image that’s repeated across three separate pages. And there are these lines underneath which change direction. My guess would be that they’re showing movement.”

Jessa bowed her head closer, trying to read the calligraphic writing.

“Gravis… Elevationis?”

“Sounds like it’s about lifting up something heavy.”

“Wait, do you speak Latin?”

Audrey shook her head. “No, but think about those words. ‘Gravis’ is like ‘grave’, or perhaps ‘grand’ as we might say now. And ‘Elevationis’ has ‘elevation’ in it. A lot of our words now come from Latin roots, remember?”

Jessa nodded, and turned more pages.

“Reliquum… adspecto. Vis… pelluceeo,” Jessa tried to sound out the headings to see if any more of the words sounded familiar to English. “I was so sure something would be in here.”

“What is it you’re looking for?” Audrey whispered, moving closer to her sister. Jessa glanced over at the man, who was humming happily, inspecting some parchment with a magnifying glass.

“I had a feeling that Lynch had some connection to these books. I even felt something when the man took it off the shelf, but now, nothing. Maybe I was wrong.”

Audrey paused, remembering Hugo’s words. She might actually be onto something. “Let’s keep looking,” she encouraged.

The two sisters hunched over the large book, trying to make sense of the black ink etched into the sandy-coloured pages. Jessa huffed audibly through her nose. “Come on,” she said under her breath. “I know there’s something here… where are you…” Her voice became quieter and quieter, to a whisper and then to barely anything. “Show me… show me…”

Jessa squidged the thin rubbery layer of the gloves between her thumb and forefinger. She glanced over her shoulder to check the library attendant wasn’t watching, then pulled off the sheath, freeing her slightly damp hand into the warm air.

Audrey moved to block the man’s view in case he turned around.

Jessa felt the thickness of the page between her thumb and forefinger, gently rubbing her skin over the wovenesque papery leaves. Then she reached out and placed her clammy hand onto the cover of Manual II.

There it was, the moment she was hoping for and dreading.

Whoosh.

Darkness. The piercing ring seemed to come from inside her own skull. Then the scene came into focus.

She was hovering above the same table at which her bodily counterpart had been standing just moments ago. He was beneath her. Even from above, she knew it was Silas Lynch. His hair was pinguid and flat, black but greying. The two men Jessa had seen before were standing back against the wall.

“Here we are,” the frizzy head of the white-coated library man walked into view, carrying the Manuals, just as he had done for Jessa and Audrey. But he had three books, not two. He offered Silas gloves.

“No.”

“Sur, it is the rule that gloves must be worn when reading these books. They are vury old and vury dulicate.”

“Tell me what this says,” his voice was quiet and sour.

“Please sur, you must put on the gloves before you touch the artefact!” he shoved the box in front of Silas’s face.

“Listen to me, idiot,” Silas put his hands around the man’s neck and squeezed.

The man gasped for air. His fingers pulled at Silas’, trying to release his grip. But Silas kept his hold and lifted him so that the toes of his maroon shoes were just barely scraping the ground.

Silas slowly took his hands away from physically touching the man, but by the sheer force of Silas’ will, the man remained suspended.

“Please!” he begged.

“Tell me what this says,” Silas said again, holding one of the books open and holding it in the man’s red face.

“I don’t know! It’s advanced Latin!”

“Tell me.”

“I swear I don’t know!”

Silas swooped his hand through the air and the man’s body followed, slamming into a bookcase and slumping to the ground where he sniffled for reprieve.

A growl of irritation escaped Silas’s throat, and he turned his attention to the book. Jessa watched him flip through the pages. He closed Manual III and gripped it under his arm.

Silas moved to the snivelling man on the ground, and crouched lower.

“Face me,” he instructed, and the blubbering man looked directly at him.

“Please don’t hurt me, I promise I won’t call the police.”

Silas reached his sinewy hand toward the whimpering man’s face and touched his skin.

Whoosh.

Jessa’s floating consciousness transported from above the scene to inside the man’s perspective as he looked into Silas’s dark, vacant eyes.

“Of course you won’t call the police. You won’t call anyone. You won’t remember any of this,” the words slithered from his thin lips as he placed his cold fingertips around the man’s head, pressing divots into his flesh.

A low gurgle escaped through the mouth that Jessa felt but was not her own. She felt the man’s eyes roll back into his head as his consciousness faded. Finally, she felt the heavy and aching sensation in the man’s brain as his memory was sucked out, violently and violated, until he collapsed into an exhausted heap.

Whoosh.

She saw the room from a different pair of eyes. Slightly dulled and everything greyish, she looked around through Silas’s vision. He reached out his scarred hand and lightly touched the front cover of Manual II.

“We have what we need.”

And he walked away.

Whoosh.

Jessa was pulled out of the scene by the grasp of a hand on her shoulder.

“What are you doing! I said no touching!” the man cawed, frantically blinking through his little round glasses. He pulled her bare hand away from the paper. “You cunnot touch the books, young lady!”

“Sorry… sorry,” Jessa managed to say.

“I thunk you’d better go,” he said, exasperated and frazzled, inspecting the page with the magnifying glass where Jessa had touched it.

“We’re leaving,” Audrey hurried her dazed sister out.

“You can’t just come in here and disobey the rules… you have to ruspect the rules, ruspect the rules… no ruspect, these kids… grubby fingers…” his voice faded behind them into the warm upstairs with every step of their descent of the spiral staircase.