Library Arc

The room looked as though it had been intended to store all the books of someone very overconfident in their ability to gauge shelf space. The walls were lined with mahogany shelves covered in all manner of books, but they had overflowed onto the floor in a knee-high morass more like a very dry swamp than anything else. Random objects were scattered among them, such as an old and stopped wooden analogue clock, a torn plushie penguin, and some sepia photos of racehorses. There were no windows; the ceiling had clusters of lights at regular intervals.

A young man picked his way across, wincing at the damage he did to the books by stepping on them. He was tall, had dark brown hair, and wore a Linkin Park shirt over scruffy jeans. He needed a shave, but managed to look handsome even with a scruffy half-beard.

The room had oak doors in three walls, and a bank of two elevators in the fourth. The knee-deep books gave a weird cadence to his footsteps; sometimes he stepped on a huge hardback with an echoing sound like a wooden floor, sometimes there were paperbacks underfoot that slipped and rustled against each other like dry leaves.

He gave the elevators a baleful look and made for one of the doors. It opened outward, or rather it would have if there hadn’t been a massive pile of books on the other side; he tried to force it anyway, until he slipped on a book underfoot and banged a knee into the door. Glad that there was nobody around to see that, he gave up and went on to the next door. This one opened inward, after he cleared out the books from in front, revealing another, larger room, full of even more books and junk. He sighed. He’d been at it awhile already.

On the left was a rectangular wooden box full of soil, with bright flowers growing in wild-looking clusters. There were lamps fixed to each corner, shining violet light on the flowers, and a little spigot quietly trickling water; the water had found a hole in the box to leak out, and the books underneath had been reduced to a soggy mess. Directly ahead was a brown ceramic mannequin of what was probably a young girl, judging by its frilly pink tutu, except the head and arms were missing. Around her neck was a cardboard sign marked in unreadable wavy script.

He padded past both, wondering who had thought to put them there, and when. There were doors on all three walls; the two to the left and in front were blocked by the sea of books and the flower bed, but the one on his right was relatively clear. At its base was what looked like a smashed car battery in a pool of mush. Careful to stay clear of the pool, he reached over and opened the door inward; the liquid flowed out to the other side and began dissolving the books there too with a gentle hiss. He looked around, moved the mannequin over as a makeshift bridge, and crossed into the next room.

The lights in this one were out, leaving the room much darker than the others. It was full of computer terminals; a blue glow from their monitors was the only light source. The darkness made the gentle hum of processors loud, almost ominous.

He made his way over to a keyboard and hit a key at random, pulling up what had to be a login or password prompt with instructions in an alphabet he didn’t recognise; he pressed buttons at random, hoping it would give him a guest account or language select, but it just flashed an unreadable message in red. He’d seen this sort of thing before; he quickly gave up.

From this room, there was a sliding door, which he hurried over to, gleeful to not have to clear out a huge pile of books for once. Once again, it opened to a rectangular room buried in books, but this time, two of the doors out were already cleared away. He picked the one on the left. It led into a third room much like the others, but this one had another person.

She was the same age as him. She wore a shin-length black skirt and a long-sleeved charcoal shirt. It was impossible to move silently on the floor of books, so she’d heard him enter and was regarding him with interest. They stared at one another for a long moment.

She straightened her skirt. “Hello,” she finally said.

“Hi.” He had a sudden bout of deja vu; he squinted at her, trying to figure out why. She had hazel eyes behind black-rimmed glasses; brown hair tied in a bun; pale skin, some freckles; shorter than him; and a quiet voice. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

She gave a small smile. “Who knows? I have a generic face. My name’s Jill, by the way.”

“I’m Roger.” He would have moved to offer his hand, but they were a little too far apart and he had a brief mental image of one of them twisting an ankle, which would have made a poor first impression. “You wouldn’t happen to know the way to an exit, would you?”

She shook her head. “I’m lost too. I don’t even know what this place is.”

“I just call it the Library.”

“It certainly fits.”

“Do you want to help me look for an exit?”

She shrugged. “I actually quite like it here, but I was wandering around aimlessly already. Okay, I’ll help, if I can. I think there was a map a few rooms back, on one of the computer terminals.”

Roger grimaced. “Those things? I’ve found them before, but I can’t read whatever language they’re in.”

She blinked. “Don’t worry about that; I can read them just fine.”

“You can?! That’s great!” He smiled at last. “Let’s go, then. There’s one right back there, actually.”

They set off. She handled walking on the books much better than he did; the ones she stepped on never seemed to tilt and throw her off, which looked like sheer luck, but really she was probably just lighter or better at gauging which piles were more solid.

“So,” he said, “if you didn’t know where you were – how did you get here?”

“Hmm?” Jill asked. “I’m one of those tourists who follows a road without reading the signs, in the hopes that eventually it’ll lead somewhere eventually. I may have read too much Lewis Carroll when I was little.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“So, lots of books here,” she observed instead of answering his implicit question. “I bet there’s a story behind that?”

“If ever I find out why, I’ll write a book about it,” Roger said, straight-faced.

“Leaving behind a fresh, even larger mystery for the next generation,” she said. “That’s thoughtful of you.”

“I’m a thoughtful guy. Here we are.”

They took a few moments to let their eyes adjust to the glow of the computer monitors, then Jill approached the terminal.

“What language is this, anyway?” he asked, looking down at the keyboard. “That isn’t even a Latin alphabet.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure,” Jill admitted. “I’m sort of winging it. It’s somewhere between Arabic script and Devanagari, but I’m good enough with languages to make out most of it. You know how Scandinavians speak a few different languages, but they all understand each other because they’re all descended from Icelandic? Except none of them understands Icelandic, ironically enough. Sorry, am I prattling?”

“You can prattle all you like if you can find a map,” he said.

“So single-minded. Still, I think I like that about you,” she said, focusing more on the computer than the conversation. “Okay. It says it’s a security port, and it’s asking for a password. If the locals are as bad about cybersecurity as my parents are, it might be something obvious.” She hit a few keys, and the screen flashed red. “But not as obvious as the password being password, apparently. Do you know anything that might be a password around here?”

He did a palms-up, then, realising she couldn’t see, “The Library? That’s just a nickname I’ve been using, though.”

“Mm. Better not push our luck, then. I get a bad feeling about those drone guns.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Look in the top corners of the room.”

With the lights out, he hadn’t noticed and couldn’t think how she had, but in two opposite corners were security cameras with underslung gunmetal-grey cylinders. He froze.

“They aren’t active,” she said. “I’ve seen them around. Their circuits are live; someone’s just programmed them to be dormant.”

“Just for the record,” he said, “the next time you try to break into a password-protected security system, would you let me know in advance if there are guns trained on us?”

“Those two weren’t going to shoot us,” she said, “but I think they might if I try again. Something like, they let you make one or maybe two mistakes in case your finger slips, but after that …”

“Humour me.”

“Fair enough.” She stepped away from the computer. “Well, this room looks like a bust, but I passed another computer a while ago. It wouldn’t have access to the security system, but I’d think it’d have a map.”

“It’s worth trying,” he said. “Not like I have any other leads.” He considered how much to tell her, but she seemed trustworthy, or at least harmless. “I’m actually not alone in here,” he added. “My sister’s back a few rooms. She wanted to rest, but I wasn’t tired, so I kept looking around. Should we fetch her now, or double back later?”

“Mm, double back, I think. I might not be able to find the terminal again anyway.”

She led the way out of the room. She gave a second look at a menorah that might have been tarnished silver, lying on a lopsided mound of books. “It’s a shame we can’t take some of these things with us.”

“Well, I won’t stop you. But you might be carrying it awhile.”

“Yeah. Have you seen anyone else here?”

“Only my sister.”

“Strange to build a place like this, and then just abandon it,” she mused. “Apart from the building itself, all these books must have cost a fortune. And then there’s the guns and other security, which the old owners could have taken with them when they left.”

“Say, can you read the books?” Roger asked. “If they’re in the same language as the computers …”

Jill knelt down and opened a tome roughly the same size as her torso. Over her shoulder, Roger recognised the same script as on the computer terminals. She flipped a few pages and shut the book again with a thump.

“It’s a biography for someone called Alha Maurya. It’s not very forthcoming about why he was important enough to deserve a biography; either he was actually very boring, or this is terribly written. Life’s too short to figure out which.” She tried another, then a third. “These are all biographies, and so were the ones I’ve tried before I met you. I guess this is the biography section. This building must be massive if it has entire wings dedicated to a single Dewey number.”

“Worth a try,” he said again. “How far is it to the terminal?”

She smiled ruefully. “I have a terrible sense of direction. If the route weren’t the only one not choked up by books, I probably wouldn’t be able to find it at all. I don’t think it’s too far, though.”

They passed through more rooms piled high with books and random objects, following the trail of doorways she’d cleared out when she first came through. Eventually, she led him up a spiral staircase, which he nearly fell off when a book flipped underfoot.

“You are sure it’s around here?” Roger asked, rubbing his bruised leg.

“This is familiar. See that sign?” She pointed up to a plank of wood covered in what looked to him like random scorch marks. “It says: Cutler’s Wing 121B. I spent a little while wandering around here earlier. I think it’s one of the doors off here. I’m not sure which; let’s trial and error it.”

This room was full of stone pillars with live vines growing on them. Double-ended bookshelves like in normal library aisles variously stood or leaned against the pillars, strewn with yet more books. A set of scuba gear sat in a corner. On one wall was a bathroom, marked with the universal symbol of two people with one wearing a dress. Three more doorways had been cleared out.

She went to the one on the left. It led to another room piled high with books, but this room was in bad shape: there was a jagged crack all through the centre of the floor, through its timber floorboards, opening up a dark hole, too deep to see its bottom.

“Right, the bottomless pit room,” she said. “See that sign on the far end? Elevator engineering. I’d like to see what I could do from there, even if it was just to deactivate the wretched things, but with the hole …”

Roger walked up to the hole to get a better look. It was five metres across at the narrowest point. There was some plaster visible in the space between the floors; below that he could see some of the oak panelling of the room below. There was a light directly overhead that penetrated a long way down, but not far enough to see the bottom. He nudged a book over the edge; the pages fluttered as it corkscrewed down.

“… Three hundred elephant,” Jill counted quietly, “four hundred elephant, five hundred elephant, six … The first time I was here, I didn’t think too hard about climbing down.”

He looked around for something he could maybe use as a bridge, and spotted another drone gun behind him to the right. Jill followed his gaze.

“I actually get the feeling that this place isn’t really a library,” she said. “This is an awful lot of security for vanity biographies. I think that either it used to be a library and then someone else took it over and made it into some sort of fortress, or it was always a fortress and books were added later, maybe as a sort of disguise. Besides, who would build something like that? It’s been excavated a long way. Who puts a library atop a crevasse?”

“I don’t think it’s excavated. How high up do you think we are?”

“,” she said. “I’d assumed we were at ground level. The air isn’t thin … but I guess buildings aren’t exactly hard to pressurise. Are we elevated?”

“You’re the one who can read the maps. I have no idea how high we are now, but I’m certain this building is at least ten storeys high.” He’d gone up and down more stairways of different size than he could remember, so it was hard to be exact. It didn’t help that he’d never found any windows or anything else to give a point of reference.

“Well, that just doubles down on the question of who builds a ten-storey library slash fortress,” she said.

“Let’s worry about that after we find a way out,” Roger said. “Next room.”